RUTHFULLY YOURS

Vladimir Bukovsky’s name, like that of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov, is synonymous with an almost unimaginable bravery and resilience in the face of Soviet totalitarianism. Born in 1942, Bukovsky was a founder of the dissident movement of the 1960s and 1970s. First arrested at the age of 20 for the possession of “anti-Soviet literature,” he was involved in organizing the December 1965 rally on Pushkin Square, the only opposition demonstration Moscow had seen in four decades. For his efforts, he was rewarded with twelve years in the USSR’s prisons, labor camps, and psikhushkas — political psychiatric hospitals.

In 1971, Bukovsky succeeded in smuggling to the West more than 150 pages documenting the Soviet Union’s abuse of psychiatric institutions to silence its opponents. Because of this, the West learned that the KGB routinely declared dissenters mentally ill to avoid embarrassing publiс trials and to discredit any regime opposition as the product of a diseased mind. In 1976, after months of negotiation between the Soviet and American governments, Bukovsky was exchanged for Luis Corvalán, the general secretary of the Communist Party of Chile. He has lived in Cambridge, England, ever since.

He has remained actively and vocally opposed to the Soviet system and to its successors, which in his view have not thoroughly enough expunged the dangerous elements of the Soviet regime. In a 1992 interview, he warned of allowing former Communists to play leading roles in the government of post-Soviet Russia:

Having failed to finish off conclusively the Communist system, we are now in danger of integrating the resulting monster into our world. It may not be called Communism anymore, but it has retained many of its dangerous characteristics. . . . Until a Nuremberg-style tribunal passes its judgment on all the crimes committed by Communism, it is not dead and the war is not over.

In 1994, Bukovsky warned that Yeltsin had become hostage of Russia’s security agencies. In his judgment, a restoration of KGB rule was therefore inevitable. He was correct. Bukovsky has not limited his criticism to Russia; he has also vocally condemned Westerners who have been gullible about, or complicit with, the Soviet Union and its successors.

In 2004, Bukovsky founded the so-called Committee 2008, along with Garry Kasparov, Vladimir Kara-Murza, and the late — murdered — Boris Nemtsov. The committee was formed to ensure free and fair elections in 2008, when a successor to Vladimir Putin would be elected. What happened instead is well known.

The general consensus among the Muslims in the now fragmented Caliphate was that the West won over the vast Caliphate not by the superiority of its idea or civilization but by its sheer superiority in organized violence. This reasoning plays into the hands of extremist Islamic groups today.

Above all, there has been no way for people to reject the past Empire and Caliphate in West Africa as failed systems because they were not replaced by better systems.

Whatever democratic values were handed to these newly independent states, however, were short-lived, trampled by military incursions. Military leadership suppressed freedoms in every aspect. This in itself served as a gag to protest the rule of any aspiring terror group. Now Africa, especially West Africa, would like to democratize. Amid the madness of terrorism, it is calling for freedom. But Is anyone listening?

Unfortunately, Iran’s nuclear deal has emboldened the terrorists, and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has also been increasing its presence in Nigeria by sponsoring Sunni clergymen into their institutions of learning.

Great civilizations were in northern Nigeria before the West ever set foot there. The Kanem Bornu Empire (700-1900) stretched to present day Chad, Libya, Niger and Cameroon, and was bound by trade and ethnic similarities and religion.

Present day Northern Nigeria, on which this piece on terrorism, concentrates, is home to a large ethnic group, the Hausa. Their language of the same name is spoken by more than 50 million people and covers the present day Sahel: central north Africa (Niger, Nigeria, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Togo, Chad, and Sudan.) Hausa is still the second language of trade; the first are from colonizers: English, and French and to a degree Arabic.

In the early 19th century a towering Islamic figure, Sheikh Uthman ibn Fodio (1754-1817), emerged in what is now northwest Nigeria. Although of Fulani extraction, he galvanized support across the Hausa-dominated regions and parts of the old Kanem Bornu Empire. In this multi-directional region, he had a uni-directional purpose: Islamic evangelism, crusade and dominance. He ended up created an Islamic caliphate.

