RUTHFULLY YOURS

It has long been an open secret that Russian agents fatally poisoned Alexander Litvinenko, a former Russian spy turned Kremlin critic, at a London hotel in November 2006. On Thursday a formal British inquiry went further. “Taking full account of all the evidence and analysis available to me,” wrote retired High Court Judge Robert Owen, “I find that the FSB operation to kill Mr. Litvinenko was probably approved by [then FSB Director Nikolai] Patrushev and President Putin.”

Litvinenko, a veteran of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB), fled Russia for Britain in 2000, after going public with evidence that Russian officials abused the state security apparatus for corrupt purposes. This infuriated Vladimir Putin, then director of the FSB and soon to be the Kremlin’s paramount leader.

In exile Litvinenko published a book accusing the Russian leader of having staged terrorist bombings in Moscow in 1999 as a pretext to reignite the war in Chechnya. (See David Satter nearby.) Litvinenko also likely cooperated with British intelligence. In July 2006 Russian legislators enacted a law authorizing the government to target state enemies abroad. An unofficial Kremlin hit list began circulating in Russian circles. Litvinenko’s name was on it.

The 2016 political season is churning with anti-immigrant vitriol and wariness of the outside world. But one group of American Christians—missionaries—continues reaching out instead of walling themselves off. They honor Christ’s message in the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 25: “Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.”

The selfless work of missionaries was poignantly illustrated by the terrorist murder on Jan. 15 of 45-year-old Michael Riddering, an orphanage director in West Africa.

Riddering and his wife, Amy, left Hollywood, Fla., in 2011 to minister to impoverished children and widows in the landlocked nation of Burkina Faso. Unicef estimates that in the country of 17 million people, almost one million are orphans. The Ridderings, who brought their young daughter with them to the town of Yako, adopted two Burkinabe children; the orphanage cared for about 400 more.

Riddering was visiting Ouagadougou, the capital about 70 miles from Yako, late last week. He was meeting with a Burkinabe pastor in the Cappuccino Café when al Qaeda terrorists attacked the restaurant and two nearby hotels. More than two-dozen people, including Riddering and six Canadians in the country on short-term missions, were killed.

DAVOS — Here in this luxe Swiss ski town, dozens of world leaders are taking advantage of one another’s presence at the massive, multi-day economic summit to get together and talk shop.

But the annual conference also draws some leaders who’d prefer not to. On Thursday morning, Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu were spotted one floor apart at the InterContinental hotel.
Mr. Zarif was eating breakfast in the hotel restaurant, just a floor above where Mr. Netanyahu and Vice President Joe Biden met. Mr. Zarif left the restaurant about 20 minutes before Messrs. Biden and Netanyahu’s meeting started. Mr. Biden’s national security adviser was also two tables away from Mr. Zarif.

Mr. Netanyahu has been a fierce and vocal opponent of the Iranian nuclear deal and U.S. engagement with Tehran. He’s warned that the accord will strengthen and embolden Iran’s leaders, who he has said will funnel money to Israel’s regional foes such as Hezbollah and Hamas as well as Syrian president Bashar Al-Assad and shiite militias.

North Korea said Friday it was holding a U.S. student for committing an unspecified “hostile act,” the latest in a series of detained American tourists and missionaries that Pyongyang has at times used to try to win diplomatic leverage with Washington.

Otto Frederick Warmbier, an undergraduate student at the University of Virginia, was accused of being manipulated by the U.S. government, according to a brief report from the Korean Central News Agency. The report provided no details of Mr. Warmbier’s actions other than to allege that he entered the country “for the purpose of bringing down the foundation of its single-minded unity.”

Mr. Warmbier was detained in Pyongyang on Jan. 2, according to Troy Collins of Young Pioneer Tours, the tour company that took him to North Korea. Mr. Collins declined to provide further details but said Mr. Warmbier’s family had been informed of his detention.

A deal that sent $1.7 billion in U.S. funds to Iran, announced alongside the freeing of five Americans from Iranian jails, has emerged as a new flashpoint amid a claim in Tehran that the transaction amounted to a ransom payment.

The U.S. Treasury Department wired the money to Iran around the same time its theocratic government allowed three American prisoners to fly out of Tehran on Sunday aboard a Dassault Falcon jet owned by the Swiss air force.

The prisoner swap also involved freedom for two other Americans held in Iran as well as for seven Iranians charged or convicted by the U.S.

The announcements coincided with the implementation of the nuclear agreement with Iran, lifting international economic sanctions in exchange for Iran curtailing its nuclear program.

The $1.7 billion financial settlement ended a 35-year legal saga that centered on a purchase of U.S. arms by Iran’s last monarch, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, that were never delivered because of the Iranian revolution in 1979.

The White House described the settlement as a victory for taxpayers, arguing that the U.S. was likely to lose in arbitration under way in The Hague, Netherlands, and could have been held liable for billions more if the process had dragged on.

Reprinted from InvestigativeProject.org.

In the aftermath of New Year’s Eve’s mass rapes of European women by Muslim refugees, the questions have been repeated: Should we have known this kind of thing would happen? Could we have known? And from local bars to parliaments, from family dinners to the nightly news, the answers keep coming back: Yes; we could. Yes, we should.

