RUTHFULLY YOURS

In spite of three attacks in three months, Britain does not seem to be choosing the path of vigilance and determination. June is not even over but the media barely talk about terrorism any more.

Then, in the early hours of June 19, a man who acted alone drove a van into a crowd of Muslims leaving Finsbury Park Mosque in London: the main “threat” to the British right now was soon presented in several newspapers as “Islamophobia”.

Decolonization added the idea that the Europeans had oppressed other peoples and were guilty of crimes they now had to redeem. There was no mention of how, throughout history, recruits to Islam had colonized the great Christian Byzantine Empire, Greece, Sicily, Corsica, North Africa and the Middle East, most of the Balkans and eastern Europe, Hungary, northern Cyprus and Spain.

While most jihadist movements were banned by the British government, more discreet organizations have emerged and demurely sent the same message. The Islamic Forum for Europe, for example, depicts itself as “peaceful”, but many of those it invites to speak are anything but that. The Islamic Human Rights Commission uses the language of defending human rights to disseminate violent statements against the Jews and the West.

London, June 5, 2017. A minute of silence is held at Potters Field Park, next to the City Hall, to pay tribute to the victims of the London Bridge jihadist attack three days before. Those who came have brought flowers, candles and signs bearing the usual words: “unity”, “peace” and “love”. Faces are sad but no trace of anger is visible. The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, a Muslim, gives a speech emphasizing against all evidence that the killers’ ideas have nothing to do with Islam.

A few hours after the attack, Britain’s Prime Minister Theresa May also refuses to incriminate Islam, but dares to speak of “Islamic extremism”. She was immediately accused of “dividing” the country. On election day, June 8, her Conservative party lost the majority in the House of Commons. Jeremy Corbyn, a pro-terrorist, “democratic socialist”, who demands the end of British participation in the campaign against the Islamic State (ISIS), led the Labour party to thirty more seats than it had earlier. In spite of three attacks in three months, Britain does not seem to choose the path of vigilance and determination. June is not even over but the media barely talk about terrorism any more. A devastating fire destroyed a building in North Kensington, killing scores of residents. Mourning the victims seems to have completely erased all memory of those killed in the terrorist attacks.

Then, in the early hours of June 19, a man who acted alone drove a van into a crowd of Muslims leaving Finsbury Park Mosque in London: the main “threat” to the British right now was soon presented in several newspapers as “Islamophobia”.

The United Kingdom is not the main Muslim country in Europe, but it is the country where, for decades, Islamists could comfortably call for jihad and murder. Although most jihadist movements were banned by the British government, more discreet organizations have emerged and demurely spread the same message. The Islamic Forum for Europe, for example, depicts itself as “peaceful”, but many of those it invites to speak are anything but that. One was Anwar al-Awlaki, who for years planned al-Qaeda operations until he was killed in Yemen in 2011 in an American drone strike. The Islamic Human Rights Commission uses the language of defending human rights to disseminate violent statements against Jews and the West.

A spate of terrorist attacks has hit Europe in the past month, not only in Manchester and London but also in Paris and Brussels, where incidents this week were mercifully terminated before they could do any real damage. In Britain, a man seeking vengeance rammed a van into a crowd exiting a mosque, giving rise to real and justified fears of an anti-Muslim backlash. The incidents have left the Continent, and especially Britain, in a state of nervous agitation, fearful of a prolonged period of social unrest and heightened tensions between Muslim communities and their secular neighbors.

On the issue of free speech, the response from authorities has been sad but predictable. Reports the New York Times: “In a coordinated campaign across 14 states, the German police on Tuesday raided the homes of 36 people accused of hateful postings over social media, including threats, coercion, and incitement to racism. Most of the raids concerned politically motivated right-wing incitement.” In Sussex, in southern England, a man has been charged with “publishing written material intending to stir up religious hatred against Muslims” on his Facebook account in 2015; he faces a year in prison. The Sussex police say they hope the lengthy sentence will deter those looking to “spread messages of fear and hate” on the Internet.

There are two things that come to mind in the wake of this suppression. The first is that Americans should never forget the value of free speech. Free speech — not its anodyne, Continental form — is by and large a uniquely American institution. It simply does not exist in Europe. Those who yearn for an America that looks more like the orderly, regulated, universal-health-care systems of Western Europe should keep this fact in the back of their mind always.

