RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20835/iran-desperately-seeking-gorbachev

Gorbachev had a thin resume as an apparatchik who had risen in the party by doing nothing, in fact, by being nobody.

When he came to London to be promoted by Margaret Thatcher, his 10-line resume introduced him as the Central Committee’s agricultural tsar who had risen to be party boss and later president of the USSR.

He was a blank face on which one could draw one’s ideal face for a Soviet leader.

Iran’s President Pezeshkian offers that kind of blank face. His thin resume inspires a variety of fanciful images.

Could Pezeshkian be Iran’s Gorbachev?

Referring to President Masoud Pezeshkian, the question was headlined in a Tehran daily Tuesday and triggered a torrent of comments.

The paper’s commentator described Pezeshkian as a man trusted by the system and thus capable of introducing unspecified reforms to save Iran from unspecified dangers.

This is not the first time that regime insiders call for adjustments in its trajectory.

The first to do so was Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic, who issued an 8-point reform manifesto which, had it been implemented, would have made Iran a Scandinavian-style democracy minus the monarchy.

Needless to say, that didn’t happen.

Instead, the nation witnessed mass executions, the pursuit of an unwinnable war against Iraq and flood-like spread of corruption.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20822/eu-von-der-leyen-program

[T]his reduction [of greenhouse gas emissions] structures and determines the whole of the Commission’s program, because all human activity — industrial, commercial and private — emits greenhouse gases. In fact, in a program document published by the Commission in February 2024, already under the aegis of von der Leyen, are plans to invest 1.5 trillion euros per year in decarbonizing the European Union, and to this end take authoritarian measures in all areas of human activity. The amount is equivalent to 10% of Europe’s GDP — every year. Apparently this policy is the uncompromising model found in every party in Germany, but apart from a war effort, there is no objective of any kind that has ever required the diversion of 10% of a continent’s GDP by political decree.

European funds, which are distributed to EU member states in various ways, will henceforth be “conditional on respect for the rule of law”… In other words, any deviation from the EU’s ideological line, in any area, will be subject to financial sanctions – as is already happening with Hungary. This new direction for the EU will lead to the ideology of Western Europe being imposed on Eastern Europe: “open borders”, environmentalism, the fight against “hate” — but only “hate” from the right of the political spectrum.

In particular, the aim is apparently to penalize social media networks that refuse to censor their users or, more precisely, that refuse to penalize their users in the way the EU wants… either X submits to the EU’s ideology and censorship, or X will have a part of its global revenue confiscated.

Again and again, the suggestion is set forth to build a European army, essentially supported by states such as Germany and Belgium, which… would already be incapable of defending their own borders without American assistance.

[I]n accordance with the ECHR’s case law, any illegal immigrants intercepted in the Mediterranean, even within sight of the African coast, must be brought to the European Union to exercise their “rights.” A tenfold increase in the number of border guards would do nothing to change the law in force; as long as the law is not reformed, unlimited and unvetted migration in Europe will continue.

[A] whole series of new regulations with global ambitions are announced, confirming the EU’s claim to legislate not just for Europe, but for the world. For instance, a “European Oceans Pact” — note the “s” in Oceans – is declared: evidently the EU claims to regulate all the world’s oceans, whereas it only dips its toes in one.

Of these groups, the center-right is by far the largest…. [But] It is the demands of the smallest group — environmentalists — that dominate….

By refusing on principle ever to govern with real right-wing parties, the center-right guarantees that the left remains forever in power.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20827/iran-nuclear-weapon-horror

Iran has hardly been shy about articulating its genocidal objectives against Israel. Iran’s newly elected President Masoud Pezeshkian, in early July, reaffirmed “Tehran’s dedication to destroying Israel.” This aim, he added, is “rooted in the fundamental policies of the Islamic Republic.”

The question, therefore, is what exactly is to be done to prevent a nuclear catastrophe initiated by Iran, one that could arrive at any moment?

“In the Middle East, Iran is virtually behind all the terrorism…. When he founded the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Khomeini pledged, ‘We will export our revolution to the entire world. We will export the Islamic revolution to the entire world’… which country ultimately stands in the way of Iran’s maniacal plans to impose radical Islam on the world?… It’s America, the guardian of Western civilization and the world’s greatest power. That’s why Iran sees America as its greatest enemy… Last month…. the foreign minister of Iran’s proxy, Hezbollah… said this: ‘This is not a war with Israel. Israel… is merely a tool. The main war, the real war, is with America.'” — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, speaking before a joint session of the US Congress, July 25 2o24.

