RUTHFULLY YOURS

Iran arrested yet another American resident on claims that he was working with U.S. intelligence services.

Nizar Zakka, a Lebanese-American, works in Washington as secretary-general of the Dupont Circle-based Ijma3 group, which lobbies for the information and communications technology industry in the Middle East.

He last tweeted on Sept. 9 about Internet freedom and free expression.

On Monday, his nonprofit said in a statement that Zakka received an invitation on Sept. 11 from Iran’s vice president for Women and Family Affairs to attend the 2nd International Conference & Exhibition on Women in Sustainable Development, titled “Entrepreneurship & Employment.”

“Mr. Zakka is a global expert on ICT (Information and Communications Technologies) for economic development and ICT public policies,” Ijma3 said. “Mr. Zakka traveled to Tehran on September 14 and attended all the events of the conference.”

The most predictable and worrying result of Jeremy Corbyn’s election was always the effect it was going to have on the growing anti-Semitism and anti-Israel activism in the UK.

For someone such as Jeremy Corbyn, an elevation to a position of leadership is a vindication of those years in the wilderness, not an opportunity to find an ideological replacement.

One of the reasons Hamas supporters spend so much time speaking to university students is because they hope such students will demonstrate a naïveté about them and their goals that might be unusual elsewhere in society.

What happens when a pro-Hamas speaker is confronted by an anti-Hamas speaker? The anti-Hamas speaker may rightly say that Hamas is an extremist organisation. The pro-Hamas speaker or naïve student might easily come back by asking how an organization can be deemed extreme if the leader of Her Majesty’s opposition is a friend and supporter of the group. This certainly makes it easier to depict its terrorists as tolerable and its racism as acceptable.

The British left, under Corbyn’s leadership, now harbour the proponents of the greatest racism of our time.

It was never hard to predict the effects of the election of Jeremy Corbyn to the leadership of the British Labour party. Although some people wondered whether the candidate of the far-left might soften some of his opinions once in power, most observers never doubted that someone who had cherished such opinions almost alone on the backbenches for three decades was hardly going to change them overnight just because he had become party leader. For someone such as Corbyn, an elevation to a position of leadership is a vindication of those years in the wilderness, not an opportunity to find an ideological replacement.

Unthinkable as it may be after all these decades of nuclear-enforced peace, Beijing’s determination to make the South China sea its own is day-by-day raising the likelihood that a full-blown shooting war will erupt. Australia’s prospects in such a conflict are especially parlous
China’s preoccupation with its past humiliation by foreign powers didn’t start with the communists: a public holiday, National Humiliation Day, was instituted by the Nationalists in 1927. Similarly, Chinese irredentism isn’t just a recent phenomenon. Chinese primary school textbooks from 1938 have a map of China that extends well beyond its current borders in all directions. Now the map in Chinese passports includes the South China Sea as Chinese territory, as well as parts of India on its northern border.

As he was concluding the calamitous nuclear agreement with Iran last summer, John Kerry asked the Iranians [1] to cut out the “Death to America” chants. (This was not long before he told [2] an astonished world that the chants did not really mean that the Iranian mullahs wanted to kill us.)

In yet another indication of just how disastrous the nuclear deal really is, the Iranians have not only rejected Kerry’s request, but are ramping up the genocidal rhetoric. On Monday [3], 192 of the 290 members of the Iranian Majlis (Parliament) declared:

The martyr-nurturing nation of Iran is not at all prepared to abandon the slogan of “Death to America” under the pretext of a nuclear agreement.

Remember: in an Islamic context, a “martyr” is not simply someone who dies for his faith. It is is someone who takes hold of the Qur’an’s promise of Paradise to those who “kill and are killed” for Allah (9:111). If the Iranian nation is “martyr-nurturing,” it is raising a generation of killers.

Maybe Sigmund Freud should have been a political scientist. Psychoanalysis might be useless as treatment for neurotics, but there’s something to be said for it as a mode of ideological investigation. To wit, what explains the fatal attraction of the secular mind to the politics of impending apocalypse?

I’m reminded of this again as embarrassed eulogies are being written for China’s one-child policy, which Beijing finally eased last week after a 35-year experiment in social folly and human cruelty. Instituted in the name of resource conservation, the policy resulted in millions of forced abortions and involuntary sterilizations, a male-female birth imbalance of 118-100, and a looming demographic disaster as Chinese grow old while the working population shrinks.

As government policy goes, the one-child policy was as repressive and illiberal as it gets: the ultimate invasion of privacy; the ultimate assault on the human rights of women and girls. Naturally, liberals loved it.

The story of a Texas schoolboy who removed the guts of an old alarm clock from its case, reconstructed the device in a suitcase and hauled it to school has become an international sensation.

