I lit the three Christingles, / I lit them one by one, / On the merry, merry Christmas Eve, / When all the work was done. / I lit the three Christingles, / And they burned with a joyous ray, / But the faces that bent above them / Were fuller of light than they.

Certainly the organization formerly known as the KGB has some expertise in destabilizing foreign countries, particularly through the use of provokatsiya. One of those non-Slavic words that nevertheless appear in every Slavic language — prowokacja in Polish, provokace in Czech — a provokatsiya is technically a provocation. But it has a narrower meaning as well: a political event or action that the authorities, through their secret services, create to serve their own purposes. A staged crisis; the publication of outrageous documents, authentic or fake; a rapidly organized political movement of the far right or far left; an anonymous bomb explosion: All of these can be provokatsiya. Putin, himself trained in KGB methods, knows this very well.

The final break in the Greenmount area is Kirra Point.

...the fact that all but a few fragments of the core of the Islamic World had succeeded in remaining independent on a low level of vitality took the edge off the appeal of the Panislamic gospel of self-preservation through an increase of inter-Islamic solidarity.