"Western education is sinful"

That's what Boko Haram means in English. It is the name adopted by a Nigerian Islamist terrorist group which is quite serious about its determination to extinguish Western education: they kill anyone associated with it, even the children in the school.

Two days ago, Boko Haram terrorists murdered two teachers and seven students in the town of Damaturu, nearly a thousand miles northeast of the Nigerian capital of Lagos.

The Nigerian military has been on the attack in that part of the country lately, destroying terrorist bases and running down Boko Haram's soldiers as they flee. But for the most part, they've simply skipped across the border to refuges in Niger, Chad or Cameroon.

The poorest people on earth live in sub-Saharan Africa, and many of them live in Northeastern Nigeria. The most innocent of these poor are the children who die at an early age as the victims of extreme Islamist ideology.

In the Mideast, Islamists are making children victims of another sort. In Gaza, Islamic Jihad runs a summer camp for boys aged 6-16, who are taught military tactics, including "kidnapping soldiers."

A twelve year old at the summer camp is quoted as saying, "As I fire the first shot of my life, my blood boils in my veins, and I will not rest until I am on the battlefield, burning the enemy with the volcano of my vengeance."

Iran's "Reformer"

Western news stories about the Iranian presidential "election" are just out of control.

Hassan Rowhani is, depending on which outlet you read, is "a centrist and pragmatist" (Los Angeles Times), "the only moderate candidate in the Iranian presidential contest" (Time Magazine), and "a pragmatist candidate who ran as a moderate" (The Daily Beast). The implication is that here, at last, is the guy who's going to end Iran's isolation from the West, negotiate some sort of compromise on Iran's nuclear weapons program, and peace in the Middle East.

Horse petootie.

First, Rowhani isn't going to be a "president" in the sense that Americans understand the word "president." The president of Iran can't do anything that the Guardian Council won't let him do. Not that he'd be interested in challenging the Guardian Council.

In today's Wall Street Journal, Sohrab Ahmari provides some useful biographical background on the president-elect:

Mr. Rohani spent Iran's revolutionary days as a close companion of the Ayatollah Khomeini and would go on to hold top posts during the Islamic Republic's first two decades in power. For 16 years starting in 1989, Mr. Rohani served as secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council. During his tenure on the council, Mr. Rohani led the crackdown on a 1999 student uprising and helped the regime evade Western scrutiny of its nuclear-weapons program.

 Oh, and by the way: Iran now has the nuclear capability it has long sought, in a form that makes a western attack on it all but impossible. Not at the Natanz facility that has long preoccupied western nuclear specialists, but at a heavy water reactor in Arak, where Iran installed a nuclear fission container a little over a week ago.

MEMRI reports that this so far little-noticed event is a game changer in several ways:

• It will force the international community to recognize Iran as a nuclear power, as Tehran continues to adhere to its claim that heavy water is not a nuclear material that requires supervision and that the IAEA will therefore not be allowed to inspect its facilities.
• With this move, Tehran has decided to break through the deadlock in the nuclear talks by shifting the focus to the plutonium route and moving the uranium enrichment route to the back burner.
• By stepping up the plutonium route by operating the heavy water reactor at Arak, Iran aims to eliminate the possibility of a military attack on its nuclear facilities – because attacking a plutonium reactor that has been activated and is operating will have, inter alia, very grave environmental consequences.

In other words, the game is over. Iran now has what it needs to make nuclear weapons, and it's an integral part of a facility that cannot be bombed without causing serious environmental damage.

Game, set, match.

Be afraid. Be very afraid. And pay no attention to that "moderate" in the president's chair. He's just there to make westerners think that things are better now, and that there's hope. Not so.

Internecine savagery

It's hard to imagine how much more revolting the pattern of violence in the Muslim world could possibly get. The propensity of Sunnis and Shiites to kill one another reached a new low over the weekend in Quetta, a provincial capital in Pakistan not far from the Afghan border.

A female suicide bomber from an anti-Shi'a group blew herself up on a bus filled with female students from the Sardar Bahadur Khan Women's University, killing at least 14 of the students and wounding dozens of others. When the injured had been moved to a nearby hospital, a male suicide bomber detonated his vest in the ER, killing at least eight more.

