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Ruth King

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Africa: Alarming Rise of Christian Persecution by Uzay Bulut

By on June 26th, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14448/africa-christians-persecution

“In some regions, the level and nature of persecution is arguably coming close to meeting the international definition of genocide, according to that adopted by the UN.” — The Independent Review of FCO support for Persecuted Christians.

“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.” — World Watch Monitor, May 2, 2019.

As the British report demonstrates, persecution against Christians and other non-Muslims is not about the ethnicity, race or skin color of either the perpetrators or the victims; it is about their religion.

If these crimes are not stopped, it is highly likely that the fate of the African Continent will be like that of the Middle East: Once it was a majority-Christian region; now, Christians are a tiny, dying, defenseless minority.

According to a recent interim report published in the U.K., “it is estimated that one third of the world’s population suffers from religious persecution in some form, with Christians being the most persecuted group.”

Although the full report — commissioned by British Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt and conducted by the Bishop of Truro, the Right Reverend Philip Mounstephen — was due to be released by Easter this year, “the scale and nature of the phenomenon [of Christian persecution] simply required more time,” according to the report. As a result, Mounstephen explained, the “interim” findings released in April are incomplete, and the final report will be published at the end of June.

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Will Iran’s Attacks on the US and Allies Escalate? by Majid Rafizadeh

By on June 26th, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14447/iran-attacks-escalate

Iran’s actions are clear; there has been virtually no attempt on its part to disguise hostile intentions. Why is there no international outrage? The mainstream media continue to fail to report adequately Iran’s attacks. There has been no focus placed on the increase over the past two months of these attacks.

On several occasions, the Trump administration invited Iran to the negotiating table in an attempt to deescalate tensions. It is Iran that rejects the talks and continues to act aggressively, all while openly threatening the U.S. and its allies.

How many people must be threatened, tortured, or slaughtered, before Trump’s response will be deemed warranted?

Criticism continues to fly at the Trump administration in response to the White House’s attempts to deter Iran’s threats. Despite increasing acts of violence, and aggressive behavior towards the US, President Trump is criticized by some people for his determination to hold the Iranian government accountable.

By using its military to attack the US and its allies, the Islamic Republic has been unabashedly resorting to hard power tactics. Iran’s actions are clear; there has been virtually no attempt on its part to disguise hostile intentions. Why is there no international outrage? The mainstream media continue to fail to report adequately Iran’s attacks. There has been no focus placed on the increase over the past two months of these attacks.

The Iranian government’s policy appears to be two-pronged. The first facet seems linked to instructing its proxies across the region to attack and wreak havoc on entities linked to the United States, European countries, and Gulf states.

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Iran Says New U.S. Sanctions Mark ‘Permanent Closure’ of Diplomacy By Mairead McArdle

By on June 26th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/iran-says-new-u-s-sanctions-mark-permanent-closure-of-diplomacy/

Iranian officials said Tuesday that new U.S. sanctions mean “closing the doors of diplomacy” between the two countries amid increasingly acrimonious relations.

The sanctions, which target the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and other top Iranian officials, are “outrageous and idiotic,” President Hassan Rouhani said.

“You sanction the foreign minister simultaneously with a request for talks,” Rouhani complained, before calling the White House “mentally retarded.”

“Trump’s government is annihilating all the established international mechanisms for keeping peace and security in the world,” Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Abbas Mousavi wrote on Twitter, calling the Trump administration “desperate.”

In response, President Trump issued a warning that attacking American targets will result in disaster for Iran.

“The wonderful Iranian people are suffering, and for no reason at all. Their leadership spends all of its money on Terror, and little on anything else,” Trump wrote Tuesday on Twitter. “Iran’s very ignorant and insulting statement, put out today, only shows that they do not understand reality. Any attack by Iran on anything American will be met with great and overwhelming force. In some areas, overwhelming will mean obliteration.”

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Last week, Trump called off airstrikes planned as retaliation for Iran’s downing of an unmanned American drone with just minutes to spare. He later cited concerns about the potential casualties, which he said would have been around 150, in justifying the decision.

Tensions with Iran have been escalating ever since the White House backed out of the 2015 nuclear weapons deal last year, brokered by the Obama administration and consistently disparaged by Trump.

