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Czech Voters Oust Communists From Parliament for First Time Since 1948 By Katabella Roberts

https://www.theepochtimes.com/czech-voters-oust-communists-from-parliament-for-first-time-since-1948_4041689.html

On Saturday, Czech voters booted the communists out of parliament for the first time since the end of World War II, voting out a party whose Soviet-backed predecessors ruled the central European nation with an iron fist from 1948 until 1989’s Velvet Revolution that ushered in democracy.

The Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia (KSČM) failed to retain enough seats to enter the Czech parliament for the first time since the formation of the Czech Republic in 1993 after Czechoslovakia was peacefully dissolved into two with the other state becoming Slovakia.

The KSČM took 3.62 percent of the vote, failing to meet the five percent mark needed to retain seats in both the house and the Chamber of Deputies.

Meanwhile, in a stunning upset, the SPOLU alliance, a liberal-conservative three-party coalition, captured 27.8 percent of the vote, beating Prime Minister Andrej Babis’ Action for Dissatisfied Citizens (ANO) 2011 party, which won 27.1 percent.

Another center-left-liberal coalition of the Pirate Party (PIR) and the Mayors and Independents party (STAN) received 15.6 percent of the vote, finishing in third place, as per the statistics office.

Ahead of the election, the SPOLU alliance vowed to form a coalition government with the Pirate/Stan coalition. Over the weekend, the alliance signed a memorandum on their intent to create a majority Czech government with the Pirate/STAN coalition.

The failure to secure enough votes comes amid waning support for the communist party who during their reign, jailed tens of thousands of people in forced labor camps in the 1950s and brutally repressed dissidents, including playwright-turned-president Vaclav Havel.

Pakistan: Lahore School Principal Becomes Latest Victim of Blasphemy Laws, Given Death Sentence And now joins the other 80 on death row. Ashlyn Davis

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/10/pakistan-lahore-school-principal-becomes-latest-ashlyn-davis/

A Muslim school principal in Lahore, Salma Tanveer, has become the latest victim of the dreaded and stringent blasphemy laws of Pakistan, and has been given the death sentence after a long trial, reports the Pakistani daily Dawn.

Salma is not only the principal, but also the owner of a private school in Lahore. She was booked under the Pakistan Penal Code’s Section 295C in September 2013, on a complaint by Qari Iftikhar Raza, a local prayer leader, also referred to as a Khateeb. Raza, in his complaint, alleged that Tanveer had published and distributed pamphlets of her writings in the Lahore area of her residence. In the pamphlets, Salma had allegedly “denied khatam-e-nubuwat” (the finality of Muhammad’s prophethood), had used disparaging remarks, and also “claimed her own nubuwat,” that is, claimed that she herself was a prophet.

Reportedly, the woman’s counsel, Mian Muhammad Ramzan, had emphasized that the magistrate concerned had ordered an examination of the accused: the main argument presented by Tanveer’s advocate was that she was of unsound mental state at the time of the incident, and pleaded with the court not to prosecute her. The defense further argued that the comparison of content from the photocopies of her pamphlets was impossible, alluding to possible alterations in the content of the alleged documents.

The state prosecutors, Sadia Arif and Advocate Ghulam Mustafa Chaudhry, however, held that Salma’s defense had been unsuccessful in establishing his client’s inability to understand the nature of her actions at the time she wrote, printed and handed out the “blasphemous” material, and claimed before the court that the accusations against Salma has been corroborated with oral and documentary evidence.

The judge observed that a report provided by the Punjab Institute of Mental Health had confirmed that the accused was fit to stand trial. After considering the statements made by the witnesses, the judge sentenced Tanveer to the death penalty, along with a fine of 50,000 Pakistani rupees ($292 US).

Red China Tried To Go Green, Now It’s Going Dark China went from dominating green energy to begging Americans for coal. Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/10/red-china-tried-go-green-now-its-going-dark-daniel-greenfield/

Last year, President Xi Jinping announced that Communist China was going to go carbon neutral by 2060. Like every Communist 5-year-plan, it began with lies and ended in disaster.

The 14th Renewable Energy Development Five Year Plan would have China dominate the green energy industry and increase its share of non-fossil fuel energy from 15% to 20%.

That was last year. This year, China is importing American coal to keep the lights on in its cities. 

China’s desperate buying spree has sent the price of lignite coal, the dirtiest coal, up from $20 to $120. While Democrats are trying to destroy coal in America, our shipments of coal have increased 30 times making China our second biggest coal market.

