Category Archives: Uncategorized

Thoughts on Making Universities Safe for Free Speech by Jeff Trag

June 20, 2017   Uncategorized   No comments
  • If a speaker or group is committing battery, assault or vandalism, the situation should be police and judicial matter — as well as valid grounds for mandatory expulsion. There is no place for vigilantism by students, faculty or administers on campus to enforce political conformity.
  • The people who are causing the problems should be the ones who pay — not only in colleges and universities but in other venues also.
  • We should never let rioters have a hecklers veto over who gets to speak.

Universities and colleges in the United States need to be safe places where students of all backgrounds and beliefs can live and study, free from intimidation by other students, faculty, and administrators.

Protests are fine, and they are our right as Americans, but there needs to be zero tolerance for violence and intimidation. If a speaker or group is committing or inciting battery, assault or vandalism, the situation should be a police and judicial matter — as well as valid grounds for mandatory expulsion. There is no place for vigilantism by students, faculty or administers on campus to enforce political conformity. There is no place for any kind of intimidation and violence anywhere in the US. We should never let rioters have a hecklers veto over who gets to speak. The following are some ideas to rein in the current terror on campuses:

  • Pass a law that the leaders of protesters will be responsible for — and must pay for — the extra security needed.
  • The people who are causing the problems should be the ones who pay — not only in colleges and universities but in other venues also. If you participate in and/or pay for a group and organize a protest, and if you or your group intentionally commits violence, you and your protestors should be held responsible for the cost of police and other security in the event of physical or personal injury. The protesters (or rioters) will say it is free speech, but when they are trying to shut down someone else’s free speech in a physical way, that is denying someone’s constitutional rights with violence.
  • If there is violence, organizers should have to pay for property damage and medical bills of the injured as well as face legal consequences.
  • Pass a rule that universities, including professors and administrators, should be personally responsible in their dealings with students not to enforce political preferences in any way. If any professor or administrator uses a student’s political beliefs in any way as a means of judging that student’s grades or position at a school, it should result in dismissal and criminal charges. The left has used social intimidation and job insecurity as a weapon to drive conservatives out of academic life for half a century. Students at a university have the right to be in an atmosphere where they are not belittled, disparaged or intimidated because they hold a minority political view. This was what the left fought for in the sixties; now they have become the oppressors.
  • There should be a federal law that makes trying to deny somebody’s right to free speech a felony with mandatory jail time, for even first offense.
  • There should be a law that says a person participating in a riot is guilty of the crimes committed by the group, the same as in robbing a bank: if one of your partners murders a teller then all the bank robbers are guilty of murder.
  • Make it a crime for a police chief or mayor to not repel violent rioting.
  • The FBI should be tasked with identifying violent rioters and building felony cases against them.
  • No one should ever take action against a protester who is not being violent. If someone is not resisting or is incapacitated, then care should be taken to use minimal force.
  • There should be a shaming-campaign to get donors to stop donating to schools that permit violence and actively try to stomp on the rights of students or any non-violent group of persons and speakers. Colleges should support free speech and diversity of opinions.
  • There needs to be a law that makes it legal to record all university classes and lectures, and public meetings. This should apply to public and private schools. If you take on the responsibility of molding young minds, there needs to be complete transparency and accountability. Whatever you teach should be public. What would be the point of keeping what you are teaching a secret? The idea of education is to spread information. What is the big secret?
  • All alumni and donors should be able to sit in on any class they wish. They should simply have to go to the administration and request a permission slip. It would be safer for students if there were a background and metal-detector check on the person making the request, but in general it should be a right for donors and alumni to be in any class at any time without the professor having prior notice, but also a right to remove them if they should become disruptive.

The rioters have been doing us a favor by showing their real colors.

(Image source: Wikimedia Commons/k_donovan11)

Jeff Trag is based in Mexico City.

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Those who rushed to declare the death of the Oslo Accords fell into Abbas’s trap. Abbas’s threats are mainly designed to scare the international community into pressuring Israel to offer Abbas more concessions. He is hoping that inaccurate headlines conc

June 20, 2017   Uncategorized   No comments

  • Those who rushed to declare the death of the Oslo Accords fell into Abbas’s trap.

  • Abbas’s threats are mainly designed to scare the international community into pressuring Israel to offer Abbas more concessions. He is hoping that inaccurate headlines concerning the purported abrogation of the Oslo Accords will cause panic in Washington and European capitals, prompting world leaders to demand that Israel give Abbas everything he asks for.

