RUTHFULLY YOURS

Canadians have long thought of themselves as morally superior to the supposedly vulgar and abrasive Americans. According to the self-justifying Canadian mythos, we embody a more enlightened and humane outlook on the world. In addition to oil, maple syrup, and lumber, our most valuable export — our gift, we imagine, to our southern neighbors — is our vision of a sustainable and irenic future. Let us examine the most current incarnation of that vision.

Canada is essentially a socialist country, closer to the increasingly decrepit European welfare and statist paradigm than to the (now faltering) classic American model of individual self-reliance. Canada instituted social programs like state-funded medicine relying on major tax hikes long before it became an issue in the U.S., and gambled on multiculturalism as a viable national project, in effect, as a kind of political eschatology. There is no question that the Canadian temper has always been more politically Arcadian than the American.

The current refugee question in particular has become a pivotal and collective expression of this temper, with citizens opening their wallets, hearts, and homes to a migratory influx from the Islamic world. Our self-congratulatory generosity is amply demonstrated in the writings of celebrated Constitutional lawyer Julius Grey. Pontificating in the Montreal Gazette, Grey urges the welcoming of thousands of Syrian migrants as we proceed “to create a society which has, on the one hand, citizens of myriad origins and, on the other, no barriers between them.”

The problem that Grey refuses to confront or even identify is that immigrants and refugees from historically backward, theocratic, anti-Semitic, Sharia-dominated, and terror-sponsoring nations are precisely the ones who are creating “barriers,” such as purpose-built ghettos, no-go zones, closed neighborhoods, special privileges and spaces, an atmosphere of threat, and who have no interest in Western-style “individual autonomy and freedom” — Grey’s chosen vocabulary. Grey is the lawyer for the Muslim-friendly socialist New Democratic Party, but there is not much sunlight between the NDP and the governing Muslim-friendly Liberal Party.

Gene Poteat is a retired CIA senior scientific intelligence officer and president emeritus of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers.

Vladimir Putin killed Aleksandr Litvinenko. The November 2006 assassination was no rogue hit. Putin had the motive, means, opportunity, and power to see that this human irritant received his comeuppance. I’ve said what everyone knows but officially hesitates to declare — until now. It took gutsy British judge Robert Owen, after a long inquiry, to say publically that former KGB operative Litvinenko was killed with a dose of Polonium 210 as part of a KGB/FSB assassination. And based on the rarity of the radioactive poison used to kill him, “probably” under orders from Vladimir Putin.

Litvinenko’s assassination is only one of several. The earlier deaths included journalist/Putin-critic Anna Politkovskaya in October 2006 and opposition leader Boris Nemtsov in February 2015. Both were on the wrong side of Putin, and both suffered standard KGB eliminations – apparently “random” street shootings. This was especially easy since their deaths took place in Russia, where Putin’s cronies pulled all the investigative strings to round up the usual suspects. Which means these were in no way as thoroughly investigated as the Litvinenko case, which took place in London.

A Putinesque assassination on a grander scale was also examined recently by an exhaustive Polish Parliamentary inquiry. It examined the orchestrated 2010 plane crash in Smolensk, Russia, which [conveniently] killed Poland’s president and 96 members of the top echelon of his pro-Western government. The accident, ignored in the West as another airplane mishap, was reported later by the brave British judge as “probably” carried out under authority of Putin, yet of little significance.

If Liberals persist in endorsing the moral, cultural, and political nihilism of their current leader nothing is more certain than the emergence of an ardent movement intent on restoring the primacy of principle. Don’t believe your media courtiers, Mr Turnbull. The storm is gathering
Conservatism is in crisis. That is the conclusion drawn by leading commentators, reflecting upon the Turnbull coup in Australia, the electoral defeat of Stephen Harper in Canada, and the ongoing success of David Cameron, seen as Tory centrist. But are they right? Or are they suffering from the premature articulation of progressivist triumphalism?