The second thing to say is that the crackdown on free speech is not occurring in absentia. The ongoing suppression interacts with decisions taken or not taken in other domains of policy and public debate. The most important of those decisions is that politicians and the culture more broadly have chosen not to inquire into the specifically Islamic roots of terrorism. To decline to blame Muslims en masse for terrorism is well and good and should continue. But the unwillingness to ask how Islam may provide a wellspring of justification for terrorist actions is harder to rationalize. It comes with a certain set of implications and corollaries.

By Kejal Vyas in Irapa, Venezuela and Sara Schaefer Muñoz in Chaguaramas, Trinidad and Tobago

Struggling to find basic staples in her own country, Mariana Revilla and five neighbors here took to crossing a treacherous 60-mile gulf under the cover of night to the island of Trinidad.

On her last trip, they made a good haul, securing seven tons of flour, sugar and cooking oil from the former British colony in exchange for fresh shrimp from home. But on the way back their rickety 46-foot boat capsized, leaving Ms. Revilla and her companions clinging to the wreckage for nearly two days before she and two others ran out of strength and drowned, according to survivors. Her stepfather says her 3-year-old daughter, Isabel, keeps asking, “Where is my mama?”

As Venezuela’s economy crumbles, an increasingly desperate people are doing all they can to get food and medicine. Here that can involve great peril.Venezuelans make trips as long as 10 hours to hawk shellfish, plastic chairs, house doors, ceramic pots and even exotic animals like iguanas and brightly feathered macaws. They are exchanged for basic goods—rice, detergent, diapers—that Caracas is increasingly unable to provide.“It’s thanks to Trinidad that we have any food here,” said 49-year-old Angela Caballero, a resident of this town on a peninsula that extends toward the island. “If that didn’t come, we’d be dead.”

If you’ve ever been to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, chances are that you visited the glass pavilion containing the Temple of Dendur. One of only three such temples outside Egypt, it was built by the Roman emperor Augustus around 10 B.C. as part of an effort to cultivate the local Nubian population. This month marks its 50th anniversary overlooking Central Park, where it provides an unforgettable glimpse of Egypt’s ancient culture for millions of tourists who will never travel to the Middle East.

But more important, at a time when the U.S. is questioning the nature of its longstanding relationships with countries across the world, the temple is a symbol of international cooperation. In the 1960s, 50 nations united to save 22 irreplaceable monuments—including the Temple of Dendur—set to be submerged during the construction of Lake Nasser. These countries were motivated not by their own national interests, but by an understanding that mankind has a common interest in protecting historic monuments.

With a final investment of $16 million, the U.S. became the largest contributor to the $100 million preservation project. As a demonstration of gratitude, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser gave the Temple of Dendur to the U.S. in 1965. After a competition led by the newly created National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities, President Lyndon Johnson decided that the 2,000-year-old temple should go to the Met.

The Middle East’s fragile cultural heritage was in the news again this week. On Wednesday Islamic State blew up the historic Grand al-Nuri Mosque in Mosul, obliterating a cultural and religious site that had stood since 1173. Religious fundamentalism, illicit excavation, black-market trade and simple neglect have destroyed historic sites in the Middle East at an alarming rate. Wednesday’s bombing underscores the most urgent problem: ISIS and its affiliates have turned cultural destruction in Iraq and Syria into propaganda, even as they sell looted works of art on the black market to raise money for arms.

Why should we worry about a bunch of old monuments when the human cost of the unrest is so high? There are two reasons. First, the Middle East is the cradle of civilization. As our forebears recognized when they acted to save the cultural heritage of Lower Nubia, these monuments are integral to our collective human story. Architectural monuments illuminate the complexity of our common past. So much has already been lost. We have a moral obligation to save what remains.

Otto Warmbier’s family and friends laid him to rest on Thursday, at a funeral in Ohio, after North Korea’s Kim regime destroyed Otto’s life and devastated his family.

Warmbier went to North Korea in late December, 2015, a 21-year-old American college student, on a short package tour. He was arrested there on Jan. 2, 2016 and accused of taking a propaganda sign off a wall in his Pyongyang hotel in the early hours of Jan. 1. On Feb. 29, 2016, Warmbier was presented publicly to deliver a forced “confession,” and just over two weeks later, on March 16, 2016, again on camera, he was sentenced to 15 years at hard labor. It took more than a year before his family, or the American public, heard any further news of what had happened to him.

