RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.”

“According to one estimate, 10−15 percent of the world’s Muslims are Islamists. Out of well over 1.6 billion, or 23 percent of the globe’s population, that implies more than 160 million individuals.” – Ayaan Hirsi Ali, in her new book, The Challenge of Dawa.

That was Ronald Reagan’s major achievement in his long war against the Soviet Union: presenting communism as a joke — exposing the lies of the Soviet regime, exposing the misery under which its people were living, and explaining why Western values were preferable to Communist ones. This is exactly what the West, Hirsi Ali explains, should be doing with radical Islam.

Western civilization is a humanist vision in which Christianity integrated Jewish wisdom, Greek philosophy and Roman law, thereby giving Western culture its distinctive character: freedom of speech and of the press, equal justice under law, the primacy of the individual, separation of religion and state, freedom of religion and from religion, property rights, sexual equality, an independent judiciary, and independent education, among other values. This is what radical Islam wants to destroy. That is why terrorists are attacking our churches, the State of Israel and why they are subverting democracy to turn it into Islamic law, sharia.

Jihad is spreading violence — and succeeding. “Of the last sixteen years,” notes Ayaan Hirsi Ali in her new book, The Challenge of Dawa, “the worst year for terrorism was 2014, with ninety-three countries experiencing attacks and 32,765 people killed.”

“The second worst was 2015, with 29,376 deaths. Last year, four radical Islamic groups were responsible for 74 percent of all deaths from terrorism: the Islamic State (also known as ISIS), Boko Haram, the Taliban, and al-Qaeda. Although the Muslim world itself bears the heaviest burden of jihadist violence, the West is increasingly under attack”.

Jews of Cape Town want their government to retake land bought by a Jewish day school and, in place of a new campus, to erect low-cost housing for poor Gentiles – right in a suburb that many Cape Town Jews find unaffordable.

American Jews direct communal resources to black rights, refugee rights, LGBT rights, women’s rights, transgender rights – to any right that is not a Jewish right. Rabbis sign a petition to allow Muslim refugees from Jew-intolerant backgrounds into America. Democrat Jews dote on Barack Obama with a hostility to the State of Israel matched only by a friendliness to powers that would do away with that nation. Jews attend a downtown Johannesburg event to hear a BDS panel confuse the Holocaust with self-governing Palestinians growing at a birthrate above the norm.

All of the above are trendy causes. They also, one and all, pick on Jews and their outlaw country.

All that was thought about Jews in the past has found a home in what trendy movements think about Israel now. The left-wing element is prone to overlook that unlovely aspect.

Every year at Passover, we read in the Haggadah: “Go and learn what Laban the Aramean sought to do to our father Jacob[.] … He sought to destroy everything.” Laban has been the paradigm of anti-Semites from time immemorial. Jews parading and protesting with modern Labanites may be tolerable; but when rabbis defend them, willfully forgetting what Laban sought to do to Israel (né Jacob), such behavior is unfathomable.

The counter-intuitive mind of the Jew is uncanny. From the sin of the golden calf onward, Jews have done things that no one can figure out. Did the Almighty create them to be contrary?

Probably not, when you hear left-wing elements speak out with clarity and moral conviction. Jacob’s kindred were created to be a light unto the world. Working with unlikely bedfellows is not aberrant behavior. On the contrary, they as Jews are doing exactly what they were put on earth to do: stand for values and modes of caring as old as the Bible. In their helter-skelter to get Muslim refugees into America, or to help the poor live in a sought after part of Cape Town, Jews of conscience have no qualms about doing what they do. History and tradition (their word for God in the secular?) marked out the Jews to care for the stranger in their midst.

But we are given to believe that the sacred duty is very selective. Caring for the stranger is everything; caring for the Jew is nothing. Kith and kin in parts of Ukraine are caught in crossfire and go hungry; in France, they live, and perish, under dire threat. While Jewish terror victims go unsung, and Zionists on campus are bullied, and the new domain for Laban’s kindred is the internet – still the gut instinct of Jews for repairing the world is for that stranger out there.

The U.S. Army recently announced that it has horrifying video footage of Islamic State fighters herding Iraqi civilians into buildings in Mosul. The plan was not to use them as human shields–that is, to announce their presence in the hope of deterring American airstrikes. Rather, ISIS was deliberately trying to ensure that American troops killed them, by “smuggling civilians into buildings, so we won’t see them and trying to bait the coalition to attack,” an army spokesman saidat a briefing for Pentagon reporters. The motive, he explained, was hope that massive civilian casualties would produce such an outcry that the U.S. would halt airstrikes altogether.

