RUTHFULLY YOURS

As the world marks the centenary of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, our attention has naturally turned to how communism ravaged the former Soviet Union and its Eastern European vassals. But the ideology also cast a shadow outside the communist world. In terms of the sheer number of people affected, India suffered more than any noncommunist country. Overcoming this poisonous legacy remains a work in progress.

Of course, democratic India witnessed no Soviet-style show trials or gulags. There is no modern Indian equivalent of China’s brutal Cultural Revolution or Great Leap Forward. Nothing in independent India’s experience approaches the horrors of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.

But though India may have been spared the worst of communist excesses, it nonetheless paid a price for the ideology’s rise to global prominence. Simply put, communism helped disfigure India’s economic imagination. If India still houses 268 million people who earn less than $1.90 a day—the World Bank’s official estimate for poverty—at least part of the blame belongs to politicians besotted by the Soviet experiment before it finally collapsed.

Lenin’s revolution had an impact on India even before its independence from Britain in 1947. Twenty years earlier, Jawaharlal Nehru, at the time an up-and-coming leader in the Congress Party, visited Moscow for the 10th anniversary of the revolution. He later wrote: “I had no doubt that the Soviet Revolution had advanced human society by a great leap and had lit a bright flame that could not be smothered.”

Though himself a Fabian socialist, a worldview he picked up as a student in Britain, Nehru freely acknowledged the impact of communism on his economic thinking. After independence, with Nehru at the helm, India enthusiastically embraced state planning. As the theory went, high-minded bureaucrats would make better economic decisions than grubby entrepreneurs.

Nehru decreed that lavishly funded state-owned companies would control “the commanding heights” of India’s economy. The phrase itself was borrowed from Lenin. In 1955 the ruling Congress Party declared its intent to establish “a socialistic pattern of society” in India.

Nehru’s fans point out that planning was all the rage in the 1950s. Communists were hardly the only ones enamored by it. This is true, but it glosses over prescient early critiques of India’s statist path by the University of Chicago’s Milton Friedman and the Indian free market economist B.R. Shenoy.

Over the first three decades of independence, Nehru, followed by his daughter Indira Gandhi, built one of the most dirigiste economies outside the communist world. Between them they nationalized aviation (1953), life insurance (1956), banks (1969) and coal mines (1973). CONTINUE AT SITE

On becoming Zimbabwe’s first Prime Minister in 1980, Robert Mugabe told Ian Smith, the defiant leader of white Rhodesa, “you have given me the jewel of Africa”. Mugabe took the jewel and shattered it, leaving a few splinters and shards strewn across a wasteland. Today, history came calling for the nonagenarian thug. He is apparently under house arrest as the army takes over and his wife flees.

Mugabe had an advantage over the first generation of post-colonial leaders from twenty years earlier: The mistakes were well known and he didn’t have to repeat them.

But he did anyway. And he managed to hang on longer than Nkrumah and Nyerere, Kenyatta and Kaunda and the other Afro-Marxist kleptocrats.

I wrote about the old monster (and his Chinese-made prosthetic) here. Half a decade or so back, I wrote: “It’s a good basic axiom that if you take a quart of ice-cream and a quart of dog feces and mix ’em together the result will taste more like the latter than the former. That’s the problem with the U.N.”

Absolutely right, if I do say so myself. When you make the free nations and the thug states members of the same club, the danger isn’t that they’ll meet each other half-way but that the free world winds up going three-quarters, seven-eighths of the way.

That’s how it went last Friday when the World Health Organization, ostensibly one of the least nutty operating units of the UN (compared with, say, the Human Rights Council), announced that Robert Mugabe was being appointed a WHO “Goodwill Ambassador”. Mr Mugabe’s idea of “goodwill” is to send his goons round to your farmhouse to announce he’s stealing your land – and, if you’re minded to object, kill your farm workers or wife or kid. When Zimbabwe’s nonagenarian monster goes Goodwill hunting, best not to stand in his path.

Yesterday the WHO was forced to back down. But how did it ever get as far as an official announcement? Mugabe’s greatest contribution to “world health” has been to raise the comparative life expectancy of every other country by dramatically reducing his own over his first quarter-century:

“My mother said that Arabs are born to hate Jews.” — Abdelghani Merah (brother of Mohamed Merah, a French Muslim terrorist who murdered seven people), speaking on French television.

