RUTHFULLY YOURS

“…. Iran is helping Venezuela build combat drones…. Iranian precision-guided missiles are being delivered to Venezuela to be fitted into advanced Iranian [predator] Mohajer drones and similar models…. Iran could provide Venezuela with parts for a future combat drone that would have an even longer range than the Mohajer-6 [reaching the shores of Florida]….”

Iran’s Ayatollahs in Latin America – Quo Vadis?

*Since their February 1979 toppling of the Shah of Iran, Iran’s Ayatollahs have considered Latin America, all the way to the US-Mexico border, the soft underbelly of “The Great American Satan.”  Hence, their intense collaboration – along with their proxies, Hezbollah and Hamas – with the leading drug cartels of Mexico, Columbia and Bolivia, Latin American terror organizations, and all staunchly anti-US governments in South and Central America: Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, Ecuador, Bolivia and Chile.  In fact, Iran’s Ayatollahs have contributed to enhanced coordination among the anti-US Latin American governments.  They have co-led the effort to establish joint anti-US Latin American intelligence facilities. In addition, they have recruited Latin American terrorists, training them in Iran.

*While some Western democracies have attempted to isolate Iran, the latter has entrenched itself in the US’ own backyard – Latin America – upgrading its terrorist, TOC (transnational organized crime), military and para-military, intelligence and security presence there. These undertakings have been advanced by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard, its Al Quds Force (which collaborates with anti-US international terror organizations) and by Hezbollah.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18516/wilders-islamic-death-threats

Geert Wilders has dedicated his life to supporting freedom of speech and religious tolerance…

What seems to have earned him these death threats is his unrelenting passion for freedom. To others, it seems, this commitment, is not a plus. Radical cleric Muhammad Abdullah Ahsan, for instance, recently proclaimed: “The rascals like Geert Wilders can’t be stopped by mere condemnation. He must be handed over to Muslims for public execution to ensure world peace.”

“It is no use threatening me, Muslims in Pakistan, Netherlands or anywhere else. Fatwas won’t stop me…. Freedom is my ideology. And no one will stop me.” — Geert Wilders, Twitter, April 15, 2022.

“An Imam who wants a politician dead is—however reprehensible—allowed to say so.” — Geert Wilders, NIS News Bulletin. March 15, 2005.

Islam is the Trojan Horse in Europe.” — Geert Wilders, speech in the Dutch Parliament, September 6, 2007.

“There is no such thing as ‘moderate Islam’. As Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan said the other day, and I quote, ‘There is no moderate or immoderate Islam. Islam is Islam and that’s it.”‘ — Geert Wilders, speech in the Dutch Parliament, September 6, 2007.

“We must never give a free hand to those who want to subjugate us.” — Geert Wilders, Middle East Online, May 31, 2011.

“‘I feel that the more Islam that we get in our societies the less freedom we get.’ He opened the press conference with a quote from George Orwell’s preface to Animal Farm: ‘If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they don’t want to hear'”. — Margaret Davis, quoting Geert Wilders, in The Independent, October 16, 2009.

The American version [of George Orwell’s Ministry of Truth, the US Disinformation Governance Board] is to be headed by a supposed “expert” on disinformation, Nina Jankowicz, who already has a record of unexpertly dismissing Hunter Biden’s easily verifiable laptop as a “Trump Campaign product;” supporting the notoriously false “Steele Dossier;” saying on National Public Radio: “I shudder to think about if free speech absolutists were taking over more platforms,” and, while discussing “online abuse” against women, she actually recommended deploying the police…

“Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one’s thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist. That, of all rights, is the dread of tyrants. It is the right which they first of all strike down. They know its power…. Equally clear is the right to hear. To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker.” — Frederick Douglass, freed slave, December 9, 1860.

Freedom of speech in free nations should supersede imposing even more limitations on freedom.

As the powers that be continue clamping down on the free speech we all should cherish, we must recognize the value and strength that people like Wilders, and even those who burn flags, bring to the public square. We may or may not agree with their views, but should recognize that through their freedom of expression they enrich the debate and discourse. They make us stronger, not weaker.

Last month, a Dutch Member of Parliament, Geert Wilders — the leader of the Party for Freedom, which is the largest opposition party in the Netherlands’ Parliament — received two fatwas. Fatwas, officially, are Islamic religious opinions; they sometimes contain calls, however, to kill whomever might be considered insufficiently supportive of Islam or its prophet, Mohammad.