RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20638/egypt-duplicity-world-silence

“A one-hundred-dollar bill does wonders with an Egyptian police officer at a Sinai roadblock who intercepts a truck packed with ‘pipes.'” — Efraim Inbar and Mordechai Kedar, BESA Center, January 22, 2009.

This is just another example of how, when Palestinians become victims of oppressive measures taken against them by their Arab brothers, the world does not care a bit. About a decade ago, when Egypt demolished dozens of houses and buildings in Rafah as part of a campaign to combat terrorism, no one said a word against the Egyptians — or even bothered to look.

If the Egyptians actually cared about the Palestinians, instead of blocking the entry of aid into the Gaza Strip, they could easily coordinate with Israel though alternative border crossings such as the nearby Kerem Shalom terminal.

Evidently the Egyptians would rather see the Gazans starve; then, the international community, as usual, would hold only Israel responsible.

That is the real problem: Where is the demand from the international community for Egypt to deliver aid to the Gaza Strip? Where are social media posts, the US college campus protests, and the op-eds condemning Egypt for deliberately withholding aid from Gaza’s Palestinians?

Why doesn’t the Biden administration pressure Egypt, and not just Israel, to allow aid to enter Gaza for the Palestinians?

Egypt has, in fact, been imposing a blockade on the Gaza Strip for the past 15 years…. Where are the protestors calling to stop the billions in aid to Egypt? They do not, of course, exist. The protests were never about helping Palestinians. They were always only about attacking Jews.

This is the same Egypt that been displacing thousands of Palestinians from Rafah after demolishing their homes and is now blocking aid to the Palestinians, that has piously decided to join the South African case against Israel at the ICJ.

Now that Israel is attempting to dismantle a terrorist group whose primary objective is the elimination of Israel, the Biden administration and many in the international community suddenly claim they are “outraged.”

If they really want to help the Palestinians, they could begin by filing cases against Egypt and the Arab states in the region that, for many decades, have turned their backs on the Palestinians and paid billions to their governments to keep on mistreating them.

On May 12, Egypt announced that it will support South Africa’s case in the International Court of Justice (ICJ), where Israel is accused of “genocide” for defending its citizens against Hamas’s murderers and rapists who invaded Israeli communities on October 7, 2023. The announcement came in response to the ongoing Israeli military operation against Hamas terrorists and bases, especially in the city of Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20637/who-tyrannical-power-grab

The proposed amendments to the International Health Regulations give the WHO Director General the authority to declare not just an actual but a potential international public health emergency and set out binding recommendations on how to address it, whether individual states agree with him or not.

Worse, no criticism of the new WHO regime and its decisions to declare potential or actual pandemics, lockdowns and treatment, including vaccines, will be allowed under the amended IHR… In other words, the government lies, obfuscations and cover-ups that so dominated the last pandemic will become normalized, and all criticism outlawed.

Already, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus (not a medical doctor) has castigated critics of the planned amendments and new Pandemic Treaty as conspiracy theorists who spread “fake news, lies and conspiracy theories.”

Since the UN claims that to “owns the science,” it is now brainwashing the public into believing that “climate change” threatens global health. This view makes it likely that you will one day find yourself in a WHO-mandated lockdown to mitigate the effects of the “climate crisis,” along with limits on where you go, how you may get there, what you do, and what you can own.

The US is already seeing forerunners of this in the Biden administration’s unconstitutional executive orders, possibly including his attempts to ban internal combustion engine vehicles and gas stoves; mandating dishwashing machines that may need repeated cycles to clean dishes, and new stricter regulations on air conditioners, washing machines, refrigerators, and even leaf-blowers — and this is only the beginning.

The WHO is not elected, has no democratic legitimacy, is not accountable to anyone and has no control mechanisms to restrain its reach. After the horrifying failures of the WHO during Covid-19, the answer is not to give the organization more power, but to disengage from it entirely.

