RUTHFULLY YOURS

Among the hard lessons of our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, surely one of them is that it’s foolish to expect that backward and often barbaric societies can be transformed into functioning liberal democracies. So why do liberals seem so surprised that so many people from these societies behave in barbaric ways after they’ve shoved their way into the West?

As I write, 516 criminal complaints have been filed in Germany against men of mainly North African or Arab origin who went on a New Year’s Eve sexual-assault rampage in the city of Cologne.

“Twenty or 30 men, foreign men, surrounded us and we couldn’t even move anymore,” a woman identified as Michelle told the BBC. “They just grabbed our arms and tried to tear us apart and pushed our clothes away and tried to get between our legs.”
Similar events also took place in Hamburg, Stuttgart and Berlin. In Sweden, a scandal erupted after it emerged that police had suppressed a report of mass groping by Middle East migrants at a festival last summer. In September, Soeren Kern of the Gatestone Institute chronicled some 30 cases of rape and sexual assault perpetrated by migrants against German and migrant women alike.

“In Bavaria, women and girls housed at a refugee shelter. . . are subject to rape and forced prostitution on a daily basis,” Mr. Kern writes, citing reports from women’s rights groups. “The price for sex with female asylum seekers is 10 euros.”

For anyone even minimally acquainted with Mideast mores, none of this is news. Mob sexual assaults in Egypt became notorious after the 2011 attack on reporter Lara Logan, but they have become a staple of Egyptian life. “Suddenly I was in the middle, surrounded by hundreds of men in a circle that was getting smaller and smaller around me,” one Egyptian woman wrote of a 2013 attack in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. “They were touching and groping me everywhere.”

“Progressive elites have accused those who condemn Muslim extremism of being extremists themselves – claiming that censure of radical Islam is an indiscriminate criticism of all Muslims. Here is an example of what progressives would call “Islamophobia,” dubbed appropriately by Andrew Cummins as a word “created by fascists, used by cowards, to manipulate morons.”

In accordance with a ten year plan of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) to implement United Nations’ Resolution 16:18 which criminalizes all criticism of Islam worldwide, the U.S. House of Representatives issued H. Res. 569 condemning violence, bigotry and “hateful rhetoric” toward Muslims in the United States.

This proposal comes on the heels of Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s post San Bernardino promise to prosecute anyone guilty of anti-Muslim speech. It is clear that Ms. Lynch is firing a canon at a fly. According to FBI’s annual Uniform Crime Report, there were 1014 hate crime incidents motivated by religious bias in 2014. Of those, 154 – 15.2 percent – were anti-Islamic. More than half were anti-Jewish incidents. Not only is this yet another example of the Obama administration exaggerating minor threats, but it suggests as well an ignorance or callous avoidance of the First Amendment.

The Saudi Arabian-Iranian crisis that has erupted with the former’s execution of prominent Shiite cleric Nimr al-Nimr could easily, but not quickly, lead to open war. That war may be inevitable because it is, at the same time, a religious struggle as well as a conflict for domination of the Middle East.

The two nations have been engaged in proxy wars for years, but the nature of the conflict and President Obama’s nuclear weapons agreement with Iran shorten the time before open war breaks out.

As I’ll get to in a moment, the proxy wars in Yemen and Syria — as well as Iran’s having turned Iraq into a virtual satellite — made the Saudis feel surrounded and isolated. Al-Nimr’s execution, however, is significant in ways the other parts of this conflict are not. Its implications reach beyond to the core of the Sunni-Shiite religious wars that are almost as old as Islam.

The immediate results of al-Nimr’s execution include an attack on the Saudi embassy in Tehran which resulted in its being partially burned. Two Sunni mosques in Iraq were similarly attacked. Accelerating the crisis were statements from Iran’s “supreme leader,” Ayatollah Khamenei, defending al-Nimr, and from Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps accusing the Saudis of a “medieval act of savagery” that would result in the “downfall of the [Saudi] monarchy.”