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France to Vote on the Great Replacement of Western Civilization by Giulio Meotti

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17843/france-election-immigration

“It is like humidity in a house. Initially the threat is invisible….” — Boualem Sansal, Algerian novelist, L’Express.

Bfmtv interviewed Fewzi Benhabib, a resident of Saint-Denis. Since his arrival from Algeria 25 years ago, he found in France the ideology from which he was fleeing in his former country “For the Islamists, it is a question of Islamizing modernity, not modernizing Islam.”

Next year, France will decide to try to save itself or continue to sink. Either way, it will unleash a tsunami that will not stop at its borders and instead flood all of Western Europe.

“Where Islam takes hold, it is forever. Islamism is based on Islam, which no one has the right to criticize. But in your countries it also plays a role in democracy and in the rule of law. Islamism exploits these values. Since democracy recognizes all opinions, from the far right to the far left, it is obliged to recognize Islam as well. All those who do not commit attacks or violent acts are, in principle, protected in a state of law. Islamism thus immediately finds itself in a conquered terrain. It is necessary to fight Islamism from the beginning. Because it is like humidity in a house. Initially the threat is invisible, it penetrates the walls which, little by little, crumble. When you realize it is too late, you have to destroy everything to clean up. It becomes a mission impossible. France is at the stage where it has just discovered that Islam is eroding her home”.

This is how Algerian novelist Boualem Sansal, in L’Express, recently described the level of Islamization in France.

Iran’s Mullahs and China Empowered Under Biden Administration by Majid Rafizadeh

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17860/biden-iran-china-empowered

In another blow to the US, after many years of Iran trying to be a full member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), SCO members finally agreed in September to elevate Iran’s status from “observer” to “full member,” even though the global financial watchdog, the Financial Action Task Force, had placed the Islamic Republic on its terrorism financing blacklist.

The SCO is a political, military, economic and security alliance that currently includes China, Russia, Iran, Pakistan, India, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan. This alliance will likely… assist the mullahs of Iran to defy the West.

In the face of these critical developments, the Biden administration has remained silent

The Chinese regime is profiting as well. This [25-year deal with Iran], which appears similar to a colonial agreement, grants Communist China significant rights over the nation’s resources. Leaked information reveals that one of its terms is that China will be investing nearly $400 billion in Iran’s oil, gas and petrochemicals industries. In return, China will get priority to bid on any new project in Iran that is linked to these sectors. China will also receive a 12% discount and it can delay payments by up to two years. China will also be able to pay in any currency it chooses. It is also estimated that, in total, China will receive discounts of nearly 32%. Another secret element of the agreement has a military dimension: China will deploy 5,000 members of its security forces on the ground in Iran.

Such a strategic and economic deal is a clear win for the Chinese Communist Party…. China will have full authority over Iran’s islands, gain access to Iran’s oil at a highly deeply rate and increase its influence and presence in almost every sector of Iranian industry, including telecommunications, banking, energy, railways and ports.

For the ruling clerics of Iran, appeasement means only more weakness.

The Chinese Communist Party has openly been helping the Iranian regime evade US sanctions — most likely due to what reports have been referring to as the weak leadership and “top national security threat” of the US Biden administration.

This Communist Chinese salvage operation could partially explain why the ruling mullahs of Iran see no incentive to halt their nuclear program or come to the negotiating table.

Germany: Cologne Mosques to Begin Outdoor Broadcasting of Muslim Call to Prayer by Soeren Kern

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17858/germany-mosques-call-to-prayer

The city of Cologne, once a stronghold of Christendom in Germany, has authorized mosques in the city to begin sounding Muslim calls to prayer over outdoor loudspeakers. The move, ostensibly aimed at promoting multicultural diversity and inclusion, represents a significant step toward the cultural normalization of Islam in Germany. It is taking German multiculturalism into uncharted territory.

Critics say that comparing Islamic prayer calls to church bells is a false equivalence because the muezzin proclaims religious slogans such as “there is no god but Allah” and “Allahu Akbar” (“Allah is the Greatest”).

“The Muslim call to prayer is not like the ringing of church bells, which are a reminder of a scheduled worship service. Instead, it is a creed and a statement of political Islam, which has unfortunately been abused in many ways in recent years. The call ‘Allahu Akbar’ is not only a call to prayer, but it has also become the battle cry of jihad by Islamist terrorists.” — Necla Kelek, Turkish-born German Islam expert.

“It’s not about ‘religious freedom’ or ‘diversity,’ as Mayor Reker claims. The mosque operators want visibility. They celebrate the muezzin as a show of power over their neighborhoods.” —Ahmad Mansour, Israeli-Arab and German Islam expert.

“The Muslim call to prayer, the muezzin call, is now permitted in Cologne. Cologne’s Lord Mayor Henriette Reker calls this a ‘symbol of diversity.’ For me it is the opposite — a sign of discrimination…. In 2015, I had to flee from Bangladeshi Islamists because I publicly criticized Islamism. When I hear ‘Allahu Akbar’ from loudspeakers in Germany, I think of a lot, just not diversity…. The muezzin call reminds me of the killing of my six blogger friends by Islamists and the brutal repression of minorities…. This call from the speakers of conservative mosques is above all a show of power. The fact that the city of Cologne now allows the muezzin call with reference to tolerance is a sign of false tolerance for me.” — Shammi Haque, a Bangladeshi-born journalist in exile in Germany.

Acceding to demands from Islamic organizations sponsored by the Turkish government, the city of Cologne, once a stronghold of Christendom in Germany, has authorized mosques in the city to begin sounding Muslim calls to prayer over outdoor loudspeakers. The move, ostensibly aimed at promoting multicultural diversity and inclusion, represents a significant step toward the cultural normalization of Islam in Germany. It is taking German multiculturalism into uncharted territory.

What Does Joe Biden’s Health Have to Do with the Future of Taiwan? by Pete Hoekstra

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17844/taiwan-biden-health

The Chinese communists very much want to gain control of Taiwan, and the current intelligence assessment that the Chinese leadership is probably looking at is one that spells opportunity—a weak President, wary of foreign military entanglements, whose political fortunes are crashing, and in their analysis the real possibility of a transfer of power to an even weaker and less popular vice president in Kamala Harris, who has little foreign policy chops.

The bottom line—the next year will be a high-risk period between China and the United States where serious miscalculations could take place. And that is why… the Biden Administration must send a clear signal of support now for Taiwan.

What is China planning? More than 150 air incursions into Taiwan’s Air Defense Identification Zone, testing Taiwanese response capabilities, strategies, timing and other military capabilities. Are these just Chinese war games or is China getting close to invading Taiwan? These are just some of the many questions that U.S. and other world leaders are grappling with as they try to determine the plans and intentions of China’s President Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party.

Understanding “leadership intent” is one of the key priorities for intelligence collection and analysis. It is safe to assume America’s intelligence agencies are doing this with China and the Chinese are doing the same with the U.S. So, what does that have to do with U.S. President Joe Biden’s health and communist China’s intentions when it comes to Taiwan?

The Chinese are making serious assessments about what they can expect from the U.S. and the Biden Administration if they invade Taiwan. What are the plans and intentions of the Biden administration in regard to China and standing alongside the government of Taiwan? And while many here may not be thinking about it, they are also assessing Biden’s health and how that may impact U.S. response and timing.

In my experience as a member of the House Intelligence Committee, I can say we did focus on the health and wellbeing of key foreign leaders. My committee was briefed multiple times on the likely death of Cuba’s Fidel Castro in the 10 years I served on the Committee. Highlighting how difficult this task was, let’s just say they were wrong multiple times before they eventually got the assessment right.

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.