RUTHFULLY YOURS

Editor’s Note: In the current issue of National Review, we have a piece by Jay Nordlinger on Vladimir Kara-Murza, the Russian democracy leader. This week in his Impromptus, Mr. Nordlinger is expanding that piece. For yesterday’s installment, Part I, go here.

So, as we’ve said, Boris Nemtsov was murdered — shot in the back on February 27, 2015, about 200 yards from the Kremlin walls. Who killed him? Who did it?

Kara-Murza gives a long answer. But it comes down to this: He can’t tell you who pulled the trigger or triggers — who the triggerman or triggermen were. But, in his mind, there is no doubt about who is ultimately responsible: Putin and his regime.

I ask a very awkward question: Did they make a mistake? Did Nemtsov’s murder backfire on them? Kara-Murza says that he will return a very awkward answer: No, they did not make a mistake. “They knew whom they were killing. From their point of view, they did exactly the right thing.”

Nemtsov was by far the most effective opposition leader in Russia, Kara-Murza explains. He could talk to anyone, from heads of state to the man on the street — most any street. He could enter a hall full of people hostile to him, and come out with many new friends.

“There is a saying that no one is irreplaceable,” Kara-Murza notes. “But Boris was unique. It’s hard to imagine that he can be replaced.” Nemtsov’s murder was a huge blow to the Russian democracy movement, and to Kara-Murza personally.

“My life is divided into before and after February 27, 2015,” he says. Before and after Nemtsov’s murder.

Three months after the murder, Kara-Murza was poisoned. One by one, his organs shut down. The experience was, needless to say, terrifying and brutal. Kara-Murza was shuttled from hospital to hospital, as doctors tried to figure out what was going on.

Finally, they realized that Kara-Murza had been attacked by a poison — one of an extremely sophisticated nature.

When he was able, Kara-Murza resumed his work. Yet there was always a threat over his shoulder. In early 2016, for example, Putin’s man in Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, did something charming. He posted to his Instagram page a video showing two men in the crosshairs of a sniper. Those men were two Putin critics: Mikhail Kasyanov, a former prime minister, and Kara-Murza.

The motives of Muslim terrorists are such a mystery. First police sought the motive of the Muslim terrorist in London. Now they’re searching for the motive of the Muslim who murdered a Jewish woman while shouting, Allahu Akbar, a cry that originated with Mohammed’s attacks on Jews, which means Allah is Greater.

​Paris police are checking suspicions that a 27-year-old Muslim murdered his Jewish neighbor, Sarah Lucy Halimi, following a confrontation in her apartment.

According to a report in Yediot Aharonot, 66-year-old Halimi was attacked by the terrorist as she slept in her bed. He stabbed her and pushed her from her third-story apartment to her death while shouting “Allahu Akbar.”

During the police investigation, the terrorist asserted that the Koran had commanded him to murder her.

Which indeed the Koran does. Islam is a fundamentally anti-Semitic and anti-everyone ideology. Islamic teachings preach violent hate toward Jews. Mohammed was a mass murderer of Jews.

But the police are going with the standard excuse for Muslim terrorists these days… mental instability.

French police continued Sunday to investigate the murder of Sarah Attal-Halimi, a 67-year old Jewish woman from Paris, who was hurled to her death from her apartment window last week.

A 27-year-old Muslim man who lived on the floor beneath the victim was detained shortly after the incident. Following a preliminary investigation, the suspect – apparently known to the police as a small-time criminal – was sent for psychiatric evaluation.

The incident has caused a storm within the Parisian Jewish community, with many claiming that the act was motivated by antisemitism. Joel Mergui, president of the Consistoire, said Tuesday that the community must allow the police to investigate the incident before branding it antisemitic, though he described the circumstances of the incident as “troubling.”

The prosecutor informed the Jewish leaders that at this stage, they do not have any evidence that the crime was antisemitic.

Or of Islamic terrorist. Just another case of Jihad mental illness. Nothing to see here folks. Now let’s welcome in some more Muslim migrants and settlers. Try not to hear the screams of their victims.

A source who spoke with Jewish media said the suspect stabbed the victim as she lay in bed sleeping, shouting “Allahu Akbar!”. The source told the Hebrew-language Hadrei HaHaredim the victim was heard begging and screaming for her life as the killer dragged her to the window, and then was seen pushing her from the third floor to her death.

There could hardly be a metaphor for Europe. And this is what the anti-Semitic collaborators of Muslim migration, like HIAS and the Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect, are bringing to America.

