RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2021/09/hungary-through-the-looking-glass/

My guess is that you may be thinking you’ve heard more about Hungary in the last few days than at any time since the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. It’s been the subject of worried liberal editorials, concerned progressive news reports, alarmist Never-Trumper op-eds, and a collective nervous breakdown live on Twitter across America.

Admittedly these things happened in America. But when the American Left has a hissy fit, the rest of us worldwide are put under house arrest.

No, don’t panic. I’m not talking about Covid lockdowns, compulsory mask mandates, vaccine passports, or the sins of Dr Fauci. That’s one set of crises Australia doesn’t need to import. Oz has outdone every nation except New Zealand in that regard.  

The reason for Hungary’s sudden eruption into America’s culture wars, and thus into Australia’s, is that its prime minister, Viktor Orban, gave an interview to Tucker Carlson on Fox News in which the questions were polite and the answers informative. And that was thought to be a national outrage by all the progressive guardians of official “truthiness” (Stephen Colbert).   

Carlson is a rare conservative news anchor and a skilled interviewer. He varies the bowling—tough and pressing towards those obfuscating, seeking clarity from those answering his questions. The second method is wrongly despised by most modern journalists anxious to win a reputation as a dragon-slayer. In fact, a hostile interrogation serves mainly to put the interviewee on the defensive. He clams up. That method rarely yields a news story, let alone a scoop. Given a platform and apparently “soft-ball” questions, however, interviewees often relax and say more than they intended. They realise their mistake when they read the next morning’s papers.

There was an additional reason for treating Orban to a formally polite questioning. He is known to an American audience mainly from attacks made on him by the Left, including Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, the latter calling him a “totalitarian thug”.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17732/iran-nuclear-weapons-weeks-away

Apparently desperate to revive the nuclear pact, the Biden administration at once began appeasing the ruling clerics of Iran.

From the perspective of Iran’s mullahs, Biden’s desperate efforts to resurrect the nuclear deal manifested his weak leadership and therefore a delectable opportunity for Tehran to buy time, get more concessions, advance its nuclear program and become a nuclear state.

Notwithstanding all these policies of incentives and appeasements, Iran’s mullahs continued to make excuses seemingly to drag out the nuclear talks. One of the latest overtures was that the world powers ought to wait until Iran’s newly elected president, Ebrahim Raisi, took office before resuming the nuclear talks.

By now, Raisi has been president of Iran for more than a month but there has not been the slightest effort by the Islamic Republic to restart any talks; in fact, all the while, the regime appears to have accelerated its enrichment of uranium to weapons-grade.

At the moment, the Iranian regime is reportedly 8-10 weeks away from obtaining the weapons-grade materials necessary for a nuclear weapon.

Since the Biden administration assumed office, the nuclear talks with Iran have gone nowhere. Six rounds of negotiations have been concluded with no results. In contrast, two other issues have gone too far: the Biden administration’s appeasement policies towards the Iranian regime, and the advancement of the mullahs’ nuclear program.

When the Biden administration took office, it announced that it would curb Iran’s nuclear program by returning to the 2015 nuclear deal — known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which by the way Iran never signed — and by subsequently lifting sanctions against the Iranian government.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/09/india-many-moderate-muslims-increasingly-open-ashlyn-davis/

Despite their negative image in popular news platforms, the Taliban is winning support from some Muslims of India. Some are wishing for the Taliban to knock on India’s doors and establish their Islamic caliphate in India as well.

The Indian Muslims who have openly declared their support for the Taliban are not a poor, uneducated bunch of hoodlums who can be dismissed as exceptional cases. Several Indian politicians, eminent citizens, government officials and teachers from the community have been found to be supporting the Taliban, with even more fervor recently than they had shown before, as they celebrate the group’s recent victory. Some social media accounts belonging to reputedly moderate Indian Muslims couldn’t contain their exhilaration following the return of Islamic rule in India’s northwestern neighborhood.

In a first, the Secretary of the All India Muslim Personal Law Board (AIMPLB), Maulana Umrain Mahfuz Rahmani, took the nation by surprise by taking to his official Twitter account to shower praises on the terror outfit for their “extraordinary success” in Afghanistan. In a tweet written in Urdu, he also claimed that this victory had come with the help of Allah, and that such powerful decisions are “made in Heaven and not on Earth.”

