RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Pakistani parliament is becoming increasingly radicalized — as the results of a local by-election in Lahore in September demonstrated.

In such a political climate, and with a new prime minister who refuses to criticize his country’s blasphemy laws, let alone work to repeal them, Pakistan’s already fragile “democracy” is on a steady slide backwards.

In late September — less than three weeks after newly instated Pakistani Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi attended the 72nd session of the UN General Assembly in New York — two Christian boys employed as cleaners at a hospital in Pakistan were arrested for violating the country’s blasphemy laws. According to the complaint lodged with police, the boys had swept up and burned strewn pieces of paper on which Quranic verses happened to be written.

At around the same time, a Pakistani court sentenced a Christian man to death for insulting the Islamic Prophet Muhammad in a poem he sent to a Muslim friend on the WhatsApp messaging service. This came two months after a young Muslim Pakistani was sentenced to death for “blasphemous” posts on Facebook.

On September 20, after the closing of the General Assembly, Abbasi was invited to give a talk at the Council on Foreign Relations. During the Q&A period — at the end of his “conversation” with David Sanger of the New York Times — he was asked by Human Rights Watch (HRW) director Kenneth Roth whether he would “speak out against [Pakistan’s] blasphemy law, and certainly about [its] harsh application…with death sentences and mob violence and the like.”

Abbasi replied by dodging the question:

“[I]t’s only up to the parliament to amend the laws. The job of the government is to make sure that the laws are not abused and innocent people are not prosecuted or prosecuted.”

At this point, Sanger interjected:

“[C]ertainly it is up to the parliament, but you’re in a position of both great political and moral leadership now in your post as prime minister. And I think the core of the question was whether or not the leaders of Pakistan are willing to go stand up to what seems to be, at least through American and Western eyes at time(s), deat

In February 2016, the director general of the Pakistani Intelligence Bureau warned the government that ISIS was emerging as a threat, with Pakistani terrorists providing a foothold for the group, whose Pakistani branch is called Walayat-e-Khurasan.

ISIS also enlists “partners of convenience” in Afghanistan and “outsources” terror attacks to Pakistani organizations — such as Lashkar-i-Jhangvi and Jamaat-ul-Ahrar — a recent UN Security Council counter-terrorism report revealed. In addition, as many as 100 Pakistanis left the country in 2015 to join ISIS in Iraq and Syria.

The most vulnerable victims of this threat are Christians, who make up a mere 2% of the Sunni Muslim-majority state. ISIS is only the latest terrorist group to have attacked Christians in Pakistan.

Concern over the extent of the presence and power of ISIS in Pakistan resurfaced on December 17, when a suicide-bombing at a church in Quetta left at least nine worshipers dead and more than 50 seriously wounded.

Had Pakistani security forces not responded swiftly to the attack on the Bethel Memorial Methodist Church — where 400 men, women and children were attending Sunday services – the assailants “would have managed to reach the main hall of the building, and the death toll would have been much higher,” Sarfraz Bugti, the provincial home minister of the Baluchistan province, where Quetta is located, told Gatestone Institute.

Responsibility for the attack — in which two terrorists, clad in explosive vests and armed with AK-47 rifles — was later claimed by ISIS, which has an impressive record of honesty in taking credit for attacks, in a statement published by the Amaq News Agency.

This was the sixth ISIS attack in Pakistan in the past year and a half. The first took place on August 8, 2016, when a suicide bomber killed at least 70 people and wounded more than 100 in an attack on a crowd of lawyers and journalists gathered in a government hospital in Quetta — in the province that borders Afghanistan and Iran — to mourn a lawyer who had been murdered earlier in the day. The attack was claimed by a joint ISIS-Taliban faction.

On October 24, 2016, ISIS claimed responsibility for a deadly attack on a police training college in Quetta. The assault, committed by three heavily armed terrorists against sleeping cadets, left more than 60 dead and more than 165 others wounded.

A Christmas season bombing of a supermarket in Russia’s second-largest city suggests that killing in the name of Islam never goes out of season.

In addition to being a time for end-of-the-year reflection, Christmas is also a popular time for Muslim terrorists to kill Christians and Jews, and sometimes, other Muslims, too.