And we have the “green energy” of the reds to thank for it.

Red China made no grand commitments to green energy, but even its 5% shift may have proven disastrous. So-called renewables are dangerously unreliable because they shift with the natural cycles of wind, sunshine, and tide. The same phenomenon leading to power outages in California has brought China, which has a much bigger population and industry, to its knees.

Going green in China is less likely to mean wind and solar than hydroelectric. That’s a wise decision because hydroelectric power is more reliable and efficient than wind and solar, but as a water empire, the Communist regime should have reckoned with China’s history of droughts. 

China’s green strategy depended on hydropower and the droughts have left it powerless. And its hydropower is anything but environmentally friendly. Mao used dams to revive the water empire strategy of the ancient emperors allowing the Communist regime to starve entire regions of the country and to undermine neighbors like India. The massive number of dams in China, a totalitarian program to enable mass murder, were environmentally devastating before being revamped as “green energy” hydropower. Green energy, as usual, has its roots in genocide.

The Jihadist Genocide of Christians in Nigeria Intensifies by Raymond Ibrahim

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17832/jihad-genocide-christians-nigeria

What several international observers have for years characterized as a “pure genocide” of Christians in Nigeria has reached new levels.

“We have never seen an evil government in this country like the one of today. The government is fully in support of the bloodshed in Nigeria. We are being killed just because we are not Muslims. These evil Fulani jihadists are enjoying the backing of the government to go about killing people, destroying their houses and farmlands, yet when we try to defend ourselves, the government will go about arresting our people. What kind of justice is this?” — Rev. Jacob Kwashi, Anglican bishop, during a funeral for 17 murdered Christians, Morning Star News, August 30, 2021.

“[T]here is an ongoing genocide in Southern Kaduna targeted at the indigenous Christians population…. Not a single church or school is left standing. Not a single herdsman has been apprehended all these years. It is unfortunate that… the western media do not believe that our lives are worth any news.” — Jonathan Asake, a former member of Nigeria’s House of Representatives, The Epoch Times, August 4, 2021.

“Since the government and its apologists are claiming the killings have no religious undertones, why are the terrorists and herdsmen targeting the predominantly Christian communities and Christian leaders?” — The Christian Association of Nigeria, International Centre for Investigative Reporting, January 21, 2020.

“It’s tough to tell Nigerian Christians this isn’t a religious conflict since what they see are Fulani fighters clad entirely in black, chanting ‘Allahu Akbar!’ and screaming ‘Death to Christians.'” — Sister Monica Chikwe, Crux, August 4, 2019.

What several international observers have for years characterized as a “pure genocide” of Christians in Nigeria has reached new levels.

Since the Islamic insurgency began in earnest in July 2009 — first at the hands of Boko Haram, an Islamic terrorist organization, and later by the Fulani, who are Muslim herdsmen also radicalized and motivated by jihadist ideology — more than 60,000 Christians have either been murdered or abducted during raids. The abducted Christians have never returned to their homes and their loved ones believe them to be dead. In addition, in the same time frame, approximately 20,000 churches and Christian schools have been torched and destroyed.

Iran Regime’s Hostage Taking: Where Are the West and the UN? by Majid Rafizadeh

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17842/iran-western-hostages

In the hope of resurrecting the disastrous Iran nuclear deal and subsequently lifting sanctions on the ruling mullahs of Iran, the Biden administration and the European Union have been silent on the fates of foreign hostages kept in Iran’s notorious prisons.

Among the current foreign citizens currently held hostage in Iran is Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a British mother…. Amid the ongoing nuclear talks between the Iranian regime and world powers, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps court sentenced her to yet another year in prison in April 2021.

American citizens held as prisoners in Iran include Iranian-Americans Baquer and Siamak Namazi, Morad Tahbaz, and businessman and conservationist Emad Shargi. Shargi’s family has pleaded with the Biden administration to help free him.

Instead of appeasing the Iranian regime and turning a blind eye to its human rights violations, the West needs to hold the ruling mullahs of Iran accountable for detaining foreign nationals as hostages, bargaining chips and as pawns with which to extract political and economic concessions.

In the hope of resurrecting the disastrous Iran nuclear deal (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) and subsequently lifting sanctions on the ruling mullahs of Iran, the Biden administration and the European Union have been silent on the fates of foreign hostages kept in Iran’s notorious prisons.

