RUTHFULLY YOURS

Three Christians were sentenced to be flogged for sipping wine during a communion Mass. “In a shock move,” however, “oppressive officials in Tehran have charged the three with ‘acting against national security’ for taking part in the Christian ritual.” — Iran.

“One begins to wonder if Catholic priests have become an endangered species.” Clergyman discussing latest murder of priest. — Nigeria.

“We are at a breaking point. People can’t put up with any more of this.” — Christian bishop, Egypt.

“They said all Christians should be killed. They said we were evil demons and made Pakistan impure.” — Christian survivor of Muslim mob attack, Pakistan.

Officials arrested 27 Christians — including several women and children — for the crime of “conducting Christian prayers” and being “in possession of Bibles.” — Saudi Arabia.

In September 2016, a group of escaped ISIS sex slaves finally revealed the true fate of Kayla Mueller — the 26-year-old American aid worker in Syria whom ISIS had reported dead more than a year ago. Her former fellow captives said Mueller had “refused to deny Jesus Christ despite being repeatedly raped and tortured.” In February 2015, ISIS claimed their captive had been killed during a Jordanian airstrike and sent photos of her dead body in a white burial shroud, apparently as a sign of respect. One former sex slave said that Mueller “put others before herself,” and once even refused a chance to escape with the other girls because she thought her American appearance would stand out and endanger the others.

Kayla Mueller was a 26-year-old American Christian aid worker in Syria. The Islamic State abducted her, and repeatedly raped and tortured her, then claimed that she was killed during a Jordanian airstrike. Above, Mueller is shown before her enslavement and death (left), and during her captivity (right), taken from an ISIS propaganda video.

An ISIS-related plot to butcher Christians with chainsaws in a Belgian shopping center was exposed in September after authorities interrogated a Muslim youth. The teen — the son of a man being described as a “radical imam” — was arrested for calling for the execution of Christians while walking down a street. Theo Francken, a Belgian official, said:

“I already signed the order to remove the Imam from Belgian soil. But he appealed the decision, so I can only hope for a quick sentence. Clearly radicalism runs in the family.”

Speaking for the first time about the slaughter of the 86-year-old French priest Jacques Hamel, eyewitness Guy Coponet — who was himself stabbed several times, including in the neck, and was not expected to survive — revealed how the jihadi murderers also forced him to hold a camera and record them slitting the throat of the elderly priest: “They even checked the quality of the image and that I wasn’t trembling too much. I had to film the assassination of my friend Father Jacques!” He said the assailants planned on using the video as propaganda, “which would allow them to earn their fame as a ‘martyr’ of Allah.”

The recent death of a “child bride” in Turkey is yet another reminder of the plight of children forced to marry in Muslim societies.

Fifteen-year-old Derya B., who was living in the province of Bitlis in eastern Turkey, gave birth to her first child at home in early December, according to Turkish newspaper Haberturk. One week after the birth, she was hospitalized — ironically on October 11, the International Day of the Girl — due to a severe headache, nausea, and vomiting. She was held in the intensive care unit of the hospital for two days. Derya eventually died of a cerebral hemorrhage.

Derya had been married off to a relative in an “imam wedding” (a non-official, Islamic wedding) last year in Mutki, a village in Bitlis, when she was 14.

Dr. Aydan Biri, an expert in gynecology, told Haberturk that factors that increase maternal death can be direct or indirect:

The death of Derya constitutes indirect maternal death. It is dangerous for child brides to get pregnant. The death rate in adolescent pregnancies is higher. Blood pressure, premature birth, and early interventionist birth are commonplace in child pregnancies. And the pregnancies of children, whose body organs are not completely developed, end, more often, in death.

Derya is only one of the millions of victims of child marriages in the Muslim world. A total of 232,313 girls, aged 16 and 17, were married in Turkey between 2010 and 2015 alone, according to the official figures of the Turkish Ministry of Family and Social Policy.

Islamic tradition records that Muhammad, the founder of Islam, who is considered al-Insān al-Kāmil (the perfect human) and uswa hasana (an excellent model of conduct) by Muslims, married Aisha when she was 6 and consummated his marriage with her when she was 9.

He was 54 years old.

As scholar Robert Spencer puts it:

Islamic apologists in the West routinely deny that Muhammad married a child or that Islamic law sanctions child marriage. In reality, few things are more abundantly attested in Islamic law than the permissibility of child marriage.

Many Islamic countries, adds Spencer:

… make Muhammad’s example the basis of their laws regarding the legal marriageable age for girls.

Similarly, Umar ibn al-Khattab, the second caliph of Islam, married Umm Kulthum bint Ali, granddaughter of Muhammad and the daughter of Caliph Ali, when she was between 10 and 12 years old and he was around 47. CONTINUE AT SITE

Ironically, those who dare to speak out against extremists either face severe consequences, such as death threats, or are called anti-Muslim bigots. This kind of response often discourages progressive voices from speaking out, and understates the progress of counter-extremism even within the Muslim community. Opposition voices still might be there — more than ever. They just go underground.

Since the unprecedented terror attacks in France, Belgium and Germany, citizens across the Europe have been living in constant fear. They seem to be sick and tired of the Muslim extremists; children might be in danger on their way to school, and shopping takes place under the protection of soldiers.

