RUTHFULLY YOURS

Staunton, September 28 – Those who are members of traditionally Muslim nations, both from within the Russian capital, the Russian Federation, the former Soviet space, and the Middle East, now number “more than three million” in Moscow, and their numbers will only increase, according to Fari Asadullin, a senior scholar at the Moscow Institute of Oriental Studies.

His figure, significantly higher than the ten percent that Russian officials invoke, reflects Asadullin’s conclusions that there are far more illegal migrants than the government wants to admit and that this community includes not only of Muslims from Russia and the former Soviet space but also from the Middle East (kommersant.ru/doc/2815999).

That makes Moscow the largest Muslim city in Russia and the largest Muslim capital in Europe, with “ethnic Muslims” now forming a quarter of some of the capital’s districts and becoming an increasingly visible part of the city’s public space, something that both the Russian government and Russian residents must accept.

As the city’s oldest Muslim community, Tatars from the Middle Volga, demonstrate, these people can eventually fit in to the city’s Russian cultural matrix, Asadullin says, unless the authorities try to block the religious practice of Muslims and Russians react to them with Islamophobia. In that event, many of the city’s new residents are likely to turn to radicalism.

EACH YEAR, the United Nations General Assembly passes a resolution condemning the US economic embargo on Cuba. Each year, the United States, joined by a dwindling number of friends, votes against the resolution. Passage is a foregone conclusion. The vote last year was 188-2.

The United Nations was born 70 years ago this autumn. Its idealistic Charter called for the promotion of peace and the protection of human rights and dignity.
The resolution has no legal effect. It is merely a vehicle for inveighing against Washington, and for pretending that communist Cuba’s long record of economic failure and human-rights abuse is somehow the fault of the United States.

For 23 years, under Republican and Democratic presidents, the United States has opposed the anti-embargo measure. But now comes word that the Obama administration may abstain from this year’s vote, an unprecedented step. “It is unheard-of for a UN member state not to oppose resolutions critical of its own laws,” the Associated Press reported on Monday, and some congressional leaders are aghast that President Obama would consider shirking his sovereign obligation to defend US interests before the world body. Even if he favors repealing the Cuban embargo (which President Bill Clinton signed in 1996), it remains the law of the land. Until that changes, says House Speaker John Boehner, the president has a “responsibility to defend US law and that’s what [he] should do.”

The parade of dictators and despots taking the U.N. stage on Monday, as the organization marks its 70th anniversary, was nothing short of spectacular. As were the lies they told without batting an eye to a friendly and respectful audience. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has his hand out for an additional $20 billion this year, so let’s look at what American taxpayers are getting for their large chunk (one-quarter) of the U.N’s bills.

Xi Jinping, President of China, said “we must endeavor to meet” the goals of “democracy and freedom.” Meanwhile, he is an iron-fisted ruler of an undemocratic state where 1.3 billion people languish without civil and political rights.

Vladimir Putin, President of Russia, said that without the U.N. — “unique in its legitimacy” — “we would be left with no other rules than the rule of force.” This from a megalomaniac who gobbled up Crimea and now occupies other parts of Eastern Ukraine by force. Putin also said, “Everything that contravenes the U.N. Charter must be rejected.” Except apparently Chapter 1, article 1, which commits the organization to maintaining international peace and security and suppressing acts of aggression.

By taking seriously the thinking of a scholar-politician who transcended the contours of our political divide, Greg Weiner illuminates possibilities for American politics that have been lost with Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s passing.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s dazzling résumé is well-known: gunnery officer in the US Navy, Harvard professor of government, ambassador to India and the United Nations, assistant secretary of labor, urban policy adviser to President Nixon, and for four terms a Democratic senator from New York. Obviously, Moynihan saw a lot and did a lot. But what did he think?

Before his untimely death in 2003, Moynihan wrote more than a dozen books, published many influential essays for outlets such as Commentary, The American Scholar, and The Public Interest, and delivered hundreds if not thousands of lectures and speeches on an extraordinary range of subjects. The question posed by Greg Weiner in American Burke: The Uncommon Liberalism of Daniel Patrick Moynihan is whether a coherent political philosophy can be gleaned from his abundant intellectual output.

Weiner—a professor of political science at Assumption College and the author of a previous book about James Madison—aims to plumb Moynihan’s public writings to see what fundamental ideas emerge. It is striking that no one before Weiner has made such an attempt. His book is a pioneering effort that tells us important things about one of the most complex and compelling figures of American political life in the second half of the twentieth century. But Weiner does much more than that. By taking seriously the thinking of a scholar-politician who in some ways transcended the contours of our political divide, Weiner illuminates possibilities for American politics that have been lost with Moynihan’s passing.

Germany is being gamed – and flooded:

German officials said Friday that nearly a third of all asylum seekers arriving in Germany and claiming to be Syrian in fact come from other nations, even as Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière called on European nations to take radical new steps to curb the region’s refugee crisis.
So far this year, Germany has received 527,000 asylum seekers — more than any other nation in Europe. Tobias Plate, an Interior Ministry spokesman, acknowledged estimates Friday that roughly 30 percent of asylum seekers who claim to be from Syria are making erroneous claims, and come from other countries instead. Because of the civil war in that country, roughly 87 percent of Syrians are successfully winning asylum in Germany.

Sweden, like most European nations, has been around a long time. I breakfasted this morning in a handsomely vaulted room built in 1307, by the Skandic knight Jens Uffesen Neb. It is now called the Beatles Lounge, because, at my very table, George Harrison and Paul McCartney had once lunched, in 1967. You can’t get much more historic than that, can you? In the photo, George is having a quiet smoke, while Paul looks unusually animated, having perhaps spotted Britt Ekland across the room.

As Miss Ekland testifies, the Swedes are an attractive people. One of their least attractive qualities, alas, is a certain moral narcissism. They promote themselves as “the humanitarian superpower”, and appear to have fallen badly for their own publicity. The other day The Independent carried the inspiring tale of a Danish yachtswoman who had courageously rescued a “refugee” from the hell of Copenhagen and singlehandedly sailed him across the water to Sweden – and freedom:

Annika Holm Nielsen, a 24-year-old Danish youth politician, sailed her yacht across the five-mile strait from Copenhagen to the Swedish city of Malmo, with a refugee on board, in a trip some have compared to the rescue of Copenhagen’s Jews during the Nazi occupation.

She met the man, whom she called Abdul, shortly after he arrived at Copenhagen’s Central Station from Germany, and took him to the marina where a friend moored their boat. “I was standing next to a person who was completely exhausted and in such great need,” she told The Independent. “We took this decision because we thought it was the safest thing to do, it wasn’t something symbolic.” She added: “He told us he had been on far worse boat trips.”