RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18568/nuclear-iran-risk

One might well wonder if the CNAS study is a “trial balloon” from the Biden Administration to begin preparing the nation and world psychologically for the advent of Iran’s “Islamic bomb.”

One might also wonder if the CNAS study is an attempt to justify consequent U.S. retreat from the Middle East, not as another humiliating defeat, but as a prudent and wise reprioritization of resources to meet the threat from China.

President Biden is defunding nuclear weapons critical to U.S. national security, such as the SLCM-N and B-83. He is also still seriously considering abolition of U.S. intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), and is doing nothing to accelerate desperately needed modernization of the U.S. nuclear deterrent — despite increasing nuclear threats from Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran.

If America, the most benign and humane civilization that has ever existed in history, is capable of using nuclear weapons, what can be expected from the evil empires that are Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran?

At minimum, a nuclear Iran will be even more aggressive supporting terrorism against moderate Arab states, Israel, and the U.S.. Iran might well also arm its proxies — many of which are officially designated as Foreign Terrorist Organizations — with weapons of mass destruction, while relying on anonymity and its nuclear deterrent to escape retaliation.

Unlike North Korea, whose overt pursuit of nuclear weapons is used for atomic diplomacy and blackmail, Iran’s nuclear weapons program is clandestine and may remain covertly secret — because Iran plans actually to use its “Islamic bomb.”

Expect the Center for a New American Security to weave more fig leaves rationalizing Biden Administration blunders and irresponsible policy as a species of wisdom. Coming soon, U.S. nuclear inferiority to Russia and China will be called an “acceptable risk.”

The Center for a New American Security (CNAS), comprising largely former, mostly Democrat administration foreign policy and defense officials, in a new study — “Risk and Responsibility: Managing Future Iranian Weapons of Mass Destruction Threats” — tries to sell the notion that Iran armed with nuclear, biological and chemical offensive weapons will be an acceptable risk. CNAS is a source of staff and “expertise” to the Biden Administration. Unfortunately, their idea is preposterous.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/05/31/the-devils-of-davos/

What happens when the world’s worst gather together to talk about their ideas? Nothing good.

The World Economic Forum that meets in Davos, Switzerland is not just a brood of hypocrites who fly in on private jets so they can mob-lecture the rest of us about our carbon footprints. These people are truly dangerous.

Here’s a quick rundown of a few of the most noxious ideas that emerged from last week’s meeting, which was promoted as “the starting point for a new era of global responsibility and cooperation,” followed by incisive comments we cannot call our own but are fitting of the moment.

“​​We need to accept that there will be some pain in the process,” Kjerstin Braathen, chief executive of the Norwegian financial services giant DNB, said about a global effort to cut carbon dioxide emissions. “The pace that we need will open up for missteps; it will open up for shortages of energy; it will create inflationary pressures, and we need to start talking about that.”

“The ruling class can afford this transition, but can the rest of us?” the Washington Times’ Kelly Sadler asked last week. “The billionaires in Davos don’t care – so long as they can hold onto their wealth, power and position. And this week, they were hatching a plan to do just that.”

“When it comes to business and economic activities, Davos is not a place for narrow self-interest,” WEF chairman and founder Klaus Schwab said. “It is instead a place for the implementation of the notion of stakeholder capitalism, a concept I’m fighting for since 50 years.”

“‘Stakeholder capitalism’ is an oxymoron, and it is a synonym for fascism,” writes Streetwise Professor. 

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18532/mosque-church-massacres

[I]f one non-Muslim attack on a mosque is enough for the UN to institutionalize a special day for Islam, what about the countless, often worse, Muslim attacks on non-Muslim places of worship? Why have they not elicited a similar response from the UN?

The above list, it should be noted, is hardly comprehensive; there have been many similar attacks on churches — in Egypt alone. But because there were few, if any, fatalities, they received little or no coverage in the Western press.

This dismissal is especially true for those remote — and, apparently, in the views of Western media, “unimportant” — regions, such as Nigeria, where Christians are being purged hourly in a Muslim-produced genocide. Thus, after noting that Muslims have eliminated 60,000 Christians between just 2009 and 2021, an August 2021 report states that, during that same time frame, Muslims also destroyed or torched 17,500 churches and 2,000 Christian schools. How many undocumented souls perished in those largely unreported terror attacks?

Therefore, the original question: If one non-Muslim attack on a mosque, which claimed 51 Muslim lives, was enough for the UN to establish an “international day to combat Islamophobia,” why have so many Muslim attacks on churches, which have claimed thousands of Christian lives, not been enough for the UN to establish an “international day to combat Christianophobia”?

The UN, it seems, would have us ignore and brush aside all these ongoing massacres of Christian church worshippers as unfortunate byproducts of misplaced “Muslim grievances” — and instead fixate on this one singular, if admittedly horrendous, incident.

For the UN, evidently, one incident constitutes a “pattern” — one in dire need of recognition and response. The response is to silence, ignore or attack all those who expose the heavily documented real pattern of abuse and violence against non-Muslims — which, make no mistake, is precisely what “combatting Islamophobia” is all about.

