RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-climate-change-drubbing-in-australia-11558283558

If American Democrats want a warning about the consequences of embracing the Green New Deal, look no further than Saturday’s election shocker in Australia. The opposition center-left Labor Party had led in the polls for months but lost as voters rejected its move left on taxes, spending and above all on climate change.

The ruling Liberal-National Coalition had been divided and tossed out two prime ministers during its nearly six years in power. Scott Morrison, the compromise choice as Prime Minister last year, managed to unite conservatives around a platform that stressed economic growth, tax cuts and support for the country’s energy producers.

Labor leader Bill Shorten promised to raise taxes on the “wealthy,” but his main theme was curbing climate change. Labor promised to cut carbon emissions nearly in half by 2030 compared to 2005 levels while subsidizing wind and solar. Mr. Shorten and Labor refused to support a job-producing coal mine in Queensland, and their candidates were routed in the resource-rich province.

https://www.nysun.com/editorials/australias-bombshell-news-for-joe-biden/90692/

Look at this, mates. From Down Under comes news that the incumbent prime minister of Australia has been returned to office in the wires a calling a “sensational” result. The “bombshell triumph,” says a leading news site, comes after “repeated polls” placed the Australian Labor party ahead of the ruling conservatives, who Down Under are called the Liberal Party.

No doubt it would be a mistake for us Yanks to make too much of this. Gravity pulls in the opposite direction on this side of the globe. Then again, too, to make too much from this. Then again, too, it might be a mistake to ignore this portent altogether, since we are entering an election in which the more liberal figure, Jos. Biden, is polling ahead of the incumbent, more conservative, president.

Particularly because Labor “scrutineers,” in the phrase of the the Australian Web site news.com.au, reckon that “older voters have punished the party for its higher-taxing agenda.” The wire reports that “states where the economy is not thriving” have backed the backed the more conservative party’s agenda “focused on the economy and jobs.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14243/burkina-faso-jihad-terrorism

“The assailants asked the Christians to convert to Islam, but the pastor and the others refused. They ordered them to gather under a tree and took their Bibles and mobile phones. Then they called them, one after the other, behind the church building where they shot them dead.” — Local Christian, reported by World Watch Monitor, May 2, 2019.

“Much of the Islamic anger in Burkina Faso has to do with the teaching of so-called Western thoughts and ideals. Besides churches, schools are also a favorite target of the militants, who are pushing to make the country an Islamic state and impose Sharia Law… Of 2,869 schools in Burkina Faso, 1,111 have been closed in the last three years as a direct result of Islamic extremist violence.” — James Murphy, The New American, May 16, 2019.

As with other African Islamic terror groups, the motivating ideology fueling the terrorists of Burkina Faso is distinctly Islamic and jihadi in nature. For example, after eight Muslims were arrested for their role in terrorist attacks that killed 14, their prosecutor said, “they all carried on their foreheads or had white bands on which were written in Arabic the following expression — translated as — ‘there is no god but Allah and Muhammad is His Messenger.'” — Africa News, July 3, 2018.

Last Sunday, May 12, in the small West African nation of Burkina Faso, as many as 30 armed Islamic terrorists stormed a Catholic church, slaughtered at least six Christian worshippers — including the officiating priest — then burned the church to the ground.

Ousmane Zongo, the mayor of Dablo, where the attack occurred, recalled the incident:

“Towards 9:00am, during mass, armed individuals burst into the Catholic Church… They started firing as the congregation tried to flee…. They burned down the church, then shops and a small restaurant before going to the health centre where they searched the premises and set fire to the head nurse’s vehicle…. The city is filled with panic. People are holed up at home. Shops and stores are closed. It’s practically a ghost town.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14245/iran-apologists-fujairah

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammed Javad Zarif has acknowledged that…. if anyone notices the Islamic Republic it is because its leaders are or pretend to be anti-American. In other words, anti-Americanism upgrades a ramshackle and incompetent regime that is visibly incapable of running a kebab-shop let alone a modern developing society. Zarif says that without anti-Americanism we would, at best, “be something like Pakistan”. And, he adds, who cares about Pakistan?

“Our solution is clear. In response to the cost of economic sanctions imposed on us we have to impose costs on the other side so that this war is no longer one-sided…. We have a free hand in striking economic blows at the enemy. America’s allies in the region, that is to say Saudi Arabia and the Emirates, are heavily dependent on two things: oil and the glass towers they have built around the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea… We must absolutely, hit the vital vein of those two countries, that is to say their oil exports. And we can do this in the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea. Such an operation will, without a doubt, force Saudi and Emirati leaders to seek peace with Iran.” — Kayhan, the day before the sabotage of four ships in the UAE port of Fujairah.

It is not enough to be anti-American or even anti-Trump to be automatically classed on the side of the angels. It is possible to be anti-American and anti-Trump and yet be a thoroughly obnoxious oppressor of the people and warmonger.

One of the problems with a dispassionate discussion of matters related to Iran today is that the issue has become too ideological to allow rational, not to say clinical, examination. Taking part in a televised panel the other evening to discuss the “sabotage” of four ships in the UAE port of Fujairah, I noted that there was as yet no evidence to show who had been behind the operation. At the same time, I noted that a leading daily in Tehran had urged the launching of precisely such operations just a day before the Fujairah attack.

Needless to say, I was attacked on all sides. Some claimed that by suggesting there was no evidence regarding the authorship of the attack, I was trying to whitewash the mullahs. Others claimed that by reminding people that such an operation had been urged in the daily Kayhan, representing the views of “Supreme Guide” Ali Khamenei, meant that I wished to incriminate Tehran to please “American warmongers.”

https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/pakistan-tightrope/

Pakistan risks falling off a tightrope as it attempts to balance its relations with rivals Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Recent developments – including the Baloch nationalist attack on a luxury hotel in the strategic port city of Gwadar and a legal dispute over completion of a gas pipeline that took place against the backdrop of Saudi-Iranian-Qatari competition for the Pakistani gas market – suggest that Pakistan is in an increasingly tenuous position.

The South Asian nation’s seemingly unsustainable tightrope walk is likely to have consequences for the security of China’s massive US$45 billion investment in the China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), a crown jewel of Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative. It could also affect the roughly US$10 billion the Saudis are planning to invest in a refinery and copper mine in the troubled Pakistani province of Balochistan. Pakistani hopes are dwindling that it will be able to contain political violence – a necessity if it is to attract more badly needed foreign investment and avoid sanctions for inadequate counterterrorism measures.

The assault on the highly secured Zaver Pearl Continental Hotel Gwadar (a part of Pakistan’s largest luxury hotel chain), in which at least five people were killed, was the second incident since Pakistani PM Imran Khan and Iranian president Hassan Rouhani agreed last month to step up security cooperation along their 959-kilometer-long border.