RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18434/turkey-aggression-greece-airspace

Turkish military aircraft violated Greek airspace 90 times in one day, on April 15, and conducted three overflights of inhabited Greek islands, according to Greek media.

Turkish aircraft have, in fact, been violating Greek airspace almost non-stop since the beginning of the year. In fact, Turkey — both its government and political opposition — has for years openly been threatening to capture Greek islands in the Aegean Sea…. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine seems to offer a convenient precedent for Turkey to increase its military aggression against Greece.

“Once again we wish to reiterate that sovereignty over the islands, islets and rocks of the Aegean was ceded to Greece definitively and unconditionally by the above Treaties and any interpretation against the letter or spirit of these fundamental Treaties would amount to an unauthorized attempt to unilaterally review and modify them.” — Greece’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations, Maria Theofili.

The legal status of the Greek islands in the Aegean is clear: The Treaty of Lausanne set the borders of Turkey and Greece, with the exception of the then-Italian occupied Dodecanese islands that reunited with Greece in 1947 following the signing of the Paris Peace Treaty between Italy and the World War II Allies.

Greek sovereignty over those islands is stipulated by international conventions: The 1923 Lausanne Treaty, the 1936 Montreux Treaty, and the 1947 Paris Treaty.

Sadly, Turkey appears to have an expansionist agenda that has a centuries-long history and that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has articulated.

Greece does not have such an agenda. Greece has not been busy invading or threatening its neighbors or other nations in the Middle East.

Turkey, however, invaded northern Cyprus in 1974, forcibly displaced the Greek Christians living there, and has been maneuvering to acquire the rest. In 2018, Turkey also invaded northern Syria and, using jihadist paramilitary forces, has been occupying the region ever since.

While the world has been distracted by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Turkey, a member of the NATO alliance, has been busy harassing another NATO member, its Western neighbor, Greece.

Turkish military aircraft violated Greek airspace 90 times in one day, on April 15, and conducted three overflights of inhabited Greek islands, according to Greek media.

https://asiatimes.com/2022/04/demographics-push-china-india-russia-triple-entente/

There are numerous examples of the bitterest of enemies turning into unlikely allies, precisely because they present too great a danger to each other.

Britain and Russia spent most of the 19th century contending in the “Great Game” over India. Britain built the navy with which Japan beat Russia in the 1905 war. But Britain and Russiafought on the same side in the world wars of the 20th century.

Russia and China fought one war in 1929 and an undeclared border war in 1969, but share common interests against the United States and its allies.

The next strategic alignment among past enemies may bring together two of today’s strategic antagonists, namely India and China. At first glance, this seems improbable in the extreme. India and China have a longstanding border dispute that caused several hundred casualties in a clash in 1967 and claimed the lives of several dozen soldiers in another last year.

But there are three reasons why a diplomatic revolution may occur sometime in the next several years, and two of them are evident from the chart below.

https://townhall.com/columnists/majidrafizadeh/2022/04/25/arrest-of-mossad-agents-to-justify-tehrans-antisemite-antiwestern-strategies-n2606282

On Wednesday, the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) announced that it had arrested three individuals on charges of spying for the Israeli intelligence service, Mossad. The identity of the persons in question or the evidence that led to allegations against them were not revealed.

Vulnerable political parties or authoritarian regimes that lack an agenda for prosperity and development have always invoked foreign boogeymen, in that they are useful to blame for one’s failures. For example, In 1980, the mullahs provoked their western neighbor into war and used the “the divine blessing”— as former Supreme Leader Ruhollah Khomeini put it — to wipe out domestic opposition. The Mujahedin-e-Khalq (PMOI), the People’s Fedayeen Organization, or any progressive movement that would have dared to speak out for democracy or women’s rights faced brutal crackdown, as a fifth columnist.

The Iranian regime has also a long history of using charges such as espionage and “collaborating with hostile states” to justify harsh sentences for political detainees. This impulse has accelerated in recent weeks as Tehran has been trying to expand its regional meddling as a hedge against the likely collapse of its 2015 nuclear agreement with the United States and five other world powers.

Opposition to Israel’s very existence has always been a central focus of the clerical regime’s appeals for “Muslim unity,” but this has faced newfound challenges since 2019 when a number of regional countries including Iran’s chief rival Saudi Arabia moved to normalize relations with Israel. Tehran has repeatedly condemned such efforts and has sought to leverage them against pre-existing relationships among other Arab and Muslim nations.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/04/macron-stays-power-bruce-bawer/

On Sunday evening, as the minutes ticked by until 8 P.M., when the French polls would close and the results of the presidential election would be announced, a correspondent for the English-language service of France 24 stood outside Emmanuel Macron’s campaign headquarters and said that the 1300-odd international journalists who were gathered there exuded an “optimism” that the incumbent “has this in the bag.” Well, at least they were honest about the fact that Macron was very much the candidate of the establishment to which they belong. Back in the France 24 studio, to be sure, one of the panelists present expressed concern that the reportedly high turnout was “maybe not good for French democracy,” meaning not good for Macron – for in France, as in the Anglosphere, when journalists use the word “democracy” nowadays, they mean keeping the left in power and erecting a cordon sanitaire around the “populists.” In the end, they need not have worried: although there were hopes that Marine Le Pen might pull an upset, Macron won, as expected, this time by a vote of 58.2% to 41.8%. Yes, the margin between the two was half as wide as when they faced each other in 2017. But a win is a win.    

