RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/a-day-in-the-life-of-a-christian-under-pakistans-blasphemy-laws/

In Pakistan, blasphemy laws carry a death sentence. These notorious statutes are often used abusively for settling personal scores, making personal gains or for satisfying grudges that one neighbor may have against another.

The country’s blasphemy laws are also used to target minority groups, and Christians are disproportionately affected. Indeed, roughly a quarter of all blasphemy accusations target Christians. Business rivals accuse Christian men of blasphemy as a means of destroying their business and reputation.

In 2020, a Christian man was sentenced to death for having allegedly sent “blasphemous” text messages to his former supervisor. He has been held in custody since 2013.

While the death sentence is seldom carried out, people accused of blasphemy are vulnerable to attack or murder by rampaging Muslim mobs. In June 2024, for instance, an elderly man was killed by mob violence after being accused of desecrating the Quran.

In its 2024 report, the human rights organization Open Doors found that anti-Christian violence in Pakistan has been at the maximum possible level for many years. Violence against Christians does not only include widely publicized attacks against the Christian community, such as in the city of Jaranwala in August 2023, but also small scale, localized, and increasingly persistent killings and attacks on Christians and churches, often spurred on by the country’s notorious blasphemy laws, which have been expanded in scope and punishment.

Christians in Pakistan are more frequently arrested and charged than acquitted, and although not all situations are linked with blasphemy accusations, those are the most prominent examples.

In 2023, Pakistan’s National Assembly passed legislation that increased punishment for some forms of blasphemy by raising the penalties from three years to no fewer than 10 years for insulting the companions, wives, and family members of Islam’s founder, Muhammad. The widening of the scope of blasphemy laws and the increase in penalties on conviction demonstrate the level of importance politics and society attach to this topic.

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/01/30/iranian-people-are-ready-to-bring-about-regime-change-does-the-west-see-it-coming/

It was like yesterday. Nearly 50 years to the day, on Dec. 31, 1977, the Shah held a state dinner for U.S. President Jimmy Carter. Watching on television from my family’s middle-class home in western Tehran, I was eager to hear Carter’s speech. Having visited the U.S. as a curious tourist the previous summer, I had learned a few things about the American political system.

In the middle of the speech, Carter toasted the Shah, saying Iran was “under your majesty, an island of stability in one of the more troubled areas of the world.” At that, I turned to my uncle beside me, who was back in Iran after years of living in California, and asked, “Where is he talking about? Americans, with their embassy and all its personnel, really don’t know what is going on in Iran?”

Though my uncle abhorred the Shah as much as anyone, he was also keenly aware of the brutality that the Shah’s notorious secret police, SAVAK, used in crushing anyone who expressed such sentiment. That evening, he tried to assure me that the president of the strongest country in the world definitely knew things that an Iranian teenager did not, and that the Shah was irremovable. Our heated argument ended without resolution after my father intervened.

That autumn, I had witnessed anti-government demonstrations by university and high-school students. As an ordinary young Iranian nothing could stop my yearning for freedom. I will never forget the first time I heard the chant “down with the Shah in the streets of central Tehran. Though the Pahlavi dynasty appeared invincible after 57 years of iron-fisted rule, it was doomed less than 14 months after Carter made his remarks.

As an anti-mullah activist, I closely follow developments in Iran, and international policies towards it. It’s clear that Western leaders remain prone to the same faulty assumptions today as they were in 1977.

Despite the visible mistakes made in dealing with the Shah before the 1979 revolution, these errors have been repeated in handling the mullahs’ regime over the past 45 years. Just as Carter labeled the monarchy an “island of stability,” many experts in the U.S. and Europe continued to relay the view that the theocratic dictatorship is here to stay, and that regime change is not feasible.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/a-real-genocide-in-sudan/

Secretary of State Antony Blinken has now announced that a “genocide” has been going on in Sudan. He blames not the regular Sudanese army, but the rebels fighting that army — the Rapid Support Forces (RSF). The media have been paying far too little attention to Sudan, where a real famine affecting close to 25 million people is now in progress. Twelve million people have been displaced in the country since 2023. As many as 150,000 people have been killed in the same period. But the international media haven’t wanted to pay attention to the real miseries in Sudan; they are determined, rather, to concentrate on the exaggerated miseries of life in Gaza, which we keep being told is “on the brink of famine,” but never quite goes over that brink. Charges including “genocide” and “war crimes” and “crimes against humanity” are bruited about whenever Israel is mentioned. But in Sudan, there is no way to blame Israel, so the media keep the focus on Gaza — the gift that keeps on giving to the legions of Israel-haters.

However, Blinken’s description of a “genocide” in the Sudan — a real genocide, not the nonexistent one that UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories Francesca Albanese, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, and Pope Francis all want to blame Israel for committing in Gaza — has brought about a sudden renewal of interest in the Sudan. One hopes, and expects, that more attention will be given to that continuing conflict and that “real genocide” in the Sudan, about which much of the media has been withholding essential information. For what has not been clearly stated is this: it’s a “genocide” committed by well-armed Arabs belonging to the RSF, who are engaged in murdering defenseless black Africans.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21346/qatar-gaza-hamas-power

Qatar wants the Palestinian Authority (PA) government to collect the garbage, rebuild destroyed houses, and pay salaries to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, while Hamas is busy rearming, regrouping and getting ready for the next attack on Israel.

[T]he PA government in Ramallah, the de facto capital of the Palestinians in the West Bank, decided to suspend the broadcasts of the Qatar-owned Al-Jazeera television for supporting and promoting Hamas and other Palestinian terror groups. Israel and some Arab states had also shut down the broadcasts for the same reason.

