RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/02/the_crumbling_of_cubas_grand_socialist_experiment.html

John Alpert is an American photojournalist whose work is featured in the Netflix documentary Cuba and the Cameraman.  He first went to the island nation in 1972, a little more than a decade after the Cuban Revolution.  Over the next 45 years, Alpert returned to Cuba, each time taking pictures of its towns and cities and people.  The images he took are a timeline that chronicle how Castro’s socialist revolution played out for the Cuban people in the years that lay ahead.

A disarmingly polite young photojournalist at the time, Alpert was one of the few Americans granted face-to-face meetings with Castro.  With the U.S. media curious about the grand socialist experiment unfolding in Cuba, Alpert was invited to appear on TV programming to discuss his conversations with Cuba’s communist dictator.  Alpert was quite impressed when Castro said he was taking concrete measures to make life better for the Cuban people, citing as evidence a free health care system, free schools, free higher education, and shiny new and rent-free housing projects. When Alpert first visited Cuba, the shelves of grocery stores and other retail establishments were filled with consumer goods of every description.

To a young photojournalist who was idealistic and somewhat naïve at the time, socialism seemed to portend a bright future for Cuba.  With its people happy and well taken care of by a paternalistic government, things were going well.  But as time moved one, Cuba’s house-of-cards communist system fell apart.  The free goods and services given to the Cuban people were funded not by the country’s top-down collectivist economy, but by a massive infusion of hard cash, gasoline, food, and other provisions from the Soviet Union.  When the Soviets eventually pulled the plug as their own socialist economy was crumbling, the day-to-day lives of the Cuban people fell on hard times, a rude reminder of Margaret Thatcher’s observation the problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.

https://thehill.com/opinion/international/483213-maduro-acknowledges-his-socialist-delusions

Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro’s quiet move to restore elements of free enterprise to his nation’s economy should serve as a cautionary tale for anyone listening to Sen. Bernie Sanders’ siren song of socialism in the Democratic primaries or who is still tempted by promises of socialist bliss.

Maduro’s move represents a desperate attempt to dampen public outrage, and thus maintain his grip on power, in the midst of an astonishing economic collapse that economists view as the world’s worst in decades in the absence of war.

Venezuela’s tale is hardly a unique one. In recent decades, socialist nations across the world have scrapped their doctrinaire visions and incorporated elements of free enterprise to rescue their ailing economies. Perhaps most striking, a post-Mao China opted for a more market-based economy as Deng Xiaoping conceded that his nation could not otherwise compete with the United States.

Maduro’s bow to reality is particularly instructive. It comes a decade after the Great Recession and financial collapse of 2008 and 2009 shook confidence in capitalism and emboldened the proponents of socialism and other alternative models. With that crisis long over, however, capitalism has again proved its mettle by nourishing more prosperity and higher living standards while Venezuela’s economy continues shrinking at an alarming rate.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15290/the-terrorists-migrating-into-europe

“Most migrant terrorists involved in thwarted or completed attacks were purposefully deployed to the migration flows by an organized terrorist group to conduct or support attacks in destination countries.” — Todd Bensman, “What Terrorist Migration Over European Borders Can Teach About American Border Security”, Center for Immigration Studies.

Bensman’s report indirectly proves that the three EU countries — Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic — which refused to take in any of the migrants that came during the migrant crisis, citing security concerns, were right.

The leadership of the European Union, however, initiated legal proceedings at the Court of Justice of the European Union against the three countries over the issue…. A ruling on the issue by the Court is expected early next year.

In response to the Advocate General, Polish government spokesman Piotr Muller, said that “ensuring security for our citizens is the most important goal of the government’s policies. Our actions were dictated by the interests of Polish citizens and the need for protection against uncontrolled migration”. — Polish government spokesman Piotr Muller, Reuters, October 31, 2019.

A new report, “What Terrorist Migration Over European Borders Can Teach About American Border Security”, by Todd Bensman, a senior national security fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, describes the extent to which terrorists disguised as migrants have entered the European Union to commit terrorist attacks. Although the study was written primarily for an American audience to prevent the same mistakes from being made on US borders, the study is extremely relevant for the European public — especially as Germany recently warned of a repeat migration crisis, similar to the one that occurred in 2015. According to Bensman:

“Between 2014 and 2017, 13 of the 26 member states lining the so-called Schengen Area’s external land borders recorded more than 2.5 million detections of illegal border-crossings along several land and sea routes, an historic, mostly unfettered surge that came to be known as the ‘migrant crisis’. The Schengen Area, which generally encompasses the European Union, consists of countries that combined immigration enforcement of a common external border of 27,000 sea miles and 5,500 land miles while removing all interior border controls to facilitate the free movement of goods and people.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/02/2_13_2020_19_20.html

On January 30th of this year, a 12-year-old girl in Egypt died as a result of her parents having Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) performed on her. Egypt has had a law outlawing the practice since 2008. The parents have been charged.  This law was written to protect females because Islamic social norms permit and encourage this practice.

According to Ian Askew, World Health Organization Director for the Department of Reproductive Health and Research:

FGM describes all procedures that involve the partial or total removal of external genitalia or other injury to the female genital organs for non-medical reasons.  It has no health benefits.

More than 200 million girls and women alive today are living with FGM and many are at risk of suffering the associated negative health consequences as a result.

These include death, severe bleeding and problems urinating.  Longer-term consequences range from cysts and infections to complications in childbirth and increased risk of newborn deaths.

FGM is a grave violation of the human rights of girls and women.

Another term used for FGM is female circumcision.  Some countries prefer the term FGC, as it is seen as “more neutral.”  (The “C” being a reference to “cutting.”)  This “more neutral” term allows their medical personnel to package FGM into the “birth package.”  Ebony Ridell Bamber, the head of advocacy and policy at Orchid Project, a UK-based NGO working towards ending FGM, states that.  “It really contributes to legitimizing and entrenching the practice even further.”

In Islam, legitimization comes when shariah, Islamic law, endorses and promotes a practice.  Under shariah, female circumcision is required of Muslim females. This is documented in Reliance of the Traveller: 

e4.3   Circumcision is obligatory (O: for both men and women.  For men it consists of removing the prepuce from the penis, and for women, removing the prepuce (Ar. Bazr) of the clitoris (n: not the clitoris itself, as some mistakenly assert).  (A: Hanbalis hold that circumcision of women is not obligatory but sunna, while Hanafis consider it a mere courtesy to the husband.)”

Islamic scholars have been found using this piece to declare to non-Muslims that shariah does not agree with FGM, going so far as to claim it is unIslamic if carried out to the extreme and totally removing the clitoris:

Female circumcision, known pejoratively in its extreme form as female genital mutilation or cutting, is not prescribed in the Quran and there are no authentic prophetic traditions recommending the practice.  The basis in Islamic law is that it is not permissible to cause bodily harm and any such practice of female circumcision proven to be harmful would be unlawful.