According to Paul Kelly in The Australian (paywalled), writing in the afterglow of the coup, there is a powerful global trend against traditional conservative values “and Australia is a frontline test case”. Leading this alleged trend is Malcolm Turnbull, “a social progressive who champions same-sex marriage, serious action on climate change, a multicultural society, a repudiation of the monarchical trappings, and an economy, entrepreneurial and innovative, geared to aspiration.”

Kelly claims that this collection of trendy issues constitutes an alternative political platform “to that adopted by any previous Liberal Prime Minister”. It is, by his reckoning, a synthesis of “economic adaptability with social progressivity [sic], not the social conservatism of Howard and Abbott”, and Turnbull’s task, again according to Kelly, is to hold the conservative forces of the Liberal Party together while he remakes it in his own progressivist image.

While this leftward shift within the Liberal Party might lead to the disaffection of the party’s traditional conservatives at the grassroots level the line is that they have nowhere to go. Moreover, their loss will be compensated by Turnbull’s “appeal to feminists, gays, environmentalists, ethnics and youths”. Apparently these latter groups will now enthusiastically join Liberal Party branches, engage in fund-raising, and stand around on election days giving out how-to-vote cards for the newly-transformed, “progressivist” Liberal Party.

ISIS control of Libya’s Mediterranean coastline allows it not only to ship its operatives, together with Muslim refugees to Europe. ISIS expansion along the Mediterranean Seaboard of North Africa poses a growing threat to commercial shipping, cruise liners, and also oil rigging platforms offshore.

ISIS is not reported to have a navy, yet. But it does not need a large force with which to paralyze commercial shipping in the Mediterranean, or to cause tremendous ecological and environmental damage.

Vice Admiral Clive Johnstone, the UK’s highest naval officer in Nato, warned today that the ISIS jihadists are likely to use “a ‘very high-quality weapons system … quite capable Korean, Chinese and Russian hardware, to attack ships. This, he said, would have “extraordinary implications’ for the Western World.”

ISIS presence in Libya’s coastal area is not new. Nor is its growing threat to commercial navigation in the Mediterranean Seaboard of North Africa.

Last February, Seth Cropsey, a former Deputy Undersecretary of the Navy, warned in the Wall Street Journal; “ISIS’s prospects for significant naval power are remote. But small boats, fishing vessels, smugglers, and merchant craft that carry concealed weapons could hijack, sink, or rake commercial shipping, including cruise liners in the central Mediterranean.”

It is only now that the Obama administration has declared “Action in Libya is needed before Libya becomes a sanctuary for ISIS…[because] We don’t want a situation like in Iraq or Syria.” However, the steps offered by the administration are not encouraging.

According to the White House, “The president directed his national security team to continue efforts to strengthen governance and support ongoing counterterrorism efforts in Libya and other countries where ISIL has sought to establish a presence,”

It seems that Obama is not in a hurry to defeat ISIS, or stop its spread. Instead, he is said to be seeking, as always, “a political solution to get a military solution,” an unlikely outcome in Libya in the foreseeable future.

Today, Iran’s IRNA news agency broadcast video apparently taken from an Iranian Revolutionary Guard unmanned aircraft as it flew directly over an American aircraft carrier operating in the Persian Gulf. The US Navy has confirmed that an Iranian drone flew “directly over” the USS Harry S. Truman and near the French carrier Charles de Gaulle, which are both in the Persian Gulf launching airstrikes against Islamic State (Daesh) forces in Syria and Iraq.

RT rebroadcast of the Iranian television footage, showing the drone flyover of the USS Harry S. Truman.
Navy Commander Kevin Stephens, a spokesman for the US Navy’s 5th Fleet, said that the Navy was “not in a position to verify the authenticity of the video as there are countless examples of similar footage to be found on the Internet.” But he did confirm that an Iranian surveillance drone passed over the Truman on January 12. The drone did not pose a threat, he said. “It was, however, abnormal and unprofessional.” Stephens added that the Navy would “respond appropriately as the situation dictates” to future incidents.