With Brexit, the election of Donald Trump, and Italy’s referendum, there seems to be a snowball effect. The growing influence of Alternative for Germany (AfD), the National Front in France, the Party for Freedom in the Netherlands, the Freedom Party Austria and the Five Star Movement in Italy all appear to be byproducts of the same rhetoric.

The dull reaction of a vast number of European Muslims to the rising wave of terror and violence has also contributed to this shift. Increasing numbers of native-born Europeans seem angry and distrustful of their fellow Muslim citizens, especially when everyone else has come out loud and clear in denouncing terrorist crimes.

German authorities and those across Europe seem finally to be strengthening their campaign against the militant far-right, including Muslim extremists, during the past few weeks.

This awakening, however, seems to be coming after a major price that Europe had to pay in terms of death and chaos unleashed by terrorists in Germany, Belgium, France, Denmark, and so on.

Governments across the Europe seem to be switching into panic mode to prevent the rise of European radicalism through the rise of the far-right, racism and nationalism throughout the entire continent.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel sounds as if she is backing down a bit from championing the influx of migrants and her slogan of “We can do it!” in developing a multicultural society. She not only vowed to Germans in an address last week that the migrant crisis must never be repeated; she also called for an all-out ban on the full-face veil covering in Germany.

Following Merkel’s lead, Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière also proposed a partial ban on veils, and pronounced them contrary to assimilation.

A quarter-century ago, on Dec. 25, 1991, as the last Soviet premier, Mikhail Gorbachev, resigned after a final attempt to keep the Communist state alive, I was so optimistic for the future. That year and the years leading up to that moment were a period when anything felt possible. The ideals of freedom and democracy seemed within the reach of the people of the Soviet Union.

I remember the December evening in 1988 when I was having dinner with friends and my mother in Paris. My family and I still lived in Baku, capital of the then-Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan, where I was raised, but I had become accustomed to unusual freedoms since becoming the world chess champion in 1985. I was no longer accompanied by KGB minders everywhere I went, although my whereabouts were always tracked. Foreign travel still required special approval, which served to remind every Soviet citizen that this privilege could be withdrawn at any time.

My status protected me from many of the privations of life in the Soviet Union, but it did not tint my vision rose. Instead, my visits to Western Europe confirmed my suspicions that it was in the U.S.S.R. where life was distorted, as in a funhouse mirror.

That night in Paris was a special one, and we were joined by the Czech-American director Miloš Forman via a mutual friend, the Czech-American grandmaster Lubomir Kavalek. We were discussing politics, of course, and I was being optimistic as usual. I was sure that the Soviet Union would be forced to liberalize socially and economically to survive.

Mr. Forman played the elder voice of reason to my youthful exuberance. I was only 25, while he had lived through what he saw as a comparable moment in history. He cautioned that he had seen similar signs of a thaw after reformer Alexander Dubček had become president in Czechoslovakia in 1968. Eight months after Dubček’s election, his reforms ended abruptly as the U.S.S.R. sent half a million Warsaw Pact troops into Czechoslovakia and occupied the country. Many prominent Czechs, like Messrs. Forman and Kavalek, fled abroad.

“Gorbachev’s perestroika is another fake,” Mr. Forman warned us about the Soviet leader’s loosening of state controls, “and it will end up getting more hopeful people killed.” I insisted that Mr. Gorbachev would not be able to control the forces he was unleashing. Mr. Forman pressed me for specifics: “But how will it end, Garry?”

I replied—specifics not being my strong suit—that “one day, Miloš, you will wake up, open your window, and they’ll be gone.”

David Cameron made a quiet return to British politics late last week by giving a talk to American students in London on, among other topics, the question of Brexit. He blamed Brexit — and by extension his own resignation — on “populism.”

I am tempted — okay, I’ll yield to the temptation — to quote Dr. Johnson: “There are ten thousand stout fellows in the streets of London ready to fight to the death against Popery, though they know not whether it be a man or a horse.” Strike out “Popery” and insert “populism” (and maybe change London to Brussels) and you have the present state of establishment European politics in a nutshell.

Populism is the omnipotent demon responsible for all the defeats and humiliations that Brussels and mainstream political parties of Left and Right have suffered in the last year. It conjures up the picture of an unreasonable rage driving millions of voters to embrace wild impossible ideas and undermining common sense and political stability. It’s a useful label to attach to anything you happen to dislike.

Mr. Cameron undermined his own argument, however, by saying on the same occasion that he thought the European Union might eventually collapse because it is inextricably bound up with the single currency, the euro, which is inflicting recession and unemployment on southern Europe. All the same, he wanted Britain to remain in the EU on the grounds that it would make Britain more prosperous in the long run.

If populists can’t follow Cameron’s logic here — How to get Rich from Inside the Coming Euro-Collapse — they may have got something right. So let’s examine populism more closely — I began doing so last week — to see what it really is and where it takes us. We now have a good (but not infallible) guide in the latest issue of the Journal of Democracy, which devotes a number of articles and columns to the topic. And since I disagree with some of the points argued there, I should say that the issue — notably the articles by Ivan Krastev and Takis S. Pappas — is very illuminating and full of good arguments from several standpoints.