In the mid-20th century, the West partitioned West Africa, and other parts of the African continent, into nation states that had nothing in common with each other apart from geographical proximity. The ethnic elements that made up the old order still consider themselves as one regardless of the fragmentation of the Caliphate into several nation states. An Azeri considers his kind as living in Iran or Azerbaijan; a Kurd, in Turkey or Iraq, a Russian in Russia, Ukraine or in the Urals, and so on. Under such splintering, it was easy for the ideas of Sayyid Qutb or Osama Bin Laden violently to re-order the region through Jihad to reverberate and gain a following.

If a tree falls in the forest — no, if a legendary Soviet dissident goes on a hunger strike, and there is no media there to report on it, will it ever crash into world consciousness?

Not so far. I find myself in some numbing degree of disbelief at the general silence over the fact that Vladimir Bukovsky is now 20 days into a hunger strike — his impasse with the British justice system becoming a life and death struggle in a frighteningly literal sense — amid scant news coverage and even less discernible sense of public urgency. Thank goodness for Claire Berlinski’s powerfully human cri de commentary that came out today at Ricchochet.

When Bukovsky, 72, who lives in Cambridge, UK, began his hunger strike on April 20, there was an initial flurry in the British press. It tapered off, and especially after the draconian measure taken on May 3 by the British High Court. The court went to the unusual and unusually totalitarian length of imposing a “reporting ban” on recent developments in Bukovsky’s libel suit against the Crown Prosecution Service, as explained here.

Another greatly disturbing development is that should Bukovsky be medically unfit for his separate criminal trial on May 16, the court has reportedly threatened to try him in absentia.

What is going on?

It all started on April 27, 2015, when the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) announced in an unusual manner — no, a unique manner, as I will show below — that it would be prosecuting Bukovsky for “making” and “possessing” child pornography, five charges each, plus one charge of possessing a “forbidden image.”

I have to pause for a moment to ask, incredulously: Is there a sentient person, naturally revolted by the thought of child pornography, even five or six images’ worth, going to believe for one minute that the British state, for decades having turned the blindest and hardest and most craven of eyes against the sexual despoilment and prostitution of generations of little British girls at risk at the hands of criminal Islamic “grooming” gangs, has suddenly developed some compelling interest in protecting the welfare of children, and thus turned its avenging sword on … Vladimir Bukovsky? The context, at least, is all wrong from the get-go.

Is it possible that this all really started on March 17, 2015, the day Bukovsky, the greatest enemy of the old Kremlin extant, testified in the inquiry into the 2006 assassination of Putin-era defector Alexander Litvinenko, poisoned by polonium, probably at the behest of Vladimir Putin? Or did it start on whatever day it was that British prosecutors determined it was in the public interest to investigate Bukovsky — or perhaps on the day before that?

We don’t know the answers to such questions; but asking them, thinking about them, is incumbent upon us. They take us to the larger and ghoulish dimension in which these legal machinations are playing out, and which Berlinski highlights in her essay. When these charges were first brought against Bukovsky in April 2015, she writes, Bukovsky couldn’t attend the initial hearing due to illness. She explains: “He was having complex heart surgery, after which he was in a medically-induced coma and hospitalized for four months. He survived, but was not expected to do so at the time.”

She continues: “So the point of the exercise wasn’t just to shut him up. He would soon be dead anyway. The point was to nullify his life, It was to prove to him, and to anyone tempted to emulate him, that the Kremlin will punish you for defying it even after your death. It will turn you, in the eyes of the world and of history into a child molester. These charges, even if he is acquitted, as he expects to be, would tarnish any man with an ineradicable stain. No one will believe there could be that kind of smoke without fire. They call into doubt Bukovsky’s entire life, testimony, and legacy. He is all too aware of this.

The Islamization of Britain made an immense advance this week, as a Muslim with extensive ties to jihadis and Islamic supremacists, Sadiq Khan, was elected mayor of London, just as London buses are set to carry ads proclaiming the “glory of Allah.”

