RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c5

About two years ago I visited Cambodia. While there I wrote this January 2019 post, which focused on the “killing fields” genocide that swept Cambodia in 1975-79, during the rule of the Khmer Rouge and their leader Pol Pot. In connection with my trip, I bought the Ben Kiernan history titled “The Pol Pot Regime,” which I have just now gotten around to reading.

Why my fascination with Cambodia in the day of the Khmer Rouge? It is one of the clearest modern instances of leftist/socialist ideology put into practice and then pushed to its logical conclusion. Highly educated elitists got taught a utopian vision of a transformed society with perfect fairness and justice, and they determined to impose that vision upon the backward and unlearned masses in their country. Then they came to power, and got the opportunity to carry out their plans. The circumstances in Cambodia were such that they could implement their plans with few to no constraints. We get to study the results. Any relevance to our current situation is for the reader to draw.

Kiernan’s basic approach is that he sought out and interviewed several hundred Cambodians who lived through the events and survived the genocide. The interviews took place starting after the fall of the regime (1979), through the 1980s and into the early 90s (the first edition of the book came out in 1996). This approach has obvious pluses and minuses. On the plus side, this is primary source, first hand information. On the minus side, the people available for interview were not randomly selected and have major gaps in their collective knowledge. Obviously, none of them were killed. If any of them were involved in the killings, they certainly don’t admit to it. Nor did any of the leaders of the regime submit to interviews, so there is nobody to offer testimony as to “here’s why we did it,” or “here’s what we were trying to accomplish.” Nevertheless, there is much to learn.

Here are the things that I find most interesting:

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17121/iran-rebellious-baluchistan

The mullahs had another reason to neglect the Baluch, a majority of whom are Sunni Muslims and deeply suspicious of a regime based on a militant Imamist ideology. During the past four decades, an accumulation of grievances has pushed the Baluch into a rebellious mood.

According to a study by the Ministry of the Interior, almost 30% of the death sentences that make the Islamic Republic the second nation with the highest number of executions in the world, after China, are passed on the Baluch, who account for 1.8% of Iran’s population.

Tehran faces a cash flow problem that has also led to cuts in stipends for Hezbollah, Hamas, and Bashar al-Assad.

Arrogance, ignorance, and repression are the main features of Tehran’s approach to what is a complex socio-politico-economic problem that requires understanding, compassion, and pragmatism, concepts that have no place in the mullahs’ lexicon. Their ineptitude has turned Baluchistan into a powder-keg.

“Like a battlefield!” This is how eye-witnesses describe the scene in Saravan after two days of violence on Monday and Tuesday during which an undetermined number of people lost their lives while local authorities briefly lost control of the city.

Tehran says two people died and five others were wounded. Local reports put the number of dead at 37 with dozens more injured. Because of the credibility gap associated with the regime and its opponents, and in the absence of normal journalistic coverage, it is hard to be sure about the figures. It is equally hard to know how the violence started.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/02/amnesty-internationals-position-on-navalny-is-unconscionable/?itm_campaign=headline-

No matter what the organization says, Alexei Navalny is indeed a prisoner of conscience in Putin’s Russia.

A mnesty International has stripped jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny of his “prisoner of conscience” status after the organization was “bombarded” with complaints highlighting some of his unseemly rhetoric from the past.

Navalny was nearly murdered by a nerve-agent attack last year, almost surely perpetrated by the Putin regime. His life was saved only after he was airlifted to Germany. Determined to return to Russia, Navalny flew back in January, at the same time releasing an investigation into the opulent lifestyles of Putin and other corrupt Russian oligarchs. Navalny was promptly arrested for violating the terms of his parole on an earlier sentence (for a trumped-up embezzlement conviction) by not checking in with a parole officer — from his German hospital bed, where he spent weeks in a coma. Initially held in a Moscow prison, he was recently moved to what is reportedly a “penal colony.”

Almost immediately after Amnesty labeled Navalny “a prisoner of conscience,” a concerted email effort by Putin allies was directed at the organization, pointing out some of the xenophobic statements Navalny made over a decade ago. Kremlin minions were deployed across social-media platforms spreading Navalny’s remarks regarding Muslims and immigrants, as well as a number of fake ones that fooled certain media outlets.

In response, Amnesty International quickly removed the “prisoner of conscience” designation, explaining, “we are no longer going to use the phrase ‘prisoner of conscience’ in regards to [Navalny] insofar as our law and policy department, having reviewed Navalny’s remarks from the mid-2000s, came to the conclusion that they meet the level of ‘hate speech.’”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17089/iran-appeasing-mullahs

Turkey and the European Union are on the same page when it comes to pursuing appeasement policies with the Iranian regime. How do the ruling mullahs of Iran repay the favor? Through assassinations and terror plots.

After the EU began pursuing ways of appeasing Iran, and after sanctions were lifted in 2015 due to the nuclear deal (which Iran never signed), Iran’s assassins and terror operatives ratcheted up their activities on the European soil.

Governments around the world need hold the Iranian regime accountable for its foreign adventurism and its reprehensible repression of dissent and peaceful protests at home. They must adopt a firm policy of expelling Iranian “diplomats” and intelligence agents like Assadi, who may be plotting further terrorist attacks. They also need to consider closing down Iranian embassies until Tehran halts its terror activities.

Turkey and the European Union are on the same page when it comes to pursuing appeasement policies with the Iranian regime. How do the ruling mullahs of Iran repay the favor? Through assassinations and terror plots.

This month, the Turkish authorities detained an Iranian diplomat, Mohammad Reza Naderzadeh, 43, for his role in killing an Iranian dissident, Massoud Molavi Vardanjani, in November 2019. Reportedly, the Iranian diplomat was a staff member in the Iranian Consulate in Istanbul and had forged travel documents for Ali Esfandiari, who orchestrated the assassination of Molavi Vardanjani.

