RUTHFULLY YOURS

It is hard to explain why Bashar Assad used nerve gas — probably Sarin — in the town of Khan Sheikhoun in Syria’s northern Idlib province. On the surface, at least, it would seem to be a totally counterproductive and reckless move likely to anger the Europeans, the Americans, and even his patrons the Russians. Then why would he do it?

It was a surprise, coming as it did immediately after U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley announced that “regime change” in Syria was no longer a priority and the U.S. focus would be on ISIS. This was a major change from the Obama administration and should have reassured Assad that he could hang on as ruler of Syria. But some pundits saw the U.S. policy shift as a perverse incentive for Assad, making it possible for him to believe he could use highly lethal chemical weapons without fear of retaliation. The Sarin would thus be a test of whether the new policy was real. To some degree, the announcement by the British prime minister that the UK had no retaliatory plans despite the attack might seem to be evidence for this argument.

It is a considerable stretch, though, to think Assad would use chemical weapons to test an American policy shift, particularly because this particular shift would have helped Assad and the Alawite minority cut a final deal that preserved their domination. It is doubtful that is the explanation.

The more likely truth is that Assad was deeply afraid that the U.S. policy shift was part of a secret deal with the Russians, one that he had to head off.

In 2014, after the first documented government use of chemicals against the Syrian population, Russia and the United States struck a deal for the removal and liquidation of Assad’s Sarin and other chemical stocks. Part of the importance of the deal lay in the fact that it was negotiated directly between Russia’s foreign minister and America’s secretary of state, making Russia and the United States the high-level guarantors of Assad’s compliance. There was not much compliance, actually — UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon said chemical stocks remained and 5 of 12 chemical plants were still operating months after the disposal was supposed to have occurred. But regardless of what they knew (and regardless of Assad’s use of chlorine gas), the deal was considered a success until Khan Sheikhoun. This first use of Sarin since the agreement poses a direct challenge to both countries, but especially to Russia.

If Facebook insists on the rules of censorship, it should at the very least administer those rules in a fair way. Facebook, however, does not even pretend that it administers its censorship in any way that approximates fairness.

Posts critical of Chancellor Merkel’s migrant policies, for example, can be categorized as “Islamophobia”, and are often found to violate “Community Standards”, while incitement to actual violence and the murder of Jews and Israelis by Palestinian Arabs is generally considered as conforming to Facebook’s “Community Standards”.

Notwithstanding the lawsuits, Facebook’s bias is so strong that it recently restored Palestinian Arab terrorist group Fatah’s Facebook page, which incites hatred and violence against Jews — despite having shut it down only three days earlier. In 2016 alone, this page had a minimum of 130 posts glorifying terror and murder of Jews.

Germany has formally announced its draconian push towards censorship of social media. On March 14, Germany’s Justice Minister Heiko Maas announced the plan to formalize into law the “code of conduct”, which Germany pressed upon Facebook, Twitter and YouTube in late 2015, and which included a pledge to delete “hate speech” from their websites within 24 hours.

“This [draft law] sets out binding standards for the way operators of social networks deal with complaints and obliges them to delete criminal content,” Justice Minister Heiko Maas said in a statement announcing the planned legislation.

“Criminal” content? Statements that are deemed illegal under German law are now being conflated with statements that are merely deemed, subjectively and on the basis of entirely random complaints from social media users — who are free to abuse the code of conduct to their heart’s content — to be “hate speech”. “Hate speech” has included critiques of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s migration policies. To be in disagreement with the government’s policies is now potentially “criminal”. Social media companies, such as Facebook, are supposed to be the German government’s informers and enforcers — qualified by whom and in what way? — working at the speed of light to comply with the 24-hour rule. Rule of law, clearly, as in North Korea, Iran, Russia or any banana-republic, has no place in this system.

What is obvious is that the West concerns itself with its live citizens; we concern ourselves in glorifying our industry of death. No one here really cares about the dead: they quickly become just an excuse for more violence and more terror attacks.

When one looks at Westerners, one can only envy the hyper-morality of their self-criticism. They are forever accusing themselves of moral lapses. Sometimes they seem to have some kind of autoimmune disease whose function is to cleanse their societies.

To us, it looks as if all they really care about are hating Jews and stroking corrupt dictatorships.

Perhaps the time has come to learn from our “enemy” and first take a cold hard look at ourselves.