  • Abbas knows that cancelling the agreements with Israel would mean dissolving his Palestinian Authority, and the end of his political career.

  • The tens of thousands of Arab refugees now seeking asylum in Europe could not care less about the “occupation” and settlements.

  • Ironically, Abbas declared that, “We are working on spreading the culture of peace and coexistence between our people and in our region.” But his harsh words against Israel, in addition to continued anti-Israel incitement in the Palestinian media, prove that he is moving in the opposite direction. This form of incitement destroys any chance of peace.

After weeks of threatening to drop a bombshell during his speech before the UN General Assembly, Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas on September 30 proved once again that he is an expert in the art of bluffing.

In the end, the bombshell he and his aides promised to detonate at the UN turned out to be a collection of old threats to abrogate signed agreements and a smear campaign against Israel.

There was nothing dramatic or new in Abbas’s speech. During the past few years, he and some of his aides have been openly talking about the possibility of cancelling the Oslo Accords if Israel does not fulfill its obligations towards the peace process.

In his speech, Abbas repeated the same threat, although some Western political analysts and journalists misinterpreted it as an announcement that he was abrogating signed agreements with Israel.

As one of Abbas’s advisors, Mahmoud Habbash, later clarified, “President Abbas did not cancel any agreements. He only made a threat, which is not going to be carried out tomorrow.”

Now, it is obvious that the talk about a bombshell was mainly intended to create tension and suspense ahead of Abbas’s speech. This is a practice that Abbas and his aides have become accustomed to using during the past few years in order to draw as much attention as possible.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas addresses the UN General Assembly, on September 26, 2014. (Image source: UN)

The threat to cancel the Oslo Accords with Israel is not different from other threats that Abbas and his aides have made over the past few years. How many times has Abbas threatened in the past to resign from his post or suspend security coordination with Israel? In the end, he did not carry out any of these threats.

Abbas is unlikely, also this time, to carry out his latest threat to cancel the agreements with Israel. He knows that such a move would mean dissolving his Palestinian Authority and the end of his political career. But Abbas would like the world to believe that he has already cancelled the Oslo Accords. Judging from the inaccurate headlines in the international media, he seems to have achieved his goal.

Now, many in the international community are falsely convinced that Abbas has annulled all signed agreements with Israel. Those who rushed to declare the death of the Oslo Accords fell into Abbas’s trap.

Abbas’s threats are mainly designed to scare the international community into pressuring Israel to offer Abbas more concessions. He is hoping that the inaccurate headlines concerning the purported abrogation of the Oslo Accords will cause panic in Washington and European capitals, prompting world leaders to demand that Israel give Abbas everything he is asking for.

Abbas is also hoping that his recurring threats will put the Israeli-Palestinian conflict back at the world’s center stage. Abbas and the Palestinians feel that the world has lost interest in the conflict, largely due to the ongoing turmoil in the Arab world, the refugee crisis in Europe and the growing threat of the Islamic State terror group.

This concern was voiced by the PLO’s Saeb Erekat immediately after President Barack Obama’s speech at the UN General Assembly, which did not include any reference to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Expressing “disappointment” over Obama’s speech, Erekat asked, “Does President Obama believe he can defeat ISIS and terrorism, or achieve security and stability in the Middle East, by ignoring the continued Israeli occupation, settlement expansion and the continued attacks on al-Aqsa Mosque?”

Of course, there is no direct link between Israeli “occupation” and settlements and the growing threat of radical Islam or the turmoil in the Arab world. The Islamic State is not beheading Muslims and non-Muslims because of the settlements or “occupation.” The Islamic State is not committing all these atrocities because it wants to “liberate Palestine.” Its main objective is to conquer the world after killing all the “infidels” in order to establish a sharia-ruled caliphate. The Islamic State would kill Erekat and Abbas — and many other Muslims — on its way to achieve its goal. In the eyes of the Islamic State, folks like Erekat and Abbas are a fifth column and traitors.

But instead of supporting the world’s war against the Islamic State and radical Islam, Abbas and Erekat want the international community to look the other way and devote all its energies and attention to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The tens of thousands of Arab refugees who are now seeking asylum in several European countries could not care less about the “occupation” and settlements. These people have lost everything they used to possess and their only dream is to either return to their homes and lands safely or start a new life in Europe and the US.

