RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17342/iran-sanctions-relief

Iran’s economy is state-led. Significant parts of the economy are controlled by just two major entities: the Office of the Supreme Leader, led by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)…. The IRGC and its front companies have a stake in almost every sector of Iran’s economy such as construction, transportation, telecommunication, banking and insurance….

The Supreme Leader and the IRGC will be the first beneficiaries of any extra revenues; they will most likely use additional cash first to strengthen their military apparatuses and guarantee the survival of the Islamic Republic and their positions in it. Increased revenues would also allow the IRGC and the Supreme Leader to crack down more easily on any domestic unrest against their government.

The other priority of the regime is to export its revolutionary ideals to other countries….promoting the regime’s interests and ideology — including anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism.

The billions of dollars that Iran will gain from the Biden Administration’s potential sanctions relief will be directed towards sponsoring terrorism, funding and arming militia and terror groups across the Middle East, harming US national and security interests, undermining US allies, particularly in the Middle East, further advancing the regime’s clandestine nuclear program to obtain nuclear weapons, and suppressing the Iranian people by squashing their hopes of establishing a democracy there.

Is this what the Biden Administration really wants as its legacy?The extent to which the Biden administration is willing to go to appease the Iranian regime to revive the 2015 nuclear deal boggles the mind. During the current nuclear negotiations, the Biden administration has reportedly been offering increasing concessions and sanctions relief to the Iranian leaders.

Not only has the current US administration seemingly been planning a major rollback of nuclear and economic sanctions on Iran, it is also reportedly eyeing lifting non-nuclear sanctions, for instance those linked to terrorism, missile development and human rights. According to the Associated Press:

“American officials… have said they are open to lifting any sanctions that are inconsistent with the nuclear deal or that deny Iran the relief it would be entitled to should it return to compliance with the accord. Because of the complex nature of the sanctions architecture, that could include non-nuclear sanctions, such as those tied to terrorism, missile development and human rights.”

Through sanctions relief, the regime would be able to breathe a sigh of relief: it would be capable of increasing its oil exports, doing business with more countries and corporations particularly companies in Europe, and bringing in foreign investment.

What will the Iranian authorities do with increased revenues — potentially billions of dollars? Will they be grateful of the Biden administration and alter their anti-American policies? Who will be the beneficiary of this windfall?

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17333/france-islamism-civil-war

The warning comes amid a wave of jihadist attacks — including the beheading of a schoolteacher — committed by young men, none of whom were previously known to French intelligence services. The letter also comes after widespread public indignation over a French justice system compromised by political correctness — as evidenced by the refusal to prosecute an African immigrant from Mali who, while shouting “Allahu Akhbar” (“Allah is the Greatest”), killed an elderly Jewish woman by breaking into her home and pushing her off her balcony.

“Every Frenchman, whatever his belief or non-belief, should everywhere be at home in continental France [l’Hexagone]; there cannot and must not exist any city or district where the laws of the Republic do not apply.” — From an open letter signed by 20 retired generals, a hundred senior officers more than a thousand other members of the French military, April 21, 2021.

“What is written in this letter is a reality. When you have a country plagued by urban guerrilla warfare, when you have a very regular and very high terrorist threat, when you have more and more glaring and flagrant inequalities, when you have a part of our patriots who are breaking up from society, we cannot say that the country is doing well.” — Rachida Dati, mayor of the 7th arrondissement of Paris and former Justice Minister .

“These harmful drifts do not result from a moment of distraction but from a political direction driven by fundamentally corrupting ideological considerations.” — Marine Le Pen, French presidential candidate.

The open letter and Le Pen’s response come amid a spate of at least nine consecutive jihadist attacks in France, all of which were carried out by individuals who were unknown to French intelligence services, and who therefore were not suspected of being radicalized and consequently were not on a jihadist watchlist. The attacks suggest that French authorities have lost control of monitoring Islamic radicals in the country.

A group of retired generals has warned in an open letter that France is sliding toward a civil war due to the government’s failure to control mass migration and creeping Islamism in the country. The letter, which has broad public support, according to polls, also warns against cultural Marxism, runaway multiculturalism and the expansion of no-go zones in France.