It’s a sign of the times – and a sign of things to come. Is anyone really surprised? That a man such as Sadiq Khan, who has shared a platform with open Jew-haters, could still be elected mayor of London, is an indication of how far gone Britain already is. In Sadiq Khan’s campaign, his opponents brought up his close ties to jihadis, Islamic supremacists and Islamic Jew-haters as a blot on his record. Soon enough in Britain, however, that sort of thing will be a selling point for candidates appealing to an increasingly Muslim electorate.

The UK banned me from the country. It is already acting like a de facto Islamic state. Did anyone really think that the notoriously anti-Semitic UK would vote for Khan’s opponent, Zac Goldsmith — a Jew? London has already been overrun – voter fraud in Muslim precincts is rampant. Not that they will really needed it soon. London’s Muslim population is 1.3 million and growing.

The Muslims who voted for Sadiq Khan did not reject his extremist ties and supremacist rhetoric, dispelling the notion that most Muslims are moderates and do not adhere to the Sharia, or support extremism. Apparently, they are not “Uncle Toms,” as Sadiq likes to call moderate Muslims.

At the same time, many Jews were prohibited from voting. Even the Chief Rabbi of London was turned away – leading to the Chief Executive of one London borough having to resign. Innumerable voters throughout the London Borough of Barnet – where much of the British Jewish community lives today – were prevented from voting by a suspicious and never-explained “error” at the area’s polling stations.

The European Union may yet come to realize that this latest ill-concealed jab at the Central- and Eastern European members of the European Union may signal the beginning of the unraveling of the European Union, an event which, considering the authoritarian structure of the organization, might be a good thing. The EU’s authority comes, undemocratically, from the top down, rather than from the bottom up; it is non-transparent, unaccountable and there is no mechanism for removing European Commission representatives.

“We especially do not like it when people who have never lived in Hungary try to give us lectures on how we should cope with our own problems. Calling us racists or xenophobes is the cheapest argument. It’s used just to dodge the issues.” — Zoltán Kovács, spokesman for Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban.

By persisting in pushing their agendas on European Union member states that still consider themselves sovereign and not merely provinces of the EU, Timmermans and his European Commission bureaucrats may just have given the European Union its kiss of death.

The European Union is hell-bent on forcing member states to take “their share” of migrants. To this end, the European Commission has proposed reforms to EU asylum rules that would see enormous financial penalties imposed on members refusing to take in what it deems a sufficient number of asylum seekers, apparently even if this means placing those states at a severe financial disadvantage.

The European Commission is planning sanctions of an incredible $290,000 for every migrant that recalcitrant EU member states refuse to receive. Given that EU countries such as Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Austria have closed their borders to migrants or are in the process of doing so, it is not difficult to discern at whom the EU is aiming its planned penalties.

The EU may yet come to realize, however, that this latest ill-concealed jab at the Central- and Eastern European members of the European Union — if it passes muster by most member states and members of the European parliament — may just signal the beginning of the unraveling of the European Union, an event which, considering the authoritarian structure of the organization, might be a good thing. The EU’s authority comes, undemocratically, from the top down, rather than from the bottom up; it is non-transparent, unaccountable and there is no mechanism for removing European Commission representatives.

The migrant crisis has revealed a deep and seemingly irreconcilable rift between those countries that roughly two decades ago still found themselves on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain and have not forgotten it, and Western European countries spared from a merciless Soviet totalitarianism. The soft Western Europeans, instead, developed politically correct credos of “diversity” and “multiculturalism,” which they intractably push down the throats of those recently released from captivity, refusing to show the tolerance of which they themselves purport to be high priests.

In September, European Commission Vice President Frans Timmermans said,

“We should know more about Central European history. Knowing that they were isolated for generations, that they were under oppression by Moscow for so long, that they have no experience with diversity in their society, and it creates fear in the society.

…

“Any society, anywhere in the world, will be diverse in the future — that’s the future of the world. So [Central European countries] will have to get used to that. They need political leaders who have the courage to explain that to their population instead of playing into the fears as I’ve seen Mr Orbán doing in the last couple of months.”

Exactly because central Europeans were subjected to a totalitarian ideology for half a century, they are rather unenthusiastic about submitting to a new, increasingly totalitarian ideology, especially one which seeks to impose itself as the “only truth,” and in its intolerance is averse to any nonconformity — as Timmermans’ comments make condescendingly clear.