Yuletide terrorist attacks seem to be becoming the new normal in several countries – and the Christmas season isn’t over yet in Russia. Eastern Orthodox Christians in Russia won’t celebrate the birth of Jesus of Nazareth until Sunday, Jan. 7, more than a week from now.

No one has yet claimed responsibility for the Wednesday evening bombing in Saint Petersburg that sent 10 people to the hospital, but Islamists are thought to have figured in a suicide bombing in the city’s subway system that left more than a dozen dead and 50 wounded in April.

The explosion took place at the Perekrestok market. At that time, thousands of people were present in the shopping complex housing the market. The source of the blast was a homemade bomb packed with shrapnel. The bomb had reportedly been concealed in a locker.

The bombing comes after Russian President Vladimir Putin called President Donald Trump earlier in the month to thank him for a CIA tip that helped head off bombings that Islamic State had planned for the city.

On Dec. 21 a 32-year-old Muslim man named Saeed Noori drove his car into a crowd of people in Melbourne, Australia, injuring 19, three of them critically, according to reports. The Australian citizen entered that country in 2004 as a refugee from Afghanistan.

Argentine prosecutor Alberto Nisman was investigating President Cristina Kirchner’s links to Iran in January 2015 when he was found dead in his Buenos Aires apartment with a gunshot wound to the head. Now a judge has ruled that he was murdered.

In 2015 Mrs. Kirchner’s secretary of security immediately declared Nisman’s death an apparent suicide. That made little sense to those who knew Nisman, in part because he was hours away from presenting evidence to Congress that Mrs. Kirchner had made a deal with Tehran to cover up Iran’s responsibility for the 1994 bombing of a Buenos Aires Jewish community center that killed 85 people.

When President Mauricio Macri took office in December 2015 he pledged that investigators would have the independence to discover the truth. The Journal reported in September that “twenty-eight government forensic experts, toiling at a secret facility for seven months, concluded” that Mr. Nisman was killed. They handed their findings to a federal court.

On Tuesday in a 656-page opinion, Argentine federal judge Julián Ercolini ruled that “the death of Prosecutor Nisman was not a suicide, and was brought about by a third party and in a painful manner.” He charged Diego Lagomarsino, who was an aide to Nisman, as an accessory to the murder.

The judge says Mr. Lagomarsino was the last person in the apartment and the bullet that killed the prosecutor came from the aide’s gun. Mr. Lagomarsino denies any role in Nisman’s death and says his boss asked him for the gun for protection.

Nisman is being vindicated in death. His thorough investigation led to the indictment of Mrs. Kirchner on treason charges earlier this month. As a sitting senator she has immunity for now but her former foreign minister, Héctor Timerman, is under house arrest. Let’s hope investigators keep following the trail to Tehran.

So there will be more empty seats round the Christmas table this year, after an “Australian citizen” mowed down pedestrians at the junction of Flinders Street and Elizabeth Street in Melbourne. The casualties include “a pre-schooler with serious head injuries”. The “Australian citizen” (I presume this designation is being used to emphasize that he’s entirely eligible to serve in Mr Turnbull’s cabinet) did it deliberately, but relax, lighten up, there’s no need to worry because, according to Victoria’s police commissioner, all this terrifying terror is “not terror-related”.

So he’s not a crack operative with the Islamic State’s Australian branch office, he’s just, as The Age’s cheery headline writer puts it, “of Afghan descent and mentally ill”. A second man, arrested while filming the scene and found to have three knives in his bag, is believed to be nothing to do with the first man. Just another Australian citizen taking his knife collection out for a stroll.

You’ll recall there was a previous “vehicle attack” in downtown Melbourne earlier this year, after which the authorities ordered up the bollardization of every pedestrianized precinct in the vicinity. As Andrew Bolt writes:

All the bollards put up after six people were killed in Bourke St Mall in January have not stopped this.

After the Halloween jihadist killed eight people on a bike path in Lower Manhattan, New York’s bollardizers commanded similarly extravagant installation of Diversity Bollards up and down the city. As I wrote:

Last week I was tootling through Williston, Vermont, which has just reconfigured its highway system to run green-painted bike paths down the center of the streets. And the thought occurred to me that, once you’ve bollarded off every sidewalk, what’s to stop jihadists mowing down cyclists? After all, if the eco-crowd are installing them in the middle of the roadway, they’re kind of hard to bollard off.

