RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17610/persecution-of-christians-june

A Muslim father-of-four abducted a 13-year-old Christian girl, forced her to convert to Islam, and then “married” her…. He had also promised to pay the girl Rs.10,000 (US $63) per month for her services, but stopped paying her after a couple of months…. . She told her grandmother that she wanted to go home and was willing to sign anything to do so…. The following day, a visibly battered Nayab appeared before court and reaffirmed that she was 19-years-old and had converted to Islam of her own free will. — Pakistan.

[N]early a million people have been displaced since 2017 and thousands slaughtered…. “They say their goal is to set up a caliphate similar to ISIS in Iraq and Syria…. They ask, ‘Are you a Christian? Or are you a Muslim?’ If you’re a Christian, you’re killed. If you’re a Muslim, then you get the opportunity to quote some Quranic verses. And if you can quote them sufficiently, you save your life. Otherwise, you also get killed [sometimes by crucifixion].” — Todd Nettleton, The Voice of the Martyrs USA, Mission Network News, June 28, 2021, Mozambique.

Five Muslims entered the hospital he worked in, seized and left with him, and then killed him and left his body in the bush… “His killers, who are herdsmen, came to the hospital, specifically asked for [the Christian doctor] …. collected his money, took him away, and killed him without asking for ransom. “What did he do wrong?…. Everyone loved him, always smiling, and he was one of the most hard-working persons I have ever known. His hospital boomed because he was saving lives. If you had any problems, Emeka would be there to help.” — Morning Star News, June 21, 2021, Nigeria.

“Armed groups are destroying schools and hospitals. Teachers and pupils are being killed. They are even killing the sick as they lie in their hospital beds. Not a day goes by without people being killed… Many people are traumatized… A large-scale project is underway to Islamize or expel the indigenous populations. Anyone who has been kidnapped by these terrorist groups and managed to escape from them alive has told the same story. They were given the choice between death and converting to Islam.” — Bishop Paluku, Catholic World Report, July 28, 2021, Democratic Republic of Congo

The following are among the abuses inflicted on Christians by Muslims throughout the month of June 2021:

Pakistan

The Rape, Forced Conversion, and Child Marriage of Christians

A Muslim father of four abducted a 13-year-old Christian girl, forced her to convert to Islam, and then “married” her. According to the father of Nayab Gill, when the beauty school she was attending shut down due to the Covid-19 lockdown, Saddam Hayat, a local Muslim who ran his own beauty shop, “told me that rather than wasting time, Nayab should learn salon skills to help her in supporting the family financially. He even offered to pick her up from home and drop her off after work, assuring us that she was just like his daughter.”

Hayat had also promised to pay the girl Rs.10,000 (US $63) per month for her services, but stopped paying her after a couple of months. When the girl went missing on May 20, her frantic parents turned to Hayat, who claimed not to know where she was, and kindly offered to help them find her. He even instructed Nayab’s simple and trusting mother to fill out the missing person’s report in a way that did not implicate him.

“On May 26, we were informed by the police that Nayab was in the Darul Aman [women’s shelter] since May 21,” her father continued. “In an application submitted to a magistrate’s court, Nayab claimed she had willfully converted to Islam a month ago …”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17620/lebanon-ticking-bombs

Lebanon’s problems are deeply political. The consensus on which the Lebanese state was founded from the start has been badly shaken. Formal government structures have been duplicated, and at times replaced, by shadowy organs answerable to no one except, perhaps, foreign paymasters. The minimum rule of law that had survived many upheavals including a full-scale civil war has been replaced by the rule of the gunman.

The outside world cannot abandon Lebanon to its fate.

On the positive side, the region and beyond in the world needs Lebanon as a haven of contact, dialogue and peace, while a Lebanon turned into a platform for “exporting revolution” and real terror, along with drugs and dirty money, could harm everyone around or close to the Mediterranean basin.

In international politics, what do you do when you don’t know what to do but wish to appear to be doing something?

The answer is: you convene an international conference.

The gimmick started with the notorious Versailles Conference after the First World War that morphed into a series of photo-ops while real decisions were taken elsewhere and behind the scenes. More recently we had the grand Madrid Conference that was supposed to produce an unlikely peace in the Middle East but became an introduction to a new era of conflict in the war-torn region. Last week we have had a virtual version of the international conference on Lebanon, the second in 12 months and designed to mark the anniversary of the deadly explosion that tore Beirut apart.

