RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/09/12/identity-politics-is-destroying-barcelona/

Barcelona has been in the news this summer for its many anti-tourism protests. Local residents have been firing water guns and blocking hotel entrances in protest against ‘over-tourism’ and its impact on living conditions.

In some ways this is not surprising. In Barcelona, there are already over four tourists for every local and this is only set to increase. Spain is soon expected to become the world’s No1 tourist destination. By 2040, it is predicted to receive 110million tourists a year, surpassing France (105million) and the United States (100million). Of course, tourism brings huge economic benefits, but the pressures it can place on accommodation and infrastructure have gone completely unaddressed by politicians. And this is far from the only issue plaguing Barcelona.

Catalonia, of which Barcelona is the capital, is ruled by a political class with a pathological obsession with identity politics. Catalonia’s elites have for years promoted the idea of Catalan identity as a nationality – through public schools and state media – rather than as a regional identity within Spain. In Barcelona, a city that was built with the help of migrants from other parts of Spain, this has been particularly divisive.

Nowhere is this clearer than through the Catalan secessionists’ weaponisation of language. Despite both Spanish and Catalan being official languages of the region, children whose mother tongue is Spanish are excluded by design from the public-school system. Since the 1980s, children have been taught exclusively in Catalan from ages three to seven. Spanish is introduced in the second year of primary school, but even then, Spanish classes are limited to two or three hours per week. Until recently, before a 2021 Supreme Court ruling, Spanish was taught as if it were a foreign language and other school subjects were generally not taught in Spanish at all.

It’s fair to say that this system puts native Spanish speakers – a substantial minority – at a disadvantage. It is particularly tough for those with special needs, who consequently aren’t given the same level of support as Catalan speakers.

https://www.jns.org/jihadists-massacre-hundreds-in-burkina-faso/

Jihadists massacre hundreds in Burkina Faso
More than 1,000 churches, public Christian properties, houses, shops and businesses were attacked, damaged, bombed, looted, destroyed, burned down, closed or confiscated for faith-related reasons in 2023.

Oct. 7-like attacks happen almost daily across Africa. In at least nine countries, armed jihadists, following what they believe to be the precepts of Islamist theology, storm villages, and torture and murder innocent Africans. Boko Haram in Nigeria, al-Shabaab in Somalia and the Rapid Support Forces in Sudan are Hamas by different names.

Like the Israelis, Africans have their homes and schools burned. Churches are a prime target. Women and girls are kidnapped and enslaved as concubines, “wives” of warriors, or merchandise to ransom or sell—all to the screams of “Allahu Akbar!”

Not all the victims are Christians; moderate Muslims and practitioners of tribal faiths are also attacked. This has resulted in the displacement of millions of people who have lost their homes and livelihoods. Yet this is generally ignored by the Western “human rights” establishment.

To break the silence, we have formed the African-Jewish Alliance: to recruit decent people for the tasks of liberating the slaves and protecting the innocent. The topic will be discussed in a series of pieces.

Jihad continues to ravage Africa.

At least 500 people in the central part of Burkina Faso were killed on Aug. 27 when jihadists opened fire on civilians who were digging defensive trenches. Hundreds of those wounded were transported to healthcare facilities.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-outcry-for-syrias-palestinians/

Yarmouk was a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria totally destroyed by the Assad regime during the Syrian Civil War. The death and destruction were far more extensive than what has happened in Gaza, but for reasons which deserve to be pondered, Yarmouk’s fate never received anything like the attention that has been given to the war in Gaza, where the IDF has been falsely accused of “ethnic cleansing” and “genocide.” More on how Yarmouk was reported on, and why its destruction received so little attention, can be found here: “The Yarmouk double standard: Why is there no outcry for Syria’s Palestinians? – opinion,” by Robert Hersowitz, Jerusalem Post, August 30, 2024:

Yarmouk, where 160,000 Palestinians had once lived, was a vibrant refugee camp, bustling with activity: shops hawking their wares, food stalls selling falafel and shwarma, children playing soccer. But then came the indiscriminate bombings, the constant artillery and sniper fire, and, gradually, widespread famine and disease.