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The Highly Conditional Priorities of Our National News Media By Jim Geraghty

By on June 26th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-highly-conditional-priorities-of-our-national-news-media/

A few respondents have observed that there were some liberals who complained about the Obama administration’s immigration enforcement policies back in his first term. That’s swell, but the amount of attention and outrage directed at separating families, crowded detainment facilities and cooperation with local law enforcement was miniscule from 2009 to 2012 compared to that of today — so miniscule that some of us could fairly conclude that the methods used in immigration enforcement were a second, third, or fourth-tier issue for most Democrats and most people in the national news media, and that many Democrats believed those methods were reasonable and justified as long as their preferred president was running things.

The argument isn’t mere hypocrisy; the argument is that large swaths of the national news media are only truly interested in topics when they are useful for demonizing Republicans. Immigration-enforcement methods that were bottom-of-page-A24 news in the Obama administration become top-of-page-A1 news in the Trump administration.

For example, Vladimir Putin is pretty much the same guy today that he was five years ago and ten years ago and 15 years ago. But the amount of coverage of his regime and the threat it represents to the United States increased exponentially once it became clear that President Trump had a friendly (some would say spectacularly naïve) perspective about him. Even now, the context for most of the discussion about Putin and Russia’s regime remains focused on the treat he presents to Democratic odds of winning in 2020 as opposed to the threat he presents to the United States and its allies. You see overwhelming coverage of the potential for more ridiculous Facebook ads and comparably little coverage of an estimated 120,000 Russian troops in eastern Ukraine.

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Erdoğan’s loss is Israel’s gain Istanbul, home to 20 percent of the Turkish population, has been emboldened by the mayoral victory of Ekrem Imamoğlu. It won’t take long for other areas of the country to follow suit. Ruthie Blum

By on June 26th, 2019

https://www.jns.org/opinion/erdogans-loss-is-israels-gain/

When Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan declared, during the lead-up to the country’s March 31 municipal elections, that “whoever wins Istanbul, wins Turkey,” he couldn’t have imagined that the catchy campaign slogan was going to energize his rivals and bode ill for his own continued reign of terror.

Even the initial mayoral victory of Ekrem Imamoğlu—the opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) candidate challenging Binali Yıldırım, a former prime minister from Erdoğan’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP)— three months ago in Turkey’s largest city didn’t seem to pose too great a problem for the Turkish despot. All he had to do was deem the election invalid on the basis of some phony “administrative error” and force a new round of polls. Which he did, on May 6, by having Turkey’s “Supreme Election Board” annul the Istanbul results.

If that didn’t work, he could always add a few dozen people to the already jam-packed jails, filled with anyone who dared to look at him cross-eyed.

Or so he must have thought.

What he didn’t realize, however, was that the extra few weeks before Sunday’s Istanbul election “redo” would work in Imamoğlu’s favor, enabling him to win by a far wider margin than the first time.

Imagine the Turkish tyrant’s horror at the massive crowds of secular CHP supporters, persecuted Kurds and disgruntled devout Muslims—sick and tired of backing the party hacks of an Islamist autocrat whose agenda never helped them improve their lot—gathering in the streets and hanging from balconies to cheer Imamoğlu.

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The US mindset on Israel Ambassador (Ret.) Yoram Ettinger

By on June 26th, 2019

https://bit.ly/2ZGSEoi

The US mindset on Israel – unlike the US attitude toward other countries – is a bottom-top phenomenon: a derivative of the US public worldview, which feeds legislators in the House and Senate and policy-makers in the White House.

The US mindset on Israel draws its strength from the religious, ethical, moral and cultural roots of the US society, which were planted in 1620 and thereafter upon the arrival of the Early Pilgrims, and bolstered by the Founding Fathers, who authored the US Constitution in 1787.

For example, the Early Pilgrims referred to their 6-8 week sail in the Atlantic Ocean as the “Modern Day Exodus” and “Parting of the Sea.” Their destination was “the Modern Day Promised Land.” Hence, the hundreds of US towns, cities, parks and deserts bearing Biblical names such as Zion, Jerusalem, Salem, Bethel, Shilo, Bethlehem, Dothan, Hebron, Gilead, Carmel, Rehoboth, Boaz, Moab, etc.