Just days after the Taliban took control of Afghanistan; an Indian MP, Shafiqur Rahman Barq, tried to legitimize the jihadist outfit by likening them to the Indian freedom fighters who fought the British. “When India was under British rule, our country fought for freedom. Now the Taliban wants to free their country & run it,” asserted the people’s representative from a local leftist political party in India. He further justified the actions of the Taliban by claiming that the “Taliban is a force that did not allow even strong countries like Russia and America to settle in their country.”

A Mufti of Darul-Uloom Deoband, Maulana Mufti Arshad Farooqi, who is also the chairman of Online Fatwa Department, was seen glorifying the Taliban in a now-viral video. He hailed the Taliban for ousting the “superpower” from Afghanistan and forcing Afghan forces to concede. The Maulana of Deoband also stated that there is something special about the Taliban. He may feel elated; after all, it is from this Deobandi movement that the Taliban originally drew inspiration.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/our-friends-the-haqqanis-afghanistan-taliban-11631053019?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

The Biden Administration and other democracies have been beseeching the triumphant Taliban not to behave like they did when they last ran Afghanistan before 9/11 and harbored al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. On Tuesday the Taliban gave their first response, naming a new government that includes Sirajuddin Haqqani as interior minister.

This is, literally, putting a jihadist terrorist in charge of internal security. Mr. Haqqani is on the FBI’s most wanted list, and the U.S. is offering up to $10 million for information leading to his arrest.

The FBI says it wants to question him in connection with a January 2008 attack on a hotel in Kabul that killed six people, including one American. The Haqqani Network he runs is also accused of plotting a 2011 suicide truck bomb in Wardak province that killed 77 American soldiers, as well as a 19-hour siege of the U.S. Embassy in Kabul the same year.

The Haqqani Network was founded by his father, who had a close relationship with bin Laden. In 2012 the Obama Administration officially designated the Haqqani Network as a terrorist organization. The ties between the Haqqani Network and al Qaeda are long and extensive, as Seth Jones describes nearby.

“The Haqqanis are considered the most lethal and sophisticated insurgent group targeting US, Coalition, and Afghan forces in Afghanistan,” says a description by the U.S. counterterrorism center. “They typically conduct coordinated small-arms assaults coupled with rocket attacks, IEDs, suicide attacks, and attacks using bomb-laden vehicles.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17721/erdogan-afghanistan-terrorists

The US and the EU should not buy Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s fake pro-Western posture (such as when he offered to run the Kabul airport, then fled) or his fake anti-radicalism (such as when he is courting the Afghan terrorists). Erdogan’s strategy, as a member of NATO, is clearly to bolster Russia’s and China’s plans for the future of Afghanistan.

Iran, for its part, seems to be hoping to hit two birds with one stone: by systematically facilitating the journey of illegal Afghans to Turkey and toward Greece, it might destabilize both Turkey and Europe.

“The persistence of Erdoğan’s relationship with Hekmatyar illustrates that it was wishful thinking to believe that Erdoğan was ever anything more than a jihadi in a business suit, no matter how many diplomats projected their hopes of change on him.” — Michael Rubin, Middle East expert, Washington Examiner, August 11, 2021.

Now, due to Erdogan’s long-term anti-Western ideology, he will probably be tempted to seek an alliance with whichever pro-sharia group(s) will, in the near future, be governing Afghanistan.

The US and the EU should not buy Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s fake pro-Western posture (such as when he offered to run the Kabul airport, then fled) or his fake anti-radicalism (such as when he is courting the Afghan terrorists). Erdogan’s strategy, as a member of NATO, is clearly to bolster Russia’s and China’s plans for the future of Afghanistan.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17715/belarus-eu-illegal-migrants

Thousands of migrants from Africa, Asia and the Middle East are pouring into the European Union from Belarus, a landlocked country in Eastern Europe. The surge in illegal immigration is being orchestrated by Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, who is accused of trying to blackmail the EU into reversing the sanctions it imposed over his disputed reelection and a crackdown on dissent.