Their homes destroyed, their streets in ruins, and with no basic services, tens of thousands of Yarmouk’s Palestinian residents fled to neighboring lands or were internally displaced. Nearly 4,000 of them were killed during the violence.

You’re probably thinking that I’m talking about Gaza. You would be wrong, however. Yarmouk is just outside of Damascus – in Syria. It was once that country’s largest Palestinian refugee camp until it was totally destroyed by Syrian government troops during the bloody civil war that began in 2011 with the ruthless repression of anti-government protesters. According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, 617,000 people – 164,000 of them civilians – have been killed since the war’s start.

And yet, in the US, even as the Palestinian (and overall civilian) death toll climbed, there were no rallies against the Bashar Assad regime in our public squares. No protest encampments on university campuses. No grassroots calls for a ceasefire. There was only a deafening silence.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20923/uk-starmer-dictatorship

Britain’s new leader, Prime Minister Keir Starmer, in the tried-and-true way of Communist dictators, has begun his first term by initiating a great purge of British dissidents.

British protesters, denounced as “far right thugs,” are being put behind bars faster than the prison services can absorb…. The youngest child arrested and charged is just 11 years old.

Because the prisons, already overflowing, cannot handle the sudden influx of mass sentenced wrongthinkers, Starmer’s government has announced that to make room for the dissidents, it will be freeing early roughly 5,500 criminals …[including] members of grooming gangs.

The mass arrests and trials are occurring at the same time as “Police are increasingly letting knife and sex offenders escape prosecution if they say sorry,” according to an August 26 report by The Telegraph.

Peter Lynch, 61, a grandfather in Rotherham, a place where children have for decades been experiencing rape, other sexual abuse, and torture at the hands of mainly Muslim grooming gangs while police and the city council looked the other way, shouted at police, “you are protecting people who are killing our kids and raping them” and “scum”. Judge Richardson told Lynch: “You did not yourself attack any police officer, as far as can be detected, but what you did was encourage by your conduct others to behave violently and you were part of this mob. What a disgraceful example you are as a grandfather”…[and] sentenced him to two years and eight months. .

Lynch was simply telling the truth: In cities such as Rotherham, Telford, Rochdale, Oxford, Peterborough, Keighley, Newcastle and Birmingham local police and councils knowingly allowed mostly Muslim grooming gangs to rape, abuse, torture and even murder thousands of little children and teenagers for decades because they said that if they stopped the crimes, they might appear “racist”.

Does the Starmer government really have so much contempt for the British? They are not even allowed to protest the rape of their children.

“At least one murder, sex assault or crime of violence is committed every two days by convicted criminals under supervision of the probation service after being released from jail, research has revealed.” — The Telegraph in July 1, 2024.

“Ideas are more powerful even than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas….” Those words appear to have become Starmer’s motto… — Josef Stalin, Soviet dictator 1924-1953, mass murderer, medium.com

Speaker of the House of Commons Sir Lindsay Hoyle recently made it clear that he thinks everything the with which the government disagrees should be banned on social media. There seems to be no awareness of the essential problem: who chooses what is misinformation?

Starmer’s methods were once exclusively reserved for dictatorships such as China, Russia, and North Korea; Western democracies did not use to sentence people to long prison sentences for speech crimes.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/09/08/islamist-terrorism-is-staging-a-barbaric-comeback/

Islamist terror has returned to Europe. But in truth, it never really went away.

On 23 August, the German city of Solingen was the scene of an all too familiar and barbaric crime.

Issa Al H, a suspected member of Islamic State, slashed at the necks of people in a crowd, as they gathered to celebrate the city’s 650th anniversary.

He killed three people and injured eight more.

