RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17258/china-western-companies-uyghurs

Companies are being pressured to scrub from their websites language about corporate policies on human rights, reverse decisions to stop buying cotton produced in Xinjian, and remove maps that depict Taiwan as an independent country.

In October 2020, the Geneva-based Better Cotton Initiative (BCI), an influential non-profit group that promotes sustainable cotton production, suspended licensing of Xinjiang cotton, citing allegations and “increasing risks” of forced labor. The statement has since been scrubbed from the BCI website, and, disturbingly, also is not accessible on the Internet Archive.

In March 2020, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, in a report, “Uyghurs for Sale,” revealed that Uyghurs were working in factories — under conditions of forced labor — that are in the supply chains of more than 80 well-known global brands in the clothing, automotive and technology sectors.

“China’s government, increasingly keen to punish critics of their Xinjiang policies, is forcing foreign companies to make a choice they have been studiously trying to avoid: support China or get out of the Chinese market…. The Communist Party views itself as increasingly able to exert economic pressure on others, using the ‘powerful gravitational field’ of the world’s second-largest economy…. The choice between the lucrative Chinese market and the values firms profess in the rest of the world is becoming unavoidable….” — The Economist, March 27, 2021.

“German companies account for a good one-half of the EU’s exports to China. The German export industry has little interest in tarnishing this balance sheet with moral zeal…. The economic dependence on China, however, further weakens the already low impact of moral arguments. As long as Europe, and in this case Germany in particular, is not prepared to reduce this dependency, complaints about human rights violations in China will, at best, continue to trigger sloppy defensive reactions from Beijing.” — Die Welt, March 24, 2021.

The Chinese government is boycotting Western clothing retailers for expressing concerns about forced labor in Xinjiang, China’s biggest region. The companies are being pressured to scrub from their websites language about corporate policies on human rights, reverse decisions to stop buying cotton produced in Xinjian, and remove maps that depict Taiwan as an independent country.

The escalating fight comes after the European Union and the United Kingdom on March 22 joined the United States and Canada to impose sanctions on Chinese officials for human rights abuses in Xinjiang, a remote autonomous region in northwestern China.

Human rights experts say at least one million Muslims are being detained in up to 380 internment camps, where they are subject to torture, mass rapes, forced labor and sterilizations.

Western companies doing business in China increasingly face an unpalatable dilemma: how to uphold Western values and distance themselves from human rights abuses without provoking retaliation from the Chinese government and losing access to one of the world’s biggest and fastest-growing markets.

The current dispute revolves around allegations that the Chinese government is forcing more than 500,000 Uyghurs and other Muslim ethnic and religious minorities to pick cotton in Xinjiang, which produces 85% of China’s cotton and one-fifth of the world’s supply. Roughly 70% of the region’s cotton fields are picked by hand. The allegations of forced labor affect all Western supply chains that involve Xinjiang cotton as a raw material. Both the European Union and the United States import more than 30% of their apparel and textile supplies from China.

In October 2020, the Geneva-based Better Cotton Initiative (BCI), an influential non-profit group that promotes sustainable cotton production, suspended licensing of Xinjiang cotton, citing allegations and “increasing risks” of forced labor. The statement has since been scrubbed from the BCI website, and, disturbingly, also is not accessible on the Internet Archive.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/04/most-tragic-story-never-told-muslim-persecution-raymond-ibrahim/

Few phenomena are as horrifically widespread as they are virtually unknown—at least in the West—as the Muslim persecution of Christians.

The general facts are undeniable and have been and continue to be documented in a number of reports issued by a variety of human rights organizations around the world.  According to one of the most recent compilations, Open Doors’ “World Wide List, 2021”—which was published in January 2021 and which annually ranks the top 50 nations where Christians are most persecuted for their faith—13 Christians are killed for their faith every day around the world; 12 are illegally arrested or imprisoned; 5 are abducted; and 12 churches or other Christian buildings are attacked.

