RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/twists-and-turns-add-doubt-to-haitis-assassination-investigation-11628071201?mod=cxrecs_join#cxrecs_s

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti—After he climbed the bloodstained staircase, Carl Henry Destin found a baffling scene.

The Haitian president lay dead on the floor, with multiple gunshot wounds. Every drawer was flung open, and papers were scattered as if someone had been searching for something.

“The bedroom had been totally ransacked…documents everywhere,” Mr. Destin said. “There were a lot of witnesses, but they didn’t want to talk.”

Mr. Destin, a judicial officer often tasked with logging evidence at a murder scene, counted dozens of bullet holes and their locations at the presidential residence. He was struck by the chaos of the scene and the thin recollections from the bystanders who described little more than hearing the clatter of gunfire.

Outside, police frantically halted traffic as they searched for Colombian mercenaries they said had been running through the narrow streets of the hillside neighborhood.

Nearly a month after Haiti’s 53-year-old head of state, President Jovenel Moïse, was killed on July 7, the circumstances remain just as murky, with no shortage of suspects and speculation—and more new questions than answers. Complicating matters: key investigators, including Mr. Destin, are in hiding, saying they are being threatened and fear for their lives.

Haitian police have implicated more than 40 people in a plot to kill the president of one of the world’s poorest countries, in a conspiracy they say ran from working-class towns in the high Colombian Andes to the Miami suburbs.

But no clear motive or mastermind has emerged in the investigation.

In a jail near the country’s airport are 18 former soldiers from Colombia suspected in the plot; another three are dead after police said gunbattles broke out in the hills of the crowded capital of Port-au-Prince.

The men deny killing the president, and say they were on a lawful drug-enforcement mission and were set up to take the blame. One Colombian suspect in custody told a visiting human-rights lawyer that the president was already dead when he arrived on the scene.

Police have also detained a barely known Florida-based Haitian-born preacher who they say attempted to install himself as Haiti’s interim ruler. Haitian politicians say they have never heard of the man.

Several senior police officers, including Mr. Moïse’s own security chief and members of his detail, have been arrested. No one has yet explained how the attackers so easily entered the residence and carried out the crime.

The following account is based on more than a dozen interviews with legal officials, political advisers, diplomats, judicial officers and lawyers briefed on the investigation, and several currently under arrest, including Jean Laguel Civil, the head of presidential security.

The Wall Street Journal reviewed WhatsApp messages among some of the suspects and audio recorded during a private planning meeting involving the Colombian ex-soldiers. Documents recording testimony given by key witnesses and photos taken during and after the chaotic melée that led to the death of the president were also reviewed.

The information, which includes details that haven’t previously been reported, adds to questions about the official outlines of the investigation.

“I really don’t trust any immediate leads of what we’ve heard so far,” said Georges Fauriol, a Haiti expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank. “The story simply doesn’t add up.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/iran-nuclear-deal-jcpoa-military-biden-ebrahim-raisi-11628101285?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

Mohammad Khatami, an affable, intellectual cleric who believed in the Islamic revolution but wanted more humanity and democracy in government, unexpectedly won the Iranian presidential election on May 23, 1997. His victory marked the beginning of the Western left’s conviction that the clerical regime was evolving into a less religious and oppressive system.

But that isn’t panning out. Ebrahim Raisi, a cleric renowned for his ruthlessness, became president this week and is the apparent successor to Ali Khamenei as supreme leader. Joe Biden may be forced to answer a question presidents have preferred to avoid: Would Washington use force to stop the development of Iranian nuclear weapons? American presidents since 2002, when the Islamic Republic’s clandestine atomic program was revealed, have declared that Iran’s possessing such arms is unacceptable.

President Biden appears unprepared to unleash the U.S. Air Force, and the administration can’t plausibly argue that opening up more trade hurts the theocracy’s aggressive, Islamist ambitions. This leaves few options beyond economic penalties. The White House probably doesn’t appreciate the irony of its now reportedly contemplating leveling more sanctions on Tehran to coerce Mr. Khamenei to re-enter the nuclear deal, after Mr. Biden and his Iran team derided the sanctions diplomacy of Donald Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign.

