RUTHFULLY YOURS

The June State Department report also lists 58 “Foreign Terrorist Organizations,” of which over a dozen are allied with Iran. One Iranian Al Qaeda agent was specifically sanctioned by the US Treasury for distributing cash to the same al-Nusra Front the Iranian Foreign Minister complains is a terrorist organization.

Even more chilling has been Iran’s joint missile and technology cooperation with North Korea, making the potential use of weapons of mass destruction against the US a growing possibility.

On September 14, the Iranian Foreign Minister wrote in the New York Times that, “coordinated action at the United Nations to cut off the funding for ideologies of hate and extremism” is needed along with “a willingness from the international community to investigate the channels that supply the cash and the arms” to terrorists. He concluded with an appeal to “join hands with the rest of the community of nations to eliminate the scourge of terrorism and violence that threatens us all.”

Given that in 2015 alone there were some 11,774 terrorist attacks in 92 countries, killing 28,300 people, one can agree that such action is needed. The irony, of course, is that the US Department of State released its annual report in June on state sponsors of terrorism, and Iran was the gold medalist for the world’s number one terrorist nation — an honor it has held since 1984. Only two other countries were listed as state sponsors of terror: Syria and Sudan.

Having Iran’s Foreign Minister call for an end to terrorism is like having Bonnie and Clyde call for law and order.

The report makes clear, along with other available evidence, that much of the terrorism in the world is Iran’s handiwork — especially the terrorism directed at America.

The report emphasized that Iran “remained the foremost state sponsor of terrorism in 2015, providing a range of support, including financial, training, and equipment, to [terror] groups around the world.” Iran provided arms and cash to terrorist groups and to nearly 30 Shia terrorist militias in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, especially Hezbollah, as well as Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Houthi rebels in Yemen, and Shia militias in Bahrain.

Iran’s Supreme Leader and autocrat, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has issued an Islamic fatwa regarding officially banning women from riding bicycles. This is only the latest in a growing multitude of activities that the Islamic Republic of Iran had declared haram (religiously forbidden).

A mullah from the Islamic Republic once described the reasoning behind this fatwa to me. He explained that if a male sees a woman in the act of riding a bicycle he would be exposed to her body physique, which will cause him to become aroused. In other words, Iran’s clerics believe that a man cannot control his sexual desires when he sees a woman on a bicycle even when she is fully covered.

Merely for engaging in an activity that millions of women around the world participate in, many women across Iran have recently been arrested. Signs declaring the new law have been installed on the streets reading, “Bicycle riding for women is prohibited.”

This is not the only absurd restriction that the women of Iran must endure. They are also prohibited from watching men’s volleyball games. A British-Iranian woman, Ghonche Ghavami, was detained and jailed in solitary confinement in Evin, notorious political prison, for attempting to watch a men’s volleyball game.

Iran’s President, the so-called moderate, has not raised any objection to this law or similar ones. In fact, under his presidency, the repressive and restrictive laws against women and their inalienable rights have increased.

The last time I was in London, in June, I was witness to the amazing populist recovery of sovereignty the world now knows as Brexit. I reported on it several times in this space (here, for example, and here, here, here, and here). It was amusing, back then, to observe the evolution of respectable sentiment about Brexit. On the run-up to the vote on June 23 almost everyone who was anyone agreed on two things: 1) those supporting Brexit were ignorant, xenophobic yobs and 2) Brexit would never pass.

The smug certainty that, of course, Brexit could never happen yielded first to incredulity, then to rage when it was clear that not only had the referendum passed, but also that it had passed handily, 52% to 48%. It was partly amusing, partly alarming to watch the flailings of the politically correct mandarins attempting to explain to each other what happened. Some called for a new referendum, since the one that delivered Brexit was impossible, while others warned of imminent financial collapse and British isolation from the light-giving fish of EU dispensation.

In the event, nothing happened. Or, to be more precise, the British stock market stabilized and then shot up, the pound lost a small percentage of its value, making British exports more attractive, and life went on as usual.

The immediate question was, would Theresa May, the new prime minister, really pursue Brexit? She was known to be a mild “Remainer” but otherwise was something of a cipher.