The European Union’s vision of an ideal “multicultural” and “diverse” society seems to be viewed by the central Europeans as humbug, perhaps because they have correctly observed that the “multiculturalism” on display in Western Europe is largely a monoculture of the Islamic variety.

If there is anything at which the Central Europeans became experts during their Soviet internment, it was deciphering the doublespeak of communist apparatchiks, which may account for their adeptness at deciphering the doublespeak coming from Eurocrats such as Timmermans. As the Hungarian Prime Minister’s spokesman, Zoltán Kovács, said in September, “… multi-culturalism in Western Europe has not been a success in our view. We want to avoid making the same mistakes ourselves.”

They’re at it again — an Israeli-Palestinian peace conference is taking place in Paris on May 30.

But there’s a catch: neither Israelis nor Palestinians will be there. They weren’t invited, and this was not France’s attempt to be “evenhanded.” In fact, French President François Hollande’s Socialist government has the exact opposite intentions.

Hollande knows that the Palestinian Authority wants the conference to occur, while Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu strongly opposes it. Inviting neither party is France’s tactic for sidestepping Israel’s decided lack of eagerness.

Not hiding Israel’s disgust, Israeli ambassador to the UN Danny Danon says that Israel is in “a state of emergency,” and that:

… each country that Israel succeeds in preventing from attending the conference will be considered an achievement.

Uri Savir, a veteran Israeli “peacenik” who sees only goodwill in diplomatic machinations, reports approvingly on France’s move:

The French are inviting the Middle East Quartet representatives (United States, European Union, Russia and the United Nations), the Arab League and approximately 20 foreign ministers.

The EU, Russia, the UN, the Arab League … and the Obama administration.

Each of the invitees tilt against Israel’s current position. The Hollande government, by the way, received overwhelming Muslim support in France’s 2012 election and is dependent on that demographic. Secretary of State John Kerry has not yet announced if either he or a lower-level U.S. diplomat will be attending.

Going forward with such a conference at such a time represents a triumph of cynicism over experience, especially considering recent Mideast events:

— Islamic governments have been imploding, especially in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Libya. There is additional violent instability in many others. The old saw that the region’s agitations all stem from the Israeli-Palestinian issue has been exposed as nonsense. There is no rational basis for believing the proverbial “Palestinian state living beside Israel in peace and security” is possible now.

— The Palestinians are divided into two political entities: Hamas-run Gaza, and Fatah-run Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. They’re at each other’s throats; by all accounts, the only thing preventing a Hamas takeover of the PA is Israel’s military presence. What sort of unified, coherent, or constructive Palestinian state could be fashioned from these two bitterly antagonistic entities — one of them run by a group the U.S. officially designates a terror organization? CONTINUE AT SITE

Who would have expected the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse to present them themselves in the personages of a billionaire reality-show star, an aging Vermont hippy, a Glock-toting Austrian rightist and a British-born Pakistani who “sucked up to extremist Muslims” through most of his career. I refer to the presumptive Republican nominee for president, the second-place candidate for the Democratic nomination, the likely next president of Austria and the just-elected Mayor of London. These are portents of the future, like comets or two-headed calves.

The lives of perhaps two billion people around the world are going pear-shaped, and the great battles of our time are not about the allocation of scarce resources, but of abundant misery. Russia Today reported May 7 on street demonstrations in Berlin for and against German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s immigration policy. The first two comments on the news story read as follows:

Europe is controlled, as with the US government, by those [Jews] who were struck out of Europe and given Palestinian land to call their own.

and

Angela Merkel is a secret Muslim like Obama.

What used to be prima facie evidence of mental defect now has has become commonly-accepted opinion (although it is still evidence of mental defect). It doesn’t matter much for the Europeans whether they choose to believe in a world conspiracy by Jewish bankers or a secret Muslim plot to conquer them, for their prospects are dim whether both, either, or neither are true. Europe may go supine before a flood of culturally-unassimilable migrants, or it may elect for one last fling with the nasty old nationalism that nearly destroyed it during the two world wars of the 20th century. The result will be the same.

