RUTHFULLY YOURS

‘A statesman,” quipped Harry S. Truman, “is a politician who’s been dead 10 or 15 years.” That wasn’t true for the “little haberdasher” who built an American-led global order from scratch in the 1940s. Nor is it true for Helmut Schmidt, the chancellor of West Germany from 1974 to 1982. Mr. Schmidt died Tuesday at the age of 96.

Statesmen—think Churchill or Lincoln—are born in adversity, halfway between triumph and tragedy. Mr. Schmidt faced his first test in 1977 when West Germany, assaulted by homegrown terrorism, was tottering on the edge of internal war. The Baader-Meinhof Gang, the self-styled “Red Army Faction,” was murdering bankers, industrialists and prosecutors.

The RAF’s strategy was a classic one: provoke the state into shedding its liberal-democratic mask by forcing it into an unchecked repression that would unleash a revolution. The climax was the hijacking of a Lufthansa plane to Somalia. The terrorists had stuffed the aircraft with explosives, and Mr. Schmidt confronted a deadly demand: Release our jailed comrades, or you will have the blood of 86 hostages on your hands.

“[H]alf any given year’s total migrants arrive by the start of October. The other half arrives between October and the end of December… If these tendencies remain relevant, we should expect the very opposite of a winter break, and should prepare instead for an increasing flood of people.” — Viktor Orbán, Prime Minister of Hungary, September 21, 2015.

The UN High Commission for Refugees announced on Nov. 2 that the number of people who illegally migrated to Europe in October alone (218,394) nearly outstripped the number of those who entered throughout the whole of 2014 (219,000).

The reality at Hungary’s central railway station in Budapest had to be seen to be believed. Hungarians were easily outnumbered 200 to 1 by predominantly young Muslim males. These newcomers engaged in sporadic violence, rioted at the sight of camera crews, and left the station littered with human excrement.

According to Björn Höcke, of the populist Alternative for Germany Party (AfD), by the end of 2016 there will be as many Muslim males of military age in Germany (5.5 million), as there are young German men of that age.

On Nov. 2, Libya threatened to send to Europe millions of migrants from Africa, unless the EU recognizes its self-declared (Islamist) government.

“We will not stop hunting Christians and burning churches. Christians are Allah’s enemies!” – Islamic leaders, Aceh region.

In other parts of Indonesia, where Islamic law, or Sharia, is not enforced, churches, even fully registered ones, are also under attack

On Dec. 25, 2012, with all required paperwork in place, when the congregation assembled on empty land to celebrate Christmas, hundreds of Muslims threw rocks, rotten eggs, and bags filled with excrement at the Christians. Police stood by and watched.

For Indonesia, the country once hailed as the face of “moderate Islam,” the “extremist” behavior one would expect of the Islamic State, or ISIS, has apparently become the norm.

In compliance with Islamic demands, Indonesian authorities in the Aceh region have started to tear down Christian churches. Their move comes after Muslim mobs rampaged and attacked churches. At least one person was killed; thousands of Christians were displaced.

The State Department’s Trafficking in Persons Report estimates that more than 44,000 trafficking victims have identified throughout the world, out of which the Department of Justice has gained convictions in just 184 cases.

Compare this to the International Labor Organization 2012 estimate of a total of 20.9 million trafficked victims in the world and hundreds of thousands in the United States.

The media usually pays scant attention to their plight.

Esperanza was a sixteen year old girl when she was brutally raped by a man named Rey. He forced her to become a sex slave, and eventually brought her to New York, where she was raped, beaten and threatened in brothels day after day

Like so many other trafficking victims, Esperanza could not speak English. A man who saw the bruises on her body connected her with Safe Horizon, a program that specializes in helping trafficking victims; they helped to rescue her.

The General Assembly at the United Nations met today. What emerged from the meeting is thunderous silence, a silence that echoes through the conscience of sensible people.

Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian parliament call for days of rage against Israeli citizens. Several Israeli’s including children and elderly women, have been killed many more injured. This is a new version of Intifada, violence to provoke. For Palestinian officials, the moment they seek is Israeli retaliation. At the point, the United Nations will be awakened. Israel will be censored. The wave of violence initiated by Palestinians will be a footnote to the deliberations. In the U.N. Jewish blood doesn’t count.

It is now clear, based on Dutch Safety Board investigation that Malaysian Flight 17 in 2014 was destroyed by a Russian made warhead installed in BUK surface to air missile system. The 283 passengers and 12 crew members lost oxygen in the freezing fuselage before the aircraft slammed to the ground.

When it comes to choosing sides, the hard left’s anti-Western mindset inevitably trumps respect for the values it otherwise professes to endorse: gender equality, gay rights and opposition to theocratic absolutism, to name but a few. Shame, however, remains an alien concept
Judged even by its own inane standards, Guardian Australia has published a splendidly stupid essay by Irfan Yusuf, in which he likens radical Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir to Andrew Bolt and modern conservatism. This comparison is apt, apparently, because of a common sense of yearning: Hizb ut-Tahrir longs for the return of the Caliphate, and Bolt for the return of Abbott.