Not surprisingly, school officials were alarmed at what appeared to be a bomb, called police and removed the boy from the campus. But activists screamed “Islamophobia,” and Ahmed “Clockboy” Mohamed became an instant celebrity, capped by Barack Obama’s invitation to the White House.

But now a commentator is calling out Obama for honoring Mohamed while refusing to even mention the case of Asia Bibi, a Christian woman under sentence of death in Pakistan for violating a Shariah-based blasphemy law.

ISIS has released a new video threatening Pres. Obama and accusing him of “waging war against Allah.”

The message refers back to the U.S./Kurdish coordinated raid that freed 70 hostages in Hawijah, Northern Iraq last week.

Titled “The reality of the American raid,” the video appears to be a recounting of the attack by ISIS sympathizers and concludes with the execution of 4 prisoners, believed to be Iraqis.

An English speaking jihadi draws his knife as a prisoner dressed in an orange jumpsuit kneels in front of him. Facing the camera, he says:

“Obama, you have learned a new lesson. 600 soldiers of the Caliphate faced four hundred of your children. They killed and injured them. By Allah’s grace, you are probably surprised by this. Oh crusaders, it is the support of Allah. You did not gain anything. You returned to your bases with loses and humiliation. Obama, you wage war against Allah; He supports us against you. There is the promise of Allah; Allah will never fail in His promise.”

The growing refugee crisis in Europe is clearly a humanitarian issue. But if leaders don’t bring some common sense into the equation, the humanitarian problems could become a geopolitical crisis. The U.S. needs to heed the lessons of Europe because a similar situation could erupt on our borders.

Margot Wallström, Sweden’s Social Democratic foreign minister, declared this week that the refugee flow in her country, with its current population of 9.8 million, was enormous: “We cannot maintain a system where perhaps 190,000 people will arrive every year — in the long run, our system will collapse. And that welcome is not going to receive popular support.”

The 190,000 refugees expected in Sweden this year would be the equivalent of 6.5 million people arriving in the U.S. — the population of Indiana.

A major reason so many refugees want to settle in Sweden, Germany, and other Northern European countries is that they have generous welfare-state programs for non-citizens. Even so, some refugees can be picky. The Swedish newspaper Local reported last week that “more than 30 asylum seekers refused to get off a bus that took them to temporary accommodation at a holiday park on Sunday night because they didn’t want to stay in such a rural location.”

Young Swedes are not allowed to vote until they are 18, and they cannot buy alcohol until they are 20, but plans are now being made to allow children as young as 12 years old to apply to have their legal gender changed.

Yes, the report actually says, “No one should have to go through any kind of medical or psychological treatment…” Nowhere in the report was there any mention of the suicide risk or any other negative aspects of mutilating healthy adolescents. The purpose of the investigation seems to be to pave the way for new legislation, not on the best interests of the children.

Activists are allowed to use the classrooms to propagandize against so-called heteronormativity and to promote all kinds of sexual expressions — except heterosexuality. One cannot but wonder if this school campaign has led to a record number of kids seeking treatment for gender dysphoria.

Studies “show that 70-80% of children who had expressed transgender feelings, over time “spontaneously lost those feelings.” — Paul R. Mc Hugh, Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Maryland, USA

Although Swedes are shocked that many immigrant girls are subjected to female genital mutilation (FGM), the Swedish government plans to allow hospitals to cut away the perfectly healthy genitals of children who believe they belong to the opposite sex. In 2011, a Swedish study done by Karolinska Institutet showed that the suicide rate among post-op transgender people is far higher than that of the general population. Other studies show that 70%-80% of kids suffering from gender dysphoria lose these feelings after a few years.

“We are importing Islamic extremism, Arab anti-Semitism, national and ethnic conflicts of other peoples, as well as a different understanding of society and law.” — From a leaked German intelligence document.

“We need to be clear that there must be limits and quotas for immigration — we cannot save the whole world.” — Markus Söder, Finance Minister of Bavaria.

“The migration crisis has the potential to destabilize governments, countries and the whole European continent. … What we have been facing is not a refugee crisis. This is a migratory movement composed of economic migrants, refugees and also foreign fighters” — Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.

“Meanwhile, refugees are still heading into Germany — at a rate of around 10,000 a day. … The decade after Ms. Merkel first came to power in 2005 now looks like a blessed period for Germany, in which the country was able to enjoy peace, prosperity and international respect, while keeping the troubles of the world at a safe distance. That golden era is now over.” — Gideon Rachman, Financial Times.

Germany’s Muslim population is set to nearly quadruple to an astonishing 20 million within the next five years, according to a demographic forecast by Bavarian lawmakers.

The German government expects to receive 1.5 million asylum seekers in 2015, and possibly even more in 2016. After factoring in family reunifications — based on the assumption that individuals whose asylum applications are approved will subsequently bring an average of four additional family members to Germany — that number will swell exponentially. This is in addition to the 5.8 million Muslims already living in Germany