RUTHFULLY YOURS

Saudi Arabia said Saturday it has executed 47 prisoners, including reformist Shiite cleric and activist Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr.
Al-Nimr was a central figure in Shiite protests that erupted in 2011 as part of the Arab Spring, and carrying out his execution may spark new unrest among the OPEC powerhouse’s Shiite minority.

The cleric’s name was among a list of the 47 carried by the state-run Saudi Press Agency. It cited the Interior Ministry for the information. Saudi state television also reported the executions.
Related: Crucifixion Sentence in Saudi Arabia Sparks Outcry
Saudi Arabia carried out at least 157 executions in 2015, with beheadings reaching their highest level in the kingdom in two decades, according to several advocacy groups that monitor the death penalty worldwide.

His 17-year-old nephew was sentenced to crucifixion earlier this year but was not among those put to death this time.
Maya Foa, a spokeswoman for rights group Reprieve, said 4 of the 47 executed were political prisoners.
“Last year saw Saudi Arabia execute over 150 people, many of them for non-violent offences,” she said. “This appalling news suggests 2016 could be even worse. Alarmingly, the Saudi Government is continuing to target those who have called for domestic reform in the kingdom.

Razeen Sally is Associate Professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore.

China’s “market Leninism” graphically illustrates the tension between a static political system and a fast-changing, globally integrated market economy. Will China’s party-state adapt, or will it stagnate and get stuck in the middle-income trap? The auguries are not good.
Without innovations, no entrepreneurs; without entrepreneurial achievement, no capitalist returns and no capitalist propulsion. The atmosphere of industrial revolutions—of “progress”—is the only one in which capitalism can survive. —Joseph Schumpeter, Business Cycles, 1939

My last Quadrant essay (November 2015) was on economic liberalism in Asia. Here I switch focus to capitalism in Asia. I say “capitalism” deliberately. What does it mean?

A capitalist economy is, of course, a market economy: the exchange of goods and services at freely forming prices in a system that unites production and consumption. This was what Adam Smith meant by a market economy; he also emphasised property rights and “natural liberty”, or what we now call economic freedom—the individual’s freedom to produce and consume, and to use his property rights, as he sees fit. But capitalism suggests more than “market economy”. I use it in the Schumpeterian sense. For hovering above this essay is Joseph Schumpeter, one of the great twentieth-century economists; he was also perhaps the greatest historian of economic thought of all time, and surely one of social science’s most colourful and dazzling performing artists.

Karl Marx wrote about “capital”—the stock of wealth around which production and class relations are structured. Werner Sombart, from the last generation of Germany’s Historical School of economics, was the first to refer to “capitalism”. But Schumpeter had a different vision of capitalism. Vision was one of his favourite words. Today the word is debased, for everyone has a “vision”, just as everyone has a “philosophy”. But Schumpeter meant something precise: a vision is a personal conception of how a whole system works, before filling in its compartments and its nuts and bolts. He laid out his vision of capitalism first in The Theory of Economic Development, and later, encompassingly, in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy.

Sweden is a country where using the word “mass immigration” usually gets criticized just for sounding racist. Only anti-Semitism does not get criticized. In Sweden, all other forms of racism — even things that some say could be classified as racism — are criticized, and ruthlessly.

TV4, one of the most important Swedish media outlets, in 2015 described anti-Semitism as simply a “different opinion.”

“What is history for us is not the history of others. … When we have other students who have studied other history books, there is no point in discussing facts against facts.” — The administration of an adult-education school, in a reprimand to a teacher who said the Holocaust actually took place.

“The Jews are campaigning against me.” — Swedish Foreign Minister Margot Wallström.

There are fewer than 20,000 Jews in Sweden; more than 20,000 Syrians received asylum in 2014 alone. That is why so few politicians — who are eager to win the votes of immigrants — talk about Arab anti-Semitism.

