RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2020/12/islam-and-the-french-soul/

In search of narratives that have defined the West of the twenty-first century, a renewed emphasis on the nation-state and Islamic terrorism are the two that immediately come to mind. The latter found starkest expression in the Twin Tower attacks of 2001, the former in the decision of the British people to leave the European Union and of the American people to elect Donald Trump in 2016.

France has been touched by a resurgence of nationalism. The question in French presidential politics today is not which two candidates will make the second and final round, but who will compete against Marine Le Pen and thus be handed the keys to the Elysée. But Islamic terrorism has touched France more acutely than any other Western nation, to the extent that Le Pen’s inevitable loss can no longer be counted upon.

Since the beginning of the last decade, France has witnessed an unending train of terrorist attacks, each seeming to trump the last in depravity and devastation. These include the murder of three paratroopers, a rabbi and three young schoolchildren in 2012, the Charlie Hebdo and kosher supermarket sieges in January 2015, the November attacks of the same year which resulted in the death of 131, the lorry attack on the Nice promenade which killed eighty-six and the Strasbourg Christmas market attack in 2018.

In the last month alone, a twenty-five-year-old Pakistani refugee stabbed four people—seriously injuring two others—outside the former offices of Charlie Hebdo after the magazine reprinted the Mohammed cartoon which led to the first attack on the publication in 2015. Last week, an eighteen-year-old Chechen, also a refugee, beheaded a history teacher, Samuel Paty, who had shown his students the same cartoon in a class on freedom of expression.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16859/iran-topple-arab-leaders

Hamas’s call on Moroccans to revolt against their leaders contradicts its own declared policy that it does not intervene in the internal affairs of the Arab countries. “Hamas does not meddle in the internal affairs of Arab and Muslim countries,” said senior Hamas official Salah Bardaweel. If true, why is Hamas denouncing Morocco’s decision to establish relations with Israel?

Showing Hamas’s hypocrisy out in the sunlight, Hamas maintains continuous communication with Egypt, the first Arab country to sign a peace treaty with Israel. Just last week, Egyptian intelligence officials again visited the Gaza Strip….

Hamas would not dare to fire one rocket or bullet toward Egypt. Evidently, Hamas leaders know that the moment they attack Egypt, they and the entire Gaza Strip would pay a heavy price, most likely by having a huge military offensive launched against the Islamist movement.

These Arabs say that they hope to see the new US administration endorse a tough policy toward Iran and not send a message of weakness to the mullahs. Any attempt to appease Iran or ease the sanctions on it will only embolden the mullahs and increase their appetite to instigate coups to overthrow various Arab countries.

Iran’s Islamist proxies in the Arab world have resurfaced to condemn last week’s normalization agreement between Israel and Morocco just as they did with similar accords reached in the past few months with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Sudan.

As usual, the Islamists and their patrons in Tehran, who seek the elimination of Israel, are using texts from the Koran and sayings attributed to the prophet Mohammed to justify their opposition to the normalization of relations between Arabs and Israel.

After the Israel-Morocco deal, however, the Islamists have stepped up their campaign of incitement against Arabs who want to make peace with Israel.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/12/trudeaus-china-syndrome-lloyd-billingsley/

December 10 marked two years since China’s Communist regime seized Canadians Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor.  “These two Canadians are an absolute priority for our government,” Canadian foreign minister Francois-Philippe Champagne told reporters, “and we will continue to work tirelessly to secure their immediate release and to stand up for them as a government and as Canadians.” According to another story that broke last week, the government’s true priority is to ignore the captives and stand up for China.

Secret government documents obtained by Rebel News reveal that the Trudeau government invited the People’s Liberation Army to conduct a “winter survival training exercise” at the Canadian Armed Forces base at Petawawa, Ontario. Defense chief Jonathan Vance canceled the training when China kidnapped Kovrig and Spavor. That came days after Canada detained Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou, sought in the United States for fraud.