Jewish News has managed to contact one of the victim’s children, Yonathan Halimi. Residing in Israel, where the family has respected since Thursday the week of mourning, he agreed to answer our call, “Because everyone must know that it was an anti-Semitic act,” introduced his wife Esther.

Yonathan Halimi expresses himself slowly. In a posed voice, he alternates French, which he perfectly knows, and Hebrew. “She was killed al pi kiddoush hashem,” hhe said.

What does he know about him? “He has lived in the building for 20 years in a family known for anti-Semitism”. Yonathan Halimi remembers the snags in the stairwell between the Jewish family on the 4th floor and his neighbors on the 2nd.

“One day, one of the killer’s sisters pushed my sister down the stairs, and the next time she called her a dirty Jew.”

A few hours before the Shabbat, he asks that one pays tribute to her who, as a director of Jewish nursery, “always sought to elevate and elevate others.” “Do something good in her memory.”

This is what Islamic migration and settlement means.

Will last Friday’s terror attack in Stockholm change Swedish attitudes toward Islam? Not likely. Pretty much all of Europe has spent the last few decades undergoing (steady) Islamization, but the invasion has progressed so much further in Sweden than in almost every other country on the continent – and has occasioned so much less frank reportage, commentary, and criticism, that brave souls in Sweden’s Scandinavian neighbors, Denmark and Norway – routinely make disparaging reference to “Swedish conditions.” What this term refers to is not only the drastic social and economic changes currently underway in the country that once proudly called itself Folkhemmet, “the people’s home,” but the mentality – a mentality not unique to Sweden, but certainly more fully developed there, in the government, media, academy, police, and the public at large, than anywhere else in Europe – that has made this dread transformation possible.

A few recent news items provide illustrative examples of what it means to be living under “Swedish conditions”:

On March 10, it was reported that despite longtime plans, there would not be a new police station in Rinkeby, a notoriously unsafe immigrant neighborhood in Stockholm. Not a single construction firm had put in a bid for the project. Why? Because, as several police officers told SVT News, “it’s much too dangerous to build a police station in the area.”
On March 12, Sweden’s Minister for Culture and Democracy, Alice Bah Kuhnke, said in a TV interview that the 150-odd jihadists who have returned to Sweden after fighting for ISIS should not be investigated, let alone prosecuted, but should instead be welcomed back and encouraged to integrate – by which she seemed to mean offering various welfare incentives and assorted freebies. (Such enticements, incidentally, would be perfectly in line with Swedish practice.)
On April 5, after Sweden’s TV4 reported that a Muslim school in Vällingby was forcing girls to sit in the back of the school bus, Victoria Kawesa, head of a party called Feminist Initiative, blamed it not on Islam but on the “global patriarchy.”

But no recent event or telecast provided a more illuminating picture of “Swedish conditions” than the April 3 episode of Horisont, a 60 Minutes-type series on Danish TV. (The fact that Danish TV airs such programs while Swedish TV does not is itself, of course, a telling reflection of “Swedish conditions.”)

The central figure on the Horisont episode was Eva Ek Törnberg, an ethnic Swede who not only lives in Seved, an immigrant-heavy district of Malmö, but is known as the “Queen of Seved” because of her decades-long efforts to cozy up to her Muslim neighbors and help them become full members of Swedish society.

On Horisont, however, she admits that her attitudes have changed over time. She used to call herself a “citizen of the world” and to champion open borders – now she looks around and finds herself thinking: “What has happened to my little Sweden?” She once thought it was “nonsense” to expect newcomers to learn Swedish – now she feels otherwise. Yes, she still believes in letting these people in by the truckload – but she no longer warms as she once did to the idea of a “multicultural society.” She perseveres in her attempt to bring Muslims into the Swedish fold – but she’s increasingly frustrated and confused by her lack of success. As she puts it, she’s curious about these people’s lives – why are they so indifferent to hers?

None of Wilders’s speeches incites violence against anyone; the violence that surrounds him is directed only at him.

The only person talking about these problems is Geert Wilders. Dutch political leaders and most journalists seemingly prefer to claim that Geert Wilders is the problem; that if he were not there, these problems would not exist.