“I heard with my own ears, Mohamed Merah’s mother saying: “in our religion it is permitted to kill Jewish children.” — Mohamed Sifaoui, journalist and director of a documentary on the Merah family, on Canal+ TV.

Incidentally, while Abdelkader Merah’s trial was underway, the headstone of Ilan Halimi — a Jew tortured to death in 2006 — was desecrated and broken. By whom? Guess.

In France, any public mention of Muslim anti-Semitism can lead you to court. In February 2017, the scholar Georges Bensoussan was sued for “incitement to racial hatred” because he mentioned in a radio debate how vastly widespread anti-Semitism is among French Muslim families.

Now, however, two types of Muslim anti-Semitism are being highlighted by the media. These two types could be called “hard anti-Semitism” and “soft anti-Semitism”.

Hard Muslim anti-Semitism is the anti-Semitism of murderers. Soft Muslim anti-Semitism is anti-Semitism of “anti-Zionists” and harrassers of various stripes.

The recently concluded trial of terrorist Abdelkader Merah is a clear and pathetic illustration of hard Muslim anti-Semitism. Abdelkader Merah is the brother of Mohamed Merah, a French Muslim extremist who murdered seven people, including three Jewish children and their teacher at a Jewish school, in Toulouse. Mohamed Merah was killed in a shoot-out with police on March 22, 2012. Abdelkader Merah, Mohamed’s brother, was on trial during the past few weeks. He was accused of being a member of a terrorist organization and to have closely monitored his brother during his murder spree. Abdelkader’s trial ended on November 2, 2017; he was convicted and sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Abdelkader’s Merah’s trial illustrated the atmosphere in a Muslim family where hatred for Jews was like a bond in the family culture. L’Express writes:

“A sinister little music hovers above all this tragedy: visceral anti-Semitism. In their indictment, investigating judges noted that Abdelkader Merah approved the ‘chosen targets’ of his brother, including ‘the Jews, against whom he seemed to be angry’. In the absence of love and attention, the Merah couple indeed fed their children with the hatred of Jews.”

Abdelghani Merah, Abdelkader’s brother, is the only member of the family who succeeded in climbing out of his family’s culture of hate: hatred of France, hatred of Jews, hatred of everyone who is not Muslim. “My mother said that Arabs are born to hate Jews” Abdelghani said on television.

The world equates American military power with the maintenance of the postwar global order of free commerce, communications, and travel.

Sometimes American power leads to costly, indecisive interventions like those in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya that were not able to translate superiority on the battlefield into lasting peace.

But amid the frustrations of American foreign policy, it is forgotten that the United States also plays a critical but more silent role in ensuring the survival of small, at-risk nations. The majority of them are democratic and pro-Western. But they all share the misfortune of living in dangerous neighborhoods full of bullies.

These small nations are a far cry from rogue clients of China and Russia — theocratic Iran, autocratic North Korea, and totalitarian Venezuela — that oppress their own people and threaten their regions.

In the Middle East, there are two places that consistently remain pro-American: the nation of Israel and the autonomous region of Iraqi Kurdistan. Both show a spirit and tenacity that so far have ensured their survival against aggressive and far larger neighbors. Both have few friends other than the United States. And both are anomalies. Israel is surrounded by Islamic neighbors. The ethnic Kurds live in the heart of the Arab Middle East. Quite admirably, the U.S. continues to be a patron of both.

For some 500 years, the Ottoman Empire terrified the Christian Middle East and Mediterranean world. Almost every country in its swath was Islamicized. Two tiny unique places were conquered but not transformed: Armenia and Greece. Both suffered terribly at the hands of the Ottomans and their successors, the early-20th-century Turkish state.

Yet both Armenia and Greece remained Christian and kept their languages and cultures. Today, both are still quite vulnerable to renewed neo-Ottoman Turkish pressures.

America has been a friend to both Armenia and Greece, although their histories with the U.S. were often controversial. In turn, they have sent millions of talented and skilled immigrants to the U.S. The world is a far better place because there are 11 million Greeks who keep the legacy of Hellenism alive. Armenia still remains a Western outpost — the first country to formally adopt Christianity as a state religion, and a nation that has preserved its faith under centuries of cruel foreign persecutions.