The government documents name Meng Wenzhou, but not Kovrig and Spavor, who show up only as “consular cases,” with no reference to their status as hostages. The biggest revelation was the cooperation between the Trudeau government and the People’s Liberation Army of Communist China.

“That cold-weather warfare you are referring to is just one of 18 different joint projects the Canadian armed forces had with the People’s Liberation Army in 2019 alone, Rebel News founder Ezra Levant told Tucker Carlson of Fox News. “Canada is training one- and two-star Chinese generals in our war colleges, training lieutenants and majors, commanders. We’re sending Canadians over to China, we’re bringing Chinese — I think they are not just soldiers, I think they’re spies, as well, and I don’t know a single person in this country knew about it.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16864/europe-coronavirus-second-wave

On December 11, Germany recorded 29,875 new coronavirus cases, a one-day record, according to the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) for infectious diseases.

Economists are warning that the second coronavirus lockdown has increased the risk of another recession in Europe’s largest economy.

“After the coronavirus crisis, Germany will look different: Now many companies, such as car factories, suppliers, steelworks and mechanical engineering companies will be closed forever. Even if the country is unlocked again, companies that are gone cannot start up again. Consumers and entrepreneurs are unsettled. This is poison for the economy and jobs.” — Tichys Einblick, German blog, December 1, 2020

In Sweden, which has stood out for its “no lockdown” approach to the coronavirus pandemic, Prime Minister Stefan Löfven imposed the toughest restrictions yet after a spike in the number of infected people filling intensive care units. He said that the “unprecedented” response was needed if Sweden is to “curb transmission.”

The German government has reimposed strict lockdown measures in an effort to reverse a spike in Covid-19 infections. Beginning on December 16, all non-essential shops and businesses, as well as all schools and daycare centers, will be closed until at least January 10.

The new restrictions, which were agreed upon after talks between German Chancellor Angela Merkel and the leaders of Germany’s 16 federal states, come after less intrusive lockdown measures that began on November 2 failed to significantly bring down the number of infections.

On December 11, Germany recorded 29,875 new coronavirus cases, a one-day record, according to the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) for infectious diseases. Germany’s intensive care unit capacity — the most important measure of a health system’s ability to deal with the pandemic — is at a critical level, with only 5% to 10% of intensive care beds available in some parts of the country, according to the Association of Critical Care and Emergency Medicine (DIVI).

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2020/12/macrons-vain-hope-for-an-enlightened-islam/

In the course of a few weeks, France, which has the highest proportion of Muslim citizens in Europe, has been subjected, once again, to bloody assassinations by attackers shouting “Allahu Akbar”. The first was the beheading of schoolteacher Samuel Paty, who had been discussing the Charlie Hebdo cartoons with his class. This was followed two weeks later by the killing of three Christian worshippers inside Notre Dame church in Nice. The Nice attacker cut the throats of Nadine Devilliers, sixty, and sexton Vincent Loques, fifty-five. Simone Barreto Silva was repeatedly stabbed and died of her wounds. These two atrocities were perpetrated by young male immigrants from Chechnya and Tunisia. In a third incident, an Orthodox priest was wounded by a shotgun blast when he was closing his church in Lyon. These three attacks were all symbolic: targeting non-Islamic faith and criticism of Islam.

These attacks came not long after President Macron had delivered a “Fight Against Separatism” speech on October 2 to the French parliament, announcing stricter measures to crack down on the growing influence of what he called “radical Islamism”, an ideology which has

a proclaimed, publicised desire, a systematic way of organising things to contravene the Republic’s laws and create a parallel order, establish other values, develop another way of organising society which is initially separatist, but whose ultimate goal is to take over it [the Republic] completely.

