RUTHFULLY YOURS

Catania, Sicily

Late last month a Jewish community was established here in southern Italy—the first such founding since King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella ordered the expulsion or forced conversion of the Jews more than 500 years ago. On the same day the community was revived, the Catania city government gave the top floor of a palace overlooking the Mediterranean Sea to the International Institute for Jewish Culture. The small community is now looking for a rabbi and raising money to furnish the space, which will be used as a synagogue.

While anti-Semitism is on the upswing in many parts of Europe, Judaism and Jews are experiencing a renaissance in Italy. The country is most strongly associated with the Roman Catholic Church, but Jews have been here for thousands of years. Given Italy’s place as a political laboratory in the Western world, its role in the revival of Judaism—particularly in the south—is worth watching.

In 2015 the bishop of Palermo gave a Jewish group a local church to convert into a synagogue. The same year Catholic authorities in Trani, on the mainland, did the same. Yet the situation in Catania is unique, as it fully revives a Jewish community abolished in 1492. This community was only one of the 52 disbanded at the time, and other communities in Italy are in the process of being revived. Baruch Triolo, a Catanian attorney who converted to Judaism while living in Miami, is leading the revival project. He has received support from numerous local and regional governments, as well as the island’s philo-Semitic Masonic groups.

State support for the Jews extends beyond helping to revive communities. The federal government helped finance the Italian translation of the first volume of the Talmud. The new volume was first presented at the country’s most prestigious cultural institution, the Accademia dei Lincei, on the banks of the Tiber river in Rome. The first two runs of the translation sold out almost immediately, and the buyers are overwhelmingly non-Jewish, according to the publisher.

Perhaps the clearest indicator of the strength and depth of Jewish popularity comes at mealtime. Jewish food, including kosher food, is suddenly chic. Restaurants in Rome’s Jewish ghetto are regularly packed. You can even get fried artichokes made “Jewish style” at takeout stands. Kosher food and wine are now regularly featured at national food fairs and can be purchased at upscale stores throughout the country.

“Regular people are selling and buying Jewish food precisely because it’s Jewish,” says the Italian journalist Carla Reschia. “Food is an example, but you can see it also in literature: In a country where Jews number less than 0.1%, Jewish authors are disproportionately popular.”

Italian historians, archaeologists and anthropologists are hard at work to document the presence of Jews from ancient times into the early modern period. There is no lack of evidence, some of which dates back to the first century, following the Roman conquest of ancient Israel. Yet many museums are not aware of the considerable quantity of evidence they have in their archives and deposits. In recent years, Sicilian cities have begun to publish catalogs of this material, and I recently attended a public meeting in southeastern Sicily that featured professors and government officials intent on creating a tourist guide to Jewish Sicily, from Taormina to Siracusa and Noto.

It is hard to overstate the enthusiasm for the Jewish revival. Cooperative ventures between Italian and Israeli universities are under way. These efforts should produce new experts and new historical finds in the coming years. Such activities will be reinforced as other communities emulate the Catania model and new centers of Jewish life are created. CONTINUE AT SITE

The Islamic State told followers to kidnap children of non-believers in a lengthy instructional article on seizing Westerners’ wealth and possessions, illustrating the kidnapping directive with a picture of church choir boys.

Jihadists residing in non-Muslim lands, according to the article, should “not hesitate to take the wealth of the harbi kuffar [non-Muslim disbelievers], either by force or through theft and fraud, and ponder the statement of [medieval Sunni theologian] Imam Ibn Taymiyyah concerning the Muslims who enters dar al-harb [land of disbelievers]: ‘Likewise, if he kidnaps them or their children, or subdues them in any way, then the lives and wealth of the harbi kuffar are permissible for the Muslims. So if they seize them in a shar’i manner they own them.’”

“Do not forget that their war on the Islamic State is dependant [sic] on wealth, so purify your intentions, place your trust in Allah, and do not seek anyone’s advice with regards to taking their wealth,” continues the directive in the latest issue of ISIS’ Rumiyah magazine. “Proceed forward with Allah’s blessing, for indeed stealing the kuffar’s wealth weakens them, threatens the security of their economies, strengthens and emboldens the believers, and prepares them for something greater than theft, and this is among the aspects of jihad that have been abandoned in this era except by a group of those who are truthful, and how few they are.”

Accompanying the article is an image of a few singers from the King’s College Choir in Cambridge, UK, which consists of 16 boys between the ages of 9 and 13 and 14 college undergraduates, with the all-caps caption: “IT IS PERMISSIBLE TO KIDNAP THE CHILDREN OF THE HARBI KUFFAR.”

ISIS has used the magazine before to call on jihadists to plunder the wealth of disbelievers and take slaves. An April article in Rumiyah said 20 percent of stolen wealth “should be set aside and given to the Khalifah or to an official representative of the Khalifah for those who are able.”