The warning comes amid a wave of jihadist attacks — including the beheading of a schoolteacher — committed by young men, none of whom were previously known to French intelligence services. The letter also comes after widespread public indignation over a French justice system compromised by political correctness — as evidenced by the refusal to prosecute an African immigrant from Mali who, while shouting “Allahu Akhbar” (“Allah is the Greatest”), killed an elderly Jewish woman by breaking into her home and pushing her off her balcony.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/mexico-city-metro-system-overpass-collapses-killing-at-least-13-people-11620106656?mod=world_minor_pos1

MEXICO CITY—An elevated section of the Mexico City metro system collapsed and sent a subway car plunging toward a busy boulevard late Monday, killing at least 20 people and injuring about 70, officials said.

A crane was working to hold up one subway car left dangling on the collapsed section so that emergency workers could enter to check the car to see if anyone was still trapped. Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum said. She said 49 of the injured were hospitalized and seven were in serious condition and undergoing surgery.

Ms. Sheinbaum said a motorist had been pulled alive from a car that was trapped on the roadway below. Dozens of rescuers continued searching through wreckage from the collapsed, preformed concrete structure.

“There are unfortunately children among the dead,” Ms. Sheinbaum said, without specifying how many.

The overpass was more than 16 feet above the road in the southside borough of Tlahuac, but the train ran above a concrete median strip, which apparently lessened the casualties among motorists on the road below.

“A support beam gave way,” Ms. Sheinbaum said, adding that the beam collapsed just as the train passed over it.

Rescue efforts were briefly interrupted at midnight because the partially dangling train was very weak.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/i-grieve-for-my-native-india-11620078871?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

I’m an immigrant, happy and assimilated. I pay closer attention to America than I do to other parts of the world. This isn’t only because I live here. Settling in a country calls for integration that is meticulous, not just heartfelt. That doesn’t mean that I wall myself off from the world. Like many immigrants, I also pay near-obsessive attention to the land of my birth.

Previous immigrant generations needed to erase their old selves to become American. You were more American by being less Italian, or by letting the Greek or Serb in you dwindle. But America now demands less. I’ve never felt pressed to forget India, where I was born. Even if I’d wanted to, I wouldn’t be able, because of technology. An immigrant now can never let go of the country of his birth.

These days have been suffused with India. I’ve spent my waking hours reading and watching news, talking to people by telephone, taking in tweets and Facebook posts, all of which describe the enormity of India’s pandemic collapse. A decade ago, I spoke to Liberian immigrants who followed from afar that country’s battle with Ebola, and also to people from Haiti as they wrestled with the earthquake’s aftermath. They spoke to me of their impotence (at being unable to help), their guilt (being in America while relatives perished from precisely the sort of fate the immigrant moved here to avoid), and their gut-churning sense of distance from loved ones who’d been sickened or buried under rubble in Port-au-Prince.

I’m in close touch with my family. I speak daily to my mother, who is isolating at home in Delhi, and to my sister, who’s raising her Zoom-schooled sons in that city and doing her job as an elementary-school teacher. My brother works as an editor, putting out a publication whose reporters go out, masked and tireless, writing up the grim news they see. A part of that news was the death of his own wife’s father.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/democracies-abetted-irans-election-to-a-u-n-womens-rights-post/?utm_source=

The election of Iran, China, and other countries with delinquent human-rights records to the U.N.’s Commission on the Status of Women last month kicked off an international whodunnit.

According to the NGO U.N. Watch, at least five Western democracies eligible to vote on commission membership would have needed to support Tehran’s bid. Meanwhile, the U.S. government called the development “troubling” but declined to issue a sharper condemnation.

Human-rights advocates blame this ambiguous stance on the Biden administration’s efforts to reenter the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, as ongoing talks in Vienna get closer to producing an agreement to jumpstart the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. “The Biden administration has joined Canada and Europe in a most disciplined reticence to criticize the Islamic Republic’s mounting repression, in the hope that the lack of scrutiny will be seen by the regime as another concession to curb its nuclear program,” said Marian Memarsadeghi, a senior fellow at the Macdonald Laurier Institute.

The problems with Tehran’s participation in any international entity involving women’s equality should be self-evident. At a Monday morning U.N. Watch press conference that focused on Iran’s election to the commission, panelists, including Memarsadeghi and Shaparak Shajarizadeh, an activist who was jailed twice and assaulted for speaking out against Iran’s mandatory hijab law, pointed to Iran’s manifest hostility to women, including the fact that the age of marriage for girls is 13 and that domestic violence and marital rape are not criminally punishable. (Read more on this from Isaac Schorr.)