As we learned only this month, shortly after Warmbier received North Korea’s hideous sentence he suffered brain damage so extensive that when North Korea finally released him early last week, at the demand of the Trump administration, he arrived home on June 13 to his family in Cincinnati in what his American doctors called a condition of “unresponsive wakefulness.” He was unable to see, speak or make any sign of conscious response. By North Korea’s much belated account, provided via U.S. envoys to Otto’s parents early this month, Otto had been in that condition, in North Korean custody, for well over a year. Surrounded by his family, six days after his return, Otto died this past Monday.

This awful display of Pyongyang’s raw and manifold official cruelties leaves a stricken family in Cincinnati mourning their horribly murdered son. It ought to drive home to all Americans the unrelenting monstrosity of North Korea’s totalitarian Kim Jong Un regime.

Yet, there’s a qualifier that keeps creeping into the U.S. press coverage of this story, a touch of ersatz journalistic due diligence, which suggests that too many American reporters have yet to grasp the full extent of North Korea’s totalitarian horrors. This qualifier, to which too many journalists seem wedded in mentioning Otto’s “confession,” is that they’re not sure whether Otto was coerced.

To pick just one of many examples, in an NBC news article about Otto, published today, up pops that phrase: “it was not apparent whether his confession was coerced.” Or, as NPR put it on Feb. 29, 2016, immediately after North Korea first released Otto’s “confession”: “It’s unclear whether Warmbier, 21, spoke of his own volition or whether he was pressured into making the statement.”

Actually, there is nothing unclear about it. Isolated from family, friends or any form of genuine defense, held under terrible threat, in utterly hostile surroundings, Otto gave a forced confession. He was clearly coerced. As his father, Fred Warmbier, accurately told the press last week, Otto was “brutalized and terrorized” by the North Korean regime.

If anyone still doubted at that point the connection between terrorism and Google’s video platform, the Daily Telegraph revealed that British counterterrorism police had been monitoring a cell of ISIS “wannabes” since March, and recorded its members discussing how to use YouTube to plot a vehicular ramming and stabbing attack in London. Terrorists have learned that YouTube can be as deadly a weapon as cars and knives.

YouTube and Google, by posting such videos, are effectively being accessories to murder. They are also inviting class-action lawsuits from families and individuals victimized by terrorism. They need to be held criminally liable for aiding and abetting mass murder.

In Arabic with French subtitles, the clip lauds terrorists “martyred for Allah.” User comments include: “beautiful… may Allah give us all the knowledge and power to accelerate our imams.” In other words, the pictures of smiling terrorists and their dead bodies serve as an inspiration to young Muslims seeking Paradise through martyrdom. This is not theoretical. According to the website Wired UK, as of June 5, there were 535 terrorist attacks around the world — with 3,635 fatalities — since the beginning of 2017 alone.

In mid-March this year, major companies began withdrawing or reducing advertising from Google Inc., the owner of YouTube, for allowing their brand names to pop up alongside videos promoting jihad, a new report released on June 15 by the Middle East Research Media Institute (MEMRI) reveals.

According to the report — which documents the failure of Google to remove jihadi content that MEMRI volunteered to assist in flagging — thus far, AT&T, Verizon, Johnson & Johnson, Enterprise Holdings and GSK are among the companies pulling their ads from the platform. Google responded by promising to be more aggressive in ensuring brand safety of ad placements.

Then came the Westminster attack. On March 22, 2017, Khalid Masood rammed his car into pedestrians — killing four people and wounding dozens of others – then stabbed an unarmed police officer to death.

Exactly two months later, on May 22, Salman Ramadan Abedi detonated a shrapnel-laden homemade bomb at the Manchester Arena, after a concert by American singer Ariana Grande. The blast killed 22 people and wounded more than 100 others.

On June 3, ahead of Britain’s general election five days later, Khuram Shazad Butt, Rachid Redouane and Youssef Zaghba murdered eight people and wounded 48 others in a combined van-ramming and stabbing attack on London Bridge.

On June 6, Britain’s three main political parties pulled their campaign advertisements from YouTube, after realizing that they were placed in or alongside jihadi videos.

If anyone still doubted at that point the connection between terrorism and Google’s video platform, the Daily Telegraph revealed that British counterterrorism police had been monitoring a cell of ISIS “wannabes” since March, and recorded its members discussing how to use YouTube to plot a vehicular ramming and stabbing attack in London.