The 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, with its sunset clauses and nonchalance about aggressive inspections, made sense as an arms-control agreement if the accord was merely one step in a process. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has, in his own way, stated exactly this, endorsing the need to make the agreement “longer, stronger, broader.” That wouldn’t be necessary if the JCPOA actually stopped, as former Secretary of State John Kerry put it, “all pathways” to the bomb and did something about the theocracy’s ballistic missiles and imperialism.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17611/iran-rouhani-presidency

[W]ith the Iranian economy on its knees and the country facing further international isolation, Mr Rouhani finds himself leaving office with his reputation in tatters and the ruling Islamic regime facing a desperate battle for survival.

Mr Raisi’s victory in Iran’s indisputably rigged elections in June should be seen not so much as a victory for the country’s ultra-conservative supporters of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei as a desperate attempt by regime hardliners to protect the Islamic revolution from mounting unrest.

So, far from being the president that transformed Iran’s fortunes for the better, Mr Rouhani will forever be remembered as one of the most disastrous leaders in the country’s history.

When Iranian President Hassan Rouhani leaves office today, Thursday, he will do so in the knowledge that his eight-year term has been little more than an abject failure, both at home and abroad.

Back in 2013, when the 72-year-old Mr Rouhani became Iran’s seventh post-revolutionary president, his central campaign pledge was to improve the country’s economic well-being. In addition he promised to adopt a more liberal approach to domestic policy while seeking to forge a more constructive engagement with the outside world.

Eight years later, with the Iranian economy on its knees and the country facing further international isolation, Mr Rouhani finds himself leaving office with his reputation in tatters and the ruling Islamic regime facing a desperate battle for survival.

Perhaps the greatest indictment of Mr Rouhani’s years of catastrophic misrule is that he is to be replaced by Ebrahim Raisi, known universally by Iranians as the “Butcher of Tehran.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/08/torching-canadian-coptic-church-unacceptable-raymond-ibrahim/

A Coptic Christian church was recently burned to the ground—not in Egypt, where the torching of Coptic churches is not an uncommon occurrence, but in Canada, also known as “the church-burning centre of the Western world.”

In the early morning hours of July 19, St. George Coptic Orthodox Church in Surrey, which served 500 families and provided food for the homeless, was set aflame and completely destroyed.  Only one charred wall remains standing.

According to the report, “The cause of the fire is still under investigation, but Surrey RCMP [police] said it is being treated as ‘suspicious.’ The St. George Coptic Orthodox Church was also the target of an attempted arson just last Wednesday, although authorities do not know if the two incidents are connected.”

What, exactly, do Canadian mounted police find “suspicious”?  The church was clearly targeted for arson, as evidenced by the fact that it was targeted for arson a few days earlier, and at the very same time (between 2:30-4:00 am).  On July 14, surveillance video captured a woman lighting a fire, one that failed to catch, at the church door.  That the “authorities do not know if the two incidents are connected” seems like wishful thinking.

What is deserving of the term “suspicious” is that, days after the church reported the first failed arson attempt to police—which should have led to better awareness and security for the church—another successful arson attempt took place.

After expressing its “immense sadness and pain” at the loss of the church, a statement from the Coptic Orthodox Diocese of Mississauga called on Premier John Horgan and the authorities to expedite the investigation, correctly observing that “The timing of this fire … raises many questions about what the authorities did to protect our church, especially considering the attempt on the same church this past Wednesday.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17606/betraying-cuban-people

Everyone knows that Biden’s hollow platitudes are utterly meaningless. “The United States stands with…” what, exactly, does that mean? What does “stands with” look like?

Here is the ugly truth: Biden does not care a damn about the Cuban people throwing off 60+ years of communism. Cubans are holding the largest anti-government rallies in decades. American media coverage has been near zero. Half of Biden’s White House staff probably does not understand what the president means by “repression,” admires Fidel and Raul Castro, and can be found wearing Che Guevara T-shirts on the weekends.

Cuban President and First Secretary of the Communist Party Miguel Díaz-Canel could order the machine-gunning of every protestor on the streets of Havana and the Biden administration would do nothing. Well, perhaps they might take the “strong action” of two weeks ago and sanction ONE Cuban government official, followed by the “stunning” sanctioning of TWO additional Cuban police officials. Díaz-Canel actually condemned protestors looking for food, calling them “counter-revolutionary mercenaries.”