The United Nations recently named March 15 as “international day to combat Islamophobia.” That date was chosen because it witnessed one of the worst terror attacks on Muslims: on March 15, 2019, an armed Australian, Brenton Tarrant, entered two mosques in New Zealand and opened fire on unarmed and helpless Muslim worshippers; 51 were killed and 40 wounded.

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/fractured-west-fix-itself/

There are many ways to fracture a people. But one of the best is to destroy all the remaining ties that bind them. To persuade them that to the extent they have anything of their own, it is not very special, and in the final analysis, hardly worth preserving. This is a process that has gone on across the western world for over a generation: a remorseless, daily assault on everything that most of us were brought up to believe was good about ourselves.

Take Britain’s national heroes — the people who used to form the epicenter of my country’s feelings of national pride. Twenty years ago, Winston Churchill easily topped the BBC’s national survey identifying who the nation thought the Greatest Briton. Today whenever the BBC runs a piece about Churchill it includes the “case for the prosecution”: a set of tendentious and fallacious arguments now frequently made against him. This has consequences. When the outburst of iconoclasm crossed the Atlantic in the summer 2020, after the murder of George Floyd, Churchill statues were among the first to be assaulted. Indeed they were attacked so often that the statue in Parliament Square was boxed up, and only got unboxed when the French president arrived in London for the day.

It isn’t just Churchill who gets this treatment. Almost everyone in British history does. Again and again, largely due to our importing some of the worst ideas in modern American life, we are told that we need to scour our past and purge whatever fails to satisfy our current urges.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18567/europe-demography-democracy

There is a replacement of civilization and the media is not even covering it.

“By 2050, 50 percent of the French population will be mixed.” — Jean-Luc Mélenchon, Radio Classique, May 17, 2021.

“The mayor of Grenoble adopts the arguments and rhetorical formulas of the Muslim Brotherhood: talking about freedom to impose sexism”. — Céline Pina, Le Figaro, May 4, 2022.

This wokeism talk pretends to be “inclusive” but carefully excludes entire groups on the clearly racist basis of skin color (whites) or ethnicity (Jews). Wokeism, filled with progressive, racist talk, pretends not to be racist but meanwhile is imbued with the syrupy racist ideology of “diversity” — which advocates replacing a society by immigration. It also promotes political correctness, a deadly virus that paralyzes the vital reflexes of the West. Wokeism is the ideal ground for the debut of political Islam in Europe.

This ever-increasing percentage of Turkish, Bosnian, Kosovar, Iranian and Iraqi politicians in Germany will increasingly influence the choices of the first European power in matters of immigration and multiculturalism.

“What we see in big cities today will be normal for the whole country in the future. In a city like Frankfurt, we will have between 65 percent and 70 percent.” — Herbert Brücker, head of migrant research at the Federal Institute for Employment Research, Die Welt, April 11, 2019.

“The massive vote for Mélenchon is proof that the strategy of community victimization that began in the 1990s produced what it was intended to produce in one or two generations. Mélenchon gathered a large part of the Muslim vote, which obviously does not make it a Muslim or Islamist party, but only a ‘cuckoo’ party. Like the cuckoo hatching its eggs in the nest of a bird of another species, a cuckoo party shelters and protects ideas that are not its own. The Muslim Brothers have a strategy that they expressed in their plans from the 1980s: to form an alliance with the most docile parties to propagate their ideas”. — Florence Bergeaud-Blackler, anthropologist, Marianne.net. April 22, 2022.

There is a replacement of civilization and the media is not even covering it.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/05/canadas-military-advised-to-go-woke/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=top-bar-latest&utm_term=fifth

“A recent report on Canada’s military is the most unserious, illiberal, anti-religious, bigoted piece of policy tripe to emerge from any NATO ally anywhere on the planet.”

A recent report on Canada’s military is the most unserious, illiberal, anti-religious, bigoted piece of policy tripe to emerge from any NATO ally anywhere on the planet.

After Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine in February and its war on the same ever since, you would think that Western policy-makers would grasp how critical it is to ensure that our militaries are well-funded, well-equipped, and ready to defend our allies in NATO — just in case.

The United States, the United Kingdom, and other selected allies including the Baltic republics and Poland have grasped this; even neutral Finland and pacifist Sweden want to now join NATO in response to Russian aggression. Meanwhile in Canada? The military is being told to go “woke.”

A Canadian military report released a few weeks ago alleges that Canada’s military is shot through with “systemic” racism. It’s a typical claim from the woke Left that sees racism everywhere and gives it as a monocausal explanation for nearly every ill and observed disparity. This new report follows that path. It’s obvious in the title and subtitle, which is an accusation in addition to being verbose: “Minister of National Defence Advisory Panel on Systemic Racism and Discrimination, Final Report: With a focus on Anti-Indigenous and Anti-Black Racism, LGBTQ2+ Prejudice, Gender Bias, and White Supremacy.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18564/iran-nuclear-deal-purpose

Many analysts argue that the nuclear deal — original and revised — is primarily about legitimizing Iran’s nuclear program. The deal, they say, is designed to strengthen, not weaken, the Islamic Republic.

