RUTHFULLY YOURS

When Great Britain told the United States in February of 1947 that it could no longer protect Greece and Turkey, President Harry Truman and his top aides realized that America would have to step up to protect freedom or cede the Mediterranean and maybe Europe and other regions to the Soviets.

The result was the Truman Doctrine to help “free peoples” resist “attempted subjugation,” the Marshall Plan to revive an economically prostrate Europe, and NATO to protect Europe from a Soviet move.

But what Truman instinctively understood is what today’s Americans desperately must re-learn: that global power abhors a vacuum, that only America can protect freedom abroad, and that a U.S. retreat will prove harmful to America itself, as Freedom House’s new report on global freedom makes clear.

“Democracy is in crisis,” Freedom House President Michael J. Abramowitz writes in “Freedom in the World, 2018,” cataloguing the 12th straight year of democratic setbacks that out-numbered gains and that “extended a period characterized by emboldened autocrats, beleaguered democracies, and the United States’ withdrawal from its leadership role in the global struggle for human freedom.”

That democratic setbacks, autocratic gains and a U.S. withdrawal occurred simultaneously is no coincidence. While America’s retreat is hardly the sole reason for democracy’s global crisis, it is a key driving force behind it. And it’s a crisis that we will allow to continue festering at our own peril.

Like its police and the firefighters, France’s prison guards say they live in a permanent climate of violence and fear. And their exasperation is growing.

“Before, every morning, I was afraid to discover a guy hanging in his cell. You know what I’m dreading today? To be slaughtered, stripped, put a blade in my back. In the name of Islam and ISIS. Every day, on my way to work, this fear gnaws at my belly.” — ‘Bernard,’ a French prison guard.

“In the old days, aggressive behavior was linked to the difficulties of everyday life. Now hatred and violence are unleashed [by Islamists] against [our] authority, our society and its values.” — Joaquim Pueyo, MP, former director of Fleury-Mérogis prison

Instead of understanding that the famous deradicalization centers have not been useful because deradicalization did not take place, they persist in thinking that the solution to the war is appeasement. Their new experiments all go in the same direction: pursuing the fantasy that “if we are nice with jihadists, they will be nice to us.”

French prison guards are on strike. In a period of less than 10 days, a number of guards in various prisons were attacked and wounded, mainly by Islamists incarcerated for terrorist offenses or petty criminals apparently on their way to becoming radical Islamists. In reaction, the guards have blocked the normal functioning of the majority of prisons.

The wave of attacks began on January 11, 2018. Three guards of Vendin-le-Vieil’s prison, in the north of France, were lightly wounded in a knife attack committed by the Christian Gantzarski, a German convert to Islam who joined Al Qaeda and masterminded the bombing of a synagogue in Djerba, Tunisia, in 2002.

On January 15, 2018, seven guards were attacked and injured by a “radicalized” inmate at Mont-de-Marsan prison, in the south of France.

Jiri Valenta is a nonresident senior fellow at the BESA Center for Strategic Studies at Bar Ilan University, Israel and author of “Soviet Intervention in Czechoslovakia, 1968” (Johns Hopkins, 1990).

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/11786/czech-elections-us-interests

Czech President Milos Zeman adamantly refuses to obey the European Union immigration quotas, even in the face of EU lawsuits.

As for the widely bruited charge that he is pro-Russian: In 1968, this writer, a former classmate of Zeman’s in the Prague School of Economics, together defended the Prague reforms before hostile academic audiences in Leningrad and Moscow just weeks before the Soviet invasion. Expelled from the Communist Party, for his opposition to the Soviets, Zeman was also thrice in two decades fired from his job. In contrast, his opponent in the run-off, Jiri Drahos, repeatedly traveled to West under the watchful supervision of the Czech secret police.

Zeman’s defeat would deprive Europe of a powerful voice against anti-Semitism and Islamo-fascism. Drahos, an inexperienced leader, is more likely to be malleable to Brussels’s demands on accepting quotas on Muslim immigration. The result of the Czech vote will reverberate through Europe. Consequently, Zeman’s reelection is in America’s national interest.

The significance of an upcoming, run-off, presidential election in Czech Republic is largely underestimated in Washington. But its prevalent view of it as a not too significant event in a small European country is dead wrong.

Contenders include the sitting President, outspoken and politically incorrect Milos Zeman, who garnered 39% of the vote in the first of a two-phase election. His rival is chemist Jiri Drahos, the correct, low key, former president of the Czech Academy of Sciences, who won 27%. A tight race is expected in the January 26-27 vote.

In America, Zeman’s foes are led by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, together with President Barack Obama’s State Department holdovers. They yearn for Zeman’s defeat at they do for the downfall of President Donald Trump, whom Zeman in some ways resembles.

As with Trump, one of key issues is whether Zeman is pro-Russian as maintained by his foes in U.S and Czech media. Yet even more crucial is Zeman’s hard line on Muslim immigration. He adamantly refuses to obey the European Union immigration quotas, even in the face of EU lawsuits.

A bit of Czech history is in order here. Curiously, the Prague events in last century on dates ending in the number 8, have often witnessed developments with major implications. In 1918, the founding of democratic Czechoslovakia by exiled Czech politician Tomas Masaryk intensified the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire. In 1938, British and French appeasement of Adolf Hitler at Munich and the Nazi occupation of the Czech Sudetenland adumbrated the outbreak of World War II a year later. In 1948 a Communist coup in still democratic Prague was a key impetus for the creation of NATO a year later.

In 1968 the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia aimed at quelling the infectious Prague Spring, became in the words of my mentor, Josef Korbel (Madeleine Albright’s father), “the inextinguishable spark” for future democratic revolutions. That happened in 1989 as playwright Vaclav Havel, “an outstanding dissident,” in Zeman’s words, became president of a new, democratic Czech Republic.