In the event, her declaration that “Brexit means Brexit” turns out to have been in earnest. At the Tory Leadership Conference in Birmingham, which is ongoing as I write, Mrs. May just announced that she would trigger Article 50, which would formally initiate Britain’s exit from the tentacles of the EU, “before March next year.” That alone should console supporters of Brexit, as should her otherwise straightforward, no-nonsense tone. Negotiations would be complex, she acknowledged, but her administration would work tirelessly to get “the best deal” for Britain.

A preliminary step, she explained, is replaying the 1972 European Communities Act, which “enshrined” Britain’s new relationship with Europe. “It’s an important step we are taking,” Mrs. May said, “because first of all it makes clear to those who voted to leave the EU, that is exactly what we will be doing.”

That’s the news, and it is good news, as of a few minutes ago.

I came to England a few days ago in order to participate in a conference in Winchester on the fate of free speech in the academy, U.S. as well as British editions. We’ll be publishing the papers for that conference in The New Criterion come January, but I can reveal now one thing that struck me about our deliberations. Two years before, we had held a conference on a similar topic (which you can read about here): “Free Speech Under Threat.” To some extent, what transpired in Winchester a few days ago comes under the rubric of what the philosopher Yogi Berra called “déjà-vu all over again.”

But there are differences. In the couple of years since we last considered the issue of free speech, blatant assaults on free speech have grown much more common to the point where they are less scandalous than simply business as usual. People are harassed, shunned, sacked, fined, even jailed in some Western countries for expressing an unpopular opinion.

It is difficult to maintain a perpetual sense of emergency, however, and it’s my sense that many incursions upon free speech are now met more with a weary shrug than the outrage they would have occasioned even a few years back. Novelty is the handmaiden of outrage, and there is, alas, nothing novel about the assaults against free speech on campus today.

One of the most conspicuous strategies to limit free speech on campuses in the United States these last few years has been via the weaponization of victimhood. This is where the demand for “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings” and the anxiety over “micro aggressions” makes common cause with political correctness to curtail free speech and establish the reign of politically correct orthodoxy.

It’s my impression that this latest gift of American academia has yet to be fully transplanted to England. The toxic rhetoric of “safe spaces,” “trigger warnings,” and “micro aggressions” is beginning to catch on here and there but has not, so far as I can see, really taken root here.

I’m sure that will change before long. It’s just too potent a weapon to ignore.

BISHOFTU, Ethiopia—Several dozen people died in a stampede Sunday morning when a religious celebration in Ethiopia turned into an antigovernment protest that led police to fire tear gas and rubber bullets.

Witnesses said people were crushed in nearby ditches as they tried to flee the chaos.

An estimated two million people were attending the annual Irrecha thanksgiving event in Bishoftu town southeast of the capital, Addis Ababa. The event took place in one of the country’s most sensitive regions, Oromia, which has seen several months of sometimes deadly protests demanding wider freedoms.

Ethiopia’s government acknowledged deaths during Sunday’s event. Through a spokesman, it blamed “people that prepared to cause trouble.” The spokesman’s office said many people were taken to hospitals. It didn’t provide figures for deaths or injuries.

Witnesses said the crush began as protesters chanted antigovernment slogans and pushed toward a stage where religious leaders were speaking. Some threw rocks and plastic bottles. Police responded by using tear gas and firing rubber bullets. People tried to flee.

Before the stampede, an Associated Press reporter saw a crowd of people holding up crossed wrists in a popular gesture of antigovernment protest. The reporter also saw police firing tear gas and, later, several injured people.

PARIS — It’s 1944, in occupied Paris. Four friends spend their days in a narrow room atop a Left Bank apartment building. The neighbors think they’re painters — a cover story to explain the chemical smell. In fact, the friends are members of a Jewish resistance cell. They’re operating a clandestine laboratory to make false passports for children and families about to be deported to concentration camps. The youngest member of the group, the lab’s technical director, is practically a child himself: Adolfo Kaminsky, age 18.

