RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/02/amnesty-internationals-position-on-navalny-is-unconscionable/?itm_campaign=headline-

No matter what the organization says, Alexei Navalny is indeed a prisoner of conscience in Putin’s Russia.

A mnesty International has stripped jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny of his “prisoner of conscience” status after the organization was “bombarded” with complaints highlighting some of his unseemly rhetoric from the past.

Navalny was nearly murdered by a nerve-agent attack last year, almost surely perpetrated by the Putin regime. His life was saved only after he was airlifted to Germany. Determined to return to Russia, Navalny flew back in January, at the same time releasing an investigation into the opulent lifestyles of Putin and other corrupt Russian oligarchs. Navalny was promptly arrested for violating the terms of his parole on an earlier sentence (for a trumped-up embezzlement conviction) by not checking in with a parole officer — from his German hospital bed, where he spent weeks in a coma. Initially held in a Moscow prison, he was recently moved to what is reportedly a “penal colony.”

Almost immediately after Amnesty labeled Navalny “a prisoner of conscience,” a concerted email effort by Putin allies was directed at the organization, pointing out some of the xenophobic statements Navalny made over a decade ago. Kremlin minions were deployed across social-media platforms spreading Navalny’s remarks regarding Muslims and immigrants, as well as a number of fake ones that fooled certain media outlets.

In response, Amnesty International quickly removed the “prisoner of conscience” designation, explaining, “we are no longer going to use the phrase ‘prisoner of conscience’ in regards to [Navalny] insofar as our law and policy department, having reviewed Navalny’s remarks from the mid-2000s, came to the conclusion that they meet the level of ‘hate speech.’”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17089/iran-appeasing-mullahs

Turkey and the European Union are on the same page when it comes to pursuing appeasement policies with the Iranian regime. How do the ruling mullahs of Iran repay the favor? Through assassinations and terror plots.

After the EU began pursuing ways of appeasing Iran, and after sanctions were lifted in 2015 due to the nuclear deal (which Iran never signed), Iran’s assassins and terror operatives ratcheted up their activities on the European soil.

Governments around the world need hold the Iranian regime accountable for its foreign adventurism and its reprehensible repression of dissent and peaceful protests at home. They must adopt a firm policy of expelling Iranian “diplomats” and intelligence agents like Assadi, who may be plotting further terrorist attacks. They also need to consider closing down Iranian embassies until Tehran halts its terror activities.

Turkey and the European Union are on the same page when it comes to pursuing appeasement policies with the Iranian regime. How do the ruling mullahs of Iran repay the favor? Through assassinations and terror plots.

This month, the Turkish authorities detained an Iranian diplomat, Mohammad Reza Naderzadeh, 43, for his role in killing an Iranian dissident, Massoud Molavi Vardanjani, in November 2019. Reportedly, the Iranian diplomat was a staff member in the Iranian Consulate in Istanbul and had forged travel documents for Ali Esfandiari, who orchestrated the assassination of Molavi Vardanjani.

The Iranian regime, it seems, targeted Molavi Vardanjani because of his social media campaign to expose corruption in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, its elite Quds Force branch, and the theocrats’ military establishment. After serving as an intelligence officer for the Iranian government, he defected. “I will root out the corrupt mafia commanders…,” he wrote on social media. “Pray that they don’t kill me before I do this.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/more-than-100-girls-kidnapped-in-latest-nigerian-school-abduction-11614338957

Gunmen kidnapped 317 girls from a boarding school in northwest Nigeria, police said Friday, the latest in a rising tide of high-school abductions across Africa’s most populous nation, where kidnapping for ransom has become a lucrative industry.

Dozens of armed militants broke into the Government Girls Secondary School, Jangebe, in Zamfara state at around 1 a.m. Friday and began shooting before packing schoolgirls onto vehicles or walking them toward the nearby Rugu forest, which spreads over three states and hundreds of miles.

By morning, parents and community leaders were tallying the number of people missing. The Zamfara police said security forces, backed by reinforcements, were in pursuit of the abductors.