Abbas wanted worldwide attention in wake of the international community’s preoccupation with the refugee crisis and the radical Islam threat. For now, he appears to have achieved his goal, largely thanks to the international community’s misreading of his speech at the United Nations.

But while everyone is busy talking about Abbas’s bombshell, only a few have noticed that his speech consisted mostly of anti-Israel rhetoric that is likely to aggravate tensions between the Palestinians and Israel. Abbas used the UN General Assembly podium to make grave charges against Israel concerning “apartheid,” settlements and tensions on the Temple Mount. His fiery rhetoric, which has been partially welcomed by Hamas and other radical Palestinian groups, is likely to exacerbate tensions between Israelis and Palestinians and encourage more Palestinians to engage in violence.

It is this form of incitement that destroys any chance of peace between Israel and the Palestinians. This is the kind of rhetoric that prompts Palestinian youths to take to the streets and throw rocks and firebombs at Israeli civilians and policemen. Still, the international media, by and large, chose to ignore this destructive part of Abbas’s speech.

Ironically, Abbas declared in his speech that, “We are working on spreading the culture of peace and coexistence between our people and in our region.” But his harsh words against Israel, in addition to continued anti-Israel incitement in the Palestinian media, prove that he is moving in the opposite direction. As Abbas was addressing the UN General Assembly, some of his loyalists in Ramallah threatened and expelled Israeli Jewish journalists who came to interview Palestinians. This is certainly not a way to spread a “culture of peace and coexistence.”

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Thief Returns Stolen Israeli Artifacts After 20 Years – With a Note

June 20, 2017   Uncategorized   No comments

After stealing millennia-old artifacts from the Gamla archaeological site in northern Israel, the thief returned them with a note: “They brought me nothing but trouble. Don’t steal antiquities.”

Amos Cohen, an employee at the Museum of Islamic and Near Eastern Cultures in Be’er Sheva, could not believe his eyes last week when he opened a bag left in the museum’s courtyard: two sling stones, used in antiquities as artillery, were laying in the bag.

A typed note attached to the bag by an anonymous individual read: “These are two Roman ballista balls from Gamla, from a residential quarter at the foot of the summit. I stole them in July 1995 and since then they have brought me nothing but trouble. Please, do not steal antiquities!”

The museum director, Dr. Dalia Manor, rushed to report the incident to the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA), and soon these stone projectiles will join other ballista balls from Gamla that are researched at the National Treasures Department. Many other stones such as these are on display at the Gamla Nature Reserve.

Gamala sling stones

The sling stones and the note that accompanied them. (Dr. Dalia Manor, the Museum of Islamic and Near Eastern Cultures)

This is not the first time the IAA has encountered antiquities robbers who have shown remorse for their theft or unauthorized possession of artifacts. In the past, a 2,000 year old Jewish coffin was returned to the Unit for the Prevention of Antiquities Robbery (UPAR). It had been kept in the bedroom of a Tel Aviv resident until he realized the morbid meaning of the find.

In another case, a cleric from the state of New York asked for forgiveness for a member of his congregation whose conscience was tormented by the fact he took a stone from Jerusalem more than a decade earlier. The stone was returned to the National Treasures.

Dr. Danny Syon of the IAA, who excavated at Gamla for many years, welcomed the return of the stones. “Almost 2,000 such stones were found during the archaeological excavations in the Gamla Nature Reserve, and this is the site where there is the largest number of ballista stones from the Early Roman period. The Romans shot these stones at the defenders of the city in order to keep them away from the wall, and in that way they could approach the wall and break it with a battering ram. The stones were manually chiseled on site by soldiers or prisoners,” he explained.

As Israel is brimming with artifacts from multiple eras which can be found almost anywhere you go, theft is fairly common. The IAA stresses that the robbers cause tremendous damage to the delicate sites and cause the loss of historical evidence, many times thousands of years old.

Excavating in antiquities sites without a license and destroying such sites constitute severe violations of the law in Israel, for which the law prescribes up to five years in prison.

There have also been incidents in which citizens exhibited exemplary behaviour when they randomly discovering artifacts and reported them, thus contributing to Israel’s understanding of its rich history and culture.