Meanwhile, over on Capitol Hill, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Squad are advocating for programs and policies right out of the Cuban Communist Party’s playbook. They actually want the power outages, rationed medical care and food shortages ordinary Cubans are protesting against. Their militant ideology and policy proposals fit right into the anti-American, Marxist “Critical FILL-IN-THE-BLANK Theory” concepts taught from the Frankfurt School.

Under the Biden administration, the Cuban people will be ignored by the United States, again, as they have been for 60+ years. It is a horror for America — with brutal, bloody consequences for the innocent people that continue to hold out hope that America will finally help.

“Elections? What for?”
— Fidel Castro, January 1960

“The United States stands with the brave Cubans who have taken to the streets to oppose 62 years of repression under a communist regime.”
— President Biden, July 22, 2021

Take a look at the opening quotes to this essay, pause, and think about them. There is a long litany of American miscalculations, cowardice, gamesmanship, indifference, condescension, and exploitation centered on Cuba, the Cuban people, and Cuban-Americans. It has been a bipartisan problem for decades, with a lot of American political rhetoric; one double-crossed, failed invasion attempt; and brutal communist intransigence.

Everyone knows that President Biden’s hollow platitudes are utterly meaningless. “The United States stands with…” what, exactly, does that mean? What does “stands with” look like? Has Biden dispatched operational detachments from 7th Special Forces Group to parachute into Cuba, raise and train a partisan army to overthrow the Communist government, and establish a democratic republic? No? Why not? For that matter, why did President Trump fail to do that in Venezuela to Maduro? So much for the modern application of the Monroe Doctrine and the “American” Hemisphere.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/08/dr-charles-jacobs-video-arabs-and-muslims-have-frontpagemagcom/

This video is brought to you by a Freedom Center-Glazov Gang collaboration on a new exclusive webinar series, Teach-Ins for the Twenty-First Century. Join us as some of the leading thinkers and pundits on the scene today discuss key issues related to the coronavirus pandemic and its ongoing implications, confronting the Left, the jihad terror threat, and much, much more. And make sure to ask your own questions of our experts.

This new webinar features Dr. Charles Jacobs, the president of Americans for Peace and Tolerance who has been named by the Forward as one of America’s top 50 Jewish leaders.

Dr. Jacobs discusses Arabs and Muslims Have Black Slaves, exposing the outrage of modern-day Islamic enslavement of blacks in Africa — and why the Left doesn’t care about it.

He explains how this injustice arose and suggests things Americans can do to both combat the leftist abandonment of black slaves, and to help free the slaves.

Don’t miss it!

https://www.jns.org/opinion/how-do-you-say-deja-vu-in-farsi/

Protesters screaming “Death to the Dictator” began taking to the streets of Tehran on Monday, after rallies elsewhere in Iran erupted a earlier this month over severe water and electricity shortages in the drought-afflicted Islamic Republic.

The response to the very real plight of the Iranian people—whose latest rigged “election” ushered in President-elect Ebrahim (“The Butcher”) Raisi—was to send in militias to gun down the thirsty and disgruntled demonstrators.
Though the death toll is unclear, cellphone footage of security-force brutality has emerged on social media. It’s a familiar scenario.

The only wonder is that there are any citizens left in Iran who are brave enough to risk their lives in such an open fashion. Previous attempts at toppling the regime all have led to the same sorry result: the arrests, torture and murder of “dissidents,” and a subsequent enhanced crackdown on the public.

No surprise there.

Nor is the rejection by Iran’s Supreme National Security Council of the points of agreement reportedly reached in Vienna during the three months of negotiations towards a return to or improvement on the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. With Raisi slated to officially assume his role next month, and with the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden having been so transparent about its desire to re-enter the nuclear deal, Iran’s master puppeteer would be foolish not to keep up the pressure on the P5+1 signatories to the JCPOA to succumb to his demands.