Samaila Umar was one of the parents who awoke to the sound of gunfire, but by the time he could reach the school campus the militants had abducted his 15-year-old daughter and 14-year-old niece.

“I couldn’t get to there to save her because the kidnappers were shooting everywhere,” he said. “The government must do all in its powers to bring back our daughters.”

Another parent Samaila Ismail, whose first daughter Asiyat was among those kidnapped, said when he reached the school he saw 55 girls emerge from the restroom where they had been hiding. “But I couldn’t find my daughter,” he said.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-sound-of-liberty-in-cuba-11614366025?mod=opinion_lead_pos10

Thirty years after the collapse of the Soviet military empire, one of the world’s remaining communist dictatorships is facing a fresh challenge to its authority. And it couldn’t sound any sweeter.

Agence France-Presse reports:

In Cuba, where music and revolution are intertwined, a song by rappers boldly denouncing the communist government has found viral appeal online — but angered a regime that keeps close tabs on culture.

The song is called, “Patria y Vida,” or “Homeland and Life,” and has logged more than two million views on Alphabet, Inc.’s YouTube. Sarah Marsh and Rodrigo Gutierrez of Reuters have more on the popular new anticommunist anthem and the Miami-based musicians who helped make it happen:

Gente de Zona, Yotuel of hip-hop band Orishas fame and singer-songwriter Descemer Bueno collaborated on the song with two rappers in Cuba, Maykel Osorbo and El Funky, who are part of a dissident artists’ collective that sparked an unusual protest against repression outside the culture ministry last November.
“Homeland and Life” repurposes the old slogan “Patria o Muerte” (“Homeland or Death”) emblazoned on walls across the Caribbean country ever since Fidel Castro’s 1959 leftist revolution and expresses frustration with being required to make sacrifices in the name of ideology for 62 years.

“It’s over,” says the song’s chorus. What’s most striking is the song’s direct demand for freedom and blunt challenge to the dictatorship and its lies. “Advertising a paradise,” sing the performers, “while mothers cry for their departed children.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/muslim-cleric-condemns-ban-female-genital-robert-spencer/

We’re constantly told in the West that female genital mutilation (FGM) is a cultural practice that has nothing whatsoever to do with Islam, but as is always the case with the leftist establishment narrative, reality is otherwise. The latest reminder of that all-important fact comes from Gambia, where the learned imam Abdoulie Fatty (he isn’t one) has condemned – on Islamic grounds — attempts by human rights campaigners to ban FGM.

Gambia’s The Voice reported Monday that “one of the Gambian top Imams has condemned a ban on Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) in the country and talked hard on campaign groups which he said are spreading falsehood about FGM everywhere.” Fatty chose the most important forum of any given week for Muslims, the Friday sermon, to issue this condemnation: he made his statements “as he descended on campaigners against FGM in his last Friday sermon (khutbat) at a Mosque in around Bartex prior the congregational Jumaat prayer.”

Fatty “emphasised that FGM has been in practice since the time of Prophet Ibrahim (ASW) and ‘it was witnessed by Prophet Muhammad (SAW) during his time, too.’”

“My dear Muslim people,” the genial imam exhorted his audience, “I am advising us on the fear of God – all of us, let’s follow the teachings of Islam. My dear Muslim people we used to hear it and hearsay and they have a wake campaign and that is the reason why we do this type of sermon anytime they came back but they will meet us like the sun in the sky.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/uk-and-mandatory-vaccinations-frontpagemagcom/

For once in our lives we Brits have made it to the top of a league table, but for all the wrong reasons.

According to academic types at the University of Oxford, Brits are enduring the sixth strictest lockdown in the world and the second harshest in Europe. Only Cuba, Eritrea, Ireland, Honduras, Lebanon and Peru have faced tougher lockdowns, and most of those places are no stranger to a military coup or a bread line or two.

It does not end with lockdown. Lockdown was never the destination. In Britain, lockdown was only ever a pathway to mandatory vaccination, using unmarked backroads to mask the destination. But we’ve finally arrived.