 

By: United with Israel Staff

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There Goes Turkish Secularism by Robert Jones

June 20, 2017   Uncategorized   No comments
  • “They hold such events to establish hegemony over society, to scare and terrorize people — mainly Alevis, secularists, Christians, and even Muslims who do not agree with their policies. They aim to silence, repress, and standardize the people.” — Kemal Bulbul, Alevi author and community leader.
  • “Laïcité [secularism] should not be in the new constitution in Turkey.” — Ismail Kahraman, the speaker of Turkey’s parliament, and an MP of the ruling AKP.
  • Countless churches in Anatolia have been destroyed, left to decay or, used for sacrilegious purposes, such as stables and storehouses.
  • Islamic supremacists do not aim to establish a system where different communities can meaningfully and peacefully coexist. Instead, they aim for political and social domination in which non-Muslims will be second class citizens — or dhimmis — who will always remain under threat.

At least a thousand Muslims worshipped in the mosque of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s presidential palace in Ankara on August 6. They performed a ceremony known as dhikr (“remembrance” in Arabic).

This event was heavily criticized by the country’s many secularists on the social media.

Hundreds of Muslims perform the dhikr ritual at Turkish President Erdogan’s palace on August 6. (Image source: Ferit Yağlı video screenshot)

According to a video of the event, the Islamic cleric Ali Yetkin Sekerci, also known as “Galibi Sheikh Ali Yetkin Sekerci,” had the dhikr filmed. Sekerci often leads dhikr rituals in mosques.

Erdogan said in a speech in Ankara, in January 2015, that the presidential palace (or complex) would be re-named the “Presidential Kulliye” and would contain a mosque, convention center and a national library.

“Kulliye” refers to an Ottoman architectural concept of buildings that surround a mosque and are managed by the mosque.

While the Turkish-language website of the Turkish Presidency refers to the presidential palace as “the Kulliye”, the English website refers to it as “the Complex.”

The Millet Mosque, opened in Erdogan’s kulliye in July 2015, is a huge mosque can hold as many as 3,000 people. During the opening ceremony, Erdogan said: “Wherever there is a dome, a minaret today, we know it is the homeland of Muslims.”

Mucahid Cihad Han, (“Mujahedeen Jihad Khan”) who, while wearing his old-fashioned Islamic turban and cassock, conducts street interviews for the Islamist Ehli Sunnet TV, posted the video on his social media account.

“Dhikrullah in the heart of the Turkish state itself,” he wrote.

The expression “in the heart of the state” gives away the psychology of those who take pride in this ceremony. They appear to think that such public acts of “extreme Islamic devotion” right in the presidential palace are indications of their taking over the state.

This was the first dhikr performance held in a Turkish presidential complex in the history of republican Turkey.

Those who practice a dhikr at Erdogan’s presidential palace know that as the pro-government Muslims, they are the only religious group that could practice a religious ritual at such a high-level state institution. In a country where Islamic azan, or call to prayer, has been recited in Istanbul’s historic Hagia Sofia Church/Museum, now being converted into a mosque, no non-Muslim community would be allowed to practice such an open act of worship in any public setting.

This dhikr show seems to be another “test of patience” by the Islamist government applied on non-Islamists in Turkey, to measure the reactions of non-Islamists and convey an open message to them: Today is the day of dhikr in the heart of the state; get ready for more.

In April, Ismail Kahraman, the speaker of Turkey’s parliament, and an MP of the ruling AKP, said that “Laïcité [secularism] should not be in the new constitution in Turkey.”

The AKP government — through such statements and acts — seems to be warming up the Turkish public to “the future Islamic Republic of Turkey,” so that the people will not be shocked or revolt when they wake up to a completely and officially Islamized Turkey one day.

These were no traditional salah, daily prayers, or other common Islamic acts of worship in which one could humbly participate. What they did convey appears, instead, to be their pride in conquering the Turkish state.

“They do not do this as a sacred form of worship that they believe in,” said Kemal Bulbul, an Alevi author and community leader from Turkey.

“They hold such events to establish hegemony over society, to scare and terrorize people — mainly Alevis, secularists, Christians, and even Muslims who do not agree with their policies. They aim to silence, repress, and standardize the people.

“I have been threatened many times. My Facebook account has been closed three times. Even Facebook is discriminatory and taking sides against us.