What adherents of this view, that the West is guilty, “forget” is that Islam long oppressed the West: Muslim armies conquered Persia, the Christian Byzantine Empire, all of North Africa and the Middle East, Spain, Greece, Hungary, Serbia and the Balkans, virtually all of Eastern Europe, Greece and southern Spain. The Muslim armies were a constant threat until the marauding Ottoman troops were finally turned away at the Gates of Vienna in 1683.

Even if the Dutch politcian Geert Wilders had won and if the Party for Freedom (PVV) he established eleven years ago had become the first party in the country, he would not have been able to become the head of the government. The heads of all the other political parties said they would reject any alliance with him ; they maintain this position to this day.

For years, the Dutch mainstream media have spread hatred and defamation against Wilders for trying to warn the Dutch people – and Europe – about what their future will be if they continue their current immigration policies; in exchange, last December, a panel of three judges found him guilty of “inciting discrimination”. Newspapers and politicians all over Europe unceasingly describe him as a dangerous man and a rightist firebrand. Sometimes they call him a “fascist”.

What did Geert Wilders ever do to deserve that? None of his remarks ever incriminated any person or group because of their race or ethnicity. To charge him, the Dutch justice system had excessively and abusively to interpret words he used during a rally in which he asked if the Dutch wanted “fewer Moroccans.” None of Wilders’s speeches incites violence against anyone; the violence that surrounds him is directed only at him. He defends human rights and democratic principles and he is a resolute enemy of all forms of anti-Semitism.

His only « crime » is to denounce the danger represented by the Islamization of the Netherlands and the rest of Europe and to claim that Islam represents a mortal threat to freedom. Unfortunately, he has good empirical reasons to say that. Also unfortunately, the Netherlands is a country where criticism of Islam is particularly dangerous: Theo van Gogh made an “Islamically incorrect” film in 2004 and was savagely murdered by an Islamist who said he would kill again if he could. Two years earlier, Pim Fortuyn, who had hoped to stand for election, defined Islam as a “hostile religion” ; he was killed by a leftist Islamophile animal-rights activist. Geert Wilders is alive only because he is under around-the-clock police protection graciously provided by the Dutch government.

This is the first time that Erdogan is openly challenging a concerted European stand.

Turkey’s foreign policy and the rhetoric that presumably went to support it, has, during the past several years, aimed less at achieving foreign policy goals and more at consolidating voters’ support for the Ankara government.

Self-aggrandizing behavior has predominantly shaped policy and functioned to please the Turks’ passion for a return to their glorious Ottoman past.

Assertive and confrontational diplomatic language and playing the tough guy of the neighborhood may have helped garner popular support for President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP), but after years of “loud barking and no biting”, Turkey has effectively become the victim of its own narrative.

In 2010, Turkey froze diplomatic relations with Israel and promised “internationally to isolate the Jewish state”, and never to restore ties unless, along with two other conditions, Jerusalem removed its naval blockade of Gaza to prevent weapons from being brought in that would be used to attack Israel. Turkey’s prime minister at the time, Ahmet Davutoglu, said Israel would “kneel down to us”.

In 2016, after rounds of diplomatic contacts, Turkey and Israel agreed to normalize their relations. The blockade of Gaza, to prevent shipments of weaponry to be used by Gazans in terror attacks remains in effect.

In 2012, Davutoglu claimed that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s days in power were numbered, “not by years but by weeks or months”. In 2016, Davutoglu had to step down as prime minister, but Erdogan’s and his worst regional nemesis, Assad, is in power to this day, enjoying increased Russian and Iranian backing. In 2012, Erdogan said that “we will soon go to Damascus to pray at the Umayyad mosque” — a political symbol of Assad’s downfall and his replacement by pro-Turkey Sunni groups. That prayer remains to be performed.

In November 2015, shortly after Turkey shot down a Russian Su-24 military jet and cited violation of its airspace, Erdogan warned Russia “not to play with fire.” As for the Russian demands for an apology, Erdogan said it was Turkey that deserved an apology because its airspace had been violated, and that Turkey would not apologize to Russia.

In June 2016, just half a year after Russia imposed a slew of economic sanctions on Turkey, Erdogan apologized to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Remember Daniel Ortega? The communist thug dictator of Nicaragua who disgusted the great Ronald Reagan with his mirrored sunglasses and his Fifth Avenue shopping sprees, and then later got into the news with child molestation charges brought on by his stepdaughter? He’s also famous for his many fraudulent “re-elections” and dismantling his country’s democracy.

