RUTHFULLY YOURS

Vladimir Putin’s intervention in Syria caught many by surprise, but it is a return to Russian geopolitical aspirations that stretch back to the czars.

Every Russian schoolchild is taught about the violent death of Aleksandr Griboyedov in 1829. A poet and playwright whose work is enshrined in the country’s literary canon, Griboyedov had the misfortune to be Czar Nicholas I’s ambassador to Tehran in the wake of Persia’s humiliating loss of territory to Moscow’s spreading empire. A Tehran mob, furious at the czar and his infidel representatives, stormed the embassy, slaughtering the unlucky ambassador and 36 other Russian diplomatic staff.

A century and a half later, in 1979, those events were almost replayed in Iran (as Persia is now known). When five leaders of the Iranian revolutionary students gathered in Tehran to decide which foreign embassy to target, two of them advocated seizing the Soviet legation. They were persuaded instead to overrun the U.S. embassy, creating a no less historic trauma for another world power entangled in the politics of the Middle East.
Russia’s long history of involvement—and warfare—in the region is largely unknown to Westerners, but it helps to explain President Vladimir Putin’s decision last fall to intervene in Syria’s civil war. Mr. Putin’s gambit on behalf of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad caught many in the West by surprise. Critics have assailed it as a miscalculated bid to replace the U.S. as the dominant outside power in the region.

But when viewed from Moscow, Mr. Putin’s Middle Eastern adventure looks like something very different: an overdue return to geopolitical aspirations that stretch back not only to the Soviet era but to centuries of czarist rule. “The Middle East is a way to showcase that the period of Russia’s absence from the international scene as a first-rate state has ended,” said Fyodor Lukyanov, the head of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy in Moscow, which advises the Kremlin and other government institutions.

Last week, a mob of 300 Muslim men in southern Egypt stripped a 70-year-old Christian woman naked and paraded her through the streets.This Islamist atrocity came a few days before an EgyptAir flight from Paris exploded in the skies near Alexandria. It was the second passenger jet bombed by jihadists in Egypt in recent months.

Egypt is hanging on by a thread. Like the attack that downed a Russian passenger jet over Sinai last October, this week’s attack is likely the work of an Egyptian airport employee. It is yet more proof that nearly three years after the military deposed the Muslim Brotherhood’s jihadist government, the Brotherhood’s supporters remain seeded throughout the country and are capable of threatening the regime and the very survival of the Egyptian state.

It isn’t in the least surprising that Islamists have this power. Most Egyptians support them.

In the parliamentary elections four-and-a-half years ago, Islamists won more than 65 percent of the vote. Those were the most open elections in Egyptian history.

Given their strength, it is far from certain that President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi will long succeed in preventing the most powerful and populous country in the Arab world from becoming another branch of Islamic State.

From Israel’s perspective, how this battle pans out is of pivotal importance. But you wouldn’t know it from the media – or from our national security leaders.

As far as they are concerned, the gravest threat facing Israel is the Israeli Right. From their perspective, the most significant development of the year was Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s decision to appoint Avigdor Liberman to replace Moshe Ya’alon as defense minister.

If victims of Islamic terrorism could ever be killed twice, then a Danish art exhibition, scheduled to open this week in Copenhagen, could probably achieve this very dubious distinction.
The art show in question has as its theme the motive of martyrs, namely, “why some people die for that which they believe in.”

“Our exhibition is about describing the term ‘martyr’ from as many different angles as possible and through history,” said a show organizer.

So far so good.

But what has outraged many is that the leftist artist collective (no surprise here) responsible for the exhibition has decided to include Islamic terrorists involved in the Paris attack last November as well as in the Brussels suicide bombings alongside “historical figures considered martyrs” such as Joan of Arc and Aristotle.

“[The] Danish artists plan to include images of the terrorists, replicas of their belongings and, and plaques explaining who they were and what they did,” reports the CopenhagenPost.

Besides representing a posthumous execution of the Brussels and Paris victims, this obscenity disguised as ‘art’ is also just another indicator to what depths of decadence and immorality the left has descended to. Its belief that every taboo must be broken for freedom to exist is also currently reflected in the trans-gender washroom controversy in America.

The following quote by a female member of the collective disturbingly indicates the left’s unnatural loss of all sense of proportion, possessed by most normal people, when it comes to recognising the difference between good and evil:

“To fly into the Twin Towers, to shoot at people in Bataclan, or to blow oneself up into the air, one does this only in the belief in a better, world.”