It is obvious that the West concerns itself with its live citizens; we concern ourselves in glorifying our industry of death.

It seems we regard our dead differently from the way the dead are regarded in the West. Here, no respect is paid to the shaheed [martyr]; he is expendable. He serves only as an excuse to hate, riot and glorify the “resistance” and the “jihad” — terrorist attacks.

Why, during the long years of our conflict in the Middle East, have we Palestinians never interested ourselves in the bodies of Palestinian terrorists killed in terrorist attacks? No one has ever shown the slightest interest in their fate. Arabs and Muslims in the Middle East often point fingers at one another, yet in reality, we respect neither the living nor the dead. No one buries the thousands of bodies of Islamists killing each other. We abandon our brothers to rot in foreign soil. There are untold number of civilians killed in Syria, Iraq and Yemen, their bodies unmourned, eaten by scavengers.

We simply use the bodies of terrorists — to call for more blood and more terrorism against civilians, and to keep the terrorism industry going. No one here really cares about the dead: they quickly become just an excuse for more violence and more terror attacks.

Sometimes it is hard to credit, but there really are good and worthwhile things to be found in the most surprising places — in this instance the journalism of Crikey’s Canberra correspondent, Bernard Keane, who can be very silly indeed. Every now then though, just like the proverbial broken clock, he gets it right and his thoughts on Yusuf Islam, the artist formerly known as Cat Stephens, make that point.

If you don’t have a particular passion for saccharine songs about love and peace and let’s-all-get-along-ism, know that Islam intends to tour Australia in November and it appears that, unlike Ayaan Hirsi-Ali, nobody is threatening to blow him up or stage massive demonstrations outside his concert venues, nor are they harassing the tour promoter’s insurers with dark talk of all the unfortunate things that might happen if Islam is allowed to sing and speak freely. You know the sort of thing: Nice little theatre you’ve got here, pal. Pity if something were to happen to it.

And there is another difference as well. While Hirsi-Ali has never called for anyone to be murdered, Yusuf Islam most definitely and emphatically has, as per this video clip. Keane writes:

Yusuf Islam joined in the Iranian-initiated demand that Rushdie be killed for his book, The Satanic Verses. According to Yusuf Islam in 1989, Salman Rushdie should have been murdered for his book.

“He must be killed. The Koran makes it clear — if someone defames the prophet, then he must die,” Islam said in February that year.

Keane adds that the singer favoured death by burning — something it will be good to remember the next time Peace Train comes on the radio.

Islam has never dis-avowed his homicidal sentiments, as far as an extensive Google search can establish, yet he is allowed to enter the country without official obstacle or intimidation of his hosts and promoters. Rushdie, meanwhile, has spent more than a quarter century shadowed by bodyguards and living every waking moment with the thought that the next might be his last.

One reason no one is protesting Yusuf’s tour may well be that, unlike the snarling Left and its Islamist allies, those of more conservative mien are too busy attending to work, family and paying taxes to look up contact information for Immigration Peter Dutton, a former policeman who some think might make a decent PM one day. This might be his chance to prove it by following the precedent set in 1975 by Clyde Cameron, who banned Alice Cooper from entering the country. Ah, innocent days!

In his latest RTRS interview (Bosnian-Serb Republic public TV service), Srdja Trifkovic talks about Russia’s complex political and economic power structure, which is mostly at odds with the image of an authoritarian Kremlin monolith presented in the Western media.
[Video here—Trifkovic segment starts at 6 minutes. Excerpts, verbatim translation from Serbian.]

Q: Professor Trifkovic, you’ve just come back from Moscow where you attended the Economic Forum, but it was also a political forum?

ST: The Moscow Economic Forum is a major annual gathering of economists and experts who advocate a change in the macroeconomic policy of the Russian government. They act from the standpoint of what one may call “patriotic opposition.” They argue that the country’s economy and financial structures are still unduly dominated by the upholders of the Washington Consensus, and by the oligarchs who continue to control the flows of money through their ownership of many private commercial banks.

Q: Are you trying to say that the Russian government is pro-American?

ST: No, but within her economic and financial structures there are officials—like Elvira Nabiullina, head of the Central Bank of Russia—who reject dedollarization, which is advocated by the “patriotic” wing of the government, as embodied in the deputy prime minister in charge of the defense industry . . .

Q: You mean Rogozin?