I was over-thinking the issue. One of the problems with bollarding off pedestrians behind a wall of Diversity Bollards is that they still occasionally have to emerge from behind the bollards to cross the street, and it’s hard to bollard off a pedestrian crossing. In this case, the non-terror-related Australian citizen simply waited until the little green sign indicated it was safe for pedestrians to cross the street and then floored it. In an amusing touch, his car eventually came to a rest against a bollard.

What’s the solution? Maybe automobile manufacturers could replace airbags with Diversity Bollards timed to inflate whenever non-terror-related drivers with mental-health issues accelerate near pedestrian crossings. Or perhaps it would be easier to issue citizens of western nations at birth with an individual ring of bollards to wear about their persons at all time, starting with when they leave the maternity ward.

Alternatively, instead of attempting to ring-fence every potential target – ie, everything and everyone – with Diversity Bollards, we could try installing bollards where they matter – around the civilized world. To reiterate what I reiterated last time:

I don’t want to get used to it – and I reiterate my minimum demand of western politicians that I last made after the London Bridge attacks: How many more corpses need to pile up on our streets before you guys decide to stop importing more of it?

Palestinians say that what they are facing in Iraq is “ethnic cleansing.” The new Iraqi law deprives Palestinians living in Iraq of their right to free education, healthcare and to travel documents, and denies them work in state institutions.

No one will pay any attention to the misery of the Palestinians in any Arab country. Major media outlets around the world will barely cover the news of the controversial Iraqi law or the displacement of thousands of Palestinian families in Iraq. Journalists are too busy chasing a handful of Palestinian stone-throwers near Ramallah. A Palestinian girl who punched an Israeli soldier in the face draws more media interest than Arab apartheid against the Palestinians.

Palestinian leaders, meanwhile care nothing about the plight of their own people in Arab countries. They are much too busy inciting Palestinians against Israel and Trump to pay such a paltry issue any mind at all.

Iraq has just joined the long list of Arab countries that shamelessly practice apartheid against Palestinians. The number of Arab countries that apply discriminatory measures against Palestinians while pretending to support the Palestinian cause is breathtaking. Arab hypocrisy is once again on display, but who who is looking?

The international media — and even the Palestinians — are so preoccupied with US President Donald Trump’s announcement on Jerusalem that the plight of Palestinians in Arab countries is dead news. This apathy allows Arab governments to continue with their anti-Palestinian policies because they know that no one in the international community cares — the United Nations is too busy condemning Israel to do much else.

So what is the story with the Palestinians in Iraq? Earlier this week, it was revealed that the Iraqi government has approved a new law that effectively abolishes the rights given to Palestinians living there. The new law changes the status of Palestinians from nationals to foreigners.

Under Saddam Hussein, the former Iraqi dictator, the Palestinians enjoyed many privileges. Until 2003, there were about 40,000 Palestinians living in Iraq. Since the overthrow of the Saddam regime, the Palestinian population has dwindled to 7,000.

Thousands of Palestinians have fled Iraq after being targeted by various warring militias in that country because of their support for Saddam Hussein. Palestinians say that what they are facing in Iraq is “ethnic cleansing.”

The conditions of the Palestinians in Iraq are about to go from bad to worse. The new law, which was ratified by Iraqi President Fuad Masum, deprives Palestinians living in Iraq of their right to free education, healthcare and to travel documents, and denies them work in state institutions. The new law, which is called No. 76 of 2017, revokes the rights and privileges granted to Palestinians under Saddam Hussein. The law went into effect recently after it was published in the Iraqi Official Gazette No. 4466.

“Instead of protecting the Palestinian refugees from daily violations and improving their living and humanitarian conditions, the Iraqi government is making decisions that will have a catastrophic impact on the lives of these refugees,” said Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor.

But what of NATO? Is Turkey a reliable NATO partner? Here the picture is more mixed.

