RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18227/russia-sweden-finland-nato

In response to the mounting tension with Russia, Sweden has been boosting its military preparedness and has sent soldiers and heavy military equipment to its largest island, Gotland, strategically located in the Baltic Sea, just 330 kilometers from Kaliningrad, the headquarters of Russia’s Baltic Fleet headquarters… Sweden has been observing a deteriorating security environment in recent years with repeated Russian incursions into Swedish airspace and territorial waters.

Unlike Sweden, Finland, which shares a long land border with Russia, never stopped investing in its defense capabilities. It recently ordered 64 F-35 fighters, at a value of $9.5 billion, to replace its existing and ageing combat jets. According to Finland’s former Foreign Minister Erkki Tuomioja, Finland “can mobilize a reserve of 280,000 trained soldiers, which no other country in Europe can do.”

In a meeting with Sweden and Finland on January 24 about the worsening security situation in Europe, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg invited the two countries to join NATO, stressing that each country has the right to choose its own military alliances.

Denmark is deploying four air force fighter jets to the Baltic states and a Danish Navy frigate will most likely be patrolling the Baltic Sea, as a contribution to NATO’s patrolling in the region. This is “a very clear signal to Russia,” Danish Defense Minister Trine Bramsen said.

Russia’s military buildup on the borders of Ukraine and its sweeping ultimatums to NATO on halting further expansion and rolling back its engagement on NATO’s eastern flank is also causing tension in northern Europe. Russia has threatened that if Finland and Sweden — which are not members of NATO but enjoy close ties with the transatlantic organization — join the alliance, it “would have serious military and political consequences that would require an adequate response from the Russian side.”

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2022/02/13/the-canadian-dilemma-in-a-nutshell-n1558926

From the perspective of freedom-loving citizens in this country, the trucker convoys and blockades protesting mask and vaccine mandates are a stirring spectacle of patriotism, civic responsibility, and true grit. They represent the offset to heavy-handed and arrogant government that is using everything in its power to suppress their efforts: threats, fines, police coercion, theft of property, and the manifestly illegal sequestering of funds donated to the truckers by private individuals. A conflict of this nature is often framed as the state versus the nation, the authorities versus the people. Whether it applies to the current situation, as we will see, is problematic.

The issue is the preservation, or restitution, of the government-violated Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms meant to guarantee common life in a democratic country—or, at any rate, a country now under the sway of an avowedly communist leader and several autocratic provincial premiers, a country that would appear well on the road to despotic control.

The problem is that fully two-thirds of the electorate rejects or is indifferent to the trucker revolt against unscrupulous and demagogic power. According to an Angus Reid poll, 54% of Canadians would like to see the COVID-19 mandates lifted, yet they are not interested in standing up for the Freedom Convoy that carries their banner. The trucker unions jealous of their perquisites and the bought-and-paid-for national press have also sided with the wielders of tyrannical authority. 

Ironically, it is popular opposition to a popular uprising that will determine the future of the country. This explains why, despite the courage and the exhilarating display of patriotic fervor animating the trucker convoys, numbers of Canadians have left or are considering leaving the country. I know of many such. They are not defectors but long-suffering citizens who are convinced that they have read the writing on the wall.

https://americanmind.org/salvo/oh-canada/

I joined the Canadian Freedom Convoy once the trucks were already firmly set in Ottawa. My time in the Canadian capital was spent gathering information, specifically to document the successful, as well as the failed, tactics and strategies of the demonstration. My reticence over details is necessary because, whether through fate or my own persistence, I am now helping the central organization with some of their strategy, and anything that I disclose publicly could be used against them. But I can give a brief overview of what is happening here.

It’s important to note that the meaning of all this is still unclear. There is indeed a very palpable sense that “this is history,” as many here are prone to say, but no one has yet presented a historical vision, and no shape has yet organically formed.

Concerning such “grand narratives,” there are many false directions. Walking through the blockade, it can seem as though multiple demonstrations are going on at the same time, some of which feel distinct. The protest can often seem like a textbook workers revolution, since much of the language used by the protestors stake the “working class” against the bourgeoisie and the other traditional enemies of the proletariat.

