RUTHFULLY YOURS

It isn’t only Niger. American troops are deployed in more than 150 countries, working with local partners to help them become better soldiers and meet their own threats. What is happening in Niger is happening in all the countries of the second tier of Africa — volatile and insecure countries of mixed Christian, Muslim and traditional indigenous religions. American soldiers are there to help governments more effectively control their own territory and borders, reducing the likelihood of transnational jihad.

Iran’s massive infusion of funds supports Sunni Hamas, al-Qaeda, ISIS, Boko Haram and others. Instability, chaos, anti-Americanism, anti-Westernism, and anti-Christianism are what Iran seeks — and they are what Sunni jihadists seek. In Iraq and Syria, ISIS did the destabilizing and Iran reaped the benefits.

At the end of White House Chief of Staff John Kelly’s moving briefing about the four American Special Forces soldiers killed in Niger earlier in October, he took questions. The first was, “Why are we in Niger?”

The question was too narrow; it isn’t only Niger. Tens of thousands of American troops are deployed in more than 150 countries, working with America’s local partners to help them become better soldiers and meet their own threats. We are on every continent except Antarctica. While we are unlikely to ever know precisely who killed the four soldiers, what is happening in Niger is happening in all the countries of the second tier of Africa — volatile and insecure countries of mixed Christian, Muslim and traditional indigenous religions. American soldiers are there to help governments more effectively control their own territory and borders, reducing the likelihood of transnational jihad.

A U.S. Army Special Forces weapons sergeant observes a Nigerien soldier in a drill during Exercise Flintlock 2017 in Diffa, Niger, March 11, 2017. (U.S. Army photo by Spc. Zayid Ballesteros)

Two broad forces are shaking the Middle East and Africa: Sunni jihadist radicalism embodied by ISIS and al-Qaeda along with smaller groups; and Shiite supremacism controlled and financed by Iran. Iran’s arms transfers to Africa are well documented, as is Iran’s support for Sunni jihad, including incubating both al-Qaeda and ISIS. Separately and together, they threaten not only countries, but also the Red Sea and the Mediterranean Sea, the two prime waterways that allow countries, including Israel and Egypt, to pursue trade with Asia and Europe.

The mullahs in Iran are not Iranian or Persian nationalists, they are Shiite supremacists. When the Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Tehran in 1979 after fourteen years of exile, he condemned all nationalism as “sherk,” which means associating other beings or things with God. He said what mattered was Islam, not Iran or any other country, according to the Iranian journalist Amir Taheri, Chairman of Gatestone Europe. Khomeini declared war on the United States, on Israel, and on the West. The declaration was real and has military as well as political implications, but it was also a way of deflecting attention from Iran’s declaration of war on Sunni Islam.

It was a bold move, because although Shiites are the majority in Iran and Iraq (though not in Syria), they represent less than 15% of Muslims world-wide. Iran’s primary targets are the Sunni governments of Saudi Arabia, which controls the holy sites in Mecca and Medina, and Egypt, the historic intellectual center of Sunni Islam.

Ever since the Iraqi Kurds held a referendum (and voted “yes”) on independence on September 25, Turkey has aligned itself with Iran and the Iran-controlled government in Iraq, who view the Kurdish political movement as a major threat.

Take the most significant geostrategic regional calculation in northern Syria: What Ankara views as the biggest security threat are U.S. allies fighting the Islamic State: the Syrian Kurds.

The anti-American sentiment in Turkey (part of which has been fueled by the Islamist government in power since 2002) may push Turkey further into a Russian-led axis of regional powers, including Iran.

In theory, Turkey and the United States have been staunch allies since the predominately Muslim nation became a NATO member state in 1952. Also, in theory, the leaders of the two allies are on friendly terms. President Donald Trump gave “very high marks” to Turkey’s increasingly autocratic, Islamist President Recep Tayyip Erdogan during the Turkish leader’s recent visit to Washington when his security detail attacked peaceful protesters.

It is puzzling why Trump gave a passionately (and ideologically) pro-Hamas, pro-Muslim Brotherhood, Islamist leader “very high marks.” But in reality, the Ankara-Washington axis could not be farther from diplomatic niceties such as “allies” or “very high marks.”