Describing the threat to France of Islamism as “existential”, Macron unveiled a series of measures to counter radicalisation, and at the same time restore and renew confidence in the Republic. Lamenting the ground already lost, he called for a “new awakening” to unite citizens behind the values of the Republic. Challenged on the one hand by Islamic radicalism, and on the other by widespread disillusionment and fear over the authorities’ failure to curb the growth of radicalism, Macron hopes to retrieve lost ground and rekindle hope for the future of France. He said that France must “tell things as they are, and also admit that we’re up against a challenge which has formed over decades in our country and that we won’t defeat it in a day”.

Macron was responding to deep-seated fears about the future of France. In 2016, after 147 people had been killed in Paris atrocities, Patrick Calvar, head of France’s Security Services, spoke of a looming civil war:

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16794/china-britain-threat

The UK’s new MI5 director, Ken McCallum, said that countries such as China and Russia were no longer focused just on traditional espionage activities, such as stealing government secrets, but also on targeting Britain’s economy, infrastructure, and academic research, while seeking to undermine its democracy.

China’s ambassador to the UK, Liu Xiaoming, later denied threatening the UK by making still another threat: “We make no threats, we threaten nobody. We just let you know the consequences. If you do not want to be our partners and our friends, you want to treat China as a hostile country, you will pay the price. That means you will lose the benefits of treating China as a friend.”

Meanwhile, Huawei’s plans to build a research center in Cambridgeshire are going ahead.

“[China’s] implementation strategy is to target elites in the West so that they either welcome China’s dominance or accede to its inevitability, rendering resistance futile”. — Clive Hamilton and Mareike Ohlberg, Hidden Hand: Exposing How the Chinese Communist Party is Reshaping the World.

In the UK, according to Hamilton and Ohlberg, the CCP has managed to “groom” British power elites to support Chinese interests, especially through the networking group the “48 Group Club”…. The group features members such as former ministers, including former Prime Minister Tony Blair and former Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, five former British ambassadors to China, leading business people, directors of large cultural institutions and professors, as well as a number of highly ranked CCP officials, including several former Chinese ambassadors to the UK.

Much of Chinese influence on British campuses is done through the CCP’s Confucius Institutes, of which there are at least 29 in the UK, according to a February 2019 report on the topic by the Conservative Party Human Rights Commission.

“If the question is which state will be shaping our world across the next decade providing big opportunities and big challenges for the UK, the answer is China,” Britain’s new MI5 Director Ken McCallum recently told journalists. He added that Russia is currently “providing bursts of bad weather, while China is changing the climate”. McCallum said that countries such as China and Russia were no longer focused just on traditional espionage activities, such as stealing government secrets, but also on targeting Britain’s economy, infrastructure and academic research, while seeking to undermine its democracy.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16848/iran-ask-then-what

Reacting to the killing of Major-General Qassem Soleimani and Brigadier-General Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, regime “thinkers” promise “revenge” and suggest this could be done with a single deadly blow to the “enemy”…. Needless to say, when Khomeinists speak of “the enemy,” they mean the American “Great Satan” and its sidekick Israel.

Even Ghulam Esmaili, spokesman for Islamic Judiciary, has joined the armchair strategists by suggesting “the clearing out of America and Israel” with a “single blow.”

Launching the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the Japanese high command also forgot to ask “what next?”.

[T]he Kayhan editorialist who urged the attack on Haifa… says because the Islamic Republic has “all US bases within range”, cowardly Americans won’t react to a destructive attack on Israel. And if they did, he says, Tehran could pour missiles against US bases in Iraq, the United Arab Emirates, the US 5th Fleet headquarters in Bahrain, the CENTCOM in Qatar, bases in Omani part of Musandam Peninsula. The editorialist believes the US would simply grin and bear each attack.

In the One Thousand and One Night tale of the princes of Serendip, all three have one desire: To achieve all their wishes with a single throw of the dice.

However, not confined to the world of oriental tales, that dream has dictated quite a few tragic, comical and tragi-comical events in history.

The latest appearance of the “one throw” theme could be witnessed in Tehran these days, where Islamic Republic leaders offer both tragic and comical versions of it.