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17332/china-new-zealand-five-eyes

The survival of the alliance in its current form, though, is under threat after Ms Ardern’s administration announced that it was making improved trade relations with Beijing its priority, rather than maintaining its support for Five Eyes.

“No matter if they have five eyes or ten eyes, as soon as they dare to harm China’s sovereignty, security or development interests, they should be careful lest their eyes be poked blind.” — Zhao Lijian, the spokesman for China’s foreign minister, BBC, November 19, 2020.

New Zealand’s naive approach to the threat posed by Beijing not only poses a threat to the future of the alliance itself. There is a distinct possibility that Wellington could find itself being expelled from the alliance over its pro-Beijing stance.

As a senior Western intelligence official recently commented about New Zealand’s continued membership of the alliance, the country was now “on the edge of viability as a member” of the alliance because of its “supine” attitude to China and its “compromised political system”.

New Zealand’s socialist government may believe that it is a good idea to throw in their lot with China’s communist rulers. But by doing so, they risk sacrificing their future to domination by China’s despots.

China is making a deliberate attempt to create divisions within the elite “Five Eyes” intelligence-sharing alliance by forging closer relations with the left-wing government of New Zealand premier Jacinda Ardern.

The Five Eyes alliance, comprising the US, Canada, Britain, Australia and New Zealand, dates back to the Second World War, when a number of key allies decided to share intelligence in their bid to defeat Nazi Germany and Japan.

Today, maintaining intelligence-sharing cooperation between the five Anglophone nations is deemed essential to combating the threat posed by autocratic states, such as Russia and Communist China.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-u-s-can-support-freedoms-ferment-in-iran-11619986320?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

Even Iran has its bipartisan moments in American political circles. Democrats and Republicans alike now largely agree that the 2015 nuclear deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, needs to be renegotiated and its provisions strengthened. Members of both parties believe that any prospective agreement must address Tehran’s ballistic missiles and its suspect regional activities. Yet often missing is any serious consideration of Iran’s human-rights record. The most consequential victims of the theocratic regime are its own citizens, and their plight shouldn’t be ignored.

Human rights have played an important role in U.S. diplomacy. During the Cold War, American officials routinely brought up the Soviet Union’s repressive policies with their Russian counterparts. In 1975, as part of the Helsinki Accords, the U.S.S.R. agreed to “respect human rights and fundamental freedoms, including the freedom of thought, conscience, religion or belief.”

Soon, so-called Helsinki groups appeared in the Soviet bloc as civil-society activists used the Kremlin’s pledges against it. More than arms control and arms buildups, the Helsinki Accords triggered changes that loosened Moscow’s totalitarian grip. The accords empowered dissidents and highlighted Soviet domestic misdeeds.

One paradox of Iran is that conversations about the Islamic Republic are at times more sophisticated in Tehran than in Washington. Far from being beaten into ambivalence, Iranians are engaged in an informed discussion about their government’s priorities and even the viability of the regime. Former government officials, enterprising intellectuals, dissident clerics and reformist newspapers such as Sharq question many aspects of Islamist rule. They may be shut out of power, but they still command a national platform.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/will-peru-get-on-the-marxist-path-11619986216?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

Peruvians will vote in a runoff presidential election on June 6, and if the polls are correct, Marxist candidate Pedro Castillo will win. An upset by his rival, center-right candidate Keiko Fujimori, is not impossible, but she is definitely the underdog.

Ms. Fujimori trails Mr. Castillo by 10 percentage points in a Datum poll released Thursday night. Importantly, some 22% of those surveyed say they are either undecided or will cast a blank vote because they don’t support either candidate. Voting is mandatory in Peru.

Until Saturday Ms. Fujimori had been confined to campaigning in Lima because she is the subject of a criminal investigation. That prohibition on travel has been lifted and she now has six weeks—an eternity in Peruvian politics—to make up for lost time.

Mr. Castillo’s thinking is frighteningly similar to that of the late Hugo Chávez, who ruled Venezuela from 1999 until his death in 2013. Chavismo strangled Venezuela’s democratic institutions, sent human capital fleeing, destroyed the economy, and generated widespread poverty. The military dictatorship is now headed by Nicolás Maduro with important intelligence backing from Havana.