Now that Hugo Chávez is gone, he’s back on the radar again, arm in arm with a new sugar daddy he’s sold his hapless country out to: Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

In an alarming story, the Washington Post reports that the Russians have set up a base camp full of Russian-speaking Russians of indeterminate purpose, in some compound at the base of a volcano, which is supposedly a GPS satellite-tracking station. U.S. officials think it might be more of an electronic surveillance station aimed at the U.S. and note that it’s aimed right at the U.S. Embassy in Managua. They say they aren’t alarmed for now, but it could have a dual-purpose spying function. Besides that, a gleaming new Russian edifice devoted to “counter-narcotics” operations has gone up, baffling many as to what interest Russia could have in the issue. Does Putin really want to keep meth out of the hands of the U.S. Rust Belt’s unemployed?

In exchange for these rather impressive concessions, the Nicaraguans get shipments of blocky, Soviet-style buses to ride around in on public transport – hot, sweaty, and always breaking down.

That sounds like the sort of deal Ortega would do.

It goes to show that Latin America’s leftist dictators’ club really is still entrenched and ruthless, and now that the oil money from Caracas has dried up, its members now put their countries up for sale to America’s opponents. Nicaragua has gotten such a good deal that El Salvador, now led by a group of aging communist guerrillas from Ortega’s 1980s heyday, want a Russian deal of their own. It’s not enough for them to ship one tenth of their population to Los Angeles and elsewhere in the U.S. as illegal immigrants in order to feed off their remittances while Americans pay for their housing, health care, jail costs, education, and welfare. No, a sellout to the Russians needs to be added to the mix to get gringo good. Because let’s face it: communist systems are unsustainable, and they can exist nowadays only if there’s a sugar daddy willing to pay. Putin knows this well and has kept his country rather uncommunist back home, the better to sell the romance to these boobs.

The U.S. left, of course, is silent. Leftists north of the Mexican border are still saying President Trump is in bed with the Russians. They’ve forgotten about their little buddy Ortega.

Last week’s cruise-missile strike against a Syrian air base in response to Bashar Assad’s use of chemical weapons has reopened debate about the wisdom of Barack Obama’s decision to forgo a similar strike, under similar circumstances, in 2013.

But the real issue isn’t about wisdom. It’s about honesty.

On Sept. 10, 2013, President Obama delivered a televised address in which he warned of the dangers of not acting against Assad’s use of sarin gas, which had killed some 1,400 civilians in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta the previous month.

“If we fail to act, the Assad regime will see no reason to stop using chemical weapons,” Mr. Obama said. “As the ban against these weapons erodes, other tyrants will have no reason to think twice about acquiring poison gas, and using them. Over time, our troops would again face the prospect of chemical weapons on the battlefield. And it could be easier for terrorist organizations to obtain these weapons, and use them to attack civilians.”

It was a high-minded case for action that the president immediately disavowed for the least high-minded reason: It was politically unpopular. The administration punted a vote to an unwilling Congress. It punted a fix to the all-too-willing Russians. And it spent the rest of its time in office crowing about its success.

In July 2014 Secretary of State John Kerry claimed “we got 100% of the chemical weapons out.” In May 2015 Mr. Obama boasted that “Assad gave up his chemical weapons. That’s not speculation on our part. That, in fact, has been confirmed by the organization internationally that is charged with eliminating chemical weapons.” This January, then-National Security Adviser Susan Rice said “we were able to get the Syrian government to voluntarily and verifiably give up its chemical weapons stockpile.”

Today we know all this was untrue. Or, rather, now all of us know it. Anyone paying even slight attention has known it for years.

In June 2014 U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power noted “discrepancies and omissions related to the Syrian government’s declaration of its chemical weapons program.” But that hint of unease didn’t prevent her from celebrating the removal “of the final 8% of chemical weapons materials in Syria’s declaration” of its overall stockpile. CONTINUE AT SITE

Editor’s Note: In the current issue of National Review, we have a piece by Jay Nordlinger on Vladimir Kara-Murza, the Russian democracy leader. This week in his Impromptus, Mr. Nordlinger expands that piece.

Two years ago, in May 2015, Vladimir Kara-Murza was poisoned. He fell into a coma. The doctors told his wife, Yevgenia, that he had just a 5 percent chance of surviving. He survived.

Almost two years later — in February 2017 — Kara-Murza was again poisoned. This time, the doctors induced a coma, to help him survive. They again told Yevgenia that her husband had just a 5 percent chance. Again, he survived.