If you’re doubting whether you’ve done enough with your life, don’t compare yourself to Mr. Kaminsky. By his 19th birthday, he had helped save the lives of thousands of people by making false documents to get them into hiding or out of the country. He went on to forge papers for people in practically every major conflict of the mid-20th century.

Now 91, Mr. Kaminsky is a small man with a long white beard and tweed jacket, who shuffles around his neighborhood with a cane. He lives in a modest apartment for people with low incomes, not far from his former laboratory.

When I followed him around with a film crew one day, neighbors kept asking me who he was. I told them he was a hero of World War II, though his story goes on long after that. It remains painfully relevant today, when children are being bombed in Syria or boarding shabby boats to escape by sea.

Like most Westerners, I usually ignore their suffering, and assume that someone else will step in to help. But Mr. Kaminsky — a poor, hunted teenager — stepped in himself, during the war and then for many different causes afterward. Why did he do it?

It wasn’t for the glory. He worked in secret and only spoke about it years later. His daughter Sarah learned her father’s whole story only while writing a book about him, “Adolfo Kaminsky: A Forger’s Life.” The English translation comes out this week.

It wasn’t for the money, either. Mr. Kaminsky says he never accepted payment for forgeries, so that he could keep his motives clear and work only for causes he believed in. He was perpetually broke, and scraped together a living as a commercial photographer, he said. The wartime work put such a strain on his vision that he eventually went blind in one eye.

Though he was a skilled forger — creating passports from scratch and improvising a device to make them look older — there was little joy in it. “The smallest error and you send someone to prison or death,” he told me. “It’s a great responsibility. It’s heavy. It’s not at all a pleasure.” Years later he’s still haunted by the work, explaining: “I think mostly of the people that I couldn’t save.”

In 2009, author Lila Rosenbloom wrote about the act of remembrance in Judaism. One of the most important ways that the State of Israel chooses to remember the Holocaust is to sound a two-minute long siren throughout the country. Sirens that are typically used to alert the country to imminent danger, are sounded so that during the appointed time, siren blasts shriek in every village, town, and city in the land and people stop in their tracks. Vehicles stop in mid-intersections, and all is silent. Yet “all the silent space is pervaded by the fullness of the same wail.”

The “wailing cries of the siren are reminiscent of the piercing, awakening cries of the shofar,” the instrument blown on Rosh Hashanah, also known as the Day of Remembrance, which begins tonight. The chief metaphor employed is the Book of Life, in which deeds and behavior stand in witness for or against us at this time of year. God judges us to determine our future — who shall live and who shall die.

It is particularly apt that a ram’s horn is used because it is also reminiscent of the radical notion that human sacrifice is abhorrent. An angel stops Abraham from sacrificing his son Isaac and “the substitution of a ram . . . is a reminder to the Jewish people that though God’s creatures will be entangled in misfortunes, in the end they will be redeemed by the horns of a ram. For the Jewish people the shofar is meant to remind them of “their eternality and future promises of redemption.”

The sound of the shofar is meant to shake one into action because while Rosh Hashanah is a day of remembrance, it is also one meant for repentance. It is about “coming back home after a period of absence.” It is the sense that someone has missed the mark but has the opportunity for renewal.

So what does this have to do with America and the West, in general? Quite simply, the West has lost its moral compass. Though America has, as Ronald Reagan described “been blessed with the opportunity to stand for something — for liberty and freedom and fairness,” we have surrendered to the contortions of political correctness and language manipulation. Consequently, evil grows.

While we abhor stories of biblical sacrifice, women around the world are being sacrificed at the altar of mass Muslim immigration into Europe. And instead of railing against this assault, European leaders meekly accept this barbarism and urge women to dye their hair and stay indoors. In a searing article Anne-Marie Waters speaks of Europe’s rape epidemic where in “Norway, recent statistics revealed that 100 per cent of violent street-rapes committed in the capital city of Oslo were committed by ‘non-western’ immigrants. It’s a similar story in Denmark, where the majority of rapes are committed by immigrants, usually Muslim.”