But “whoever kills a kafir – for which he has proof of his killing him” gets to keep all the loot. Or, specifically, “whatever the kafir possesses at the time and place he is killed.”

“This includes his clothing, jewelry, all kinds of weapons, gold, silver, currencies, as well as the vehicle he was using, and so forth,” ISIS added.

ISIS defined “property” that can be included in these booty-collecting operations to include people: “May Allah, the Most Generous, make the kuffar’s wealth, weapons, women, and children ghanimah [booty] for those who strive for His cause.”

This month’s 60-page Rumiyah, issued online in various languages including English and French, was published about a week late amid ISIS losing the nine-month battle to hold on to their Iraqi stronghold, Mosul.

Those who are legitimate targets for theft of property or persons, ISIS says in the new issue, are “not only those kuffar who are at war with the Muslims.”

“Rather, the harbi kuffar include all those to whom the Muslims have not granted security, either with a dhimmah contract, a covenant of security, or a ceasefire treaty, regardless of whether they are soldiers enlisted in the military, or non-combatants and others from among the common masses of the kuffar,” the article states.

In a directive long on quoting of the Quran and Islamic scholars to back up their booty-plunder quests, ISIS reiterates that the jihadist gets to keep 80 percent.

“And it is permissible for the Muslims to commit deception when stealing wealth from harbi kuffar wherever they are and however they are found, and it has not been established through any shar’i evidence nor through any cultural norms that entry visas are contracts or that they entail the granting of security,” ISIS continues. “Rather, an entry visa is permission to enter the land, and permission to enter does not entail the granting of security. And a man does not have security in his land while some people of those lands don’t have security from one another, and one party granting security does not entail the other party also granting security.”

“…And whoever enters dar al-harb using documents that are forged, or those that are authentic and which establish his religion and personal information, it is permissible for him to kill them and take their wealth if that is easy for him, because this does not represent the granting of security.” CONTINUE AT SITE

Liu Xiaobo was, in a sense, the leader of China. He was the country’s foremost proponent of freedom, democracy, and human rights. He thought that Communism was a gross imposition on China and that it could not last indefinitely, if enough Chinese stood up against it.

Liu has now died at 61. Apparently, the cause was liver cancer, plus years of torture and abuse in prison. He died surrounded by state agents, as he had lived much of his life.

He was born in 1955. An intellectual, he became a scholar of literature. In 2008, he was a founder of Charter 08, the democracy movement patterned after Charter 77. Charter 77 was the movement in Czechoslovakia, founded in 1977. It was led by Václav Havel — who would become a major supporter of Liu’s.

Like so many other Chinese democracy leaders, Liu was at Tiananmen Square in 1989. He was then imprisoned for a year and a half. Persisting, he was again imprisoned in 1995. From 1996 to 1999, he was in a “reeducation through labor” camp. Charter 08 was the last straw, and Liu was imprisoned in December of that year.

Never before had the Nobel peace committee given its prize to a Chinese person. In 2010, they did: to Liu Xiaobo. He could not attend the ceremony, of course, being a political prisoner. In 1936, the committee gave the prize to a prisoner of the Nazis, Carl von Ossietzky. Before his death, the Nazis transferred him to a hospital, where he died surrounded by guards (in 1938).

Just the same would happen to Liu Xiaobo, almost 80 years later.

During his years of imprisonment, his wife, Liu Xia, was kept under house arrest — of a particularly brutal kind. She has been denied access to the outside world. (This includes television and the Internet.) Guards have kept her locked in, day and night, as her health has unraveled.

In the United States, there was a peep or two for Liu Xiaobo, but not many. The 2009 Nobel peace laureate, President Obama, did not bestir himself for the 2010 peace laureate. In the Senate, however, Ted Cruz proposed that the area outside the Chinese embassy in Washington be renamed “Liu Xiaobo Plaza.” In this, he took a page from the Reagan Republicans of the mid 1980s, who renamed the area outside the Soviet embassy “Andrei Sakharov Plaza,” after the leading dissident in the USSR.

Incidentally, Sakharov, too, was a Nobel peace laureate, and denied the opportunity to attend the ceremony.

The “Liu Xiaobo Plaza” bill passed the Senate by unanimous consent. It was then killed in the House by the GOP leadership. No explanation was given.

‘Sanctions were not discussed at my meeting with President Putin, ” Donald Trump tweeted Sunday. “Nothing will be done until the Ukrainian & Syrian problems are solved!” Hours before the two presidents met, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson underlined this tough line on sanctions by appointing Russia hawk Kurt Volker as chief U.S. envoy on Ukraine.