Iranian Navy Commander Admiral Habibollah Sayyari told IRNA that the drone’s flight over the Truman was “a sign of bravery,” and it “allowed our men to go so close to the warship and shoot such a beautiful and accurate footage of the combat units of the foreign forces.” IRNA also reported that a small Iranian diesel submarine was involved in surveillance of the ships. The drone and submarine operations are part of an Iranian Navy exercise being mounted this week.

Italian officials declined to comment after being ridiculed this week for covering up the ancient nude statues in Rome’s Capitoline Museums, so as not to offend the sensibilities of a visiting foreign dignitary.

The delicate world leader in question was Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, who took a four-day trip to Italy and France to seal some business deals in the wake of the lifting of nuclear sanctions.

But being shielded from naked marble wasn’t the funniest, or even most pathetic, part of Rouhani’s trip to the City of Seven Hills. Far worse was his reception at the Vatican, where Pope Francis fawned all over the puppet head of the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei-led regime, directly and indirectly responsible for the slaughter of Christians across the world.

The father of the Catholic Church nevertheless greeted “His Excellency Hassan Rouhani, president of the Islamic Republic of Iran” as though he were a fellow pacifist, ready, willing and able not only to spread a global message of brotherly love, but to carry it out. According to a statement from the Vatican after the meeting, the two held “cordial discussions” in which “common spiritual values emerged.”

“When in Rome, do as the Romans do” evidently does not apply to Iranian President Hassan Rouhani. During his visit to Rome this week, Rouhani was spared an encounter with ancient nude Roman statues. Nude statues at Rome’s Capitoline Museums, including a centuries-old Venus, were covered up in deference to Rouhani’s Islamic faith, as the Iranian president proceeded to meet with Italian government officials and sign 17 agreements with Italy. This was but the latest exercise in ongoing European submission to Muslim cultural norms in the name of multiculturalism.

Responding to backlash, Italian government officials tried to cover up whom had actually decided on the statues’ covering. Italy’s culture minister even took it upon himself – belatedly – to criticize the decision as “incomprehensible.” For his part, Rouhani denied that his government had requested such statuary modesty, but he was appreciative of the gesture nevertheless. “I thank you for this,” he said when asked about the temporary accommodation.

Submission to Iran’s Islamic cultural norms not only does a disservice to Italy’s own rich history and culture. It sends the wrong signal to Iranian citizens living in Iran, who are trying to seek more individual freedoms.

An Iranian women’s group, My Stealthy Freedom, posted a scathing criticism of the statue covering in a Facebook page addressed to Italian news outlets and female politicians:

“As you know, your country has just censored some of your highly celebrated artwork in a bid to welcome the delegation from the Islamic Republic of Iran. This censorship reminds us the way that the Iranian regime has been forcing millions of women in Iran to cover up. The politicians of our country, regardless of whether a woman is Muslim or not, force women in Iran to cover up and their justification is, ‘You, as a woman, should be shrouded in front of my eyes in order not to provoke me’. This way of thinking is completely unacceptable.”

“Italy, for the sake of pleasing the Islamic Republic, has not hesitated to conceal some of the masterpieces of its own history, which gives the impression that for them respecting the requirements of the Islamic Republic and its unpopular laws take precedence over their own history and cultural heritage. One has to bear in mind that these same laws are being challenged by millions of Iranian women who have been risking all kinds of dangers in Iran to be themselves.”

“Why should we children have to grow up in such fear?”

That is the very reasonable question 16-year-old German teenager Bibi Wilhailm asks, in her 20-minute YouTube video, garnering her some much-needed recognition in cyberspace. Her video had first appeared on Facebook, but was taken down for reasons that still remain unclear.

But Wilhailm doesn’t seem to care too much for fame. In her first ever YouTube appearance, she says she only wants her old life back. It is a life that she describes as “toll” (fantastic), before Chancellor Angela Merkel allowed one million, mostly male and Muslim, refugees into Germany last fall. Since then, Wilhailm says, “life has become very unsafe on the streets for young women like me and my friends.”

“This is the truth. We are no longer allowed to walk outside,” said Wilhailm. “We are no longer allowed to wear our clothes. We are no longer allowed to live the German life. This is the sad truth.”

