RUTHFULLY YOURS

UNITED NATIONS—Senior U.N. officials and diplomats on Monday engaged in a flurry of diplomatic initiatives to contain the growing crisis between Iran and Saudi Arabia.

The effort, they said, was to prevent U.N.-led peace initiatives in Syria and Yemen from being derailed, after Saudi Arabia and its allies severed or downgraded ties with Iran over attacks against the Saudi embassy in Tehran.

The U.N. Security Council later Monday issued a statement condemning the attacks on the embassy and Saudi consulate in Mashad—by Iranians protesting the kingdom’s execution of a Shiite cleric—and sharply criticized Iran for failing to protect diplomatic premises. The council also called on all parties to maintain dialogue and take steps to reduce tensions in the region.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called the foreign ministers of Iran and Saudi Arabia on Sunday and Monday to express his concerns over the escalating crisis and to seek reassurance that the two countries would remain committed to peace talks.

“The security-general urged both foreign ministers to avoid any actions that could further exacerbate the situation between two countries and in the region as a whole,” Mr. Ban’s statement said.

The U.N. said it was sending its special envoy for Syria, Staffan de Mistura, to Riyadh on Monday and to Tehran later this week to mediate and seek reassurance that the Syria talks would remain on track. Officials said the U.N. special envoy for Yemen also would stop in Riyadh this week.

Two thousand sixteen will be the year of America living dangerously. Barack Obama will devote his last full year in office to shaping a liberal legacy, irrespective of real-world results. America’s enemies will see his last year as an opportunity to take what they can, while they can. America’s allies, or former allies, will do what they must.

And then Hillary Clinton will likely become president. Whether the Republican Party chooses to remain intact remains to be seen.

For aficionados of political delusion, it must have been fun to watch Mr. Obama rattle off his list of foreign-policy accomplishments at his year-end press conference last month. There was the Paris climate deal, the Iran nuclear deal, the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, the opening to Cuba—“steady, persistent work,” the president said, that was “paying off for the American people in big, tangible ways.”

Tangible means perceptible by touch. But the Paris climate accord is voluntary and unenforceable; the Pacific trade deal is unratified and unpopular, especially among Democrats; the opening to Cuba is “tangible” only if you enjoy taking your beach holiday in a dictatorship that, as my colleague Mary O’Grady has noted, made some 8,000 political arrests in 2015—that is, after it normalized relations with the U.S.

A recent Heritage Foundation panel – worth watching in full online – welcomed Muslim reformers from around the world to speak about the doctrinal roots of global dangers emanating from Islam today. The Washington, D.C. event was refreshingly frank about the urgency in fighting the violence in Islam.

Former Pakistani parliamentarian and author Farahnaz Ispahani called “Islamic extremism is the primary national security and human rights concern of the world today.” In a play off of the Islamic doctrine of Dar al-Islam, or House of Islam, Danish-Syrian parliamentarianNaser Khader compared Christian and Islamic civilizations to two houses. “In the past, there were lots of wrongdoings in the name of Jesus,” he said. “But today, Christianity is a beautiful house.” He touched on human rights abuses that mark the Islam house’s dilapidation and impressed upon the audience the necessity of Islamic reform. “If we don’t start this enormous renovation project, I am afraid the house will collapse and turn even worse.”

Saudi Arabia severed ties with Iran following protests over the execution of Shiite cleric Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr.

Riyadh expelled Iran’s diplomats on Jan. 3, citing attacks on the Saudi Embassy in Tehran in which protesters set part of the building on fire. Saudi ally Bahrain followed suit in cutting off relations on Jan. 4 as did Sudan. The United Arab Emirates has downgraded ties.

It is not known how far tensions will spiral out of control. Saudi Arabia and Iran back opposite sides in the wars in Syria and Yemen and also have very different attitudes on Iraq, where Iran funds, arms and trains Shiite militias, which have been accused of sectarian atrocities against Sunnis.

It is important to remember both Saudi Arabia and Iran are states which implement sharia as state law. Both carry out executions of gays, alleged blasphemers and adulterers. Both implement strict dress codes for women and enforce them with roaming bands of morality police.

A new Islamic State video surfaced purporting to show the execution of five British spies.

The 10-minute video features a masked man with a British accent who calls the video “a message to David Cameron.”

He calls Cameron “Slave of the White House; Mule of the Jews,” mocking the British contribution to the war effort as insignificant.

He says the Islamic State will remain and “will continue to wage jihad, break borders and one day invade your land, where we will rule by the sharia.”

The executioner then says Britain will lose the war, as it lost in Iraq and Afghanistan, before shooting the captives. At the start of the video each captive gave a video confession detailing his alleged crimes in Arabic.

The video concludes with a young boy saying “we are going to kill the kuffar over there.”

It was unheard-of for Soviet ambassadors to keep personal diaries during Stalin’s rule, for on return to the USSR those diaries would be examined by the relevant authorities and could prove fatal to the diarist. Ivan Maisky kept very detailed diaries over his period as Soviet Ambassador to Great Britain (1932 to 1943) and years later used them, but very selectively, as the basis for a series of memoirs. Only following their discovery by Gabriel Gorodetsky in the archives of the Russian Foreign Ministry in more recent times have they been made available to the world, first in Russian and, just a few weeks ago, in English.