The explosion shocked many, including France’s President Emmanuel Macron, out of years of inattention to the many time-bombs that were ticking in Lebanon for almost three decades.

The first conference ended with classical clichés about solidarity with the Lebanese people and sugar-coated with pledges to provide $295 million for helping rebuild the shattered capital. The second conference noted that none of those clichés have acquired any meaning and that the money promised has either not been disbursed or ended up in the pockets of the usual suspects. The only rebuilding that has taken place, albeit on a modest scale, has been done by NGOs with some help from Switzerland and a few other countries.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/08/false-phobia-symmetry-syndrome-lloyd-billingsley/

In recent weeks, more than 40 Christian churches have been torched in Canada, supposedly a response to abuse of indigenous people in residential schools. The arson campaign has drawn a variety of responses, including “Not much difference between Islamophobia and Christophobia,” from Vancouver Sun columnist Douglas Todd.

He defines Islamophobia as “dislike of or prejudice against Islam or Muslims, especially as a political force.” Christophobia is “Intense dislike or fear of Christianity; hostility or prejudice towards Christians.” From these definitions Todd extrapolates symmetry of action.

“In Canada there is now no shortage of shocking displays of both Islamophobia and Christophobia,” Todd explains. “There have been assaults on Muslims, some deadly. There has been arson attack after attack on churches.” In reality, it’s not quite so simple.

Islamophobia is an incantation to ward off any discussion of subjects such as Islamic jihad, hatred of Jews, and Muslim violence against non-Muslims. What Todd calls “Christophobia” is nothing more than hatred of Christians, next to anti-Americanism surely Canada’s strongest hatred, particularly among the ruling class.

In the Vancouver suburb of Surrey, “a Coptic Orthodox Church, frequented mostly by immigrants from Egypt, was destroyed by fire.” The Copts are an ancient Christian community that, as Raymond Ibrahim notes, suffers horrible persecution in Egypt, and in the Sinai Copts cry, “They are burning us alive!”

Coptic Christians flee this hatred, now going on in Canada. Since the Copts have nothing whatsoever to do with Canada’s residential schools, a different dynamic must be motivating the arson against the Surrey Coptic Orthodox Church. Todd does not explore all the possibilities but does note that police are “silent about these being hate crimes.”

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police “are certainly sensitive to recent events,” one RCMP sergeant told reporters, but “will not speculate as to possible motives.” If enraged mobs were burning mosques to the ground, one may be certain, it would be called a hate crime motivated by Islamophobia, and that would be proclaimed up front.

By contrast, “Christophophobia” was not invoked in 2017 when Habibullah Ahmadi, 21, attacked Christian grandmother Anne Widholm, beating the 75-year-old Windsor, Ontario, woman into a coma before she died from her wounds. No photo of the suspect was released, nor any investigation of his background. Habibullah Ahmadi was charged with second-degree murder but his possible motive was never explored. For one of the most brutal murders in Canadian history, the convicted murderer could possibly gain release from prison in 10 years.

Catholic Churches have been prime targets but arsonists recently torched the House of Prayer Alliance Church in Calgary, Alberta. “We are refugees,” Pastor Thai Nguyen told reporters, “We escaped from Vietnam to come here to get more freedom, to live, and we think it was a good country – and now it happened to our church. Maybe it is not safe to be here in Canada compared to Vietnam.” That nation is a Communist state, but police and reporters seemed uninterested in the possible motive for burning the refugees’ church. Prime Minister Trudeau, who cries “Islamophobia” at the drop of a hat, does not seem overly concerned.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17574/turkey-west-drifting-apart

In theory, Turkey is a NATO ally. In theory, also, Turkey is in negotiations with the European Union for full membership. In reality, both are illusions.

In April, the European Council on Foreign Relations surveyed more than 17,000 people in 12 European countries. The survey found that: “Turkey is the only country that more Europeans see as an adversary than a necessary partner…. Europeans understand there are aspects of their relations with Russia, China, and Turkey that make these countries rivals or even adversaries.”

The feeling of drifting apart between the Turks and Westerners is mutual and growing…. an inevitable result of Turkey’s top-to-bottom Islamization over the past two decades.