Islamic State swiftly took responsibility, calling this murderer a ‘soldier’, and hailing the attack as an act of ‘revenge for the Muslims in Palestine and elsewhere’.

The killer is a Syrian asylum seeker, who was slated for deportation last year to Bulgaria – the place where he had first registered for asylum.

He only managed to stay in Germany because he was not at his asylum accommodation when immigration officials showed up to collect him.

In Germany, this kind of Islamist nihilism is, disturbingly, becoming the new normal.

In May, in the city of Mannheim, a suspected Islamist extremist stabbed six people at an anti-Islam rally. A police officer later succumbed to his injuries.

What’s more, the number of foiled plots in Germany, even over the past few months, is staggering.

http://bit.ly/3MJaqBL

The US State Department determination to suspend and soften economic sanctions on Iran’s Ayatollahs has added – since February 2021 – some $175bn to the Ayatollahs’ national income. This added-income has bolstered the Ayatollahs’ anti-US global terrorism and drug trafficking, while the US persists in its feeble responses to the frequent assaults on US installations in the Persian Gulf, Syria and Jordan by the Ayatollahs and their proxies in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen. These rogue activities by the Ayatollahs have undermined the safety of the main trade route (the Red Sea) between Europe and the Far East, while causing a severe economic setback to the pro-US Egypt, and threatening the survival of all pro-US Arab regimes.

At the same time:

*Mexico’s expanding alignment with anti-US, pro-Iran Latin American governments – such as Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, Colombia, Bolivia, Ecuador, Brazil and Chile – attests to the erosion of the US strategic posture in its own hemisphere, as well as the dramatic inroads made by Iran’s Ayatollahs – in collaboration with their Hezbollah proxy – into the soft underbelly of “The great American Satan.”

*Mexico has followed in the footsteps of the tri border area of Argentina-Paraguay-Brazil, becoming an arena for Iran and Hezbollah drug trafficking and terror-financing money laundering. For example, Iran’s Ayatollahs and Hezbollah have trained Mexican drug cartels in the areas of car bombs and improvised explosive devices, supplying them equipment for the construction of underground tunnels, as well as  predator unmanned aerial vehicles..

*The collusion with Mexican drug cartels has provided Iran’s Ayatollahs and Hezbollah a potent staging ground to severely undermine US homeland security, while establishing a multitude of dormant terror cells in the US.

*The Ayatollahs’ and Hezbollah’s deep involvement in Latin American terrorism and drug trafficking was initiated in the early 1980s, shortly after toppling the Shah of Iran with the ardent support of the US State Department.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20919/iran-proxies

Iran’s regime and its proxies constantly launch attacks – at Sunni Gulf States, at Israel and at US troops — with the seeming goal of eradicating the Jewish state and driving “The Big Satan” out of the region. That way, the mullahs appear to believe, Imperial Iran would be able to enjoy the run of the corral without interference from countries they allege are imperialist, and revel in an unfettered “open season.”

Iran and its proxies have attacked US troops in the region more than 150 times just since October. The US response has not exactly been a deterrent. In the meantime, the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism continues cheerfully to put the finishing touches on its nuclear weapons program.

The regime hides behind its proxies because it would rather its proxies receive retaliatory strikes instead of Tehran, Isfahan, Qom or Natanz, and it seems above all to fear losing its grip on power. The mullahs doubtless are aware that they lack broad support among the Iranian people, so it is easier to extend their influence and Islamist ideology through their proxies. Why should a country that does not treat its own people well treat others any better?

The time to put a stop to Iran’s runaway aggression is long overdue – before it launches nuclear weapons.

For nearly four decades, since the rise of Iran’s Islamist regime in 1979, the West has funneled substantial political and economic resources into combating Iran’s proxies. To what effect? Not enough, it would seem, to write home about.

After all these years, the West might consider, instead, facing a crucial realization: it might consider attacking the source, not merely its symptoms. It is high time for the West to wake up.