After a humiliating defeat in Syria and Iraq, thousands of European jihadis are set to return home. Western governments seem set to roll out the red-carpet for them as if they were heroes rather than turncoats.

The UK has launched an integration program, Operation Constrain, for its homecoming jihadis to provide them with assistance in finding a job and living a “normal” life.

Such theatrics, however, are not expected to deter determined terrorists, unless the authorities are equally determined with brutal honesty to see what is being said extremist mosques and seminaries and know their sources of funding.

When a minister from the Gulf warns European countries that their mosques or imams should be licensed, you know you have a problem on your hands.

While France and Germany marked memorial days for the 2015 Paris and 2016 Berlin terrorist attacks, many Islamists seem to remain undeterred. The October 31 terror attack in New York and the arrest of three suspected ISIS militants in Germany are merely reminders of how determined many Islamists are to rattle the foundations of modern civilization and move their plans forward inch by inch.

As ISIS retreats in Syria and Iraq, its adherents show up in the West as “inspired” home-grown or would-be terrorists. Anyone believing that these homecoming terrorists were merely hostages of ISIS or were only given air-guns is misinformed.

So many terrorist attacks this year have made people in the West doubt the ability of governments to counter terrorist aggression. Some political leaders, such as London’s Mayor Sadiq Khan, have said that people will just have to get used to terror attacks — a response the public might understandably find less than satisfactory.

Meanwhile, President Trump’s tweet after the October 31 attack in New York — “We must not allow ISIS to return, or enter, our country after defeating them in the Middle East and elsewhere. Enough!” — resurfaced skepticism about how terrorism is being handled.

Zimbabwe was once Rhodesia-called the “breadbasket of Africa”- the most productive nation with an infrastructure, judicial system, and gifted with natural beauty, thriving agriculture and a growing middle class of White and Black citizens. Post-colonial independence brought corruption, destruction, epidemics, and a loss of all basic human rights…..It appears that nothing will change for the better….rsk
Zimbabwe’s generals swear what they started doing in the early hours of Wednesday morning isn’t a coup, but it sure looks like one. By the end of the day, long-time strongman Robert Mugabe was under house arrest, his wife Grace was rumored to have fled the country, and state media and the main airport were under military control.

It would be nice to think the military is belatedly punishing the Mugabe regime for the economic and political misery it has inflicted on Zimbabwe’s people for the 37 years the Old Man has been in power. But the coup’s motives are more venal and arise from a power struggle within the ruling Zanu-PF party.

The generals who have long been silent partners in the Zanu-PF government worried that the 93-year-old Mr. Mugabe’s moves to position his 52-year-old wife as his successor imperiled their own influence. The main goal of the coup may be to push Mr. Mugabe out before he could realize his dynastic ambitions. To that end, the military might bring back recently deposed Vice President Emmerson Mnangagwa, whom Mr. Mugabe fired last week for becoming an alternate center of power within the party.

As gratifying as it is to watch the scorpions fight, the victims as always will be Zimbabwe’s people. Mr. Mugabe’s misrule has left them lurching from one bout of starvation, disease and hyperinflation to another, while the country’s rulers enrich themselves.

This coup offers little hope of immediate improvement. After the crisis in Harare dies down, the government still will be focused mainly on patronage politics coupled with often violent suppression of political dissent. Mr. Mnangagwa allegedly was responsible for his share of the repression as Mr. Mugabe’s security chief in the 1980s.

Zimbabwe may escape one trap by avoiding a ruling family dynasty, and that’s a precondition for the political and economic reforms Zimbabwe needs to have any shot at prosperity. But the country that once was Africa’s bread basket needs a total overhaul of its governance, not merely a coup, and that day is not here.

Suburbs have become transformed into one of the most visible signs of the Islamization of France. Anti-Semitism is devouring the French Republic.

While Jewish symbols disappear from France, Islamic symbols proliferate, from burkinis on the beaches to veils in the workplace. Jews who have not fled France are trying to become “invisible”.

France’s suburbs are rapidly becoming apartheid societies. Hatred of Jews has become the gateway to “la France soumise” — the submission of France.

