RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17433/hamas-iran-gaza-cemetery

The Arabs are aware that Hamas’s only interest is to appease the mullahs in Tehran for the sake of milking them for more money and weapons. The Arabs understand that this just is another farce by Hamas and particularly Iran.

It is… refreshing to see how many Arabs are aware of the dangers of Iran’s involvement with Palestinian terrorist groups that seek the elimination first of Israel, then of them.

“The Hamas militias in the Gaza Strip belong to Iran…. Iran wants to use the Palestinian issue as a winning card at the Vienna negotiations….. to force the US to lift the sanctions on Iran in return for ending the security escalation which threatens Israel…. Iran’s weapons are for destruction, not construction.” — Amjad Taha, prominent Arab journalist, Twitter, May 27, 2021.

“The more killing and destruction, the more Hamas’s income increases while the Palestinians continue to suffer from siege and poverty.” — Saeed Al-Kahel, Moroccan writer and political analyst, Assahifa, May 29, 2021.

“Iran exploited Hamas and the Islamic Jihad for its own benefit only, and if it wanted the interest of the Palestinians, it would have contributed to the reconstruction of the Gaza Strip…. Tehran has not contributed or made donations for humanitarian or reconstruction projects in Gaza….” — Samir Ghattas, former Egyptian parliament member and head of the Egyptian Middle East Forum for Strategic Studies, Al-Arabiya.net, May 26, 2021.

The Egyptian expert [Muhammad Mujahid Al-Zayyat, a consultant at the Egyptian Center for Thought and Strategic Studies]… is joining other Arabs in warning the Biden administration and the Western powers against allowing Iran to be rewarded for Hamas’s war of terrorism against Israel.

It now remains to be seen whether the Biden administration and the Western powers will heed this warning or continue to bury their heads in the sand, pretending that the mullahs in Iran, in exchange for massive bribes from the US, will magically change their savage stripes. They did not last time; what will happen to the region if they again do not?

Hamas’s claim that it “won” the last war with Israel has become the subject of ridicule and mockery by many Arabs who are not afraid to call out the Iranian-backed terrorist group for lying to the Palestinians and the rest of the world.

The Arabs are also not afraid to hold Hamas responsible for the massive destruction and the loss of the lives of innocent Palestinians and Israelis in order to serve the interests of its masters in Iran.

Scenes of Palestinians celebrating the Hamas “victory” sparked a wave of condemnations in the Arab world, especially in the Gulf states. The reactions of the Arabs to Hamas’s self-proclaimed victory shows that many in the Arab world are not fooled by the terrorist group’s propaganda machine. The Arabs are aware that Hamas’s only interest is to appease the mullahs in Tehran for the sake of milking them for more money and weapons. The Arabs understand that this just is another farce by Hamas and particularly Iran.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17434/biden-and-the-ayatollah-game-plan

[I]n dealing with the mullahs it is appeasement that encourages war.

[N]o sooner had Biden’s appeasement squad been deployed than Ayatollah Ali Khamenei… revive[d] the embers of several conflicts into blazing flames.

The revised budget… includes a 62 percent raise in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ share. The Quds (Jerusalem) Force, which is in charge of exporting revolution and keeping the pot boiling in Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Gaza, sees its budget increased by almost 40 percent. Some estimates put the total increase of Iran’s military budget since 2019 at around 150 percent

[Khamenei’s] kind of war is labelled in many different ways: proxy, asymmetric, low-intensity, low-cost, cottage industry war…. he pursues it through surrogates and mercenaries recruited in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Gaza and Yemen.

According to best estimates the Islamic Republic has spent around $20 billion in its various low-cost wars since 2000, a relatively modest sum compared to the huge cost of a full-scale war…. the regime needs a minimum of $60 billion a year to cover its basic costs and survive while continuing its decades-long campaign to de-stabilize the Middle East in the hope of what Kayhan, a mouthpiece for Khamenei, describes as “the inevitable tsunami of Islamic revolution”….

Blinken talks of his hopes for a “breakthrough”… Khamenei, too, wants a breakthrough based in a promise to enrich the uranium he does not want or need at a lower grade in exchange for the cash flow he does need to reactivate his momentarily interrupted special kind of war against the US and its regional allies, indeed against what is often known as ” the world order”.

Fear of an illusory war may lead to a deal which would allow a real war to continue behind the façade of an illusory peace.

