RUTHFULLY YOURS

On Friday, in Jeddah, Saudi Arabian authorities began carrying out their sentence of 1,000 lashes for Saudi blogger Raif Badawi, co-founder of a web site, now banned, called the Liberal Saudi Network. The whipping began with 50 lashes, a process which according to various reports will be repeatedly roughly weekly until all 1,000 lashes have been inflicted — some 50 lashes per week, over the next 20 weeks. That’s just part of his sentence. As Amnesty International [1] summarizes the case:

Raif Badawi was sentenced to 10 years in prison, 1,000 lashes and a fine of 1 million Saudi Arabian riyals (about US$266,000) last year for creating an online forum for public debate and accusations that he insulted Islam.

Reporters without Borders, which has been calling for Badawi’s sentence to be overturned, released a statement [2] that his “only crime was to start a public debate about the way Saudi society is evolving.” The BBC, drawing on AFP eye-witness quotes, summarizes the scene [3] of the lashing in Jeddah:

France’s terror rampage ended Friday as police killed three Islamists, but not before they had paralyzed much of the country, taken more hostages, and killed at least four more innocents. Europe and the U.S. had better brace for more such attacks, while reinforcing the antiterror defenses, moral and military, that have come under political assault in recent years.
***

The biggest question raised by Paris is whether it presages a new offensive by homegrown jihadists carrying European or U.S. passports who are inspired by al Qaeda or Islamic State. Officials say one of the killers was trained by the al Qaeda offshoot in Yemen, and we can expect other such links or sympathies.

It’s tempting but probably wrong to think that France has a unique jihadist problem because of its relatively large Muslim population (about 7.5% of the country) and the immigrant ghettoes where they congregate. These certainly are breeding grounds for radicalism. Yet the United Kingdom has Birmingham, the Islamist petri dish for the London subway bombers, and the U.S. sheltered the killer Tsarnaevs in Boston and the Somali immigrants in Minnesota who’ve gone to Syria.

Israel’s Minister Without ApologiesA rising conservative star says the old formulas for pursuing peace with the Palestinians are obsolete. The two-state solution? Not anytime soon.

Tel Aviv

It’s election season in Israel, and so far the most talked-about campaign ad features an Orthodox politician in an unorthodox role. In a YouTube video that quickly went viral, Naftali Bennett plays a fashionably bearded Tel Aviv hipster with a compulsion to say sorry—especially when he’s the one being wronged.

A waitress spills coffee on him: He begs her forgiveness. His car gets rear-ended: He steps out to tell the offending driver how sorry he is. He sits on a park bench and reads an editorial in a left-wing newspaper calling on Israel to apologize to Turkey for the 2010 flotilla incident, in which nine pro-Palestinian militants were killed aboard a ship after violently assaulting Israeli naval commandos. “They’re right!” he says of the editorial.

At last the fake beard comes off and the clean-shaven Mr. Bennett, who in real life is Israel’s minister of economy and heads the nationalist Jewish Home Party (in Hebrew, Habayit Hayehudi), looks at the camera and says: “Starting today, we stop apologizing. Join Habayit Hayehudi today.”

Notwithstanding the conventional claim that Israel is increasingly isolated, the multinational accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers determined that 2014 was a record year of overseas investments in Israel’s high-tech industries: $15bn in acquisitions of 52 Israeli startups (compared to $7.6bn in 2013), in addition to $9.8bn raised by 18 Israeli companies in overseas stock exchanges (compared to $1.2bn in 2013). Once again, Israel’s impact on global medicine, health, agriculture, irrigation, energy alternatives, science, cyber, homeland security and defense, as well as Wall Street, supersedes the impact of Gaza Strip.
But, Israel is increasingly isolated…

Since 1948, a recycled assumption has maintained (e.g., the 1975 “Zionism is racism” UN resolution) that an anti-Israel global Tsunami is about to smother the Jewish State, triggering unprecedented isolation, the collapse of its international standing and the breakdown of its ties with the US, unless it committed itself – in the unpredictable, unstable, violent Middle East – to re-dividing Jerusalem, uprooting over 500,000 Jewish settlers, and retreating to a 9-15 mile sliver along the Mediterranean, which is dominated by the mountain ridges of Judea and Samaria.