The UN and the WHO evidently want unlimited control. If they are not stopped right now by national governments that refuse to approve the new Pandemic Treaty and proposed International Health Regulations amendments, unlimited control is what they will have — and it is we who will have given it to them.

https://www.algemeiner.com/2024/05/10/south-african-jews-forcibly-removed-while-protesting-ministers-call-intensify-pro-hamas-campus-protests/

South Africa’s Jewish community on Friday protested Foreign Minister Naledi Pandor’s recent call for students and university leaders to intensify the anti-Israel demonstrations that have engulfed college campuses across the US, chanting “no space for Jew hate” as they were forcibly removed despite demonstrating peacefully.

Members of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies (SAJBD) and South African Union of Jewish Students (SAUJS) gathered at the entrance of the Sandton Convention Center, a major venue for hosting events in South Africa, to protest what they described as an incitement to violence and antisemitism by a senior government official.

The Jewish activists were met with verbal and even physical abuse, with some people attending a conference at the center pointing and shouting “Zionist” at them in an accusatory tone. In one case, someone physically pulled a poster out of a protester’s hands, spat in her face, and told her to “f—k off,” according to the SAJBD.

The police ended up physically relocating the protesters from outside the entrance of the convention center as they shouted, “No space for Jew hate.”

The SAJBD noted that the peaceful demonstration was solely meant to raise awareness about the threat to the safety of Jewish students on university campuses and was limited to 15 people, thereby within the legal parameters for a public gathering.

The protest was in response to comments that Pandor made while delivering a lecture at the University of Johannesburg on Wednesday.

Titling her lecture “The Responsibility of the Academy in a Time of Genocide,” Pandor urged greater university and student activism and boycotts against Israel for what she called its “scholasticide” and “systemic obliteration of education” in Gaza.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20635/condorcet-gets-a-keffiyeh

T]he protest feeds on media attention. As soon as TV cameras are switched off, the shouting of slogans dies down.

[E]even if all the UN resolutions were implemented, they would not reassure Israel and won’t quench Hamas’ “from the river to the sea” thirst.

For seven decades, Israelis accepted the “advice” of the US and its European allies to accept a fish-tail end to its wars rather than the victory won on the battlefield. Beyond Hamas, which wants everything, Palestinians, too, have realized that listening to advice from “well-wishers” like Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and George W Bush, the inventor of the “roadmap” to a two-state solution, will not provide even half a state for them.

Today’s protesters know little about what they are rebelling against and, at least in our experience of talking to some of them in Paris and reading and/or hearing what their counterparts say on American campuses, don’t even wish to know.

To those of us old enough to remember the good (or bad) old days of student revolt in Western universities in the 1960s, current disturbances in a number of European and American universities appear as a bad remake of a controversial original.

The current disturbances are on a much smaller scale.

In the US, they have affected a handful of universities and attracted a few thousand students out of a total college enrollment of over 15 million.

In France, the “uprising” is centered on the Paris Institute of Political Studies (Sciences Po), which boasts between 12,000 and 15,000 students, a third of them foreign, from more than 100 countries.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20626/iran-desperate-nuclear-weapons

Ayatollah Khamenei’s initial issuance of a fatwa against nuclear weapons coincided with damning revelations in 2002: Iran was exposed clandestinely engaging in nuclear activities, including uranium enrichment, at covert facilities in Natanz and Arak.

These activities flamboyantly violated the principles outlined in the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), to which Iran was a signatory.

The timing of Khamenei’s fatwa should only raise questions about its authenticity and underlying motive: it likely an attempt to mitigate international backlash and deflect scrutiny away from Iran’s covert nuclear endeavors.

Iran’s constitution explicitly mandates that both the Army of the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps are not only tasked with safeguarding the nation’s frontiers, but also with advancing the ideological mission of jihad in the name of Allah. This mission entails the propagation and imposition of Allah’s law worldwide and reflects the regime’s fervent commitment to spreading its Islamic revolutionary principles beyond its own confines.