Last February, when the new Biden administration launched its promised bid for a revival of the Obama “nuclear deal” with the Islamic Republic, apologists described it as an attempt at preventing another Middle Eastern war. This echoed the old mantra that in dealing with the Khomeinist regime, the choice is between appeasement and full-scale war.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17411/goran-adamson

In 2017, three out of four people suspected of murder in Sweden were migrants — a figure that seems frightfully high. The funny thing is that the Swedish Social Democrats, and others you might call multiculturalists — the “politically correct” — they have not been interested in investigating this, even though these are issues that Swedish people are talking about.

In Sweden, however, what people talk about are “socioeconomic factors” — which they claim are the causes behind everything: crime, rape, marginalization, exclusion, unemployment and financial issues. The multiculturalists link these issues to our country and say they are something we are to blame for. Those are completely different from culture, which is something that people bring with them when they come to Sweden.

“Culture,” they repeat over and over again, “has nothing to do with it!” So we ask them, “Then how do you explain that migrants from, say, Vietnam or Thailand, have a far lesser propensity for crime than migrants from other parts of the world?”

Orwell said something like, “I know enough about the working class not to idealize it.” You can apply the same concept to… fantasies about other cultures: the fact that we know very little about them because if we knew enough… we would not idealize these countries the way many academics in Sweden, Paris, or London are doing: we would know too much.

Another aspect here relates to when migrants come to Sweden. They are greeted by those who know very little about their own culture, who care very little about it and who are happy to compare it unfavorably to other cultures. Almost like a pastime. “Oh, you know, the way we treat homosexuals or women or migrants or structural racism in Sweden…” It is simply not true. We all have these dinners and just sit around and harass our own country, and everyone else does the same and we love it.

If people come to Sweden, how are they supposed to respect Swedish culture if we do not respect it ourselves? But in Sweden, we are not allowed to do that. In basically every other country, every other culture, people have a certain respect — even in dictatorships, they love their country, the tradition, and so on. In dictatorships, of course, if they do not love their country, they are not allowed to say so. If Sweden is such a bad place, why is everyone coming here?… No one is escaping from Sweden to Yemen.

It is as if we simply cannot accept the fact that we are fortunate and privileged because it goes against our own self-deception…. This whole self-critical, self-harassing attitude is a perfect way to avoid the kind of shame of being privileged. This self-critical attitude among scores of Western elites can only occur in wealthy societies. It is an odd fruit among those who are troubled by the fact that they are privileged and fortunate. But why on earth be troubled by it? Why be ashamed by all those before us who made our country so successful? This is just head-spinningly grotesque.

So, this is a one-sided tolerance: self-criticism, even if sometimes possibly justified, is replaced by self-annihilation. An idea fostered from above by political elites whereby Western cultures, Western traditions, Western ideas are being dismissed for the benefit of some kind of multicultural veneration and idealization of anything exotic — the more exotic, the better.

You could say that this whole focus on…. sexual identities and so forth sounds not only like sidetracking, but also an attempt to… engage people in… relatively unimportant battles while there are much more important battles to be fought. Most prominently, the battle against globalization, neo-liberalism, the dismantling of national borders, and the intensifying aggression of predatory nations. Those are the most important.

Göran Adamson, an associate professor of sociology with a PhD from the London School of economics, is engaged in public debate in Sweden focusing on issues of free speech and diversity; and an outspoken critic of “multiculturalism.” His most recent book — Masochist Nationalism: Multicultural Self-hatred and the Infatuation with the Exotic — was published by Routledge in March 2021.

Grégoire Canlorbe: You have been working on a statistical study of the relationship between ethnic background and crime in Sweden. Have you found a connection?

Göran Adamson: Important information was just revealed in an update of the 2005 prevention agency report I recently headed — a completely private initiative. It had been almost 20 years since the Swedish state had done any research about the relationship between migration and crime. The two most salient features we found were that that among people who were suspects or were, with good reason, suspected of a crime were migrants. The result was more than half — about six out of 10 in Sweden. When it comes to the murder rate, people suspected, with good reason, of murder made up about 73% or 74%. In 2017, three out of four people suspected of murder in Sweden were migrants — a figure that seems frightfully high. The funny thing is that the Swedish Social Democrats, and others you might call multiculturalists — the “politically correct” — they have not been interested in investigating this, even though these are issues that Swedish people are talking about. Maybe the most important issue — and the reason why the other party, Sweden Democrats, has become so huge over the last 10 years; they are now almost the biggest party in Sweden — like Marine Le Pen’s National Rally Party in France. I think if you check the migrants who are the most likely suspects of crime, many of these people are, regrettably, Muslims — the risk that this person has committed a crime is about roughly three times higher than for a Swede. So, sadly you could say that there is a link.

