RUTHFULLY YOURS

“Bangladesh is a Muslim country, no culture of statue establishment would be allowed by the people here… all of them must be removed.” — Nur Hossain Quashemi, president, Dhaka branch of Hefazat-e-Islam.

“The Quran says: You [women] should stay at your home… Your duty is to stay at the husband’s house and safeguard property. Your primary duty is to stay home and look after your family and children only. Do not go out even for shopping.” — Shah Ahmed Shafi, chief of Hefazat-e-Islam.

Millions of Bangladeshi youths are increasingly wearing Islamic attire; and freedom of speech and freedom of movement are fast becoming a luxury — if not a threat to the safety — of Bangladesh’s more secular-minded people, already feeling themselves a minority of sorts.

The government of Bangladesh, led by historically known secular political party Awami League, has completely surrendered to the country’s radical forces regarding the demands, made by Hefazat-e-Islam and some other Islamic political and religious organizations, including the removal of the sculpture that was designed with the theme of the Greek goddess of justice. The statue was installed in last December following a decision taken by the Chief Justice. On May 26, at night, Bangladeshi authorities, in the name of the “consent of the chief justice”, removed the sculpture from the front side of the Supreme Court. The current chief justice, incidentally, is the ever first non-Muslim to hold the constitutional post.

In reaction, the next day, after Friday prayers, Islamists, led by Hefazat-e-Islam, arranged a rally and expressed joy and satisfaction over removal of the sculpture and demanded further removal of all existing idols/statues/sculptures — whatever one might call them — across the country. “Bangladesh is a Muslim country, no culture of statue establishment would be allowed by the people here… all of them must be removed,” said Nur Hossain Quashemi, the president of Dhaka branch of Hefazat-e-Islam, to the media.

They’re falling like dominoes, starting with the great Robert E. Lee, whose statue went down with a yank of a crane in a jiffy, after standing tall on his New Orleans perch for 133 years. Jefferson Davis is also down, and the great Confederate general P.G.T. Beauregard, who partnered the heroic General Johnston on his left flank in the battle of Shiloh, has also bitten the dust.

Removing statues of great American generals who fought for, er…the wrong cause is the latest trendy thing to do. In fact, the virus has spread as far away as Australia, where the politically correct in cahoots with the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender brigades are demanding that a tennis legend’s name be removed from a stadium named after her. Margaret Court won 24 Grand Slam titles in her time during the ’60s and early ’70s, one more than Serena Williams, but a couple of years ago committed the greatest crime ever: She criticized same-sex marriage from the pulpit of her church in Perth, where she is a pastor. Her name has been mud ever since, at least among those who think it’s normal for people of the same sex to marry.

So far so bad, and I will get back to Margaret Court in a minute, but here are a few predictions of my own concerning these latest outrages by the PC crowd: Old Hickory is history, as far as the $20 bill is concerned, Malcolm X or Muhammad Ali will take his place. Andrew Jackson killed too many Indians and never apologized for it, so there. Poor old Alexander Hamilton had a close call, but the Broadway play depicting him as black and speaking rap has saved him on the tenner, at least for now. The next big bad guy is going to be Thomas Jefferson, who not only owned slaves but also slept with them. I expect my old alma mater the University of Virginia, whose founder he was, will deal with him rather sternly. The big one, of course, will be when the PC Nazis demand old George be struck off the dollar bill for owning and freeing his slaves only after he met his maker.
“America has started the trend by taking down the greatest general ever, Robert E. Lee.”

Back in the old country, Greece, people are in a tizzy over the removal of past heroes in order to satisfy present trends. “The Parthenon was not exactly built by rich Athenians, only financed by them,” was the way a nephew of mine put it. “It was the slaves, under a merciless whip, who put it up. Should we dynamite it?” The Parthenon is known as the most perfectly symmetrical and beautiful edifice ever built by man, but it was slave labor that put the marble pieces together. And what about the pyramids down south? Did free rich Egyptians carry those stones all the way up to the top during the permanent heat wave that is Egypt? We’ll need a lot of TNT to blast those monuments to smithereens, but what the hell, as long as the PC bunch is satisfied, who are we old-timers to object?