This is a select (and brief) recent anatomy of what some analysts call “hostage diplomacy” between the two “staunch NATO allies.”

In June this year, Pew Research Center’s Global Attitudes Survey, covering a total of 37 countries, revealed that 79% of Turks had an unfavorable opinion of the U.S. That was the second-highest among the countries surveyed, after 82% in Jordan. Anti-American sentiment in Turkey is 27% higher than in Russia, and more than twice as high as the global median of 39%.

There are reports that six Turkish government banks face billions of dollars in fines from the U.S. over alleged violations of Iran sanctions.

Turkey is keeping in jail, among a dozen or so others, a NASA scientist who was vacationing with relatives in Turkey, and a Christian missionary who has lived in Turkey for 23 years. Others include a visiting chemistry professor from Pennsylvania and his brother, a real-estate agent. All of them face long prison sentences for allegedly playing a part in last year’s failed coup against Erdogan’s government.

There is little doubt that the U.S. citizens are being held in Turkey as a bargaining chip to pressure Washington to extradite Muslim cleric Fethullah Gülen, a former Erdogan ally and allegedly the mastermind behind the attempted putsch. Erdogan himself does not hide his intentions. If Gülen were handed over, Erdogan said, he would sort out the American pastor’s judicial case. “Give him to us and we will put yours through the judiciary; we will give him to you,” he said recently.

Early in October, as “hostage diplomacy” intensified, the “staunch allies” U.S. and Turkey stopped issuing non-immigrant visas to each others’ citizens — a restriction that has already affected thousands of travelers. The first ban came from the U.S., then Turkey retaliated. The U.S. move came after Turkey’s arrest of a U.S. consulate employee, a Turkish citizen, on charges that he had links to Gülen. The visa ban put Turkey in the same category of countries such as Chad, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Somalia, Venezuela and Yemen. Erdogan also claims that the U.S. is hiding a suspect in its Istanbul consulate who is also linked to Gülen.

Perhaps even more objectionable is Turkey’s persecution of novelists who do not even take part in the political debate. They are hated by Erdogan’s Islamist government simply for conveying Western ideas and fighting for freedom of speech.

Turkey’s Erdogan is following the Soviet Stalinist method of burying the books, often along with their authors. Turkey is purging culture.

After the failed coup last year, Erdogan fired “21,000 teachers” and “1,577 university deans”. It is the beheading of Turkey’s academic culture. Shamefully, Europe has kept silent about this ideological massacre.

End of August, Madrid: At the Turkish government’s request through Interpol, Spanish police arrested a famous Turkish writer, Dogan Akhanli, who was on vacation in Spain. A few days earlier, in Barcelona, Spanish authorities had arrested the Turkish writer, Hamza Yalcin, a reporter for the left-wing newspaper Odak. Meanwhile, in Turkey, another writer, Ahmet Altan was on trial. Turkish authorities prevented yet another Turkish novelist, Asli Erdogan, from flying to Europe to receive the Erich Maria Remarque Peace Prize in the German city of Osnabrück.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey has already made headlines for jailing dozens of journalists in a round-up that has transformed Turkey into “the world’s biggest prison for reporters”. Perhaps even more objectionable is Turkey’s persecution of novelists who do not even take part in the political debate. They are hated by Erdogan’s Islamist government simply for conveying Western ideas and fighting for freedom of speech. What is happening in Turkey is even more urgent than what is happening in Iran and Saudi Arabia, two other Islamic countries that persecute and jail writers: Turkey is, at least rhetorically, a democracy as well as the Islamic world’s purported bridge to Europe.

In August, at the Turkish government’s request through Interpol, Spanish police arrested a famous Turkish writer, Dogan Akhanli (pictured), who was on vacation in Spain. (Image source: © Raimond Spekking / CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons)

Nazis used to burn books; Turkey’s Erdogan is following the Soviet Stalinist method of burying the books, often along with their authors.