Wilhaim’s fears are neither unfounded nor exaggerated. A security official as prominent as the police chief of Vienna, Gerhard Purstl, confirmed Wilhailm’s claim when he warned women not to venture out at night alone and to “avoid suspicious-looking areas.” Purstl’s warning came after several sex attacks in Austria by migrants.

If anyone possessed any doubts about Muslim migrant attitudes toward the ‘infidel’ women of their host countries, these doubts should have been painfully and publicly dispelled last New Year’s Eve at Cologne’s central train station. A thousand of the new arrivals, mostly young Arab men, gathered there that evening and, like packs of hyenas, molested hundreds of women, raping several.

“We are so scared,” said Wilhailm, expressing the fear young women are now forced to face. “We don’t want to be scared to go to the grocery store alone after sunset.”

Twelve years ago, I wrote a small book, The Cube and the Cathedral: Europe, America, and Politics Without God, in which I argued that Europe’s fecklessness in the face of both its own domestic problems and the jihadist threat was the logical, if deeply disturbing, result of what I styled a “crisis of civilizational morale.” This indictment did not go down well on the banks of the Charles River, where the Harvard eminento Stanley Hoffmann cleared his Gallic throat, harrumphed, and informed the readers of Foreign Affairs that my book was a “rambling attack on contemporary European secularism [written] with a condescension exceeding that of Robert Kagan.” I hope Professor Hoffmann, prior to his death last September, never learned that Bob Kagan used to play third base on a softball team that had Scooter Libby at shortstop and me at second base; who knows what nightmares of conspiracy would have plagued his latter years?

In any event, I do wonder what Professor Hoffmann, from his present position on the Other Side, thinks of recent events in Italy, where the government of Prime Minister Matteo Renzi covered the nude sculptures in Rome’s Capitoline Museum, and then denied his dinner guests wine, in order not to offend the sensibilities of Iranian president Hassan Rouhani and thereby not inhibit Italy’s entrepreneurs from getting their share of the post-Iranian-nuclear-“deal” swag. For if those gestures of cravenness were not evidence of a crisis of civilizational morale in its terminal, or hospice-care, stage, I’m not sure what would be.

The tender-minded will, I suppose, suggest that Renzi’s surrender to the aesthetic and culinary mores of the seventh-century Arabian peninsula were gestures of respect for difference and, coupled with the fulsome reception President Rouhani received in the Vatican, signs of a new opening to interreligious dialogue with the dominant Iranian form of Shia Islam. Two incidents from the life of Pope St. John Paul II, who knew something about both civilizational morale and interreligious dialogue, ought to put paid to such self-demeaning rubbish.

Among ISIS’s exploits, satellite photos now show, was the destruction in 2014 of St. Elijah, Iraq’s oldest Christian monastery.

The Guardian reports that it was 1,400 years old and had “26 distinctive rooms including a sanctuary and chapel.” The photos reveal that its “walls have been literally pulverized.”

“St. Elijah’s,” The Guardian notes, “joins a growing list of more than 100 religious and historic sites looted and destroyed [by ISIS], including mosques, tombs, shrines and churches. Ancient monuments in the cities of Nineveh, Palmyra and Hatra lie in ruins. Museums and libraries have been pillaged, books burned, artwork crushed or trafficked.”

Second only to the terror group’s horrific crimes against living human beings are these erasures of treasures of history and faith, evoking universal shock and outrage.

There is one part of the Middle East, though, where a people’s attachment to treasures of history and faith does not seem to count. When it comes to the West Bank (or Judea and Samaria) and the Golan Heights, the U.S. administration and the European Union have been upping the pressure on Israel to regard these areas—rich in biblical and historical sites—as something it has no rights to at all.

The EU had already announced in November that it would be labeling Israeli products from these areas as “made in settlements” instead of “made in Israel.” Israel and supporters have objected that, out of 200 territorial disputes in the world, this is the only one for which the EU resorts to labeling, evoking anti-Semitic practices. It falls on deaf ears.