Venezuela was once one of the most advanced countries in the region. Today Venezuelans live primitively, often without running water, electricity or basic medical supplies.

https://www.westernjournal.com/french-generals-top-officers-warn-political-elites-military-intervention-divisive-critical-race-theory-breaks-society/

“The generals’ letter closed with the words of the late Cardinal Désiré-Joseph Mercier, famous in his own time for his pastoral resistance to the German occupation of Belgium during WWI. “When prudence is everywhere, courage is nowhere.” Indeed, it is time for the West to regain its courage.”

A massive group of former and current French military personnel signed an open letter this week warning of the imminent danger posed by so-called anti-racist ideology, and urging French President Emmanuel Macron to work quickly to prevent a civil war.

The letter, published in French magazine Valeurs Actuelles, was signed by 20 former French generals, 100 officers and over 1,000 other military personnel.

It accused the French government of kowtowing to destructive ideologies such as anti-racism and Islamism, which it said were being leveraged for the purposes of sowing unrest in French communities and risking a descent into full-blown civil war.

The signatories expressed grave concern with the government’s push to deconstruct and decolonize its own history in an attempt to placate a growing Islamism that has wracked the nation with violence and argued that radical Islam is being used to subject neighborhoods to dogmatic rules that go against the French Constitution, creating an unconstitutional parallel Islamic state.

“Perils are mounting, violence is increasing day by day,” the letter warned. “Who would have predicted ten years ago that a teacher would one day be beheaded when he left school?”

The sentence was a reference to the murder and beheading of Samuel Paty, a middle school teacher, in a Parisian suburb last year.

Paty had been teaching a course on free speech and showed his class the cartoon of Muhammad that Islamic terrorists claimed justified the Charlie Hebdo shooting. He was soon after ambushed, murdered and decapitated by a Muslim refugee. Seven more people were charged with facilitating the murder, including a local imam, a parent of one of his students and two students who attended the school.

Notably, the letter explicitly linked the growing threat of an Islamic insurgency in France with the everyday terror of violent socialist and anti-racist riots that have frequently piggybacked off of the chaos of the Yellow Vest protest movement.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17301/erdogan-reform-collapse

“We don’t see ourselves elsewhere but in Europe,” Erdoğan said on November 21. “We envisage building our future together with Europe.”

According to Turkish news site Gazete Duvar, a total of 128,872 people have been indicted in the past six years for insulting Erdoğan. Of those, 27,824 had to stand trial and 9,556 were convicted.

Apparently, Erdoğan wants a democratic system without opposition.

But who cares about the Constitution in a country where the governing bloc is proposing to close down even the Constitutional Court, in addition to banning opposition parties? All these autocratic measures occurred in the less than half-year since Erdoğan pledged democratic reforms.

A few years ago, then Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu had vehemently refuted claims that Turkey was a second-class democracy. He was right. Turkey has since remained a third-class democracy.

His critics often joke that when President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan pledges democratic reforms, one should run away immediately. His latest charm offensive in November, aimed at repairing Turkey’s badly-strained ties with the West and Western institutions, has proven that the joke still holds value.

“We don’t see ourselves elsewhere but in Europe,” Erdoğan said on November 21. “We envisage building our future together with Europe.” Two days later, Defense Minister Hulusi Akar described NATO as the “cornerstone of our defense and security policy” and said that Turkey was looking forward to cooperating with the incoming administration under Joe Biden in the United States. Erdoğan also promised a bold package of democratic reforms.

Less than five months later, Italy’s Prime Minister Mario Draghi had to call Erdoğan a “dictator.” That was not because an experienced European politician wanted to insult a Muslim head of state.

According to Turkish news site Gazete Duvar, a total of 128,872 people have been indicted in the past six years for insulting Erdoğan. Of those, 27,824 had to stand trial and 9,556 were convicted. By comparison, only 11 Turks had been convicted for insulting Ahmet Necdet Sezer, president between 2000 and 2007.

After Erdoğan’s latest reform pledge, on March 21, Turkish authorities arrested a pro-Kurdish opposition MP who had refused to leave parliament for several days after his seat was revoked. Ömer Faruk Gergerlioğlu “was brought out by force while he was in pyjamas and slippers” by “nearly 100 police officers,” the leftist Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) said in a statement.