“The Alevis especially are under grave threat. Alevis must stand guard in their villages now. After the June 15 attempted coup, some Islamists entered Alevi neighborhoods in convoys in many major cities such as Malatya, Hatay, and Izmir. They harassed, and threatened people. Not a single perpetrator has been arrested. If the government officials value democracy so much, what is stopping them from becoming a truly democratic government? Turkey, is at risk of massacres by the Islamic State. They might happen at any time. The situation is serious. I think there will be a bloodbath in Turkey if required precautions are not urgently taken against the Islamic State. Why are the United States government and the European Union turning a blind eye to what is happening in Turkey?”

Since mid-July, the Turkish government called on the citizens to join the “pro-democracy demonstrations.” Many people, however, took to the streets not to ask for more democracy, but to declare their desire for Islamist supremacy.

On 16 July, for example, another public dhikr performance was held in the Kizilay square in Ankara, just meters away from the Turkish parliament. According to the website Sendika.org, people in the square “recited takbir [‘Allahu akbar’], called for Islamic sharia law and jihad, and performed a dhikr.”

In Turkey — commonly, but falsely, described as a “secular state” — only Muslims (or devout Muslims) have full “religious liberty”, or, to put it more precisely, religious supremacy, which they often use to repress people of other religions or of no religion.

There are about 20 million Alevis in the country, but their faith, Alevism, and their places of worship, cem houses, are not officially recognized.

It was the founding government of Turkey, under the Republican People’s Party (CHP) that made the repression of Alevis legal and official.

A law enacted in 1925 during the rule of the CHP, which is still in effect in Turkey, bans Alevi religious centers and denies their faith. This law required the closure of the tekkes (dervish lodges), zaviyes (central dervish lodges) and tombs. The law also included the closure of Alevi religious centers.

For more than 90 years, Alevis have requested official recognition and equality, but their requests have not yet been met.

According to 2015 data of the state-funded Directorate for Religious Affairs (Diyanet), however, there are 86,762 mosques in Turkey.

Anatolia had been a Christian-majority territory before the Islamic invasion in 1071. Many Christians were slaughtered during and after the 1453 Ottoman invasion of Constantinople, officially renamed Istanbul by the Republic of Turkey in 1930. Over the centuries, countless churches in Anatolia have been destroyed, left to decay or, used for sacrilegious purposes, such as stables and storehouses.

One of the latest victims is the historic Greek Church in the city of Nigde, in terrible shape, one of the many humiliated churches in Turkey. The archaeologist Erman Ertugrul describes the situation of the church on the website Arkeofili:

“With its locked doors, the church has been left to its fate. The surrounding area has been turned into a garbage dump. It smells of urine and is filled with beer bottles. Graffiti covers the entire interior and exterior of the church. The church was used as a storehouse of the Nigde municipality for many years. After it was emptied, many people wrote their names with spray-paint or carved their names on the walls of the church.”

Christian Cappadocian Greeks were a people native to the region; they had a continuous presence there since antiquity. But between 1913 and 1922, the Greeks of Anatolia were exposed to forced deportation, mass murders, death marches, and other crimes at the hands of Muslim Turks. Their abandoned homes were then plundered or destroyed, alongside those of alongside the Armenians and Assyrians.

In 1923, the remaining Cappadocian Greeks were expelled from Turkey as part of the forcible population exchange between Greece and Turkey; many of their churches were converted to mosques. According to the UNESCO Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger, Cappadocian Greek is now an extinct language.

Meanwhile, the Republic of Armenia is reportedly building the world’s largest Yazidi temple, which will also include a conference hall, seminary and museum, all designed as a symbol of resilience for persecuted worshippers, and scheduled to be completed next year.

Why do Turkish authorities not repair collapsing historic churches? Or do these churches remind them of who the indigenous people of Anatolia are — a fact many Turks are unwilling to accept? Why do they not build a giant church, and an Alevi cem house and a Yazidi temple in Ankara, as an act of solidarity with persecuted minorities, as an apology for the suffering Turkey has inflicted on its non-Muslim citizens?

Why does the Turkish government not allow a thousand Christian, Jewish, Yazidi or Alevi citizens of Turkey to carry out prayer services in the presidential palace — just for once? Or invite a group of secularists, atheists and agnostics to hold a seminar and press conference there, and give them a chance to discuss their ideas and concerns with the public? These acts would be meaningful gestures to the non-Muslim citizens of the country and help them feel that they are equal citizens of the country for whom the government cares as well.

But these things will never be. Islamic supremacists do not aim to establish a system where different communities can meaningfully and peacefully coexist. Instead, they aim for political and social domination in which non-Muslims will be second class, “tolerated” citizens — or dhimmis — who will always remain under threat.

