O Contraire

Because Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Somali-then but American now, Muslim Brotherhood–then but anti-Muslim now, is someone I admire and have interviewed—smart, a fine, brave writer, and a good thinker—I began reading with interest her latest essay in the Wall Street Journal. Well I began it with interest; how I ended it is a different matter. Titled “Swearing in the Enemy,” it proposes a radically new method for the US to naturalize future citizens.

Hirsi Ali is famous (often, within certain cultures, infamous) for saying the unsayable and writing what others know perfectly well but are fearful of acknowledging, even to themselves in quiet moments. That is her strength. Six years ago, she told a London newspaper: “Britain is sleepwalking into a society that could be ruled by sharia law within decades unless Islamic schools are shut down and young Muslims are made instead to integrate and accept Western liberal values.”

It was almost a year ago that Egypt’s former president, Hosni Mubarak, was convicted of failing to stop the killing of hundreds of protesters back in 2011, an accusation for which he received a life sentence. Personally, I always found that a peculiar allegation: most of the world failed, for that matter, to stop the killing of Egypt’s protesters back in 2011, and although Mubarak naturally wielded more power in his own country than did the rest of the us, and doubtless did nothing to stop the killings, I’m not so sure that “failing to stop” is a solid charge, or one for that matter that deserves life imprisonment.

So what exactly did Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the elder brother of the two Boston bombers, do while living in a Russian province back in 2012? Russian intelligence officials believe he was meeting with militants, according to the Los Angeles Times, which is kind of a gee-whiz conclusion. After learning the guy had spent six whole months in Dagestan, a hotbed of Islamic terrorist activity, most of us might arrive at a similar conclusion.

But real the question is: Why didn’t the FBI or the CIA? What intelligence agency, in other words, likely knew all about what was going on with Tamerlan abroad, but kept most of the information bottled up? Since non-intelligence organizations seem to have no trouble piecing together the doings abroad of Tamerlan and his friends before the Boston Marathon, it is not an unnatural question.

In November 1995, Yigal Amir assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Four elements are central to this unhappy event—but we’ll get to the fourth a bit later. The first is, as Amir told the police who arrested him, the killer was “satisfied” with what he did.

The second: at his trial he said his own personal destiny (he would be sentenced to life imprisonment) was irrelevant and unimportant to him. He had succeeded—that was the main object. Rabin, a peacemaker Amir had grown to detest after the Oslo Accords, was, Amir summed up with considerable pleasure, “out of the way.”

Here’s a question. Who benefits most from the finger-pointing after the Boston Marathon bombings? If you answered “Russia” or “Vladimir Putin,” I’m with you. And I’m not the only one: As the Daily Beast points out, Akhmed Zakayev, a former Shakespearean actor who turned into a Chechen rebel commander, says exactly that. The Boston bombings, he insists, were “a gift to the Kremlin and Putin.” The fact that Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the elder of the two brothers who allegedly set off the bombs, traveled to Russia last year for six months might only inflame such theories.

From his safe haven in Britain, of course, Zakayev can say anything he wants, however crazy-sounding—including, “I could believe if they come to Moscow that they could have some instruction from someone from Russian Special Services.” The devoutly Muslim Chechen rebel obviously has motive to blame the Kremlin—and it should be noted that Putin’s government had warned the US about Tsarnaev, and the FBI in response did almost nothing to check out those warnings.

Because I thought it more than worthwhile to meet Masha Gessen, I accepted with gratitude Victor Ashe’s invitation to join him at a dinner honoring the relatively new director of Radio Liberty’s Russian service. This blog, after all, had featured Gessen on several occasions, generally not in a flattering light. Ashe, once the US ambassador to Poland and now the vice chairman of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Board of Governors, was also a sometime critic of a few RFE/RL top-level employees. He was kind enough to e-mail me a copy of the invitation he accepted for us both (see here). It was definitely time, I decided, to see who Gessen was, hear her speak—and not judge her solely by what other people said about her.

Long long ago, I interviewed a British member of Parliament who had absolutely no hope of becoming anything more exalted. My purpose: to ask him how it was that a woman candidate had actually been put forth by a UK political party to run for prime minister—and a conservative party at that. And then won!

His answer: “Whenever a political party is desperate, really desperate, they will nominate anyone at all. Even a woman. The fact that the Conservatives chose Margaret Thatcher, a most unpleasant person with an extraordinarily bad hairstyle, shows how deeply unpopular they were, and how frantic they were to find someone—anyone—to represent them.”