I’m sitting in a Washington, D.C., restaurant with him. I tell him that I’m always happy to see him. (We first met last year.) But today I am especially happy to see him.

Smiling, Kara-Murza says, “I’m very happy, and very grateful, to be sitting here with you.”

“No cane!” I say. When I met him last year, he was walking with a cane, and limping. He is in weakened condition today, understandably. But no cane …

The poisonings — the attacks — took place in Moscow, where Kara-Murza is the vice-chairman of Open Russia, a civil-society group. This is the group started by Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the Russian businessman who crossed Vladimir Putin, spent ten years in jail, and is now in exile.

One by one, Kara-Murza’s colleagues have been exiled, like Khodorkovsky. Or imprisoned. Or killed. Kara-Murza is determined to press on, however, believing that he has important work to do. And if people shrink from doing it, how will it get done?

He is 35 years old, born in 1981 to a distinguished family. His peculiar name — Kara-Murza — means “Black Prince.” In all likelihood, it comes from Golden Horde days, centuries back.

Vladimir was just shy of ten in August 1991. That was a pivotal month in the history of Russia. Hard-liners in the Soviet government attempted a coup against the party leader, Gorbachev. Kara-Murza will never forget it. Those few days in August are stamped on him indelibly.

Tanks were in the streets of his hometown, Moscow — just as they had been sent to Budapest in 1956, as he says. And to Prague in 1968. And to Vilnius, earlier that same year, 1991 (January).

Thousands and thousands of people poured into the streets of Moscow — armed with nothing. They were fed up. Fed up with oppressive rule. They stood in front of the tanks — their own tanks, Russian tanks, or Soviet tanks. Those tanks turned around and left.

At the end of the year — Christmas — the Soviet Union dissolved.

“No matter how powerful the forces against them,” says Kara-Murza, “when people are prepared to stand up for what they believe, they succeed.” In fact, “that’s the basis of my hope for the future of Russia.”

We talk a little about Yeltsin — Boris Yeltsin, the president of Russia in the ’90s (1991-99). He is widely remembered as an alcoholic buffoon. But he was a lot more than that, as Kara-Murza says.

“He was in power for eight years — two terms — and then he left. Compare that with what we have now.” (Putin has been entrenched since 2000: 17 years.)

“We had a real parliament, not a rubber-stamp parliament. Compare that with what we have now.”

Arabs and Muslims have long lost faith in their leaders’ ability to deal with the crises plaguing Arab and Islamic countries. The civil war in Syria, which has been raging for more than five years and which has claimed the lives of more than half a million people, is seen as a shining best example of Arab and Muslim leaders’ incompetence and apathy.

Others are calling Trump “Lion of the Sunnis”, “Caliph of the Muslims” and “Defender of the Islamic Holy Sites.” Some wrote: “Blessed be the hands of Abu Ivanka al-Amiriki (Trump),” and expressed hope that he would do more to rid the Syrian people of their dictator. “We love you Trump” and “Trump is our hope” are two of many hashtags that have become extremely popular on social media, especially Twitter. Many of the writers are Syrians, Egyptians and Gulf citizens.

Many Arabs and Muslims perceive themselves to have been betrayed by the Obama administration. They felt, rightly, that the Obama administration turned its back on Washington’s friends and allies in the Arab world in favor of Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood.

A new hero has been born in the Arab world and his name is Donald Trump. And this is not a joke.

Arabs and Muslims love leaders who talk tough and do not hesitate to use force. In the Arab world, compromise is a sign of weakness.

Until recently, Trump was anathema to many Arabs and Muslims. So what happened? U.S. President Donald Trump did something Arab leaders have failed to do: he helped the Syrian civilians who were being gassed by their ruler.

Arabs and Muslims have long lost faith in their leaders’ ability to deal with the crises plaguing Arab and Islamic countries. The civil war in Syria, which has been raging for more than five years and which has claimed the lives of more than half a million people, is seen as a shining best example of Arab and Muslim leaders’ incompetence and apathy.

The most recent Arab League summit in Jordan, which brought together many Arab heads of state and monarchs, will be best remembered for the photos of leaders falling asleep during the discussions. These pictures, which have been circulating widely in the Arab media, feel like salt in the festering wound of Arab leaders’ indifference to their peoples’ plights.

The summit, which utterly failed to find a solution to the ongoing killings in Syria, Yemen, Iraq and other Arab countries, is now being sarcastically referred to by many Arabs as the “Sleep Summit.”