RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13306/asia-bibi-asylum

Asia Bibi is expected to remain in Pakistan until her case is once again “reviewed in an appeal process” ordered by the Prime Minister. Bibi’s judicial process now looks infinite. Meanwhile, thousands of Islamists fill the Pakistani streets, calling for her execution.

Many of the values that make the West “the West” are now at stake in her fate: freedom of expression, religious freedom, freedom of movement, the rule of law, human dignity, and the separation of church and state. If the West does not fight for Asia Bibi, for whom should it fight?

“If Asia Bibi is denied asylum in the UK then what the heck is the point of the asylum system?” — Ayaan Hirsi Ali, refugee from Somalia, author and human rights campaigner.

A London where an ISIS-supporting preacher of Pakistani descent, Anjem Choundary, is free and comfortable, while a Pakistani Christian woman, Asia Bibi, would be unsafe and threatened, is the end of the West as we know it.

Asia Bibi’s case looks as if it is coming from “another, medieval world.”

Her “guilt,” as an “unclean” Christian, was for drinking water from a communal well, used by Muslim neighbors. Two Muslim women alleged that because she, a Christian, had touched the water from the well, the entire well was now haram (forbidden by Islamic law). Bibi responded by saying “I think Jesus would see it differently from Mohammed,” that Jesus had “died on the cross for the sins of mankind,” and asked, “What did your Prophet Muhammad ever do to save mankind?” She was accused of insulting the Islamic prophet Muhammad and put on trial for “blasphemy.” She was told to convert to Islam or die.

Bibi spent more than eight years in a Pakistani prison, in solitary confinement, much of that time on death row. On October 3, 2018, Pakistan’s Supreme Court acquitted her. Then, for a whole week, her fate remained unclear. After violent protests by “hard-line Islamists call[ing] for her execution” that “paralyzed large parts of the country for two days,” the government made “concessions” to the Islamists, and capitulated to their demands. The government pledged not to oppose adding Bibi to a “no-fly list,” which would prevent her from leaving the country.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271937/theyre-not-waving-eu-flags-bruce-bawer

I’ve always enjoyed being in German-speaking cities, even though my German isn’t what it used to be (and wasn’t even much back then), and even though it’s hard not to be reminded, now and then, of, well, you know. In Germany, to be sure, they go out of their way to remind you of that unpleasant interval from 1939 to 1945, filling their cities with hideous examples of what you might call the architecture of atonement – brutalist eyesores that we’re supposed to perceive as heartfelt proclamations of sincere Holocaust remorse. At the same time, however, paradoxical though it may sound, they’re determined to put their past behind them.

And behind you, too. In Berlin, that once gray but increasingly shiny city, you get the distinct impression that the inhabitants desperately want to pretend that the world was reborn anew after World War II and that a dynamic, hyper-contemporary Deutschland, its sins washed entirely clean by all those flagrant public gestures of apology for Auschwitz, is leading us all into a post-national, post-historical utopia, hoisting the EU banner aloft and singing Beethoven’s Ode to Joy in joyful chorus. Yes, if you’re visiting Berlin, by all means do your duty by wandering around that dreary landscape of stone near the Brandenburg Gate that purportedly memorializes the dead of the Shoah – but then get your ass out of there, head down the Eberstraße, and start shopping like crazy at the high-end boutiques of ultra-glitzy Potsdamerplatz.

Vienna, where I am right now, is of course a German-speaking city, but it’s different in key ways from Berlin – or, for that matter, from any burg I know in Germany. Like Rome (also a Catholic capital), Vienna has a feel of being utterly at ease with its history, its cultural heritage, and its national identity. Around the corner from where I’m staying is a shop crammed with immense early nineteenth-century portraits of Austrian aristocrats. In the front window of a nearby chocolatier is a big poster of a court painting of the same period. And a local taproom is decorated with framed photographs of Franz Josef-era military officers. All over town, national, but not EU, flags abound – the opposite of Germany.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-modernizing-dictator-is-no-myth-1542153977

The murder of Jamal Khashoggi has led to justified misgivings about Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s declared effort to modernize Saudi society. Critics argue that the killing disproves what Robert Kagan calls “the myth of the modernizing dictator”: the notion that repressive strongmen sometimes pave the way for socioeconomic development, which eventually may also lead to democratization.