No doubt Yusuf and the Guardian heartily congratulated themselves for their daring, but I think the essay is interesting for reasons that Yusuf certainly didn’t intend. He writes

Perhaps another reason groups like HT have some traction is because, for all their silly rhetoric, they are actually doing something.

Doing what, exactly? He has warm words for the group’s efforts to educate everybody on counterterrorism, surveillance and radicalisation. He admonishes what he evidently regards as lazy Muslim moderates and concludes

You don’t have to believe in Hizb ut-Tahrir’s caliphate to appreciate their effort.

There you have it. The intellectual clumsiness is staggering. You watch transfixed as some mild criticism of Hizb ut-Tahrir wobbles into an endorsement. I mention, only in passing, that Hizb ut-Tahrir has also made an effort to justify the actions of jihadists going to fight in Syria, as well as the murder of Australian troops and the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists. None of this invalidates Hizb ut-Tahrir’s credibility. For all his loose talk about the group’s undeserved media attention, the worst Yusuf can offer is modest applause.

In the history of political clichés, has there ever been one quite so misjudged as the line—some version of which is attributed either to Israel’s martyred Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin or fabled Defense Minister Moshe Dayan—that “you make peace with your enemies, not with your friends”?

OK, “give peace a chance” and “nation building at home” are worse. But the Rabin-Dayan line is an expression of the higher mindlessness that passes for wisdom among people who think they are smart. After Monday’s make-nice session between President Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, it’s time for a reconsideration.

To wit: You do not make peace with enemies. You make peace with former enemies—either because you have defeated them, as we defeated the Axis Powers in World War II; or because they collapse, as the Soviet Union did after the fall of the Berlin Wall; or because they have defeated you and you’re able to come to terms with the outcome from a safe distance. Witness Vietnam.

The Rouhani-Zarif façade of civility toward the West was enough to persuade the vain, delusional and acquisitive in Western leadership circles that change had finally come again to Iran. However, no amount of Persian tea or Iranian rosewater-drenched ice cream shared between Kerry and Zarif can drown out the deceptive hoax of the JCPOA. Before the ink was dry, Khamenei and the security services announced that the agreement has no standing in Iran.

To punctuate the point, Tehran arrested a prominent Iranian-American businessman, Siamak Namazi, and a Lebanese-American, Nazar Zaka, to add to its collection of fraudulently-charged hostages: Washington Post journalist Jason Rezaian; former marine Amir Hekmati; Pastor Saeed Abedini, and retired FBI agent Robert Levinson.

Just in case the U.S. needed one more symbolic kick, the regime closed down the first KFC fast food restaurant in Tehran on Monday, just one day after it opened.

In the end, it matters little what the government, people, or even the theocratic institutions think is in Iran’s best long-term interests.

“She writes something but means something else.” — Tehran Islamic Prosecutor.

The irony in all this is that Ekhtesari is not a political poet. In fact, she has written that those who try to use poetry for politics betray both.

The sentencing was made easier thanks to a recent lecture by “Supreme Guide” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, laying down the rules of what he believes “good Islamic poets” should observe when writing poetry.

The poet Sa’id Sultanpour was abducted on the day of his wedding and shot dead in a Tehran prison. Rahman Hatefi-Monfared had his veins cut and was left to bleed to death in the notorious Evin Prison.

“I hope to see the day when no one is sent to jail in this land for writing poems.” — Mehdi Mussavi, convicted poet.

Does a seminar on reforming the meter and rhyme schemes of Persian poetry violate “Islamic values” and threaten the foundations of the Islamic Republic of Iran?

Monday, Nov. 9, marks the anniversary of Kristallnacht in 1938, when Nazi hordes ran wild throughout Berlin, as well as in other German cities. Jewish houses of worship were desecrated and then set afire. Thousands of Jews were rounded up, some beaten to death, others sent to concentration camps. Jewish-owned businesses and homes were looted.

I will never forget seeing the unimaginable horror of the night and the following day 77 years ago. By luck, my parents were not in Berlin. I was at my grandmother’s. Through the window I could see my beautiful synagogue engulfed in flames as desperate screams rose from the street below. Each knock on our apartment door brought terror, followed by incredible relief. By some miracle, two of my uncles made it to my grandmother’s seeking safety from the savagery of this night.

The next morning as I wandered through my neighborhood, I saw shards of plate glass everywhere, as every Jewish-owned shop had been looted and painted with vile Jew-hating slogans. Uniformed Nazis and their sympathizers were having fun as they surveyed their brutality. One group looked at a large stain on the street that was said to be the blood of a Jew. Even now I can hear their laughter.