RUTHFULLY YOURS

RIYADH—A Saudi court on Tuesday overturned a death sentence against a Palestinian poet convicted of apostasy and imposed an eight-year prison term and 800 lashes instead.

A court in the southwestern city of Abha also ordered the poet, Ashraf Fayadh, to repent and renounce his poetry on official state media, his lawyer Abdulrahman al-Lahim said.

Mr. Lahim said his client, 35 years old, was innocent of the charges against him and would appeal the latest sentence. He also said he had asked the court to release Mr. Fayadh from jail on bail, pending the outcome of his appeal.

This was the latest Saudi freedom-of-expression case in recent months to be met with a harsh sentence. It has become a flashpoint for criticism from international free-speech and human-rights groups, which have called on the Gulf kingdom to free Mr. Fayadh since his detention in January 2014.

President Obama on Wednesday will visit a U.S. mosque for the first time in his presidency. According to the White House, during this visit he will “celebrate the contributions Muslim Americans make to our nation and reaffirm the importance of religious freedom to our way of life.” Over the past two years, in the president’s efforts to counter violent extremism, he has emphasized the responsibility of Muslim “scholars and clerics” to help ensure that mosques are not used as a platform to preach Islamist extremism.

Such extremism isn’t limited to out-of-the-way mosques where radical clerics operate in the shadows. It is occurring in mainstream and leading mosques world-wide, including at one of the most important religious institutions in Islam, the Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem.

Consider a Jan. 16 sermon at Al Aqsa by Sheikh Abu Taqi Al-Din Al-Dari, a Palestinian cleric who called for jihad against the West and Europe, and for the burgeoning Islamic State to “conquer Rome, Washington and Paris.”

When Theo van Gogh was murdered by an Islamist on a street in Amsterdam, Ayaan Hirsi Ali could not even attend the funeral because she would have put the lives of others at risk. So the Dutch intelligence agreed to take her to the morgue. The next day, bodyguards accompanied her from her home and gave her three hours to pack and leave. From there she went to the air base at Valkenburg, near The Hague, where she would be embark on a plane. The portholes were closed, they told her not to approach them nor go near the door. The plane was full of soldiers. Hirsi Ali was leaving a country at war. They landed at a military base in Maine, in the United States. This is how the love affair between America and the first refugee from Western Europe since the Holocaust began. A story that continues to this very day.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is still a shadow. But her voice at the telephone is clear, tough, cool. It is that of a young Somali woman who has undergone genital mutilation, who has lived in Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, Kenya, before being betrothed to a Canadian cousin she had never seen before. Hirsi Ali escaped from Germany to the Netherlands.

She worked as an interpreter in the Islamic Dutch ghettos, she graduated, became a Liberal MP, helped Van Gogh to make the film “Submission” and then disappeared. Now she talks with me about Europe from her think tank, the American Enterprise Institute. Hirsi Ali recently released her third book on Islam, “Heretic”, an optimistic book on the reform of Islam.

How do you build a state for people who don’t want it built? That’s the obvious question that emerges from the latest chapter in the ongoing saga of Rawabi, the first new Palestinian city. It’s a flagship project that international diplomats routinely laud as a model of Palestinian state-building, but it has won no such praise from fellow Palestinians. Instead, the very people it was meant to benefit are now accusing Rawabi’s founder of collaboration with the enemy for having committed such horrendous crimes – this is not a joke – as providing residents with electricity and running water.

Rawabi was founded with the goal of providing decent, affordable housing for middle-class Palestinians – theoretically a goal that should be welcomed by the Palestinian Authority and its residents, who routinely complain to the international community about how wretched their situation is. From the start, however, the PA did its best to undermine the project; despite repeated promises of support, it refused to provide even the basic infrastructure that most governments routinely provide to new residential developments. Thus as JTA reported last week, Rawabi’s water and sewage system, streets, schools and medical clinic were all financed, like the houses themselves, by entrepreneur Bashar Masri and the Qatari government.

On Sunday, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon published an op-ed in The New York Times to ‎do what he does best: Pummel Israel while protesting against those who call him to task for it.‎

In the piece, Ban whined that the statements he made last week — first calling on both the ‎Jewish state and the “occupied Palestinian territories” to stop the violence, and then doubling ‎down on his assertion that Israeli “occupation” was the real culprit behind it — were unjustly ‎‎”twisted” to imply that he was justifying terrorism.‎

That the U.N. chief had said it was “human nature” for downtrodden people like the Palestinians ‎to express their frustration through violence had something to do with Israel’s adverse reaction to ‎his words, particularly since he hasn’t said such things about al-Qaida, Islamic State, Hezbollah ‎or Boko Haram. You know, the group that on Saturday night burned 86 Nigerian villagers alive, ‎among them many children.‎

But Ban nevertheless repeated his anti-Israel accusations.‎

To prove that he had been unfairly misquoted not once but twice, he clarified: “The stabbings, ‎vehicle rammings and other attacks by Palestinians targeting Israeli civilians are reprehensible. So, ‎too, are the incitement of violence and the glorification of killers. Nothing excuses terrorism. I ‎condemn it categorically.”‎

Readers did not have time to heave the slightest sigh of relief, however, since Ban proceeded ‎from there to explain why Israel is nevertheless responsible.‎

The State Department said today it’s trying to verify a Saudi report that nine Americans were among 33 swept up in an anti-terrorism operation in the kingdom.

The Saudi Gazette reported Sunday that four Americans were arrested a week ago and five more were taken into custody later in the week. Also seized during that period were 14 Saudis, three Yemenis, two Syrians, an Indonesian, a Filipino, an Emirati, a Kazakh and a Palestinian.

