RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20817/persecution-of-christians-june

One elderly and ailing Orthodox priest, Fr. Nikolai Kotelnikov, had his throat slit by the Muslims yelling “Allahu akbar” [“Allah is the greatest”]. – asianews.it, June 24, 2024, Russia.

ISIS militants, using machetes and rifles, slaughtered more than 80 Christians….ISIS emphasized the religious identity of its victims in a post, saying that “Caliphate soldiers” killed “Christians.” According to one report, many of the slain were “very young” and were targeted for “refusing to convert into Islam”…. some bodies were found “tied up” and “decapitated.” – premierchristian.news, June 18, 2024, Democratic Republic of Congo.

In Lahore Pakistan, authorities arrested Jameela Khatoon, a 62-year-old mentally ill Christian woman, after a Muslim shopkeeper, Muhammad Asif, complained that she had committed blasphemy against his namesake, the prophet of Islam. Jameela is being charged under Section 295-C of Pakistan’s Penal Code, which carries a mandatory death sentence for those who insult Muhammad. Earlier that day, after Jameela had entered Asif’s shop, they argued about shampoo. – britishasianchristians.org, June 7, 2024, Pakistan.

[A]n “anti-terrorism” court, despite lack of evidence, handed out another death sentence to Ehsan Masih, a 27-year-old Christian man, for allegedly sharing a “blasphemous” video against Muhammad on a social media platform. – morningstarnews.org, June 7, 2024, Pakistan.

[A]n impoverished Christian rickshaw driver, [Dennis Albert], is facing a long prison sentence, possibly for life, for stepping out of his carriage onto some papers alleged to have been pages of the Koran. – morningstarnews.org, June 18, 2024, Pakistan.

“Dennis has studied till 10th grade, but he had no clue that the pages he was standing on had religious value. He’s a simple rickshaw driver earning an honorable livelihood for himself. He did not have any intention of hurting religious sentiments of any person or community… He’s losing hope for his freedom. He’s being kept in a special barrack reserved for blasphemy accused…” – Imran Albert, the rickshaw driver’s brother, morningstarnews.org, June 18, 2024, Pakistan.

“Typically kidnapped girls in Pakistan, some as young as 10, are abducted, forced to convert to Islam and raped under cover of such Islamic ‘marriages’ and are then pressured to record false statements in favor of the kidnappers, rights advocates say. Judges routinely ignore documentary evidence related to the children’s ages, handing them back to kidnappers as their ‘legal’ wives.” — morningstarnews.org, July 9, 2024, Pakistan.

[A] Muslim factory owner tortured his Christian employee to death — Waqas Salamat, age 18 — for refusing to continue working for him…. Muhammad instantly sent some factory workers to collect him; they bound his hands and feet and carried him to Muhammad’s factory. There, Muhammad, his son, and several Muslim employees began torturing Waqas for hours—beating him with pipes and administering electric shocks to him—until he died. He was the main breadwinner for his impoverished family. According to his mother, Rubina.

“Our financial condition is such that we didn’t even have enough money to arrange for his burial… Waqas was my beloved son and my biggest support. He would often tell me that he’ll work very hard to make life easier for us….” — morningstarnews.org, June 11, 2024, Pakistan.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/a-new-polish-star/

Not all that long ago, Spain and Ireland and Poland were seriously Catholic countries, famous for cultures that – in comparison with most of Western Europe – seemed downright old-fashioned, and famous, too, for the severity of their laws on matters like divorce and abortion. No more. In the post-Franco era, the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) has held the reins of power in Madrid longer than any other, and Spanish culture has changed accordingly. During the same period, Ireland has undergone a no less dramatic transformation.

Poland’s big political metamorphosis has happened more recently. When I visited Warsaw a few years ago, it was conservative, pristine, obviously proud of its history and heritage. I’ve been to a lot of cities in Western Europe, but, for reasons I probably need not expatiate upon, none felt as safe as Warsaw. Like most other Eastern European countries, Poland belonged to the EU but was fiercely skeptical about its leaders’ globalist agenda, their attempt to turn duly elected national governments into mere puppets, and their determination to fill Europe with Muslims who despise Western values.

Perhaps above all, I was impressed – and touched – by the Poles’ staunch pro-Americanism: unlike some Europeans, the Poles, who have always had the exceedingly bad luck of being located between Germany and Russia, those two chronically aggressive powers, and who spent much of the twentieth century under the brutal heel of Nazism and Communism, have never fallen for the widely promoted delusion that it is the EU, and not NATO – with America at its head – that keeps them safe from the threat of Russian predation.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20791/eu-funding-iranian-aggression

The continued funding of Iran’s regime by the EU is crucial in bolstering Iran’s ability to attack its neighbors and US troops in the region, both directly and through its proxies — Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the Houthis — and to accelerate enriching uranium to complete its nuclear weapons program.

The regime’s actions appear part of a broader strategy aimed at ultimately annihilating not only Israel but also oil-rich Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

While the EU loves to portray itself as a front-runner in human rights, often lecturing the world about those values and global security, its actions — all mercenary, all the time — tell a very different story.

The Iranian regime, largely thanks to the backing of a powerful ally, the European Union, has managed to sustain and even increase its revenue streams.

The continued funding of Iran’s regime by the EU is crucial in bolstering Iran’s ability to attack its neighbors and US troops in the region, both directly and through its proxies — Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the Houthis — and to accelerate enriching uranium to complete its nuclear weapons program.

Support from the EU has enabled Iran to continue its regional and international militaristic endeavors without the looming threat of financial insolvency.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20789/hostage-diplomacy-iran

That Iran can, through hostage-taking and extortion, force countries such as the United States, Belgium and Sweden to hand over a convicted criminal who has clearly violated international law shows that gangster methods, used by the Iranian mullahs and others, evidently carry more weight than international law.

This blackmail essentially teaches rogue states that through violence and extortion they can get Western states to make concessions, massive payments, and to de-prioritize and deviate from international law.

If a state takes foreign visitors hostage, and all power then lies with those who kidnap the most, threaten the most and have the largest capacity for violence — including the imminent probability of nuclear weapons — then international law will soon mean nothing.

Apart from effectively having a public budget to support terrorism, Iran’s regime acts as lawlessly as the regimes of Russia or North Korea, and behaves in general as terrorists.

It seems clear that hostage diplomacy is a deliberate strategy for Iran and Russia’s current regimes. Why should it not be? It works!

Countries in the West might do well to communicate this situation and disclaim responsibility for anyone who, despite that lawlessness, chooses to travel to Russia, Iran or other such states. Hostage diplomacy must be stopped.

On June 15, the Swedish government announced that it had conducted a prisoner exchange with Iran’s regime. An Iranian citizen, Hamid Noury, was exchanged for two Swedish citizens, Johan Floderus and Saeed Azizi.

Noury stood convicted by a Swedish court of the torture and mass execution of political prisoners he had committed in Iran’s Gohardasht prison in the late 1980s, following a fatwa from Iran’s then Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20784/iran-president-moderate-hardliner

[Rafael Grossi, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN-sponsored body that is responsible for monitoring the mullahs’ nuclear programme] also warned that it could take Iran just a month or so for the Iranians to assemble a nuclear warhead, given the progress they have made in recent months in their enrichment programme.

The acknowledgement by an internationally respected body such as the IAEA that Iran has now acquired sufficient material to build several nuclear warheads, which could be assembled within the space of a month, is a devastating indictment of the Biden administration’s policy of appeasement towards Iran since US President Joe Biden took office.

Biden’s refusal to hold Iran accountable for its actions has resulted in the Iranian regime receiving billions of dollars in added revenue because of Washington’s decision not to enforce oil sanctions against Iran. As a result, the extra funds received by Iran have been used to fund the regime’s terrorist networks across the globe, including Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon.

As a senior official with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps admitted to The Telegraph, in the wake of the election, that Pezeshkian had only been allowed to compete in the election to “legitimise the vote”.

It is vital, therefore, that the Biden administration fully understands the cynicism shown by Iran’s hardliners in seeking to legitimise their brutal regime before making any further overtures to the country’s so-called moderate president.

In the uncompromising world of Iran’s autocratic Islamic republic, there is no such thing as a moderate Iranian president — a fact that Iran’s long-suffering people know only too well.

Before the Biden administration gets too carried away celebrating the election of Iran’s so-called moderate president, it should understand that Masoud Pezeshkian’s victory is nothing more than a ploy to distract world attention away from Iran’s nuclear weapons programme.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/07/in_france_it_s_left_vs_left.html

The right-leaning media and pundits are excited: Marine Le Pen’s party gained twice as many seats in recent French elections.  The left-leaning media and commentariat are thrilled, too: Le Pen’s right-wing party won the popular vote but landed only third place in the French National Assembly.  If both sides of the political spectrum are so enthusiastic, it could mean only one thing: something is missing here.