“Is this war now with Israel?… My answer is that this is not a war with Israel. Israel is merely a tool. The main war, the real war, is with America.” — Khalil Rizk, Hezbollah’s head of foreign relations on Al-Manar TV, June 17, 2024.

“The greatest tragedy of the Jewish people,” Nobel Peace Prize laureate Eli Wiesel stated, “is that they listen to the promises of their friends and not the threats of their enemies.”

The leaders of Israel should take seriously the threats of their enemies and act to protect both Israel and the Free World from potential imminent disaster.

The primary obligation of any national leader, including Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, is to protect the integrity of the country’s borders and to ensure the safety of every citizen. Netanyahu’s legal, political, and moral duty is to ensure that every citizen can live in peace, and be free, prosperous, and independent.

https://melaniephillips.substack.com/p/murder-machetes-and-mobs-in-britain?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=77655&post_

Hardly had we managed to digest the horrific news of the massacre of small children at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class yesterday in a northern English town than we were looking on appalled at what followed.

At a school in Southport, three little girls aged six, seven and nine were murdered by a random attacker wielding a knife. Five of the eight other children who suffered stab wounds as well as two adults were left in a critical or serious condition.

The suspect who was captured was the Cardiff-born, 17 year-old son of Rwandan immigrants. At time of writing we know no more hard facts about him than that. 

But throughout yesterday X/Twitter and other social media were heaving with claims that the attacker had an Arab name, that he was a Syrian Muslim asylum-seeker and that he was on an MI6 watch list. 

None of these claims was remotely verifiable at the time, and today we have learned they were all untrue. There are reports that some of these claims originated from Russian bots or AI. Yet they were recycled all day yesterday by commentators and known influencers, demonstrably inflaming already heightened fury online.

The police made a point of announcing during the day that the attacker had been born in Cardiff. If this was an attempt to calm passions by showing that he wasn’t a Syrian asylum-seeker, it failed. The police announcement was treated with scorn. 

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-812412

Australia, an entire country founded on settler violence, is imposing sanctions on a handful of Israelis whom it accuses of “settler violence.” Talk about hypocrisy!

The Australian government has announced that it is penalizing seven Israeli “settlers” and a youth group that it suspects of clashing with Palestinian Arab rock-throwers.

Folks who live in the “land down under’ know something about “settler violence.” The first foreigner to “discover” Australia was a violent settler named Cap. James Cook. Kids around the world today are taught that he was a famous explorer. And that he was. But the indigenous peoples of the South Pacific remember him a little differently.

In 1770, Cook and his settler gang landed in New Zealand, where they murdered at least eight members of the indigenous Maori tribe. Then they headed west to Australia, landing there on April 29 and shooting a member of the Dharawal/Eora nation who opposed them. It would not be the last act of violence by the Cook settlers.

Eight years later, violent British settlers established a penal colony in Australia. European criminals were not the only dangerous import. The settlers also introduced tuberculosis, smallpox, and measles.

Australia is almost three million square miles in size. That’s 350 times the size of Israel. You’d think the violent British settlers who took over Australia could have left at least part of the country to the indigenous tribes, known as the Aboriginals. But no, the settlers had to have the entire thing. So they expanded, and they expelled, and they murdered. Within a century, the Aboriginals, who had numbered 750,000, were down to less than 100,000.

What was it like for victims of British settler violence in Australia? Hannah McGlade, a member of one of the Aboriginal tribes, the Kurin Minang Noongar, spoke about it at a United Nations forum last year.

https://dianebederman.com/oh-canaduh-the-corruption/

Most of us are aware of the corruption in government, from the top down, but how many are aware of the corruption from the bottom up? We, the tax-paying citizens, are being squeezed – or is it screwed – in the middle.

First, I am sharing my experience with local government in Caledon, Ontario. A little bit country, a little bit city. Then I will move on to federal politics.

I had a problem regarding construction on my street. I turned to my elected representative and the Mayor. After 6 months of bafflegab and obfuscation, I realized that the only group who could help me was the Town Council! Great. So, I contacted the Mayor and asked to speak to Town Council. She said “no.” My elected representative also said “no.” Hmmmm.

