RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.aol.com/news/japan-ex-leader-abe-reportedly-031004756-043411862.html

TOKYO (AP) — Former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, an arch-conservative and one of the country’s most divisive figures, was shot and critically wounded during a campaign speech Friday in western Japan. He was airlifted to a hospital but officials said he was not breathing and his heart had stopped.

Police arrested the suspected gunman at the scene of the shocking attack in a country that’s one of the world’s safest and has some of the strictest gun control laws anywhere.

Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said Abe was in “severe condition” and he hoped Abe will survive. He called the attack “dastardly and barbaric” and added that the crime occurring during the election campaign, which is the foundation of democracy, was absolutely unforgivable.

Kishida and his Cabinet ministers hastily returned to Tokyo from other campaign events around the country after the shooting. “I’m praying for former prime minister Abe’s survival from the bottom of my heart,” Kishida said at the prime minister’s office after he arrived on a defense helicopter from Yamagata.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18667/nato-family-blackmail

“I don’t know what Turkey’s trying to extract from them, but at the end of the day that’s what this is about. And maybe if we get in the game, they’ll want to extract from us too, which I will be vehemently opposed to. We don’t need for any extraction to take place or any concessions to take place to have two great democracies join NATO.” — US Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Menendez (D-NJ), June 22, 2022.

Talking to Erdoğan in the language he understands best, in early June, the U.S. State Department and the European Commission expressed their support to Greece and its sovereignty over its islands of the eastern Aegean Sea, and called on Turkey to stop airspace violations and overflights, threats and provocative rhetoric.

That means, in Erdoğan’s language, further economic sanctions on Turkey. And further sanctions will mean Erdoğan’s chances for re-election will get even slimmer amid a punishing economic crisis.

Erdoğan controls 90% of the media in Turkey. That is a big asset in politics.

So, the whole choreography, from the beginning, was aimed at a domestic audience who would feel triumphant from Erdoğan’s victory over the infidels.

The “Nordics in NATO” issue is not entirely over. Full accession will require approval from all 30 NATO parliaments. This, and other future issues, will always give Erdoğan new leverage to blackmail the West’s strongest institution.

It was another happy time in Madrid, of half-baked, Kodak-moment pleasantries when the leaders of 30 NATO member states posed for the cameras with broad family smiles. They were on display for Turkey’s Islamist president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, for having removed his veto against the accession of Sweden and Finland to NATO. How did that happen? The stick.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/07/iran-regime-fires-irgc-intel-chief-arrests-senior-vijeta-uniyal/

Amid failed Iranian terrorist plots abroad and the assassination of several operatives linked to its nuclear weapons program, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the regime’s military and foreign terrorist arm, appears to be in total disarray.

News reports say that the Iranian regime fired the IRGC’s intelligence chief and arrested a senior IRGC commander on a charge of spying for Israel.

Hossein Taeb, who reportedly masterminded the recently foiled terror plot to kill Israeli nationals in Turkey, has been fired from the post of IRGC’s intelligence chief.

The Times of Israel noted, “Taeb was identified by Hebrew media last week as the Iranian official behind planned attacks on Israelis in Turkey.”

“The reports, citing Israeli security officials, said that Taeb was under intense pressure to carry out an attack, amid growing frustration in Iran over repeated Israeli successes in penetrating Iran’s most secret organizations,” the Israeli news website added.

Taeb’s plot was foiled last week after Israeli intelligence warned the Turkish authorities of an impending terror attack that led to the capture of several Iranian and local operatives in Istanbul.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/07/some_wonderful_news_out_ofwait_for_itsaudi_arabia.html

Trump may be gone from office, but the beneficial effects from the Abraham Accords just keep flowing (with a little help from both Obama and Biden).

For a long time, Saudi Arabia was one of the intellectual homes of antisemitic and anti-Israel sentiment. The Wahabi clerics whom the Saudi royal house supported held a special animus for Jews and that animus infused education in Saudi Arabia. Now, though, Saudi Arabia is backing away from this hostility to Israel and its textbooks are reflecting the increasingly friendly relationship between the two nations.

Two things are responsible for the change to that dynamic. The first was that Barack Obama worked hard to set Iran on the road to being a nuclear power, something that terrified Saudi Arabia and pushed it closer to Israel. The second was Trump’s Abraham Accords, which sidelined the troublesome Palestinians and encouraged Muslim nations in the Middle East to make separate peace agreements with Israel for both profit and national security.

While Saudi Arabia never officially entered into an Abraham Accords agreement with Israel, Trump (and, I’ve heard, Jared Kushner, who had a good relationship with Prince Mohammed bin Salman) nevertheless managed to create a behind-the-scenes conduit between Israel and Saudi Arabia. The external pressures bringing these two nations together have become even stronger as Biden picks up where Obama left off in terms of sheltering Iran on its way to becoming fully nuclear.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18652/turkey-erdogan-aegean-trouble

Various opinion polls put [Erdoğan’s] popularity at less than 30%, compared to the 52% with which he won re-election in 2018.

Many Turks, although starving, are nevertheless proud that they have a leader who can confront the “infidel West” — including their traditional rival and neighbor, Greece. It is precisely this feeling that President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, whose popularity has been plummeting in recent months, sees as a national weakness to stoke.

What should Erdoğan do, therefore, as former loyalists of his powerful Justice and Development Party (AKP) seem to be deserting en masse?

Erdoğan has already set the stage for the new episode of his theatrical extravaganza. His coalition partner, ultranationalist leader Devlet Bahçeli, claimed that U.S. military bases in Greece pose a “direct threat” to Turkish security… How could a peaceable NATO ally, Greece, pose a direct threat to another NATO member, Turkey, home to US military bases? Are US bases in Turkey a direct threat to Turkey?