Messrs. Trump and Putin made limited progress on Syria, but Moscow has been intensifying its efforts to destabilize Ukraine. Mr. Putin has been reluctant to deploy large military forces, but fighting in Eastern Ukraine claims five or six lives a week. Of late the Kremlin has escalated its aggression with military attacks on civilian targets, assassinations, cyberattacks to cripple the state and economy, and the economic and partial political integration of the occupied region into Russia.

Mr. Putin’s war against Ukraine has boomeranged. His aggression has consolidated popular opinion, with one recent poll showing that 92% of those on territory controlled by Kiev now see themselves as Ukrainians. A decade ago that number stood at 75%. While a portion of this shift is attributable to the absence of data from occupied portions of Ukraine, most of it comes from shifting public attitudes. Mr. Putin is further stymied by Ukraine’s growing military capability and frustrated by signs of its economic recovery, both results of President Petro Poroshenko’s reforms.

For Mr. Putin, this is unacceptable. Russia is paying a large economic price because of Western sanctions. It also faces a growing threat of social discontent in the impoverished parts of Ukraine it controls. With 1.8 million residents internally displaced on Ukraine-controlled soil and 600,000 resettled in Russia, the self-styled Donetsk and Luhansk “peoples republics,” known by the acronyms DNR and LNR, have a combined population of more than 3.5 million. Many are retirees dependent on Ukrainian state pension payments. Others are miners and industrial workers whose plants were deeply integrated into the Ukrainian economy.

Mr. Putin’s response has been to step up the aggression. The first five months of 2017 saw a steep increase in attacks on hospitals, schools, factories and other civilian targets, resulting in 44 fatalities. Terrorist bombings and assassinations in Kiev and elsewhere have become commonplace. On June 27 and 28 car bombs killed two colonels from Ukraine’s security service. On June 1 a Russian citizen posing as a correspondent for the French newspaper Le Monde shot but failed to kill a Chechen volunteer in the Ukrainian militia. In late March an assassin from Russian-annexed Crimea killed a former Russian parliamentarian and Putin critic who had received asylum in Ukraine.

Russia is also accelerating the integration of occupied Donbas into Russia. On Feb. 18, Mr. Putin issued a decree enabling Russian state and private institutions to accept passports and other identity documents issued by the self-styled DNR and LNR. The Russian press widely promoted the view of Luhansk separatist leader Igor Plotnitsky that the decree is a “step along the path of international recognition of our sovereignty.”

The DNR and LNR economies have begun rapidly converting to the Russian ruble. A further step came March 5, with the confiscation by the “republics” of some 40 major privately held Ukrainian companies. These enterprises had provided employment for locals while paying taxes to Kiev and scrupulously withholding them from the renegade authorities.

Although these “nationalizations”—a war crime under the Geneva Conventions—had been accelerated by an unofficial embargo of trade with the region started by Ukrainian civic activists in January, the swiftness of the confiscations suggested they had long been planned. On the day of the takeovers, senior Russian managers appeared at the “nationalized” workplaces to announce they were taking charge.

In mid-March, Kremlin-controlled media publicized the launch of a “Committee for the Integration of the Donbas and Russia” in Russian-annexed Yalta, Crimea. The Russian media trumpeted a call there by Mr. Plotnitsky for a referendum on the accession of the LNR to Russia. CONTINUE AT SITE

Liu Xiaobo, the 2010 Nobel laureate, died on Thursday, only weeks after he was moved to hospital from a prison cell. The Chinese government bears responsibility for failing to competently diagnose and treat his liver cancer. To Beijing’s shame, the only other Peace Prize winner to die in custody was Carl von Ossietzky, a prisoner of Nazi Germany who won in 1935 and died in 1938.

Liu played a pivotal role in the 1989 student protests in Tiananmen Square, helping to negotiate the peaceful departure of the last students to occupy the square. He kept the spirit of that movement alive in 2008 when he helped to write Charter 08, a democracy manifesto. Shortly thereafter he was sentenced to 11 years in prison for “subversion.”

Main Street Columnist Bill McGurn on the life and death of the Nobel Laureate, and what it portends for China’s future. Photo Credit: Getty Images.

China’s rulers have worked hard to make sure their citizens learned little about Liu’s ideas. That fear of one man’s courage testifies to the illegitimacy of their power. Liu could have played an important role in China’s transition to democracy, but his example will serve as an inspiration to future generations.

Beijing has used the fruits of economic reforms started by Deng Xiaoping in 1979 to prolong authoritarian rule far longer than most thought possible. But its obsession with social control is hampering further moves toward a free-market economy. The resulting tensions are building and increase the risk of instability.

At the Nobel prize ceremony in 2010, Liu was represented by an empty chair. His death is a reminder of the world’s obligation to keep attention on China’s rights abuses. Without political reform, China will continue to use its growing economic and military clout to spread its authoritarian model. Pressuring Beijing to free the imprisoned human-rights lawyers who have taken up Liu’s freedom fight would serve the interest of China’s people, as well as the rules-based international order that its undemocratic government seeks to subvert.

