RUTHFULLY YOURS

Russia’s options in Syria are poor. While Vladimir Putin intervened to save his client Assad and Russian access to warm-water ports, it is beginning to look as if air power won’t do the job for Russia any more than it will for the U.S. – and the Russians are using much higher volumes. In addition, it appears that Russia will suffer now from pushback, the first incident of which might have been the jetliner downed over Sinai.What can Putin do? Cutting a deal with Saudi Arabia may be the least of several not-very-good options.

Putin’s goal was initially to stave off the imminent collapse of the Syrian regime. Assad’s army was suffering from large-scale defections, and Iran and Hezbollah were proving to be less than capable foot soldiers. (As a reminder, the Iranians were poor soldiers in the field during the Iran-Iraq war and consequently turned to asymmetric warfare in the late 1980s.) The Russians have hinted that Iran made repeated requests for intervention. Syria likely asked for help and – minimally – approved and facilitated Russian aircraft, pilots and support personnel coming into the country.

The emission-cut pledges will cost $1 trillion a year and avert warming of less than one degree by 2100.
The United Nations climate conference in Paris starting Nov. 30 will get under way when most minds in the French capital will still understandably be on the recent terror attacks. But for many of the 40,000 attendees, the goal is to ensure that climate change stays on the global economic agenda for the next 15 years.

The Paris conference is the culmination of many such gatherings and is expected to produce agreements on combating climate change. President Obama and the dozens of other world leaders planning to be in Paris should think carefully about the economic impact—in particular the staggering costs—of the measures they are contemplating.

The U.N.’s climate chief, Christiana Figueres, says openly that the aim of the talks is “to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the industrial revolution.” That outlook will be welcome among attendees like the delegation from Bolivia. That country’s official material submitted for the talks proposes a “lasting solution” for climate change: “We must destroy capitalism.”

Terror groups have for years waged a technical battle with Western intelligence services that have sought to constrain them through a web of electronic surveillance.

The Paris attacks, apparently planned under the noses of French and Belgian authorities, raise the possibility that Islamic State adherents have found ways around the dragnet.

French authorities say two of the attackers knew each other in prison, but it isn’t clear how the group communicated in plotting and coordinating the Friday attacks. Intelligence services have monitored communications from one terror suspect, Belgian Islamist Abdelhamid Abaaoud, between Syria and alleged associates in Belgium and Morocco.

LEADING commentator Janet Daley’s article in Saturday’s Telegraph ‘The West is at war with a death cult’ stands for everything that is woeful about European elites’ response to Islamic jihad.
It is a triumph of religious illiteracy.

The jihadist enemy, she asserts, is utterly unintelligible, so beyond encompassing in ‘coherent, systematic thought’ that no vocabulary can describe it: ‘This is just insanity’, she writes. Because the enemy is ‘hysterical’, lacking ‘rational demands’, ‘negotiable limits,’ or ‘intelligible objectives’ Daley claims it is pointless to subject its actions to any form of historical, social or theological analysis, for no-one should attempt to ‘impose logic on behaviour that is pathological’.

Despite this, Daley then ventures to offer analysis of and explanations for ISIS’ actions, but in doing so she relies upon her own conceptual categories, not those of ISIS.

Her explanations therefore fall wide of the mark.

Leaders at the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) condemn Friday’s coordinated terrorist attacks in Paris that left an estimated 130 people dead. They really, really condemn it.
But if the discussion turns to the terrorists’ religious motivations, they’ll condemn that, too. Beginning with social media posts and a news conference with leaders of other Muslim organizations Saturday, CAIR is waging a campaign to stifle any reference to the Islamist ideology that drove the Islamic State attack on Paris.
If defeating ISIS requires a war of ideas among Muslims to determine how literally to apply the Quran, CAIR wants no part.
“Let’s not legitimize ISIS and help them in their propaganda by calling them the Islamic State,” CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad told reporters.” They’re not Islamic. They’re not state. They’re anti-Islamic. Let’s not call them jihadis. They have nothing to do with jihad. Jihad is a legitimate self-defense in Islam. Let’s not give them this legitimizing title. They are brutal killers. They have no legitimacy

The historian Arnold Toynbee once wrote – in what has become a cliché – that “Civilizations die as a result of suicide, rather than murder.” Toynbee was obviously referring to self-inflicted wounds – moral breakdown, loss of confidence. Alas, that can now be observed across the western civilization landscape. The irrational attacks on the First Amendment by students at Yale and University of Missouri and the metastizing spread of hateful and divisive diatribes in institutions of so-called higher learning point to a desire to destroy western civilization.

It appears to be working. The cowardice of those who should resist the loud and defiant is also on display. The White House is conspicuously absent from this assault on basic freedom. Fear seems to have locked the lips of sensible voices. And mainstream media rationalize the mindless and bullying behavior of soi disant campus revolutionaries. It is a magisterial failure that warrants attention as a civilizational affliction.

We live in the age of the sanctified tantrum—the political and religious furies we dare not name or shame, much less confront.

Students bully college administrators with contrived political demands. The administrators plead they can do better, then capitulate. Incompetent writers pen trite racial screeds aimed at the very society that lifts them above their ability. They are hailed as geniuses. Donald Trump’s bid for the Republican presidential nomination epitomizes the politics of the tantrum. He’s angry as hell, and so is his base. We’re supposed to respect this.

And then there is the tantrum of Islam, another eruption of rage that feeds off our astonishing willingness to indulge it.

Before Friday’s carnage in the City of Light, the world was treated to the hideous spectacle of Palestinians knifing Jews in Israel. The supposed motive of these stabbings was a rumor among Palestinians—fanned by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas—that the Israeli government intended to allow Jews to pray on the Temple Mount.