As things stand, mandatory vaccinations are not currently legal in the UK.

And yet, this week’s headlines included ‘No jab! No job!’, indicating that employers will mandate vaccinations in new work contracts, forcing the unvaccinated out of work.

If that weren’t enough, they are coming for our kids, too. Most parents with children in state schools received a letter just like this:

‘Students will not be allowed to enter the school or return to lessons until they have been tested once and found to be negative.’

In short, without a negative COVID test, your child is not coming in to school.

https://pjmedia.com/spengler/2021/02/25/everybody-almost-has-a-last-stand-n1428214

There’s an old joke about the housewife who calls her husband on his cell phone during the evening commute. “Be careful, Dear,” she says. “The news says there’s a wrong-way driver on the Beltway.” “A wrong-way driver?” the husband shouts. “There are thousands of them!”

This came to mind while enjoying Michael Walsh’s superb book Last Stands: Why Soldiers Fight When All Is Lost. Freedom-loving men will fight to the death for all they hold sacred, and Michael’s book is adorned by a moving memoir of his father, a Marine officer during the terrible American retreat from the Chosin Reservoir. The book is enormously popular, and deservedly so.

But I should like to add a footnote to the story: Everybody (almost) eventually fights to the death. As Franz Rosenzweig noted in The Star of Redemption, every tribe sends its young men out to fight for its survival until one day they are defeated and the tribe is extinguished. That’s why nearly 150,000 languages have been spoken on Planet Earth since the dawn of man, and only a couple of thousand are left. Extinction is the norm.

Small neolithic peoples who encounter modernity are dying today. The BBC reported earlier this week:

The last male member of the Juma indigenous group in the Brazilian Amazon has died after falling ill with Covid-19.

Aruká’s death last week is the latest blow to the group whose numbers were reduced from around 15,000 in the early 20th Century to only six people in the 1990s.

Aruká was the last surviving male of the group, but as BBC News Brazil’s Juliana Gragnani reports, his grandchildren have taken an unusual step to ensure his legacy is preserved.

Aruká’s exact age is not known but he was estimated to be between 86 and 90 years old. During his life, Aruká witnessed the decline of the thousands-strong Juma community which once fished, hunted and planted lands in the southern region of Amazonas state.

Following a series of massacres carried out by rubber tappers and the spread of deadly diseases, the Juma’s numbers dwindled until Aruká’s family was the only one left.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17099/finance-china-military

Wall Street wants to finance the enemy, and the Biden administration is opening the door wide…. Beijing views the U.S. financial community as its channel to influence the highest levels of the American political system.

“It would be a tragic mistake for the new administration to postpone, dilute, or otherwise eviscerate implementation of the key provisions of Executive Order 13959. Doing so would only serve to enrich Wall Street and Beijing at the expense of American security, fundamental values, and investor protection.” — Roger Robinson, chairman of the Prague Securities Studies Institute, interview with Gatestone.

The People’s Republic of China is a unified state, so the investment ban should apply not only to companies the Trump administration designated but also to all state-owned enterprises. State enterprises are by no means separate businesses. The divisions among them are artificial, and all are tightly controlled by the Communist Party. Each one of these entities, therefore, is military-linked and Party-controlled.

China’s Military-Civil Fusion means the People’s Liberation Army “has the right to raid any non-military Chinese company for any technology it decides could advance its military strength.” — Richard Fisher, of the International Assessment and Strategy Center, interview with Gatestone

The Biden administration is allowing Wall Street to use the cash of “scores of millions, up to 160 million Americans” to “fund ICBMs targeting their families, to fund concentration camps in Xinjiang.” Most Americans will have no idea their retirement and other savings are being used to finance their own destruction…. financing China’s war on America.

Wall Street wants to finance the enemy, and the Biden administration is opening the door wide.

How can this be?

On January 26, the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control issued General License No. 1A, which permits Americans to continue acquiring shares in certain companies associated with “Communist Chinese Military Companies,” known as CCMCs, until May 27. The previous deadline, set by the Trump administration, was January 28.