RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/putin-and-consequences-11618266935?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

Most Americans haven’t noticed, but the world is becoming a more dangerous place by the day. The hottest current spot is Russia’s border with Ukraine and the Black Sea, where the Kremlin has amassed more forces than any time since its invasion of the Donbass region when Joe Biden was Vice President.

Vladimir Putin’s ambitions aren’t clear, though some think he wants to control the entire Black Sea coast, further squeezing Ukraine. An invasion to grab more Ukrainian territory is also possible. The U.S. Navy has dispatched two ships to the region.

On Monday the U.S. also joined the other G-7 foreign ministers asking Mr. Putin to cease and desist: “These large-scale troop movements, without prior notification, represent threatening and destabilizing activities. We call on Russia to cease its provocations and to immediately de-escalate tensions in line with its international obligations.”

Mr. Putin has never been one for “international obligations,” so don’t expect the G-7 to scare him—even when the foreign ministers also demand, as they did, that he follow “the procedure established under Chapter III of the Vienna Document.” International law: Such a lovely fiction.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken was somewhat more forceful Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press”: “So the question is: Is Russia going to continue to act aggressively and recklessly? If it does, the President has been clear there’ll be costs, there’ll be consequences.”

This sounds like a line in sand, and we’ll see how seriously Mr. Putin takes it. He might assume that a G-7 that can’t even agree to stop the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline from Russia to Germany might merely huff and puff and do nothing. China and Iran will also be watching to see how Mr. Biden, now in the Oval Office, defines “consequences” if Mr. Putin calls the G-7’s bluff.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/04/russia_and_the_new_middle_east_russias_predicaments_both_foreign_and_domestic.html

Russia is beset with predicaments both foreign and domestic.

Three alliances have been formed in the Middle East with which Russia must contend:

Iran and its puppets in Lebanon, Iraq, and Yemen;
Turkey, Pakistan and Qatar, which support radical Islamic groups, most importantly, the Muslim Brotherhood;
Israel and moderate Arab regimes (Abrahamic Jewish-Arab Alliance).

Russia maintains the balance of power among these three alliances, in order  to advance its own interests, exactly as the European powers did during their heyday in the 19th century.

One of her main tasks is ousting the United States from the region and simultaneously putting pressure on Washington in the global geopolitical games. (See addendum below) It is calculating, calibrated and clever realpolitik, contrasting with America’s ignorant, chaotic and inconsistent politics based on ideological, mercantile or personal preferences.

Israel is holding back the ambitions of both Iran and Turkey. This is a good thing from Russia’s point of view. In Libya and the Eastern Mediterranean, Israel is allied with the UAE, Egypt and Greece, which are holding back Erdogan. On a different front, Israel is cooperating against Iran and its proxies with Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Bahrain on all levels.

Russia is absolutely not interested in the victory of either Iran or Turkey. Below we will explain why Moscow sees the success of these states as a direct threat to itself.

The current alliance with the Oriental despots — Turkey and Iran — is not durable. Historically, Moscow’s relations with these countries have fluctuated in the “cold peace” – “hot war” range. We should remember that Moscow has a long and bloody history of relations with both of them, and all the peoples of Eurasia have a good memory.

Turkey

Justice and Development Party of Recep Erdogan is a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, which spreads its ideology among Muslims in North Caucasus, Tatarstan and Bashkortostan. The birth rate among the Muslims of Russia significantly exceeds the birth rate of the Slavic population, and in addition to this, gigantic masses of Muslim migrants from Central Asia rush to the Russian megalopolis.

In 2019 Muslim spiritual leader in Russia Mufti Rawil Gaynutdin said that in a decade and a half, up to 30% of Russia’s population will be Muslim. According to Archpriest Dimitri Smirnov, one of the leading figures of the Russian Orthodox Church, “We, as a Russian state, have 30 years left only …. Muslims will live in the European part, and the Chinese in the Asian part.”

