RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16984/iran-presidential-show

The aim, here, is exclusion rather than qualifications.

One fake university with an address in the island of Saba, in the Caribbean, has sold over 500 doctorates to Iranian officials for $25,000 apiece.

To complicate matters further, the conditions demand other qualifications that are hard if not impossible to measure…. For example, how do you prove “heartfelt belief in the necessity of religion” or “transparent hostility to the West” or “opposition to all seditions that have taken place against the Islamic Revolution”?

Things become more complicated when would-be candidates are asked to prove loyalty not only to the regime and all its policies but also to be committed to preserving all the existing institutions of the Islamic Republic. This means that those who dream of reforming let alone disbanding the High Council of Guardians of the Constitution or merging the Revolutionary Guard with the national army need not apply.

Perhaps to divert attention from here and now problems, such as the ravages caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, economic meltdown, hyperinflation and rampant corruption, Tehran’s ruling elite have decided to give an early start to a presidential election expected to be held in June.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16972/france-schools-religion

In France, a low-intensity war is bubbling, aimed at radicalizing education.

At the Pierre Mendès France School in Saumur, a student told his teacher, “My father will behead you”. It has become impossible even to make a precise list of these incidents. They occur every day in France.

“Faced with Islamist intimidation, what should the free world do?” — Title of Robert Redeker’s column in Le Figaro in 2006. A few days later, he began receiving death threats.

If extremists have managed to intimidate France’s schools and universities, why should they not be able to subdue all of society?

“Unlike you, Colonel, and so many others, Mila will never submit”, wrote the French teenager’s father to her school’s principal in a letter published by Le Point. On January 18, 2020 Mila O., then 16 years old, made insulting comments about Islam during her Instagram livestream.

“During her livestream, a Muslim boy asked her out in the comments, but she turned him down because she is gay. He responded by accusing her of racism and calling her a ‘dirty lesbian’. In an angry follow-up video, streamed immediately after she was insulted, Mila responded by saying that she ‘hates religion'”.

Mila continued: “The Koran is a religion of hatred; there is only hatred in it… Islam is sh*t…” Since then, she has received approximately 50,000 messages and letters that contain threats to rape her, slit her throat, torture and behead her. She has had to keep moving from one school to another.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/01/biden-re-engages-china-centric-world-health-joseph-klein-0/

Joe Biden signed an executive order on Day One of his presidency, which fully re-engages the United States with the World Health Organization (WHO). In doing so, the sleepy “woke” 46th president of the United States is rewarding an incompetent global governance body that helped the Chinese regime cover up the severity of the coronavirus it unleashed upon the world. Biden is committing the United States to waste many millions of U.S. taxpayers’ dollars on this unreformed globalist bureaucracy. Biden has also laid the groundwork for participating in the COVID-19 Vaccine Global Access (COVAX) Facility, co-sponsored by the World Health Organization, which is seeking to administer the worldwide distribution of coronavirus vaccines. Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the Chief Medical Adviser to President Biden, is the Biden administration’s representative to the World Health Organization.

The spokesperson for United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres declared that “the United States joining and supporting the COVAX facility will give momentum to efforts to ensure equitable access to vaccines for all countries.” This means socially engineered global COVID-19 vaccine redistribution, akin to leftist progressive schemes for global wealth redistribution. China, which is a participant in COVAX, will stand to benefit the most from COVAX’s allocation of vaccine doses to all participating countries, because the COVAX allocations will be proportional to the participants’ total population size. By joining COVAX, the Biden administration is effectively helping China receive more vaccine dose allocations than it needs or deserves, simply because it is the most populous country in the world. Life-saving vaccines developed by American companies with the backing of the U.S. government may be diverted to COVAX’s vaccine pool and hence to China because of Biden’s decision. This would mean potential vaccine shortages in the United States, denying some Americans timely access to vaccines they helped pay for through their taxes.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16915/radical-islam-definition

Al-Azhar, the most respected Islamic university and organization in the Sunni world, is not – by their own definition – a terrorist organization. Yet the question remains. Is al-Azhar truly moderate, or could it be radical? If we fail to establish clear definitions, we can create chaotic situations that result in our asking radical institutions to help us counter radicalism.