While hundreds of Muslims in Turkey are holding dhikr events in public, in an apparent attempt to signal their power and hegemony over other people, Alevis stand guard at their villages for fear of violence by Islamist extremists, while ancient churches collapse and reek of urine.

So much for Turkish “secularism”.

Robert Jones, an expert on Turkey, is currently based in the UK.

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The word of the Lord came to me,on 03rd Aug 2014,and the voice of the Lord gave me the Rhema called WAR WAR,this is definition of this words:

June 20, 2017   Uncategorized   No comments

The word of the Lord came to me,on 03rd Aug 2014,and the voice of the Lord gave me the Rhema called WAR WAR,this is definition of this words:


“It was not worth even one life,” said Harry Patch shortly before he died in 2009 at the age of 111. He was the last survivor of the 65 million soldiers who fought in the First World War, and by the time he died it was a normal, quite unremarkable thing to say. But he would never have said it in 1914.

Very few people thought that war was a bad thing in 1914. LOSING a war could be a bad thing, but the obvious solution to that problem was to be very good at war. Human beings had always fought wars, military values were deeply embedded in our culture, and nobody expected those attitudes to change. And then they did change.

The First World War was a human tragedy, of course, but this was when the human race began to question the whole institution of war: how useful it is, but also how inevitable it really is. And the answer to both questions is: not very.

There are still a few countries that owe everything to their ability to win wars: Israel comes to mind at once. But most countries, and most people, now see war as a very undesirable last resort. We have the First World War to thank for this great change.

The thing most people miss about the First World War is that it was a perfectly normal political event. Ever since the rise of modern centralised states in 16th-century Europe, they had all gone to war with each other in two big alliances at around half-century intervals. The wars were effectively about everything: borders in Europe, trade routes, colonies in Asia, Africa and the Americas.

The great powers fought other, littler wars as well, but these big events – the 30 Years’ War, the War of the Spanish Succession, the Seven Years’ War and so on – were like a general audit of their status. Who’s up, and who’s down? Who can expand, and who must yield?

It was a perfectly viable system, because the wars mostly involved small professional armies and did not disturb civilian populations much. The casualties were low, and hardly any major player ever crashed out of the system entirely. Naturally enough, most people did not see this system as a problem that had to be solved. It was just another fact of life.

The only diplomatic difference in 1914 was that the great powers coordinated their moves better than before. Almost all of them were at war in a few days, where it would have taken months or even a few years in the old days. The armies could move quickly to the frontiers by rail, so now you created your alliances BEFORE the war – and everybody had the telegraph , so the final decisions were made fast.

But once the war started, everything was different. The armies were ten times as big as they used to be, because these were now rich industrialised countries that could afford to put most of the adult male population into uniform. That meant that the soldiers getting killed were fathers, brothers, husbands and sons: part of the community, not the wastrels, drunks and men on the run who made up such a large part of the old professional armies.

And they were getting killed in unprecedented numbers. The new weapons – machine guns, modern artillery and so on – were very efficient killing machines, and within a month the soldiers had to take shelter in trenches from the “storm of steel”. They spent the rest of the war trying to break through the trenches, and by the end of it 9 million of them had been killed. THAT is what changed everything.

One response to the ordeal, inevitably, was to demonise the other side and define the war as a crusade against evil. That way, at least, the ghastly sacrifice of lives could be seen as necessary and meaningful. But many people saw through the propaganda, and some of them were in high places.

The senior politicians and diplomats of 1918, living amid the wreckage of the old world, could see that the old international system was now delivering catastrophe, and had to be changed. So they set out to change it, by creating the League of Nations. They outlawed aggressive war, and invented the concept of “collective security” to enforce the new international rules.

They failed, at first, because the legacy of bitterness among the losers in the First World War was so great that a second one came only twenty years later. That one was bigger and worse – but at the end, everybody tried again. They had to.

The United Nations was founded in 1945, with slightly more realistic rules than the League of Nations but the same basic goal: to stop wars among the great powers, for those are the wars that kill in the millions. Stopping other wars too would be nice, but first things first – especially now that there are nuclear weapons around.

All you can say is that it hasn’t failed yet in its main task: no great power has fought any other one directly for the past 69 years. Ignore the headlines that constantly tell you the world is falling apart. The glass is more than half-full.

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