The Iranian regime, it seems, targeted Molavi Vardanjani because of his social media campaign to expose corruption in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, its elite Quds Force branch, and the theocrats’ military establishment. After serving as an intelligence officer for the Iranian government, he defected. “I will root out the corrupt mafia commanders…,” he wrote on social media. “Pray that they don’t kill me before I do this.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/more-than-100-girls-kidnapped-in-latest-nigerian-school-abduction-11614338957

Gunmen kidnapped 317 girls from a boarding school in northwest Nigeria, police said Friday, the latest in a rising tide of high-school abductions across Africa’s most populous nation, where kidnapping for ransom has become a lucrative industry.

Dozens of armed militants broke into the Government Girls Secondary School, Jangebe, in Zamfara state at around 1 a.m. Friday and began shooting before packing schoolgirls onto vehicles or walking them toward the nearby Rugu forest, which spreads over three states and hundreds of miles.

By morning, parents and community leaders were tallying the number of people missing. The Zamfara police said security forces, backed by reinforcements, were in pursuit of the abductors.

Samaila Umar was one of the parents who awoke to the sound of gunfire, but by the time he could reach the school campus the militants had abducted his 15-year-old daughter and 14-year-old niece.

“I couldn’t get to there to save her because the kidnappers were shooting everywhere,” he said. “The government must do all in its powers to bring back our daughters.”

Another parent Samaila Ismail, whose first daughter Asiyat was among those kidnapped, said when he reached the school he saw 55 girls emerge from the restroom where they had been hiding. “But I couldn’t find my daughter,” he said.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-sound-of-liberty-in-cuba-11614366025?mod=opinion_lead_pos10

Thirty years after the collapse of the Soviet military empire, one of the world’s remaining communist dictatorships is facing a fresh challenge to its authority. And it couldn’t sound any sweeter.

Agence France-Presse reports:

In Cuba, where music and revolution are intertwined, a song by rappers boldly denouncing the communist government has found viral appeal online — but angered a regime that keeps close tabs on culture.

The song is called, “Patria y Vida,” or “Homeland and Life,” and has logged more than two million views on Alphabet, Inc.’s YouTube. Sarah Marsh and Rodrigo Gutierrez of Reuters have more on the popular new anticommunist anthem and the Miami-based musicians who helped make it happen:

Gente de Zona, Yotuel of hip-hop band Orishas fame and singer-songwriter Descemer Bueno collaborated on the song with two rappers in Cuba, Maykel Osorbo and El Funky, who are part of a dissident artists’ collective that sparked an unusual protest against repression outside the culture ministry last November.
“Homeland and Life” repurposes the old slogan “Patria o Muerte” (“Homeland or Death”) emblazoned on walls across the Caribbean country ever since Fidel Castro’s 1959 leftist revolution and expresses frustration with being required to make sacrifices in the name of ideology for 62 years.

“It’s over,” says the song’s chorus. What’s most striking is the song’s direct demand for freedom and blunt challenge to the dictatorship and its lies. “Advertising a paradise,” sing the performers, “while mothers cry for their departed children.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/muslim-cleric-condemns-ban-female-genital-robert-spencer/

We’re constantly told in the West that female genital mutilation (FGM) is a cultural practice that has nothing whatsoever to do with Islam, but as is always the case with the leftist establishment narrative, reality is otherwise. The latest reminder of that all-important fact comes from Gambia, where the learned imam Abdoulie Fatty (he isn’t one) has condemned – on Islamic grounds — attempts by human rights campaigners to ban FGM.

Gambia’s The Voice reported Monday that “one of the Gambian top Imams has condemned a ban on Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) in the country and talked hard on campaign groups which he said are spreading falsehood about FGM everywhere.” Fatty chose the most important forum of any given week for Muslims, the Friday sermon, to issue this condemnation: he made his statements “as he descended on campaigners against FGM in his last Friday sermon (khutbat) at a Mosque in around Bartex prior the congregational Jumaat prayer.”

Fatty “emphasised that FGM has been in practice since the time of Prophet Ibrahim (ASW) and ‘it was witnessed by Prophet Muhammad (SAW) during his time, too.’”

“My dear Muslim people,” the genial imam exhorted his audience, “I am advising us on the fear of God – all of us, let’s follow the teachings of Islam. My dear Muslim people we used to hear it and hearsay and they have a wake campaign and that is the reason why we do this type of sermon anytime they came back but they will meet us like the sun in the sky.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/uk-and-mandatory-vaccinations-frontpagemagcom/

For once in our lives we Brits have made it to the top of a league table, but for all the wrong reasons.

According to academic types at the University of Oxford, Brits are enduring the sixth strictest lockdown in the world and the second harshest in Europe. Only Cuba, Eritrea, Ireland, Honduras, Lebanon and Peru have faced tougher lockdowns, and most of those places are no stranger to a military coup or a bread line or two.

It does not end with lockdown. Lockdown was never the destination. In Britain, lockdown was only ever a pathway to mandatory vaccination, using unmarked backroads to mask the destination. But we’ve finally arrived.

As things stand, mandatory vaccinations are not currently legal in the UK.

And yet, this week’s headlines included ‘No jab! No job!’, indicating that employers will mandate vaccinations in new work contracts, forcing the unvaccinated out of work.

If that weren’t enough, they are coming for our kids, too. Most parents with children in state schools received a letter just like this:

‘Students will not be allowed to enter the school or return to lessons until they have been tested once and found to be negative.’

In short, without a negative COVID test, your child is not coming in to school.