RUTHFULLY YOURS

Last week, two events injected energy and excitement into what was beginning to look like an anemic end of the year in the Middle East as far as political developments are concerned.

The first event was the decision by the Saudi leadership to create a new mechanism to deal with alleged cases of corruption, embezzlement and influence-peddling.

The sheer number of cases referred to a special court on those charges was enough to capture the headlines. The fact that the 208 people under investigation included princes, prominent bureaucrats, and business tycoons intensified the event’s headline-grabbing potential.

But what really attracted world attention was the unexpectedness of the Saudi move.

Few, even among genuine or self-styled experts on Saudi Arabia, expected Riyadh to go right to the heart of the matter rather than dance around the issues as had been the norm in the past. Some observers, including many in Western think-tanks, warned of the danger of instability inherent in departure from old patterns of behavior.

However, the latest move is in accordance with the kingdom’s new strategy aimed at recruiting the concept of change as an ally rather than a threat.

It is possible to argue that because old methods didn’t produce the desired results, stability, which had been a key asset of the kingdom for decades, had morphed into stagnation. Thus, the new strategy is designed to end stagnation and prepare the path for a new form of stability capable of reflecting changed social, economic and political circumstances of the kingdom.

If Saudi Arabia is genuine in its declared desire to become an active member of the global system, the first thing it has to do is to offer the rule of law in the sense understood by most people around the world.

Trying to build an economy beyond oil, Saudi Arabia needs to attract massive foreign investment in both financial and technological domains. And that won’t be possible without a strong legal system backed by transparency, competition and equality of opportunities.

“While outside the mosque there is constant talk of integration, the opposite is preached inside. Only in rare instances are parts of the sermon — or even more rarely, all of the sermon — translated into German… [fostering] social integration into an internal ethnic environment, and thus ethnic segmentation.” — Constantin Schreiber, author of Inside Islam: What Is Being Preached in Germany’s Mosques.

“Politicians who repeatedly emphasize their intention of cooperating with the mosques, who invite them to conferences on Islam, have no idea who is preaching what there.” — Necla Kelek, human rights activist and critic of Islam, human rights activist, in the Allgemeine Zeitung.

In the debate on migrants in Germany and Austria, no other term is used more often than “integration.” But the institution that is most important for many Muslim migrants does not generally contribute much to this effort — and often actively fights it: the mosque. That is the finding of an official Austrian study as well as private research conducted by a German journalist.

In late September, the Austrian Integration Fund (ÖIF), a department of the foreign ministry published a study, “The role of the mosque in the integration process”. For the purposes of the study, employees of the ÖIF visited 16 mosques in Vienna, attended several Friday sermons and spoke with the individual imams — that is, if the imams were willing to have a conversation, which was often not the case. The result of this, according to the ÖIF, is that only two of the mosque associations foster the integration of their members. The report applauds a Bosnian mosque association that also runs a soccer club. During the discussion, its imam said: “Every country, as with Austria, has its rules and laws and — something I always stress — it is our religious duty to comply with these standards and to integrate accordingly.”

With regard to gender roles, in all of the mosques they visited, the authors were struck by the almost complete absence of women at Friday prayers:

“Only three of the mosques… provide women with their own space, which is reserved for them and actually used by them. If they exist at all, most of the mosques make the women’s areas on Fridays available to men, too.”

Just a few days after circulating a propaganda poster depicting a jihadist driving toward the Vatican, a pro-ISIS media group today released another poster depicting Pope Francis beheaded.

In the image from the Wafa’ Media Foundation, a jihadist stands over the orange-jumpsuited body of a prisoner with his hands behind his back, chest-down on the ground on a dirt street. The terrorist, clad in khaki with a white scarf covering his face, holds a knife in one hand and touches the head that looks like Pope Francis — propped on the back of the body — with his other hand.

“Jorge Mario Bergoglio,” the pope’s name, is written next to the head.

In the background is an indistinguishable cityscape and a pickup with jihadists flying an ISIS flag from the bed.

Earlier this week, Wafa’ circulated a poster depicting a vehicle moving toward the Vatican with a cache of weapons, vowing “Christmas blood.”

“So wait…” were the only other words on the image, an illustration showing the point of view of an unseen driver as his BMW approached St. Peter’s Basilica in the evening with an unobstructed view driving down Via della Conciliazione. In the passenger seat: a rifle, a handgun and a backpack. In the rearview mirror, a masked face.

ISIS followers have favored attacks during the holiday season, with the 2015 attack on a San Bernardino County Christmas party by Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik as well as last December’s truck attack on the Berlin Christmas market by Anis Amri.

The Syrian Civil War killed hundreds of thousands and displaced millions. Its ripple effects brought terror to Europe and dragged the United States into the fighting. And it’s just the appetizer for the coming war.

The real war is the one that the Saudis and the Iranians have been maneuvering toward for years. Those maneuvers included everything from Iran’s nuke deal, the fighting in Yemen, the Syrian Civil War, the Iraqi suppression of Kurdish independence, the rise of ISIS, and the Qatari embargo.

The death toll from the buildup to the Sunni-Shiite regional war is approaching a million. And the war hasn’t even begun yet. It may never become an actual war as we understand it. It’s possible that there will be a hundred little wars exploding across the region. These wars will tear apart more of the region and the talking heads on television will blame global warming or Israeli settlements.

Those progressive excuses make much more sense to the media than an Islamic religious war.

And it will almost certainly drag us in.

Obama’s policies lit the fuse. The withdrawal from Iraq, the Arab Spring, the Iranian Nuke deal and the alliance with the Shiite regime in Baghdad did a great deal to increase Iranian power. When the United States left Iraq, Iran took control. The Arab Spring tore apart the region. And Iran used the opportunity to expand its power over Yemen, Iraq and Syria. The nuke deal signaled that Obama wouldn’t do anything to stop Iran from becoming a nuclear power or a regional power. And by outsourcing the fight against ISIS to Shiite terrorist militias, Obama allowed Iran to consolidate control over Iraq and Syria.