In the last month alone, four great Turkish writers made headlines not for their novels, but for their arrests, trials and persecution. Erdogan’s plan, however, goes beyond these writers’ fate. Turkey is purging culture. The purge has been called an “intellectual massacre” that “has hit faculties from physics and biology to drama and politics at some of Turkey’s best universities, chilling teachers and students alike”. After a failed coup, last year, Erdogan fired “21,000 teachers” and “1,577 university deans”. It is the beheading of Turkey’s academic culture. Shamefully, Europe has kept silent about this ideological massacre.

In an unprecedented move, Erdogan is now promoting a plan to review the school textbooks, with the announced deletion of Darwin’s theory of evolution and the insertion of Islamic holy war. At the same time, Erdogan is also asking to remove from the Turkish vocabulary words with a “Western” influence. The word “arena” will therefore be removed from sports stadiums. It is a typical totalitarian maneuver to change the language to control the population. Turkish authorities this week also removed Chopin’s music from funeral marches and replaced it with an Ottoman era composition based on Koranic verses.

“In the past, Kemalists or leftists were merely suspicious of the political intentions of Western powers against Turkey”, wrote the journalist Mustafa Akyol. “In the latter-day AKP narrative, however… Western civilization, with all its values, institutions, culture and even science, became something that must be doubted, if not outright rejected.”

Fazil Say, a famous Turkish pianist, has been put on trial for “blasphemy”. In one message he retweeted a verse from a poem by Omar Khayyám in which the 11th-century Persian poet attacks pious hypocrisy:

“You say rivers of wine flow in heaven, is heaven a tavern to you? You say two huris [companions] await each believer there, is heaven a brothel to you?”

Nedim Gursel, a professor of literature at the Sorbonne in Paris, was persecuted for his novel, The Daughters of Allah. The publisher Irfan Sanci was put on trial for “obscenity” for publishing The Exploits of a Young Don Juan, an erotic novel by Guillaume Apollinaire. In today’s Turkey, everything that culturally conveys social and sexual freedom is seen as suspect.

A few months ago, Turkey decided to replace plays by foreign authors, such as Shakespeare and Bertolt Brecht, with those of Turkish authors. Turkey also censored The Soft Machine, a novel by an American, William S. Burroughs, whose books had always been translated into Turkish. Of Mice and Men, an American classic by John Steinbeck, was also threatened with censorship.

Sevan Nisanyan, an Armenian, just escaped from jail a few days ago and fled. “Turkey has turned into a veritable madhouse,” he said.

He had been sentenced to 16 years and seven months for having made ironic comments about the Prophet Muhammad.

Editor’s Note: This article and its accompanying sidebars originally appeared in the October 30, 2017, issue of National Review magazine.

If there is one line we surely will never hear uttered, even in these times, it is any variant of this statement: “I grant that the Nazis committed excesses, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t something to be said for Fascism.” While there certainly are groupuscules of neo-Nazis around, they do not get a polite reception on campuses, let alone tenure. Watered-down versions of Fascism do not emerge in the manifestos of mainstream political parties in the West. No student is ever seen sporting a T-shirt with a chic Reinhard Heydrich likeness emblazoned across the front.

If the bacillus of Fascism is never dormant, then at least we appear to have retained significant stockpiles of societal antibiotics with which to counter it. It is unlikely that Richard Spencer will address the Conservative Political Action Conference anytime soon. Unlikely that there will be celebratory centennials for Mussolini’s rise to power. And less likely still (despite the cries to the contrary of professional anti-Fascists, who need Fascists for business purposes) that anyone dreaming of a fairer Fascism will reach the White House in any coming electoral cycle.

Yet 100 years on from the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, can the same be said about the Communist dream? Only the wildest optimist could say so. For in fact wherever you turn in the world today, it seems that the virus of Communism — in every Marxist, socialist strain — remains alive and well. Conditions for its spreading range from moderate to good.