About 309 million of these Christians “suffer very high or extreme levels” of persecution.  “That’s one in 8 worldwide, 1 in 6 in Africa, 2 out of 5 in Asia, and 1 in 12 in Latin America.”  More specifically and for the reporting period covered (Oct. 2019 – Sept. 2020), “4,761 Christians were killed for their faith”; an additional 4,277 Christians were unjustly arrested, detained, or imprisoned; 1,710 were abducted for faith-related reasons; and 4,488 Churches or Christian buildings were attacked.

The worst category, “extreme persecution”—the harassing, beating, imprisoning, raping, and/or slaughtering of Christians on sight—occurs in 12 of the 50 nations.  Nine of these top 12 worst persecutors are Muslim: Afghanistan (#2), Somalia (#3), Libya (#4), Pakistan (#5), Yemen (#7), Iran (#8), Nigeria (#9), Iraq (#11), and Syria (#12).  (That these nations are racially, culturally, politically, and economically very different—Arab, Asian, Iranian, sub-Saharan African, etc.—should be indicative that something else accounts for their commonality towards Christians.)

Over all, the persecution Christians experience in 39 of the 50 nations making the list is also either from “Islamic oppression” or is occurring in Muslim majority nations.  This means nearly 80 percent of the Christian persecution around the world—including of those 13 Christians killed for their faith every day—is committed by Muslims.

While the above numbers are important, including in displaying the magnitude of the problem, one should not lose sight that they represent real people; what they experience, when read in detail—girls chained and gang raped; Christians burned alive for supposedly “blaspheming” Muhammad; Muslim husbands and wives stabbing and poisoning each other whenever one apostatizes to Christ; another 30 having their heads sawn off just for the heck of it—is tragic if not bloodcurdling.

The following, for example, are among the most recent incidents to occur as of this writing (excerpted from the February, 2021 edition of the monthly “Muslim Persecution of Christians” reports):

https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-iran-begin-indirect-talks-to-revive-2015-nuclear-deal-1161770628

VIENNA—Western and Iranian officials kicked off talks on Tuesday on reviving the embattled 2015 nuclear accord, amid the challenge of bitter relations between Washington and Tehran, punishing U.S. sanctions on the Islamic Republic and moves by Iran to accelerate its nuclear activity.

The parties to the 2015 nuclear agreement, which placed limits on Iran’s nuclear activity in exchange for lifting international sanctions on the country, had said on Friday that they would gather in Vienna for talks. The Trump administration withdrew from the deal in May 2018 and placed sanctions on Iran. In return, Iran has taken steps to breach the agreement and resume nuclear activity.

The goal of the Vienna meeting is to produce a road map for the U.S. and Iran to return simultaneously to compliance with the deal.

The parties agreed to continue talking in the coming days in two parallel expert meetings, one focused on how the U.S. is to lift sanctions on Iran, the other on how Iran will roll back its nuclear activities to comply with the deal.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-peace-of-trump-11617740860?mod=opinion_lead_pos11

U.S. social media companies like Twitter that suppressed negative stories about Joe Biden during the 2020 campaign are still preventing former President Donald Trump from speaking on their platforms. But the impact of Trump policies may be much harder to suppress. The historic peace agreements Mr. Trump brokered last year between Israel and its regional neighbors have lately been yielding some striking results.

Joshua Marks writes in the Times of Israel:

Over Passover I did something that was unthinkable before last September’s signing at the White House of the Abraham Accords that normalized relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain.
I took a direct flight of just under three hours through Saudi Arabian airspace from Israel to the UAE on a Dubai-owned airline as an Israeli citizen to celebrate the holiday with the Jewish community there…
Boarding the flydubai Boeing 737-800 at Ben Gurion Airport the reality of the Abraham Accords started to set in for me. Here was an Arab airline with an Arabic-speaking cabin crew announcing our departure from Tel Aviv to Dubai like it was the most normal thing in the world…

Before returning to Israel Mr. Marks participated in a Passover event with local Emiratis and reports:

It felt like a new beginning of a warm friendship between Jews and Israelis and Arabs and Emiratis but also felt like the rekindling of an ancient relationship of “cousins” who were separated for thousands of years and are now finding our way through the darkness back into the light of a shared future of peace and prosperity for the peoples of the Middle East.