The Saudis and the Iranians are both assembling their coalitions. And they’re coloring outside the lines. Qatar’s billionaire Sunni Islamists are aligned with Iran. That’s why the Saudis slapped an embargo on the terror state. Meanwhile Israel is loosely aligned with the Saudis. That may sound strange, but Israel’s biggest threats, from Iran’s nukes to Hamas and Hezbollah terrorists, can be traced back to Tehran.

The Saudis are no slouches when it comes to funding Islamic terrorists. But Qatar’s fellow Sunni oil tyrannies looked at the way that its allies, the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda variants, were tearing apart entire countries, and decided that the little terror state had become too powerful and dangerous.

Iran and Qatar aggressively expanded their influence by using Islamist militias to tear down and take over countries. And between them, the two Islamic terror states were transforming the Middle East.

The dramatic events in Saudi Arabia of the past few days portend a game change in the Middle East not seen in decades. Predictably, the mainstream media, desperate as they are to find something, anything to blame on President Trump, have completely missed it. Instead, they have babbled about the market implications of the arrests of Prince Alwaleed bin Talal and Co., Saudi Arabia ‘emerging’ as an arms manufacturer, conflict with Hezbollah, palace intrigue, etc. etc. Few have put their finger on the actual events – a palace revolution in Riyadh that could change the Middle East in profound and possibly positive ways. For the logic of what’s taking place in the House of Saud is a revolt against the medieval obscurantism that has been the lifeblood of radical Islam and indeed terrorism since the middle of the 20th century. There is no guarantee that it will succeed, for the forces arrayed against it are formidable, but fundamentally, as with the demise of any long-lasting obscurantism, the more appropriate question to ask is: ‘What took so long?’

To seasoned observers, what is taking place in Riyadh is not a complete surprise and some inkling of changing attitudes was on hand as far back as the Arab Spring in 2011, when the Saudis appeared to end their longtime support of the Muslim Brotherhood, and take the side of the military in Egypt, quite unlike the Obama administration which remained wedded to the myth that the MB was a ‘moderate’ organization. Three years later, the UAE declared 82 Islamic organizations, including two prominent American ones (CAIR and MAS) long supported by the Saudis, to be terrorist and this past summer came the break with Qatar for its support of radical jihadists in Syria and elsewhere.

Much more important are the unmistakable signs that the new Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, known as MbS, is turning on the reactionary Wahhabi establishment that has long supported radical Islam and terrorism. While his ostensible drive against corruption has received much ink, it has largely escaped notice that caught in the ‘corruption’ purge were senior Wahhabi clerics like Salman al-Awdah, Awad al-Qarni and others. And there is a good reason for their detention, if MbS is serious about “preventing extremism” and “crimes under the name of Islam,” as he has said time and again. It is a fact that the belief system of the dominant Wahhabi ulema is ideologically indistinguishable from that of the ISIS zealots. As an example of the kind of pushback he can expect, no less a figure that the former imam of the key Mecca mosque, Adel al-Kibani, continues to argue publicly that ISIS draws it inspiration from Saudi salafism.

Nonetheless, MbS has continued and accelerated his assault on Wahhabism. Not only has he promised to do away with the Wahhabi ban on women driving and reined in the religious police, but he has now forced the ‘Shura Council’ a hardline Wahhabi ulema outfit, heretofore, to approve an anti-hate law, apart from setting up a “Hadith Complex” in Medina, tasked with “monitoring interpretations of Islamic teachings used to justify violence or terrorism.”

Chancellor Angela Merkel’s open-door migration policies have set in motion a self-reinforcing cycle of violence in which more and more people are carrying knives in public — including for self-defense.

A 40-year-old man stabbed to death his 31-year-old wife and mother of their three children. Police said the man was angry that his wife was using social media.

A “dark-skinned” man (dunklem Teint) drew a knife on a 54-year-old female train conductor when she asked him for his ticket.

A recent surge in stabbings and knife-related violence across Germany is drawing renewed attention to the deteriorating security situation there since Chancellor Angela Merkel’s 2015 decision to allow in more than a million migrants from Africa, Asia and the Middle East.

In recent months, people armed with knives, axes and machetes have brought devastation to all of Germany’s 16 federal states. Knives have been used not only not only to carry out jihadist attacks, but also to commit homicides, robberies, home invasions, sexual assaults, honor killings and many other types of violent crime.

Knife-related crimes have occurred in amusement parks, bicycle trails, hotels, parks, public squares, public transportation, restaurants, schools, supermarkets and train stations. Many Germans have the sense that danger lurks everywhere; public safety, nowhere.

Police admit they are outnumbered and overwhelmed and increasingly unable to maintain public order — both day and night.

Statistics that are reliable on knife violence in Germany — where police been accused of failing to report many crimes, apparently in an effort “not to unsettle” the public — do not exist.

A search of German police blotters, however, indicates that 2017 is on track to become a record year for stabbings and knife crimes: Police reported more than 3,500 knife-related crimes between January and October 2017, compared to around 4,000 reported crimes during all of 2016 — and only 300 in 2007. Overall, during the past ten years, knife-related crimes in Germany have increased by more than 1,200%.

The media in Germany do not report most knife-related violence. Crimes that are reported are often dismissed as “isolated incidents,” unrelated to mass immigration. Moreover, many crime reports, including those in police blotters, omit any reference at all to the nationalities of the perpetrators and victims — ostensibly to avoid inflaming anti-immigration sentiments.

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