RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/new-zealand-massacre

On July 22, 2011, Anders Behring Breivik killed eight adults at a government office complex in Oslo with a truck bomb and then gunned down 69 people, mostly members of the youth division of the Norwegian Labor Party, at a summer camp on the nearby island of Utøya. Before setting out on his murder spree, Breivik posted online a “manifesto”—consisting largely of cut-and-pasted material from other sources—in which he accused the Labor Party of abetting the West’s cultural suicide by encouraging mass Muslim immigration.

It hardly needs to be said that Breivik’s actions were deplorable, monstrous, sheer evil. Yet they did not suddenly negate the reality of the previous decade—major jihadist attacks on New York and Washington, Bali, Madrid, Beslan, London, Mumbai; growing Muslim enclaves in Western cities, whose residents, to an alarming extent, maintained the primitive practices (forced marriage, honor killing, female genital mutilation) associated with their faith, despised the core values of their host cultures, refused to assimilate into them but did not hesitate to exploit their welfare systems, and raised sons who commit violent crimes against non-Muslims, including gay-bashing, the tormenting of Jews, and the mass rape of children. In one Western country after another, surveys of Muslims showed that a terrifying proportion of them wanted to see the countries in which they had settled—many of them as refugees from Islamic tyranny—subjected to sharia law, under which apostasy from Islam, homosexuality, adultery, and many other offenses against totalitarian Koranic strictures would be punishable by death.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13907/three-crises

The last century witnessed a plethora of ideology-based regimes: The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the People’s Republic of China, the United Arab Republic and the Buddhist Socialist State of Myanmar among others. The pretension behind all those labels was that rather than being the art of solving the people’s problems, politics was a means of advancing the real or imagined goals of an ideology.

Another thing the three crisis-struck regimes (Iran, Algeria, Venezuela) have in common is that they are all oil-and-gas states, which means that because they don’t depend on income from taxation, they can regard their people as expensive and bothersome extras.

In all three countries, the traditional military holds the balance of power between the ruling elite of which their own top brass is part and the mass of the rebellious citizenry.

Three crises in three continents: Iran in Asia, Algeria in Africa and Venezuela in Latin America. Do they have anything in common?

The obvious thing they have in common is that all three crises are rooted in a sharp disconnect between a discontented but combative people thirsty for change and a tired but arrogant ruling elite hell-bent on hanging onto power.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13908/ireland-anti-israel

Ireland, as a European Union member state, is subject to the EU’s commercial rules. EU trade rules may prohibit Ireland’s unilateral action as an EU treaty requires common commercial policy for all EU member states. The proposed law “could force US companies with Irish subsidiaries to choose between violating the Irish law or violating US Export Administration Regulations.” — Orde Kittrie, Professor of Law, Arizona State University.

Worst, there is no evidence that Ireland’s “pro-Palestinian” activities are in any way helping Palestinians, who continue to be arrested, tortured and deprived of any viable future by their own corrupt leaders. Most European activities seem actually focused on trying to destroy Israel.

What is most notable, of course, is that there is no commensurate hostility toward any other country. Ireland’s rancid vote also needs to be contrasted to its virtual silence regarding countries that are daily committing hair-raising crimes against humanity, such as Iran, China, Turkey, Syria, North Korea, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Mauritania, Cuba, Venezuela or Sudan, for instance. Why only Israel? What is now on display is simply a hypocritical condemnation by Ireland of the only democracy in in the Middle East with equal rights for all its citizens.

What is essential is that this double standard — one set of rules for Israel and a whole other set of rules for countries actually committing atrocities — must stop.

Ireland’s legislative lower house (Dáil) on January 29 approved a bill that would make it a crime for Irish citizens to import or sell any product produced by Israelis in areas located beyond the 1949 armistice lines, most of which, such as Jerusalem, were actually liberated by Israel during the 1967 Six Day War from their illegal occupation by Jordan in 1948-49, after Israel was attacked by five Arab armies who were literally hoping to crush it the day of its birth. In 1967, Egypt, presumably hoping to finish the job it had started in 1948, created a casus belli (cause for war under international law) by announcing a blockade of Israel’s access to the Red Sea via the Straits of Tiran.

Ireland’s legislative lower house (Dáil) on January 29 approved a bill that would make it a crime for Irish citizens to import or sell any product produced by Israelis in areas located beyond the 1949 armistice lines, most of which, such as Jerusalem, were actually liberated by Israel during the 1967 Six Day War from their illegal occupation by Jordan in 1948-49, after Israel was attacked by five Arab armies who were literally hoping to crush it the day of its birth. In 1967, Egypt, presumably hoping to finish the job it had started in 1948, created a casus belli (cause for war under international law) by announcing a blockade of Israel’s access to the Red Sea via the Straits of Tiran.

https://twitter.com/andrewbostom/status/1106913024517070849
https://courtnews.co.nz/2018/02/15/youth

A Christchurch teenager who converted to Islam planned to ram a car into a group of people and then stab them until the police killed him, the Christchurch District Court was told at his sentencing.The teen has now told a psychologist that when the violent incident began he “decided not to hurt anybody because he did not have the means to kill enough people”, Crown prosecutor Chris Lange told the court.“The reason no-one was hurt was that he did not have access to knives,” Mr Lange said. But there was significant premeditation, and hostility towards non-Muslims.The teen harboured thoughts for five months of killing multiple people, and expected to be killed by the police. He had written a goodbye note to his mother.

After his arrest, the youth told police he was angry and had “done it for Allah”.The court has adopted a rehabilitative approach to the teen’s sentencing, with Judge Stephen O’Driscoll releasing him on intensive supervision with a list of conditions and a warning that if he breaches the conditions or reoffends, he will likely be sent to prison.Among the conditions – which will apply for two years while the judge monitors his progress – is counselling by a member of the local Muslim community.