Turkey of late, with the purchase of two batteries of the Russian S-400 air defense system, appears to have taken a big step away from the NATO alliance. The Erdogan regime’s nationwide post-coup purge of civil and military personnel, and its threatening acts against freedom of speech, such as the mass arrest of journalists, are eviscerating the country’s independent civil society institutions. In addition, Turkey’s crackdown on the activities of non-governmental organizations in Turkey is another sign that Turkey is turning away from democratic values shared by NATO Alliance members.

Is Turkey still a reliable ally? After repeated endorsements by the government of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of policies inimical to U.S. interests, the answer seems to be not really.

Erdogan recently announced he will seek United Nations support to annul President Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

In addition, the Turkish Ministry of Justice has issued warrants for the arrest of two American Turkey specialists, in effect placing a bounty of $800,000 on their heads.

Additionally, there is the somewhat comical furor in Turkey over the adoption by Turkish entrepreneurs of the American “Black Friday” sales concept. Several Turkish businesses, which had attempted to increase sales by borrowing the U.S. “Black Friday” market lure, were attacked by devout Muslims who accused store owners of disrespecting Islam’s day of prayer. The perceived insult to Islam’s Friday Prayer obligation is just another example of a widening antipathy towards the U.S.

While the misunderstanding by Turks over “Black Friday,” will likely fade quickly, the diplomatic damage brought on by the early October arrest by Turkey’s police of a Turkish employee at the U.S. Consulate in Istanbul allegedly for espionage is likely to be more long-lasting.

The arrest of the U.S Consulate’s employee precipitated the U.S. Ambassador’s suspension on October 8, of all non-immigrant U.S. visas for Turkish citizens. The incident underscores how bilateral relations have plummeted since Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan first came to power.

Shortly after Erdogan was elected in 2002, Turkey appeared to start turning away from its U.S. alliance when it refused to grant permission for U.S. troops to cross Turkish territory into northern Iraq. Turkey’s parliament, the Grand National Assembly, voted down the request. Erdogan seems now to be focusing on regional affairs rather than on Turkey’s traditional ties to the United States and Europe. Since Erdogan came to power, Turkey has increased its economic and diplomatic ties to Arab states.

The rules for Russia’s presidential election this spring may appear opaque and confusing to outsiders, but they boil down to one. Vladimir Putin is running for re-election, and if you are someone whose popularity holds the potential to embarrass him, you’re not going to be allowed on the ballot.

That is what is now happening to Alexei Navalny, the Russian lawyer who uses a popular blog to expose corruption in government and state-owned entities. These included a March video that went viral accusing Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev of graft. For the past year, Mr. Navalny has been making trips across the country in a grass-roots election bid for the Russian presidency. As the election nears, Mr. Navalny is proving too popular for Mr. Putin’s tastes.

On Monday Russia’s top election body barred Mr. Navalny from running for president, invoking a politically motivated conviction for embezzlement to declare him ineligible. Mr. Navalny has responded by calling for Russians to boycott the election. So the Kremlin is now saying Mr. Navalny’s call for a boycott may also be illegal, and perhaps that will serve as pretext for another arrest.

Welcome to democracy, Putin-style. In today’s Russia, an opposition candidate is convicted on trumped up charges that are designed to scare him off from politics and his anticorruption campaigns. He decides to run anyway, and then is declared ineligible by virtue of the conviction. Which leaves the Kremlin in the position of threatening Mr. Navalny with more jail time for boycotting an election the Kremlin has prevented him from entering.

Mr. Navalny is a brave man who knows what he is doing and what he’s risking. But Mr. Putin’s moves against Mr. Navalny and his associates aren’t those of a strong and confident man. To the contrary, they are the actions of someone letting his fears get the best of him. In the video statement Mr. Navalny put out after he was declared ineligible, he had it exactly right: “Putin is terribly scared and is afraid of running against me.”

One of the most striking images from the night of the London Borough Market terror attack was of drinkers being marched out of the Market under police escort with their hands on their heads. The British public at that point looked not like stoical, pugnacious heroes, but like a defeated army being marched into captivity.

Contrary to all our public statements, we have become terrorised, just as the terrorists want.

It is a glimpse into the soul of a city; and like all such ugly glimpses, we will turn away from looking at it, rather than considering it and wondering what it truly suggests.