Some of the foreign hostages in Iran come from Western countries, including the United States, France, Canada, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Australia.

Our greenwashed cognitive emergency Boris Johnson’s clowning scarcely competes with the farcical imbecilities of his net-zero agenda Melanie Phillips

https://melaniephillips.substack.com/p/our-greenwashed-cognitive-emergency?token=

At the very moment that Britain’s prime minister was indulging himself with his callow vaudeville act at the Conservative party conference, gas prices were going through the roof.

The immediate cause was the blackmail tactics being deployed by the Russian president Vladimir Putin, with state-owned Gazprom supplying the bare contractual minimum of gas supplies to Europe to force it to approve the Nordstream 2 pipeline from Germany. 

But as I wrote here and here, the obsession with “climate change” by Britain and the EU has destroyed the crucial resilience of their energy supplies to any such all-too predictable unforeseen shocks.

In Boris Johnson’s conference speech, one of the few allegedly serious passages was his commitment to the net-zero carbon agenda in which he waxed lyrical about the “aquatic forest of white turbines towering over the water” in the Moray Firth.  “Allegedly,” because this obsession with “doing something to save the planet” is no less clown-like than his stream of gags. 

For renewables, in which so much greenwashed investment is being sunk, are the weak link in the energy chain. Renewable energy currently accounts for around 40 per cent of Britain’s electricity generation — a fourfold increase over the last decade. But when the wind drops, as it did over the past few months, the amount of power that the “aquatic forests” of turbines generate drops too. 

This is hardly rocket science. Indeed, you’d have to be an imbecile not to grasp this. And yet all kinds of folks with important jobs — including in the energy sector — seem to be wholly impervious to this somewhat elementary process of cause and effect.

A.R.T. for All & Sundry: Sterile Social Progress and Sexless Equality Nidra Poller

https://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm?frm=190868&sec_id=190868

[This article is translated from the original French by the author. The article is a response to the debate in France on legislation that will extend access to PMA, Procréation Médicalement Assistée (or ART, Assisted Reproduction Technology) to lesbian couples and single women in France.]

Isn’t it heartless to block the flow of such tender desires? Where is the “why” strong enough to answer the “why not?”

        Society is about to assume divine powers to compensate for the stinginess of a God who’s lost His glory. Enthusiasts only count the positive side of the calculation: the 1 + 1 = 2 love of the same-sex couple + their love for the wanted child cancels the minus-one of the father. And the absent mother of the child born by gestation pour autrui, known as GPA (inevitable authorization of surrogate motherhood) will be compensated by the sweet tale of the sperm-donator and the womb-lender, venerated like the mythical genitors of an ancient people.

        How should we calculate the deliberate deprivation for the child born of these equations, of splendid male/female dynamics? Militants of the cause write it off as a sustainable loss. The father or mother of a “conventional” couple can disappear by accident or by choice, n’est-ce pas? So, it’s doable. No room for old-fashioned sexual differentiation hang-ups. Move over, buddy!

        Transgenderism helps erase the father + mother = child formula by positing a range of possibilities that denies the essential difference between a man and a woman. An ill-defined aberration—dysphoria—becomes a sort of state of mind that will be soothed by “medical treatment” (that has nothing to do with healthcare), boosted by a proselyte ideology that seeps into society as a whole.

        In one of the more grotesque variations on the theme, we have the “man” that claims to be the father and/ or mother of the child carried in the uterus she kept, at least temporarily, during the male-to-female transition.

Islamic/Arab terrorists bite the hands that feed them Ambassador (Ret.) Yoram Ettinger

https://theettingerreport.com/islamic-arab-terrorists-bite-the-hands-that-feed-them/

The extension of US gestures and concessions to Islamic terrorists, and the waiving of a US military option while negotiating with Iran’s regime of terror, are perceived as weakness by terrorists, adversaries and allies of the US. 

Such a policy ignores, or takes lightly, the objective and well-documented 1,400 year old past track record of Islamic terrorism, while emphasizing the subjective and speculative future track record of terrorists.

Such a policy erodes the US posture of deterrence, which is a prerequisite to the minimization of global turbulence, undermining US interests in the international arena, while bringing the threat of Islamic terrorism closer to the US mainland.