In theory, Turkey is a NATO ally. In theory, also, Turkey is in negotiations with the European Union for full membership. In reality, both are illusions.

In September 2010, Turkish and Chinese aircraft conducted joint exercises in Turkish airspace. In 2011, the Turkish government announced plans to build a ballistic missile with a range of 2,500 kilometers. In 2012, Turkey joined the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) as a dialogue partner. (Other dialogue partners were Belarus and Sri Lanka; observers were Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, Iran, and Mongolia.) Since then, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has said numerous times that Ankara will abandon its quest to join the EU if it is offered full membership in the SCO.

In September 2013, Turkey announced that it had selected a Chinese company for the construction of its first long-range air and anti-missile defense system. After Ankara scrapped that contract, it went on to acquire the Russian-made S-400 system, which resulted in Turkey’s suspension from the U.S.-led multinational consortium that builds the F-35 fifth-generation fighter jet. The S-400 controversy also triggered U.S. CAATSA sanctions against Turkey.

Turkey’s sociopolitical distance from the West has been growing steadily. New research, by the Turkish pollsters Areda Survey, has shown that:

54.6% of Turks view the U.S. as the biggest security threat to their country while 51% think the biggest threat is Israel; 31.1% think it is the United Arab Emirates; and 30.7% think it is Saudi Arabia.
35.5% of Turks consider the U.S. unreliable; 32.8% think it is a colonialist state.
72.2% object to any kind of cooperation with the U.S.
When asked with which one of the two countries Turkey should develop its relations, 78.9% said Russia against 21.1% who defended cooperation with the U.S.
58.2% of Turks think that Russia is their strategic ally.
69.3% think that the acquisition of the Russian S-400 system was the right decision.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/08/cries-freedom-biden-are-you-listening-clare-lopez/

Iran’s new president, Ebrahim Raisi, has not even been sworn in yet, but tensions both within Iran and around the Middle East are ratcheting up a in serious way. Protests that began in Iran’s southwestern Khuzestan Province over electricity blackouts and water shortages amidst the worst drought in 50 years have now spread nationwide. The Iranian people are in the streets in many of the country’s major cities, including the capital, Tehran. They have been massing in the streets and closing major roads and highways. Many Iranians blame regime corruption and mismanagement for the severe lack of electricity and water during the worst of the region’s blistering summer heat. In fact, Iran’s hydroelectric system is near collapse. And while Iranians first took to the streets of Khuzestan to protest the water shortage, their chants now are calling for the fall of the regime itself (“Death to the Islamic Republic”) and “Death to Khamenei!”, the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic.

The timing of these protests coincides with the elevation of Ebrahim Raisi to the presidency, with his inauguration scheduled for Thursday, 5 August 2021. Raisi’s June “selection” was openly arranged by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in a presidential campaign and voting that was boycotted in protest by most of the Iranian electorate. Raisi rose to power in the ranks of the judiciary and was the Judiciary Chief before being tapped as Iran’s next president. He is known and reviled for his savage violations of human rights, especially in his role on the Death Commission that sent tens of thousands of Iranian prisoners, many of them belonging to the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK), to their executions in 1988. In typical fashion – and likely preview of Raisi’s presidential role as the regime’s enforcer — Tehran has unleashed its security forces against the people, using live fire against demonstrators, disrupting Internet service, and carrying out sweeping arrests.

The intensity of Iran’s unrelenting domestic upheaval combines with an escalation of regional tensions that together are pummeling the regime. Sensing that developments are spiraling out of its control, the Tehran regime is lashing out in multiple directions, both at home and abroad. The situation in Lebanon is deteriorating as Iran’s jihadist proxy, Hizballah, is facing an ongoing economic and governmental crisis that shows no signs of abating. Recent rocket fire out of Lebanon into Israel has been met with retaliatory artillery strikes by the IDF, which also has been conducting air strikes inside Syria targeting Iranian weapons deliveries. Additionally, Israel has been launching maritime strikes against ships carrying Iranian oil and weapons in regional waters. Beset within and without, the Iranian regime hit back at Israel on Friday 22 July 2021 with a drone strike off the coast of Oman in the Arabian Sea against a Liberian-flagged oil tanker operated by an Israeli-owned firm. The attack against the Mercer Street killed two crew members. Although Iran initially denied being behind the attack, an Iranian TV network later admitted responsibility, claiming it was retaliation for an Israeli strike inside Syria.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/08/mustsee_video_hungarian_prime_minister_viktor_orbn_on_tucker.html

“Orbán is something rare in politics and unknown in America: He’s not just a politician but a statesman who puts his country’s interests front and center.”