In June, Russians were asked in an opinion poll to name “the top ten outstanding people of all time and all nations.” Perhaps it is unsurprising that the joint second most commonly given name was Pushkin. Even less surprising that Russia’s national poet should have shared this position with the country’s current strongman, Vladimir Putin. What is more startling for any outsider is that the person whom the largest number of Russians declared the “most outstanding” person in world history was Joseph Stalin. It is true that the man responsible for the deaths (around 20 million, by most moderate estimates) of more people than any other in Russian history has slipped slightly. This year he was at 38 percent, down from 42 percent in a 2012 survey. Yet still he leads the polls. Were the greatest mass murderer in Russian history able to return from his grave today, he could resume power without even needing to fix the ballot.

Of course, if Adolf Hitler remained the most popular figure in modern Germany, the world would be worried. But with the Communists it was always different. An admirer of General Franco who opposed Primo de Rivera is somehow not the same as a Trotskyist who opposed Leninism (a type that remains a staple of the media and academic worlds). Perhaps the 20th century’s greatest remaining mystery is how, between the twin totalitarian nightmares, it remains acceptable to have spent a portion of your life envying, emulating, or celebrating the global cataclysm that commenced in 1917.

It is not surprising that Russians have not reckoned with their past. Five years ago, on a visit to Stalin’s birthplace in Gori, Georgia, I paid a visit to the Soviet-era museum that still stands alongside the tiny wooden hut where the dictator was born and that is still preserved, like a relic. Here you can view the train carriage in which Stalin traveled, a suitcase he used, his writing implements and furniture, and, of course, gifts from the many people who admired him. The last room you enter on this tour of the house is somber and contains his death mask. This whole tour uncritically celebrates the great leader who, from the moment he succeeded Lenin, caused a disproportionate number of deaths of people from this region of his birth.

Then, in 2012, the Georgian authorities were only at the start of what would turn out to be a failed attempt to transform their fawning, Communist-era memorial to the region’s most famous son into a museum of “Stalinism.” At that stage they had made only one half-hearted effort to put the man into anything other than a hagiographical context. After learning about his astonishing rise and rule, and before being presented with a slim volume of his early poetry (“The lark sang its tune / High up in the clouds. / And nightingale joined / In the jubilating song”), visitors were taken under the main staircase. There two rooms had recently been added, to commemorate all the people who died in the Gulag, with a desk to re-create an interrogation cell from the time of his rule. It was like visiting a museum dedicated to the career of Adolf Hitler only to learn at the last moment (after due recognition of the Führer’s skill as a watercolorist) that there had been this thing called Auschwitz. The gift shop sold Stalin wine (red), lighters, and pens. No memorial to the victims of Fascism can finish with an attempt to sell visitors a Heinrich Himmler tea towel.

Anyone hoping that such attitudes would remain confined to what was once the Soviet Union will feel deflated when they look about the rest of the world. Not only because there are still countries attempting to perfect the experiment (North Korea most ascetically, Cuba and China with increasing laxness) but because, away from the scenes of the 20th-century charnel houses, the experiment is barely remembered at all. And where it is, it is not remembered in a negative light.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/11095/europe-demography-muhammad During the next thirty years, the population of Africa is expected to increase by one billion. The French economist Charles Gave recently predicted that France will have a Muslim majority by 2057 — and this estimate did not even take into consideration the number of expected new migrants. No doubt, Africa’s exploding population will […]

Lincolnshire is a largely rural, even isolated county at the far eastern end of the British Midlands. It is heavily Conservative and voted “Leave” in last year’s EU referendum by a margin of almost two to one. Its largest city, Lincoln, has a population of 120, 000, roughly equivalent to that of Fargo and less than half that of Lincoln, Nebraska.

Yet even in this quiet corner of the U.K., Islam is a headline story. After Drummer Lee Rigby was butchered by terrorists on a busy London street in May 2013, a Lincolnshire man was arrested and another was given a warning by county police. For aiding or supporting the killers? No. For mentioning online that the killers were Muslims. A summer 2014 entry on the blog of a prominent British Muslim records her presence at an Islamic Society of Britain-sponsored festival, “Living Islam,” at which “Lincolnshire Police had a tent and were face painting kids.” And in 2015, Lincolnshire Police warned the families of British soldiers to “stop sharing their personal details online” after one soldier’s wife received a death threat from a Muslim. Did the police make any effort to track down the source of the threat? If so, I can find no record of it online.