While the EU — hampered by its ideological commitment to open borders — appears at a loss as to what to do next, Poland, Latvia and Lithuania are being forced to spend millions of euros to build fences along their borders with Belarus. An EU spokesman explained that Brussels “does not finance fences or barriers.”

Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis said that Belarus should be a concern not only for the Baltic countries or the EU, but for the “whole democratic world” which, he advised, “needs to wake up.”

“We firmly believe that the protection of European external border is not just the duty of individual Member States but also the common responsibility of the EU. Hence, proper political attention should be paid to it on the EU level and sufficient funding allocated.” — Joint statement issued by the prime ministers of Poland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.

“Only a very clear and unified EU policy on returning irregular migrants can effectively prevent criminal groups and regimes from exploiting illegal migration for their own purposes. Europe’s message must be short and precise — those illegally entering the EU cannot be granted a refugee status and will be returned to their countries of origin.” — Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis.

Thousands of migrants from Africa, Asia and the Middle East are pouring into the European Union from Belarus, a landlocked country in Eastern Europe. The surge in illegal immigration is being orchestrated by Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, who is accused of trying to blackmail the EU into reversing the sanctions it imposed over his disputed reelection and a crackdown on dissent.

Many of the migrants are being flown to Belarus from the Middle East and then bussed to EU borders by Belarusian authorities. The trips are being organized by Belarus’s state-owned tourism agency, which charges migrants between $1,800 to $12,000.

The number of people illegally entering the EU from Belarus increased sharply after Lukashenko signed a decree on July 1 that allows citizens of more than 70 countries to travel to Belarus without visas and stay for up to five days, ostensibly to get Covid-19 vaccine shots.

The EU’s notoriously fraught relations with Belarus deteriorated in August 2020 after fraudulent presidential elections which Lukashenko claimed he won with 80% of the vote. He subsequently launched a brutal nationwide crackdown against pro-democracy protesters. The EU responded by sanctioning 40 officials suspected of election misconduct — but not Lukashenko himself.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17723/taliban-wait

More importantly, perhaps, it may be naïve to demand that Taliban give up terrorism — the very method that has given them some significance for more than a quarter of a century. Terror is the very raison d’etre of this outfit.

The New York Times ran reports glorifying the USSR at a time that the Georgian master of the Kremlin carried out bloody purges. And, for a while at least, President Franklin D. Roosevelt saw Heinrich Himmler as leader of “moderates” in Nazi Germany….

China has not morphed into the “moderate” power that Henry Kissinger, Beijing’s chief lobbyist in the US, claims.

Why should the group listen to Western powers when they have neither a coherent policy nor the hard power needed to back that policy? The Taliban know that they owe their very existence to terror and repression….. They reached the top of the pile because they could cut throats, stone women to death and dot the roads used by foreign troops with home-made bombs.

The Taliban may promise not to threaten Western interests directly…. In the final analysis, however, a regime that treats its own people with utter contempt is unlikely to offer foreigners, especially the “infidel,” a better deal. In most cases, at least in the short and medium terms, a regime’s foreign policy is the continuation of its domestic policies.

There is no need to rush towards any deal with Taliban.

In dealing with nasty regimes, the choice is not limited to full scale invasion or abject surrender.

As the world tries to absorb the shock of Taliban’s return to Kabul, officials in Western democracies are launching a debate on how to deal with the new masters of Afghanistan.

So far the main theme in this debate seems to be a desire to recognize the gun-toting “religious students” as the legitimate government of that long-suffering land. However, to ward off charges of appeasing a terrorist group, Western officials set a number of conditions before the implied recognition is granted. French President Emmanuel Macron, on a visit to Baghdad, has set four conditions while British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab has unveiled four conditions of his own.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/09/pandemic-australia-still-liberal-democracy/619940/

In a bid to keep the coronavirus out of the country, Australia’s federal and state governments imposed draconian restrictions on its citizens. Prime Minister Scott Morrison knows that the burden is too heavy. “This is not a sustainable way to live in this country,” he recently declared. One prominent civil libertarian summed up the rules by lamenting, “We’ve never seen anything like this in our lifetimes.”