Ivan Maiskii or Maisky (properly Ivan Mikhailovich Lyakhovetsky), like his mentor, Soviet Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov (also a Jew), belonged to the old school of Soviet diplomacy, which is to say he was expected to establish close working and social relationships with the most senior British political figures, informing Moscow of developments and endeavouring to influence British policy in his own country’s interests—the normal function of any senior diplomat, and one in which Maisky revelled and excelled. This traditional role, where personal initiative was vital, all but vanished in the late 1930s and 1940s under Molotov as Foreign Minister: Soviet ambassadors were now to do little more than execute orders from Moscow.

Maisky’s performance of the traditional role, one Stalin certainly understood and initially supported, is what makes these diaries so revelatory. Writing them, Maisky was aware of Stalin as a potential reader (he later willed them to the dictator), and assumed Stalin would understand what was required to get the diplomatic work done. Maisky was indispensable to Stalin in London because he alone had all the requisite contacts, their trust, confidence and (in many cases) liking. His best trick, as Gorodetsky repeatedly shows, was “to convey to Moscow his own ideas, while attributing them to his interlocutors. It was the only effective way of operating, with the Terror raging in the 1930s.”

Daniel Johnson, the founder and editor of the British monthly Standpoint, writes widely on politics, culture, and religion

Europe is a continent, and an idea, with an alternately heroic and ignominious past and with what seemed, until recently, to be an enviable present. But does it have a future? The November 13 terrorist attacks in Paris marked the culmination—so far—of a concerted campaign directed mainly at Europeans and orchestrated, or inspired, first by al-Qaeda (Madrid 2004, London 2005) and more recently by the self-proclaimed caliphate based in the Islamic State of Syria and Iraq. The latest round of carnage began with the 2014 attack on the Jewish Museum in Brussels, was stepped up in January of this past year with the Charlie Hebdo and kosher-supermarket massacres in Paris, continued with shootings at a free-speech gathering in Copenhagen and mass assaults on European tourists in Tunisia, followed by explosions in Ankara and Beirut and reaching a crescendo with the multiple attacks in Paris.

Europeans are now faced with questions they have hitherto preferred to dodge. Are Europeans ready to fight for Europe? What is the place of Islam in a post-Christian Europe? Or, to look at it from the jihadist point of view, what is the place of Europe in a fast-expanding and globalized Islam? Is 21st-century Europe still the heart of Western civilization, or is it changing out of all recognition?

However one answers those questions, a brave new world seems to be emerging in which Europe becomes the theater where the clash of civilizations is played out. So far, the signs are that this encounter will be no more peaceful than it has been in the Middle East.

Instead of wishing Palestinians a happy and prosperous New Year, both Fatah and Hamas are asking their people to prepare for increased violence and “resistance,” including suicide bombings, against Israelis.

Fatah’s armed wing used the occasion to issue yet another threat: “We will continue in the path of the martyrs until the liberation of all of Palestine.”

Masked Palestinians in Bethlehem attacked several restaurants and halls where New Year’s Eve parties were supposed to take place. The assailants, eyewitnesses reported, were affiliated with Abbas’s Fatah faction, not Hamas.

Hamas banned Gazans from celebrating New Year’s Eve, saying such parties are “in violation of Islamic teachings.” Hamas does not want young Palestinians enjoying their time in restaurants and cafes. Instead, Hamas wants them to join its forces, armed and dressed in military fatigues, preparing for jihad against Israel.

The mayor of the southern French city of Beziers is facing heavy criticism and accusations of racism after sharply denouncing a Muslim group’s offer to protect a church during a Christmas midnight mass.

Robert Menard, elected mayor of Beziers’ 72,000 inhabitants in 2014 with the support of France’s nationalist party, Front National, didn’t pull any punches when condemning the Muslim initiative. Responding on the city’s website on December 26 in an entry titled “Muslim Guard: What Is the State Doing?” he wrote:

“A Muslim guard ‘protecting’ a Catholic church. Against whom? Hordes of Buddhist monks? Siberian shamans? Who are they mocking here? And where is this country going? Since when do the arsonists protect against fires?”

Menard, the former head of the respected ‘Reporters Without Borders’ organization, later pointed out that the proposal was simply a “foretaste of the Lebanisation of France” and that the Muslim group making the offer is led by “two activists known for their fundamentalist and anti-Israeli stances.” Menard stated the Muslim group made the same offer at the city’s 13th-century cathedral, adding he will inform police about this ‘Muslim guard’.

To advance its diplomatic opening to Iran, the administration spied on both law-abiding US citizens and on US lawmakers.

It is far from clear why senior Obama administration officials told The Wall Street Journal that under President Barack Obama, the National Security Agency has been aggressively spying not only on Israeli officials but on US citizens and lawmakers who communicate with Israeli officials. Perhaps they were trying to make Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu look like a fool.

After all, the article concludes that the NSA intercepts of these communications “revealed one surprise.”

“Mr. Netanyahu and some of his allies voiced confidence they could win enough votes” in Congress to scuttle Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran.

Ha ha. What dummies.

If their goal was simply to show that the White House has more leverage over Democratic lawmakers than the Israeli government does, then the article overshot the mark.

Beyond expressing the administration’s contempt for Netanyahu, the Journal’s article showed that Netanyahu isn’t the only one the administration sneers at.

It sneers at the American public and at members of Congress as well. And in so doing, it sneers at and deliberately breaks US law and tramples the US Constitution.

Under US law, American intelligence gathering agencies, including the NSA, are only permitted to spy on US citizens in order to protect US national security.

Under the US Constitution, the administration is arguably prohibited from spying on US lawmakers.