Vladimir Putin once presented himself as an ally of the West in the war on terror, and Russia has had its own battles with jihadist violence emanating from Chechnya. But Russia’s response to the recent Islamist attacks in Paris, as expressed through its official and quasi-official media outlets, reflects a major shift. As Michael Khodarkovsky explains, Putin, who has reached an uneasy compromise with his nation’s large Muslim minority, considers liberal democracy a more dangerous ideology than jihadism:

On January 10, a protester holding a sign “I am Charlie” was arrested in Moscow and later sentenced to eight days in jail. A few days later, the federal media watchdog ordered the St. Petersburg edition of the Business News Agency to remove the new cover of Charlie Hebdo from its website. The same agency was warned that reprinting the cartoon depicting the prophet Muhammad could be considered a criminal offense, and that it would violate the “ethical and moral norms formed in Russia through the centuries of different peoples and faiths living side by side.” . . .

Behind the purported wish to protect the feelings of the faithful lies a pragmatic attempt to maintain the support of conservative Christian, Muslim, and nationalist groups, and to keep Islamic extremists at bay. . . .

Though the Kremlin was quick to express solidarity with France and condemn terrorism in the aftermath of the Paris attack, the pro-government media placed equal blame at the feet of the Charlie Hebdo journalists for their provocative cartoons, and at the Western liberalism that allows such publications.

Israel will likely respond directly against Iran after yesterday’s attack, and has made known that it will calibrate its retaliation based not on the extent of the damage, but on the scale of the attack. The specifics are anyone’s guess, but Edward Luttwak has a suggestion, put forth in an article published just hours before the missile barrage: cut off Tehran’s ability to send money and arms to Shiite Arab militias.

In practice, most of this cash comes from a single source: oil. . . . In other words, the flow of dollars that sustains Israel’s enemies, and which has caused so much trouble to Western interests from the Syrian desert to the Red Sea, emanates almost entirely from the oil loaded onto tankers at the export terminal on Khark Island, a speck of land about 25 kilometers off Iran’s southern coast. Benjamin Netanyahu warned in his recent speech to the UN General Assembly that Israel’s “long arm” can reach them too. Indeed, Khark’s location in the Persian Gulf is relatively close. At 1,516 kilometers from Israel’s main airbase, it’s far closer than the Houthis’ main oil import terminal at Hodeida in Yemen—a place that was destroyed by Israeli jets in July, and attacked again [on Sunday].