RUTHFULLY YOURS

Gunmen took 170 people hostage on Friday morning at a hotel in Bamako, the capital of Mali, a West African nation where French troops are at war with al Qaeda militants.

Soldiers and police surrounded the Radisson Blu hotel in a standoff, said Capt. Baba Cissé, an army spokesman. The Brussels-based Rezidor Hotel Group, which operates the hotel, said two gunmen were holding 30 of its workers and 140 of its guests inside.

The U.S. embassy asked its citizens to stay indoors.

Mali is a somewhat forgotten front in the West’s war on Islamist insurgencies. Al Qaeda allies took control of the country’s desert north, including the fabled city of Timbuktu, in 2012. In 2013, French troops and United Nations peacekeepers arrived to combat those terrorists.

When no one is out there to protect freedom and democracy, groups masquerading as democratic forces move in to serve the designs of their masters.

Anyone questioning the authorities’ interpretation of Islam is dealt with in a barbaric fashion, from the 2am “knock on the door” to sham trials, public floggings, protracted imprisonment, rape, beatings, torture and extrajudicial murder. In some countries, the lawyers who represent such clients are also murdered.

Mauritania passed a new anti-slavery law this year, but has yet to start jailing slave-owners instead of anti-slavery activists. The government has yet to release award winning anti-slavery activist Biram Dah Abeid, arrested last year for organizing a peaceful demonstration against slavery.

Many theocracies have little-to-no respect for law; freedom of expression; equal justice under the law; freedom of (or from) religion; for women’s rights; tolerance of homosexuals or other sexual preferences — but they condone the sexual assault of children.

The targets in all the Paris attacks were not chosen “randomly.” Charlie Hebdo stood for the Enlightenment value of free speech, for the right to challenge, even to make fun of figures who deem themselves above criticism: politicians, religious leaders, the rich and famous. It stood for the right to be secular: for refusing to fence off religion, or award believers greater respect than non-believers.

Like the attempts to shut down all criticism of Islam — whether in novels such as Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, cartoons such as those of Muhammad drawn and published in Denmark, or debates between academics — the Charlie Hebdo killings were intended to instil fear and silence all honest discussion of Islam and its values.

Through bold criticism in a secular manner, European states have been able to create a more pluralistic, tolerant, and humane culture. For devout Muslims (not just radicals), this is blasphemy of the worst sort: democracy, made by man and not by Allah, is evil, and tolerance for all beliefs is a path to hell.

This ongoing failure to admit that the law of jihad is explicitly cited by spokesmen for Islamic State is the root cause of our inability to fight this war. The ancestors of today’s Europeans knew how to fight against Islamic encroachment, but today, hundreds of thousands of Muslim migrants, some of them devoted to waging jihad, are being given free access to enter Europe.

Before we’re confronted with an AK-47 killer or suicide bomber, we must confront those who claim that our lives aren’t precious enough to defend.

Readers may be surprised to learn that I watch – but am not a fan of – the apocalyptic series, The Walking Dead (TWD). Of course I dismiss the notion of zombies as pure nonsense, just as I dismiss much past and current science fiction as nonsense. However, the series fascinates me because it presents, in spite of its ludicrous premise, moral dilemmas and issues related to emergency ethics. I can’t stand the graphic comic books on which the series is based. And in this culture, with its too visible protective and insular cloak of moral relativism and multiculturalism, there isn’t much else to watch on TV.

So I’m left with a series in which zombie craniums are disabled with a squelch of a knife or by a bullet or by decapitation, and in which still-living human predators are gunned down without mercy. It says a lot about our culture that virtually the only place one might find interesting and challenging moral conflicts and compelling characterizations is in a TV horror series.

Yes, this column is connected to the Islamic raid on Paris on November 13th, and it’s about an element of “mercy” that has been introduced in the series.

In one of the very first episodes of Season One of TWD we are introduced to Morgan Jones (played by British actor, Lennie James), who saves deputy sheriff Rick Grimes (played by another Brit, Andrew Lincoln; James and Lincoln’s Georgia accents, characters, and on-screen persona are so convincing you’d hardly believe these actors are British) after the latter awakens from a coma to find the world gone to hell. He was shot by a criminal after a car chase through the Georgia countryside before the apocalypse.

Mike Lee represents Utah in the U.S. Senate. Mike Kelly represents Pennsylvania’s third district in the U.S. House of Representatives.

‘What will it take to get an agreement in Paris?”

That’s the question on the minds of environmental activists, U.S. State Department officials, and foreign bureaucrats as we approach the latest round of United Nations climate-change negotiations in France’s capital city.

It was also the question asked of Sam Kutesa, the president of the United Nations General Assembly, at an event on April 17, 2015, according to an e-mail obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request.

The author of the e-mail — subject line: “Best answer of night” — was President Obama’s chief climate-change negotiator, Todd Stern. Stern was writing to a colleague to recount how President Kutesa responded to this all-important question.

His answer? One word: “Money.”