Statements by Obama and his senior foreign policy advisors, the same people who are now advising President Biden, reflect a belief — a naïve one, many say — that if Iran were stronger, and traditional American allies — Israel, Saudi Arabia and Turkey — were weaker, the Middle East could achieve a new balance of power that would result in more peaceful region.

“The catch to Obama’s newly inclusive ‘balancing’ framework was that upgrading relations with Iran would necessarily come at the expense of traditional partners targeted by Iran — like Saudi Arabia and, most importantly, Israel. Obama never said that part out loud, but the logic isn’t hard to follow: Elevating your enemy to the same level as your ally means that your enemy is no longer your enemy, and your ally is no longer your ally.” — Lee Smith, Middle East analyst, Tablet magazine.

“The Realignment rests on, to put it mildly, a hollow theory. It misstates the nature of the Islamic Republic and the scope of its ambitions. A regime that has led ‘Death to America’ chants for the last 40 years is an inveterately revisionist regime. The Islamic Republic sees itself as a global power, the leader of the Muslim world, and it covets hegemony over the Persian Gulf — indeed, the entire Middle East.” — Tony Badran and Michael Doran, Middle East analysts, Tablet magazine.

“After oil, the Islamic Republic’s major export item is the IRGC-commanded terrorist militia — the only export that Iran consistently produces at a peerless level. Malley and Sullivan got it exactly wrong when they argued, in effect, that allies are suckering the United States into conflict with Iran. It is not the allies but the Islamic Republic that is blanketing the Arab world with terrorist militias, arming them with precision-guided weapons, and styling the alliance it leads as ‘the Resistance Axis.’ It does so for one simple reason: It is out to destroy the American order in the Middle East.” — Tony Badran and Michael Doran.

U.S. Special Envoy for Iran Robert Malley has confirmed that diplomatic efforts to revive the Iran nuclear deal originally signed by U.S. President Barack Obama are at an impasse. “We do not have a deal with Iran, and prospects for reaching one are, at best, tenuous,” Malley told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee during a hearing on May 25.

Malley also admitted that the Biden administration is seeking a new deal that is “shorter” and “weaker” than the original deal. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, during his confirmation hearing in January 2021, promised that the administration would pursue a new deal that is “longer” and “stronger.”

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2022/05/25/majority-report-canadas-latest-advance-in-precognitive-legislation-n1600764

The 2002 film Minority Report was a box office success and, like the Matrix franchise, emerged as one of the most talked-about movies of recent times. The crux of the film involved a “precrime” policing unit that could act to prevent crimes before they were committed, on evidence provided by a team of comatose subjects with precognitive abilities. Of course, the plot was utterly absurd, demanding major suspension of viewer disbelief, but nonetheless provocative in its social and political implications. 

Though the story descends into complicated but typical melodrama — abducted child, failed marriage, false accusation, eventual resolution — resulting in the abandonment of the clairvoyant project, the idea of precrime prevention is the fanciful “hook” on which the narrative depends. It serves as the fiction within the fiction that has to be initially accepted if the film is to retain its unlikely coherence. Of course, what the film calls a “minority report” is an anomalous factor, different from the more comprehensive reports of predictive infallibility, but second sight remains the rule. Obviously, no such precognitive technology is even remotely conceivable — or so we might have thought.

Leave it to the Canadian prime minister, as many have noted, to translate the central premise of the movie into the realm of public policy. Bill C-261, currently pending before Parliament, proposes to deal with the newly formulated crime of online “hate propaganda” and “hate speech” before said crime has actually been contemplated, let alone occurred, assuming the plaintiff believes that he or she is the intended target of hate. An individual can thus be accused of a crime and made to pay the price — censure, compensatory damages, or even imprisonment — before the event has taken place. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/05/death-tehran-kenneth-r-timmerman/

The motorcycle killers who assassinated a senior Quds Force officer in Tehran on Sunday knew what they were doing.

According to Iranian media accounts, accomplices blocked the street behind the target’s car by double-parking and raising their trunk, clearing the way for the motorcycle killers who shot Colonel Hassan Sayyad Khodaei five times as he was about to drive off in his Kia Pride.

The feat was even more brazen since the Colonel’s street led directly to the Iranian parliament, one of the most secure areas of Tehran. The assassins hit Khodaei from behind in the head and the heart, blowing out both the driver and the passenger side windows of his car, according to photos subsequently released to the Iranian media.

The Iranian regime immediately blamed Israel for the assassination, referring to Khodaei as a “defender of the shrine,” a reference to Quds Force officers engaged in the fight against ISIS in Syria.

Khodaei, whose real name was Bahram, was one of three brothers who joined the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps in the 1980s and fought in the war against Iraq. All three brothers, and four more Khodaei cousins, later became officers in the elite Quds Force, Iranian sources said.