Furthermore, the Philadelphia Liberty Bell, which represents the Founding Fathers’ concept of liberty, features an inscription from Leviticus, 25:10, which presents the Biblical core of liberty – the Jubilee: “Proclaim liberty throughout all the land and all the inhabitants thereof.” Moreover, Yale University’s seal is inscribed in Hebrew letters: אורים ותומים, which was the power of the High Priest during the Exodus from Egypt. And, the seal of Columbia University features the four Hebrew letters of God: יהוה (Jehovah) and one of God’s Angels: אוריאל (Uriel – Divine Light in Hebrew). The battle against slavery was based on Biblical values and themes, such as “Let My People Go,” and a key leader in that battle, Harriet Tubman, earned the name “Mama Moses.”

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My Testimony on Reparations written by Coleman Hughes

By on June 25th, 2019

https://quillette.com/2019/06/20/my-testimony-to-

Editor’s note: Coleman Hughes delivered the following testimony at a United States House Judiciary subcommittee hearing on Bill H.R. 40 on June 19, 2019. If passed, the bill would establish a commission for reparations.

Nothing I’m about to say is meant to minimize the horror and brutality of slavery and Jim Crow. Racism is a bloody stain on this country’s history, and I consider our failure to pay reparations directly to freed slaves after the Civil War to be one of the greatest injustices ever perpetrated by the U.S. government.

But I worry that our desire to fix the past compromises our ability to fix the present. Think about what we’re doing today. We’re spending our time debating a bill that mentions slavery 25 times but incarceration only once, in an era with zero black slaves but nearly a million black prisoners—a bill that doesn’t mention homicide once, at a time when the Center for Disease Control reports homicide as the number one cause of death for young black men. I’m not saying that acknowledging history doesn’t matter. It does. I’m saying there’s a difference between acknowledging history and allowing history to distract us from the problems we face today.

In 2008, the House of Representatives formally apologized for slavery and Jim Crow. In 2009, the Senate did the same. Black people don’t need another apology. We need safer neighborhoods and better schools. We need a less punitive criminal justice system. We need affordable health care. And none of these things can be achieved through reparations for slavery.

Nearly everyone close to me told me not to testify today. They said that even though I’ve only ever voted for Democrats, I’d be perceived as a Republican—and therefore hated by half the country. Others told me that distancing myself from Republicans would end up angering the other half of the country. And the sad truth is that they were both right. That’s how suspicious we’ve become of one another. That’s how divided we are as a nation.

If we were to pay reparations today, we would only divide the country further, making it harder to build the political coalitions required to solve the problems facing black people today; we would insult many black Americans by putting a price on the suffering of their ancestors; and we would turn the relationship between black Americans and white Americans from a coalition into a transaction—from a union between citizens into a lawsuit between plaintiffs and defendants.

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The Fog of Youth: The Cornell Student Takeover, 50 Years On written by Tony Fels

By on June 25th, 2019

https://quillette.com/2019/06/25/the-fog-of-youth-the-cornell-student-takeover-50-years-on/

On April 20, 1969, an era of student rebellions that had rocked American campuses at Berkeley, Columbia, San Francisco State, and Harvard reached a culmination of sorts with the triumphant exit of armed black students from Cornell’s Willard Straight student union building after a two-day occupation. The students had just won sweeping concessions from the university’s administration, including a pledge to urge faculty governing bodies to nullify reprimands of several members of the Afro-American Society (AAS) for previous campus disruptions on behalf of starting up a black studies program, judicial actions that had prompted the takeover. White student supporters cheered the outcome. And when the faculty, at an emergency meeting attended by 1,200 professors, initially balked at the administration’s request to overturn the reprimands, the radical Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) led a body that grew to six thousand students in a three-day possession of the university’s Barton gymnasium. Amid threats of violence by and against the student activists, the faculty, in a series of tumultuous meetings, voted to reverse themselves, allowing the crisis to end. Student protestors claimed victory for a blow successfully dealt to what they held to be a racist institution.

