RUTHFULLY YOURS

Kano, Nigeria (CNN)The Nigerian government has released the names of the 110 missing girls, some as young as 11 years old, who have not been seen since a raid on their school in Dapchi last week.
Fighter jets, helicopters and surveillance planes have all been deployed in the search for the girls, who vanished after suspected Boko Haram militants attacked the Government Girls Science Technical College.
According to a list of names released by the authorities Tuesday, the missing are aged between 11 and 19. The names have been verified by a panel of school administrators and government officials, according to a statement by Alhaji Lai Mohammed, Nigeria’s Minister of Information and Culture.
As of Monday evening, the Nigerian Air Force had flown a total of 200 hours while searching for the girls. Nigeria’s Chief of Air Staff, Air Marshall Sadique Abubakar, has been relocated to Yobe State, where Dapchi is located, to personally supervise the search, the government statement said.

The school is only 275 kilometers (170 miles) from Chibok, where Boko Haram militants kidnapped nearly 300 girls from a school in 2014.

If efforts to expose Iran’s and Hezbollah’s roles in the Argentinean bombings are successful, the information will elucidate for regional leaders the dark side of Iran’s ties to sub-state terrorist groups to increase even further its influence in Latin America.

For decades, Iran has seemingly been employing both normative diplomatic ties and criminal links to export its Islamic revolution to the Western Hemisphere. By using similar methods of subversion, Iran appears already to have penetrated other Latin American nations, including Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Brazil and some island countries in the Caribbean.

Iran’s activities in Latin America are a direct challenge to U.S. primacy in the Western Hemisphere. Iran, it seems, wants to replace the U.S. as the power ally of Latin American countries.

While Iran’s nuclear, ballistic missile, and expansionist policies in the Middle East are well known, most of the Islamic Republic’s operations in Latin America appear to have been proceeding underway, below the radar, for several decades.

During a joint news conference on February 4 in Buenos Aires with Argentina’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Jorge Faurie, U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson pledged to combat Hezbollah’s fundraising in Latin America, which is used to finance its terrorist operations. This indicates that U.S. intelligence and enforcement agencies could be closely following Iranian and Hezbollah incursions into Central and South America. The Department of Justice, for instance, recently announced that it had established a Hezbollah Financing and Narcoterrorism Team (HFNT) to monitor and prosecute the criminal activities of Hezbollah, Iran’s allied terrorist network in the region.

Last week, Russia escalated its military profile in Syria by dispatching its top of the line fighter bomber to the war-ravaged country. Based on publicly available Israeli satellite imagery and eyewitness accounts, the Russians have deployed between 2 to 4 Su-57 fighter bombers to Khmeimim Airbase. In addition to the Su-57, the Russians also deployed advanced Su-36 fighter jets, and an A-50U airborne command and control plane.

The Su-57 is a fifth generation fighter bomber, and according to Russia, is said to possess stealth characteristics and performance features similar to the U.S. F-22 Raptor and the F-35 Lightning II. The Israeli Air Force has adopted the F-35 (which it calls the Adir) as its premier fighter and has outfitted the plane with an indigenously designed avionics package. The Su-57 is almost certainly the product of stolen U.S. technology, obtained through corporate espionage, cyber penetrations and surprisingly, open sources. The Russians have over the years developed a penchant for stealing or otherwise appropriating Western technology. Regardless, the F-22 and F-35 are still considered far superior to the Russian plane.

But if Russian reports regarding the aircraft’s performance are accurate, the Su-57 platform poses a serious challenge to U.S. and Israeli aerial operations. Both Israeli F-35s and U.S. Raptors are active over the cluttered skies of Syria.

In June 2017, a U.S. F/A-18E Super Hornet shot down a Syrian Su-22 after it dropped bombs on Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) positions. The SDF is an anti-Assad militia which is working with the U.S. to defeat ISIS and also operates as an effective bulwark against Iranian expansion. On December 14, two U.S. F-22s intercepted two Russian-piloted Su-25s and a third Su-35 which flew into coalition airspace on the east side of the Euphrates River.

One of the most beautiful towns in England, Lewes is relatively unspoiled by the twentieth-century British architectural incompetence that has proved so destructive of urban grace, spreading the most hideous ugliness almost everywhere as a kind of metonym for social equality. From Lewes’s streets can be seen the lovely, rolling downs of Sussex, and it is curious how the sight of green hills from the center of a town or city (still possible in Dublin, for example) soothes the mind. Among Lewes’s most famous residents were Thomas Paine, author of The Rights of Man, and Charles Dawson, the man most likely to have forged Piltdown Man, the hoax human fossil whose inauthenticity was not exposed until 40 years after its “discovery” in 1912. To my great delight, Lewes’s High Street has three excellent secondhand or antiquarian bookshops.

I had been invited down to a literary event, the Lewes Speakers Festival, to talk about my recently published memoir of life as a prison doctor, The Knife Went In. I was to be the penultimate speaker, followed by a controversial conservative journalist, Katie Hopkins, who was to talk about her own recently published memoir, Rude.