It wasn’t clear what their terror links may have been; the Saudis have arrested many suspected ISIS members over the past several months.

On Friday, four people were killed and 36 were wounded in a suicide bombing and shooting at Al-Ridha Mosque in Al-Ahsa province. The casualty count would have been higher had security not stopped the attackers at the gate.

A surviving 27-year-old terrorist at the mosque “sustained major injuries after being thrashed by worshippers,” Arab News reported.

It’s not know if any of the detained Americans were connected to that plot. The Arab News called the terror arrests a “pre-emptive crackdown.”

After the Hitler and Stalin disasters, Europeans swore “Never Again!” over and over again. Never Again to the Holocaust and Stalin massacres, but also to the many occasions of mass bloodshed that began with the wars of the Reformation.

And yet, today we can see Europe’s boastful old narcissism again.

It is a troubling and ominous sight.

I don’t mean to pick on Europe — there are plenty of mad political movements in the world. But Europe has been the source of all major international wars for centuries. Maybe it was only the Industrial Revolution that made Europe so destructive. But its neurotic repetition compulsion goes back at least to the invention of the printing press, which made mass political movements possible.

“Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad,” said the Greeks, and they were right. The very same signs of severe mental pathology seem to show up before every major bloodletting in history. If you look for historical patterns, you can see the signs long before mass violence breaks out again. Today, the most stunning example of pathology is visible in the suicidal policies of the European Union, a grossly dysfunctional family if ever there was one.

Many historians consider World War I to be the greatest disaster of the 20th century, because it killed a whole generation of highly educated men, who could have given constructive political and cultural leadership for decades to come. World War I itself was triggered by a century of tit-for-tat Franco-German wars, and it led directly to Hitler and the Cold War.

The war brought Lenin to power in Russia, followed by the first Marxist Terror. Hitler’s rise was driven by a desire to take revenge for WW I. Without WW I the world would have been spared much suffering.

Every European disaster echoes the previous one, which is why the historical pattern looks so neurotic. Europe’s propaganda line changes, but it always comes down to the same old narcissistic grandiosity, the same glorious rhetoric of Empire. Today the European Union is seriously intent on taking over the world via bureaucratic imperialism, using a network of international “laws” that nobody has ever voted for. Euro-imperialism is the reason behind the global climate fraud.

In the words of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, the tunnels are being dug not only to “defend the Gaza Strip, but to serve as a launching pad to reach all of Palestine.” As one can see from any map of Palestine, “all of Palestine” does not mean living in peace alongside Israel; it means supplanting Israel.

To its credit, Hamas has been refreshingly transparent about its ambition, the elimination of Israel. Hamas wants the Palestinians to continue living in misery and bitterness. It is fertile soil for jihad recruitment.

A Palestinian Authority-Hamas unity government would mean tunnels not only along the border between the Gaza Strip and Israel, but also from the West Bank into Israel.

Forever looming, of course, is the illusion that Abbas will be able to persuade Hamas to abandon its aim to destroy Israel.

The myth that Hamas uses tunnels to smuggle food and other necessities to the “besieged” Gaza Strip has been buried under the rubble of the tunnel that collapsed last week east of Gaza City.

The incident, in which seven members of Hamas’s armed wing, Ezaddin Al-Qassam, were killed when the tunnel they were working in collapsed, provides further proof that the Islamist movement has stayed true to its charter, which calls for the total destruction of Israel.

Islamic State terrorists beheaded a 14-year-old boy in front of his parents, according to ARA News. The murder took place on January 30 in Jarablus – a city in northern Syria. The report said that the boy had missed Friday prayers at the mosque.

At the worship space in central Jarablus, extremist preachers who call for an Islamic Caliphate regularly call down death sentences for alleged sinners.

Human rights campaigner Nasser Taljbini reported that the Islamic sharia court had ordered the execution of sentence to take place in public. “Dozens of people attended the brutal execution, including the victim’s parents who were forced to witness the beheading of their own son,” Taljbini said.

ISIS forces boys and adolescents to fight alongside adult terrorists and sometimes forces them to participate in beheadings of captives.

Earlier this week ISIS reportedly arrested dozens of women in Jarablus for violating the Sharia dress code. According to their interpretation of Islam, women must be fully covered from head to foot. Infractions are dealt with harshly.

Our government is playing games with itself. And losing.

On Wednesday Chaim Levinson reported in Haaretz that for the first time in nearly two years, last week the Civil Administration of Judea and Samaria approved new building plans for a small number of Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria.

Levinson also reported that last month Jerusalem’s municipal planning and building commission gave final approval to plans to build nearly 900 housing units in the southern neighborhood of Gilo. Initial approval was granted back in 2012.

But in the intervening three years, the commission refused to allow them to go forward.

From the report, we learn that the government’s critics in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria who claimed that it was barring Jewish building were right all along. Despite the government’s denials, the fact is that for at least the last year and a half, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his ministers maintained an undeclared freeze on construction for Israeli Jews in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria.

During this period, Jews have only been permitted to build in these areas either on the basis of plans that had received final approval before the unofficial freeze took effect, or in cases where refusal to approve building would have involved admitting that a freeze was in effect. So, for instance, in areas where the rights of Jews to their property in Judea and Samaria have been challenged before the Supreme Court by EU-financed Israeli NGOs like Yesh Din, the government has defended those rights and so given permission for Jews to exercise their property rights.

The government opted to enact this unofficial building freeze, and so trample the civil rights of hundreds of thousands of Israeli citizens, in the hopes of convincing the Obama administration to protect Israel from Palestinian efforts to pass anti-Israel resolutions at the UN Security Council.