Every time Obama “contextualizes,” Putin and ISIS grow bolder. Not too long ago, most Russians were reportedly unhappy with Vladimir Putin. His crackdown on freedom and his kleptocratic economy were hardly popular. Most likely, given their druthers, Russians were not all that interested in Putin’s risky and costly dream of gobbling up former Soviet Republics to create some grander version of Russia’s mess. But now? As the ruble crashes, as Russia’s oil income dives, and as sanctions start biting the man in the street, Putin, in counterintuitive fashion, is apparently more popular than ever.
Why? Because he has become an easy mechanism for ordinary Russians to vent frustration and anger over what they perceive as a too-powerful and bullying West. In a fairer world, Western decadence and self-indulgence would not have earned Americans and Western Europeans singular wealth, leisure, influence, and an overall good life — at least not more so than an Orthodox, politically proud, and historically illustrious Mother Russia.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali is the founder of the AHA Foundation and the author of Infidel, Nomad, and the forthcoming Heretic: The Case for a Muslim Reformation, to be published next spring.
ISIS is recruiting young Muslims from around the globe to Jihad, and the White House apparently doesn’t understand why
Recent days have witnessed a number of attempts to grapple valiantly with the threat posed by ISIS and radical Islam. Graeme Wood in The Atlantic and Damon Linker in The Week are among those who are now confronting the theological arguments that inspire radical Islamic fighters and groups such as ISIS.
How can the Obama Administration miss the obvious? Part of the answer lies in the groups “partnering” with, or advising, the White House on these issues. Groups such as the Muslim Public Affairs Council or the Islamic Society of North America insist that there should be no more focus at the Summit on radical Islam than on any other violent movements, even as radical Islamic movements continue to expand their influence in Syria, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Nigeria, and elsewhere.
Penny Starr of CNSNews.com has reported that the second day of this past week’s White House summit on “Countering Violent Extremism,” was initiated by an unidentified “Muslim prayer,” exclusively, while “no other religious text was presented during the portion of the event that was open to the press.” Imam Sheikh Sa’ad Musse Roble, president of the World Peace Organization in Minneapolis, MN., recited a “verse from the Koran”, in Arabic, only, followed by a translation of his words by Imam Abdisalam Adam of the Islamic Civil Society of America. Adam stated,
In translation those verses of the Koran mean ‘Whoever kills a soul unless for a soul or for corruption in the land, it’s as if he has slain mankind entirely, and whoever saves one life, it’s as if he has saved mankind entirely.”
…..And over to the right, a knot of Muslims, the men in board shorts and bare chests, the solitary woman in Koranic swimming attire – ankle-length trousers, hijab and some species of voluminous shawl that hangs limp and wet atop yet even more bolts of fabrics. Poor thing, you think, having earlier watched as she struggled from the water in that broad acreage of soggy drapery.
But they seem happy enough, gabbling and laughing, the woman included. If there is a cause for a concern, it hangs over everyone on the beach, regardless of origin and ethnicity. The afternoon’s blue skies are vanishing behind a mattress of low, dark cloud rolling in from the Bay. You can feel a storm brewing and that may well mean one of Melbourne’s infamously sudden drops in temperature, with the pelting rain and lightning that so often go with them.
Indeed, there is a distant rumble, but it could not be thunder because it comes out of the north and grows louder with every second: a Qantas jumbo is climbing out of Tullamarine. The plane is now overhead and banking to the east, setting its course for Godknowswhere. There is not yet need to fret about gathering up the towels and baskets in a sudden, wind-whipped barrage of stinging sand.
Just like everyone else, the Middle Eastern clan notices the low-flying jetliner, and one of the bearded men says something that makes his companions smile.
Then, as the plane cuts its arc above the water, he raises both arms as if to mime the shooting of a rifle, sights the jetliner with a pair of lined-up upraised thumbs and squeezes an imaginary trigger.
There are more smiles as the red tail and its flying kangaroo diminish in the distance. Just another day in multicultural Melbourne.
A President who refuses to acknowledge that Islamist terror has anything to do with Islam is a poor prospect to resist Russian ambitions in the Baltic, should Moscow next target those nations in its campaign to re-claim the former Soviet empire. As Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia understand, they are on their own.
Two weeks from now, March 11, 2015, will mark 25 years since Lithuania declared its independence from the crumbling Soviet Empire, the “evil empire”, as President Ronald Reagan so eloquently and accurately described it. Similar declarations followed from Latvia and Estonia. This milestone should be an occasion for celebration. Instead, there is growing fear about the future.
My Lithuanian-born wife is in frequent contact with family and friends in her former homeland. All have expressed fear about Russian intentions. My Brother’s-in-Law daughter is now in her third year of medicine. In her spare time she has written poetry and short stories. She has read the classics in English. The youngest son is shortly to leave school. Both were born after independence. Will they be condemned to face a loss of personal freedom in the future? I do not pretend to be a disinterested observer.
