RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://worldisraelnews.com/british-court-sentences-holocaust-denier-to-prison-tim

Alison Chabloz is expected to serve nine weeks in prison for promoting anti-Semitic rhetoric in two interviews with far-right online sites.

A woman in Britain said to be a virulent anti-Semite has been found guilty of spreading offensive messages and material over the Internet and was sentenced to 18 weeks in prison by a magistrate court there.

Reports say that Alison Chabloz, 57, who is known for promoting Holocaust denial, is expected to serve nine weeks in prison for violating the country’s communications act after she promoted anti-Semitic rhetoric and ideas on the GAB social-media service in two interviews she did with far-right online sites.

GAB has been under fire for being utilized by far-right extremists.

“Today’s verdict and sentence finally give the Jewish community justice and protection from someone who has made a vocation out of denying the Holocaust and baiting Jews. It also sends a clear message to those who might be tempted to go down the same path,” said Stephen Silverman, director of investigations and enforcement at Campaign Against Antisemitism, in a statement. “This is not the end. Ms. Chabloz now faces even more serious charges on other matters that we have brought to the attention of the police. We will not rest until all anti-Semites like Alison Chabloz are behind bars, where they belong.”

In 2018, Chabloz received a suspended sentence for singing songs that claimed the Holocaust was a “bunch of lies.”

According to the Daily Mail, in issuing his ruling, District Judge Michael Snow told Chabloz: “I’m not sentencing you on the basis that you are anti-Semitic, I’m not sentencing you on the basis that you are a Holocaust denier. I’m sentencing you on the basis that on two separate occasions whilst subject to a suspended sentence, you participated in a radio program where you made grossly offensive comments.

“The grossly offensive contributions by the defendant to both programs are insulting to members of a vulnerable community,” continued Snow. “The need to protect that community from such gross offense is a pressing social need.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17245/bangladesh-despair-presumption

Sheikh Mujib, as everyone called him, sent a battered Studebaker, vintage 1951, to fetch me to his home. This was a fairly modest villa by most standards, but at that moment looked like an oasis of tranquility and, because of a garden full of flowers, even of beauty. After endless cups of tea and half a dozen delicious but unidentifiable sweets, I concluded that far from being a troublemaker, Sheikh Mujib was a fantasist, for he spoke of his people’s desire to assume control of their destiny which meant splitting Pakistan.

The energy that Mujib generated was truly amazing. The masses of the “walking skeletons” that I had seen were suddenly transformed into sizzling balls of fire. Yet, I had a feeling that all that was going to end in tragedy. And it did. Mujib won a majority in the Pakistan-wide election but was refused the right to form the government for a united Pakistan. The Pakistani leadership decided on a crackdown, which included prison for Mujib and martial law in East Pakistan.

Like most “developing nations,” it is inflicted by corruption, mismanagement and injustice. But it is feeding its people and, having enjoyed growth rates of over 6 percent since 2005, its economy is now 40 percent larger than that of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. (It was 42 percent smaller before independence.) In fact, Bangladesh is one of only 20 “developing nations” in which all seven indices of human welfare, though still below the global average, are now positive.

“Don’t get emotionally involved!” This is one of the first lessons I was told to learn when, as a young reporter in the 1970s, I was sent to cover “events” in distant lands.

The euphemism covered wars, revolutions, ethnic-cleansing operations, famines, and in their less harmful version, military coups bringing jackboots with sunglasses to power. One of the first such “events” was the general election in what was then a united Pakistan. I arrived in Dhaka one early evening and was whisked to a hotel on the outskirts of the sprawling capital of what was then East Pakistan. After a brief shower, I came down to the lobby and asked for a taxi to take me to the city. My inquiry caused a sensation. I was told it was “perhaps inadvisable” to visit the city after sunset and that waiting until tomorrow was the best option.