Stalin and Hitler also believed in better worlds. The former of a world with a single ruling class, and the latter with a single ruling race. Millions perished unwillingly in the attempt to realize these unrealizable, homicidal visions.

Unfortunately for most sane people in the West, the unnamed ‘artiste’ is not alone in her twisted thinking. In America, Professor Ward Churchill called the World Trade Tower victims “little Eichmanns”. And in the same vein, the German columnist, Henryk Broder, cites the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen who called 9/11 “the greatest work of art there is in the universe.” He also quotes the painter Anselm Kiefer who said that with 9/11, Osama bin Laden “created the most perfect picture that we have seen since the steps of the first man on the moon.”

Broder also points out what is most obviously wrong with this art exhibition, which should be evident to anyone possessing even a modicum of rational thought: the Islamic terrorists, who calmly shot people down at the Bataclan in Paris and blew up dozens more in Brussels, including themselves, are not martyrs but mass murderers.

And unlike Joan of Arc and Aristotle, these killers did not go alone to their deaths but dragged several hundred unwilling victims with them. These two outstanding heroes of Western civilization would never have wanted to see anyone executed for their sake or because of their actions. Besides, they did not seek death and ‘martyrdom’, like Islamic jihadists do, but rather were sentenced to die after dubious trials.

“Why didn’t the Paris attackers, who caused the bloodbath in Bataclan, instead throw themselves down from the Arc de Triomphe?” asks Broder.

The first question anyone should ask is: Who invited this “Salafist megastar,” who denies the Holocaust and is known for making anti-Semitic statements, to visit Malmö?

What do you do when anti-Semitism in Sweden’s third largest city is so normalized that children in a public school can endorse a conference with anti-Semitic elements?

Antisemitism, is, in fact, such a gigantic problem in Malmö that even senior politicians and officials in Malmö cannot understand how it became so normalized. They seem to dismiss it as part of a non-Swedish culture that, in a multicultural society, must be tolerated, even accommodated.

If there are children in Swedish public schools today who are promoting an anti-Semitic conference, what will these children do in the future?

Is Sweden really turning into a country where Jews are no longer welcome, someday to become a country without Jews? And if that happens, what does that say about Sweden? And about who will come next after the Jews?

Malmö, Sweden’s third largest city is an important, visible part of Sweden. If you read the Municipality of Malmö’s political objectives, which the Municipal Council of Malmö has endorsed, you will see that “racism, discrimination and hate crimes do not belong in open Malmö.” The reality, however, is different. Antisemitism there has reached bizarre levels — with politicians and other policymakers in Sweden doing nothing about it.

On a crisp, sunlit morning in March, I ceased to feel at home in London. It dawned on me that the city where I had been born 58 years ago was no longer safe. I was walking past two men at a stall outside my local Underground station. Their beards and dress revealed them as Salafists; they were proselytising for their fundamentalist form of Islam. My face must have betrayed my anxiety, because they started pointing and talking while I entered the station. As I looked round, both men were grinning at me.

Why did I find their presence disquieting? A couple of hours earlier in Brussels, three suicide bombers had detonated nail bombs in the airport and on the Metro, killing 32 passengers outright and inflicting horrific wounds on another 312 people, of whom 62 were critically injured — all in the name of the Islamic State. It was hard to believe that the two jovial gentlemen outside the station could have been unaware of what had just taken place less than 200 miles away. That was presumably why they were there.

As I descended into the Tube, my thoughts went back to a similar morning, July 7, 2005, when four suicide bombers struck the London transport system. I was going to work on one of the Tube lines that was attacked, having just delivered my two youngest children to their school. Like thousands of others, I was lucky to be on a different train and to have escaped injury, but 52 died and 700 were maimed in the name of al-Qaeda. At the time, Londoners assumed that this terrorist threat would eventually pass, just as the IRA threat with which we had grown up had passed. Though Madrid had already been attacked, killing 192 and injuring more than 2,000, nothing on the scale of the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington had then seemed likely. But over the past decade the threat has grown steadily worse. Above all, last year there had been the attacks on Paris, since which the French capital had yet to return to normality. After Paris and Brussels, I looked back on the horror of London 11 years ago with a sickening feeling of dread. Was there any reason to suppose that such attacks would not be repeated, now that jihadis loyal to IS had multiplied across Europe and notably in London? We now know that Mohamed Abrini, the “man in the hat” bomber who survived the Brussels airport attacks, was not only also involved in the Paris massacre, but visited Britain last July and allegedly met more than a dozen Islamists here. At the time of writing, five Britons have been arrested.

