RUTHFULLY YOURS

European officials have been not only mute about the Iranian regime’s attacks on its own people. They have also been missing “a robust defense of Western values”, now under attack in Iran: freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, separation of religion and state, judicial due process.

The European Union these days is alarmed about political reforms in Poland, but totally quiet about Erdogan’s “coup against civilians” in Turkey.

How is it possible that Pope Francis, the world’s highest Catholic authority, does not feel any urgency to denounce the avalanche of anti-Semitism and hate coming from the Islamic authorities, but pleased them by sending a letter of support?

As these last few years of terror attacks should have proven to them, they delude themselves if they think that this deadly ideology will be kept confined to Tehran, Ramallah or Ankara.

Federica Mogherini has been busy in recent weeks, appeasing one repressive regime after another. Mogherini, the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, began with Iran. “Mogherini was mute on the popular uprising in Iran,” wrote Eli Lake at Bloomberg.

“She waited six days to say anything about the demonstrations there. When she finally did, it was a mix of ingratiation and neutrality. ‘In the spirit of openness and respect that is at the root of our relationship,’ she said, ‘we expect all concerned to refrain from violence and to guarantee freedom of expression'”.

Swedish Foreign Minister Margot Wallstrom, who was proud to lead “the first feminist government in the world”, merely tweeted that she was “following” the demonstrations in Iran. UN Watch condemned her for being silent. A year ago, Swedish Trade Minister Ann Linde and ten other female members of the Swedish government marched in front of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani wearing hijabs. While real Iranian girls were marching to protest the mandatory hijab, Ann Linde was retweeting about laws against climate change during the severest days of Iranian repression in the streets.

“You can live a normal life here [Turkish-occupied northern Cyprus] if you keep quiet, if you don’t tell the truth that we live under Turkish occupation, that much of our territory is a military zone where we can’t go.” — Şener Levent, owner and editor of the daily newspaper Afrika, in Turkish-occupied Cyprus.

In 1974, the Turkish army brutalized and terrorized at least 170,000 indigenous Greek Cypriots into fleeing to the free, southern part of the island, seized their properties, and replaced them with illegal settlers from Turkey.

“40,000 Turkish troops remain in Cyprus as a presence that prevents securing the human rights of Greek Cypriots. Turkey has been found guilty of mass violations of human rights by the European Commission and the Court of Human Rights, including the right to life, the right to property, liberty, and security of person, freedom of thought, conscience, and religion, and the prohibition of discrimination.” — Artemis Pippinelli and Ani Kalayjian.

On January 20, Turkey launched a military offensive against the U.S.-backed Kurdish forces in the Afrin district of northern Syria. Ironically code-named “Operation Olive Branch,” the offensive was proudly described by Turkish Parliament Speaker Ismail Kahraman as “jihad,” a holy war, without which “there can be no progress.”

Parroting this sentiment, both pro- and anti-government mainstream media outlets in Turkey endorsed the Afrin invasion, using similar jihadist slogans. One newspaper that did not do so was the Turkish Cypriot daily newspaper Afrika, which headlined its coverage of the offensive by comparing it to Turkey’s 1974 invasion of Cyprus, which it called a “peace operation.”

No one in the Women’s March called out the Iranian government for imprisoning, torturing and killing women trying to break free of their shackles. Instead, they chanted “Me Too” and “Time’s Up,” as they paraded with activists such as Palestinian-American Linda Sarsour, who calls for jihad and apparently also denigrated one of her employees who was a victim of sexual assault in the workplace.

The same day as activists, fighting tyrannical regimes, were burning hijabs in solidarity with Iranian and other suppressed women across the world, the spineless British Foreign Office was handing out hijabs, trying to sell them as a symbol of “Liberation”, “Respect” and “Security”.

These women — who are trapped in despotic Middle Eastern dictatorships, who face possible prosecution and having their lives ruined — were given no attention by the same women marchers in the U.S. Evidently, feminists in the West were too busy wearing hijabs in solidarity with Sarsour and other promoters of Islamic law (sharia), which advises husbands to beat their wives; that in court, a woman’s testimony is worth only half a man’s testimony; that daughters can receive only half the inheritance of a son, and that if a woman is raped, she will need four male Muslim witnesses, supposedly at the scene, to prove that she was not committing adultery.

