RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15630/iran-pseudo-democratic-election

The difficulty was that the leadership of the revolution had no intention of creating a Western-style society in which economically and socially Westernized Iranian middle classes would feel at home. One way to deceive them was to continue with a tradition of elections dating back to 1907.

For decades later, a new middle class has emerged, President Hassan Rouhani refers to it as “the well-off 30 percent”, people who are prepared to live a double life in which economic comfort, not to say prosperity, is combined with lack of political freedoms and restrictive social norms….In this double life, the new middle class passes part of the year abroad, mostly in Western Europe and North America, where it can wear what it likes, eat what it likes and live like its Western counterparts.

[O]ver 3,000 high-ranking officials have permanent resident permits for the United States and Canada…. Thousands of the children of this new middle class attend Western universities, mostly in the US and Canada…. In Western Europe and North America tens of thousands of former Islamic officials and their associates own property and substantial investment portfolios.

A Majlis reflecting the reality of a corrupt, incompetent and brutal regime in full is less harmful than one designed to hide the nature of the Islamic Republic and promote forlorn hopes of moderation and reform.

Iranians went to the polls on Friday to elect a new Islamic Consultative Assembly, an ersatz parliament designed to give an autocratic regime a pseudo-democratic varnish. At the same time, voters were invited to participate in by-elections to fill vacancies in the Assembly of Experts, a grouping of mullahs supposed to supervise the performance of the “Supreme Guide”.

With the final official results not yet available, it is not clear how many of the 60 million people eligible to vote bothered to take part in an exercise that many regard as insulting and futile. A number of polls, including some conducted by the government, predicted a turnout no higher than 50 percent. A Ministry of the Interior poll put the number of those who intended to vote in Tehran at 24 percent.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2020/03/09/escape-from-wuhan/#slide-1

An account of the coronavirus quarantine in China

The onset of the crisis in Wuhan startled me like a jump scare in a horror movie. You’ve seen the kind I mean. The audience is led to believe that the monster, psycho killer—or what have you—pursuing the intended victim is still distant. Then whatever it is stands up from behind, leaps out in front, bursts through the floor, or otherwise appears and delivers the jolt. 

In mid January, my girlfriend visited the hospital for an ordinary illness. She came back on edge about the new disease, which had alarmed the staff. She had to cancel her usual trip home for Chinese New Year, too. She was told that if she visited her family, who lived in a smaller town (by Chinese standards!) near Hubei Province, she would be quarantined for two weeks, as a precautionary measure. The same would be done to anyone who arrived from Wuhan. She advised me to avoid the subway at peak hours.

Ominous signs mounted after that. More and more I saw surgical masks—usually blue, sometimes white—on the faces of people walking on Guangba Street where I lived. These were different from cloth breathing masks, the ones used for filtering out pollution, that had, in a casually dystopian way, been incorporated into fashion. Those I think make people look like characters from the 1990s video game Mortal Kombat. The preponderance of these new masks on people’s faces was a rough barometer of the intensifying climate of fear.

On Wednesday, January 22, the proportion of people on the streets I saw wearing the masks jumped up precipitously from about 25 percent the day before to about 80 percent. Pharmacies were selling out of them. When I sat down in a coffee shop that evening, someone took my temperature with an electronic thermometer you pointed at the target’s ear, to make sure I wasn’t running a fever. They were doing this with all of the patrons. Other businesses were, increasingly, doing the same thing. This is getting weird, I thought.

The next day, the real shock came. 

https://gatesofvienna.net/2020/02/geert-wilders-the-koran-is-full-of-jew-hatred/

In the following video Geert Wilders, the leader of the Party for Freedom (Partij voor de Vrijheid, PVV) in the Netherlands, speaks out in the Dutch parliament, taking government ministers to task for refusing to acknowledge Islam as a major factor in the growth of Jew-hatred in the Netherlands:

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/25236

“Islamic ideologues work in the same way on both shores of the Mediterranean: what they did twenty or thirty years ago in the Maghreb, they do it today in France. If these Islamist ecosystems continue, they will speak for our Muslim companions. In the event of an extreme right reaction or electoral victory, we will be in a civil war scenario”.

This is the scenario outlined on Le Figaro by Bernard Rougier, academic and Arabist author of the new book “Les territoires conquis de l’Islamisme”. This is the scenario on which Emmanuel Macron spoke on Tuesday. He explained that French Muslims have their place in the national community, they are French among the French, but that [their intention is that] there will be laws of Islam on French soil.

Macron said that the republican ideal is not an empty space but a historical reality whose density is urgently needed and everyone must be respected. Macron said it from Mulhouse, in Alsace, where Islamists are working on a space that takes charge of all aspects of life by placing them under Islamist control, a real enclave – financed by Qatar and Turkey.

Macron launched a campaign against political Islam and what he calls “Islamist separatism” in some French cities, announcing measures to strengthen controls over the external financing of mosques, to end the nomination by Algeria, Morocco and Turkey of 300 imams per year in France and ban Turkish and Arabic courses. Imams, Macron said, are often related to Salafism or the Muslim Brotherhood and “preach against the republic”.