An article by Rachel Aviv titled ‘The Trauma of Facing Deportation’ describes an unusual disorder known as ‘uppgivenhetssyndrom’ or ‘resignation syndrome’ that only exists in Sweden and is specific to the children of immigrants. Published in the April 3, 2017 issue of The New Yorker, Aviv describes how refugee children suffering from resignation syndrome fall into a coma-like state after being informed that their families will be expelled from the country. The Swedish refer to the condition as ‘apathy’ and the children as ‘de apatiska’, the apathetic. There have been several hundred cases of resignation syndrome in the past decade. The symptoms are very severe and typically begin with depression followed by a gradual withdrawal into an unconscious state that requires tube feeding. The children are unable to move, eat, drink or respond even to painful stimuli and are in this state for months sometimes years. The only known cure is for their families to receive residency permits to stay in Sweden.

A simple objective cultural explanation for resignation syndrome is that it is another manifestation of honor violence. However, studies that suggested the family was staging the illness were labeled xenophobic while research that theorized the migratory process precipitated the condition became the basis for government policy. Hence, a 2013 guide for treating apathy published by the Swedish Board of Health and Welfare advised “A permanent residency permit is considered by far the most effective ‘treatment,’ and that a patient will not recover until his family has permission to live in Sweden.” In brief, political correctness tainted the studies because it was more politically expedient to grant residency to all families with children suffering from the syndrome than to acknowledge that this could be another manifestation of honor violence where cultural traditions allow parents to abuse their own children. If honor violence is proven to be the reason for the syndrome than Sweden’s immigration policy is the cause of the illness not the cure.

Honor violence is a form of domestic violence that is committed by family members against other family members to either prevent the family from being dishonored or restore the families damaged honor. Victims of honor violence typically internalize the values of their family or community and feel guilty and responsible for the perceived offense against honor. Honor violence is typically attributed to assaults and murders of women who have refused arranged marriages or defiled the family’s honor by not following traditions. Honor violence is not always punitive for alleged violations of cultural traditions. Anything that preserves the family honor is permitted including forcing children into slavery or child marriage to settle a debt. Being deported back to a country where the family status and honor would be diminished could be motivation for shaming a child into staging resignation syndrome. The New Yorker article did not mention that the majority of mothers of the apathetic refugee children had been subjected to physical and/or sexual abuse and were described as severely traumatized. One study suggested a Munchausen by proxy scenario proposing the idea that the mother staged the illness as a method to cope with her own trauma. The theory characterized the syndrome as ‘lethal mothering’, a behavior that is consistent with honor violence. In honor based tribal cultures men can justifiably subject their wives to physical and sexual abuse and mothers can willingly harm their own children to preserve the family honor. A 2016 study claimed that almost all children with resignation syndrome suffered traumatization from physical abuse, harassment or by witnessing violence and abuse in the close family. Intrafamily violence is also consistent with honor crimes.

ST. PETERSBURG, Russia—Russian authorities identified a 22-year-old man from the Central Asian republic of Kyrgyzstan as the suicide bomber who caused a deadly subway-train blast in Russia’s second-largest city on Monday, underscoring Moscow’s concerns about radicalization in Central Asia.

In a statement Tuesday, Russia’s Investigative Committee identified the attacker as Akbarjon Jalilov.

The explosion occurred Monday on a train between Sennaya Ploshchad, a busy downtown subway intersection, and Technological Institute station.

According to the statement, forensic experts found genetic traces of Mr. Jalilov on a bag containing an explosive device that was found and disarmed at Ploshchad Vosstaniya, another subway station not far from the site of Monday’s explosion. Investigators also drew their conclusions based on surveillance-camera footage, the statement said.

Russian Health Minister Veronika Skvortsova said Tuesday morning that 14 people had been killed and 49 remained in hospital.

Earlier Tuesday, the Investigative Committee said that an explosive device could have been detonated by a man whose fragmented remains were found in the third carriage of the subway train.

Rakhat Sulaimanov, the official representative of the Kyrgyz security agency, said the person responsible was likely a native of Kyrgyzstan who then became a Russian citizen. Mr. Sulaimanov said Kyrgyz security services were in contact with Russian authorities over the matter, but declined to provide further details.

No group has claimed responsibility for the blast. It occurred during a visit to the city by Russian President Vladimir Putin, raising official concerns that the attack was timed to his stay. CONTINUE AT SITE