February 1 marked World Hijab Day, an annual expression of solidarity with “millions of Muslim women who choose to wear the hijab and live a life of modesty.” Less than two weeks earlier, on January 20, a Women’s March was held — with rallies across the United States — to re-enact the protests of the previous year against the election of President Donald Trump.

“I’ve always felt the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the Government, and I’m here to help,” Ronald Reagan famously said. But the most terrifying words in every other language are, “We’re from the international community and we’re here to help.”

In Haitian Creole that would be, “Nou soti nan kominote entènasyonal la e nou isit la pou ede.”

When an earthquake hit Haiti in ’10, everyone who was anyone in the international community quickly showed up. Bill Clinton had been appointed as the UN Special Envoy for Haiti a year earlier where he had touted the “unique opportunities for public and private investment” in Haiti. The earthquake opened up those opportunities to Clinton Foundation donors.

A year later, Bill Clinton was touting a $45 million new hotel owned by an Irish cell phone tycoon who was a close pal as the only thing a country with a million homeless needed. A CNN puff piece claimed that the hotel would house “aid workers, potential investors and other visitors”. Like Anderson Cooper, who needs someplace to take a hot shower after standing waist deep in water for 5 minutes on camera.

Haiti was a gold mine for the Clintons. Literally. Hillary’s brother was added to the board of a small company that got a gold mining permit at half the standard rates with a 25 year renewal option. Tony, Hillary’s brother, is a college dropout who had worked as a repo man and a prison guard.

The Clintons not only turned a disaster into a slush fund, but even got Hillary’s idiot brother a gig.

But inflicting the Clintons on Haiti wasn’t the worst thing that the United Nations did to the impoverished island. The worst thing that the UN can do to any country is send in the blue helmets.

There have been wild reports that the United States is considering a “bloody nose” preemptive attack of some sort on North Korea’s nuclear arsenal. Such rumors are unlikely to prove true. Preemptive attacks usually are based on the idea that things will so worsen that hitting first is the only chance to decapitate a regime before it can do greater damage.

But in the struggle between Pyongyang and Washington, who really has gotten the upper hand?

With its false happy face in the current Winter Olympics, North Korea thinks it is winning the war of nerves. Yet its new nuclear missile strategy is pretty transparent. It wants to separate South Korea’s strategic interests from those of the United States, with boasts—backed by occasional missile nuclear tests—that it can take out West Coast cities.

Pyongyang could then warn its new frenemy, Seoul, that the United States would never risk its own homeland to keep protecting South Korea. Thus it would supposedly be wiser for Koreans themselves, in the spirit of Olympic brotherhood, to settle their own differences. A failed but nuclear North Korea ultimately would dictate the terms of the relationship to a successful but non-nuclear South Korea.

North Korea might even insincerely offer to dismantle some of its nuclear assets if the United States would just pull out its forces from the demilitarized zone at the 38th parallel. This strategy would also send the message to the United States that it should have little interest risking a nuclear exchange over a distant and largely internal Korean matter.

Environmental activist Kavous Seyed Emami, a dual Canadian-Iranian citizen, became the latest victim of Iran’s government last week when he died in Evin Prison under suspicious circumstances. An ailing American may be next on the regime’s death list.

The 63-year-old Seyed Emami was a founder of the Persian Wildlife Heritage Foundation, which works to preserve wildlife in Iran. The foundation’s website says it’s funded by “individuals as well as companies with a sense of social responsibility,” and that it works with “commercial ventures,” other conservation groups and Iran’s “hard-working officials in charge of our natural resources at the Department of Environment.” Not exactly foes of the regime.

Yet Seyed Emami and several colleagues, including Iranian-American board member Morad Tahbaz, were detained in January on espionage charges after anti-regime protests roiled the country. The government says Seyed Emami committed suicide by hanging, which is what the regime claimed about Sina Ghanbari, a young protestor who died in Evin prison in January. Odd how prisoners keep killing themselves in authoritarian dungeons.