On Thursday, Tucker Carlson conducted a fairly in-depth interview with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. It was a fascinating look at a classic liberal: Liberty-oriented values that don’t veer into anarchy, strong principles, and a healthy nationalism. The left has used “nationalism” as a dirty word since Hitler, as they seek a borderless world they control, but healthy nationalism means doing what Trump did: Putting your countrymen first, without regard for other nation’s demands that you subordinate your country to them – and that’s what Orbán does.

Orbán was born in Hungary in 1963 when it was still under Soviet control. As a child, he was a devoted communist, but his two years of military service turned him into a conservative.

Ironically, in 1989, it was a scholarship from the Soros Foundation that first took Orbán out of the communist bloc and saw him study political science at Oxford. He entered politics in 1990 and has consistently run as a liberty-oriented conservative, who believes in traditional Judeo-Christian values, a strong national identity, and individual liberty.

For most Americans, Orbán, who has been Prime Minister since 2010 (his second term in that office) might not have been a recognized name were it not for the fact that, in 2015, Angela Merkel opened Europe’s gates to millions of Muslim migrants, most of them single men. Orbán, despite being a member of the EU, refused to get with that program. If people want to immigrant to Hungary, he said, they must comply with its immigration laws, rather than just walking in.

Orbán has also presided over Hungary’s passing a set of laws that, while they would have been normative three or four decades ago, are now decried as gross violations of LGBTQ+ human rights.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/08/economist-softpedaling-islam-bruce-bawer/

Yes, sprawling Muslim families on lifelong welfare are draining the treasuries of Western Europe. Muslim imams rule ever more imperiously over sharia enclaves in major cities from Manchester to Marseilles to Munich. Muslim youth gangs have turned ever-expanding sections of those cities into war zones and caused increasing numbers of Jews to flee the continent. And Muslim husbands who keep multiple wives at once and treat them like property – while forcing their daughters into arranged cousin marriages – have made a joke of Europe’s supposed devotion to human rights and sexual equality.

But never mind! Banish your worries! For years, that most smug, supercilious, and self-important of glossy newsweeklies, The Economist, has been taking a special interest in Islam, and especially on the phenomenon of Islam in the West. And for years it’s been assuring us that Islam shouldn’t trouble our little minds – that any problems incorrectly associated with it have nothing whatsoever to do with Islam itself; that most of those problems are, when you examine them dispassionately, our fault in one way or another; and that in the long run everything will be just fine.

Why does The Economist’s take on this topic matter? Because the mag, ubiquitous on international flights between leading business hubs, arguably exudes even more of an air of obnoxious authoritativeness – of absolutely definitive definitiveness – than the New York Times.

Its secret? While other long-lasting periodicals like Time fade in significance (and try to stay alive by running ever more inane, sensational nonsense), The Economist, based in the two top global cities, London and New York – and publishing its articles in a language that is its own unique, precious cross between British and American English – postures itself as having taken the high road.

Marketing itself to upscale readers as a calm, cool, preternaturally sober-minded compendium of objective reporting from every corner of the earth (and its lack of bylines makes every sentence sound like an ex cathedra expert statement), The Economist has garnered a reputation as an indispensable source of trustworthy information for serious cosmopolites who consider it their responsibility as citizens of the world to stay well-informed.

Consequently, The Economist’s perennially reassuring pontifications on Islam have had a meaningful – and deleterious – impact.

Its logic on the subject seems always to have been more or less as follows: economies are all-important; globalism is all-important; open borders are all-important; and sooner or later, inevitably, dollars to doughnuts, all those gazillions of Muslim immigrants in the West – or their children, or maybe their grandchildren – will go off the dole, pour into the workforce, and, at long last, provide Western European employers with a vast and wonderful supply of cheap labor. And what a beautiful day that will be for the global economy!

My awareness of The Economist’s line on these matters dates back to 2006, when I published While Europe Slept, my book warning about the threat of Islam in Europe. In their review, the mag’s anonymous scribes looked down upon it with a world-weary sigh.

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.”