During our visit to Russia back in 2012, I noted in my travel diary the Russian ambivalence towards its Soviet past. At the Moscow River Port on July 5, 2012, just before our departure on our River Cruise to St Petersburg, I wrote: “Amused to see a cruise vessel named Felix Dzerzhinsky (founder of the Cheka). This reflects a typical Russian ambivalence about its past. Could you imagine a German cruise vessel on the Rhine being called the Heinrich Himmler?”
The problem is about the conservative culture in which the Turks take much pride. Child brides and buying brides (mostly in return for gold or cattle), are fine. Killing your daughter because she was raped is from a tradition to protect family honor. Killing your daughter because she fell in love with a boy is also normal. Covering up such horrible crimes is fine, too. But a boy putting on an earring would be unacceptable.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was angry because feminists had objected to his remark that, “in Islam, women are entrusted to men.”
Murders of women in Turkey, between 2002 and 2009, have risen by 1,400%. — BBC report, 2013.
As details leak out of the very bad deal the world powers are about to make with Iran, Bibi’s speech and position appear increasingly justified.
Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, in a public statement, referred to the threatened deal between Iran and the west, as a “bad deal,” a “very, very bad deal”
Iran looks to be the big winner in the high stakes negotiation game that the world powers, led by U.S. President Barack Obama’s team, have played like amateurs.
The biggest news is that, whereas ten years ago Iran was not permitted to have even one centrifuge, the “deal” the P5+1 will be offering, according to senior Israeli and other officials, allows Iran about 6,500 centrifuges.
Carrie Sheffield is a Warren T. Brookes Journalism Fellow for the Competitive Enterprise Institute and a former researcher for American Enterprise Institute scholar Edward Conard. She is author of editorials for The Washington Times, covered Congress for POLITICO and The Hill.
A push to “boycott, divest and sanction” (BDS) Israeli companies has limited impact on the credit profile of Israel, yet it directly harms its intended beneficiaries, the Palestinians. The BDS movement, including universities, pension funds and leaders of some Christian denominations (to the chagrin of many congregants), ignores economic data. And it coincides with a disturbing rise of violent anti-Semitism across Europe.
“The impact of BDS is more psychological than real so far and has had no discernible impact on Israeli trade or the broader economy,” Kristin Lindow, senior vice president at Moody’s Investors Service and Moody’s lead analyst for Israel (in full disclosure, a former Moody’s colleague) told Forbes. “That said, the sanctions do run the risk of hurting the Palestinian economy, which is much smaller and poorer than that of Israel, as seen in the case of SodaStream.”
If Eric Greitens sent you his résumé, you wouldn’t believe it. But maybe you have some time to kill and figure why not call him up, go to his home in Missouri, and catch him in a lie. “Very impressive resume, Mr. Greitens. A Navy SEAL and a Rhodes Scholar? Sure buddy, and I’m Mother Teresa … oh, so now you’ve worked with Mother Teresa …”
The conversation could go on like this for hours. You’d hear how This Navy SEAL who works to help veterans is entering politics. And he’s a Republicanhe spent his Duke University years tending to victims of poverty and genocide from Calcutta to Rwanda, that after Oxford he turned down his ticket to the One Percent to become a SEAL to live out his humanitarianism-through-strength dissertation thesis, that he lived off an air mattress to start a non-profit helping wounded veterans. He’d tell you that Fortune Magazine named him one of the 50 greatest leaders in the world, that Time Magazine said he’s one of the 100 most influential, that he’s only 40 years old. By the end of the conversation, you’d fly down to St. Louis to see if he’s lying when he says he’s a golden gloves champ, too.
A report from a committee of Britain’s House of Lords released Friday offers a scathing indictment of British and European policy toward Russia. Europe went “sleep-walking” into the crisis in Ukraine, says Lord Christopher Tugendhat, the committee chairman. “The lack of robust analytical capability” in Western foreign ministries “effectively led to a catastrophic misreading of the mood in the run-up to the crisis.” Matters were made worse by an “optimistic premise” in Britain and the European Union that Russia was moving in the right direction when it came to democracy and the rule of law.
It’s a bald and brutal judgment. But the truth about U.K. policy toward Russia is so much worse.
That truth is buried with the remains of the late Alexander Litvinenko. The one-time KGB agent defected to Britain after credibly accusing his former masters of orchestrating the 1999 bombings of Russian apartment buildings—death toll: 293—as a pretext to restart the war in Chechnya and bring Vladimir Putin to power. In November 2006, Litvinenko ingested a fatal dose of polonium-210. He died three weeks later, naming Mr. Putin as the man who ordered his murder.