For those whose chief concern is the advance of Islam in the West, the significance of that victory is manifest. During the latter part of Macron’s term, they heard, on the one hand, the cringing statements by Emmanuel Macron’s appointees: the ambassador to Sweden who in 2020 called France “a Muslim country” and the Foreign Minister who, shortly therafter, on a visit to Egypt, assured Muslims of his “deep respect” for Islam. On the other side, there were the defiant members of the French military – more than a thousand of them, including no fewer than twenty generals – who, last year, sending a message that was consistent with Le Pen’s own, declared in an open letter that France is endangered by Muslim enemies within who “despise our country, its traditions, its culture, and who want to see it dissolved by removing its past and its history.”

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/macron-or-le-pen-france-faces-stark-choice-president-2022-04-24/

Le Pen admits defeat
Macron ministers hail win, vow to listen more to voters
Macron can expect little to no grace period
Opposition turns focus to June parliamentary elections

PARIS, April 24 (Reuters) – French President Emmanuel Macron defeated his far-right rival Marine Le Pen on Sunday by a comfortable margin, securing a second term and heading off what would have been a political earthquake.

Cheers of joy erupted as the results appeared on a giant screen at the Champ de Mars park at the foot of the Eiffel tower, where Macron supporters waved French and EU flags. People hugged each other, danced and chanted “Macron!”.

European leaders also welcomed the news that pro-European Union Macron and not nationalist eurosceptic Le Pen had won.

Pollsters projected Macron securing around 58.5% of the vote. Such estimates are normally accurate but may be fine-tuned as official results come in.

“I am very relieved – it had looked very close and populism was at our door,” 42-year old Alessandro Paleni told Reuters at the Macron rally. But he stressed the president faced a difficult task given how many votes went to the far-right.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/ukraine/2022/04/a-passover-reflection-on-the-ukraine-war/

This year’s Passover, what Gentiles sometimes call Exodus, is being celebrated amidst fears the beginning of a third world war is playing out on Ukrain’s flatlands. Somewhat surprisingly, perhaps, what comes to mind — my mind at any rate — is a connection between the ancient rebellion of Jewish slaves with the struggle of the Ukrainian people against Russian aggression.

The parallels are astounding, despite a long and heated tradition of enmity between two peoples. I am acutely conscious of the blood-soaked history of Jewish-Ukrainian relations, if one can call it that. This is history drenched in Jewish blood:  Koliivshchina rebellion, Khmelnitzky pogroms, SS murders, Babi Yar massacre – to mention just some of the crimes that figure in the mind-numbing magnitude of Jewish persecution, suffering and slaughter. These masacres are condemned to live in infamy in Jewish memory no less than Auschwitz and the Nazis’ other death mills. They are indelibly engraved in the voluminous history of Ukrainian anti-Semitism and I have no right to ignore the massacres or forgive their perpetrators. Ironically, many Ukrainians recognized the value of having the Jewish community as part of Ukrainian society despite anti-Semitism being an integral part of the national psyche. This is reflected in a Ukrainian saying, Yak bida, tak do Zhida – “If in trouble go to a Jew for help”. To put it mildly, Jewish-Ukrainian relations were far from cordial for a long, long time.

And then something happened. Ukraine, traditionally anti-Semitic Ukraine, voted overwhelmingly for a Jewish man, the descendant of a Holocaust survivor, to be their president in time of peace and, as it happens, in war as well. One can argue that Volodymyr Zelensky’s victory was either a protest vote against Ukraine’s all-pervading corruption or, perhaps equally, a reflection of a newly evolved political sophistication. Be that as it may, the unwillingness of the Ukrainians to have Jews as their fellow citizens and neighbors is held by a mere 5 per cent of the population, according to a recent Pew Centre poll. This is a level of acceptance and tolerance which the same polling found to be the highest in all Europe. The same survey indicated that 13 per cent of Russians and 32 per cent of Armenians are not prepared to have a Jew marry into their families or even as a neighbor.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18466/france-leap-into-unknown

A Le Pen presidency could face other hurdles. She wants to take France out of NATO’s integrated military command, a move that would upset relations with the US and most other EU members.

In the current campaign, Le Pen has tried to explain away her long abiding admiration for Vladimir Putin as “the kind of strong leader that France needs”, and her endorsement of the annexation of Crimea by Russia.

More importantly in terms of here-and-now, she says she will oppose European schemes to impose a total ban on gas imports from Russia, thus ensuring a regular source of income for Putin.