There’s an important point to this story which the spokesman neglected to mention: This tactic is borrowed directly from Hamas. And it was borrowed because the world’s response to successive Hamas-Israel wars convinced ISIS that creating massive civilian casualties among residents of its own territory is an effective strategy. Admittedly, Hamas hasn’t yet been caught on video actually herding civilians into buildings before launching attacks from them. But there’s plenty of evidence that Hamas prevented civilians from leaving areas whence it was launching rockets or other attacks at Israel, thereby deliberately exposing them to retaliatory strikes.

During the 2014 Gaza war, for instance, the Israel Defense Forces warned civilians to evacuate the town of Beit Lahiya before launching air strikes at Hamas positions. But according to Palestinian human rights activist Bassem Eid, who based himself on interviews with Palestinians in Gaza, Hamas gunmen showed up and warned that anyone who left the town would be treated as a collaborator. Since Hamas executes collaborators, that was equivalent to saying that anyone who tried to leave would be killed on the spot. Thus, faced with the alternative of certain death at Hamas’s hands, most Beit Lahiya residents understandably opted to stay and take their chances with the IDF.

There’s also plenty of evidence that Hamas deliberately launched attacks from buildings where it knew civilians were present. Just last month, for instance, I wrote about a case during the 2009 Gaza war in which Hamas directed sniper fire at Israeli troops from the third floor of a well-known doctor’s home, thereby forcing the soldiers to choose between becoming sitting ducks or shooting back and risking civilian casualties. Unbeknownst to the soldiers, Hamas was also storing explosives in the house (using civilian buildings as arms caches or wiring them with explosives is standard practice for Hamas). Consequently, when the soldiers fired at the Hamas position, an unexpectedly large explosion ensued, killing three of the doctor’s daughters and one of his nieces.

Australian Imam: “Palestine is Jewish Land”  http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/2017/04/australian-imam-palestine-is-jewish-land.html No wonder Ayaan Hirsi Ali admires this Australian Shi’ite imam, Sheikh Mohammad Tawhidi.  He is speaking to the Rotary Club of Adelaide. Hear him out. Memri.org video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUe4SbpN5-E)

Like other criticisms of Hirsi Ali, the effort was to portray her as the problem itself rather than as the response to a problem.

That this type of campaign can succeed — that speakers can be stopped from speaking in Western democracies because of the implicit or explicit threat of violence — is a problem our societies need to face.

There is a whole pile of reasons why Islamists want to stop her explanations from being aired. But why — when the attacks keep on happening — do our own societies collude with such sinister people to keep ourselves the dark?

Only a fortnight after a vehicular terrorist attack in Westminster, London, another similar attack took place in Stockholm, Sweden. On one of the city’s main shopping streets, a vehicle was once again used as a battering-ram against the bodies of members of the public. As in Nice, France. As in Berlin. As so many times in Israel.

Amid this regular news there is an air of defeatism — a terrible lack of policy and lack of solutions. How can governments stop people driving trucks into pedestrians? Is it something we must simply get used to, as France’s former Prime Minister Manuel Valls and London’s Mayor Sadiq Khan have both suggested? Must we come to recognise acts of terror as something like the weather? Or is there anything we can do to limit, if not stop, them? If so, where would we start? One place would be to have a frank public discussion about these matters. Yet, even that is easier said than done.

There is a terrible symmetry to this past week in the West. The week began with the news that the Somali-born author and human-rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali had been forced to cancel a speaking tour in Australia. “Security concerns” were among the given reasons. A notable aspect of this issue, which has been made public, is that one of the venues at which Hirsi Ali was due to speak was contacted last month by something calling itself “‘The Council for the Prevention of Islamophobia Incorporated”. Nobody appears to know where this “incorporated” organisation comes from, but its purported founder — Syed Murtaza Hussain — claimed that the group would bring 5000 protestors to the hall at which Hirsi Ali was scheduled to talk. This threat is reminiscent of the occasion in 2009 when the British peer, Lord Ahmed, threatened to mobilise 10,000 British Muslims to protest at the Houses of Parliament in Westminster if the Dutch politician Geert Wilders were allowed to speak. On that occasion — as on this one — the event was cancelled. Promises to mobilise thousands of angry Muslims can have such an effect. But the long-term implications often get lost in the short-term outrage.