RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/macron-and-the-islamists-11604098346?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

France has been rocked in recent weeks by three terror attacks, the latest on Thursday in Nice. That stabbing in a church, which killed three, followed the beheading of teacher Samuel Paty two weeks ago outside his school near Paris. A knife attack last month outside the former office of the Charlie Hebdo magazine injured two.

France is no stranger to Islamist terrorism, especially after the 2015 Paris attacks that killed 130 and the 2016 Nice truck attack that claimed 86 lives. But the latest incidents have shocked the country, for coming so close together and being such a frontal assault on French values.

Mr. Paty was singled out for displaying caricatures of Mohammed in a lesson on free speech—cartoons such as those linked to the 2015 rampage at Charlie Hebdo’s office after the magazine published similar images. Thursday’s knife attack in Nice is not the first to target religious sites in the traditionally Catholic country; a priest was murdered in a church in Normandy in 2016.

President Emmanuel Macron appears to understand the relationship between Islamist rejection of French values and this terrorism. This month he delivered a major address promising a national strategy to combat Islamism, which he described as “Islamist separatism.” Proposals include making it harder for radical imams from overseas to relocate to France, and requiring religious organizations that run sports clubs and the like to pledge to support “republican values” in exchange for public funding.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/ditching-jeremy-corbyn-11604098252?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

“The new Labour leader, Keir Starmer, is working hard to purge left-wing anti-Semitism, and Mr. Corbyn’s suspension is a clear and overdue statement of what sort of party Labour wants to be. It’s also an example to parties such as America’s Democrats that also have struggled with creeping anti-Semitism among elected officials.”

Plenty of politicians have led their parties to electoral defeats, but few then have their party membership challenged. Few deserve this unique dishonor more than Jeremy Corbyn, who was suspended on Thursday by the British Labour Party he formerly led over anti-Semitism on his watch.

Mr. Corbyn was elected to lead the party in 2015, and his tenure revealed the anti-Semitic underside of far-left politics. Mr. Corbyn frequently drew the wrong kind of attention for commenting approvingly of anti-Semitic artwork on social media or, earlier in his career, writing a foreword for a book laden with anti-Jewish stereotypes. His office allegedly suppressed investigations into Labour members accused of anti-Semitism—accusations that increased as Mr. Corbyn’s left wing of the party crept into greater leadership roles.

This scandalized British voters, including many Labour members who take pride in their party’s history of opposition to racism. It contributed to Labour’s historic rout in December’s election, and it exposed the party to legal problems.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-france-security-nice/three-dead-as-woman-beheaded-in-knife-attack-at-french-church-idUSKBN27E17D

NICE, France (Reuters) – A knife-wielding attacker shouting “Allahu Akbar” (God is Greatest) beheaded a woman and killed two other people at a church in the French city of Nice on Thursday.

A defiant President Emmanuel Macron, declaring that France had been subject to an Islamist terrorist attack, said he would deploy thousands more soldiers to protect key French sites, such as places of worship and schools.

Speaking from the scene, he said France had been attacked “over our values, for our taste for freedom, for the ability on our soil to have freedom of belief”.

“And I say it with lots of clarity again today: we will not give any ground.”

In Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, state television reported that a Saudi man had been arrested in the Red Sea city of Jeddah after attacking and injuring a guard at the French consulate. The French Embassy said he was in hospital after a knife assault though his life was not in danger.

Within hours of the Nice attack, police killed a man who had threatened passersby with a handgun in Montfavet, near the southern French city of Avignon.

France’s Le Figaro newspaper quoted a prosecution source as saying the man was undergoing psychiatric treatment, and that they did not believe there was a terrorism motive.

Nice’s mayor, Christian Estrosi, said the attack in his city had happened at Notre Dame church and was similar to the beheading earlier this month near Paris of teacher Samuel Paty, who had used cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad in a civics class.

Thursday’s attacks, on the birthday of the Prophet Mohammad, came at a time of growing Muslim anger at France’s defence of the right to publish the cartoons, and protesters have denounced France in street rallies in several Muslim-majority countries.

After the Nice attack, Prime Minister Jean Castex raised France’s security alert to its highest level.

Estrosi said the Nice attacker had repeatedly shouted “Allahu Akbar” even being detained by police.

At around 9 a.m. (0800 GMT), a man armed with a knife entered the church and slit the throat of the sexton, beheaded an elderly woman, and badly wounded a third woman, according to a police source.

The sexton and the elderly woman died on the spot, the third woman managed to make it out of the church into a nearby cafe, where she died, Estrosi told reporters. None of the victims has so far been named.

“The suspected knife attacker was shot by police while being detained. He is on his way to hospital, he is alive,” he said.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16697/europe-iran-regime

Swiss and German economic deals might be aiding Iran’s illicit nuclear weapons program…. The Swiss firm Ceresola TLS reached an agreement [in 2010] with the Rahab Engineering Establishment in Iran to deliver tunneling technology as part of a subway project. This is precisely the type of heavy earth-moving equipment Iran’s rulers need to burrow away nuclear facilities underground, as the regime did with the Qom and Natanz nuclear enrichment plants.

The German company Krempel delivered to two Iranian companies insulating pressboards that were incorporated into Iranian missiles armed with chemical warheads, which were used by the Syrian regime in a chlorine gas attack in January 2018. The attack resulted in 21 injuries, including six children.

The Association of Iranian Banks in Europe wrote in July: “45 percent of the EU exports to Iran came from Germany, which delivered goods worth 555 million Euro, with an increase of 31 percent compared to last year.”

Europe’s most powerful economic engine, Germany, and the rest of the EU have sadly opted to align themselves with the Islamic Republic of Iran on the pressing issues of Iran’s nuclear program, and its stomach-turning human rights record.

To better understand Europe’s current policy toward the Islamic Republic of Iran, it is worth citing an episode recounted in a 2006 essay by Iran expert Amir Taheri.

In 1984, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, then foreign minister of the Federal Republic of Germany and an ex-member of the Nazi party, traveled to Iran in an attempt to moderate the malign conduct of the then five-year-old revolutionary regime of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

Genscher declared his intention to engage in “critical dialogue” with the regime, but the notion sparked the joke that “critical dialogue” was really “an exercise in joint criticism, by the mullahs and the Europeans, of the Americans,” Taheri wrote. The German foreign minister announced at the time that his dialogue with Iran’s rulers was a success in “intensifying” political relations between then West Germany and the Islamic Republic.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/10/french-outrage-bruce-bawer/

On October 2, as I reported here recently, French president Emmanuel Macron gave a major speech – well, a long one, anyway – in which he vowed, after years of passivity and appeasement, to get tough on Islam. This was no small promise. France is arguably Ground Zero for European Islam, whose adherents – now constituting roughly 10% of that country’s population – represent an existential threat to French secular governance, to French culture and the French language, to French law and order, to the survival of France’s welfare state and its national economy as a whole, and to the core Gallic values of liberté, égalité, fraternité.    

Exactly two weeks after Macron’s speech, an atrocity took place that seemed to challenge Macron to act upon his lofty words. Abdoullakh Abouyezidovitch Anzorov, 18, a Moscow-born Chechen who had lived in France since 2008, beheaded Samuel Paty, 47, a teacher of history and geography at a secondary school, the Collège du Bois d’Aulne, that is located in a Paris suburb. Anzorov then posted a picture of Paty’s severed head on Twitter.

Anzorov’s motive? During a class on freedom of expression, Paty had shown his students some of the famous cartoons of Muhammed that had been published to international outcry in 2005 in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten and later reprinted in Charlie Hebdo. According to the parent of one of Paty’s pupils, Paty had permitted Muslim youngsters to leave the classroom before he displayed the cartoons, saying, “Go out, I don’t want it to hurt your feelings.” That invitation proved to be insufficient, alas, to avoid offending Anzorov’s feelings.

Shortly after the murder, Anzorov was shot dead by police; at least 15 other people have since been arrested in connection with the crime. One of them, a parent of one of Paty’s pupils, had started an online campaign to demonize Paty and exchanged text messages with Anzorov before the murder; four of those detained were pupils at the school, including two pupils of Paty, aged 14 and 15, who were apparently paid by Anzorov to identify Paty outside the school; four were members of Anzarov’s family; and yet another was a noted Islamic preacher, Abdelhakim Sefrioui, who had made anti-Paty videos. Also in the wake of the murder, about 40 raids have been made on the residences of suspected radicals.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/china-to-sanction-u-s-defense-contractors-supplying-weapons-to-taiwan/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=top-bar-latest&utm_term=first

China said Monday that it will sanction U.S. defense contractors including Lockheed Martin and Boeing’s defense division that are involved in Washington’s sale of weapons to Taiwan.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said the sanctions will also apply to Raytheon Technologies, among other “relevant American individuals” involved in supplying weapons to the small democratic state, which China claims as a territory.

The State Department last week approved the $1.8 billion arms sale to Taiwan of three weapons systems including sensors, missiles, and artillery.

“In order to safeguard national interests, China decided to impose sanctions on the American companies that were involved in arms sales to Taiwan,” Zhao said at a press briefing.

Zhao said Beijing “firmly opposes” the arms sales, which “severely damage Chinese sovereignty and security interests.” He called the sanctions “necessary measures” for “those individuals and companies who behaved badly in the process of the arms sales” and called on the U.S. government to “stop arms sales to Taiwan and stop any military interaction with Taiwan.”

http://UN Rewards Iranian Atrocities by Judith Bergman

In 2012, [Nasrin Sotoudeh] received the European Parliament’s Sakharov Prize for her work, which included representing dissidents arrested during mass protests in 2009, an effort for which she previously served three years in prison. She has also represented convicts on death row for offenses committed as minors. She is perhaps most famous for her defense of women’s rights, including the defense of several women who protested against wearing the headscarf, or hijab….

There seems to be little hope for the political prisoners of Iran today. Even despite a global outcry, the young wrestler Navid Afkari was executed on September 12 by the Iranian regime. US President Donald J. Trump had also appealed to Iran to let him live: the wrestler’s “sole act,” he said, “was an anti-government demonstration on the streets”

Meanwhile, the international community rewarded Iran. On August 14, the UN Security Council voted against a US resolution to extend the 13-year arms embargo against Iran indefinitely. Instead, the embargo will expire in mid-October, allowing Iran to buy and sell conventional weapons without UN restrictions. Perhaps it is time for the US to defund the UN, rather than bankroll and be complicit in these crimes against humanity.

In March 2019, Iranian human rights activist and lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh was sentenced to 38 years in prison and 148 lashes. Last month, she was committed to a hospital after more than 40 days on a hunger strike. She was held at a hospital for a few days, heavily guarded by Iranian security, then returned, despite a serious heart condition, to notorious Evin Prison, where she is serving her 38-year sentence. As she began her hunger strike, Sotoudeh wrote in a letter from Evin prison:

“In the midst of the coronavirus crisis engulfing Iran and the world, the situation facing political prisoners has become so difficult that their continued incarceration under these tyrannical conditions has become impossible.

“Political [activists] have been accused of unbelievable acts: espionage, corruption on earth, undermining national security, prostitution… which can keep them behind bars for up to 10 years or even lead to execution.