For Russia, Free Speech Is as Bad as Islamist Terror

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: