RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/10/what_latin_americas_communist_travails_say_about_americas_future.html

During his 1961 inaugural address, President John F. Kennedy made it abundantly clear that he was concerned that the countries to the south of the United States not fall prey to communism.  He wrote:

To our sister republics south of our border, we offer a special pledge — to convert our good words into good deeds — in a new alliance for progress — to assist free men and free governments in casting off the chains of poverty.  But this peaceful revolution of hope cannot become the prey of hostile powers [emphasis mine].  Let all our neighbors know that we shall join with them to oppose aggression or subversion anywhere in the Americas.  And let every other power know that this Hemisphere intends to remain the master of its own house.

Yet not only have communist inroads been made south of the border, but jihadist attacks have increased.  Thus, “[d]uring the 2000s and early 2010s, Iran made notable inroads throughout Latin America.  Tehran capitalized on shifting power dynamics in an increasingly multipolar world and a tide of anti-US sentiments in Latin America in order to assert Iranian influence, most notably in countries where Left-leaning governments were in power.  Iran’s then-president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and other Iranian officials deepened Tehran’s relations with governments in Bolivia, Brazil, Cuba, Ecuador, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.”  In fact, South America has served as a “base for Hezbollah operatives who represent an extension of Iranian influence” into our southern neighbors’ countries.

In 2018, apologists for socialism cited Bolivia as a “seemingly successful” socialist regime.  They claimed that Bolivia had experienced a “3.8 percent growth rate” and that this was proof that socialism could work.  They contrasted Bolivia’s success with Venezuela’s total destruction under socialism and claimed that the latter was an “outlier” instead of a prime example of what occurs under socialist regimes.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/islamism-converges-with-cancel-culture-11603659312?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

Samuel Paty wanted to teach his students a lesson about free speech. He ended up paying with his life. Paty, 47, a middle-school teacher in a Paris suburb, announced to his civics class in early October that he would show some of the caricatures of the prophet Muhammad that the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo published in 2015 and that students were free to opt out of viewing the images.

The teacher was immediately denounced on social media. In a viral video, the Muslim father of one of Paty’s students related a series of fabrications. He falsely claimed that his daughter attended the class on free speech, that the teacher banned all Muslim students from the room and later showed the class a “photograph of a naked man” as if it were a portrait of “the Prophet of Islam,” and that his daughter had been excluded from the school in retaliation for her objections. 

On social media the father posted Paty’s name and the school’s address and encouraged all Muslims who shared his concerns to assist him in having the “rogue” instructor fired. The father and his entourage repeatedly described the affair as an act of racism and Islamophobia. 

An 18-year old Chechen refugee, Abdoullakh Anzorov, learned of the uproar from social media. He came to the middle school and bribed students to find out which teacher was Samuel Paty. Anzorov followed Paty as he left the school, then beat and stabbed him to death, decapitated him, and posted an image of the teacher’s severed head on Twitter. Later that day Anzorov was confronted by police; he attacked them with a knife and was shot and killed. 

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2020/10/25/france-recalls-ambassador-to-turkey-after-erdogan-says-macron-needs-mental-treatment-n1085581

France’s President Emmanuel Macron has declared war on radical Islam and Islamic separatism in France following the beheading of a history teacher who became a target after teaching about the Mohammed cartoons. This has angered Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose Islamist regime is at loggerheads with France and NATO over their spat with Greece over some islands.

Erdogan took Macron’s crackdown on radical Islam as an affront to Muslims and questioned Macron’s sanity for doing so.

CNN:

“What is Macron’s problem with Islam? What is his problem with Muslims?” Erdogan said, speaking at his Justice and Development Party meeting in Kayseri.

Erdogan added: “Macron needs some sort of mental treatment. What else is there to say about a head of state who doesn’t believe in the freedom of religion and behaves this way against the millions of people of different faiths living in his own country?”

Given that Erdogan’s own policies are an affront to freedom of religion, it’s so delicious that he’s oblivious to his own hypocrisy.

Naturally, the French government resented this insult and recalled its ambassador for “an evaluation.”

“Excess and rudeness are not a method. We demand that Erdogan change the course of his policy because it is dangerous in every way. We do not enter into unnecessary polemics and do not accept insults,” a spokesperson at the Elysée Palace, home of the French presidency, told CNN.

The spokesperson added that France was recalling its ambassador to Ankara for an “evaluation of the ongoing situation,” which they described as a “rare move.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16686/nigeria-killing-christians

In just the first four months of 2020, Fulani herdsmen and other terrorists “hacked to death … no fewer than 620 defenseless Christians,” and engaged in the “wanton burning or destruction of their centers of worship and learning.”

How have formerly simple and unarmed Fulani herdsmen managed to kill, since 2015, nearly twice as many Christians as the “professional” terrorists of Boko Haram….?

“Since the government and its apologists are claiming the killings have no religious undertones, why are the terrorists and herdsmen targeting the predominantly Christian communities and Christian leaders?” — The Christian Association of Nigeria, International Centre for Investigative Reporting, January 21, 2020.

“Why are you killing Christians?” US President Donald J. Trump apparently shocked his Nigerian counterpart, Muhammadu Buhari, by asking this question the first time they met in the White House in April 2018. The Nigerian president admitted this, according to a September 8, 2020 report, toward the end of a recent talk with his cabinet members:

“[W]hen I was in his office, only myself and himself, with Allah as my witness, he looked at me in the face and said ‘why are you killing Christians?’ I wonder, if you were the person how you would react? I hope what I was feeling inside did not betray my emotion…”

He should not have been shocked. Several international observers characterize what Nigerian Christians experience not just as “persecution” but as a “pure genocide.”

Since 2009, “not less than 32,000 Christians have been butchered to death by the country’s main Jihadists,” according to a May 2020 report. Hundreds more have been killed since then. Earlier this year, Christian Solidarity International issued a “Genocide Warning for Christians in Nigeria” in response to the “rising tide of violence directed against Nigerian Christians and others classified as ‘infidels’ by Islamist militants….”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/beijings-covid-recovery-isnt-so-enviable-11603393097?mod=opinion_featst_pos2

Few myths are proving so durable in our pandemic age as the notion that China has somehow cracked the coronavirus code. It hasn’t.

The argument proceeds in two steps. The first is to assert that Beijing’s authoritarian approach to mass lockdowns, followed by intrusive testing and tracing, defeated the virus in a way almost no democratic government has managed. This might be true, but it is also meaningless. It does little good to argue in favor of Chinese methods to control a pandemic when a democratic society would by definition find that authoritarianism a cost not worth paying.

More interesting is the second prong of the Beijing-beats-the-world myth: the economy.

We’re supposed to believe that China’s success in suppressing the virus has facilitated a phenomenal economic recovery—and, by extension, that our economies would be growing again too if only we had batted down Covid-19 as efficiently. The claim was bolstered this week by more good news from Beijing’s statistics gnomes, who reported gross domestic product increased by 4.9% in the third quarter compared with the same quarter last year. China is set to be the only major economy that manages to grow this year.

This might even be true. Chinese economic data are notoriously, oh, what’s the word I’m looking for . . . fake. Headline GDP numbers tell you less about the real state of the economy and more about the Communist Party’s political preoccupations and goals. Still, there is substantial evidence that the Chinese economy is growing to some extent. Important and harder-to-fudge measures such as industrial production and retail sales have improved in recent months.