The religiousness of Russian Muslims is much higher than that of the Russians themselves.  A militant Islam is rapidly infiltrating through the “soft underbelly” of Russia: the Volga region with ancient Russian cities Izhevsk, Cheboksary, Ufa, Penza, Saransk, and, of course, Kazan, the capital of Tatarstan, a large scientific and industrial center in the country.

https://www.jns.org/iran-reports-electrical-incident-at-natanz-a-day-after-advanced-centrifuges-spun-up

The accident caused no casualties or pollution and is under investigation, says Atomic Energy Organization of Iran spokesman • Former top Israeli defense official: “Israeli attack can’t be ruled out.”

Iranian state media reported an “incident” at Iran’s Natanz nuclear facility on Sunday, a day after advanced uranium-enrichment centrifuges were spun up at the site as part of its “National Nuclear Technology Day.”

Atomic Energy Organization of Iran spokesman Behrouz Kamalvandi told Iran’s Fars News Agency that the incident involved the electricity distribution network at the facility, and had caused no casualties or pollution.

The accident is under investigation, and additional information will be announced later, he said.

Giora Eiland, a former head of the Israel Defense Forces Operations Branch, said that the power outage could have been sabotage.

“According to reports, this was not a power cut that you can solve by flicking a switch back up,” he told Army Radio.

Eiland, who is also a former head of Israel’s National Security Council, said that the installation of new equipment at the facility might have created an opportunity for a potential attacker, “whether through cyber [means] or through other damaging means placed in centrifuges ahead of time.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17180/what-makes-erdogan-tick

At the end of the year, there was a Turkey in deep stages of cold-to-colder-war with the EU (in particular, with EU members Greece, Cyprus and France), Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, General Khalifa Haftar of Libya and the United States (over the S-400 dispute).

Not one of these state actors stepped back and appeased Erdoğan or changed policy in the face of Turkish hostilities.

In December, the Trump administration announced that the U.S. would sanction Turkey for its purchase of the Russian-made S-400 surface-to-air missile system….

All that must have made Erdoğan tick. Apparently cornered, Erdoğan launched a new charm offensive in November. He said Turkey’s future was in Europe – quite a radical departure from his usual histrionics that Europe is Islamophobic, fascist, racist and Europeans are “remnants of Nazis.”

Erdoğan’s tough guy manners have finally been decrypted by state and non-state actors in the former Ottoman lands.

“Erdoğan will not back down until you show him teeth. That’s what we did when we negotiated the (Syrian) ceasefire in October of 2019. We were ready to crush the economy.” — James Jeffrey, former U.S. special envoy for Syria (and former ambassador to Ankara), Al Monitor

A comparative analysis of where Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s aggressive war-mongering and assertive foreign policy — based on an imaginary Superpower Turkey — stood a year ago, and today’s relative Turkish composure at all problematic fronts should give us invaluable lessons on dealing with the wannabe sultan. The events during the past year offer precious experimental confrontations that reveal an answer to a question that concerns a rich menu of nations: What makes Erdoğan tick?

Erdoğan has threatened Europe several times with “sending millions of refugees your way.” On February 27, 2020, the Turkish government finally pressed the button to execute the threat: Millions of (mostly Syrian) migrants on Turkish soil were now free to travel to Europe; Turkish border gates were now open. Tens of thousands of these migrants (not only Syrians) were given free bus rides from Istanbul to Turkey’s land borders with Bulgaria and Greece, about 150 miles west of the Istanbul. In a declaration that looked more like propaganda talk than reality, Turkish Interior Minister Süleyman Soylu chimed in on March 1, 2020 that, in a span of three days, 100,000 refugees had already crossed the borders into Europe.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17270/france-macron-radicalism

There are also teachers who, possibly because they are scared, choose to bow their heads, give up teaching certain subjects and — when students shout anti-Semitic and anti-Western insults — to act as if they hear nothing. It has become almost impossible in most French high schools to talk about either Israel or the Holocaust.