In any case, hotel taxis didn’t operate after evening prayers. My verbal to-and-fro with hotel personnel was interrupted by a tall thin man who offered to give me a ride in his ramshackle rickshaw. That was good enough for me and we set out. As we approached the city, I felt as if I were being sucked into a different world. This was a scene of absolute chaos with countless number of people, mostly half-naked, barefoot and obviously undernourished milling around amid rickshaws, tricycles, beasts of burden, beggars, children on the loose and men in sundry military or police uniforms, often dirty.

A couple of hours of that spectacle was enough to make me physically sick and to beat the retreat back to the luxury hotel, which now looked like a big lie hiding the truth. I felt as if my youthful optimism about the future of mankind was evaporating. I had thought that even the most abject poverty could be defeated either by technology or by ideology. My first incursion into the heart of Dhaka had punctured that optimism. In a cowardly mood, I contemplated taking the next plane out. Then I remembered that two days later, I had an appointment with one Sheikh Mujib ar-Rahman, a man described by East Pakistani leaders I had interviewed a few days earlier as “a dangerous troublemaker.”

tps://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_breakingnews/the-man-behind-chinas-raging-nationalist-campaigns-against-us_

Though it may not be clear that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is collapsing for many westerners, the Chinese are quite certain the crash of the Chinese regime is imminent as over 375 million Chinese have quit the CCP and its affiliated organizations.

The CCP—which is on the verge of a crisis—has again raised the banner of nationalism in order to save itself.

It has been a regular tactic over the past century when it has been cornered and has had no other choice.

The latest nationalist campaign started with the CCP’s diplomatic system when Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on March 18 that the United States had “deep concerns with actions by China, including Xinjiang, Hong Kong, Taiwan, cyber-attacks on the United States, [and] economic coercion toward our allies.”

In the midst of the diplomatic dilemma, the Central Committee of the Communist Youth League (CYL) joined in to initiate a heated boycott of foreign goods, with the CCP’s official mouthpieces provoking nationalist sentiment along the way.

Taken altogether, this incident shows that Wang Huning, a current member of the CCP’s Politburo Standing Committee, who controls not only the CYL but also the CCP’s Publicity Department, and has the official media as one of his tools, that he is controlling the diplomatic system from behind the scenes.

Staged Confrontation in Alaska

At the two-day senior-level Alaska talks between China and the United States on March 18 and 19, the two sides to the talks, led by Chinese foreign policy official Yang Jiechi, and Blinken for the United States, respectively, crossed fire with full force at the beginning of their talks, bringing their conflict under the international spotlight.

Yang spoke for 17 minutes without giving time for translation in between. The most surprising remark he made was: “the United States does not have the qualification to say that it wants to speak to China from a position of strength. The U.S. side was not even qualified to say such things even 20 years or 30 years ago, because the Chinese people don’t buy it.”

https://www.city-journal.org/canadian-father-jailed-for-speaking-out-about-trans-identifying-child

At this moment, a Vancouver postman named Rob Hoogland is sitting in a jail cell in British Columbia. He will be there until at least April 12, when he’s scheduled for a court date. At that time, he may be ordered to remain behind bars for a period yet to be determined.

Has Hoogland killed or robbed somebody? Is he an arsonist? A rapist? No. What did he do, then? Short answer: he tried to save his emotionally unstable daughter from self-destruction.

The long answer begins in the 2015–16 school year, when, as Hoogland recounted in a talk last October, his then fifth-grade daughter (he also has an older son) was getting into trouble at school and Hoogland and his estranged wife (whom he divorced in the spring of 2015) decided it might be good for her to see her school counselor. Since it’s forbidden by the British Columbia Supreme Court to make her name public, she’s referred to in legal documents as “A.B.” (Hoogland is “C.D.,” and the girl’s mother is “E.F.”)

