RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/08/australia-begins-mass-vaccination-children-katie-hopkins/

The video clip below is hard to watch. It is the Prime Minister of Australia giving a press statement regarding the ‘mass vaccination’ of 24,000 Australian children.

Scott Morrison is talking about children in Year 12 — usually aged 16 and 17.

You will hear him say they are planning to “get through” 24,000 kids “this week.”

You will hear him say that mums and dads are NOT permitted to be present.

You will hear him say the children will be ushered to their jabs by members of the Youth Command and Police.

And he goes on to liken this mass injection of children as an opportunity — an opportunity to be grasped with both hands. He even tries to draw a parallel with Olympic athletes (presumably because this mass event is happening at the Olympic Park), inferring that Olympic athletes would also tell parents to grab this opportunity, like their child might win a gold medal for compliance.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17671/afghanistan-night-falls

Rival Islamist groups are already present, controlling chunks of territory. The so-called ISIS is planted in Konar and Loghar while another outfit known as Khorasan and promising to create a new caliphate covering parts of Central Asia, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran is also busy recruiting. The Taliban itself is a far from united outfit with Pakistan, Islamic Republic in Iran and, it seems even Turkey, China and Russia having their respective “contacts” in the movement.

More importantly, Taliban may face an urban people-based opposition that was often absent in Afghan politics. The experience of the past four decades, especially the past 20 years, cannot be wiped out with a stroke. Millions of Afghans have had a taste, albeit furtive, of a different way of life and are unlikely to put the clock back 1,400 years as Taliban demand.

In other words, Taliban are doomed to fail, leaving Afghanistan as an ungoverned land. And that is bad news for the whole world, as an ungoverned land is ideal location for terrorist groups of all denominations.

With President Ashraf Ghani’s hasty flight from Kabul, we are now witnessing the fall of the second of five regimes that label themselves “Islamic Republic” in just over two years.

The first to fall was the Islamic Republic of the Sudan and what we have left are Islamic Republics in Pakistan, Iran and Mauritania. If we include the Islamic State created in parts of Iraq and Syria a few years ago and still lingering as a bad smell, we might conclude that, despite Taliban’s latest success, the label “Islamic” is not as invulnerable as some suggest.

The difference is that in Sudan the Islamic Republic was replaced by a timid, though no less sincere, attempt at democratization while the Islamic Republic in Afghanistan signals the return of the Islamic Emirate or a more radical version of Islamism.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17653/iran-obtaining-nuclear-weapons

The Biden administration… has made no efforts to pressure the Iranian regime into answering the International Atomic Energy Agency’s questions about three undeclared clandestine nuclear sites found in Iran.

“For objectivity’s sake, I should say that the Iranian government has reiterated its will to engage and to cooperate and to provide answers, but they haven’t done that so far. So I hope this may change, but as we speak, we haven’t had any concrete progress.” — General Rafael Mariano Grossi, Director General, International Atomic Energy Agency, Seattle Times, June 7, 2021.

It seems — worryingly, especially after failures of both intelligence and planning in the Afghanistan debacle — that the Biden administration is again standing idly by while the mullahs of Iran comfortably keep enriching uranium to acquire a nuclear weapons arsenal.

We have seen what they do to their own people and the region when they do not have one. Just look at what has been called “the world’s greatest sponsor of state terrorism” has done when they have no nuclear weapons — both domestically to their own people, and internationally to Lebanon, Yemen, Libya, Iraq, Syria, Saudi Arabia, the Palestinian territories and even Venezuela and larger South America… What then can the Free World expect that Iran will do after they have nuclear weapons?

The Iranian regime appears just a few months away from obtaining nuclear weapons, all while the Biden administration is completely silent and has not articulated any clear policy for preventing this dangerous and predatory regime from becoming a nuclear state like North Korea.

Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz told ambassadors from countries on the United Nations Security Council during a briefing at the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem on August 4, 2021:

“Iran has violated all of the guidelines set in the JCPOA and is only around 10 weeks away from acquiring weapons-grade materials necessary for a nuclear weapon… Now is the time for deeds – words are not enough. It is time for diplomatic, economic and even military deeds, otherwise the attacks will continue.”