Most journalists seem to prefer avoiding all discussion of the advance of radical Islam in France. They know that those who do so are immediately called “racists” or “Islamophobes” and are often threatened, prosecuted, sentenced to heavy fines or fired from their place of work.

Even though what the journalist Éric Zemmour said was accurate and verifiable, the CSA (Superior Audiovisual Council), said that to state certain facts constitutes an “incitement to racial hatred”.

In 2015, a French journalist compared the National Rally Party to the Islamic State. [National Rally President] Marine Le Pen responded by posting on Twitter two photographs of crimes committed by the Islamic State and added, “This is Islamic State”…. In court, the judge asked Le Pen, “Do you consider that these photos violate human dignity?”. Le Pen replied, “It is the crime that violates human dignity, it is not its photographic reproduction”.

“Fourteen months before the presidential deadline of 2022, … the supposition is that … Marine Le Pen, will necessarily be in the second round of the election and that whoever will face her is no longer guaranteed to win”. — Le Monde, March 22, 2021.

November 1, 2020. Didier Lemaire, a high school teacher who works in Trappes, a small town west of Paris, published an open letter in the left-wing magazine Le Nouvel Observateur. He spoke of the murder of Samuel Paty, another teacher, savagely beheaded two weeks earlier by a Muslim extremist. He denounced the submission of the French authorities to religious intimidation and the impossibility of the French school system being able to transmit any real knowledge of history or to give students the intellectual means to think freely. He said that in just a few years, the situation in the city where he worked has deteriorated markedly. Lemaire wrote:

“The year I arrived in the high school where I teach, the city’s synagogue had just been burned down and Jewish families forced to leave. After the 2015 and 2016 attacks in France, I got involved in preventive actions…. In 2018, seeing that my efforts collided with forces much more powerful than me, I wrote to the President of the Republic to ask him to act urgently to protect our students from the ideological and social pressure exerted on them, a pressure which gradually withdraws them from the national community. Unfortunately, no action was taken….

https://www.theepochtimes.com/how-a-political-prisoner-of-17-years-resisted-communist-cubas-persecution_3765484.html

After 17 years of political persecution and imprisonment at the hands of the Cuban communist regime, and having ultimately found refuge in the United States, Jorge Luis Antonis reflected on what he learned and what helped him resist oppression during a very difficult period in his life.

It was March 15, 1990. Luis was 25 years old. He and a number of others were enthusiastic about reforms and events at the time in Eastern Europe that signaled the fall of communism, such as the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall and the impending total collapse of the Soviet Union.

That day, Luis recalled being in a public venue where a broadcast was underway showing a speech Cuban dictator Raul Castro was delivering about the upcoming Fourth Congress of the Cuban Communist Party.

“I took the opportunity to openly declare myself as political opposition,” Luis told The Epoch Times’ “Crossroads” program, in Spanish.

Since Fidel Castro came to power in Cuba in 1959, citizens were systematically denied fundamental freedoms such as speech, association and assembly, movement, due process, and privacy. By 1990, nothing had changed—civil and political rights were still a figment of the imagination.

“Back then, it was a real defiance of the regime because there was basically no opposition activists, there were no human rights groups, or independent journalists,” Luis explained. “And there, I started shouting slogans in favor of change, in favor of democracy, in favor of respect for human rights. I was beaten brutally and I was sentenced to prison, charged with ‘verbal enemy propaganda.’”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17269/iran-between-illusion-and-reality

As for voter turnout, we now know that the regime has set the stage for an “historic event”. Revolutionary Guard chief Gen. Hussein Salami says the “Supreme Guide” has ordered “an epoch-making turnout” that his force will help assemble.

[I]t is clear that the “Supreme Guide” will not tolerate the slightest deviation from the course he has set: a revolution that he claims is moving from strength to strength. “Today we are stronger and America is weaker,” he said recently. One of his ideological gurus, Dr. Hassan Abbasi, aka “Dr. Kissinger of Islam”, goes further: “America is the sunset power,” he says. “We are the sunrise power!”