Suburbs (“banlieues”) — distant from the affluent boulevards and bistros of Paris — form the “other France”. They are the “peripheral France”, (“La France Périphérique”) as the geographer Christophe Guilluy calls them in an important book. They are where “living together” between communities has really been tested.

In the last 20 years, these French suburbs have not only become “concentrations of poverty and social isolation”, but have gone from being some of France’s most densely-populated Jewish areas to “lost territories of the Republic”, according to the great historian Georges Bensoussan, in his book, Les territoires perdus de la République.

These suburbs have become transformed into one of the most visible signs of the Islamization of France.

Anti-Semitism has returned as one of Europe’s worst diseases. France hosts Europe’s largest Jewish community, and Jews have been fleeing the suburbs to either emigrate or move to gentrified districts of the cities, where they feel more protected. What happens to the Jews will have a seismic impact on the entire continent.

In the Parisian suburb of Bagneux, someone recently vandalized the memorial plaque for Ilan Halimi, a young Jew who was kidnapped, tortured and murdered by a “barbarian gang” in 2006, just for being a Jew. At the time, it was France’s first case of murderous anti-Semitism in many years. After it, Islamists murdered Jews at a school in Toulouse and a kosher supermarket in Paris.

As Le Monde reported in a chilling new inquiry, anti-Semitism now knocks daily at the doors of the French Jews. It has been creating a serious migratory trend: French Jews have become “internal refugees”.

French Jews are now not only threatened in their synagogues and schools, but in their homes. A Jewish family was recently held hostage, beaten and robbed in their home in the suburb of Seine Saint-Denis. Before that, a retired Jewish doctor and schoolteacher, Sarah Halimi, was beaten and thrown to her death from her balcony, in the Belleville district of Paris. The man who murdered her, while yelling “Allahu Akbar” (“Allah is Greater”), was a Muslim neighbor. Two Jewish brothers were recently attacked on a Paris street by men wielding a hacksaw and shouting “You dirty Jews! You are going to die”.

Shortly after taking office in November 2015, Canada’s Prime MinisterJustin Trudeau on CBC’s “1 on 1” argued the importance of working with “the Muslim community to demonstrate that Islam is not incompatible with free and open Western societies.” Thus, reiterating the oxymoron that was introduced by the Muslim Brotherhood and has since been used by their many affiliated Muslim organizations to dupe the West.

So when on October 18, 2017, the province of Quebec passed a new law banning the wearing of niqab or burqa “when riding public transit or receiving government services” for security reasons– Trudeau made it known he wasn’t happy with the new provincial law, law. “As a federal government, we are going to take our responsibility seriously and look carefully at what the implications are” even though the federal government, cannot challenge the new law, implying others could.

It didn’t take for the leading Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated, the National Council of Canadian Muslims and the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, together with Marie-Michelle Lacoste, a Montreal convert to Islam to file a lawsuit with the province’s Superior Court requesting to suspend the law because the ban “gravely infringes” the religious and equality rights of Muslim women in the province. She accused the local government of sending a message “ to the citizens is that if they already have negative thoughts about Muslim women wearing the niqab, it’s OK to think this way, (that) you are right to harass them, to threaten them, to insult them,” she announced. The Court is scheduled to hear her request later on Wednesday. Rest assured that if the court denies her request, she and the Islamic organizations that support her will not stop until the ban is lifted.

“The Awareness guide – listed terrorist entities,” posted on the Royal Canadian Mounted Police website quotes Sections 318, 319, and 320 of the Criminal Code, which forbids hate propaganda. “Hate propaganda” means “any writing, sign or visible representation that advocates or promotes genocide or the communication of which by any person would constitute an offence under section 319.”

But since Trudeau took office, his pro-Islamic policies led to lax enforcement of Canada’s anti- “hate-crime” and incitement laws against Canadians, including Muslim religious leaders, who publicly support the mujahideen in their armed struggle against infidels, and the killing of the enemies of Islam.

Last September Quebec prosecutors decided not to file hate crimes charges against Sheikh Sayyed Al-Ghitawi, an imam at the Al-Andalous Islamic Center in Montreal,

who during two Friday sermons on August 2014, prayed to Allah to “destroy the accursed Jews” and to “kill them one by one.” “Oh Allah, turn their children into orphans and their women into widows,” he said in the sermons, which were posted on the Alrahma Qanat on YouTube.