RUTHFULLY YOURS

Je suis Charlie. French for “I am Charlie,” the phrase became a global expression of solidarity and resolve after Islamist gunmen murdered 12 people at the Paris offices of the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo.

In a terrifying copycat attack Sunday in Garland, Texas, two men with assault rifles attempted to gun down people attending an event satirizing Muhammad with cartoons. A single police officer managed to shoot and kill both gunmen before they got inside the event. With some 200 people in the building, the potential for another politicized mass murder was great.

On Monday authorities said one of the gunman, Elton Simpson of Phoenix, had been under surveillance for years because of interest he’d shown in joining jihadist groups overseas. He was found guilty of making false statements to the FBI, but a federal judge ruled there wasn’t enough evidence that Mr. Simpson’s activities were “sufficiently ‘related’ to international terrorism.”
Against this backdrop we have the extraordinary—almost comical—irony of some of America’s bien pensant intellectuals boycotting a ceremony Tuesday by the PEN American Center to confer its annual courage award for freedom of expression on Charlie Hebdo. PEN is an association of writers, and six prominent novelists—Peter Carey,Michael Ondaatje,Francine Prose,Teju Cole,Rachel Kushner and Taiye Selasi—have been trying to repeal the award for Charlie Hebdo.

In the early spring of 1944 a political prisoner in the Buchenwald concentration camp penned a letter to his wife, Käthe, in Hamburg.

“It looks like we have to count on a long separation, but we must hope strongly for a reunion,” wrote the prisoner, a doctor named Hermann da Fonseca-Wollheim. “Today is Palm Sunday, a sunny, wintry day on our mountain. Tonight at six I will listen to Furtwängler’s concert on the radio. Why don’t you, too, tune in to the radio on Sundays and then we can think about each other fervently.”

It was the last letter Käthe would receive from Hermann. Six weeks later, on May 13, she was notified of his death, supposedly of disease.

Hermann had been arrested by the Gestapo the previous August and held on charges of Ausländerfreundlichkeit, or xenophilia. He was suspected of being friendly to foreign workers, mostly forced laborers from Ukraine, whom he treated in his practice. He had also been overheard saying that sooner or later everybody would have to learn Russian, and was learning some Russian himself. It smacked of defeatism. After the July 1943 firebombing of Hamburg, the Gestapo were keen to make examples of would-be dissenters.

May 8 marks the 70th anniversary of VE Day – the end of World War II in Europe.

Images flash before us – Neville Chamberlain waving a piece of paper said to guarantee “peace for our time,” Hitler giving a stiff-arm salute at a Nuremberg rally, a Czech woman weeping as panzers rolled into Prague, a smiling FDR wearing his naval cape, his cigarette holder at a jaunty angle, Churchill flashing a victory sign, GIs wading ashore on Omaha Beach, skeletal survivors in a liberated death camp, and a Russian soldier raising the Soviet flag on the Reichstag building above the ruins of Berlin.

The war that ended on May 8, 1945 began with the Treaty of Versailles (June 28, 1919), which, despite its reputed harshness, did little to stop a resurgence of German militarism. When he saw the treaty, Marshal Ferdinand Foch, France’s last World War I commander, famously remarked: “This is not peace. It is an armistice for 20 years.” Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939 – 20 years and 65 days later.

Thanks to an infection and the antibiotics taken to rid myself of it, I have had several days of being able to do little more than watch the news on television, listen to it on the radio, and reading about it in my daily edition of The Wall Street Journal. If there was anything else happening in the world, you would not know it because it was 24-7 Baltimore, Baltimore, Baltimore.

Specifically, it was about the arrest and death of Freddie Gray, a known drug dealer and user with an extensive rap sheet. There are different descriptions of the manner of his death, but the details of the autopsy are still obscure beyond a reference to having received a blow to his spine. This is attributed to having been placed in the police van, shackled hand and foot, but not having a safety belt applied.

The response from a certain element of Baltimoreans was to begin to loot, vandalize and set fire to their own neighborhoods by way of protesting alleged police brutality. This followed his funeral on Monday. The Mayor’s response was to tell the police to stand down and let the protesters have their way. When that predictably did not work, the National Guard was called in and a curfew imposed.