At other times there are intimations of 1960s counter-culture, where blunts are circulated, heart-shaped signs are passed out, and placards read, “Live. Love. Freedom.” The most obvious theme of the protests is state imposed restrictions under the pretense of bio-medical safety. According to this logic, once the mandates end, everyone will go home. In this last case, this would mean that the protests are counter-revolutionary in nature, since all the people want is to turn things back to normal.

https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/593983-free-speech-becomes-roadkill-in-the-crackdown-on-canadian-truckers

Canada appears to be facing its greatest threat since Benedict Arnold came close to seizing Ottawa in 1775. The source of this “insurrection” and “attack on democracy,” however, is not a foreign government but Canadians who have descended on their own capital to protest continuing COVID-19 mandates.

The protest has been peaceful — and highly successful in cutting off key highways. But the most alarming development has not come from the convoy but from the commentary about it, including calls for mass arrests and even vigilantism. The Ottawa Police Services Board chairman has called it a “nationwide insurrection,” adding, “Our city is under siege.”

CNN analyst and Harvard professor Juliette Kayyem was apoplectic at the thought of truckers shutting down roads and interfering with trade. She tweeted out a call to “slash the tires, empty gas tanks, arrest the drivers, and move the trucks.” CNN correspondent Paula Newton said this act of civil disobedience was nothing less than a “threat to democracy. An insurrection, sedition.”

Blocking streets, occupying buildings and shutting down bridges have long been tactics of protesters. Yet what constitutes a protest or an insurrection often seems to depend on the cause involved. When rioters caused billions of dollars in damages, burned police stations and occupied sections of American cities in the summer of 2020, for example, few in the media declared them to be terrorists or a threat to democracy. But CNN’s Kayyem once called conservative protesters occupying a state capital to be “domestic terrorists.” GoFundMe, which previously helped fund arrested Black Lives Matter (BLM) protesters, froze more than $10 million raised for Canadian truckers to prevent it from being used to support them.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18226/christians-persecuted-worldwide

“When the Taliban took control of Afghanistan, they tried to appear moderate—but there’s no sign that Christianity will be anything other than a death sentence.” — World Watch List-2022.

“The persecution of Christians in India has intensified, as Hindu extremists aim to cleanse the country of their presence and influence. The extremists disregard Indian Christians and other religious minorities as true Indians, and think the country should be purified of non-Hindus…..” — World Watch List-2022.

“The COVID-19 pandemic has offered a new weapon to persecutors. In some areas, Christians have been deliberately overlooked in the local distribution of government aid and have even been accused of spreading the virus.” — World Watch List-2022.

In Qatar, “Violence against Christians rose sharply ….” — World Watch List-2022.

In Bangladesh (#29), local authorities told Muslim converts to Christianity who, like their Muslim counterparts, sought governmental aid, “to return to Islam or receive nothing.”

In the Central African Republic, which was “hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic … Christians were denied government aid and told to convert to Islam if they wanted to eat.”

Another notable trend concerns the growing number of internally or externally displaced people — 84 million: “a significant number [of whom] are Christians fleeing religious persecution.”

[A]t least a quarter, though arguably much more, of all hate crimes registered in Europe in 2020 were anti-Christian — representing a 70% increase compared to 2019.

[I]t is telling that the European nations suffering the most also happen to have Europe’s largest Muslim populations — namely, Germany (where anti-Christian hate crimes have more than doubled since 2019) and France (where two churches are reportedly attacked every single day, some, as in the Muslim world, with human feces).

In short, the persecution of Christians, which was already horrific, has increased by nearly 70% over the last five years, with no signs of abating.

How long will it be before this seemingly irreversible trend metastasizes into those nations currently celebrated for their religious freedom?