The event ended in violence.

The festival organizer, Marc Rattray, had informed me in advance that there might be trouble from demonstrators who would want to prevent Hopkins from speaking. No doubt it is a measure of how detached I am from the ordinary life of my country that I had until then scarcely heard of her, for she is either loved or abominated by millions of my fellow countrymen. (I would have guessed, if put to it, that she was an actress or a pop singer.) Some love her because she says things that many think but dare not say, while others abominate her, accusing her of bigotry and spreading hatred—hatred directed at the wrong people, that is.

Turkish propagandists also have been twisting facts to try to portray Greece as the aggressor.

Although Turkey knows that the islands are legally and historically Greek, Turkish authorities want to occupy and Turkify them, presumably to further the campaign of annihilating the Greeks, as they did in Anatolia from 1914 to 1923 and after.

Any attack against Greece should be treated as an attack against the West.

There is one issue on which Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and its main opposition, the Republican People’s Party (CHP), are in complete agreement: The conviction that the Greek islands are occupied Turkish territory and must be reconquered. So strong is this determination that the leaders of both parties have openly threatened to invade the Aegean.

The only conflict on this issue between the two parties is in competing to prove which is more powerful and patriotic, and which possesses the courage to carry out the threat against Greece. While the CHP is accusing President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s AKP party of enabling Greece to occupy Turkish lands, the AKP is attacking the CHP, Turkey’s founding party, for allowing Greece to take the islands through the 1924 Treaty of Lausanne, the 1932 Turkish-Italian Agreements, and the 1947 Paris Treaty, which recognized the islands of the Aegean as Greek territory.

In 2016, Erdoğan said that Turkey “gave away” the islands that “used to be ours” and are “within shouting distance.” “There are still our mosques, our shrines there,” he said, referring to the Ottoman occupation of the islands.

Given Western Europe’s open aversion to the rise of right-wing parties in Eastern Europe, the EU’s silence in the face of Poland’s behavior politically makes no sense.

Ever since Poland’s far-right Law and Justice Party (PiS) took control of both the presidency and the parliament in November 2015, and quickly changed the rules for public media, the secret service, education, and the military, the European Parliament has been claiming that Warsaw is putting the “rule of law and democracy” at risk.

When it comes to the issue of Polish anti-Semitism, Europe is suddenly at a loss for words. This suggests that it is not merely ineptitude at work.

Implementation of the controversial Holocaust bill, passed by the Polish Senate on February 1, was “frozen” temporarily, due to the toxic rift it caused in Warsaw-Jerusalem relations. The bill, proposed by the ruling Law and Justice Party (PiS), makes illegal any suggestion that Poland was complicit in the Holocaust, particularly the Nazi death camps, which were German, but located on Polish soil.

Criticism of the bill in Israel and among diaspora Jews has been loud and forceful across the political spectrum. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the bill an attempt to “rewrite history,” and a Polish diplomatic delegation is arriving in Israel on February 28 to discuss the diplomatic crisis.

Although Jewish outrage over such a law — which would fine and even jail anyone who dared to implicate Poland in the Nazi genocide — is probably no surprise, the crashing silence from the rest of Europe is shocking.

To his credit, European Council President Donald Tusk, a former prime minister of Poland, made two public statements against the bill — one on Twitter and the other during a press conference in Brussels. His sentiments were echoed by members of the world media and intelligentsia, who have protested Poland’s move.

Former Obama National Security Adviser Susan Rice and others who say the U.S. can live with a nuclear-armed North Korea cite deterrence and the North’s certain destruction if it attacks Americans. This is a convenient faith, but alas it ignores the threat of proliferation to other regimes or actors that might also use weapons of mass destruction against Americans.

This proliferation threat was in sharp relief Tuesday with leaks from a confidential United Nations report alleging that Pyongyang is circumventing trade and financial sanctions and plying its military wares and knowhow to dozens of nasty foreign customers, including Bashar Assad’s Syria.

The Journal’s Ian Talley reports that the North has shipped 50 tons of supplies to Syria, including “high-heat, acid-resistant tiles, stainless-steel pipes and valves,” likely for use in a chemical weapons plant. The report, written by the Panel of Experts that oversees North Korea’s compliance with U.N. resolutions, reveals more than 40 shipments between 2012 and 2017. It also claims Pyongyang sent weapons experts to Syria multiple times as recently as the past two years.

This would solve the mystery of how Assad obtained the sarin gas he used against his people in 2013 and again in 2017. The U.S. believes he is still using chlorine gas against civilians. In 2007 North Korea worked with Syria to build a nuclear-weapons facility at Al Kibar—until Israel destroyed it in a military raid, against the advice of George W. Bush and Condoleezza Rice.

The chemical-weapons news also underscores the porousness of U.N. sanctions as the North sells whatever it can for cash to keep its dictatorship afloat. If sanctions are going to stop North Korea, the U.S. and its allies will have to start boarding ships and commandeering aircraft believed to be carrying WMD material. North Korea will sell anything to any bad actor for a price.