Moreover, “[i]n England, it’s been rape after rape – tens of thousands of young British girls are brutalised, tortured, beaten and raped by organised gangs comprised almost exclusively of Muslims. And now we have Germany. When Chancellor Merkel threw open the doors of her country to hundreds of thousands of migrants from the Middle East and Africa, she opened the door to the rape of German women.” Thus, “rape in Germany has already been described as an ‘epidemic’ and one that the German authorities, and media, are keeping rather quiet about. The reality is that German authorities . . . allow [the refugee] men to live freely among German women – they have decided to allow German women to be raped, just like authorities all across Europe.”

TEHRAN, Iran—Iran’s Revolutionary Guard has built a new attack drone that is similar to a U.S. unmanned aerial vehicle captured five years ago, Iranian media reported Saturday.

The semiofficial Tasnim news agency says the “Saegheh” (Thunderbolt) drone is similar to the RQ-170 Sentinel spy drone. Iran’s state-run Press TV says the long-range drone can carry four precision-guided bombs. Neither report gave figures for the drone’s range.

Iran claimed to have shot down an RQ-170 drone used by the Central Intelligence Agency in December 2011 and broadcast footage of the recovered aircraft. It also claims to have captured three American ScanEagle drones.

Iran said last year that it had successfully tested its replica of the RQ-170.

Also on Saturday, Tasnim published photos of what it said was a U.S.-made MQ-1C drone captured recently by the Revolutionary Guard. It didn’t say when or how the drone was captured.

Three Muslim men slaughtered a 15-year-old Christian student, Wajaesh Shono. One of the murderers was the boy’s schoolteacher. — Pakistan.

A Muslim mob killed and beheaded a Christian pastor’s wife based on a false accusation of “blasphemy.” — Nigeria.

His father and stepmother became furious when they learned of the boy’s conversion. They began… starving him, in keeping with Islamic law recommendations for apostate women and children. — Uganda.

As usual, Egyptian TV reported the one-sided attacks from the Muslim majority on the Christian minority as “clashes.” After arriving, the police stood back and allowed the mob to continue rioting, plundering and setting more Christian homes and vehicles on fire. — Egypt.

A Christian woman who escaped ISIS said the militants “married and divorced” her as many as nine times every night to justify the act of raping her. — Iraq.

Christians reciting the rosary inside St. Anthony Church in Ventimiglia, Italy were told by refugee-volunteers to keep their prayers down as they were bothering newly arrived Muslim migrants. — Italy..

At the height of one of the worst months for Christians under Islam, June, 2016, both the U.S. government and “mainstream” media continued to ignore the plight of Christians.

Despite the U.S. government acknowledging that ISIS is committing genocide against Christians in Iraq and Syria, statistics showed the number of refugees the Obama administration has welcomed since the start of 2015:

From Syria: 5,435 Muslims; 28 Christians
From Iraq: 11,086 Muslims; 433 Christians

As for the mainstream media, the death of a gorilla was covered six times more than the Muslim slaughter of Christians for their faith, according to a report.

Is Japan a democracy or a Shinto democracy?

The president of the United States was suggesting to Europe’s rich club of nations that it must admit as full member not a democracy but a “Muslim democracy.”

Obama did not understand that Turkey could never join the EU before it has fully transformed from being a Muslim democracy into a democracy.

Apparently, Erdogan thinks that the U.S. is ruled as Turkey is ruled. He does not understand that the president of the U.S. cannot phone a judge and order an arrest warrant for a foreign national.

Can there be democracies and democracies with religious prefixes? Is the United States a democracy or a Christian democracy? Is Israel a democracy or a Jewish democracy? Is Japan a democracy or a Shinto democracy?

In a 2010 interview with the Italian daily, Corriere della Sera, U.S. President Barack Obama referred to Turkey as a “great Muslim democracy.” In the same interview, he said that: “The U.S. always expressed the opinion that it would be wise to accept Turkey into the European Union.” All that was music to Turkish ears. But in reality, the president of the United States was suggesting to Europe’s rich club of nations that it must admit as full member not a democracy but a “Muslim democracy.” Obama did not understand that Turkey could never join the EU before it has fully transformed from being a Muslim democracy into a democracy.