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18208/free-speech-britain

“It isn’t hate to speak the truth.” — J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter books, Twitter, June 6, 2020.
“An entire generation are puzzled by the idea that anyone has the right to say things they don’t agree with…for most people, true free speech has ceased to exist…. On some issues, such as the transgender controversy, it is virtually impossible to say anything without attracting the attention of the Thought Police.” — Peter Hitchens, author and journalist, Daily Mail, December 11, 2021.
“Among millions, the idea that you can defend someone’s right to say something you disagree with is now puzzling. They have no idea why anyone would do that. For them, the debate is over, they have won, and those who oppose them are stupid and wrong.” — Peter Hitchens, Daily Mail, December 11, 2021.
“They also view my doubts about the theory of man-made global warming as ‘denial’ of a fact which they regard as proven. To them, this is little short of sabotage of efforts to combat this peril.” — Peter Hitchens, Daily Mail, December 11, 2021.
“All of them believed that they owned the truth, that they were profoundly good and that those who got in their way were therefore evil as well as wrong.” — Peter Hitchens, Daily Mail, December 11, 2021.

Freedom of speech is doing extremely poorly in the UK, according to a recent YouGov poll. When Britons were asked what should be the priority, 43% said protecting people from offensive or hateful speech should be the priority, while only 38% said the focus should be on protecting free speech. Generally, men and conservative voters were more concerned about protecting free speech, while women, younger people and Labour voters were more concerned about blocking offensive or hateful speech.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/02/12/oligarchys-response-to-the-freedom-convoy-bodes-ill-for-them/

As I write, Canadian police, many dressed in military garb and supported by armored vehicles and snipers(!), are moving in to enforce several court orders and demands of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Ontario Premier Doug Ford, and others that the “Freedom Convoy” of Canadian truckers stop blocking the Ambassador Bridge, the major artery between the United States and Canada, and disperse. Some of the protestors are leaving while many others are standing their ground. 

Will the heavy hand of the state succeed in crushing the protest? In the short term, perhaps. 

On Friday, Fox News host Tucker Carlson presented a montage of Canadian and American officials berating the truckers and threatening all sorts of dire retribution should they fail to obey their masters. Carlson was right: the hysterical squeaking of Justin Trudeau, U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, and the other political mannequins was pathetic—a sign of impotence, not strength. 

But impotence comes in long-term and short-term varieties. Long-term, I think Carlson is right. Officialdom’s response to the Freedom Convey is a desperate effort to put the genie of liberty back in the bottle. Ultimately, it will not work. But on the way to that failure there will be plenty of opportunities for the coercive power of the state to manifest itself. 

As General Mark “White Rage” Milley, the anti-Trump chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, put it when commenting on the January 6, 2021 protest in Washington, D.C., “We’re the guys with the guns.” Well, some of them, anyway. Joe Biden was trespassing on the same territory when he said that if you want to take on the government, you’ll need “some nukes and F15s.” 

I do not think that is true. In fact, I would say we are rapidly approaching a situation that the columnist Matt Taibbi evoked when he suggested that Justin Trudeau’s response to the Freedom Convey might be his “Ceaușescu moment.” After the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the oxygen of legitimacy rapidly went out of Communist dictatorships throughout Eastern Europe. Romania’s Nicolae Ceaușescu was one of the unlucky tyrants. He went from delivering a speech to an angry populace to facing, along with his wife Elena, a firing squad four days later on Christmas Day. 

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18212/apartheid-middle-east

Where is the outcry from Amnesty International and other human rights organizations? When an Arab country subjects Palestinians to actual apartheid measures, the international community is too busy lying about Israel’s alleged abuses to take notice.

“It is estimated that 65% of the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon live under the poverty line.” — UNRWA, October 2017.

Palestinians in Lebanon have long been prevented from practicing such professions as medicine and law, given that only the Lebanese could join professional syndicates.

Thirty-nine professions remain prohibited to Palestinians in the following fields: healthcare (general medicine, dentistry, nursing, midwifery, pharmacy) transport and fishing, services and daycare, engineering, law, tourism, and accounting.

Palestinian refugees in Lebanon are at risk of food insecurity, electricity blackouts, increased health problems and complications amid the shortages of medicine and health-care interventions. — UNRWA, January 2022.

“My husband works as a driver and earns less than two dollars a day. We mainly eat vegetables and beans because that’s all we can afford. Meat and chicken have become a dream; we can’t buy them because prices have increased so sharply. We no longer eat three meals a day, and sometimes I send my kids to bed without dinner.” — Rihab Maajel, a 50-year-old Palestinian from Shabriha in southern Lebanon, UNRWA, January 2022.