“Meanwhile, on Sunday morning TV, the most hate-filled studio “discussion” took place between Israel bashers and defenders, hand-picked, it would seem, by Katie Hopkins. Lunatic, petrifying, anti-Semites — the worst being self-hating Jews who prefaced each remark with “I’m Jewish myself, but . . .”. Shame on the researchers. It made me feel sick all day.
The Palestinian cause is as important a cause as the occupation of Tibet, Chechnya, Crimea, Kurdistan, Northern Cyprus. I won’t go on because they will accuse me, as they always do, of “what-about-ism” and never, never give me an answer as to why they don’t give a flying fart about the “right to return” of any of these other oppressed peoples. So, as I said, I did not respond. I am too tired. I am 4,000 years too tired.”

“So what do you think?” people keep asking me. Would I come on the Today programme, Newsnight, breakfast television for heaven’s sake, and talk about it. “It” was not the opening of a new play, the surprisingly good reviews, or the fact that one of the four actresses had to leave the show permanently after the first night due to family illness. Nor the broken limbs of two audience members who tumbled down the theatre steps, on two different nights (making the term “break a leg” a no-go area for ever more), stopping the show while paramedics were called.

Nor was it for my thoughts on Barack Obama’s gig as a stand-up comedian — good — or his lecturing us on the consequences of a Brexit — bad — or even the terrible shock of losing the bright and beautiful Victoria Wood, whom I had not even known was ill.

What they sought was my response to Ken Livingstone’s response to Naz Shah’s delicate 2014 tweet on the Jewish question. I turned them all down. I was — am — too tired.

I read and listened and watched, though, and came to a cynical conclusion. For the Jews in the diaspora, as for the state of Israel, one thing is for sure: we’re damned if we respond and damned if we don’t.

Out of the blue, the papers and the airways are filled with the word “anti-Semitism”. It is all about us. Again. Why? Have I missed something? Did Israel attack a neighbour in response to rocket fire? No. Have Jews attacked, surrounded, blown up, beheaded, caged, destroyed, proselytised, rounded up, raped or hijacked anybody? No. Have any recent terrorist attacks been perpetrated by Jewish groups? No. Have we vowed in our constitutions, on our websites and on social media to destroy any one of the Muslim states or Catholic or Christian countries of the world, or urged young Jews to stab members of other faiths? Have we flown planes into tower blocks or trained suicide bombers to blow themselves up in marketplaces, on buses, and in hospitals? No.

For 17 days this month, Dutch columnist Ebru Umar was held against her will in Turkey, legallybarred from leavingthe country. Her alleged crime: insulting President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. But after extended negotiations between the two governments, the controversial, outspoken Umar finally returned home to Amsterdam on May 11.

But she is hardly free, and certainly not home safe: threats against her life mean she cannot return to her apartment. She stays in safe-houses in “undisclosed” locations. She must notify police of her whereabouts at all times. Officials have offered bodyguards, though she refuses.

Yet while she still faces prosecution – and a potential four-year jail sentence – in Turkey, it is neither Erdogan nor his government that poses the real danger. It’s the Dutch.

Or rather, it is Dutch-born men and women of Turkish ancestry, who continue to issue threats against her life.

In fact, it was Dutch Twitter users who reported Umar, herself of Turkish heritage, to the Turkish police for her obscenity-laced, anti-Erdogan postings on her Twitter feed, sent out from her vacation home in Kusadasi. And it is Dutch youth, mostly appearing to be in their 20s, who have since posted things like, “The Mosque has collected funding to rent a crane to hang you when you arrive at Schiphol.” Another stopped her in the street in Turkey and snarled, “I know where to find you in Holland. You know what happens after death?”

In 2006, Pope Benedict XVI said what no Pope had ever dared to say — that there is a link between violence and Islam. Ten years later, Pope Francis never calls those responsible for anti-Christian violence by name and never mentions the word “Islam.”