If you were to say that crime among migrants has to do with culture, I think unfortunately it is fair to say that an association has to be made.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/taiwans-leader-hurt-by-recent-setbacks-11622907613?mod=hp_lead_pos5

TAIPEI—Taiwan and its leader, Tsai Ing-wen, were riding high last year as the island fended off the coronavirus, expanded its economy and won vocal support from Washington.

Now, President Tsai faces a trio of setbacks threatening to dent her popularity amid increasing pressure from China: a crippling drought, ongoing blackouts and Taiwan’s worst-yet surge in Covid-19 cases.

Some of the tension has eased in recent days. It has rained again, and more vaccines are on their way. Still, the confluence of crises is creating a rare opening for the opposition Kuomintang, or Nationalist Party, which has struggled for a path back to relevance and which favors closer ties with Beijing.

Ms. Tsai—who thumped the Kuomintang last year to win a second term in office—has seen her popularity plummet to below 50% for the first time since her re-election in one poll run by a former member of her party.

The crises have dented her image as a pragmatic and capable technocrat, and complicate her efforts to maintain a delicate status quo with an increasingly assertive Beijing, which never ruled the democratic island but claims it as part of Chinese territory.

Though Ms. Tsai is unable to run again for re-election, the crises are chipping away at the political fortunes of her Democratic Progressive Party.

“Popularity and elections are not our priority at this moment. It’s people’s health,” a spokeswoman for Taiwan’s Presidential Office said, adding that the administration is aware of and open to the criticisms.

With Covid, the Taiwanese leader is in part a victim of her own success. More than 2½ weeks of daily triple-digit increases have brought the island’s total number of cases to 10,956, with 224 deaths. Those numbers are relatively small but still startling for a population that previously had fewer than 1,200 cases, thanks to a swift response to the initial outbreak last year.

https://melaniephillips.substack.com/p/facing-a-tsunami-of-antisemitism?token

The tsunami of antisemitism over the past few weeks is the work of an axis of anti-Jewish evil that spans continents and has the whole Jewish world in its cross-hairs in both Israel and the diaspora.

It’s the product of an alliance between the Islamic world and the western left, making common cause against the Jewish people ostensibly over the Palestinian issue.

In both Britain and America, antisemitic attacks have been going through the roof. Jews have been singled out for assault in the street and in restaurants, baited on social media or from passing cars, their synagogues attacked and their children harassed in school.

These attacks were triggered by the 11-day Israeli bombardment of Hamas in Gaza aimed at stopping the thousands of rocket attacks against Israeli towns.

Despite Hamas’s war crimes against both Israeli and Gazan civilians — and despite the incitement to mass murder of Jews by the Palestinian Authority and the consequent terrorist attacks on Israelis in Jerusalem that preceded the hostilities in Gaza — the western media added to this incitement by recycling Hamas propaganda and falsely depicting the Israelis as wanton killers of Palestinian children.

This trans-national neo-pogrom is thus being facilitated by western elites who, if they aren’t actually taking part in this war against the Jewish people either on the streets or in the media, are piously wringing their hands but not taking the action necessary to put a stop to it.

The flimsy veil has therefore been torn off the hypocritical west to reveal a culture that is predominantly either hostile to the Jewish people or indifferent to their fate.

It treats no other people in this way. The killing of George Floyd produced breast-beating denunciations of “white privilege”; mass movements of illegal immigrants across the English Channel or the Mexican border with America elicit savage condemnation not of the migrants but of anyone who wants to stop this traffic; but when it comes to antisemitism (with some honorable exceptions), people look the other way.

Yet the reaction to all this by diaspora Jews has been woefully weak — a combination of outraged protest at the attacks with a refusal to acknowledge the shattering implications of what’s happening.

A video podcast made by a British Jew illustrates this skewed reaction. He was responding in particular to the recent shocking antisemitic episode in London where a masked youth was filmed telling a Muslim crowd: “We’ll find some Jews here … We want the Zionists, we want their blood!”

Minutes earlier, another Muslim had whipped up the mob against the “terrorist apartheid state of Israel” by declaring: “We love death”.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17431/iran-fake-elections

The unelected Guardian Council has a history of arbitrarily disqualifying reform-minded candidates, women and those who are perceived as disloyal to the principles of the state and the Islamic revolution, from running for office.

Out of 592 individuals who registered to run as candidates in the Iranian regime’s 13th presidential election, the unelected Guardian Council only approved seven individuals to run for the presidency.