When President Obama was a student at Columbia College he wrote a paper calling for the “end of nuclear weapons.” It was a time when there were similar calls for the elimination of these weapons of mass destruction; this was ostensibly an idealistic cri de coeur. Unilateral disarmament of the kind this movement demanded was seen as playing directly into the hands of a Soviet rival expanding its nuclear weapons capability.

The emergence of a multi-polar nuclear world has made the once idealistic claim seem polyannish. A unilateral reduction in U.S. nuclear forces, without a reciprocal response from other nuclear powers, only weakens the deterrent effect of our arsenal.

The purpose of the free-speech event was to highlight the threat posed by Islamic supremacists. ‘Even free-speech enthusiasts are repulsed by obnoxious expression.” That acknowledgment prefaces the main argument I’ve made in Islam and Free Speech, a just-released pamphlet in the Broadside series from Encounter Books. Alas, in view of last night’s deadly events at the Curtis Culwell Center in Garland, Texas, the argument is more timely than I’d hoped.

In Garland, two jihadists opened fire on a free-speech event that was certain to be offensive to many Muslims. The gunmen wounded a security guard before being killed when police returned fire. The jihadists are reported to be roommates who resided in Phoenix. As this is written, only one of them has been identified: Elton Simpson. The wounded security guard, Bruce Joiner, was treated and released. Joiner works for the Garland Independent School District, which owns the Culwell Center.

By Bijan Khajehpour
Iran’s political leadership must move quickly, and non-ideologically, to resolve the current water use crisis and avoid the possibility of mass migrations.Al-Monitor reported in May 2014 that Iran faced an unprecedented water shortage, and now, a year later, the crisis has deteriorated to the point of raising the alarm that a large number of Iranians might be forced to migrate, including externally, to access water if workable solutions are not found in the next few years. Addressing this critical issue will require Iranian authorities to make crucial strategic decisions.

Iran’s political leadership must move quickly, and non-ideologically, to resolve the current water use crisis and avoid the possibility of mass migrations.

We are living in infamous times. Reality outpaces fiction, and the worst case scenarios keep unfolding in our daily headlines.

Critics of torturers and mass murderers are demonized as “extremists” and “provocateurs.” Israel is accused of human rights atrocities it has never committed by those very entities who themselves actually commit such atrocities; anyone who points this out is deemed an “extreme conservative” and a “racist.” Anti-infidel hate speech—as long as it is directed against America and Israel—is seen as protected by the First Amendment and by the doctrine of Free Speech; exposing the diabolical Big Lies is considered politically incorrect “racist” hate speech which has no place in the Western media, on campus, at the UN, or in any international human rights organization.

Either the West fights back or it surrenders to these Orwellian rules. Many Western intellectuals prefer scapegoating Israel and surrendering quietly to these diabolical Islamist rules rather than risk their reputations and their lives.

Read AP’s Bosnia-War Motive for Gunman with a Grain of Salt Lake City
This incident happened less than a week after a Bosnian-involved Aussie terror plot was foiled, and at the very police station where former NY cop Bob Leifels worked a 1997-98 stint as international police.

Gunman Shouting Allahu Akbar in Bosnia Storms Police Station (AP; ABCNews.com, Apr. 27)

A gunman stormed into a police station in a northeastern Bosnian town shouting “Allahu akbar” on Monday, killing a policeman and wounding two others, authorities said.

The gunman was also killed during the attack in the town of Zvornik….The Bosnian Serb police chief, Dragan Lukac, identified the man as Nerdin Ibric.

Here comes the requisite retro-justification part of any MSM report when Serbs are targeted:

Zvornik is a town in the Bosnian Serb part of the country and it is located on the border with Serbia. Before the 1992-95 war, about 60 percent of the town’s population was Muslim Bosnians. Almost all were expelled and many were killed during the war as part of a Serb campaign to create a purely Serb area.

“The first of April is the day we remember what we are the other 364 days of the year.” Mark Twain (1835-1910)

As will be true for the next eighteen months, Presidential campaigns dominated the news. In the week-ago weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal, political commentator Michael Barone noted we had better get used to long election cycles. “We ain’t going back.” That won’t change unless both Parties adopt the coronation method used by Democrats this season. Mainstream media will look into every dark recess – going back to pre-natal days – of every Republican candidate’s past. Whatever dirt they discover (and even some that will have been manufactured) will be prominently displayed. Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, talk radio and others will return the favor by revealing secrets of Democrat candidates. Vice sells better than virtue. We will learn more of indiscretions than accomplishments.