The Biden administration has been insisting on reviving the disastrous Obama nuclear deal and the theocratic establishment of Iran has evidently seen this as a perfect opportunity to buy time and inch closer to acquiring nuclear weapons.

The Biden administration first showed its desperation by making it clear to the Iranian leaders that the US wanted to return to the nuclear deal and was willing to lift all sanctions re-imposed by the Trump administration.

As nuclear talks began, the Iranian regime began advancing its nuclear program at a faster pace as the negotiations went on. The Biden administration not only remained silent in the face of Iran’s violations, it also started offering even more concessions to the mullahs. The Biden administration, for instance, announced not only that it was willing to lift nuclear-related sanctions, but also that it was considering lifting non-nuclear related sanctions.

Iran first began increasing uranium enrichment to 20% in January 2021. On January 9, the Iranian parliament passed a law requiring the government to expel the International Atomic Energy Agency’s nuclear inspectors. In April, the regime raised its uranium enrichment level to 60%, edging closer to weapons-grade levels. While his government was holding indirect nuclear talks with the Biden administration, Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf, speaker of Iran’s parliament, bragged:

“The young and God-believing Iranian scientists managed to achieve a 60% enriched uranium product. I congratulate the brave nation of Islamic Iran on this success. The Iranian nation’s willpower is miraculous and can defuse any conspiracy.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17659/afghanistan-disaster-biden

The fear now is that, as Western intelligence agencies are no longer able to monitor the activities of Islamist extremists both in Afghanistan and in neighbouring countries like Pakistan and Iran, the West will find itself increasingly vulnerable to high profile terror attacks as a direct consequence of Mr Biden’s disastrous withdrawal plan.

An important first step for the security of the United States would be immediately to shut its southern border.

The alarming implications, in terms of Western security, of a Taliban takeover of Afghanistan are clearly an issue the Biden administration failed to take into consideration when deciding to abandon Afghanistan to its fate. It is an oversight that adds to the scale of the disaster that Mr Biden has just inflicted on the security of the Western alliance.

The ability of U.S. security officials to monitor and disrupt the activities of Islamist terror groups will be severely diminished as a consequence of the Biden administration’s catastrophic decision to end America’s military involvement in Afghanistan.

One of the most notable achievements of the US-led coalition’s presence in Afghanistan during the past two decades has been its relentless campaign to destroy the terrorist infrastructure of Islamist terror groups such as Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda organisation.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/biden-islamic-world-christianity-afghanistan-war-taliban-american-founding-11629402268?mod=opinion_lead_pos9

Historians, soldiers and politicians will debate for decades the particulars of what went wrong during America’s intervention in Afghanistan. But a simple truth has been apparent for years: We Westerners failed not for lack of effort, but because military and economic power alone cannot change the Islamic world in a lasting way.

The U.S.-led coalition arrived in South Asia 20 years ago seeking justice after 9/11. Soon we turned into apostles of universal civilization, the idea that human beings everywhere would make the same basic decisions we made in building political community. We set out to establish a liberal democratic state, not realizing that politics lies downstream of culture, and culture downstream of religion. It never occurred to us that America was what it was because of Christianity, and Afghanistan was what it was because of Islam.

The political scientist Samuel Huntington was right: Islamic societies belong to a distinctive civilization that resists the imposition of foreign values through power. We may believe that argument or not, but trillions of dollars, tens of thousands of lives, and two decades of warfare have not proved otherwise.

Still, many remain blind to the obvious. Facing seemingly unrelated chaos in places like Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, the Palestinian territories, Yemen, Libya and Nigeria, our diplomats and strategists devise one-off responses that ignore the common ideologies and actors that link them. Finding piles of broken china around the room, they diligently glue the pieces back together, not seeing the elephant nearby whose feet are covered in ceramic dust.