Now the Lincolnshire Police have produced a thirteen-minute video as part of “Hate Crime Awareness week.” It is directed at the county’s children, which presumably means that copies will be, or have been, distributed to schools so that teachers can screen it for their pupils and lead discussions afterwards.

Unsurprisingly, the video – described as the “brainchild” of constable Glenn Palmer – is pure propaganda. At the beginning, we see the following words onscreen: “British Muslims. How are they portrayed? Terrorists? Jihadis? Islamic State? Maybe the following people will give you a different perspective.” We’re then introduced to a series of people who have obviously been selected to represent the very best of the British Muslim community: a soldier, a police officer, a doctor, a Member of Parliament, the head of Bradford’s Muslim Women’s Council, and (not least) one Asim Hafiz, OBE, the first imam to serve as a Muslim chaplain in the British Armed Forces.

It’s the usual drill: terrorists, we’re told, “do not represent the views of normal Muslims.” The doctor (a woman in hijab) asserts that it was the compassionate principles of Islam that motivated her to be a doctor. And of course somebody reminds us that “we are stronger together.”

The Muslim who probably gets the most screen time is a leader of a Muslim aid organization called Al Imdaad. We hear a great deal from this fellow about how much good his group does. What he doesn’t mention is something Robert Spencer pointed out the other day in response to this video: Al Imdaad, based in South Africa, has Hamas fingerprints all over it. As Samuel Westrop reported three years ago, an Al Imdaad trustee named Qari Ziyaad Patel “has written and sung a nasheed [Islamic song] in praise of the Taliban.” In 2012-13, wrote Westrop, “Al-Imdaad’s British branch raised over £400,000 for the IHH, a Turkish charity widely accused of funding terrorism and that publicly supports Hamas. Al-Imdaad UK has also given over £50,000 (over $80,000) to the Zamzam Foundation, a Somali charity run by the Saudi-funded Somali Muslim Brotherhood.”

The Lincolnshire Police video doesn’t mention any of that, naturally. In its pretty, sanitized portrait of British Islam, there are no terrorists, no friends of terrorists, no supporters of terrorists, nobody who ever so much s met a terrorist. These Muslims are all do-gooders. They would all have us believe that they love Britain with all their hearts and that they thoroughly condemn acts of terror committed in the name of their religion.

The Islamic State just lost its capital at Raqqa, and with it the last of the terrorist group’s fantasies of establishing a Middle East caliphate.

In recent years, ISIS has horrified global audiences with video clips of unspeakable atrocities. What sort of humans could behead, incinerate, drown, torture, and blow up innocent civilians, mock and record such horror, and then narrate their macabre videos for a world audience?

How could such pre-modern psychopaths ever be defeated, given that in a matter of months ISIS had managed to overrun vast swathes of Iraq and Syria?

The zealotry of the Islamic State in celebrating the unthinkable added to its cult of invincibility. Young would-be jihadists from the Western world flocked to the group’s Middle East compounds, eager to engage in viciousness as if it were the latest video game.

Dejected Middle Eastern armies seemed to have no answer for the medieval violence of ISIS. Impotent Western leaders either ignored or denied the group’s homicidal appeal. Indeed, in 2014, pessimistic analysts were predicting that ISIS might soon carve out enough oil-rich parts of Iraq and Syria to spread its barbarism throughout region.

But recently, the entire Islamic State project began going up in smoke almost as abruptly as it was born. It turned out that squadrons of American bombers were not impressed by ISIS threats and bombed to smithereens its command centers and headquarters.

Secretary of Defense James Mattis relaxed the rules of U.S. engagement and made it a veritable open season on Islamic State jihadists, while American forces trained entire new cadres of anti-ISIS fighters. Specialized drones and GPS-guided Western munitions made it almost impossible for ISIS leaders to escape constant attack.

Their past horrors had earned Islamic State jihadists only ill will. Tens of thousands of Iraqi and Syrian victims volunteered to fight ISIS with a ferocity that they had rarely exhibited in the past.