It is notable in this context to mention that French President Emmanuel Macron met with the Grand Imam of Egypt’s Al-Azhar University, Ahmed Al-Tayeb, and called for all French imams to be trained at the Al-Azhar religious institution. The President of France probably has asked for this form of training without determining if Al-Azhar itself was a radical organization or a moderate one.

Other metrics of Islamic radicalism such as accepting child marriage, considering the lives of Muslims to be more precious than the lives of non-Muslims, and accepting force or violence to impose Islamic religious values upon others can be also included.

Based on these metrics, if any person or Islamic organization fails to reject such abhorrent ideological values, they should not be called moderates. Instead, they should be called what they are: Islamic radicals. We urgently need to detect and expose ideological radicalism before it turns – as it inevitably will – into acts of terrorism.

Since the September 11, 2001 attacks by 19 radical Islamists, the main response by many governments – as well as the United States – has been conducting direct, kinetic warfare to fight the threat of Islamic terrorism. No doubt there is a need to use kinetic force to fight militant jihadists; however, failing to fight the ideology that drives them ensures an endless supply of such individuals who will fight eternally against what they believe are infidels.

Things get more complicated when we realize that what we call radical Islam is not clearly defined – there are no standard metrics by which to measure it. In other words, we are fighting an undefined enemy. It is like fighting or trying to treat diabetes without applying metrics to the disease to determine who is diabetic and who is not, and who has improved with treatment.

The lack of metrics to measure Islamic radicalism is further confounded by the fact that the word “radicalism” can be such a relative term. We could argue about it forever as long as we do not have clear metrics for it. In other words, people can disagree whether an Islamic organization is moderate or radical if they lack the means to determine what is radicalism.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/about-chinas-booming-gdp-11611000318?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

The economic data Beijing released Monday seems to suggest that China has met expectations that it would be the only major economy to grow in 2020. China being China, there’s much more—and less—to the story.

The top-line data make China a rare good news story in the pandemic year. Inflation-adjusted GDP growth hit 6.5% in the last three months of the year, making it 2.3% for 2020. This contrasts with the rest of the world, where social distancing and lockdowns have triggered some of the worst contractions on record and raise the specter of long and difficult recoveries.

Some of Beijing’s cheerleaders want you to believe this is mainly because the Chinese government acted so aggressively to suppress the pandemic. That story sits uneasily alongside Beijing’s slow-rolling of early information about Covid-19 when more information sharing might have helped other countries.

Beijing adopted particularly aggressive lockdowns once it did act, sealing off entire cities and even now locking down apartment buildings or neighborhoods at a moment’s notice to suppress outbreaks. To the extent anyone can trust Beijing’s data about virus spread, it appears to have Covid mostly under control.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/navalnys-arrest-and-the-west-11611000490?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

Russian authorities detained opposition leader Alexei Navalny upon his return to Moscow over the weekend, five months after he survived an assassination attempt in Siberia. His personal courage is as notable as Vladimir Putin’s fear of his appeal.

Mr. Navalny, Mr. Putin’s most effective domestic critic, fell into a coma in August after being poisoned with a chemical nerve-agent of the Novichok group. Last month Mr. Navalny and investigative outlet Bellingcat presented compelling evidence tying the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) to the poisoning.

The dissident spent several months convalescing in Berlin, and he could have remained safe outside Russia. But he returned aware that the country’s penitentiary service recently had accused him of fraud and parole violations. On Monday a court ordered that he be held for 30 days, but given Russia’s lawlessness he could remain behind bars for years.

“I know that the criminal cases against me are fabricated,” he said shortly before being taken into custody. He has since called for mass protests. “I’m not afraid of anything and call on you not to fear anything.”

Mr. Putin and his cronies certainly fear him. Mr. Navalny built a national following by exposing high-level corruption, and this isn’t the first time he’s been arrested on dubious charges. Thousands waited to greet him but his flight was diverted to another airport.