Erdoğan did not mention that the same treaties also ban the militarization of Turkey’s islands in the Aegean Sea and Turkey’s Dardanelles and Bosporus straits.

Fortunately, all these theatrics are about barking, not biting. Turkey does not have the political, military or economic might to invade a member of the EU… Turkey invading Greece is not Russia invading Ukraine. Erdoğan is a gambler who has used the same tactic for domestic consumption many times before. The ruse never ended up in a war across the Aegean. This one is no exception: Erdoğan, whatever he is, is not suicidal.

Turkey is a year away from presidential and parliamentary elections. Many Turks are starving. Literally. Their per capita GDP of around $9,500 has crushed many of them under a triple-digit inflation rate and a fast-depreciating national currency, while independent economists warn that this may be only the beginning of worse torment in a country of 84 million people, excluding 9 million refugees and migrants.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/07/after-oslo-bloodbath-bruce-bawer-0/

On the night of Friday, June 24, a 42-year-old Muslim named Zaniar Matapour shot up the city’s largest gay bar, London Pub, and the tiny watering hole next door, Per På Hjørnet (Per on the Corner). He killed two and wounded twenty-one. But even though Matapour kicked off his evening of mayhem by shouting “Allahu akbar” and was later shown to belong to a radical Islamic clique, don’t think for a moment that his offense had anything to do with Islam. And even though he committed his dastardly deeds on the eve of Oslo’s scheduled Pride parade, a week after his buddy Arfan Bhatti, a convicted terrorist, posted a note on Facebook calling for the murder of gays, don’t dare suggest that the crime might have been rooted in Islam’s deadly view of homosexuality.

After all, as I reported here on June 27, no less eminent a figure than Masud Gharahkhani, the 39-year-old president of the Norwegian parliament who is (after the king) the country’s highest-ranking person – and who, like Matapour, came to Norway as a child refugee from Iran – was quick to deny that this was an Islamic act. “Hate is hate,” Gharahkhani told a reporter for VG, “and has nothing to do with religion or background.” (Why, then, did his parents flee Iran after it became an Islamic theocracy?)

Norway’s leading Muslim organizations agreed with Gharahkhani. The Islamic Council (IRN), which for years refused to take a position on punishing homosexuality with the death penalty,  condemned the atrocity and denied any Islamic connection. Ditto Senaid Kobilica of the Muslim Dialogue Network (MDN). Ditto, too, Fahad Qureshi of IslamNet, who asserted, in total contravention of the Koran, that “Islam does not permit taking the life of an innocent person, no matter gay or straight.”

You had to go into the archives to discover just how hypocritical Qureshi’s statement was. He’s on the record as saying that all Muslims support the death penalty for gays. (For obvious strategic reasons, he’s since announced that gays who abstain from sex need not be executed.)  As for Kobilica and IRN, get a load of what happened in 2009 when Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the world’s leading Islamic scholar, praised the Holocaust. Asked for a comment, IRN’s then Secretary General, Sultan Shoaib, referred reporters to Kobilica, who was then IRN’s head. Kobilica, in turn, passed the buck to the Islamic Association’s Basim Ghozlan, who declined to comment on Qaradawi’s remark because, he said, it was a “political statement.”

So the same Muslim leaders who now pretend to be appalled by two murders chose to stay mum on the Shoah.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18678/iran-ayatollah-model

Iran accounts for 50% of all executions in the world although the country represents only 1.1% of the world population. More than 40% of all political prisoners and prisoners of conscience are in Iran.

According to Transparency International, the Islamic Republic is also in the world’s top league for corruption. According to Tehran’s official reports, between 2016 and 2020, embezzlement and bribery rose by 300%. Only last month, a $400 million embezzlement case was reported among 85 other cases of “big corruption” being investigated.

Official reports show that some 80 unnamed but presumably powerful figures owe untold sums to state-owned banks on the basis of non-existent collateral.

Add to all that the challenges that average Iranians face in social, cultural and political domains, and Alam al-Hoda’s “Islamic model” is unlikely to find a big market across the globe.

While Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping are marketing their authoritarian rules as alternatives to a “moribund” Western democratic system, the Khomeinist mullahs in Tehran are also throwing their hat, sorry turban, into the ring as contenders for leading a New World Order.

https://pjmedia.com/spengler/2022/07/03/auto-draft-4-n1610144

 “Donald Trump is magnificently right about Ukraine.” For all his failings—and I have not hesitated to call attention to them—Trump is a realist who wants a good deal for the United States, and he has contempt for the utopians who will risk the American homeland to propagate their vision of a new world order.”

Germany’s leading center-right newspaper Die Welt posted a banner headline at the top of its page last Friday evening just before Shabbat came in here in New York: “[Ukrainian Ambassador to Germany Andrej] Melnyk’s statement trivializes the Holocaust.” In a radio interview last week, Melnyk compared Ukrainian Nazi leader Stephan Bandera to Robin Hood and vehemently denied—in the face of massive historical documentation—that Bandera had helped to murder 800,000 Ukrainian Jews during World War II.” The Banderites also helped to murder between 40,000 and 100,000 Poles.

Poland’s embassy to Berlin also denounced Melnyk’s statement.

Yet there was barely a peep in the American press—I found a single passing mention in the Washington Post and nothing elsewhere—and not a word from any American Jewish organization.

The incident was a top item in every major German news outlet, but unmentionable in the American media, not to mention polite company. Echo-chamber-driven group-think has achieved a new dimension of control.

Israel’s embassy to Germany had declared: “The statements of the Ukrainian Ambassador are a distortion of the historical facts, a trivialization of the Holocaust and an insult to those who were murdered by Bandera and his people. The statements of the ambassador undermine not only the values that we all treasure, but also undermine the brave fight of the Ukrainian people to live in peace and with democratic values.”