The net result is now mass ISIS surrenders. Half-starved jihadists in rags and in tears beg their captors for forgiveness — and not to show them the same savagery that had so often fueled ISIS slaughtering.

The fate of ISIS reminds us that throughout history those who posed as superhuman savages, without any limitations to their cruelty, were often bullies who could not stand up to the determined payback of their finally aroused and outraged victims.

After 9/11, al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden frightened Westerners with his tough talk about the “strong horse” of radical Islam, for whose brutality and cruelty a supposedly weak and decadent West had no antidote. But after years of the U.S. and its allies whittling away al-Qaeda from Afghanistan to Iraq, and bombing its ringleaders wherever they appeared, bin Laden was killed in a dingy Pakistan compound.

In the early 1940s, the most feared killers in the world were Nazi kingpin Heinrich Himmler’s SS elite. The SS claimed they were the new racial supermen, overseeing extermination camps and spearheading the German army by executing prisoners and civilians alike.

The pipe dream of peacefully integrating self-proclaimed “refugees” from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and other terrorist prone countries into European society is falling apart. Germany, which led the way in opening the floodgates to such refugees, has become a leading incubator of jihadist-inspired terrorism in Europe. Prosecutors in Germany have opened up approximately four times as many terrorism-related cases this year so far than during all of 2016, and more than ten times than in 2013. There are at least 705 Islamists in the country said to be willing to carry out a terrorist attack, with thousands of more Islamists also present in the country. Germany’s federal police (BKA) chief, Holger Münch, has said that the terrorist threat posed by jihadists is far graver than any threat from domestic terrorists on the left or the right.

Sex crimes have also risen in areas of Germany inhabited by refugees. The mayor of one town told his constituents, who were upset by the increase in sexual harassment from the migrants, “Just don’t provoke them and don’t walk in these areas.” German citizens are being told to cede their freedom of movement in their own city to refugees who refuse to accept the legal and cultural norms of their host country.

A parallel system of Sharia law has emerged in Germany, the Gatestone Institute has documented. Islamist morality police patrol some German streets, enforcing Sharia law. One example involves Salafists from Chechnya. “The vigilantes,” according to another Gatestone Institute report, “are using threats of violence to discourage Chechen migrants from integrating into German society; they are also promoting the establishment of a parallel Islamic legal system in Germany.”

Germany continues to spend billions of Euros in an effort to help refugees integrate into German society with little to show for it. The German government has allocated 21.3 billion Euros to refugee assistance in 2017, which constitutes six percent of its 2017 annual operating budget and more than half of Germany’s annual defense budget. Language, religious and cultural differences cannot be overcome by simply throwing money at the problem.

The mainstream media in Germany tried to cover up the problem, acting as cheerleaders for Chancellor Merkel’s policies. A team of researchers at the Otto Brenner Institute concluded, according to a study reported on in The Local Europe AB, that journalists “put moral pressure on citizens to contribute to the cause of supporting refugees” and treated citizens who were critical of government open door policies as “suspect” and “potentially racist.” Journalists were criticized in the study for echoing “the slogans of the political elite” and not reporting honestly on the reasons underlying the concerns of citizens and some experts. In short, Germany has experienced the same type of condescending media bias so prevalent in the United States.

Despite the press bias, the German people have demonstrated that they do not like the direction their country has been taking. Indeed, the parliamentary election success of the Alternative for Germany party is directly attributable to Chancellor Merkel’s “open door” refugee policy that opened the door to jihadist terrorists. As a result, her party failed to secure an outright majority, forcing it into negotiations to form a coalition government. Although unrepentant for her colossal blunder in allowing more than one million migrants into Germany in 2015, Chancellor Merkel has bowed to political reality. She agreed to a cap of 200,000 on the number of refugees Germany continues to accept each year in order to secure the support of Bavaria’s Christian Social Union as a coalition partner. She may have problems persuading another potential coalition partner, the Greens, to go along with such a cap, however. “When you throw together asylum seekers, refugee contingents, resettlement programs and family members joining refugees all in one pot, and then set a limit of 200,000, one group will be thrown under the bus,” said Simone Peter, a co-leader of the Greens.