When I was young and on the tennis circuit I met Margaret Court, Smith as she then was, and she could not have been nicer. We were not close by any means, but I remember her standing out because of her winning ways and—let’s face it—her refusal to join the crowd of female competitors who were mostly lesbian, although extremely discreet. Fifty years later she has become a hated figure despite the fact that there are members of the LGBT community in her church who admit that she is not homophobic. In one of her sermons, Margaret included that “a lust for the flesh leads people to destroy their lives.” Which rang a bell. I remembered during a tournament in Rome when I was in hot pursuit of an American female tennis player, Margaret told me words to that effect. “I hope I’m destroyed sooner rather than later,” I answered her, and she gave me a rueful smile and dropped it.

So here we are, with Martina Navratilova, as great a champion as she was a predator, pressing for the name of Margaret Court Arena to be changed, describing Margaret as racist and homophobic. The latter is neither, but you know how it is—if you believe in God too much, you must also be someone who wants to boil all gay people and all black people, and all brown people, and all those with slitty eyes. The fact that in her church Margaret Court has people from ten different African countries is neither here nor there. Navratilova knows better. Heaven help us.

The U.S. has shot down a Syrian Su-22 near Ja’Din and close to the strategic dam at Al Tabqa. The Sukhoi 22M series, the model in the Syrian inventory, is an old and relatively slow aircraft primarily used for bombing targets. First produced in 1970, the Russians improved the model over the twenty years it was manufactured (until 1990). It is entirely noncompetitive against top U.S. jet fighters including the F-18 that shot down the Syrian Sukhoi.

It is unlikely the Syrian pilot had any warning before being shot out of the sky. Indeed, the warning issue is what is at the heart of the dispute between Russia and the United States, and it may tell us more than the Russians would like us to know about their unstable relationship with Syria.

According to the Combined Joint Task Force official report, at around 4:30 P.M. Syria time, there was a Syrian attack on Ja’Din which was held by the Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF. The SDF is “multi-ethnic and multi-religious alliance of Kurdish, Arab, Assyrian, Armenian, Turkmen and Circassian militias.” The SDF took a number of casualties before Coalition aircraft chased the Syrians away. Immediately on the heels of the Syrian attack, the U.S. made use of what is called the deconfliction hotline and called the Russians. A little more than two hours later, another Su-22 was bombing in the same area and this is the plane that the U.S. shot down. There was no further call to the hotline, and while not precisely stated it is nearly certain that the Su-22 was not warned in any way by the approaching F-18.

The U.S. action is consistent with the agreements reached with the Russians. However, the Russians are claiming the U.S. did not use the hotline. Without saying so, they are likely treating the second incident as one that was separate from the first. Of course, this is something of a reach on their part, but it is probably the only response the Russians could have given under the circumstances because the Syrians went ahead with another airstrike on their own after the deconfliction warning was initially given.

Why would the Syrians do this? It boils down to an argument between the Russians and the Syrians over how to treat the Kurds. Last year, the Russians sponsored a peace proposal for the Kurds that would have given them autonomy inside a new Syrian constitution that ultimately would have divided the country into cantons, keeping the appearance of central Syrian Alawite control but in reality changing the nature of the existing unitary state into something different and perhaps acceptable to all sides in the conflict. Moscow flew in a delegation of experts from the Foreign Ministry and Defense Ministry to meet with the regime and Kurdish representatives. It appears to have been Moscow’s view, which is largely President Putin’s idea, that this solution would achieve a number of important goals: move the peace process forward and separate the Syrian Kurds from the Americans. Apparently, the Russians failed to do their homework, for while the Syrian Kurds appeared to be onboard, the Assad regime was contemptuously against the deal and rejected it out of hand, the result being the Moscow delegation was sent home emptyhanded or worse. The current Syrian regime attack on the Kurds near Ja’Din should be seen exactly in this context.