Appallingly, the surveillance did nothing to prevent the carnage. It did provide further evidence, however, that jihadis purposely use the major online platform to spread their message and recruit soldiers in their war against the West and any Muslims deemed “infidels.” Terrorists have learned that YouTube can be as deadly a weapon as cars and knives.

Nor could Google claim that it is unaware of the increasing pernicious use of its platform, or that it lacks the algorithmic tools to monitor YouTube’s massive traffic – involving 1.3 billion users and 300 hours of video uploaded every minute.

In the first place, complaints about jihadi content have been lodged by individuals and organizations for years. Secondly, Google vowed to tackle the problem through a flagging feature that alerts YouTube to material that “promotes terrorism.” Furthermore, YouTube itself claims: “Our staff reviews flagged videos 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to determine whether they violate our Community Guidelines.”

On Wednesday, King Salman of Saudi Arabia pushed aside his heir-apparent, Crown Prince Mohamed bin Nayef, and moved his own son Mohamed bin Salman into that spot. He also removed Mohamed bin Nayef (known as MbN) from his powerful post as interior minister, meaning that MbN’s days in the sun are entirely over.

What’s up? Why did this happen, and what comes next?

Here are a few key points.

First, it has been obvious since King Salman ascended to the throne in January 2015 that he wanted his son Mohamed bin Salman (known as MbS) to succeed him. The young man was the apple of his eye, and was immediately named deputy crown prince. The question was whether the aged king — now 81 and in questionable health — would live long enough to elevate young MbS, who was then only 29 and is now 31. The danger, for the king, has been that he would die suddenly, and that MbN would ascend to the throne and remove his cousin MbS from the line of succession. This week the king decided that waiting is not smart: Why take chances? Perhaps there is a saying in Arabic that resembles “God helps those who help themselves.”

Second, we now know (barring calamities like assassination) who will rule the kingdom for many decades. King Salman may rule for several additional years, but there is no reason MbS cannot rule after him for 50 more. This has never happened before. The Saudi system has had brother succeed brother — all of them the sons of the founder of the modern kingdom, Ibn Saud (1875–1953). Naturally, as his sons succeeded each other more or less in order of age, each successor was older than his predecessor; as noted, Salman was 79 when he became king. So the system has produced geriatric rule for decades now, while the Saudi population grew younger and younger. The CIA World Factbook says the median age in the kingdom is now just 27. And now the kingdom will have a ruler from those younger generations — for the first time ever.

Third, the Saudi system of brother following brother could only work for one generation — and King Salman was the end of that system. Ibn Saud had 45 sons of whom 36 survived to adulthood, and some of them were clearly ineligible to be king. So, there were a limited number of truly eligible brothers to take the throne from his death in 1953 until now — seven decades. But all those sons of the founder simply had too many sons themselves, and there has been no workable principle for figuring out how to choose a king in the follow-on generation. It looked like the first person in that generation, the grandchildren of the founder, would be MbN, but that’s over; it will be MbS. And (again, barring some calamity) he will rule for decades. What may happen by the time the aged MbS leaves the throne in, say, 2070, is that his line will have seized and will thenceforth keep the throne. He might name a son of his as crown prince, and that son could serve for ten or 20 years and be accepted as successor, and the old Saudi system will have changed: The bin Salman line will be the true royal family, and the others will all be on the outs.

Why should they accept that outcome? Because no one has offered an alternative that’s better, and there does have to be a king; Saudi Arabia is a monarchy. If there is an election of sorts for king, among thousands of princes who are both voters and candidates, that’s close enough to an electoral democracy to give non-royal Saudis modern ideas about actual elections — something the royals will want to discourage — and would diminish the status of whoever was “elected” king. Moreover, there are still plenty of jobs and financial rewards to pass around. Mohamed bin Nayef’s father, Prince Nayef, was minister of the interior and MbN got the post when his father died. In this week’s shake-up MbN was removed not only as crown prince but also as minister of the interior; but a nephew of his, Abdul Aziz Bin Saud Bin Nayef, age 33, was given the post — keeping it in the bin Nayef line and thereby reducing intra-family dissension. A son of Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the long-time ambassador to Washington, was named ambassador to Germany, so the bin Sultans (Prince Sultan, Bandar’s father, was the minister of defense from 1963 until his death in 2011) also get a prize.