RUTHFULLY YOURS

WASHINGTON — A Russian dissident recovering from his second poisoning in two years said this morning that massive protests in nearly 100 cities across Russia last Sunday signaled an unstoppable movement driven by the younger generation that has known no other Kremlin leader than Vladimir Putin.

Vladimir Kara-Murza, 35, a journalist who was a close associate of murdered Kremlin critic and opposition politician Boris Nemtsov, is vice chairman of the pro-democracy group Open Russia. Three months after Nemtsov was shot to death within view of the Kremlin in 2015, Kara-Murza suddenly suffered kidney failure and was in coma. It was determined he had been poisoned, and although he recovered the perpetrators were never caught.

On Feb. 2, a day after Kara-Murza posted a Facebook tribute to Nemtsov, it happened again. He was placed in a medically induced coma on life support, suffering from the same symptoms as the first time, and was released from the hospital more than two weeks later.

At an Atlantic Council event today with Senate Foreign Relations Committee Ranking Member Ben Cardin (D-Md.) and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), Kara-Murza said doctors gave him about a 5 percent chance of recovery. “I look better than I feel,” he noted, adding doctors warned him of another poisoning that “if you have a third time, that’ll be the last one.”

He is determined to return to Russia after his rehabilitation and full recovery. “I do want to go back and I will go back… our work is important,” Kara-Murza said. “…There’s nothing more the Kremlin would like than for us to give up and we’re not going to give them that.”

Kara-Murza emphasized that the “vast majority of those who came out to the streets of Russia last Sunday were young people… these are the Putin generation who have never known any other political reality.”

This new generation, he said, are getting information from sources other than just state TV and “increasingly recognize” that the Kremlin is damaging their future.

“I have to admit I was surprised about the scale… but I was not surprised about the participation,” he added.

More than a thousand people were arrested during the protests, including key Putin opponent Alexei Navalny, whose Anti-Corruption Foundation estimated the total number of protesters to be around 150,000. “If you watched Russia state TV, you wouldn’t know who Alexei Navalny was,” Kara-Murza noted. CONTINUE AT SITE

How the United States responds to these protests abroad can determine not only the future of those protesting, but also the future of the governments that find themselves under pressure.

Russia seeks superpower status in the Middle East and Europe, but real superpower status has always required the ability to shoulder burdens abroad without fear of upheaval at home.

Ignoring the Green Movement in Iran was a missed opportunity for the West and a tragedy for the people of Iran. It is not America’s job to create or foment unrest in Russia or anywhere else. But it is in the interest of the West to support and hearten those who have the courage to take on a corrupt and aggressive government.

For all the hyperbole in Washington about Russian hacking, Russian disinformation, Russian influence, and Russian espionage, the really remarkable events in Russia over the weekend appear barely to have registered.

One hundred years after the assassination of the last Czar, and two-and-a-half decades after the fall of the communist regime, Russian people have taken to the streets.

In early March, anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny posted a report on YouTube detailing the corruption of Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev. After more than 13 million views in roughly three weeks, people, including a large number of teenagers, answered Navalny’s call for public protest. They flooded the streets of 95 Russian cities, as well as London, Prague, Basel, and Bonn. Many carried rubber ducks — or real ducks — referring to reports of a luxury duck farm on one of Medvedev’s properties.

Navalny is now in jail.

LONDON—Investigators have concluded that the 52-year-old man who killed four people in a car-and-knife attack near Parliament made a test run in the days before, two security officials said Thursday.

U.K. investigators are still trying to piece together the motives and planning behind Khalid Masood’s attack last week, the worst in Britain since a series of coordinated bombings in 2005 killed 52 people.

Two security officials said tracking of his car’s GPS showed he drove across Westminster Bridge and approached Parliament on Saturday, March 18. The following Wednesday he plowed into pedestrians on the crowded bridge before crashing his car outside Parliament and stabbing a policeman. He was shot dead by police.

Masood’s movements show he prepared the attack, rather than making a last-minute decision beforehand, the officials said.

But it also suggests he wasn’t a trained terrorist. In that case, he “would have come on the same day of the week, or at least a weekday, to ensure the security measures and traffic were similar,” one official said.

A London police spokesman said “the investigation is live and ongoing, and we’re not prepared to comment further at this time.”

Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack, saying in a statement that it was a response to U.S.-led coalition strikes against the extremist group. But police said they have found no evidence he was linked to Islamic State or al Qaeda. Investigators have said that they believe he acted alone and was inspired by Islamist terrorism. CONTINUE AT SITE

Editor’s Note: This article was first published by us in 2015. With the state of terrorism and the terrorist attacks that are happening in the streets of our cities around the world, we have decided it was worth repeating.

Ask people in the United States what a dhimmi is and perhaps a handful might know. In Europe, and as far as India and the far east, the number would be higher because of latent memories of battles fought against invading Moslem armies across the span of centuries.

For a while there was the specter of triumphant Islam building a giant mosque mere yards from Ground Zero in New York City where Islamic fanatics, in the name of Allah, destroyed the World Trade Center and brought the two magnificent towers down in a cascade of horror.

The mosque would have risen to thirteen or more stories and overlooked the blasted hole in the ground that was once a symbol of America’s freedom and technical ingenuity.

If this outrage had been built, it would not have been a symbol of Muslim outreach to non-Moslems; it would have been a sickening insult to the victims of Islamic barbarism and a tangible rallying cry to millions more jihadists who would see it as Islam’s victory over a vanquished United States of America.