This blindness is driven by a noble desire to see humans as equal, interchangeable beings for whom faith and culture are accidents of birth. But these accidents are non-negotiable truths for hundreds of millions of people who would rather die than concede them. Failure to comprehend this is a symptom of spiritual emptiness: Alienated from America’s Christian origins, millions cannot fathom how faith could play a vital role in binding humans together.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-joe-biden-broke-nato-allies-boris-johnson-angela-merkel-emmanuel-macron-11629406300?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Remember when candidate Joe Biden said America “needs a leader the world respects”? Apparently President Biden forgot. Of the many consequences of his misbegotten Afghanistan withdrawal, one of the more serious is the way it has damaged America’s relationships with its allies, especially in Europe.

Afghanistan was an operation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and America’s NATO allies have invested significant blood and treasure in the conflict. That includes tens of thousands of troops over 20 years, more than 1,100 of whom were killed, and billions of dollars spent on the military operation and reconstruction effort.

This was a fulfillment of their obligations after the Sept. 11 terror attack led to the first invocation of the mutual self-defense clause in NATO’s founding treaty. European allies also have a stake in preventing a nation of nearly 40 million people from collapsing into a failed state that could trigger more mass migration to Europe, or become a new breeding ground for terrorism.

Yet everything about Mr. Biden’s Afghan withdrawal has been a slap to those allies. They didn’t want the U.S. to leave, but he did. The botched execution has left them scrambling to airlift out thousands of their citizens and thousands more Afghan translators and others who assisted each nation’s war effort.

And the snubs keep coming from Washington. In his Monday speech, Mr. Biden made only a glancing reference to NATO and none to America’s European allies in his account of the conflict. U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson reportedly had to wait a day and a half after requesting a call with the President to get Mr. Biden on the phone.

No wonder European leaders are apoplectic. U.K. Defense Minister Ben Wallace called the Trump -Biden agreement with the Taliban “a rotten deal,” in an interview this month after the Taliban started capturing chunks of the country. In Parliament on Wednesday, Tom Tugendhat —chairman of the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee who served in the British forces in Afghanistan—called Mr. Biden “shameful” for blaming the retreat on a supposedly pusillanimous Afghan military. Former Prime Minister Theresa May criticized Mr. Biden for following President Trump’s lead in a “unilateral” negotiation with the Taliban.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17657/biden-appalling-mistake

The main mission was and should have remained one of self-defence. Once this was forgotten, muddle and a sapping of will set in. Moral ambivalence about our values and ourselves, which our enemies do not have about themselves, expressing itself as an embarrassment about using force in our self-defense, meant that softer edges were attached.

We needed strategic patience of the sort that has kept US forces on the Korean peninsula, or British forces in Cyprus, for a lifetime of decades. Our leaders, and mainly one, lacked the vision to have that patience and we shall pay a heavy price.

This withdrawal is therefore a set-back for the Free World as we square off to defend our way of life against Xi Jinping’s communist command group which, like the Taliban, does not understand win-win. “We win, you lose” is the next game.

[O]ur political class … was utterly naïve at “12/11” when the PRC was let into the WTO, expecting it to become like us. This was like letting the fox into the hen-house in the expectation that it would behave like a hen.

What is needed now is a swift cold shower of geo-strategic reality in our political classes. The time for self-harming distractions with “wokus pocus,” obsessing about sexual dysmorphia, Marxist “critical race theory” and “climate catastrophism” … — all of which the Chinese Communist Party is glad to encourage — must end.

Of course we, the Western Alliance, were going to withdraw from Afghanistan sometime. But not now and not like this. The twenty-year expedition in Afghanistan has been a litany of strategic and tactical errors starting with the failure to follow through on the success of Task Force Dagger to crush the Taliban when we most easily could have done so. The operationally brilliant first intervention by the Green Beret Special Forces “Horse Soldiers” of Alpha 595 (known to cinema-goers from the film “Twelve Strong” and now immortalised in an equestrian statue at 9/11 ground zero in New York), partnered with the Northern Alliance at the end of 2001, vectoring in modern Air Force fire-power from horse-back.