So I contacted David Boghosian, the Integrity Commissioner, and much to my surprise, he told me that there is nothing in the Town Council Code of Conduct that makes the elected officials accountable to the electorate – the taxpayers!

According to, Mr. Boghosian, the Integrity Commissioner, there is no provision for the manner in which Council members are to deal with the public based on the Code of Conduct. In his words:

“the Code does not empower me to investigate individual dealings between Members of Council and members of the public that do not otherwise constitute a violation of some other provision of the Code.”

Now that was a shock, as silly me; I assumed the people one elects are accountable to the people who elect them!

https://www.frontpagemag.com/paris-olympics-worst-opening-ceremony-ever/

The opening ceremonies of Olympic games have always followed the same pattern. A parade of national teams enters the stadium, led by Greece, and followed by the other countries in alphabetical order, with the host nation coming last. When that’s done, the stadium turns into a stage for an splendiferous show of some kind, an extravaganza marked by lights, dance, fireworks, that is meant to reflect the very best of the host country, its culture and history. Over the years these displays have grown more and more ambitious.

Thomas Jolly, the man who put together last Friday’s opening ceremony for the Paris Olympics, decided to take another route. First of all, the parade of athletes took place not in a stadium but along the Seine, where the nations’ representatives rode in on yachts, barges, and other vessels. As usual, the parade was led by the Greek team. It was followed by something called the “Refugee Olympic Team.” After that, the teams appeared in French alphabetical order, although the signs identifying them were in English, which made for some confusion, if you cared to give the matter any thought.

Indeed, the mixture of those two particular languages brought to mind the annual Eurovision song contest, and unfortunately this event, like that one, was not lacking in terrible music. Instead of holding off the entertainment, to use the word loosely, until after the parade, Jolly mixed it all together, cutting away from the parade repeatedly to focus on a wide range of performances, most but not all of them taking place along the riverbank. Almost every bit of it was absolutely horrible. Lady Gaga did an extraordinarily annoying (and endless) song and dance number (in French) while being circled energetically but with very little in the way of artistry by a couple of dozen guys in black body tights. (It brought to mind Danny Kaye’s “Choreography” number in the movie White Christmas, a wicked parody of some of the more pretentious varieties of modern dance.)

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20819/trump-china-tariffs

This is a contest that the United States cannot lose. In short, trade-surplus countries, such as China, cannot prevail over trade-deficit ones, such as America. Last year, America’s merchandise trade deficit with China was $279.4 billion.

That is why, ultimately, China will have to pay the cost of tariffs that Trump — or any other American leader — may impose. Clearly, China’s regime knows this. People’s Daily, the Communist Party’s self-described mouthpiece and therefore the most authoritative publication in China, this month is arguing that America should not raise tariffs.

China steals each year somewhere in the neighborhood of a half trillion dollars of American intellectual property. Critics of tariffs, whether they make valid points or not about increased costs, have an obligation to say how they would eliminate or reduce this criminal practice through other means.

Why should Americans want to decimate the Chinese factory sector? The Communist Party of China sees the U.S. as an enemy and seeks the destruction of the American republic. The struggle, in short, is existential. China’s regime cannot wage the fight against America without American money.

So why should Americans supply the cash to their enemy?

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/society/2024/07/spectre-of-the-fall-is-the-west-doomed/

Conclusion As this brief survey indicates, there is a considerable body of scholarship and commentary illuminating the dire future into which Western societies are allowing themselves to descend. Tragically, there seems to be little political will or capacity to confront this challenge, in itself a marker of the extent of the decline, but at the same time there are several political events approaching that may give rise to hope. Time will tell, but time is running out.

A spectre haunts Western Civilization – the spectre of its decline and fall. And invariably, it seems, this spectre is envisaged in terms of Rome, as Bryan Ward-Perkins confirms in The Fall of Rome & the End of Civilization (2006): “Deep within the Western psyche lies an anxiety that, if ancient Rome could fall, then so too can the even the proudest of modern civilizations”. Indeed, unfolding events “make it possible to use Roman history to show the West is experiencing only the beginnings of what will be an unfolding and, potentially, even an existential crisis, and secondly, that this crisis is revolving around the same key components that undermined its ancient Roman counterpart.” (Peter Heather & John Rapley, Why Empires Fall: Rome, America & the Future of the West,  2023)

Death Spiral The West may already have entered a ‘death spiral’ comparable to that which doomed the Roman Empire 1500 years ago, as Adam Creighton points out in a recent article, ‘Joe Biden’s decline is a perfect mirror of West’s slow decay’. He quotes prominent Stanford academic John Ionnidis, who defines such a precipitant societal collapse as a “vicious cycle of self-reinforcing dysfunctional behaviour characterised by continuous flawed decision making, myopic single-minded focus on one set of solutions, denial, distrust, micromanagement, dogmatic thinking and learned helplessness.”

