RUTHFULLY YOURS

Before long the same administration that declared the fighting in Iraq over several times will claim victory over ISIS. The timetable for its push against the Islamic State appears to have less do with the victimized Christians and Yazidis who have been prevented from coming here as refugees in favor of Syrian Muslims than with the Clinton presidential campaign. Like Obama’s declarations that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were over, the announcement that ISIS has been defeated will be premature.

It is based on a profound misunderstanding and misreading of Islamic terrorism.

Long before its current string of defeats, ISIS had begun evolving into another Al Qaeda; a multinational alliance of Jihadists scattered around the world. Bombing Mosul isn’t hard, but try bombing Marseille, Brussels or London. There is no doubt that the ability of ISIS to temporarily establish a caliphate allowed it to build a network that could carry out terror attacks from New York to Miami to Nice to Munich. But it would be dangerous to assume that losing Iraq and Syria will stop ISIS.

ISIS doesn’t matter. The idea of ISIS does. And the idea of ISIS is Islamic supremacism.

The organization we think of ISIS has transformed and rebranded countless times. Even now our leaders vacillate between calling it ISIS, ISIL or, more childishly, Daesh, while it dubs itself the Islamic State. We have been fighting it in one form or another for over a decade. It would be unrealistically optimistic to assume that the war will end just as this old enemy has shown its ability to strike deep in our own cities.

The bigger error though is to think that we are fighting an organization. We are fighting an idea. That is not to contend, as Obama does, that we can debate it to death. It is not the sort of idea that argues with words, but with bullets, bombs and swords. But neither does it just go away if you seize a city.

UNESCO has joined forces with Islamic State. The fundamentalists now have a new weapon: resolutions passed by servile international bodies.

An earlier delay and the opposition of UNESCO’s chief, Irina Bokova, had raised hopes that this act of jihadist, barbaric, unjust, and, frankly, arrogant supremacism might be voted down. It was not. Now a new lie was given the sanction of the world’s largest and most unaccountable body whose reason for being is to preserve significant sites, not to bowdlerize them.

Lies by UNESCO to rewrite history, erasing all traces of Judaism and Christianity to favour a jihadist Islamic fancy, were already under way in 2015. UNESCO fraudulently renamed two ancient Biblical Jewish sites, Rachel’s Tomb and the Cave of the Patriarchs, as Islamic sites. Historically, Islam did not even exist until the seventh century.

This is the history of Islam, how it takes over — with both hard jihad (violence) and soft jihad (usurping history, migration [hijrah], political and cultural infiltration), and intimidation (soft jihad with the threat of hard jihad underneath it). What is even more saddening is that often, as with this vote, it is done with the West’s cooperation and voluntary submission.

Before the United Nations, with its authoritarian, anti-democratic voting blocs, finishes eradicating Western, Judeo-Christian civilization, as it is clearly trying to do, it is high time for Western democracies to run, not walk, away, before further harm comes to them too, as it surely promises to do.

UNESCO last August planned to vote on the historical status of Jerusalem’s Temple Mount and its associated Western Wall. Back then, this author stated that UNESCO’s plan was to deny any Jewish link to this most central of all Jewish holy sites, to trash a history going back thousands of years, and to claim the Mount and the Wall as Islamic sites.

Islam believes that it is eternal and had therefore preceded the other two great monotheisms, Judaism and Christianity, even though it was only to become visible to the world through Mohammad in the seventh century AD, but entitled to elbow out the two older religions.

WASHINGTON—A Russian jet fighter flew within a half-mile of an American military aircraft over Syria earlier this month, prompting U.S. officials to register pointed concerns to Moscow, U.S. military officials said.

The encounter was sufficiently close that the “jet wash,” or turbulence from the passing Russian fighter, was felt by the crew of the American aircraft, according to Col. John Dorrian, the spokesman for the American-led coalition against Islamic State in Baghdad.

“That’s closer than we’d like,” he said of the Oct. 17 incident.

Col. Dorrian said U.S. officials have determined thus far that the Russian jet fighter’s near miss to the U.S. aircraft wasn’t done for any “nefarious” purpose, but was an accident. The jet fighter apparently was escorting a Russian spy plane. U.S. officials declined to identify the American plane involved, citing the sensitivity of its mission.

