RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17270/france-macron-radicalism

There are also teachers who, possibly because they are scared, choose to bow their heads, give up teaching certain subjects and — when students shout anti-Semitic and anti-Western insults — to act as if they hear nothing. It has become almost impossible in most French high schools to talk about either Israel or the Holocaust.

Most journalists seem to prefer avoiding all discussion of the advance of radical Islam in France. They know that those who do so are immediately called “racists” or “Islamophobes” and are often threatened, prosecuted, sentenced to heavy fines or fired from their place of work.

Even though what the journalist Éric Zemmour said was accurate and verifiable, the CSA (Superior Audiovisual Council), said that to state certain facts constitutes an “incitement to racial hatred”.

In 2015, a French journalist compared the National Rally Party to the Islamic State. [National Rally President] Marine Le Pen responded by posting on Twitter two photographs of crimes committed by the Islamic State and added, “This is Islamic State”…. In court, the judge asked Le Pen, “Do you consider that these photos violate human dignity?”. Le Pen replied, “It is the crime that violates human dignity, it is not its photographic reproduction”.

“Fourteen months before the presidential deadline of 2022, … the supposition is that … Marine Le Pen, will necessarily be in the second round of the election and that whoever will face her is no longer guaranteed to win”. — Le Monde, March 22, 2021.

November 1, 2020. Didier Lemaire, a high school teacher who works in Trappes, a small town west of Paris, published an open letter in the left-wing magazine Le Nouvel Observateur. He spoke of the murder of Samuel Paty, another teacher, savagely beheaded two weeks earlier by a Muslim extremist. He denounced the submission of the French authorities to religious intimidation and the impossibility of the French school system being able to transmit any real knowledge of history or to give students the intellectual means to think freely. He said that in just a few years, the situation in the city where he worked has deteriorated markedly. Lemaire wrote:

“The year I arrived in the high school where I teach, the city’s synagogue had just been burned down and Jewish families forced to leave. After the 2015 and 2016 attacks in France, I got involved in preventive actions…. In 2018, seeing that my efforts collided with forces much more powerful than me, I wrote to the President of the Republic to ask him to act urgently to protect our students from the ideological and social pressure exerted on them, a pressure which gradually withdraws them from the national community. Unfortunately, no action was taken….

https://www.theepochtimes.com/how-a-political-prisoner-of-17-years-resisted-communist-cubas-persecution_3765484.html

After 17 years of political persecution and imprisonment at the hands of the Cuban communist regime, and having ultimately found refuge in the United States, Jorge Luis Antonis reflected on what he learned and what helped him resist oppression during a very difficult period in his life.

It was March 15, 1990. Luis was 25 years old. He and a number of others were enthusiastic about reforms and events at the time in Eastern Europe that signaled the fall of communism, such as the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall and the impending total collapse of the Soviet Union.

That day, Luis recalled being in a public venue where a broadcast was underway showing a speech Cuban dictator Raul Castro was delivering about the upcoming Fourth Congress of the Cuban Communist Party.

“I took the opportunity to openly declare myself as political opposition,” Luis told The Epoch Times’ “Crossroads” program, in Spanish.

Since Fidel Castro came to power in Cuba in 1959, citizens were systematically denied fundamental freedoms such as speech, association and assembly, movement, due process, and privacy. By 1990, nothing had changed—civil and political rights were still a figment of the imagination.

“Back then, it was a real defiance of the regime because there was basically no opposition activists, there were no human rights groups, or independent journalists,” Luis explained. “And there, I started shouting slogans in favor of change, in favor of democracy, in favor of respect for human rights. I was beaten brutally and I was sentenced to prison, charged with ‘verbal enemy propaganda.’”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17269/iran-between-illusion-and-reality

As for voter turnout, we now know that the regime has set the stage for an “historic event”. Revolutionary Guard chief Gen. Hussein Salami says the “Supreme Guide” has ordered “an epoch-making turnout” that his force will help assemble.

[I]t is clear that the “Supreme Guide” will not tolerate the slightest deviation from the course he has set: a revolution that he claims is moving from strength to strength. “Today we are stronger and America is weaker,” he said recently. One of his ideological gurus, Dr. Hassan Abbasi, aka “Dr. Kissinger of Islam”, goes further: “America is the sunset power,” he says. “We are the sunrise power!”

[The coming election] could end the illusion that the Khomeinist regime might change course and seize opportunity offered to it to re-join the global mainstream…. The four-decade pursuit of “behavior change in Tehran” would have to be reviewed.

Khamenei speaks of a “conspiracy” to force Iran to become a “normal nation” like everyone else and vows to never allow that to happen.

The Khomeinist system isn’t a Middle Eastern version of the people-based Scandinavian Social Democracy…. It is a despotism of the medieval kind with a pseudo-modern varnish borrowed from misunderstood Marxism.

The replacement of illusion with reality, no matter how bitter, may be good news after all.

The old script is out of the files and dusted, the décor shined and up, and the puppet-master testing the strings and flexing his fingers. But something is still missing: new puppets to make the show attractive to those who have seen the same old puppets once too often.

Got it? We are talking of the presidential election in the Islamic Republic in Iran, scheduled for next June but so far attracting little attention. In previous versions of the show, interest in it started up to two years before polling day as rival factions within the regime mobilized to reach for the prize or at least make an impression. On at least two occasions the rigmarole produced one pleasantly surprising result and one unexpectedly horrible one. On a third occasion, it triggered a nationwide prising that pushed the Khomeinist regime to the edge of collapse.

Those of us who had long conceded that this simulacrum of an election was an insult to human intelligence, nonetheless maintained an interest in it for at least two reasons.