Contrived Panics Climate change hysteria and the Covid-19 over-reaction may be cited as two example of this phenomenon. In particular,

Nothing confirms the collapse in governing wisdom so much as the destructive response to COVID-19, when across a few years almost all advanced governments crushed their citizens living standards, rights, and educational outcomes over a new virus whose fatality rate was known among experts from early 2020 to be less than 0.05%.

One result of this carefully contrived panic was that several gigantic pharmaceutical corporations made absolutely immense profits supplying vaccines that may have been either unnecessary or harmful, or both, but which were compulsory. Meanwhile they fund the regulators that were to meant to oversee their activities and ensure public health. It’s very notable that no comprehensive, properly empowered inquiry– e.g., a Royal Commission — into the Covid-19 disaster has been undertaken.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20817/persecution-of-christians-june

One elderly and ailing Orthodox priest, Fr. Nikolai Kotelnikov, had his throat slit by the Muslims yelling “Allahu akbar” [“Allah is the greatest”]. – asianews.it, June 24, 2024, Russia.

ISIS militants, using machetes and rifles, slaughtered more than 80 Christians….ISIS emphasized the religious identity of its victims in a post, saying that “Caliphate soldiers” killed “Christians.” According to one report, many of the slain were “very young” and were targeted for “refusing to convert into Islam”…. some bodies were found “tied up” and “decapitated.” – premierchristian.news, June 18, 2024, Democratic Republic of Congo.

In Lahore Pakistan, authorities arrested Jameela Khatoon, a 62-year-old mentally ill Christian woman, after a Muslim shopkeeper, Muhammad Asif, complained that she had committed blasphemy against his namesake, the prophet of Islam. Jameela is being charged under Section 295-C of Pakistan’s Penal Code, which carries a mandatory death sentence for those who insult Muhammad. Earlier that day, after Jameela had entered Asif’s shop, they argued about shampoo. – britishasianchristians.org, June 7, 2024, Pakistan.

[A]n “anti-terrorism” court, despite lack of evidence, handed out another death sentence to Ehsan Masih, a 27-year-old Christian man, for allegedly sharing a “blasphemous” video against Muhammad on a social media platform. – morningstarnews.org, June 7, 2024, Pakistan.

[A]n impoverished Christian rickshaw driver, [Dennis Albert], is facing a long prison sentence, possibly for life, for stepping out of his carriage onto some papers alleged to have been pages of the Koran. – morningstarnews.org, June 18, 2024, Pakistan.

“Dennis has studied till 10th grade, but he had no clue that the pages he was standing on had religious value. He’s a simple rickshaw driver earning an honorable livelihood for himself. He did not have any intention of hurting religious sentiments of any person or community… He’s losing hope for his freedom. He’s being kept in a special barrack reserved for blasphemy accused…” – Imran Albert, the rickshaw driver’s brother, morningstarnews.org, June 18, 2024, Pakistan.

“Typically kidnapped girls in Pakistan, some as young as 10, are abducted, forced to convert to Islam and raped under cover of such Islamic ‘marriages’ and are then pressured to record false statements in favor of the kidnappers, rights advocates say. Judges routinely ignore documentary evidence related to the children’s ages, handing them back to kidnappers as their ‘legal’ wives.” — morningstarnews.org, July 9, 2024, Pakistan.

[A] Muslim factory owner tortured his Christian employee to death — Waqas Salamat, age 18 — for refusing to continue working for him…. Muhammad instantly sent some factory workers to collect him; they bound his hands and feet and carried him to Muhammad’s factory. There, Muhammad, his son, and several Muslim employees began torturing Waqas for hours—beating him with pipes and administering electric shocks to him—until he died. He was the main breadwinner for his impoverished family. According to his mother, Rubina.

“Our financial condition is such that we didn’t even have enough money to arrange for his burial… Waqas was my beloved son and my biggest support. He would often tell me that he’ll work very hard to make life easier for us….” — morningstarnews.org, June 11, 2024, Pakistan.