When they're not killing each other with bombs, they busy themselves with ensuring the deaths of innocent victims of preventable disease. About five hundred miles northwest of Quetta, gunmen murdered a two-man polio vaccination team in Swabi. The police officers who were supposed to be protecting the team ran away when the attack began.

Unspeakable savagery. Incomprehensible hatred. Human nature at its Hobbesian worst.

Today's Supreme Court decisions: no more unanimity

Five opinions from the Supreme Court this morning, and unlike last Thursday, when all four decisions handed down were unanimous, today's batch are all split decisions, some fitting the usual liberal/conservative pattern, and some of which are odd splits.

The most controversial case of the bunch is Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council, in which the court struck down Arizona's proof-of-citizenship requirement for voting in federal elections. It's a 7-2 decision written by Scalia, who is joined by Roberts, Kennedy and all of the court's liberals.

There will be a tendency to oversimplify the Arizona decision, portraying it as a repudiation of state efforts to require government-issued photo ID for those wishing to vote. It's a little more nuanced than that. The heart of the matter is whether the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 preempts state law in this area. The Court held that the federal law does preempt state law.

The NVRA requires only that a voter state, under penalty of perjury, that he is a citizen. Arizona tried to add a requirement that a voter provide documentary evidence of citizenship and requiring voter registration officials to reject any application for voter registration lacking that evidence. The Court did not rule out photo ID requirements. It simply ruled that states can ask the federal Election Assistance Commission to allow them to add a "concrete evidence requirement," and allows states to sue under the Administrative Procedures Act if the EAC refuses.

The practical result remains to be determined, as states with evidence requirements go the EAC/APA route.

Other cases today:

Salinas v. Texas, (5-4) dealing with the Miranda rule in a criminal case where the defendant voluntarily discussed a crime in some, but not all, of its particulars. Standard conservative-liberal split, Alito writing the for the majority.

FTC v. Actavis, (5-3) a case involving drug patents. The Court held that lower courts erred in dismissing an FTC complaint challenging a decision by several generic drug firms. The generic drug makers decided that they would not produce generic versions of a drug in exchange for a multi-million dollar payment from the firm that developed the drug in the first place. Justice Alito recused himself from the case, for reasons not given. Breyer wrote the opinion of the Court.

Alleyne v. U.S., (5-4) in which Justice Thomas joined with court liberals in a case involving mandatory minimum sentences. Thomas wrote the decision, but others on the prevailing side joined in some, but not all, of his opinion.

Maracich v. Spears, (5-4) a case in which both parties have less than sterling reputations, and thus it's hard to know who (if anyone) to root for. A group of trial attorneys decided they would troll for business among people who'd bought cars from a collection of auto dealers. They filed a FOIA request with the South Carolina DMV "seeking names and addresses of thousands of individuals in order to solicit clients for a lawsuit they had pending against several South Carolina car dealerships." Although lawyers do have a right to seek that kind of information in some types of litigation, the Court held that this went much too far, overruled the lower courts, and remanded the case. Opinion by Kennedy.

More cases to be released on Thursday, next Monday, and if necessary, a week from Thursday as well. Fourteen cases have yet to be announced, including those on same sex marriage and affirmative action.

Will we miss him when he's gone?

As I write this post, it's a bit past 10:00 at night in Iran, and there are still voters waiting line for the opportunity to vote in the presidential election there. From this distance, it's hard to understand why: the "election" offers no real choice, since every candidate is a cleric, and they're all supporters of Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei.

In fact, as Reza Aslan puts it over at Foreign Policy today, "the one thing that the top contenders to replace [current President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad] have in common is their comical obeisance to the supreme leader."

Aslan's most provocative assertion is that despite Ahmadinejad's "bellicose rhetoric and his inane populism," he "may have been the last, best hope of stripping the clerical regime of its 'God-given' right to rule Iran."

Those of us in the West who've recoiled at Ahmadinejad's propensity for bitter anti-Semitism and "inane populism" tend to miss the fact that he's been waging his own little war with the mullahs all the while he's been president. "[N]o president in the history of the Islamic Republic has so openly challenged the ruling religious hierarchy, and so brazenly tried to channel the government's decision-making powers away from the unelected clerical bodies that hold sway in Iran."

In other words, in the not too distant future, we may regard the era of Ahmadinejad's presidency as "the good old days."

Egad.