Such a constitutionally mandated objective underscores the regime’s revolutionary zeal and underscores the potential significance of acquiring nuclear weapons as a means of furthering its ideological agenda on a global scale.

In spite recent claims by Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi that Iran harbors no intentions of pursuing nuclear weapons, along with a repeated fatwa from Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei supposedly banning nuclear weapons, it would be insane for Western powers naively to accept these assertions at face value.

While some leaders in the West may be inclined to regard such declarations lightly, the international community cannot afford to underestimate the potential threat posed by Iran’s nuclear ambitions, especially given the deceptive nature of the claims by the regime.

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

Israel and Ukraine are fighting wars for survival. Neither wants more land or to impose their values on their neighbors. They are fighting to maintain their independence and to keep their way of life. Iran and its proxies have said they want to annihilate Israel, not shrink its borders. Putin has not gone that far with Ukraine, but the analogy of a camel getting its nose under the tent applies. To the extent that Israel and Ukraine are our allies we have a duty to support them in their existential wars.

Israel is not a colonialist power. Over three quarters of a century it has created a thriving democracy on land from which their ancestors came. Today they combat forces that want to drive them from their land. Former Iranian president Rafsanjani called Israel “a one-bomb state,” that one nuclear weapon could erase Jewish civilization. Palestinians speak of the “River to the Sea,” effectively extinguishing the state of Israel. Israelis fight for their survival. If Rafah is not taken Hamas, a political party elected by Palestinians to govern Gaza, will survive, and threats to Israel will persist.

Ukraine was once part of the Russian empire and later part of the Soviet Union. In 1991 the nation drafted a declaration of independence, which received overwhelming support in a public referendum, and it was recognized as an independent state that year. It now fights to keep its independence. Yet Putin has said that Ukraine is an “aberration that doesn’t really exist.” He considers it a province of Russia and a country whose language should be obliterated. Should we help them? If we do not, does anyone think Putin will stop with Ukraine?

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/05/06/the-poison-of-islamic-sectarianism/

The UK Green Party’s Mothin Ali had just been elected to Leeds City Council in the Gipton and Harehills ward, when he punched his fist in the air and yelled out: ‘Allahu Akbar!’ Draped in a Palestinian keffiyeh, he told his supporters in his victory speech on Friday: ‘We will raise the voice of Gaza. We will raise the voice of Palestine!’

Ali’s fiery victory speech spoke to a broader trend. In last week’s elections, voters in vast swathes of England were essentially asked to pass comment on the Israel-Hamas war, rather than local issues like bus routes and bin collections. In many wards with large Muslim populations, this turned out to be a successful gambit. Akhmed Yakoob, an independent endorsed by George Galloway, put Palestine at the front and centre of his campaign for the West Midlands mayoralty. He secured 69,000 votes – which was almost enough to deprive Labour’s Richard Parker of his victory over Tory incumbent Andy Street. Labour lost control of Oldham Council for the first time in 13 years, thanks partly to a surge in support for independents who campaigned on Palestine. Activists in Bradford celebrated their city’s apparent rejection of ‘Zionism’ (even as Labour retained control of the council). A BBC analysis of 58 local-council wards found that in areas where more than one in five voters is Muslim, Labour’s share of the vote plummeted by 21 percentage points compared with 2021. In typical Keir Starmer fashion, Labour has flip-flopped over Gaza, angering many previously loyal supporters in the process. Party strategists are terrified that this could undermine Labour’s chances of a landslide at the next General Election.

What all this confirms is that Islamic identity politics, in which Palestine now plays a pivotal role, is becoming a significant electoral force in the UK. Of course, you do not have to be a Muslim to take an interest in the Gaza war, but polls show that one in four British Muslims names Palestine as his or her most important election issue, compared with just three per cent of the public as a whole.

It seems the victory of George Galloway in the Rochdale by-election in February – a contest he described as a ‘referendum on Gaza’ – was a foretaste of this new sectarianism.