Europeans who encourage migration, like Chancellor Merkel and Pope Francis, may be the cause of the greatest humanitarian catastrophe in history, by encouraging tens of millions of desperately poor people to seek a welcome in Europe. The United Nations counts 60 million refugees, almost all within reach of Europe upon a few thousand dollars’ investment in a passport and passage, and there are ten times that number who would gladly become refugees if opportunity presented itself. Millions and perhaps tens of millions will die as a result of such misdirected kindness.

The Iran nuclear deal, marking its first anniversary, does not appear to have had a calming effect on the Middle East.

Iran funnels money to Hamas and Islamic Jihad because they share its desire to eliminate Israel and replace it with an Islamic empire. The Iranian leaders want to see Hamas killing Jews every day, with no break. Ironically, Hamas has become too “moderate” for the Iranian leadership because it is not doing enough to drive Jews out of the region.

More Palestinian terror group leaders may soon perform the “pilgrimage” to their masters in Tehran. If this keeps up, the Iranians themselves will puppeteer any Palestinian state that is created in the region.

The Iran nuclear deal, marking its first anniversary, does not appear to have had a calming effect on the Middle East. The Iranians seem to be deepening their intervention in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in general and in internal Palestinian affairs in particular.

This intervention is an extension of Iran’s ongoing efforts to expand its influence in Arab and Islamic countries, including Iraq, Yemen, Syria and Lebanon and some Gulf states. The nuclear deal between Tehran and the world powers has not stopped the Iranians from proceeding with their global plan to export their “Islamic Revolution.” On the contrary, the general sense among Arabs and Muslims is that in the wake of the nuclear deal, Iran has accelerated its efforts to spread its influence.

Iran’s direct and indirect presence in Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Lebanon has garnered some international attention, yet its actions in the Palestinian arena are still ignored by the world.

That Iran provides financial and military aid to Palestinian groups such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad has never been a secret. In fact, both the Iranians and the Palestinian radical groups have been boasting about their relations.

On Thursday morning, sailors on board the USS Cole were lining up for an early lunch. Seventeen of them died as an Al Qaeda bomb on board a fishing boat tore through the hull outside the galley. The dead included 15 men and 2 women, one of whom had a young child. For three weeks the crew of the USS Cole struggled to keep their ship from sinking while working waist deep in water with bucket brigades, sleeping on the deck and living surrounded by the terrible aftermath of the terrorist attack.

The survivors, wounded and whole, received the words “Glory is the Reward of Valor” written on the bent steel removed from the site of the explosion that tore through their ship and their lives.

The President of the United States promised that justice would be done. “To those who attacked them we say: You will not find a safe harbor. We will find you and justice will prevail.”

Despite Clinton’s words, justice did not prevail.

The father of Hull Maintenance Technician Third Class Kenneth Eugene Clodfelter believed that there would be justice, but he was to be disappointed. “I just felt, for sure, you know, they’re not going to go ahead and just kiss off the lives of 17 U.S. sailors,” he said. “In fact, they didn’t do anything.”

Walid bin Attash, a planner of the USS Cole bombing and who also played a role in the 9/11 attack, is still at Gitmo. His trial continues to drag on while he and his lawyers play games. Rahim Hussein al-Nashiri, another of the planners, is still awaiting trial. But Mashur Abdallah Ahmed al Sabri, one of the members of the USS Cole cell, has already been released by Barack Obama from Guantanamo Bay.

Sabri was rated as a high risk terrorist who is ”is likely to pose a threat to the US, its interests, and allies”, but that was no obstacle for Obama who had already fired one Secretary of Defense for being slow to free dangerous Al Qaeda terrorists and was browbeating his latest appointee over the same issue.

The very paperwork that was used as the basis for the decision to free Sabri describes him as “a member of a Yemeni al-Qaida cell directly involved with the USS Cole attack”. This cell “conducted surveillance” on the targeted vessel and “prepared explosives for the bombing”. Sabri had been arrested in Yemen for his involvement in the attack before he managed to make his way to Afghanistan.

