RUTHFULLY YOURS

Sunday a week ago, the French government sponsored a solidarity rally featuring an array of foreign leaders and all domestic political parties joining together in a “sacred union” (a term recalling World War I) against the massacres at Charlie Hebdo magazine and the kosher market.

Make that all the political parties except one — the National Front (NF) headed by Marine Le Pen, ostensibly excluded because it does not subscribe to “republican values.” In reality, it was barred because, uniquely among French political parties, it opposes immigration; and other politicians fear that the NF gains in the aftermath of the massacres. Likewise, the government yesterday forbade a demonstration by the secularist Riposte Laïque organization that called for “Islamists out.”

Had they not died as part of the Charlie Hebdo killers’ final act, I wonder how much publicity the murders of Philippe Braham, Yohan Cohen, YoavHattab, and François-Michel Saada at a kosher grocery store would have attracted. An Islamic fanatic killed another quartet of Jews at the Jewish Museum in Brussels last spring, and it was a big story for a couple of days, and then faded away. Over the last decade, the Continent seems to have developed a certain psychological ease with the routine murder of Jews. What remains of Jewish communal life in Europe now takes place behind reinforced doors and barbed wire, and the actual extinction of an entire identity group’s presence is discussed as calmly as the long-range weather. Forty-five per cent of British Jews say Jews have no future in Britain, and 58 per cent says Jews have no future in Europe.

Despite administration claims to the contrary, 2014 was the year of failure on the foreign policy front. In every area of the globe chaos or instability reign.

The Middle East is a cauldron of warring factions and theological imperatives. Libya is falling under the sway of radical groups each trying to gain control of Tripoli. In essence, government has ceased to exist. French forces may be the only hope for the restoration of order, but that is not a sustainable solution.

Iraq is struggling to maintain a state that resembles the recent past. With ISIL carving out a segment for itself and the Kurds banging the drums for autonomy, the future is indefinite. A modus vivendi between Shia and Sunni leaders is also unlikely. On Iraq’s border, Syria is in a similar state of dismemberment. Assad holds on to power precariously with overt Russian support and tacit U.S. acceptance, but his base is restricted to an area around Damascus as rebels of various stripes carve up the rest of the country.

The largely ignored war in the Sinai continues unabated with Egyptian forces taking significant casualties. Sinai has become a sanctuary for terrorists who threaten Egyptian stability and Israel’s southern border.

When interviewing a Jewish woman at the unity march in Paris, BBC Reporter Tim Willcox had the temerity to admonish her, “Many critics of Israel’s policy would suggest that the Palestinians suffer hugely at Jewish hands as well.” This was a woman who herself might have been murdered in that very supermarket earlier that day. Clearly, this man lacks sensitivity and benevolence, and could never have visited Israel. He evidently attended the march not as a reporter of events, but as one whose ideology was to challenge its purpose where Jews were concerned.

The march was called and attended by more than 40 world leaders because Muslim terrorists killed 17 people – 13 for what they did (publish a satirical newspaper) and four for what they were, Jewish; Willcox attempted to justify the murder of the latter. His later retraction of the comment and explanation did not evidence an understanding of the Middle East with respect to Islam’s 1400-year history of carnage in the name of their god, conducted with the intent to establish a worldwide Caliphate and Sharia law.

Two weeks into the 2006 Second War in Lebanon, as Israel tried to put a stop to Hezbollah rockets that were pummeling huge swaths of the northern part of the country, then-U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice arrived in the region. She had come to tell Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to do his best to eliminate the terrorist threat as swiftly as possible.

During a press conference with Rice in Jerusalem, Olmert said that he was “determined to carry on the fight against Hezbollah.” This undertaking was particularly difficult, due to the fact that the arch-terrorist organization supplied by Iran placed its headquarters and bases in civilian apartment buildings and strategically stashed military materiel under structures such as nurseries and a baby-formula factory.

Sound familiar?

Seems the West will do anything these days to avoid a confrontation with Vladimir Putin.

Oleksander Turchynov, the secretary of Ukraine’s national defense council, told the country’s parliament something startling last week. He said that there were 8,500 Russian regular troops now deployed in eastern Ukraine and that another 52,000 were poised just on the other side of its eastern border.

The figures are dramatic—and so much larger than what has been reported during the months of Russian attempts to destabilize Ukraine, while Vladimir Putin ’s denials of his troops’ presence continue with stubborn ridiculousness. I asked a Western security expert if the numbers sounded plausible.

A prosecutor who fingered Iran dies the day before he was to tell all.

Argentine federal prosecutor Alberto Nisman was set to deliver proof to the Argentine Congress Monday of an alleged cover-up by President Cristina Kirchner of Iran’s responsibility in the 1994 terrorist attack on a Buenos Aires Jewish community center. Hours before the hearing, Nisman was found dead in his Buenos Aires apartment.
Argentine security officials said a .22 caliber pistol and one shell were found near the body. Within hours the government’s secretary of security declared Nisman’s death an apparent suicide. The coroner hasn’t made a final ruling but the timing of his death is cause for suspicion. Last week he filed a criminal complaint alleging that Mrs. Kirchner and foreign minister Hector Timerman conspired to bury the truth about the bombing of the Jewish center, which killed 85, in exchange for deals to sell food to Tehran and buy its oil.

The Fifth Republic has been a good home for Jews. A Sixth Republic may not be so hospitable.

Should French Jews move out? Does it make sense for a community that, in this century, has lost roughly 10 people to jihad in France, to pack up and go to Israel—where jihadis have claimed more than 1,000 Jewish lives? Haven’t the leaders of the Fifth Republic demonstrated in word and deed that they are committed to the protection of Jewish property and life?

The answer to that last question is yes, they have. The problem isn’t the Fifth Republic, in which French Jews have, on the whole, thrived. The problem is the arrival, sooner or later, of the Sixth. Which is why French Jews need to leave sooner rather than later, despite the disruption and risk, while the exits are not blocked and the way is still open.

In any litany of the failures of policy of the Obama Administration, the question of Guantánamo ranks high on the list.

The Bush Administration, in the white heat of post-9/11, absentmindedly improvised a solution to problem of the capture of prisoners of war–but in a war against a non-state entity. It chose an extra-legal method since Supreme Court decisions have set a precedent that non-citizens are entitled to the same legal rights as citizens under the constitution. And since the nationality of the party with which the U.S. was at war could not be identified, these were a new kind of POW, who (for lack of a better rubric) fell under the rubric of criminals.

Dismissing criticism of the creed that spawns so many fulminators, fanatics and public dangers as mere prejudice ignores Islam’s history, its embarrassment in failing to fulfill Divine admonitions to dominate and a scripturally endorsed contempt for rival religions. Hotheads and moderates alike, this is what Islam believes-the former simply exalt their faith with action

* * *Between people formed within “Western culture” and those in “the world of Islam” there is and has long been much fear, mistrust, anxiety and resentment -some of it born of incomprehension (and therefore “remediable” simply by the provision of facts, mere information), and some, even much, of it born not so much of an ignorance (that simple facts can dispel) as a vague memory of an adversarial relationship, even of hostilities.

On both sides, non-Muslim and Muslim alike are heirs, although differently, to a long history of historical rivalry for world ascendancy between civilizations representing the second and third “successor” variants of the unfolding Abrahamic faith tradition of ethical prophetic monotheism. For a thousand years these two rivals, these two organizing frameworks for world order, faced each other across the Mediterranean – and for much of that time the world of Islam was the more powerful, far-reaching and culturally accomplished.