Unknown to Hoogland, A.B. continued to see school counselors well into seventh grade, when one day she suddenly cut her hair very short. At the end of that school year, Hoogland saw that she was listed in her yearbook under a male name. It turned out that the school had been feeding her transgender ideology, and that she’d already begun “socially transitioning” to a male identity under the direction of a psychologist, Wallace Wong, who was encouraging her “to take testosterone.” To this end, Wong referred her to an endocrinologist at the Gender Clinic and Children’s Hospital in Vancouver.

It used to be understood that gender dysphoria is vanishingly rare, typically afflicts boys, and almost always begins to manifest when a child is extremely young. In recent years, however, there’s been an epidemic in many Western countries of older girls who suddenly claim to be in the wrong body. This “rapid onset gender dysphoria,” as Abigail Shrier argues in her important 2020 book Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters (which I reviewed), is a fad rooted in a number of contemporary social factors.

Many have expressed concern about this trend. Yet transgender activists, eager to increase their visibility and clout, have embraced these girls as real cases of gender dysphoria and have pushed for them to be “transitioned,” pronto. Such transition usually starts with the administration of puberty blockers, continues with massive doses of testosterone, and concludes with “gender-affirmation surgery”—known to today’s self-identified trans teenagers, rather innocuously, as “top surgery” (mastectomy) and “bottom surgery” (metoidioplasty and phalloplasty, which transform the clitoris into something resembling a penis).

A decade ago, subjecting minors to these protocols would have been seen as malpractice and child abuse. But in the last few years, the practice has won widespread political, cultural, media, and judicial support. Never mind that puberty blockers, while presented as harmlessly allowing young teens a “pause,” so that they can ponder their options, can in fact be quite harmful and are almost always followed by hormone therapy; that testosterone, which can cause sterilization, osteoporosis, heart disease, and stunted growth, invariably results in such irreversible symptoms as sterility, facial hair, and a deeper voice; and that “gender-affirming surgery,” of course, destroys healthy body parts that can never be restored.

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2021/04/china-and-the-looming-warfare-over-taiwan/

It is hard to believe that the Japanese High Command is not saying to the Chinese High Command, secretly or otherwise, that if China attacks Taiwan, Japan will have to respond whatever the Americans or anybody else chooses to do.

Taiwan is absolutely essential to the defence and security of Japan. It is the key link in what has been called the First Island Chain running more or less parallel to the Asian mainland from Sakhalin in the north down through the pencil-like line of Japanese islands through the Ryukyu Archipelago to Taiwan through Batan and Babuyan to the Philippines and then down to Indonesia. This chain of islands prevents the Chinese from getting out of the Sea of Japan, the Yellow Sea, the East China Sea and the South China Sea into the North Pacific Ocean in any militarily significant numbers.

If China occupied Taiwan it would be able to amass significant and seriously threatening naval power both east and west of Japan. Being a long narrow line of islands, Japan lacks serious geographical strategic depth, and while it is reputedly the world’s third-largest economy, it must import all of its oil and most of its food, minerals and other essential goods. It would be very difficult, if not impossible, for Japan to mount a successful defence without massive support from the US and other allies.

These strategic realities have been occupying the minds of Japan’s best strategists for at least a hundred years, and of course they have been working diligently to maintain the chain. I first became aware of these matters when I visited Japan in the late 1960s and early 1970s and interviewed some of Japan’s major naval and other strategists.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9417537/ISIS-brag-killing-Christians-Mozambique-massacre-claimed-one-British-life.html

The Islamic State has bragged of ‘killing dozens of Mozambican armed forces and the Christians’ in a days-long assault near a major gas plant in the country’s northeast. 

ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack in a statement issued by its Amaq news agency on Monday alongside a photo of militants from the group celebrating the capture of the town of Palma.

Scores of people have been killed, including one British contractor, and dozens of expats remain unaccounted for following the attack, which began last Wednesday. 

A contractor from Somerset who worked at a hotel in the area is among the missing and a friend has said he fears he has been killed.