ADAZI, Latvia—The North Atlantic Treaty Organization said its deterrent force is fully in place in the Baltic area with the addition of a Canadian-led battle group in Latvia, enhancing deployments criticized by Russia.

A ceremony on Monday, featuring parading troops from Latvia, Canada, Poland, Italy, Spain, Slovenia and Albania, marked complete deployment of the fourth and final alliance battle group to the Baltic region. In all, NATO has positioned some 4,500 troops in Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and Poland.

Allied and Russian forces have both been building up in the Baltic region. The deployments have raised the risk of miscalculation, some analysts said, but both sides have said they are necessary defensive initiatives.

The U.S. has deployed a tank brigade to Central and Eastern Europe and is conducting exercises in the Baltic Sea region. This month, the U.S. flew B-2 stealth bombers to Europe for what American military officials called a demonstration of reassurance for allies. The U.S. has also deployed other bombers and Army units for exercises in the Baltic Sea area.

Russia, too, is enlarging its forces. It is creating a larger permanent military presence in the region, including missiles and new army units, moves it says counter the NATO deployments. Russia and Belarus are also preparing for a large military exercise in September.

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said he didn’t see any “imminent threat” to NATO forces or the Baltic states. He also said he hoped to convene a meeting between NATO ambassadors and their Russian counterpart so the two sides could brief each other on coming exercises.

Terrorism in the middle east knows no limits. The ancient monastery of St. Catherine’s in Egypt’s Sinai desert was attacked with 40 worshippers slaughtered. This is the same religious shrine that has a decree of protection issued by the Prophet Muhammed himself until the end of days.

A bus carrying Coptic Christians on a prayer vigil was attacking killing 26 people, including ten children.

As these incidents indicate the challenge for Middle East leaders is the maintenance of religious beliefs within limits imposed by modernity along with secularization that doesn’t trample religious observance.

The terrorists had clear goals in mind. One, they wanted to demonstrate that the government does not have the ability to deter terrorism. Two, the attack was a way to discourage tourism, the major source of revenue in the country. Three, by making this incident distinctly religious, it is believed this would cause defections from the secular impulse in the nation.

Religious freedom is clearly being threatened in Egypt, a condition that goes back 50 years ago to the publication of Sayyid Qutb, Islamic theorist and member of the Muslim Brotherhood. This trend applies throughout the Levant where secular nationalism has had to compete with the orthodox stance of radical Islam. General Nasser walked a fine line between the two positions by evoking a sense of national pride, but when his regime descended into pan Arabism and economic collapse, secularism suffered as well.

In the Middle East, it is apparent that what is dormancy is not death. President al Sisi is a pious Muslim who cautions against the extremism within his faith. These who want to weaken him do not fully understand the political alternatives. Removing loathsome dictators as was the case in Iran, Libya and Iraq does not yield the blossoming of a new Spring, but rather extremist forms of religions far more destructive than the regimes replaced. Radical elements do understand the meaning of replacement. A pathway to an Islamized Egypt lies in the “bulls-eye” on Sisi’s back.

Western goals in the region invariably refer to Ataturk’s secularization program in Turkey. But while Ataturk’s influence was profound, President Erdogan has disinterred religious ideas imposing them in a manner that would have been unthinkable before 2002, when he was first elected. Religion may have been in a long slumber in Turkey, but it is now awakened and playing a profound role.

Sisi, to his credit, understands the need to balance religion and modernity; perhaps that explains why he is a threat to Islamists. In his case, dedication to his faith is real, but it is not a faith imposed on the Egyptian people. Surely, his critics contend the blasphemy laws are not applied fairly to non-Muslims. And this may be true. Nonetheless, the balance his government has achieved, however imperfect, is a veritable model for the region and the best hope for stabilization.