Whenever Britain suffers a terrorist attack — and it has suffered four Islamist attacks this year alone — the British public responds the same way.

Twelve years ago, when four suicide bombers detonated homemade bombs on the London underground and on a red-top bus in central London, there was much talk of “Blitz spirit”. After 7/7, the media erupted with boasts of wartime echoes. Some people who lived in London noticed a rather different atmosphere. Of course people “got on with their lives” (what else could they do?) but in the days and weeks after the attacks it was not really “business as usual”. Especially not after another four suicide bombers went onto the tube a fortnight later, on July 21, and attempted to repeat the exercise. Fortunately, on that occasion the bombs failed to detonate. But during the period that ensued, it was certainly easier than usual to get a seat on the London Underground.

Of course, political leaders relish the opportunity to accentuate and exaggerate these echoes. If the British public are the citizens of London in the Blitz, then the politicians are Winston Churchill. After attacks like the 2013 daytime slaughter of Drummer Lee Rigby on the streets of London, then-Prime Minister David Cameron stressed from the steps of Downing Street that “One of the best ways of defeating terrorism is to go about our normal lives. And that is what we shall all do.” These themes are thought to play deep to the spirit of the British people.

But the more this conspicuous, self-conscious egging-on of such attitudes is stressed, the thinner it seems to get. In March, after Khalid Masood ploughed a car across Westminster Bridge, mowing down locals and tourists, and crashed the car and stabbed policeman Keith Palmer to death inside the gates of the Palace of Westminster, one prominent British journalist took to the pages of the New York Times to pour out the clichés.

“By Thursday morning, London was, if not quite back to normal, then certainly back in business. As I traveled through the south of the city, up to Chelsea and later over to King’s Cross, Londoners really were going about their lives as on any other day.

“This behavior reflects something deeper than conscious defiance, I think. It would simply not occur to the 8.6 million citizens of this megalopolis to allow one man to send them into hiding. As they say in the East End, you’re having a laugh, aren’t you?”

American funding for UNRWA is problematic itself because the organization is inextricably intertwined with Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon. This may be the right time to review the number of Palestinian “refugees” in the world and the world’s obligation to them.

Ten years ago, in a forum on Capitol Hill, then-Rep. Mark Kirk called for an international audit of UNRWA. Kirk admitted he was unsuccessful, despite such accounting anomalies as a $13 million entry for “un-earmarked expenses” in an audit conducted by UNRWA’s own board.

Palestinians are the only “refugee” group that hands the status down through generations, which is why they are governed by UNRWA; all other refugees are under the care of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, which has a mandate to settle refugees so they can become citizens of new countries.

Palestinian refugees are a slippery population — but when 285,535 of them go missing from a small country such as Lebanon, it should raise eyebrows.

UNRWA in Lebanon reports on its website that 449,957 refugees live under its protection in 12 camps, but a survey by Lebanon’s Central Administration of Statistics, together with the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, could only find 174,535. The Lebanese government said the others “left.” Okay, maybe they did — Lebanon constrained them viciously, so it would make some sense. What does NOT make sense, then, is the UN giving UNRWA a budget based on nearly half a million people when, in fact, there are far fewer than a quarter of a million. Who is paying and who is getting the money?

We are and they are.

The UNRWA website shows a budget of $2.41 billion combined for FY 2016 and 2017. The U.S. provides more than $300 million to UNRWA annually, about one-quarter of the total. In August 2017, UNRWA claimed a deficit of $126 million. A former State Department official said the budget shortfalls are chronic but that “the funds seemed eventually arrive” after pressing others for more money — some of that additional money is from the U.S.

American funding for UNRWA is problematic itself because the organization is inextricably intertwined with Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon; see here, here and here. And specifically for Lebanon, the connection goes as far back as 2007. But stay with the “floating” population problem for a moment.

The huge discrepancy in Lebanon suggests that UNRWA may have trouble counting refugees in the West Bank, Jordan, Gaza, and Syria as well. (We’ll give them a pass on Syria for now.) The problem is not new, but that Palestinian agencies were running the census may help the United States overcome its own long-term obstinacy when it comes to counting and paying.