There are other signs that her heart still belongs to Putin if not as daddy at least as sugar daddy who financed the National Front and its new epiphany, National Rally, through low-interest loans from Russian banks.

Le Pen has also tried to camouflage her party’s visceral anti-Americanism, partly highlighted by her father Jean-Marie Le Pen’s admiration for the Khomeinist regime in Tehran.

This is the third time in a generation that French voters are given a choice between an incumbent they don’t especially like and a challenger that most find unlikable.

Many French voters have told me in recent weeks that they still dream of a “real election” in which one is able to choose with both head and heart. This time round, however, the heart is out of the equation, leaving only the head. And that may give Macron a second term — just.

Until even two weeks ago, most political analysts regarded France as the current leader of the European Union, with President Emmanuel Macron the point-man in dealing with the crisis triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Macron gave some credence to that analysis with almost daily calls to Vladimir Putin and trips to various European capitals, refusing to take to the campaign trail in the presidential election.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18464/persecution-of-christians-march

“For the entirety of March 8, social media comment columns were awash with people who, as always, condoned the murder…. Old pictures of Maria were passed around, in which she was still wearing a hijab, and people commented, ‘see, this is what happens when you leave your faith,’…. Lies and slander were spread about her, and men and women threw themselves into a contest to see who could blame her most for her murder.” — medyanews.net, March 10, 2022 – Iraq.

“[M]y father went inside the room and picked up a bottle of acid and began spraying it on us while the group started shouting, ‘Allah Akbar [Allah is the greatest], you deserve death'”… The following day, while all three family members were still hspitalized, Muslim relatives set their home ablaze. — Morning Star News, March 22, 2022 – Uganda.

A few days after a Christian man and a Muslim woman got married—and photos of their wedding in a Catholic church went viral—…the Indonesian Ulema Council the nation’s leading Islamic clerical body, declared that “the marriage of this couple is invalid and cannot be allowed.” According to Islamic law, or sharia, interfaith marriages are permissible only when the man (seen as the head of the woman and future children) is Muslim. The married couple responded by ignoring the clerics. — Union of Catholic Asian News, March 9, 2022 – Indonesia.

“Egyptian authorities have failed not only to protect Coptic Christians from repeated sectarian attacks against their communities, but also to bring those responsible for such violence to justice.” — Philip Luther, Amnesty International’s Middle East and North Africa Research and Advocacy Director, Amnesty.org, March 30, 2022 – Egypt.

The following are among the abuses Muslims inflicted on Christians throughout the month of March, 2022:

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/04/zelensky_more_than_something_of_a_hero.html

Where are the heroes of today? They were present in every region, time period, culture and creed. In the distant past, Achilles, Odysseus, Hercules.  More recently, Mahatma Gandhi, Indian lawyer, anti-colonial nationalist, advocate of non-violent resistance; Florence Nightingale, the Lady with the Lamp; Abraham Lincoln led the nation as President and preserved during the Civil War; Nelson Mandela, anti-apartheid revolutionary and political leader, first  president  of South Africa; Winston Churchill, successful leader and Prime Minister with inspiring rhetoric of Britain during World War II. Raoul Wallenberg, Swedish diplomat who saved thousands of Jews from the Nazis in Hungary; Vaclav Havel, playwright and president of Czechoslovakia, courageous fighter for freedom.

All exemplify some of the features that characterize heroes: courage, bravery, boldness, leader of a worthy cause, personification of nobility and civilized behavior, performing acts that involve personal risks or sacrifices, no expectation of reward, inspiration to others.  

In our cancel culture era, heroes are not evident, and supposed past heroes have been toppled: Confederate generals, Christopher Columbus, Spanish Conquistadors.  The implication for the topplers is that designation of heroes is the result of social and political constructions, linked to the norms and values of a particular time. Moreover,  because of the impact of social media on opinion, the incessant stream of information and misinformation,  misgivings about the actions of officials of government and organizations, avoidance of action on issues, and perhaps the declining quality of elected representatives in democratic societies, no one individual or few are likely to remain as a hero on a pedestal for long. Thomas Jefferson, we now know, was a slave owner, and Martin Luther King, Jr., courageous fighter against segregation, discrimination, and racism, had a weakness fort beautiful women.

Of course, in everyday life, heroic deeds tend to be underrated or unappreciated. This is often the case with the teacher who helps a handicapped student, or the police officer or fire fighter who risks life to protect others. These individuals, heroes in their own way, can serve as models for teaching, good citizenship, or desirable political involvement, though not heralded.

The surprise in the last two months is the emergence of an improbable person to be the outstanding heroic figure  in the  world.  He is not the archetypal protagonist, a legendary warrior or king, or one resembling King Arthur searching for the Holy Grail, but a relatively obscure figure of modest background, inexperienced and imperfect.  He may not be an angel because angels are so few, but until the day that one comes along Volodymyr Zelensky will do.