But interestingly, the people who say this with the most conviction are not right-wing Muslim-bashers, or activists opposed to the settling of Syrian refugees in Europe. They are Muslims, and mostly Muslim women.

Over and over, these women, and other Western women who have worked in the Middle East and North Africa, pointed out the commonality of rape in the Middle East, North Africa and Southeast Asia (the MENASAS region), and noted the oppression of women in most cultures there. (The Kurds form a notable exception.)

Many point to the rapes in Tahrir Square in 2011 and 2013 as cautionary tales, describing the so-called “circle of hell” that women faced then: lone women surrounded by men whose hands groped and pulled, ripped and pressed, and eventually overpowered. A 2013 study conducted after the attacks showed that a stunning 99 percent of Egyptian women had experienced some sort of sexual harassment.

The Palestinian leadership is very busy waging political, economic and propaganda warfare against Israel.

In Ramallah, the Palestinian Authority is holding official funerals to “heroes” who stabbed to death Israelis, and encouraging others to also become martyrs.

In the International arena, the Palestinian Authority is working hard to obtain an Arab League, EU and the UN Security Council resolution that will condemn and declare all Israeli West Bank “settlements” illegal under international law and an obstacle to peace. However, at the same time, Palestinian supporters in Europe and the U.S. are making efforts to delegitimize the Jewish State of Israel. They are successfully lobbying professional groups and universities to ban Israelis.

Today, “71 British doctors have submitted a request to the World Medical Association to have the Israel Medical Association expelled. In London’s Kings College, on January 16, 2016, a group of KCL Action Palestine, stormed an event where the former head of the Israeli secret service Shin Bet and commander-in-chief of the navy, Ami Ayalon was speaking. They threw chairs, smashed windows and set off fire alarms. At least 15 MET police officers were needed to evacuate the building. Despite the violence, and damage to property no arrest were made. Apparently, the police considered this a free-speech demonstration.

Elsewhere in Europe and the U.S. the Palestinians BDS movement to ban Israelis in Academia and business, as well as Israeli products of Jews from Judea and Samaria and the Golan Hights, is in full swing. Last November the European Union decided to allow such warning labels and supermarket chains throughout Europe stopped carrying Israeli products. In the U.S., the latest to join the BDS movement, was the pension fund for the United Methodist Church, one of the largest Protestant denominations in the United States. It has removed five Israeli banks from its investment portfolio.

What to fear in Germany — an ideologically driven leader who unilaterally is changing the demographics of the nation without public support, or an angry populist counter-movement that vows to keep Germans safe by any means necessary when the government won’t? Both, or neither? Is Germany postmodern in erasing borders, or premodern in bullying its neighbors to do the same?

Does the world want Germans to stand up, reassert their pride in Western liberality and tolerance, and insist that migrants either integrate and follow Western values or go back home and stay there? Or does it want Germans to more or less continue to repress any expressions of cultural confidence?

To even the least-informed observer, German chancellor Angela Merkel’s recent decision to allow tens of thousands of young Muslim migrants — about two-thirds of them young men — into Germany from the war-torn and terrorist-infested Middle East seemed unhinged. Over a million migrants entered Germany in 2015 alone, the vast majority of them young, male, Muslim, from the Middle East. They were not refugees by any classical definition. Apparently Merkel in particular, and Germans in general, must assert that they are the most recklessly postmodern of all Western nations in order to reassure the world, 77 years after the outbreak of World War II, that they are no longer the most recklessly nationalistic.

Even a cynic who saw Germany’s demographic crisis and need for unskilled labor as the catalyst for welcoming in hundreds of thousands of Middle Eastern males could not figure out why Merkel would bring such chaos to what is otherwise usually the least chaotic nation in the world. That migrants are currently harassing and, at worst, assaulting German women is the logical, not the aberrant result of dumping thousands of young Muslim men from the Middle East into one of Europe’s most affluent and most progressive cultures.

Walter Laqueur is the author of, among other books, Weimar, A History of Terrorism, Fascism: Past, Present, Future, and The Dream that Failed: Reflections on the Soviet Union. His newest book, Putinism: Russia and Its Future with the West, has just been released by Thomas Dunne/St. Martin’s.

For the sake of Europe’s future, it would pay to revisit the many warning signs that, though pointed out at the time, were mocked, dismissed, or denied.

According to Daniel Johnson, Europe is in grave trouble. These days, few would disagree. To the many longstanding and unsolved problems facing the continent over the last decades, several new ones have recently been added: the economic disaster in Greece and similar economic straits elsewhere, the mass invasion of refugees from the Middle East and Africa, and the looming prospect of a British exit (“Brexit,” for short). Among the latest books about the condition of Europe, none bears the confident title of Mark Leonard’s Why Europe will Run the 21st Century, published only a short decade ago.

Does Europe have a future? That’s the question Johnson asks, and it’s the right question. But there are other questions, one of which is whether today’s crisis came as a total surprise or whether unmistakable warning signs existed that were systematically ignored or denied. This is not a matter of historical interest alone; there might well be lessons to be gleaned for, yes, the future of Europe.