Of course, for the ayatollah, the elections are “flawless” because his regime gets to pick who runs.

Instead of condemning the mullahs for this charade of fake elections, the Biden administration — after feathering the nests of American enemies such as Russia and China — continues to try to make a deal that will not be kept, shower Iran’s regime with masses of money it demands from America’s hard-working taxpayers, and lift sanctions to further empower yet another corrupt and predatory regime.

Iran’s presidential “elections” will be held in less than three weeks. Do not, however, be deceived by any narrative that suggests the mullahs’ system is democratic or that the people of Iran freely or fairly get to elect their president.

Iran’s mullahs claim that the Islamic Republic is a “democratic” system of governance. Iran’s Supreme Leader recently boasted about the Islamic “democracy,” the regime’s political system and people’s crucial role in influencing and shaping the political establishment:

“The Islamic Revolution transformed the rule of a country from a despotic monarchy into a popular, democratic republic run by the people. Today, the nation of Iran rules over its own destiny. It is the people who choose. They may make a right choice or a wrong choice, but it is they who choose. This is very important.”

In reality, though, the Iran is an authoritarian, theocratic regime masquerading as a democracy. The ordinary people of Iran do not run the system and have no influence whatsoever in choosing who will be their leaders.

To clarify, let us begin with the top position in the Islamic Republic: the Supreme Leader. The Supreme Leader of Iran is not elected. This position is held by an ayatollah who enjoys the final say in the nation’s domestic and foreign policy issues; who is the chief of Iran’s military institutions including the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), its elite branch the Quds Force and the paramilitary group Basij, and who also appoints the IRGC’s senior cadre and generals and the head of the judicial system.

Next in line are the positions of the president and members of the parliament (Majlis) in the Iranian regime. The President of the Islamic Republic basically does not have power. He acts as a puppet for the Supreme Leader and the IRGC, and facilitates their achieving their parochial and ideological goals, both regionally and internationally. One example, for instance, is the 2015 nuclear deal that the Iranian president reached with the US Obama administration and getting sanctions lifted for the Iranian regime.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/06/the_islamification_of_large_parts_of_england.html

In 1981/1982, for my junior year abroad, I attended Leeds University in Leeds, a city in Yorkshire, up in the north of England. At the time, being there was tremendously satisfying because, while southern England was then a very international (and tourist-ridden) region, Leeds was still extremely British, as was the surrounding countryside. By 2004, though, while in Florida, I met a woman from Leeds who told me that large parts of Yorkshire had come under Muslim control. A new book reveals that, in the ensuing 17 years, it’s only become worse.

Ed Husain, a former Muslim radical who is now a professor at Georgetown University, traveled across England to find out just how much Islamification has occurred in the country that provided the template for American liberties. What Husain found is disheartening, especially in the north of England where Islam took root while London ignored it.

Bradford, for example, is a former industrial hub about 25 minutes east of Leeds. It was a quintessentially England manufacturing city during the industrial revolution. Now, though, as Husain described to the Daily Mail, it’s becoming a hardline Islamic city:

In nearby Bradford, Ed was amazed by the lack of white English people in the city, and asked a Muslim taxi driver ‘where they are’.

He was told they had all ‘gone with the wind.’

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17432/china-coronavirus

Even if the coronavirus did not start out as a biological weapon, the world now has enough information to conclude that China’s regime turned it into one.

Proponents of sovereign immunity make valid points, but there are overriding factors. Crimes against humanity are so heinous that no one should be barred from seeking compensation.

Plaintiffs, at least as a technical matter, should be able to overcome the sovereign immunity defense: The Communist Party of China, which controls the Chinese central government, is not a sovereign.

As of this moment, 3,579,000 people have died from COVID-19, including 596,000 Americans. The Chinese regime committed mass murder…. Mass murderers do not deserve sovereign immunity protection.

It is absolutely essential that the Biden administration disabuse Chinese leaders of the notion that they can spread the next pathogen, or whatever else they are planning, without a cost.

Let us remember what is at stake. In China’s laboratories, researchers are now cooking up far more deadly pathogens than SARS-CoV-2, including those that would leave the Chinese immune but sicken or kill everyone else.

For the first time in history, one country has attacked — at the same time and in one audacious move — all the other ones.

China committed that horrific crime by taking steps, in December 2019 and January of last year, to deliberately spread COVID-19 beyond its borders.

The international community must now impose the most severe costs on the Chinese regime to, among other things, establish deterrence. Why? China’s regime committed the crime of this century and may well be planning another horrific act.