President Obama imagined he could end his second term with an arms-control detente with Iran the way Ronald Reagan did with the Soviet Union. It looks instead that his nuclear deal has inspired Iran toward new military aggression and greater anti-American hostility.

The U.S. and United Nations both say Iran is already violating U.N. resolutions that bar Iran from testing ballistic missiles. Iran has conducted two ballistic-missile tests since the nuclear deal was signed in July, most recently in November. The missiles seem capable of delivering nuclear weapons with relatively small design changes.

The White House initially downplayed the missile tests, but this week it did an odd flip-flop on whether to impose new sanctions in response. On Wednesday it informed Congress that it would target a handful of Iranian companies and individuals responsible for the ballistic-missile program. Then it later said it would delay announcing the sanctions, which are barely a diplomatic rebuke in any case, much less a serious response to an arms-control violation.

JERUSALEM—A gunman opened fire outside a popular bar in the coastal Israeli city of Tel Aviv on Friday afternoon, killing two people and wounding at least three others before he fled the scene, police said.

The motive for the shooting spree, which took place on a busy street, wasn’t immediately clear, police said. Media reported the assailant was a member of Israel’s Arab minority and called it a nationalistically motivated attack, but police refused to comment, saying the investigation was under way.

Israeli Channel 10 TV showed CCTV footage of the incident, obtained from a health-food shop next to the bar. The video showed a man with short hair, glasses and a black bag over his shoulder scooping up some nuts, putting them in a plastic bag, then emptying them back. The footage then showed the man walking toward the entrance of the store, placing his backpack on a shopping cart and taking a gun out of it. He then stepped outside and started shooting, after which he ran away.

The final planning for the terrorist attack in Paris last month might have taken place in the Molenbeek district of Brussels—but, like the massacre in San Bernardino, Calif., weeks later, the inspiration came from a continent away, in the self-proclaimed caliphate of Islamic State, or ISIS. The difference: ISIS directly engineered the Paris slaughter, while the San Bernardino killers appear to have simply taken cues from the terror group.

Even so, ISIS propagandists have been promising for months to bring the full panoply of their horror to Europe and the U.S. They began the Twitter hashtag #WeWillBurnAmerica. An article this spring in the official ISIS magazine, Dabiq, promised an attack that would make “any past operation,” including 9/11, look like a mere “squirrel shoot.”

Many in the West view Islamic State’s barbaric crimes—its genocidal campaign against the region’s Christians and Yazidis; its lovingly choreographed beheadings of innocent journalists and aid workers—with horrified bafflement. They see ISIS as an aberration that appeared last year as if out of nowhere. They have a vague idea that it is related to, or grew out of, al Qaeda.

My friend Ingrid Carlqvist, whom I had the great pleasure to see during my trip to Copenhagen for the Motoon anniversary, provides a round-up from Sweden of a month in multiculturalism. Scandinavia is much admired by Bernie Sanders and other liberal progressives as the natural end-point of civilized societies. Sanders et al neglect the most salient feature of these Nordic boutique states: They are highly developed societies with a small population (Sweden has just under ten million people, Denmark about five million) that until very recently was racially and culturally homogeneous and with the necessary high degree of social solidarity to sustain a welfare state. Importing large numbers of young men from the most institutionally misogynist societies on earth to live among blonde Swedish totty would be an unlikely recipe for social stability, but that’s no reason not to give it a go. Ingrid reports:

The Swedish Immigration Service sent out a press release, saying that it had hired close to a thousand additional employees since June. The Immigration Service now has over 7,000 employees, including hourly workers and consultants — double the 3,350 employees who worked there in 2012. Most of the new recruits work with the legal processing of asylum applications, but the units dealing with receiving migrants and filing their initial applications have also expanded considerably. As if the record influx of migrants this autumn were not crushing enough, the Immigration Service also had trouble retaining its staff.