The Taliban were out of Kabul and on the run by November 2001 and Osama Bin Laden was on his way to the Tora Bora caves. US President George W. Bush’s decision to open up war in Iraq before the Afghan job was done was a costly deflection. In the second phase, the Afghanistan mission lacked focus. Crushing terrorist bases? Nation-building? Narcotics suppression? Educational programmes for girls? Which? All?

Our mission should have been kept perfectly clear and the maintenance of aim should have been constant. It should have been about our national security first and last. Security from Islamist terrorist attacks was to be maintained by dominating these hard lands to the exclusion of others, as the British had done with some success for decades after General “Bobs” Roberts culminating victory over Ayub Khan in September 1880 at Kandahar in the Second Afghan War. This was called the Great Game. Geo-politics are facts on the ground. It is the Great Game still.

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/hassan-nasrallahs-schadenfreude-opinion-677195

Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah may be evil, but he’s not stupid. This was evident in his televised speech on Tuesday night, delivered in the wake of US President Joe Biden’s hasty withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan.

His oratory appropriately coincided with the ninth day of the “Mourning of Muharram,” observed by Muslims to mark the anniversary of the Battle of Karbala, when the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson, Hussein, was killed by the forces of Ubayd Allah ibn Ziyad.

What a perfect opportunity to assert Islamic victory over the West.
Gloating over the Taliban takeover, the Lebanon-based, Iran-backed terror-master compared the scene on Monday, when US personnel absconded from Kabul, to the fall of Saigon in 1975.

“The United States is still ignorant,” he said, “and is repeating the same mistakes.”

It’s not that his heart was bleeding for the terrified Afghans desperate to escape their fate and attempting to board the US jets taking off from Hamid Karzai International Airport. Nor was his analogy meant to express sympathy for the South Vietnamese who faced the same predicament 46 years ago.

No, he couldn’t care less about the torture and killing of innocent people, certainly those who aren’t Shi’ites – especially not ones who spent two decades collaborating with Uncle Sam.

But he definitely loves witnessing Washington’s weakness on display for all the world to see and ridicule. It’s a sight that gives credence to all his hopes, dreams and predictions about the decay and eventual death of “America, the Great.” 

The “Great Satan,” that is.

“Biden wanted a civil war in Afghanistan through a fight between the Taliban and Afghan forces,” Nasrallah continued. “[And] the Americans… came out as humiliated, losers and defeated.”

Indeed, he added, not only did the US-led NATO mission in Afghanistan “fail miserably,” but Biden’s behavior showed that Washington couldn’t be counted on to “fight on behalf of its allies.”

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2021/08/whats-in-store-for-the-women-of-afghanistan/

With Afghanistan to all intents and purposes now restored to the Taliban’s control,  the most devastating and tragic impact will be felt by women and girls. As Greg Sheridan has written in The Australian:

We are about to witness one of the worst tragedies for women and girls in modern history. From now on, once more, young girls, pre-teens, will be married off too much older men, often enough with multiple wives. Young girls won’t be allowed to go to school, they won’t be allowed to learn to read and write, let alone sing, they won’t be allowed to practice most careers, they won’t be allowed to go the bazaar without the permission, and generally the presence, of their controlling male relative.

Senator Amanda Stoker from Queensland also commented on Facebook, “Afghanistan’s women and children, who are—as shown by the photo (above) of pictures of women being painted out of the public eye—likely to face great suffering in the time ahead.”

The ABC is also reporting:        

For Afghan women, their increasing power is terrifying.

In early July, Taliban leaders, who took control of the provinces of Badakhshan and Takhar, issued an order to local religious leaders to provide them with a list of girls over the age of 15 and widows under the age of 45 for “marriage” with Taliban fighters.

If so-called progressives are  true to form, they will gloss over these actions as not representing “true Islam” but of militant extremists. This is anything but the case. What follows is a ten-point summary of what the religion of Islam actually teaches.[1]