North Korea recently test-launched a long-range missile capable of reaching Alaska.

When North Korea eventually builds a missile capable of reaching the U.S. mainland, it will double down on its well-known shakedown of feigning indifference to American deterrence while promising to take out Los Angeles, San Francisco, or Seattle unless massive aid is delivered to Pyongyang.

Kim Jong-un rightly assumes that wealthy Western nations would prefer to pay bribe money than suffer the loss of a city — and that they have plenty of cash for such concessions. He is right that the medicine of taking out Kim’s missiles is considered by Western strategists to be even worse than the disease of living with a lunatic regime that has nukes.

No wonder that the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations had few answers to North Korea’s serial lying and deceit about its nuclear intentions.

Sanctions were eventually dropped or watered down, either on reports of the mass starvation of innocent North Korean civilians or on false promises of better North Korean behavior.

China publicly promised to help rein in its unhinged client while privately doing nothing. Apparently, Beijing found a rabid North Korean government useful in bothering rivals such as the Japanese and South Koreans while keeping the U.S. off balance in Asia and the Pacific. The dynamic economies and pacifism of Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan were taken for granted by China as easy targets for coercion and blackmail.

Russia is never any help. Under President Vladimir Putin, Russian foreign policy is reductive: Whatever causes the United States and its allies a major headache is by definition welcomed.

There seems to be zero chance of a North Korean coup or a Chinese intervention to remove Kim. The brainwashed North Korean population is cut off from global news and knows nothing other than three generations of Kim family dictators. The military junta that surrounds Kim is likely as aggressive as its leader. These functionaries see his survival as the only guarantee of their own privilege and influence.

A preemptory strike might not get all of North Korea’s nuclear missiles and could prompt a conventional response that would wreck nearby Seoul — a scenario about which North Korea openly brags.

Pyongyang believes that only the Israelis are wild enough to preempt and bomb neighboring nuclear facilities, as they did in 1981 against Iraq and again in 2007 against Syria. And yet Israel attacked only because neither Iraq nor Syria had created deterrence by possession of a single deliverable nuclear weapon.

What the West needs to know is that in the Muslim world, jihad is considered more important than women, family happiness and life itself. If we are told, as Linda Sarsour said, that Islam stands for peace and justice, what we are not told is that “peace” in Islam will come only after the whole world has converted to Islam, and that “justice” means law under Sharia: whatever is inside Sharia is “justice;” whatever is not in Sharia is not “justice.”

Rebelling against Sharia is, sadly, for the Muslim woman, unthinkable. How can a healthy and normal feminist movement develop under an Islamic legal system that can flog, stone and behead women? That is why Sarsour’s jihadist kind of feminism is no heroic kind of feminism but the only feminism a Muslim woman can practice that will give her a degree of respect, acceptance, and even preferential treatment over other women. In Islam, that is the only kind of feminism allowed to develop.

Muslim activist and Women’s March organizer, Linda Sarsour, has helpfully exposed a side of Islam that is pro-Sharia and pro-jihad:

“I hope that … when we stand up to those who oppress our communities, that Allah accepts from us that as a form of jihad, that we are struggling against tyrants and rulers not only abroad in the Middle East or on the other side of the world, but here in these United States of America, where you have fascists and white supremacists and Islamophobes reigning in the White House.”

Although Sarsour later protested that the word jihad literally means “struggle” or that “our beloved prophet … said… ‘A word of truth in front of a tyrant ruler or leader, that is the best form of jihad,'” that is not what the word jihad means in general parlance to anyone you might ask in the Middle East. The people there know only too well that if they even tried to speak a “word of truth” to someone in power, that could possibly be the last word they would ever utter.

The word jihad is not a matter of left or right or liberal or conservative, except when it being manipulated to repackage and sell as something warm, fuzzy and non-threatening to trusting people in the West.

In Sarsour’s world, women who do this are called feminists, but, in reality, they are as dangerous to women’s rights, the peace of a nation and stability of its government as male jihadists.

At a recent Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) convention, Sarsour urged fellow Muslims, in an openly racist speech, to wage jihad against the “fascist” and “white supremacist” White House, be perpetually outraged, and not to assimilate. She mentioned 9/11 not as a terrorist event waged by Muslims against Americans, but as a day that triggered victimization and Islamophobia against Muslims by America.

Americans got upset just because they were murdered? As the saying goes: “It all started when he hit me back.”

Even though Sarsour later claimed her use of the word “jihad” meant non-violent dissent, that is not what the word is taken to mean in any Muslim country. There, it means only one thing: war in the service of Islam. In addition, her speech did not sound peaceful. It clearly sounded more like a call for an Islamic uprising against the White House.