RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.jns.org/opinion/the-ayatollahs-anxiety-is-showing/

Whether the uprising in Iran is leading to the ultimate collapse of the 40-year reign of the ayatollahs remains to be seen. But there is reason to believe that, unlike the protests of 2009-10 and 2017-18, the current unrest has weakened the regime’s grip irreparably.

One good sign is that today’s demonstrations have spread to rural areas of the enormous country, beyond the cities. And though they are being met with the same kind of violence as those that were quelled in the past, they do not seem to be abating. Indeed, even the mass arrests and gunning down of thousands of protesters by mullah-led militias and police have not succeeded in extinguishing the fire in the hungry bellies of the populace.

Another indication of cracks in the Islamic Republic’s armor is the panic that it has been exhibiting in relation to the assault on its hegemonic agenda by the United States and Israel.

The White House withdrawal from the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)—the disastrous nuclear deal pushed through at all cost by the previous administration in Washington—and simultaneous increase in sanctions has made it more difficult for the Islamic Republic to keep up the pace of its spinning centrifuges without emptying its till and the pockets of its citizenry. Which is why the latter took to the streets on Nov. 15 in the first place, initially to decry a government hike in gas prices.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15262/norway-koran-translation

This 2013 Norwegian-language “Koran” is available online. A perusal of key passages, however, shows that it bears little or no resemblance to the actual Koran.

Let us hope that the word gets around that the book they are being handed is not really the Koran at all.

To borrow a phrase from Lewis Carroll, the news about the aftermath of a public Koran-burning in Kristiansand, Norway, on November 16, keeps getting curiouser and curiouser.

As explained in previous pieces here, the 30 or more police officers who were on hand at the event, which was organized by a group called Stop the Islamization of Norway (Stopp Islamiseringen av Norge – SIAN) were under secret orders from the chief of the Norwegian police, Benedicte Bjørnland, not just to douse any flaming Koran but to keep SIAN members from setting fire to a copy of the Muslim holy book in the first place. Bjørnland had maintained that the so-called “racism clause” of Norway’s criminal law gave her the power to issue such orders, while the Minister of Justice, Jøran Kallmyr, made the puzzling comment that while burning the Koran was legal, it could “become” a crime, a statement that made no more sense in Norwegian than it does in English.

To be sure, Bjørnland and Kallmyr, when confronted on a TV debate program on November 25 by politicians of the left and right as well as by a jurist, pulled back on their claims and acknowledged the primacy of free expression – although Bjørnland, apparently unable to shake off the idea that the intactness of any given copy of the Koran should be more sacred than free speech, clung to her line that the situation was “complicated.”

Nonetheless, the case seemed to be closed. Alas, not for long. Afterwards, Deputy Foreign Minister Jens Frølich Holte felt obliged to weigh in. He wrote an op-ed in which he condemned SIAN’s Koran-burning in the name of the Norwegian government and explained that whereas Norwegians do indeed have the right to say what they wish, their government also has the right to condemn what they say. The question Holte did not address in his op-ed was this: why, in a country with more than its share of newspaper op-ed pages, online news and opinion websites, and news discussion programs on TV and radio, does the government only feel obliged to refute publicly a private citizen’s point of view when that point of view concerns the topic of just one religion?

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2019/12/vladimir-bukovsky-the-dissident-who-won/

Vladimir Bukovsky, the great anti-Soviet dissident, died on Sunday, November 4. Five days later the thirtieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall was celebrated throughout Europe but especially in the cities of Warsaw, Prague, Budapest and points east whose liberation had been entrenched by that symbolic event on November 9, 1989. 

Some of Bukovsky’s obituarists saw a poignancy in the near coincidence of the two dates because they believe the democratic promise of 1989 has not been fully realised in a “Europe whole and free”. But I don’t think Bukovsky, whom I was fortunate to know as a friend, felt quite that sentiment.

He undoubtedly believed strongly that the promise of 1991 when the Soviet Union disintegrated had been illusory. Admittedly, the USSR was no more, its constituent republics had regained their independence, the Communist Party had been defeated and discredited, and a revived Russian national state under Boris Yeltsin was restoring democratic government. All these, especially the independence of the Baltic republics (which has been sustained), obviously delighted him.