[The coming election] could end the illusion that the Khomeinist regime might change course and seize opportunity offered to it to re-join the global mainstream…. The four-decade pursuit of “behavior change in Tehran” would have to be reviewed.

Khamenei speaks of a “conspiracy” to force Iran to become a “normal nation” like everyone else and vows to never allow that to happen.

The Khomeinist system isn’t a Middle Eastern version of the people-based Scandinavian Social Democracy…. It is a despotism of the medieval kind with a pseudo-modern varnish borrowed from misunderstood Marxism.

The replacement of illusion with reality, no matter how bitter, may be good news after all.

The old script is out of the files and dusted, the décor shined and up, and the puppet-master testing the strings and flexing his fingers. But something is still missing: new puppets to make the show attractive to those who have seen the same old puppets once too often.

Got it? We are talking of the presidential election in the Islamic Republic in Iran, scheduled for next June but so far attracting little attention. In previous versions of the show, interest in it started up to two years before polling day as rival factions within the regime mobilized to reach for the prize or at least make an impression. On at least two occasions the rigmarole produced one pleasantly surprising result and one unexpectedly horrible one. On a third occasion, it triggered a nationwide prising that pushed the Khomeinist regime to the edge of collapse.

Those of us who had long conceded that this simulacrum of an election was an insult to human intelligence, nonetheless maintained an interest in it for at least two reasons.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/04/despite_bidens_efforts_the_mullahs_may_be_in_trouble.html

After years of struggle, Iranians finally gained the right to vote.  Their first election was held in August 1906.  However, one of the complaints Iranians had about the Pahlavi regime was that was the king would decide who would become prime minister or designated candidates for important government positions.  After the Shah’s fall in 1979, the Islamic Republic increased this election engineering.  Iranians now call them “magical elections.”  This year, though, Iranians are done with magic — and even Biden lifting some sanctions may not help.

Iran will hold a presidential election on June 18, 2021.  As always, Ayatollah Khamenei, the supreme leader, using so-called “legal” methods, will pick the head of the Judiciary, the Legislature, and the president.  The way this works is that the “Approving Council” filters out the candidates, and then the “Guardian Council” mass eliminates the candidates in favor of the candidate closest to the supreme leader.

In March, Khamenei himself acknowledged in a speech for the Iranian new year that there are complaints about how the Guardian Council operates.  He urged Iranians to ignore them.  “Our enemies want to destabilize the elections, and for this reason, they accuse the organizers of electoral engineering or accuse the Guardian Council or try to discourage people from voting by inducing the idea of ‘people’s ineffectiveness.'”

But the main issue in this year’s election is something entirely new: the distrust the Iranians feel for the government of Khamenei and President Rouhani has created a gulf too wide to close.  Many no longer consider the government legitimate, leading some to think that the situation is ripe for another revolution.  This is yet another aspect of how weak the regime is.  These are some indicators of that weakness:

Iranian’s economic conditions are getting worse every day with increasing prices, inflation of 65%, government corruption, and the closure of thousands of industrial units and production workshops.  Unemployment, the disappearance of the middle class, and the poor’s crushing poverty have up to half of Iranians living in shantytowns.  This phenomenon has pushed the Iranian economy to the verge of collapse.  (The National Council of Resistance of Iran, while a partisan activist site, has articles with data about Iran’s economic despair.)

The coronavirus pandemic has taken a toll on Iran.  Again, information comes from opposition sites (such as this one), but the facts do seem to bear out claims that the mullahs have handled COVID disastrously.  People say Khamenei has used the coronavirus as a defensive shield for the survival of his regime.  This has created deep mistrust between the people and the government in Iran.

When IRGC missiles downed a Ukrainian passenger plane, killing 176 people, and then tried a cover-up, Iran severely downgraded its world standing.

The bloody crackdown on protests in December 2017 and especially in November 2019 in more than 200 cities, where 1,500 people were killed by Islamic Revolution Guard Corps (IRGC) security forces, also weakened the regime from within.