U.S. military personnel aboard the American craft immediately contacted the Russian aircraft crew. The following day, U.S. officials followed up on the incident more formally through an official channel with the Russian military, first established in October 2015.

The memorandum of understanding establishing the channel provides for routine military-to-military exchanges in an effort to “de-conflict” the airspace over Syria. The more formal and higher-level exchange between senior level military and civilian officials on both sides may also take place as needed.

Today, the United Nations General Assembly will elect 14 of the 47 members of the Human Rights Council (UNHRC), the organization’s main body tasked with protecting and promoting human rights globally. Appallingly, six notorious dictatorships — China, Cuba, Egypt, Russia, Rwanda, and Saudi Arabia — are running for reelection for a new three-year term. By gaining these highly coveted seats, which they consistently use to exercise a heckler’s veto, authoritarian regimes seek to prevent any significant exposure of their horrendous human-rights records.

The UNHRC was established in 2006 with the authority to appoint U.N. special procedures (working groups, independent experts, special rapporteurs, etc.), assess the human-rights situation among the 193 member states of the U.N. through its Universal Periodic Review, and receive individual complaints. In practice, around 22 authoritarian regimes — roughly 47 percent of its members — control the council’s agenda, using their seats to block resolutions against friendly dictatorships, disproportionately criticize Israel, paint a rosy picture of their own dictatorial records, and shut down victims of human-rights abuses.

Authoritarian regimes with a leading voice in the council include Ethiopia, Venezuela, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, and Burundi. Their hijacking of the council is not a recent trend. The UNHRC was created to replace the Human Rights Commission, a body established in 1946, which was disbanded after it infamously elected Muammar Qaddafi as president in 2003.

Prior to its disappearance, the commission suffered a barrage of criticism and vilification precisely because many of its members were dictatorial regimes. Kofi Annan, the U.N. secretary general at the time, said in 2005 that “the commission’s capacity to perform its tasks” was “undermined by its declining credibility and professionalism.” In particular, Annan criticized the states that had “sought membership of the commission not to strengthen human rights but to protect themselves against criticism or to criticize others,” resulting in a “credibility deficit” that cast a “shadow on the reputation of the United Nations system as a whole.”

To prevent the disaster that was the Human Rights Commission from happening again, the U.N. General Assembly established a set of minimum standards that states should fulfill if they wished to join the newly created council. Its founding resolution mandated that states “take into account the contribution of candidates to the promotion and protection of human rights and their voluntary pledges and commitments made thereto.” The resolution also stated that the candidates “shall uphold the highest standards in the promotion and protection of human rights.”

So, given the selection criteria developed by the U.N. General Assembly itself, no country that violates human rights systematically and that is likely to use its membership to undermine the protection of human-rights victims should even be allowed to run for election.

She leads a clandestine existence, on the move and under 24-hour guard as France’s most protected woman. Yet Zineb El Rhazoui, the Charlie Hebdo journalist who happened to be in Casablanca on January 7 last year, the day terrorists “avenging the Prophet” massacred nine people at the satirical magazine in Paris, believes she has a duty to defy Islamists desperate to silence her.

Shaken but undeterred by the fatwas and relentless, precise death threats issued via social media to “kill the bitch” since she helped produce the publication’s first survivors’ issue following the attack — and spoke about it in Arabic for the Arab press — the Moroccan-French writer refuses to assume an anonymous identity. Fleeing Paris or abandoning her human rights activism, and her unforgiving critiques of the religion she grew up with, are also out of the question.

“I don’t have the right to renounce my struggle, or to give up my freedom,” says the reporter and sociologist of religion in an interview with Women in the World, during a recent trip to New York, as part of French president Francois Hollande’s delegation when he received the Appeal of Conscience Foundation’s World Statesman Award for 2016. “If the French state protects me it is not little individual me: What is being protected is my freedom to be irreverent, and freedom of expression, so I should exercise this even more because I enjoy this protection.”

“It’s totally crazy. I have done nothing against the law and have nothing to hide, yet I live with security while those who threaten us are free,” El Rhazoui declares with an air of shock and anger that underscores the arbitrariness and brutality visited on a 34-year-old woman condemned to living on the run and mostly in the shadows. “And if you call them by their names you are Islamophobic and racist. I am racist? I can teach them a few things about Arab culture. I can show them how to discover its richness and the diversity of their culture. I believe this culture deserves universality because you can be Arab, Muslim and a free thinker.”