Pope Francis does not even try to re-evangelize or reconquer Europe. He seems deeply to believe that the future of Christianity is in the Philippines, in Brazil and in Africa. Probably for the same reason, the Pope is spending less time and effort in denouncing the terrible fate of Christians in the Middle East.

“Multiculturalism” in Europe is the mosque standing on the ruins of the church. It is not the synthesis requested by Pope Francis. It is the road to becoming extinct.

Asking Europe to be “multicultural” while it experiences a dramatic de-Christianization is extremely risky. In Germany, a new report found that “Germany has become demographically a multi-religious country.” In the UK, a major inquiry recently declared that “Britain is no longer a Christian country.” In France, Islam is also overtaking Christianity as the dominant religion.

To scroll the list of Pope Francis’s apostolic trips — Brazil, South Korea, Albania, Turkey, Sri Lanka, Ecuador, Cuba, United States, Mexico, Kenya, Uganda, Philippines — one could say that Europe is not exactly at the top of his agenda.

The two previous pontiffs both fought for the cradle of Christendom. Pope John Paul II took on Communism by toppling the Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain. Benedict XVI took on “the dictatorship of relativism” (the belief that truth is in the eye of the beholder) and bet everything on re-evangelizing the continent by traveling through it (he visited Spain three times) and in speeches such as the magnificent ones at Regensburg, where he spoke bluntly about the threat of Islam, and the German Bundestag, where he warned the gathered politicians against declining religiosity and “sacrificing their own ideals for the sake of power.”

In January, I attended the Cybertech conference in Tel Aviv, on a trip sponsored by the America–Israel Friendship League and the Israeli Foreign Ministry. Also on the trip was Richard Stiennon who wrote about it here. In his illuminating article, he calculated the number of information security vendors per country.

Predictably the United States came out on top with 827 firms. Surprisingly, Israel was second with 228. What’s astonishing from Stiennon’s research is that Israel has more security companies than the next 5 countries combined. How is it that Israel has more security firms than the UK, Canada, India, Germany and France combined? The question is even more compelling given that Israel has a population of roughly 8 million; while those five countries have roughly 1.5 billion inhabitants.

An excellent resource with detailed listings of Israeli technology startups is the IVC Research Center High-tech Yearbook. It has trend analysis and YOY investor activity, along with detailed profiles of investors, including venture capital funds, private equity funds, incubators, angels and corporate investors investing in Israel.

For a visual listing of firms, the Israel CyberScape map from Bessemer Venture provides a listing across 14 information security domains.

So just how did Israel become a global information security superpower? Here’s a few of reasons.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu set the goal of making Israel one of the world’s five leading global cyber powers. When a government makes something a priority, and backs it up with financials incentives including research and development grants, which Israel has done; that’s a compelling initiative to generate interest.

Both around the world and here at home, free speech is under assault. From the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris to the “unexplained” deaths of critics of Russian president Vladimir Putin, people who express unpopular opinions or report the truth are in danger. Worldwide, more than 110 journalists were killed in 2015, bringing the total to 787 since 2005, according to Reporters without Borders.

The threats to free speech in this country don’t rise to that level, of course. But Hillary Clinton wants to change the First Amendment to limit political speech, and Donald Trump wants to rewrite libel laws so that he can sue media critics. Meanwhile, colleges routinely punish those who take unpopular stands and reject speakers who might challenge student orthodoxy.

That’s one reason why it is significant that the Cato Institute will award the eighth biennial Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty to a true champion of free speech, the Danish journalist and author Flemming Rose.

Rose came to the world’s attention in 2005, when, as an editor at the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, he published a series of twelve cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. Rose did so, not because he sought to be offensive, he said, but to challenge the growing wave of “self-censorship in Europe caused by widening fears and feelings of intimidation in dealing with issues related to Islam.”

Rose’s decision to publish the cartoons sparked riots in Europe and across the Islamic world. A price was put on Rose’s head, and he has received numerous credible death threats. A plot to assassinate him was disrupted by the FBI in 2009. Still, he firmly rejects the idea, so prevalent these days, that “you have a right not to be insulted or offended.”

While he came to prominence as a result of the Muhammad cartoons, Rose is not a provocateur but a defender of free speech as a matter of principle. In fact, he has recently undertaken a new cause: standing up for Muslims targeted by some of Europe’s new anti-terror laws, and fighting restrictions on religious speech deemed “extreme” by authorities. He has condemned Dutch politician Geert Wilders’s call to ban the Quran.