“I fear that I may freeze to death this winter. I cannot afford to buy gas for heating.” — Nawal Kayed, 66, Palestinian in Lebanon, UNRWA, 2022.

The group also noted that Palestinian refugees in Lebanon who want to receive medical treatment in a Lebanese hospital have to wait for weeks to obtain a permit. — palhrw.org, January 20, 2022.

When Palestinians in Lebanon cannot feed their children this winter, chalk it up to the world’s unjust lethal obsession with Israel.

ive thousand homes belonging to Palestinians in Lebanon are at risk of collapsing and are in dire need of renovation, according to a report in the Lebanese newspaper Al-Akhbar.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/02/rape-britain-bruce-bawer/

On May 25, 2018, Tommy Robinson was standing outside the courthouse in Leeds, England, microphone in hand, reporting live on the trial of several Muslims for child rape, when, without prior warning, he was arrested for breach of peace, hustled into a van, and, within the space of four hours, tried, convicted, and sentenced to thirteen months’ incarceration – not, curiously enough, for breach of peace but for contempt of court. Conveyed tout de suite to the prison in Kingston upon Hull, he spent much of the next year and a half in and out of lockup, undergoing physical and psychological torment while behind bars and the rankest of forensic malpractice while at the so-called bar of justice.

And why did all this happen? Here’s why. Islam teaches its adherents that (1) they’re in a state of constant war with the infidel and (2) sex with minors (as demonstrated by the fact the prophet Muhammed took his wife Aisha’s virginity when she was nine) is permissible; consequently, Muslim men have every right to molest the children of the infidel at will. As Islamic communities established themselves in major English cities, Muslim rape gangs, known as “grooming gangs,” took root. Eventually, thousands upon thousands of non-Muslim girls, almost all of them members of the working class, would be victimized by these gangs, not just once apiece but repeatedly, in most case over a period of years.

British police, social workers, and journalists are known to have been aware of this phenomenon for decades. But instead of addressing it fully and responsibly – which, they know, would have required mass arrests and prosecutions of prominent Muslims, and frank media coverage of these transgressions as well as of their roots in Islamic doctrine, all of which in turn would almost certainly have led to social tumult on a dangerous scale – these parties chose to do and say nothing. And when confronted with a single individual who refused to play along – a working-class bloke who insisted on shouting from the rooftops both about these offenses and the official policy of silence and subterfuge – they knew what they had to do: vilify him, smear him, find crimes to charge him with, lock him up and hope that Muslim fellow inmates would do the rest. Or, failing that, hope that after he’d endured a certain amount of persecution, he’d break down, or give up, and crawl away into a hole and keep his mouth shut.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18206/france-freedom

“If every time we are shocked, we were to pronounce death sentences, what would become of us? What kind of society would we live in?” — Mila to a tribunal, L’Union, June 21, 2021.

“We resist because, otherwise, they will have won”. — Mila’s mother, testifying in court, bfmtv.com, June 21, 2021.

One morning… Val learned that Al Qaeda had issued a death sentence on him. The poster showed his photograph, stained in blood.

Social media are filled with ways to kill her — bullets, explosives, crushing her head, slitting her throat or setting her on fire.

These threats and attempts to intimidate prove the danger presented by those committed to… creating a new society by force and terror: If you criticize me, I will kill you — behead you or slit your throat.

Fear works. No one wants to see their name on an internet hit list, or falsely be called racist. Journalists studiously look the other way and are nowhere to be found.

In April, the country will vote. The next day, it will be possible to tell what direction the country — and with it, Europe — will take. Will it submit — or not?

“What else do you need to wake up and understand that we have to defend ourselves?”, asked the late Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci.

We should be worried about Europe. It is the cradle of European culture, especially France. Henry James, in The Ambassadors, writes about France as the epitome of civilization, as the “eldest daughter of the Church”. Now, however, France’s churches are being burned, demolished and abandoned, and its adherents sacrificed on the altar of political correctness. France’s Jews, “the canaries in the coalmine”, are being physically attacked and leaving their country. Since 2000, more than 60,000 have fled.