A man previously known to French authorities for radicalism has rammed his car into a bus filled with police on the iconic Champs-Élysées in the heart of Paris this afternoon.

Paris (CNN)Tourists strolling along Paris’ famous Champs-Elysees on Monday afternoon watched in horror as a car rammed into a police van — and some witnessed the car burst into flames as police grabbed the man inside and put him on the ground.
The armed driver deliberately plowed into the police vehicle and later died, authorities said.

“We were waiting to cross the street and suddenly heard an explosion and the car was in flames,” said Eugenio Morcilla, who captured video after the collision. “The police acted very quickly.”
It’s the latest in a series of terror attacks this year against security forces in the French capital. The Paris prosecutor’s office has opened an anti-terror investigation.

“Once again, France’s security forces have been targeted in an attempted attack on the Champs-Elysées,” Interior Minister Gerard Collomb told reporters on Monday.
According to CNN affiliate BFMTV, the driver was under what is known as a “Fiche S” file, a French terror/radicalization watch list composed of thousands of names, of which some are under active surveillance. Active surveillance means that they are on law enforcement’s radar, not necessarily under rigorous surveillance.

The incident, which took place at 3:40 p.m. local time (9:40 a.m. ET), began when a police squadron drove down the Champs-Elysses and an individual hit the first vehicle of the squad.
“The car contained weapons, explosives, enough to allow him to blow up this car,” Collomb said.

The small white car caught on fire after the collision, but neither officers nor members of the public were hurt, an Interior Ministry spokesman said.
Morcilla, who was in Paris on vacation with his girlfriend, took video of the aftermath of the attack.

“They got out of a police truck and tried to break the glass and take the man out, they shot and threw tear gas and they took him out by force…” he said.
Security forces were working to identify the weapons in the vehicle, and they are investigating “the individual’s past and see what motives pushed him to take action,” Collomb said.
“This shows once again that the threat level in France is extremely high,” the interior minister said.

— In March, a man holding a gun on a French female soldier at Orly Airport shouted, “I am here to die in the name of Allah … There will be deaths,” before two of the soldier’s comrades shot the attacker dead.

British police have now identified the man who plowed a van into a crowd of British Muslims exiting the Finsbury mosque in London at midnight as 47-year-old Darren Osborne. Osborne, a Welsh father of four, killed one person and injured at least ten. Media coverage of the atrocity is refreshingly — if calculatedly — free of the usual temporizing about motive: Osborne was out to mass-murder Muslims. He saw himself as a one-man retaliation squad for attacks on British crowds by radical Muslims using the same car-ramming tactic.

The good news, at least for now, is that he really does appear to have been a lone wolf. As with any of these situations, we should hesitate to draw conclusions about the perpetrator’s background and associates at this early stage of the investigation. What we can say confidently is that the leaders of the mosque appear to have performed heroically: detaining but shielding Osborne from potential retaliatory violence until the police could arrive; tending quickly to the victims.

A couple of observations.

First, this attack is being unanimously condemned, across British society and beyond. The notion that street violence is the answer to street violence is rejected, and there will be no attempt to rationalize the savagery as an excess in a righteous cause. Osborne will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. The story tomorrow, just as today, will be his attempt to carry out mass-murder, not anxiety over potential “blowback” attacks against non-Muslims. Would that all terrorist attacks were regarded this way.

Second, too many people are falling into the error of echoing the claim that attack was “motivated by Islamophobia.” Not surprisingly, this allegation was instantly made by Harun Khan, general secretary of the Muslim Council of Britain. The MCB purports to be the face of “moderate Islam” in the U.K., notwithstanding its close ties to such sharia supremacist organizations as Jamaat-i-Islami and the Muslim Brotherhood. As we’ve discussed many times, “Islamophobia” is a smear label dreamed up by the Muslim Brotherhood, designed to demagogue any legitimate concern about Islamic doctrine as irrational fear and, of course, as racism.