What do the Swedish people get for doubling the size of their immigration service? Well, a lot of bonnie, bouncing, bearded infants:

Whistleblower Merit Wager revealed on her blog that administrators at the Immigration Service had all been ordered to “accept the claim that an applicant is a child, if he does not look as if he is over 40.”

This matters because, in most EU countries, a “child” gets a firmer grip on the public teat than a mere “refugee” adult does. A 17-year-old “refugee” is entitled to the same treatment in law as a 17-year-old child citizen. So every refugee is now 17 going on 18. In Jule Styne’s great show Gypsy, the aging child star is asked how old she is:

BABY JUNE: Nine, going on ten.

CRATCHITT: How long has that been going on?

In Sweden, tens of thousands of strapping Muslim men can keep it going on until they’re 39 going on 40. With all these kiddies running around, the playground is getting a little livelier than usual. Miss Carlqvist again:

New York, N.Y. — A sign with a flower outside the cathedral at what has to be one of Manhattan’s busiest intersections, 34th Street and Second Avenue, stands as a subtle reminder of genocide. One wonders how many diplomats on their way to and from the United Nations headquarters, VIPs on their way to or from one of the airports, and daily commuters have passed St. Vartan’s Cathedral this year without noticing the banner outside proclaiming, “Centennial of the Armenian Genocide: 1915 to 2015. United We Stand Against Genocide.” I confess, I had been among the passers-by until I finally stopped in to pray there for the persecuted during the Christmas octave — and before the centennial year was through.

Perhaps the banner would have more impact if it read, “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?”

That’s how Adolf Hitler made his case for invading Poland in 1939 — and seeking to rid the world of Poles.

Even 100 years on, the Armenian Genocide still goes largely unacknowledged throughout the world. As Philadelphia archbishop Charles J. Chaput put it in a speech last spring: “This year marks the 100th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide. Armenians were the first nation in the world to adopt Christianity, in a.d. 301. Starting in 1915, Turkish officials deliberately murdered more than 1 million members of Turkey’s Armenian minority. The ethnic and religious cleansing campaign went on into the 1920s. The victims were men, women, and children. And they were overwhelmingly Christian. Turkey has never acknowledged the genocide. It’s one of the worst unrepented crimes in history.”

“”This is why it’s so important not to just go after one organization called ISIS, but to recognize this radical Islamist ideology that’s driving ISIS, that’s driving al-Qaeda, al Nusra and these groups that go by other names. That’s the only way that we’re actually going to be able to defeat this threat.”

A congressional Iraq War veteran doubted that the gains made against ISIS in Ramadi will be able to hold.

Iraq claimed victory over ISIS in the capital of Anbar province, but sections of the city still remain under the control of Islamic State jihadists.

About 80 percent of the city that once housed 200,000 people is in ruins, Iraqi officials say.

Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) told CNN that the question is, “Will this be able to be sustained?”

“And if you look at it, the battle was actually, I think, the easier question. The tougher question is, unless there is a plan in place for the Sunni territory to be governed and secured by the Sunni tribes, then I think the likelihood is very high that you will see an opening for ISIS to make their way back in,” Gabbard warned.

For those who may not know, it was 57 years ago today that Batista fled Cuba and Fidel Castro filled the vacuum created. It did not happen as depicted in Godfather II, but he did leave in a military plane with Mrs. Batista, a few friends, and lots of personal belongings. In other words, people were not running for their boats or revolutionaries willing to blow up themselves for the cause. In fact, most Cubans heard the news on radio or TV, as my parents did.

On January 1st, the Cuban government will celebrate another anniversary. Usually, Fidel Castro gave a multi-hour speech that you had to watch on TV unless you had a radio that could pick up a Miami AM music station.

This year, Raul Castro, who is filling in for sick brother, is telling Cubans to get ready for very hard times ahead. My friend Dr. Carlos Eire brought this speech to my attention today and commented this:

Well…. as unpleasant as it is to say “we told you so,” it’s appropriate to do so after reading today’s article in the Washington Post.