This positive interpretation of the meaning of the Cornell events has surprisingly remained mostly in place among the left-leaning participants (all within the SDS orbit) with whom I have kept in touch over the past 50 years. Most other former New Leftists whom I have spoken with or who have written about the crisis see it roughly the same way. One might have thought that decades of personal maturation would have produced profound doubts about the wisdom of such extreme actions taken when we were still in, or just past, our teenage years.

The continuity in interpretation by former SDSers is all the more remarkable in light of the fact that the nation at large took a distinctly critical view of the same events right from the start. Most Americans immediately recoiled at the sight of the widely reproduced image, captured in a Pulitzer prize-winning photograph, of the bandolier-wearing student leading the Willard Straight Hall activists, rifles at their side, out of the building. Headlines describing Cornell’s “capitulation” and “disgrace” typified national news coverage. Among 4,000 letters written to Cornell’s top administrators after the crisis, under five percent viewed the administrators’ actions favorably, and the student rebellion no doubt helped reinforce the country’s shift toward conservative dominance that had begun the previous November with the election of Richard Nixon. Yet through this immediate aftermath and on into the future, most of the aging participants have shown little evidence of rethinking.

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12 Things Americans Can Learn From Israel’s Pro-Parenting Culture In Israel By Melissa Langsam Braunstein

By on June 25th, 2019

https://thefederalist.com/2019/06/25/12-things-americans-can-learn-israels-pro-parenting-culture/

There’s longer maternity leave, better health care, designated days for families, and very little helicopter parenting. Can we learn from them?

Do rising expectations for parents help explain falling fertility rates? It certainly sounds logical, at least as one piece of a complex puzzle. Consider that our culture frequently paints parenting as joyless, anxiety-inducing, and expensive. So why would millennials and Generation Z be gung-ho about it?

In his Father’s Day column, Ross Douthat wondered whether current parenting norms are making parents unhappy. He observed that “parents everywhere seem harassed and exhausted, while marriage and childbearing both are falling out of fashion.” That’s true enough across the West—except for in Israel.

Consider that the total fertility rate for American women, “an estimate of lifetime fertility, based on present fertility patterns” dropped to a record low 1.73 in 2018. That puts us squarely below the 2.1 children per woman needed for populations to avoid shrinking. Israeli women, by contrast, average 3.1 kids apiece.

Before we consider why that gap exists, let’s stipulate that 8 million-plus people live in New Jersey-sized Israel, so this is not an apples-to-apples comparison. But I surveyed friends who’ve lived in both countries about the differences, and they offered several. Parenting in Israel is a completely different experience. Perhaps it’s time we consider improving our own parenting culture.

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The Fraudulent Paper Trail Through the Anti-Trump Conspiracy Diana West

By on June 25th, 2019

https://www.theepochtimes.com/the-fraudulent-paper-trail-through-the-anti-trump-c

Remember the simple rule: Anyone who pronounces on Trump–Russia from the baseline of, “Yes, the Russians hacked the Democratic National Committee (DNC),” or its current, fuzzier iteration, “Russia interfered in the 2016 election,” is either directing, party to, or victim of a seditious campaign of deception against the U.S. people based on a series of untrustworthy if not downright fraudulent documents.

As a longtime student of “Russian interference,” I hasten to add I never rule out “Russian interference”; I just expect to find it inside the anti-Trump conspiracy. But that’s another story.

The outrageous fact is, a stack of dodgy documents makes up the shaky foundation of one of the most virulent attacks on our nation in history; to date, though, they have largely passed inspection. Even as they variously come under scrutiny and dispute, they remain in place, undergirding escalating attacks on the legitimacy of the 2016 election and the presidency of Donald Trump.

There is simply no coming to terms with this conspiracy inside the U.S. government until the U.S. people are able to recognize the fraudulence of the paper trail that got it started, and see that those involved in perpetrating these frauds upon us, the People, are, as we often say but never do, brought to justice.

I hate to say it, but I have a hard time believing we ever will see justice. Still, for the record, here is a list of dodgy documents that set us off on this dangerous voyage through U.S. sedition. Reading through, do bear in mind this rule of thumb from West’s Encyclopedia of American Law: “Evidence is not relevant unless its authenticity can be demonstrated.”

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