Such a policy is based on the assumption that Islamic terrorism is driven by despair, and the need to dwell on the despair (diplomatically and economically) rather than dealing with terrorism (militarily). However, Islamic terrorism has been driven – since the 7th century – by the imperialistic religious vision to establish a universal Islamic society, dominating the world and subordinating the “infidel” to Islam, peacefully or militarily.

Such a policy is based on the assumption that Islamic terrorism is driven by US policy. However, Islamic terrorism has haunted the US since the late 18th century, during Democratic and Republican Administrations (e.g., the Obama and Trump Administrations).
For example:

*During the 1980s, it was US diplomatic, financial and military assistance which enabled the Mujahideen to drive the USSR out of Afghanistan. But, Mujahideen-related Islamic terrorists reacted in an anti-US terrorist offensive, which has persisted since 1996, culminating on September 11, 2001.

Turkey’s Airstrikes in Syria, Iraq by Uzay Bulut

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17839/turkey-airstrikes-syria-iraq

Turkey appears to be maneuvering to expand an Islamic state in Syria and Iraq.

The same Turkish government that claims to counter “terrorism” through its fight against the Kurdish PKK has supported ISIS in the region for years.

“The ability of ISIS to become a functioning state so quickly is largely due to its relationship with President Erdoğan in Turkey.” — Dr. Mordechai Kedar, BESA Center, October 11, 2020.

The Turkish government — a member of NATO — clearly seems to feel itself on a jihadist roll.

Since the Taliban’s violent takeover of Afghanistan on August 15, Turkey has increased its expansionist military activities in the Middle East in a way that is significantly impacting the lives of minorities.

Turkey appears to be maneuvering to expand an Islamic state in Syria and Iraq.

Turkey has so far been using its fight against the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party) as an excuse to justify its military aggression, destruction and casualties of persecuted minorities. Among those communities affected by Turkish military actions in Iraq and Syria are Yazidis, Assyrians and Kurds — communities previously targeted by ISIS and al-Qaeda.

On August 17, in Iraq, the Turkish military carried out an airstrike on a hospital in Sinjar Province, where the Yazidi minority had already been victim of a genocide in 2014 at the hands of ISIS.

The raid, consisting of three drone strikes, “totally destroyed” the makeshift hospital in the village of Sekaina. A doctor in Sinjar said that at least three people had been killed and five others wounded. A senior Iraqi army officer told AFP that the raid had been carried out by Turkey’s military. Another Turkish air strike on August 16 targeted and killed a senior Yazidi leader, Hassan Saeed.

Assyrian Christians, another persecuted indigenous minority in Iraq, are also suffering from Turkish airstrikes. In a 2021 report , “Caught in the Crossfire: Assyrians and the Turkey-PKK Conflict in Iraq,” by the Assyrian Policy Institute, reported:

“Turkish strikes in northern Iraq have caused irreparable and costly damage to civilian properties and agricultural lands… The destruction to private property and farmland caused by Turkish airstrikes effectively robs Assyrian farmers of their livelihoods and immediately threatens their ability to stay in their homes and villages.”

Multicultural barbarians are emptying France of its Jews Giolio Meotti

https://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/314463

“Intellectual life is undermined by the alliance of two messianisms, Islamism and a left whose main activity is to track down ill-thinkers. An intellectual life where it is no longer a question of deciding between error and truth, but between good and evil ”.

Thus, in Le Figaro, the great French historian Georges Bensoussan defines the “hold” of Islamism on public opinion. His “fault” four years ago was declaring on the radio that Muslim immigrants absorb anti-Semitism from an early age like mother’s milk. Since then, for the editorial director of the Memorial of the Shoah in Paris the caudine gallows of trials and ad personam attacks have opened.

Bensoussan provides other impressive numbers: “More than 500 districts in France are declared ‘sensitive’. To put it bluntly, we are talking about several million people who are subject to Islamist law.
Bensoussan tells Le Figaro what is happening to the Jews of France: “For safety reasons, Jewish children have massively abandoned public education. In the neighborhoods there is a climate that recalls the worst memories of the Jewish Maghreb. It is a French defeat and not a Jewish defeat, because the whole of French society is threatened by what threatens Jews today. For the descendants of Jews who have left the Arab world, the anti-Semitism of the ‘neighborhoods’ is once again a nightmare. It is a trauma to be overwhelmed by a climate of persecution that was thought behind and that condemns them to undergo a new exodus, abroad or in France itself: thus, the Seine-Saint-Denis has lost 80% of its Jewish population in twenty years “.