This would have been the 21st century revenge of resurgent Islam over those who centuries ago beat back the many previous Islamic invasions and attempted Muslim conquests of non-Muslim lands.

In 732, Charles Martel led his Frankish forces at Tours to victory against an Islamic invasion of France, which nearly destroyed Christian Europe. Similarly, Islam was ousted from Spain in 1492 after an occupation of the Iberian Peninsula by the Moslems for hundreds of years.

In Italy, Islamic power was brought to an end when the heavy Turkish galleys were defeated by Venetian galleasses at the great naval battle of Lepanto in 1571. And the Moslem Ottoman power, which at its height again threatened Europe, was barely turned back at the gates of Vienna on 11 September 1683 by a coalition of European armies. A previous 9/11.

These were four major defeats by Europe of Islamic attempts of conquest and subjugation set against a history of victorious Moslem invasions and conquests that has been the hallmark of Islam since its founding in the seventh century.

But what of the peoples and nations that fell under Islamic occupation? For them the story was one of forced conversions to Islam, slavery, death, and the Islamic institution of dhimmitude.

It has from the beginning been designed to denounce Israel as an illegal state, all under the cover of supposed neutral academic inquiry.

It is not, however, in the least surprising that an Irish government would pass a motion like that so wholeheartedly. After all, links with the PLO and other terrorist groups were connived at or even encouraged by the Irish government itself.

The conference put itself in the welcoming hands of the city council, a body thoroughly in agreement with the aims of the event, to find spurious legal arguments for the delegitimization and eventual destruction of Israel.

Readers may remember a controversy reported in January. It was proposed that an international “academic” conference about the legitimacy of Israel would take place in University College Cork in the Republic of Ireland. There have been several developments in this sorry enterprise since then.

What the conference, which goes under the revealing title, “International Law and the State of Israel: Legitimacy, Responsibility and Exceptionalism”, was about may be summed up in a few sentences. It has from the beginning been designed to denounce Israel as an illegal state, all under the cover of supposed neutral academic inquiry. The organizers had previously tried to hold the event at Britain’s Southampton University and, reportedly, other European universities, each time without success.

Let’s give 18C the benefit of the doubt and allow, for argument’s sake, that it was conceived with the very best of intentions. OK, that’s my concession, but I also expect any reasonable person on the other side of the argument to acknowledge it has become a handy weapon, often a lucrative one.
Ah, this evergreen topic of insult and offence. What a maze to skip through, this business of not “insulting and offending” anyone! There’s such a rich and wondrous variety of reasons why people might dislike, sometimes intensely, anything you say or do that it boggles the mind. Even if you manage to avoid contentious topics — race, religion, money, politics, immigration, abortion, drugs, Section 18C, ABC, environment, elections, Trump, Hillary, women, sex, discrimination, human rights, terrorism, victims, Aborigines, carbon footprints, homosexuality, prostitution, conscription, vaccination, coal, renewables, oppressed sharks and pot-bellied parrots — you might yet trigger a warning of some kind.

Table conversations become more and more like valedictory dinners in a minefield. Step back from the table and its thin fare of acceptable opinion and topics for discussion and one false move detonates the big kaboom! So, rather than rile the table, you wear the standard-issue solemn face as steaming servings of politically correct tripe are dished up for general consumption. Beg to differ and, well, it could be the end of a beautiful relationship. Risqué jokes? None of those, please, unless the punch line is aimed at conservatives, which is always acceptable and necessarily so. There are now so many subjects and identity groups the Left has declared off-limits, Liberals are about the only free-range prey left.

Where would we be if anyone could tell a joke about anyone and anything? Dragged before the tax-hoovers of the Human Rights Commission, like poor Bill Leak, that’s where. An appropriate deference — indeed, a secular adoration — for the paraded virtues of the Fitzroy, Brunswick and Balmain set is required to avoid a public shunning and, once Dr Tim Soutphommasane has touted for “victims” on Facebook prepared to keep him busy and in the headlines, there will be no escaping the substantial legal costs. These morally superior, specimens struggle mightily to bring us mugs into the bright, brave future they envision for all humankind, whether the rest of us like it or not! Solemn agreement, meek acquiescence and, for those who wish to get ahead, a fawning deference that would shame Uriah Heap is what they (and their taxpayer-funded legal departments) expect and demand. They are, by their own estimation, the sole custodians of human rights’ eternal flame. Place your unfettered sense of humour before the altar of PC rectitude and surrender it as an offering to what they imagine is the greater good.

Very soon there will be no permissible topics for pointed jocularity, not unless they are the sort based on Pavlovian stimulus and response. If you have been to one of those “comedy” festivals, you will know what I mean. The stand-up guy or gal says “yada yada yada … little Johnny Howard” and the audience roars with laughter because, well, that is what good groupthinkers are supposed to do — respond on cue. Like the screamers in 1984‘s Two Minute Hate, they know and enjoy the satisfaction of howling with the mob at those they love to hate, be it howling with derisive laughter or old-fashioned, flat-out contempt.

They say the personal political, so let me ask if Section 18C protect me? As a Jew, I am sensitive to anti-Semitic insults, and 18C is presented as protecting me from this scourge. As far as an open assault, whether physical or verbal, it is not a foolproof protection as far as my safety and my family’s is concerned. For example, consider the variety of organisations declaring themselves to be “anti-Zionist” that are, in effect, no more nor less than anti-Semitic. Did 18c inhibit the mobs of chanters and bullies who, week after week, invaded the Max Brenner chocolate shops? Watch the video below if you are groping for an answer.