The man who carried out the mosque attack is not an “Islamophobe.” He is a vile specimen of anti-Muslim hatred. His hatred does not render Islamophobia real. It does not convert into hysteria our worries that a sizable percentage of Muslims — for reasons that are easily knowable if one simply reads scripture and listens to renowned sharia jurists — construes Islam to endorse violence against non-Muslims and to command the imposition of oppressive sharia.

We must be of one voice in condemning Osborne’s attack, and urging that he be swiftly tried and severely punished. But we must not allow righteous outrage over the attack to dupe us into adopting the Muslim Brotherhood’s false “Islamophobia” narrative.

June 19 (Reuters) – U.S. student Otto Warmbier, who was imprisoned in North Korea for 17 months before being returned home in a coma less than a week ago, has died in a Cincinnati hospital, his family said in a statement on Monday.

“Unfortunately, the awful torturous mistreatment our son received at the hands of the North Koreans ensured that no other outcome was possible beyond the sad one we experienced today,” the family said in a statement following Warmbier’s death at 2:20 p.m. EDT (1820 GMT) at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center.

The European Union announced this week that it would begin proceedings to punish Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic for their refusal to accept refugees and migrants under a 2015 scheme the E.U. commission created. The mission’s aim was to relieve Greece and Italy of the burden from migrant waves arriving from the Middle East and Africa, largely facilitated by European rescues of migrants in the Mediterranean.

The conflict between the EU and these three nations of the Visegrád Group is not just about the authority the EU can arrogate to itself when facing an emergency (one largely of its own making), but about the character of European government and society in the future. It is hard not to conclude that the dissenting countries are correct to dissent. Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia had voted against the 2015 agreement. Poland’s government had supported it then, but a subsequent election saw a new party come into power that rejected the scheme.

There is no doubt that Italy and Greece are under strain. This week the mayor of Rome, Virginia Raggi, pleaded with the Italian government to stop the inflow of people to her city. Raggi is a member of the Five Star Movement a Euroskeptic and anti-mass-migration association. Her election was a distress signal in itself, sent by the electorate. And Raggi has sent another such signal to Italy’s government, saying that it is “impossible, as well as risky to think up further accommodation structures.”

But the EU’s plan to impose sanctions on Eastern Europe has been met by unusually frank talk from dissenters there. Mariusz Błaszczak, the interior minister of Poland, said in an interview that taking in migrants would be worse than facing EU sanctions. “The security of Poland and the Poles is at risk” by taking in migrants, he said, “We mustn’t forget the terror attacks that have taken place in Western Europe, and how — in the bigger EU countries — these are unfortunately now a fact of life.”

The Polish government certainly has the wind of democratic support at its back. The truth is that the majority in nearly every European country says that migration from Muslim countries into Europe should be slowed down or stopped entirely. In Poland, less than 10 percent of respondents disagree with the statement that “all immigration from majority Muslim nations should be stopped.”

When public sentiment runs so strongly this way, and the sentiment of the political class runs the other way, coercive measures such as sanctions become inevitable. But that coercion may be dangerous to the continuation of the European project.

This week, former Czech Republic president Vaclav Klaus issued a fiery denunciation of the EU’s scheme: “We are protesting the attempt to punish us and force us into obedience.” He said that his nation should prepare itself to exit the European Union altogether. But he also took all the subtext hiding behind refugee politics and made it explicit. “We refuse to permit the transformation of our country into a multicultural society . . . as we currently see in France and in Great Britain.”

In the past year, Western European politicians often scolded Eastern European governments for retreating from European values, “the open society,” and democracy. And Eastern Europeans on social media just as often threw that rhetoric back in their face. Which looked more like an open democratic society, Paris with its landmarks patrolled by the military — or Krawkow, with its Christmas market unspoiled by the need for automatic weapons?