The Qataris do not want the PA in the Gaza Strip to rein in Hamas and other terrorist groups, or to prevent attacks against Israel. Instead, they want the PA to act as a front to maintain Hamas’s hold on power — as a cover for keeping Hamas in power.

Qatar has one main purpose: to safeguard its friends in Hamas, continue promoting radical Islam, and deceive Westerners into believing that the Jihadists are a better alternative to the Arab world’s present regimes. Whether the new US administration will be as gullible as other Westerners in trusting Qatar remains to be seen.

Why does Qatar, the largest funder and sponsor of Hamas, have such a strong desire to restore the Palestinian Authority (PA) to the Gaza Strip? To guarantee Hamas’s continued domination of the Gaza Strip.

Qatar has no problem with the PA, which was expelled from the Gaza Strip by Hamas in 2007, taking up its duties there again as long as Hamas is permitted to maintain its grasp on power and preserve its security and military forces and capabilities.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/01/27/the-debasement-of-the-holocaust/

On 27 January 1945, Soviet forces liberated those then still imprisoned at Auschwitz, the infamous Nazi concentration and death camp. Eighty years on, millions of young people in the West know nothing about Auschwitz or indeed the Holocaust itself. They are ignorant of the gravest crime of the 20th century.

A recent survey has shown that one in nine young Germans has not heard of the Holocaust. A quarter cannot name a single concentration camp, death camp or ghetto. It also showed that ‘nearly half of American adults could not identify any killing sites of the Holocaust’.

A poll carried out by The Economist and YouGov in 2023 made for equally disturbing reading. It showed that more than a fifth of young Americans, aged between 18 and 29, agreed with the statement that ‘the Holocaust is a myth’, while a further 30 per cent neither agreed nor disagreed. That means that less than half of young Americans firmly believe the Holocaust actually happened.

This growing historical amnesia is worrying enough. But of even greater concern is the way in which the meaning of the Holocaust has been distorted and inverted by our cultural and political elites, and weaponised by anti-Israel zealots.

Indeed, Auschwitz itself – a death camp designed for the genocide of the Jews – is fast being turned into something else: an all-purpose symbol of human cruelty. It is becoming Disneyfied, transformed into a gruesome theme park for those looking for an easy moral message.

Take UNESCO, arguably the most powerful international cultural institution in the world. In its official assessment of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, a World Heritage site, it talks of its ‘outstanding universal value’. It claims that the camp serves as a symbol of ‘humanity’s cruelty to its fellow human beings in the 20th century’.

To treat Auschwitz as a generic symbol of cruelty, as UNESCO has done, renders it totally banal. There are countless examples of humanity’s terrible cruelty throughout history, but there is only one Holocaust. Its unique historical significance derives from the fact it was an industrialised extermination campaign singularly directed at Jewish people. And it’s that meaning we are now in danger of losing altogether.

https://jihadwatch.org/2025/01/islamic-republic-of-iran-two-girls-arrested-for-dancing-could-face-years-in-prison-or-death-penalty?utm_source=rss&utm_

The Ayatollah Khomeini said it: “Allah did not create man so that he could have fun. The aim of creation was for mankind to be put to the test through hardship and prayer. An Islamic regime must be serious in every field. There are no jokes in Islam. There is no humor in Islam. There is no fun in Islam. There can be no fun and joy in whatever is serious.”

“Teenage girls arrested by Tehran over viral video of them dancing on Iranian war memorial could now face ‘years in prison or the death penalty,’” by Tom Midlane, Daily Mail, January 25, 2025:

Two young women were detained by police in Iran for posting a video of themselves dancing.

The viral Instagram post features the two girls, who appear to be teenagers, purportedly dancing at the Monument to the Unknown Martyrs of the Sacred Defence war memorial in Tehran.

The monument was built by Italian architect Marcello D’Olivo and honours those killed in the Iran-Iraq War that raged between 1980 and 1982.

Both of the women are wearing jeans, with one wearing a knitted jumper and the other a blue top covered by a cardigan.

Iranian authorities have said the girls’ outfits were ‘inappropriate’ and both girls have had their Instagram accounts blocked, according to Iran International.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-change-at-the-top-of-the-international-criminal-court/

Nawaf Salam, who had been the president of the International Court of Justice, has just accepted the post of Prime Minister of Lebanon. When Salam headed the ICJ, the Court agreed to consider South Africa’s charge that Israel was committing “genocide” in Gaza. But one judge — Julia Sebutinde of Uganda, who has been Vice President of the ICJ since February 2024 — robustly rejected South Africa’s claims. And now that Salam has left his ICJ post, Judge Sebutinde becomes the president of the ICJ for the next three years. That may well result in a more just treatment of Israel by the Court. More on Judge Julia Sebutinde can be found here: “Pro-Israel judge poised to take over ICJ presidency,” Jewish News Syndicate, January 14, 2025:

Judge Julia Sebutinde is set to assume the presidency of the International Court of Justice (ICJ), marking another milestone in her groundbreaking career as well as a significant shift for the court.

The Ugandan jurist, who recently made headlines for her robust defence of Israel against South Africa’s genocide allegations, will take the helm following current President Nawaf Salam’s departure.

Salam has been appointed Prime Minister of his native Lebanon by new president Joseph Aoun, whose election, backed by the US and Saudi Arabia, represents a major blow to Iran and its proxy Hezbollah.