Philip Mawer has not been seen or heard from since gunmen ambushed a convoy of vehicles fleeing a hotel on Friday.

His friend Peter Zweemer told The Sun that the French oil giant Total, whose employees Mawer was reportedly helping to build a camp for left its workers to be ‘slaughtered’.

‘As far as I know and from eye witness accounts, unfortunately, we have to assume Phil got killed Friday.

‘There is still no access into Palma to recoup bodies or asses damages and missing people do appear under the most amazing circumstances but I’m afraid the news about Phil is not encouraging.

‘It’s a shambles and they allowed these contractors to be slaughtered.’ 

Tales of horror began to emerge on Tuesday as some survivors made it to safety and established contact with loved ones.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17193/european-union-tragic-farce

Five hundred years from now, when historians look back on the COVID era, they will say that America’s “Operation Warp Speed,” under President Donald J. Trump, was a triumph of science and logistics.

Many liberals have a short memory, but the EU has not always been the big, remote machine it has become.

The principle of equality of states and the principle of equality of citizens cannot be reconciled in the current EU setting of institutions, says Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court.

Of course, EU institutions are dressed up with flowery language — such as “making the EU more democratic” — aimed at making people believe that EU institutions… are increasingly democratic and only waiting to become fully democratic.

This evolution consisted, first of all, in subverting European institutions to make them accomplish, in addition to their economic aims, missions that were foreign to them, such as a “common foreign policy” that was never anything than words. How could you have a foreign policy common to the UK, Austria and Portugal?

EU elites are weak, cowardly and pusillanimous because they know they do not represent anyone, in the true democratic sense of the word – they are not democratically elected, they are not transparent and they are not accountable to anyone. They are ultimately the playthings of governments that never agree with each other – but that do have the legitimacy of being truly democratic: elected, transparent, and accountable. There is also no mechanism for citizens to unelect anyone, should they wish to do so.

Concerning the European Union, opinions are divided between those who consider it useless and costly, and those who believe it to be the future of Europe and a model for the human race.

What is the reality?

Before today’s EU emerged, the construction of a European union was, at first, a tremendous success.

Many liberals have a short memory, but the EU has not always been the big, remote machine it has become. In the era of the more modestly named “European Communities” – entailing, for example, cooperation amongst multiple countries’ economies; or within their coal, steel and nuclear industries – Europe achieved four freedoms of movement: those of people, capital, services and goods. Despite its flaws, shortcomings and innumerable imperfections (nothing human is perfect), this common – or single – market made a massive and substantial contribution to the freedom and prosperity of Europeans.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/convicted-in-hong-kong-11617316506?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

A Hong Kong court Thursday convicted Jimmy Lai, Martin Lee and five others of organizing or taking part in a pro-democracy protest. Mr. Lai, 72, is a billionaire who founded and publishes Apple Daily, which is a frequent critic of the Chinese Communist Party and among Hong Kong’s most popular news outlets. Mr. Lee is 82 and known as Hong Kong’s “father of democracy.”

Everyone in the former British colony understands the message being sent from Hong Kong’s new masters in Beijing: If we can get these men, we can get you too.

That’s especially true for the thousands of other Hong Kong citizens, far less well known, who were also arrested on charges relating to participating in such protests. The Aug. 18, 2019, protest at the center of this trial drew 1.7 million people, which is roughly a quarter of Hong Kong’s population, though police had not granted a permit.

The convictions are the flip side of the recent rewrite of Hong Kong’s election rules meant to ensure that only pro-Beijing “patriots” hold positions of power. This week the U.S. consul general to Hong Kong, Hanscom Smith, explained that the new rules “will not produce meaningful democratic results, and will be neither inclusive nor credible representations of the will of people in Hong Kong.”

For China that’s a feature, not a bug. The real crime of those convicted this week is that they took seriously China’s promise of autonomy for Hong Kong in the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration. They are being punished today simply for trying to make the governments in Beijing and Hong Kong honor that promise.