If diesel is still scarce next month when the harvest begins, a savvy Egyptian wheat farmer informs the New York Times, “There will be a revolution of the hungry.” Fuel in Egypt is very hard to find now, even on the black market. Hoarders and profiteers are brandishing knives and guns at gas station attendants. Food prices are soaring. And the country’s leader, Mohamed Morsi, is doing … nothing.

Nothing about the Egyptian economy, anyway.

• Alexander Litvinenko: dead, 2006, radiation poisoning.

• Arkadi Patarkatsishvili: dead, 2008, fatality attributed to natural causes.

• Alexander Perepilichnyy: dead, 2012, while out jogging. Cause of death unknown after two postmortems.

• German Gorbuntsov: shot six times last year by an unknown assailant—and alive, yes, but currently plotting the death of someone else. I mean allegedly plotting the death of someone else, of course.

• Boris Berezovsky: dead 2013, in fact just days ago, by hanging.

What do these four deaths and six attempted homicides have in common? Well, for one thing, they all occurred in Great Britain, which evidently is a great place to kill foreign fugitives with extremely long names.

Great Britain has never been a haven for press freedoms. For one thing, most British despise the media, as a BBC-sponsored poll indicated some years ago: at the time only one-third of British respondents said they approved of their news organizations, and I suspect it is even fewer these days. For another, much of the British media deserve their derision.

Sometimes it helps to be a history major. Here’s a fact most contemporary chroniclers either don’t know or choose not to recall: John Adams, who eventually became the second president of the United States, once let it be known that he, Adams, thought George Washington was so terrific that he should be referred to as “His Highness, the President of the United States and Protector of the Rights of Same.” (Washington declined the honorific.) I reflect on that Adams suggestion every time I read about the killing, in late 2011, of Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen. When you think about it, it’s awfully easy to slip—even after a revolution—from a democrat to an autocrat.

He was detained in prison—without a trial—for almost three years, while the prosecution dragged its feet. He was put on suicide watch, a classification that evidently meant the mentally fragile inmate had to stand at attention stark naked every morning, and also go to bed naked every night. He was sleep-deprived—woken up regularly by guards in the event he had a blanket over his head, or was found curled up against the wall. His prescription glasses were removed, returned only in rare instances when he was permitted to watch television.

One hour a day, each day, he was permitted to walk to and from his cell in shackles.

What’s better than offering your compatriots a chicken in every pot?

Silvio Berlusconi’s most recent promises. There’s almost nothing Berlusconi won’t offer the electorate this time around. For example: If elected as Italy’s prime minister (yet again…), Silvio, who happens to be very rich and tax-averse, said, “I will take four billion euros of my own fortune and give it to Italians.” That’s the amount Berlusconi believes his countrymen had to pay in stiff new property taxes last year.

Berlusconi uttered his personal tax refund declaration on television, and since he rose long ago from shipboard crooner to media magnate and now owns almost all Italian networks, you can bet word got around. Especially since Berlusconi also promised (surprise!!) a pardon for all tax evaders. There were many, many reasons for this assurance to the electorate, the prime one being that Berlusconi himself makes a habit of cheating the taxman. In fact he was convicted of it. So if he gets elected, he can pardon himself, among many, many others.

“No evidence was produced by the Dubai police that links Israel to the incident in Dubai,” an Israeli foreign ministry spokesman told an Australian radio station three years ago after the untimely death of a Hamas leader in a Dubai hotel room. This sort of pronouncement is known as a non-denial denial, an accomplishment government spokesmen everywhere have perfected. By “incident” the foreign ministry spokesman actually meant “murder”—Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, a nasty piece of work, was first injected with a muscle relaxant and then smothered with a pillow by a group of foreigners wearing tennis whites, awkward-looking wigs, and fake beards. And by “links” the Israeli spokesman actually meant “Good luck trying to prove those guys in the beards worked for us.”

One of my favorite lines, thus far anyway, concerning Pope Benedict’s surprise resignation comes from Italian parliamentarian Alessandra Mussolini, a really good-looking woman despite being, yes, the granddaughter of the pulchritude-challenged Il Duce.  Much of her facial good fortune owes something to the other side of her family: she is also Sophia Loren’s niece. However, there her genetic triumph both begins and ends. Mussolini is—how to put this gently?—not a genius. For example back in 2003, when the leader of the Italian fascist party abruptly performed a surprise turnaround, denouncing fascism as “the absolute evil,” Mussolini swiftly left that party in disgust.

Now she wishes to share her views on the pope.