Curiously, the most spectacular modernizers since World War II—South Korean, Taiwan and Singapore—have been absent from the debunking. South Korea alternated between authoritarian elected presidents and sheer dictatorships until 1987. Taiwan was under martial law until the 1990s. Under such regimes, both countries went from being among the world’s poorest to the most advanced within a generation, while laying the ground for subsequent democratization. In Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew led a similarly meteoric process of modernization in a semiauthoritarian system he created.

The main secrets of success in all these cases were market-friendly policies and a concerted investment in modern education. Less spectacular examples, such as Francisco Franco’s Spain and Augusto Pinochet’s Chile—abhorrent as both regimes were—also enabled economic modernization and eventual democratization.

It is historically rare for a country to become a fully liberal democracy before modernizing—the U.S. and now India are prominent exceptions. The first modernizer, Britain, became democratic—rather than merely parliamentary and increasingly liberal—only around 1900, after it had industrialized. Its modernization had involved uprooting the peasants, the vast majority of the population, from the countryside and turning them into an urban proletariat. Their hardship was immense and the long-term benefits to their children and grandchildren were far from obvious. They wouldn’t have consented if they had the vote. Similar problems plague modernization attempts in today’s developing societies.

To be sure, many dictators in developing societies fail to modernize: some because they adopt the wrong policies, some because of intractable cultural obstacles. That may turn out to be the case for Crown Prince Mohammed. But democracies in such countries also face daunting obstacles to modernization—and are highly susceptible to collapse. Moreover, the main hazard in such countries isn’t modernizing dictatorships but regressive populist regimes, reactionary dictatorships and authoritarian socialism. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.wsj.com/articles/macrons-faux-pas-on-nationalism-1542066344

Can the trans-Atlantic relationship be saved? That’s the question the world faces 100 years after the end of World War I.

The signs from the centennial commemorations in Paris were not good. French President Emmanuel Macron publicly condemned nationalism as “the opposite of patriotism” as self-proclaimed nationalist Donald Trump looked on stonily. The relationship between the U.S. and its three principal European allies—Germany, Britain and France—is arguably cooler than at any time since the Truman administration.

Paradoxically, the chill has occurred just as the security, economic and even ideological interests of the leading Western states have grown increasingly aligned. Russia and China both seek a weaker European Union, a divided Western alliance, and a decline in American power. China’s aggressively mercantilist economic plans target the capital-goods and automotive industries at the core of the German economy. In a world with better leadership, the major European states and the U.S. would deepen their partnership to prepare for a challenging new era in world politics. In our world, however, bitterness and resentment fester on both sides of the ocean, and the alliance weakens as the need for it grows.

The oracles of conventional wisdom naturally blame Mr. Trump—and they’re not all wrong. His negotiating style with Germany and France has been abrasive. From Iran to trade to the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty to the environment, he assaults what most Europeans see as their interests even as his “America First” rhetoric grates on their sensibilities.

But if Mr. Trump is wrong about many things, on one big issue he is right. However tangled its history, nationalism is an important force in global affairs that world leaders should respect. Mr. Macron’s disdainful remarks made for good headlines, but his inability to appreciate the role of nationalism in world politics exemplifies the failure of imagination at the root of many of Europe’s troubles.

The instinctive antinationalism of leaders like Mr. Macron is rooted in the belief that Western Europe is the real Europe and that its history is a universal history with lessons equally compelling for the rest of the world. These egotistical beliefs are so deeply held among elites in Western Europe that they are often unconscious.