RUTHFULLY YOURS

The assets his cronies have piled up in the West demand more scrutiny.

Vladimir Putin was reelected president of Russia today in an event as predictable as the sun’s rising. But his biggest asset hasn’t been his iron grip on Russian politics, it’s been the fecklessness and passivity of his Western counterparts in the face of his outrageous actions. Garry Kasparov, the former world chess champion who has lived in exile in the West since 2013, wrote on Facebook that Putin, like most dictators, prefers playing poker to chess. “You can win at poker with a weak hand if your opponents play foolishly and keep folding their cards.”

It was to plan a better series of future moves against Putin that Kasparov and Thor Halvorssen, the leaders of the Human Rights Foundation, assembled a collection of 30 anti-Putin experts in New York last Friday. Called PutinCon, the event featured everyone from former intelligence officials to a former Red Army veteran to former U.S. attorney Preet Bharara to Alexei Navalny, the anti-corruption crusader who was blocked from the presidential ballot in Sunday’s presidential election in Russia.

All of them agreed that the West should confront Putin and take serious measures to counter his increasingly brazen behavior. According to British foreign secretary Boris Johnson, this behavior now includes the stockpiling of the deadly nerve agent Novichok, recently used against Sergei Skripal, a former Russian spy granted asylum in Britain, and his daughter Yulia.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky, an opponent of Putin’s who is exiled and now lives in Switzerland, says that Russia has become a gangster-run state. Speaking of the attack on the Skripals, he told the BBC, “Either Putin has given his consent to this operation, or he doesn’t control the secret service to such an extent they can do it without his approval.” The FSB, the successor to the Soviet Union’s old KGB secret police, has seized complete control over Russia’s security apparatus. The FSB is now more powerful than the KGB was at the time of Stalin — and much more independent from the Kremlin.

Despite a partially rigged popular vote and thanks to the Electoral College, America backed off a Hillary administration. Canada would have given her a heftier majority than it awarded the androgynous Justin Trudeau. We are heading pell-mell in the direction that would have sunk the United States. Business investment and industrial productivity are down, while taxes and real unemployment are up.

We live in a Trumpless country. Canadian supporters of Trump have been taken to task for it innumerable times by people who know nothing of Trump except what the media tell them. Academics, especially, whose salaries are guaranteed and have nothing to worry about, despise the American president as a boor. The intellectual class in general considers Trump the manifest inferior of Barack Obama, whose silver tongue – or golden teleprompter – masked his hatred of his own country and whose policies brought foreign debacles and economic ruin in their train. Under Trump’s administration, trade, industry, and employment numbers are flourishing in the U.S. Canadians, however, consider these gains an aberration that detracts from the social justice agenda that dominates the national temper.

Case in point: Canada’s ongoing NAFTA trade negotiations with the U.S. tell an “it was a dark and stormy night” story that puts Canada’s economic adventure under the Trudeau administration into dismal perspective. Trudeau has assigned his minister of foreign affairs, the ineffable Chrystia Freeland (of “100 years ago pretty much all women were beaten by their husbands” fame), to represent the country vis-à-vis Donald Trump. NAFTA is crucial to Canada’s economic prosperity, given that Canada enjoys a massive trade surplus with the U.S. Yet, as John Mueller of the Society for Academic Freedom and Scholarship (SAFS) remarks regarding Freeland, “I thought the first time I saw her that she would singlehandedly sink the NAFTA discussions” (personal communication).

It is in Nigeria that the balance between Islam and Christianity in Africa will be decided, according to Philip Jenkins, a leading expert of Christianity. That is why the Islamists have been killing the Christians en masse.

“If the Islamists should overrun Nigeria, it will be a steppingstone [sic] to conquering smaller countries. If Nigeria falls to Islamic extremists, all of Africa will be at risk”. — Catholic Bishop Hyacinth Egbebo, Nigeria.

Wole Soyinka’s “horde” will not be confined to the Nigerian borders, but will try to strike Western Europe as well. We are lucky to have survived as many attacks as we have in Madrid, London, Paris and Berlin, to recall just a few. But how many more? And for how long?

Usually, Africa only breaks through to the West when Western targets are attacked by terrorists. First, two US Black Hawk helicopters were shot down in Somalia in 1993. Then Al Qaeda attacked US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. Then, only a few days ago, Islamic State published a video purporting to show an ambush in Niger in which four US soldiers were killed last October. The West was silent. The West does not seem to care about the ongoing Islamic terrorist genocide on Africa’s biggest Christian population in Nigeria.

A few days ago, the Coliseum in Rome was lit up red to protest the persecution of Christians. Italy’s most famous landmark was illuminated at the behest of “Aid to the Church in Need” to draw attention to the intense and enormous massacres Christians are suffering.

Writing for The Spectator, Douglas Murray rightly asked: “Who will protect Nigeria’s northern Christians?”. In the last attack, 15 Christian villages were ethnically and religious “cleansed”. First, extremist Muslims ransacked Christian towns and cleared them of Christian religious symbols, and then murdered 19 Christians . In just one month, more than 80 Christians have been murdered, often hacked to death with machetes.

Apparently for Turkey’s extremist Muslims, this is a war between “us good Muslims” and “those infidels.”

First, Turkey is running a military show in Arab Syria: targeting Muslim Kurds who it claims are terrorists. Erdogan has vowed that after Syria, the military campaign will target northern Iraq.

In the meantime, Erdogan’s “Arab friends” are showing signs of hostility, one after the other.

The events in the last couple of weeks seem to confirm that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s ambitions for a Turkey-led ummah (Muslim community) are not welcome in the Arab world. This emerging divide among Sunni Islamists — Turkey, Saudi Arabia et al — is important for the West.

In Turkey, a hysteria has set in. It appears a national competition of patriotism that has captured the Turkish imagination. Screams of martyrdom and jihad can be heard echoing across the country. Even children are not spared from the ugly “death talk.”

There is a story behind this jihadist euphoria. In 2016, Turkey’s Religious Affairs General Directorate (Diyanet), the ultimate religious authority in the country, issued comic books to the nation’s children telling them how glorious it is to become an Islamic martyr. One cartoon was a dialogue between a father and his son. “How marvelous it is to become a martyr,” the father says. Unconvinced, the son asks: “Would anyone want to become a martyr?” “Yes” the father replies, “one would. Who doesn’t want to win heaven?”

Students, including kindergarteners, have been asked to conduct military marches and recite ultranationalist poems at schools . Some state schools have replaced their recess bells with Ottoman military marches.