Chief among these, of course, is a lifting of all international sanctions. But there are other conditions, as well, which have to do with the level of monitoring of nuclear facilities and allowances for the build-up of ballistic missiles.
According to multiple news analyses, if the talks in Vienna are postponed until after Raisi enters office, the whole process could be put on hold for months. Rather than applauding this development, however, the fantasists in America and Europe are worried.

Naturally.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17487/china-digital-currency

The real purpose of the new digital currency… seems to be… to challenge the long-standing global reign of the US dollar.

The new digital currency is part of the CCP’s ambition, as laid out in its new Five-Year Plan for the years 2021-2025, to digitalize China. The digitalization, in turn, is part of China’s ambition to become technologically independent of the West and to dominate global tech, and overtake the US as the world’s dominant power by 2049,” the 100th anniversary of China’s Communist Revolution.

Crucially, China’s new digital currency, in addition to increasing state control and surveillance in China.. .could affect the ability of the US, and other countries, to level sanctions at the Chinese government for its human rights abuses and other breaches of international law.

The US, on its part, does not appear ready for China’s challenge over the future of money.

“Not only are the American monetary authorities underestimating the threat posed to dollar dominance by China’s pioneering combination of digital currency and electronic payments. They are also treating the blockchain-based financial innovations that offer the best alternative to China’s e-yuan like gatecrashers at their own exclusive party.” — Niall Ferguson, historian, Bloomberg, April 4, 2021.

Communist China is adding another element to its toolbox of surveilling and controlling its population. Already known as the country in the world with the most pervasive surveillance and social credit system, China has now created a digital currency, the digital renminbi or yuan — also known as Digital Currency Electronic Payment (DCEP) — to ensure that hardly any transaction goes unregistered.

Unlike cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin, which are not issued by governments and therefore cannot be used as means of payment in most daily transactions, China’s digital currency is issued and controlled by China’s central bank.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the currency “is expected to give China’s government vast new tools to monitor both its economy and its people. By design, the digital yuan will negate one of bitcoin’s major draws: anonymity for the user.”

“DCEP is the antithesis of Bitcoin. The ultimate goal of a cryptocurrency is the separation of money and state,” said Stewart Mackenzie, a cryptocurrency expert based in Hong Kong. “It’s easy for them to say that it’s like Bitcoin when it’s worlds apart.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17580/bangladesh-passport-israel

Whatever the public perception and the explanations by cabinet members are regarding the passport issue, the government of Bangladesh has taken a big step forward by removing the clause. At least, from now on, the state will not be able to prosecute someone for visiting Israel. As an extra benefit, the country’s declared foreign policy of “friendship to all and malice towards none” will be more meaningful as well.

Recently, the government of Bangladesh dropped the infamous phrase “this passport is valid for all countries of the world except Israel” from its new passports. Those words had been prominently inscribed since the country’s independence from Pakistan in 1971. Six months ago, when Bangladeshi government introduced a new machine-readable passport with an electronic chip, the “except Israel” clause was quietly erased with no public announcement. The change was, in a sense, classified.

In early May, a man went to the passport department headquarters to collect the passports of his mother and brother, when he noticed that the clause had been omitted. Through social media, the news went viral. Now it has become a national issue of debate.

Having been informed of the news, the deputy Director-General for Asia and the Pacific with the Israeli Foreign Ministry, Gilad Cohen, joyfully tweeted: “Great news! #Bangladesh has removed travel ban to Israel. This is a welcome step & I call on the Bangladeshi government to move forward and establish diplomatic ties with #Israel so both our peoples could benefit & prosper.” The reactionary comments to his tweet from Muslims are notable.

The Jerusalem Post wrote: “Bangladesh has reportedly lifted its travel ban in an unexpected move….” In Bangladesh, however, several cabinet members, especially the home minister and the foreign minister, apparently felt pressure. The reaction had been enormous.

On May 30, the Islamic Movement Bangladesh, a religious party, demanded reinstatement of the clause and a judicial investigation against “the culprits involved in the misdeed”. The leftist parties’ alliance of Bangladesh insisted on revoking the decision. The Palestinian Authority’s ambassador to Dhaka, Yousef Ramadan, told local media that he was “saddened” by Bangladesh’s move not to single out Israel in its passport.