In 1969, Winston Churchill’s biographer Martin Gilbert interviewed Edward Lewis Spears, a longtime friend of Gilbert’s subject. “Even Winston had a fault,” Spears reflected to Gilbert. “He was too fond of Jews.” If, as one British wag put it, an anti-Semite is one who hates the Jews more than is strictly necessary, Churchill was believed to admire the Jews more than elite British society deemed strictly necessary. With attention now being paid to Churchill’s legacy as portrayed in the film Darkest Hour, I thought it worth exploring the little-known role that Churchill’s fondness for the Jewish people played at a critical period in the history of Western civilization.

The film highlights three addresses delivered by Churchill upon becoming prime minister in the spring of 1940, with the Nazis bestriding most of Europe. Of the three, his two speeches before Parliament—the one that promised “blood, toil, tears, and sweat,” the other that “we shall fight on the beaches”—are more famous. The most important disquisition, however, may have been the radio remarks delivered on May 19, as they were the first words spoken by Churchill to the British people as leader of His Majesty’s Government. Britain faced, he said, “the foulest and most soul-destroying tyranny which has ever darkened and stained the pages of history.”

The Nazis had thus far destroyed every adversary that they had faced, leaving in their wake a “group of shattered states and bludgeoned races: the Czechs, the Poles, the Norwegians, the Danes, the Dutch, the Belgians—upon all of whom the long night of barbarism will descend, unbroken even by a star of hope, unless we conquer, as conquer we must; as conquer we shall.” Noting that he was speaking on a celebratory day in the Christian calendar, Churchill then concluded with an apparent scriptural citation—a rare rhetorical choice for him—as inspiration to his country at the most perilous moment in its history.

Today is Trinity Sunday. Centuries ago words were written to be a call and a spur to the faithful servants of Truth and Justice: “Arm yourselves, and be ye men of valour, and be in readiness for the conflict; for it is better for us to perish in battle than to look upon the outrage of our nation and our altar. As the Will of God is in Heaven, even so let it be.”

Thus ended Churchill’s first radio address as prime minister to the British people, which has come to be known as the “Be Ye Men of Valour” speech. That evening, Anthony Eden told Churchill: “You have never done anything as good or as great. Thank you, and thank God for you.” The scriptural conclusion was a stunning success, stiffening the British spine and capturing the English imagination. But where in the Bible is the verse with which Churchill concluded and for which his speech is named?

Prior to any discussion on what to do about Venezuela, a consensus about what led to this crisis needs to be reached. The role of Iran is critical in such a conversation.

As in the Syria conflict, Iran’s primary role is preparing the Venezuelan battlefield through a range of operations in irregular warfare, using non-state actors and surrogates to gain influence over the population.

Strong evidence suggest that Venezuela used its immigration agency to provide Venezuelan identities and documents to several hundred, if not thousands, of Middle Easterners. Without proper vetting and verification measures in place, and a high degree of counterintelligence support, our regional allies will not know if Venezuelan refugees spilling across borders are legitimate refugees or members of a transregional clandestine network between Latin America and the Middle East.

Any intervention in Venezuela — military, humanitarian or otherwise — will not work unless it is aimed at removing the external influences, especially Iran, Russia and China, that have turned Venezuela into the Syria of the Western Hemisphere.

U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson just completed, by most accounts, a successful visit to Latin America. He began his five-nation tour by invoking the Monroe Doctrine and suggesting the Venezuelan military could manage a “peaceful transition” from the authoritarian leader Nicolás Maduro. This reminded several regional observers of President Trump’s suggestion last year of a possible “military option” for Venezuela, hinting at possible U.S. or multilateral intervention to stop the country’s collapse.

An armed action or military intervention in Venezuela by any nation in the Western Hemisphere, including Venezuela’s own military, must take into account the role of Iran, Russia and China in the crisis. Russia and China were prominently mentioned by Tillerson during his visit to the region; Iran, however, was notably absent from his remarks.

Prior to any discussion on what to do about Venezuela, a consensus about what led to this crisis needs be reached. The role of Iran is critical in such a conversation.