Up to now one of Earth’s freest societies, Australia has become a hermit continent. How long can a country maintain emergency restrictions on its citizens’ lives while still calling itself a liberal democracy?

Australia has been testing the limits.

Before 2020, the idea of Australia all but forbidding its citizens from leaving the country, a restriction associated with Communist regimes, was unthinkable. Today, it is a widely accepted policy. “Australia’s borders are currently closed and international travel from Australia remains strictly controlled to help prevent the spread of COVID-19,” a government website declares. “International travel from Australia is only available if you are exempt or you have been granted an individual exemption.” The rule is enforced despite assurances on another government website, dedicated to setting forth Australia’s human-rights-treaty obligations, that the freedom to leave a country “cannot be made dependent on establishing a purpose or reason for leaving.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17714/iran-torture-epidemic

While the Biden administration and other members of the United Nations Security Council continue to push for the resuscitation of the disastrous nuclear deal — granting Iran nuclear weapons and global legitimacy — they have turned a blind eye to the mullahs’ ever-increasing violations of human rights.

There are reports of slow public hangings-to-death on cranes, amputations of fingers by special guillotines, electric shocks, floggings and rape….

One can also regrettably assume that neither of these men, nor any of the multitudes of others treated in a similar way, was given a fair trial or anything close to a legal defense. According to the Center for Human Rights in Iran, “Three more human rights attorneys in Iran were handed unjust prison sentences in July 2021 amid an ongoing campaign to eliminate due process for activists and dissidents by intimidating the lawyers who defend them….”

The UN, instead of doing its job, appears to have granted the Iranian regime’s leaders full impunity. For how long are the UN, the European Union and the Biden administration going to continue appeasing the mullahs of Iran instead of holding them accountable for their crimes against humanity?

While the Biden administration and other members of the United Nations Security Council continue to push for the resuscitation of the disastrous nuclear deal — granting Iran nuclear weapons and global legitimacy — they have turned a blind eye to the mullahs’ ever-increasing violations of human rights.

Recently, a hacking group calling itself Edalat-e Ali (Ali’s Justice) leaked videos of Iran’s prisons, some of which revealed abuse, including beatings and other unspeakable treatment of detainees carried out by the Iranian authorities at the notorious Evin Prison, where political prisoners are held. “We will continue to expose the oppression,” that the Iranian government is “inflicting on people,” the group said.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/09/eternal-jihad-raymond-ibrahim/

Although August 15, 2021 will forever live in infamy as the date when the Taliban reconquered Afghanistan, for over 13 centuries that date was famous for another event—Constantinople’s defeat of the caliphate, August 15, 718.  While these two events separated by exactly 1,303 years are vastly different in nature—not least that in 718 Islam lost, while in 2021 it won—they both confirm one irresistible point that the confident West should take to heart: the tenacity of Islamic jihad—this relentless snake of war that always bides its time, even if by remaining coiled for many centuries, before striking.

Consider the first event.  In 718, the Eastern Roman Empire (“Byzantium”) repulsed, in dramatic fashion, the Arabs.  It was such a spectacular victory, and Muslim losses were so bad, that, for many centuries, the caliphates never dared make another attempt against the walls of Constantinople.

Put differently, for many centuries after the year 718, anyone living in Constantinople would have thought—and would have apparently been justified for thinking—that the Islamic threat, whatever it was elsewhere, was well behind them.

And yet, in the early 1400s—700 years after the people of Constantinople had thought they’d seen the last of jihad—it was back again besieging them, with the city finally falling to Islam on May 29, 1453.

More significantly, those who besieged and conquered Constantinople in 1453 had little to do with those who besieged it in the eighth century.  The latter were Arabs, under the Umayyad caliphate centered in Damascus.  Those who actually conquered Constantinople were Turks, whose capital was Adrianople (now Edirne).

On the surface there is no connection or continuity between those who in the eighth century tried to conquer, and those who in the fifteenth century did conquer, Constantinople—except, of course, for one thing: both were Muslims, and both articulated their hostility for and need to conquer Constantinople in distinctly jihadist terms: like every other infidel, the Christian kingdom had two choices before it: submit to Islam—which it rejected—or fight.