Now he has been sent to the homeland of terrorism, Saudi Arabia.

After praising the “beautiful religious tradition” of Islam, which the USS Cole terrorists had “twisted”, President Clinton had promised that, “America will not stop standing guard”.

But under him, it never even started standing guard.

While Osama bin Laden prepared for US retaliation, evacuating Kandahar and escaping into the desert, President Clinton rejected military action against the terrorists claiming that the evidence against Bin Laden was not strong enough. The State Department warned that attacking Bin Laden would “inflame the Islamic world”.

Very little has changed since then. Muslim terrorists strike and we are told to close our eyes and appease harder or we risk inflaming the tender sensitivities of the Muslim world.

Most Americans have grown numb to the parade of Islamic terrorists triumphantly exiting Gitmo as free men. No matter their risk rating, the Arabic names, the dark smirks and scowls all come to blend together. But Sabri is not just another Bin Laden bodyguard or operative. His cell has American blood on its hands.

The USS Cole attack was the final step on the road to 9/11. Our government’s inaction sent a message that America could be hit hard and we would not retaliate. It told Al Qaeda that American blood was dirt cheap and that the murder of our people came with no price.

These days we are sending that same message all over again.

Obama’s release of Sabri is yet another page in that same dark history. It is a betrayal of the dead and the wounded. And of their families. It is a betrayal of the promise made by his Democratic predecessor, vowing, “After all they have given us, we must give them their meaning.”

In 2009, Obama had met with USS Cole families and promised them swift action. But a year later the families were accusing his administration of inaction and broken promises. His statement on the tenth anniversary of the attack made no mention of bringing the attackers to justice. Instead he stated that, “We will honor their legacy of selfless service by advancing the values that they stood for throughout their lives.” What were these values and how did they justify releasing one of the Cole cell terrorists?

From Clinton to Obama, there has been a long shameful tradition of substituting vague generic sentiments for justice. Of speaking of honor and healing, of pain and history, of tragedy and courage, while giving the killers behind the attack yet another pass. There is neither honor nor courage in that. Mashur Abdallah Ahmed al Sabri has left American custody as a free man. It is not inconceivable that Obama will free even the masterminds of the USS Cole attack. As he empties Guantanamo Bay of the monsters squatting in its darkest corners, he slowly works his way toward the worst of the worst with an eye to letting them all go.

After the USS Cole attack, President Clinton contended, “If, as it now appears, this was an act of terrorism, it was a despicable and cowardly act.” This uncertainty and lack of conviction continues to haunt our War on Terror. Behind every statement about courage and honor, there is an “if”. Lurking behind every promise of action is yet another “if”. And these “Ifs” keep anything from being done.

“A vote to leave is the gamble of the century.

And it would be our children’s future on the table, if we were to roll the dice.”

David Cameron, February 2016

“We have our own dream and our own task. We are with it, but not of it. We are linked but not combined.

We are interested and associated, but not absorbed.

If Britain must choose between Europe and the open sea, she must always choose the open sea.”

Winston Churchill, 1953

On June 23 the British will go to the polls. They will vote whether to remain in or leave the European Union. Preliminary polling suggests the decision will be close. There is comfort in staying – the status quo is easy, while change portends unknowns. Maintaining the current system is the preference of many, even as the country drifts toward greater political control from Brussels. The knowledge that bigger government is accompanied by diminished personal freedoms doesn’t bother those who say “stay!” Yet, the creep of “big” government is insidious. It lulls one into complacency; it assuages before it suppresses.

There is risk in leaving the EU. It is a leap into the unknown. It is frightening to those who have grown accustomed to dependency, and unappealing to those who work in government. Almost certainly, the immediate reaction of financial markets would be negative. There are other concerns. Would the UK, as President Obama inappropriately suggested, go to the back of the queue in terms of trade with the U.S. and the rest of Europe? Would the economy lose a couple of percentage points of growth in GDP, as the wizards at the Financial Times suggest? Would leaving herald an end to the peace that has prevailed in Europe for the past seventy-one years? These are important questions, but ones with no no clear-cut answers. There is no crystal ball.