The answer lies most likely in conflating two different political spectra: absolute and relative.  Since Stalin proposed the modern relative political spectrum, it garnered popularity, and members of the Frankfurt School of socialism brought it to American soil.

As it is known, in the 1930s, Joseph Stalin altered the game’s rules: he decided to utilize the pre-existing left-right conceptual dichotomy (in a pretty narrow setting) to crush any opposition to his dictatorial rule.  Any aberration from the orthodox communist party line — no matter how small — had to be labeled.  Thus, the “Right-deviationists” and “Left-deviationists” were born.

The “Left-deviationists” were deemed “too orthodox,” “too revolutionary,” as strange as it may seem, for the taste of bloodthirsty revolutionary Bolsheviks.  In contrast, the “Right-deviationists” were considered traitors to the idea of the planet-wide socialist revolution because they dared to consider building a workers’ paradise by cleverly exploiting the mechanisms of state capitalism.  Unquestionably, the word “capitalism” was anathema to communists.  The “Left-deviationists” were to the left of Stalin, and the “Right-deviationists” were to his right.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/dont-be-fooled-by-irans-bogus-election-of-a-puppet-president/

As Robert Spencer stated earlier on Jihad Watch: “No one can run for the presidency of Iran without Khamenei’s approval.”  Iran’s constitutional body, the Guardian Council, has confirmed the victory of so-called “reformist” Masoud Pezeshkian, who will now succeed the late hardline President Ebrahim Raisi, but expect little change.

Elections in Iran are hardly democratic. The Supreme Leader, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the Guardian Council disqualify any contender for the presidency who may be deemed a threat to the regime.

The outcome of a presidential election reveals Iran’s strategic direction. Pezeshkian serves to potentially pacify domestic and international threats via his diplomatic demeanor. The Iranian regime faces international disapproval of its brazen hardline approach as it moves toward developing a nuclear bomb; Western scrutiny over its ongoing war against the State of Israel by means of its proxies; and the ongoing threat of a potential uprising by fierce anti-regime dissidents, even as the Iranian government dismisses such a threat.

The Associated Press describes Pezeshkian as a “reformist politician within Iran’s Shiite theocracy — always pushing for change but never radically challenging the system overseen by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.” That’s because Pezeshkian is a pawn of the regime and has its approval.

https://www.jns.org/uk-election-sees-rise-of-anti-israel-independents/

Labour Party’s landslide in last week’s elections in the United Kingdom was no surprise. What came as a jolt was the success of the ‘pro-Gaza independents.’ All ran on the issue of “Palestine” and Gaza in heavily Muslim districts.

The winning independent candidates were Shockat Adam, Adnan Hussain, Ayoub Khan and Iqbal Hussain Mohamed.

They unseated four Labour members of parliament. As one British headline blared: “Pro-Palestinian MPs become ‘sixth largest’ party in shock Labour defeats.”

The ‘Gaza bloc’ capitalized on anger toward the Labour Party among Muslim voters, who believed Labour hadn’t done enough against Israel and for “Palestine” in the current conflict.

Though Labour performed well overall, it did poorly in areas with high Muslim populations.

Labour Party leader and incoming prime minister, Keir Starmer, and wife Victoria greet supporters as they enter 10 Downing Street in London following a landslide election victory in the United Kingdom on July 5, 2024. Photo by Dan Kitwood/Getty Images.

https://apnews.com/article/nato-summit-biden-trump-europe-russia-ukraine-6c24773349aa1a9f6592a15268f98169

WASHINGTON (AP) — NATO leaders meet this week for a summit commemorating the 75th anniversary of the military alliance, which has never been larger and more focused but is also facing potentially existential threats from outside and within.

If Russia’s war in Ukraine, challenges posed by an increasingly aggressive China, and the Israel-Hamas conflict in Gaza weren’t enough, some key members’ commitment to defend their allies is coming under question.

There is deep uncertainty over President Joe Biden’s ability to beat his predecessor, NATO skeptic Donald Trump, in November to lead the most powerful member of the alliance.

While Biden’s political troubles are stirring concerns at home and abroad, countries in Europe are facing their own issues with a rise of far-right populism, particularly in France and Hungary, threatening what had been a bedrock pillar of post-World War II security and stability.

Here’s what to watch for at the three-day summit:

All eyes on Biden