However, the demise of the USSR (which facilitated the 1991 revocation of the USSR-sponsored “Zionism is Racism”), the affirmation of the USA as the dominant super power, the upgraded US-Israel mutually-beneficial cooperation, and the emergence of Israel as a global commercial and military high tech power, have enhanced Israel’s global standing, dramatically expanding Israel’s global networking, beyond Europe, into India, China, Russia, the former Muslim Republics of the USSR, Latin America, all irrespective of diplomatic setbacks.

On the day when journalists were massacred in Paris, while blood still ran wet where they had fallen, and as eye witnesses described the killers’ shouts of “Allahu Akbar” – “Allah is great” – the New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof asked the world not to judge the killers too quickly: most urgently, he said, don’t jump to the conclusion they are Muslims.

Really? Even when they sounded the Muslim prayer? Even when they called their deeds, loud and clear in the streets of Paris, “vengeance for the Prophet”?

Here’s what Kristof did not do: condemn the killings. Praise those who had been slaughtered. Express horror at their execution. And admit that men who praise Allah after committing mass murder are, religious profiling or not, probably going to turn out to be Muslim.

The Islamist massacre at Charlie Hebdo has understandably captured global attention because it was a barbaric attack on France and freedom of expression. In a moment of defiant moral clarity, “je suis Charlie” emerged as a popular phrase of solidarity with the victims. Hopefully such clarity persists and extends to those facing similar challenges every day in the Middle East.

Christians and other religious minorities have been beheaded by Islamists for years, but it wasn’t until US journalist James Foley was beheaded that the West cared. The Islamic State raped and slaughtered thousands of Yazidis — leaving the surviving refugees stranded on Mount Sinjar — before the West took notice. But one Islamist besieging a cafe in Sydney, killing two, dominated global coverage for the entire 16-hour incident.

Jeannette Bougrab was the girlfriend of Charlie Hebdo’s editor-in-chief Stéphane “Charb” Charbonnier and she spoke out about the murders.

In emotional interviews, 41-year-old Jeannette Bougrab said: ‘I always knew he was going to die like Theo Van Gogh (the Dutch cartoonist murdered in 2004).’

‘I begged him to leave France but he wouldn’t. My companion is dead because he drew in a newspaper.’

Miss Bougrab, who had lived with Charb and her adopted daughter May for three years, added sadly: ‘He never had children because he knew he was going to die. He lived without fear, but he knew he would die.’

Proudly, Bougrab added: ‘He died standing.

‘He defended secularism. He defended the spirit of Voltaire. He, in fact, was really the fruit of this ideal of the Republic that we’ve almost forgotten.

‘He died, executed with his comrades, as he would say.’

Bougrab, a member of the French National Council of State who served under Nicolas Sarkozy’s administration has been described as a ‘hard secularist’.

Why Is The West Always Shocked?

9/11 happens in America & the Americans
are shocked.

7/11 happens in Britain & the Brits
are shocked.

Attacks happen in Madrid & the Spanish
are shocked.

Attacks happen in Australia & the Australians
are shocked.

Attacks happen in Canada & the Canadians
are shocked.

Attacks happen in France & the French
are shocked.

Attacks have been happening in Israel for decades &
the world yawns.

Notice a problem here?

“Don’t tell me about how Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama “condemn terrorism in the strongest possible terms.” They “condemn” it in the most vapid words. Islamic-supremacists don’t hear the words. They hear the groveling.”

If constitutional constraints and Western tradition won’t abide laws that bar speaking against Islam, then we’ll just have to rely on extortion. On that, Hillary Clinton and Anjem Choudary could not have been clearer, or more in sync.

Mr. Choudary argued the case as an Islamic-supremacist imam from Britain — one who makes no bones about his desire that sharia, Islam’s repressive legal code, be imposed throughout the West, very much including America.

Mrs. Clinton argued the case as America’s secretary of state.

Against that backdrop, we consider this week’s carnage in Paris: A savage exercise in extortion for the precise purpose of suppressing free speech derisive of Islam — not just silencing Charlie Hebdo with extreme prejudice but making the satirical magazine a chilling example of what happens when Islamic supremacists are crossed.

P.S. Apart from readers of Trollope, who often refers to “hebdomadal”
(i.e., weekly) church occasions, how many people do you suppose know what
“CharlieHebdo”
means? EDWARD ALEXANDER
“this is how the world ends…”

–T. S. Eliot
On Thursday, White House press secretary Josh Earnest announced that the
Obama administration would “prioritize” fighting Islamophobia in the
aftermath of the terrorist attack on Charlie Hebdo in France….

The real problem, according to the Obama administration, is lack of
leadership in defending Islam: