RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16550/france-terrorism-silence

This brand of extremism has also managed to transform many European citizens into prisoners, people hiding in their own countries, sentenced to death and forced to live in houses unknown even to their friends and families. And we got used to it!

“[T]his lack of courage to follow in Charlie’s footsteps comes at a price, we are losing freedom of speech and an insidious form of self-censorship is gaining ground.” — Flemming Rose, Le Point, September 2, 2020.

“To put it simply, freedom of speech is in bad shape around the world. Including in Denmark, France and throughout the West. These are troubled times; people prefer order and security to freedom.” — Flemming Rose, Le Point, August 15, 2020.

On September 25, in Paris, two people were stabbed and seriously wounded outside the former offices of Charlie Hebdo, where 12 of the satirical magazine’s editors and cartoonists were murdered by extremist Muslims in 2015. The suspect, in police custody, is being investigated for terrorism.

The accused murderers in the 2015 attacks are currently on trial in Paris.

Shortly before the knifing attack, on September 22, Charlie Hebdo’s director of human resources, Marika Bret, did not come home. In fact, she no longer has a home. She was evicted after serious and concrete death threats from extremist Muslims. She decided to make her “exfiltration” public for French intelligence to alert the public to the threat of extremism in France.

“I have lived under police protection for almost five years”, she told the weekly Le Point.

“My security agents received specific and detailed threats. I had ten minutes to pack and leave the house. Ten minutes to give up a part of one’s life is a bit short and it was very violent. I will not go home. I am losing my home to outbursts of hatred, the hatred that always begins with the threat of instilling fear. We know how it can end”.

Bret also claimed that the French Left abandoned the “battle for secularism”.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16552/egypt-christians-abduction-rape

“One of the strategies they used to gain the girls’ trust was for the kidnapper, a Muslim man, to tell the Christian girl he loved her and wanted to convert to Christianity for her. They would start a romantic relationship until, one day, they would decide to ‘escape’ together. What the girls do not know is that they are actually being kidnapped.” — Former Egyptian human trafficker, World Watch Monitor, October 5, 2017.

“The kidnappers receive large amounts of money. Police can help them in different ways, and when they do, they might also receive a part of the financial reward the kidnappers are paid…. In some cases, police provide the kidnappers with drugs they seize.” — Former Egyptian trafficker, World Watch Monitor, October 5, 2017

“If all goes to plan, the girls are also forced into marriage with a strict Muslim. Their husbands don’t love them, they just marry her to make her a Muslim. She will be hit and humiliated. And if she tries to escape, or convert back to her original religion, she will be killed.” — Former Egyptian trafficker, World Watch Monitor, October 5, 2017.

“There are countless families who report that police have either been complicit in the kidnapping or at the very least bribed into silence. If there is any hope for Coptic women in Egypt to have a merely ‘primitive’ level of equality, these incidents of trafficking must cease, and the perpetrators must be held accountable by the judiciary.” — From “‘Jihad of the Womb’: Trafficking of Coptic Women & Girls in Egypt,” a report by Coptic Solidarity.

The kidnapping, sexual abuse and forced conversion of Christian women and girls in Egypt — a “particularly vulnerable group to exploitation” that is quietly living an “unimaginable nightmare” — is rampant, with no signs of easing up. This is the finding of a report published on September 10, 2020 by Coptic Solidarity, an international organization based in Washington D.C., that works to promote equal citizenship rights for Egypt’s Christian minority.

In its 15-page report, “‘Jihad of the Womb’: Trafficking of Coptic Women & Girls in Egypt,” Coptic Solidarity documents “the widespread practice of abduction and trafficking” and estimates that there have been “about 500 cases within the last decade, where elements of coercion were used that amount to trafficking,” according to the UN’s own definitions, particularly per its “Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons Especially Women and Children.”

According to Coptic Solidarity:

“The capture and disappearance of Coptic women and minor girls is a bane of the Coptic community in Egypt, yet little has been done to address this scourge by the Egyptian or foreign governments, NGOs, or international bodies. According to a priest in the Minya Governorate, at least 15 girls go missing every year in his area alone. His own daughter was nearly kidnapped had he not been able to intervene in time.”

The report offers 13 separate case studies. Victims range from teenage girls, to newlywed and pregnant young women, to married women with children. Most of the victims disappeared in one of two ways: either they were publicly kidnapped, often by being forced into a car while traveling to school, church, or work; or — especially true for teenage girls — they were lured into relationships with young Muslim men who promised them the world, until, that is, they realized they had been duped. According to a former Egyptian human trafficker:

“[O]ne of the strategies they used to gain the girls’ trust was for the kidnapper, a Muslim man, to tell the Christian girl he loved her and wanted to convert to Christianity for her. They would start a romantic relationship until, one day, they would decide to ‘escape’ together. What the girls do not know is that they are actually being kidnapped. Most of the time they will not marry their kidnapper, but someone else.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16551/cfr-javad-zarif

The tweet contains interesting indicators to how [the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, Richard] Haas tries to dodge the issue. He presents Afkari’s killing as a judicial “execution”, enabling Zarif to say “well, you have executions in some states of the US as well.”

In November 1938, a few days after Kristallnacht, the French ambassador to Berlin Robert Coulondre reported the event to Paris, describing the savagery in the heart of Europe, concluding that “nevertheless [néanmoins in French] one should understand German grievances against the Jews.”

[I]n his expose at the CFR meeting, Zarif repeated the same claims, not to say lies, that he has been dishing out to the illustrious audience for years. And it seems that they gobbled it up with the same appetite as before. To hoodwink his audience, Zarif never used the term “Islamic Republic” and pretended that “Supreme Guide” Ali Khamenei doesn’t exist. Nor did he talk of Islam and Tehran’s strategy to “export the Islamic Revolution” to the whole world, including New York where the CFR is located.

Portrayed by Zarif, the Khomeinist regime is a peace-and-love enterprise where the judiciary is independent, all freedoms are respected, and the strategic aim is to establish peace and harmony across the globe. There are no political prisoners in Iran. Tehran’s support for Hezbollah and Hamas is cultural and the Iranian presence in Syria is only advisory, at the invitation of the Syrian government. There are, of course, no American and other foreign hostages in Iran. If there is trouble in the Middle East it is the fault of the United States. OK, not of good Americans like John Kerry and Barack Obama but of people like Donald Trump and Mike Pompeo.

For the past few years, hosting the Islamic Republic’s Foreign Minister, Mohammed Javad Zarif, has developed into an annual ritual of the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). This year, however, CFR’s invitation to Zarif raised a storm of protest beyond the bubble in which American foreign policy junkies play games, indulge in fantasies, and address their principal task, which is fund-raising.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16538/middle-east-transformational-peace

Both Arab countries and Israel will benefit immensely.

Palestinian leaders are suddenly discovering that, as the Arab saying goes, “The dogs bark but the caravan moves on” – possibly without them.

“We [realists] understand that only defeat will convince Palestinians like Mrs. Ashrawi, and through them Iranian, Turkish, Islamist, leftist, fascist, and other anti-Zionists, that the century-plus conflict is over, that Israel has prevailed, and that the time has come to give up on futile, painful, and genocidal ambitions.” — Daniel Pipes, Middle East Scholar.

If President Trump is able to continue following the bold, unconventional path he has traced, he will most likely succeed where all his predecessors have failed. What he has accomplished already — in less than four years, with so many forces determined to undermine him… is extraordinary.

“Trump has done more for peace in the Middle East in four years than any other American President in seventy-two years.” — Meyer Habib, member of the French National Assembly, i24 News, September 14, 2020.

On September 15, two peace agreements with Israel and known as The Abraham Accords – one with the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and one with Bahrain, and — were made official at a White House ceremony. President Donald J. Trump spoke of a “historic breakthrough” and a “previously unthinkable regional transformation”. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu added that the world is witnessing “the dawn of a new Middle East “.

The agreements, which come 26 years after the last peace treaty, between Jordan and Israel, mark a further step towards the integration of Israel in the region.

The UAE and Bahrain are the first Arab countries to recognize Israel without requiring any concession from Israel (Netanyahu said that the extension of Israeli sovereignty to parts of Judea-Samaria and the Jordan Valley was suspended, not canceled) and without any American financial contribution involved.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2020/09/pakistani-attacks-charlie-hebdo-workers-wmeat-daniel-greenfield/

The Religion of Peace would like to remind you that it’s still lethal even while everyone’s focused on a virus.

A man armed with a meat cleaver attacked and wounded two people on Friday who had stepped out for a cigarette in front of the Paris office building where Islamist militants gunned down employees of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo five years ago.

Police detained the man suspected of carrying out the attack soon after with bloodstains on his clothes next to the steps of an opera house about 500 metres (yards) away.

French officials said the attack was terrorism. A police source told Reuters the suspect was 18 years of age and of Pakistani origin.

A second suspect was detained and prosecutors were trying to establish his relation to the knife attacker. The second man is Algerian, according to the police source.

The staff of the magazine issued a statement expressing their support for the victims of Friday’s attack. “Far from terrorising us, such events should make us even more assertive in the defence of our values,” the statement said.

Pakistani and Algerian. Nothing to do with religion then.

 According to Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin, however, there is little doubt: “clearly it is an act of Islamist terrorism “, the minister said on France 2 this Friday evening.

The French can actually say the “I” word.

Meanwhile, these days, American conservatives want a medal for saying, “Radical Islamic terrorism” as if there are “moderate Islamic terrorists” to distinguish them for.

He was arrested a month ago “for carrying a prohibited weapon”, a “screwdriver”, when he was “still a minor”.

I presume we’ll shortly be saturated with claims that…

1. He suffered from mental illness

2. Was on drugs

3. Was entrapped by police

4. Was reacting to racism and economic oppression

… the 4 usual claims made by the pro-terror lobby in and out of the media.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-tale-of-two-chinese-economies-11601075108?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

Investors around the world appear to be taking comfort in the revival of China’s economy, but the question has to be which Chinese economy they’re watching. There are two, and Beijing is subsidizing growth in the wrong one.

Look beyond encouraging data such as the second quarter’s above-3% GDP growth, and what’s reviving is the export-and-government-driven manufacturing economy. As of August, manufacturing investment is positive again and this is driving industrial production and exports.

But the Chinese economy comprised of household consumers—ordinary Chinese people—is stuck in the doldrums. The unemployment rate is falling, to 5.6% in August. But this measures only some urban workers, and the true level of unemployment and underemployment almost certainly is much higher. The best reason for optimism is that consumer spending perked up in August. This was mostly concentrated in luxury goods, however—and in China stockpiling jewelry and handbags constitutes a form of saving.

The explanation for this divergence is straightforward, as Kevin Rudd and Daniel Rosen explained recently in these pages. President Xi Jinping still talks a good game about economic reform, but he has all but abandoned many of the overhauls his predecessors attempted. In the broadest terms, China no longer seeks to attract a wide variety of foreign investment as a path toward higher productivity and more economic opportunities.

Instead, since the 2008 financial panic and especially since Mr. Xi took power in 2012, Beijing has relied on debt-fueled stimulus of manufacturers and local governments to avert recessions. The trend is pronounced in the months since the coronavirus pandemic took hold.

http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/sharpe/200924

The President of Kosovo is  Hashim Thaci who was  indicted in late June for war crimes and crimes against humanity by a special tribunal investigating the 1998-1999 conflict with Serbia. When Thaci was Prime Minister of Kosovo,he was accused of being the “boss” of a “network of unlawful activity,” which included prisoner abuse and organ harvesting. rsk

Serbia’s troubles with Kosovo parallel Israel’s problems with the terrorist Palestinian Authority. It is very fitting that Serbia and Israel should have political, economic and cultural ties as the similarities between each of the embattled nations are considerable and significant in historical terms. Like the ancient Land of Israel and the modern Jewish state of Israel, Serbia has a magnificent yet tragic history. Both peoples have suffered from Islamic threats, aggression and an uncaring and, too often, hostile world as during World War 2.

In the 14th century, the Byzantine Empire began to crumble, finally falling to the Ottoman Turks in 1453. But in 1389, the Ottoman Turkish sultan, Murad, had begun to lead his Muslim horde against the armies of the Serbian Christian prince Lazar.

Prince Lazar had already been active in resisting increasing Muslim raids against Christian lands in the Balkans and the place chosen to make a stand against the Turks was at Kosovo Polje (the Field of Blackbirds) – the heartland of the Serbian nation. It was in June, 1389, on St. Vitus Day, (Vidovdan), that the rival forces met. The battle began at first with Serbian successes and the great Serbian hero, Milos Obilic, killed the Muslim sultan, Murad. For a while the Turks were in disarray but they managed to recover and by sheer weight of numbers ground down and finally defeated the Serbian army.

Thus began 500 years of Christian suffering under the Muslim yoke

It was not a mere military defeat but the end of Serbian independence. But worse still, the Serbian heartland of Kosovo was lost. For the Serbian people, the blood shed at the Battle of Kosovo in the Field of Blackbirds marks Kosovo as eternally Serbian.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16549/hezbollah-network-europe

According to Nathan Sales, the U.S. State Department’s counterterrorism coordinator, Hezbollah has been steadily building up its weapons stockpiles in Europe with the aim of preparing for any future acts of terrorism that may be ordered by Tehran.

Describing Hezbollah’s arms build-up in Europe as posing a “clear and present danger to the US” and its allies, Mr Sales said that US intelligence reports showed that Hezbollah had weapons based in Belgium, France, Greece, Italy, Spain and Switzerland, while “significant” ammonium nitrate caches had either been discovered or destroyed in France, Greece and Italy.

Further evidence of Hezbollah’s expanding terrorist presence in Europe has emerged in Ireland, where ten members of an Irish dissident group known as the New IRA (NIRA) were arrested on terrorism charges last month, following claims they met with Hezbollah officials at Iran’s embassy in Dublin.

At a time when tensions are increasing between Iran and the West over Tehran’s controversial nuclear programme, the expansion of Hezbollah’s terror operation in Europe should certainly be a major cause for concern. Iran, after all, has a long history of resorting to terrorism to put pressure on its adversaries, and Europe is an obvious target for future Iranian terror attacks.

The conviction in absentia of two terrorists with links to the Iranian-backed Hezbollah militia for murdering five Israeli tourists in Bulgaria in 2012 has shed new light on the organisation’s expanding terror network in Europe.

The convictions, which were announced earlier this week by the Specialised Criminal Court in Sofia, the Bulgarian capital, relate to a suicide bomb attack against a bus carrying Israeli tourists on July 18, 2012.

The attack took place at the airport in the Bulgarian Black Sea resort of Burgas, killing five Israelis, as well as the bus driver.

Bulgarian investigators subsequently identified two prime suspects in the case, Meliad Farah, a Lebanese-Australian, and Hassan El Hajj Hassan, a Lebanese-Canadian, whom they claimed carried out the attack on behalf of Hezbollah.

While Hezbollah has consistently denied any involvement in the murders, the court nevertheless found the two men guilty of the attack, and sentenced them to life imprisonment without parole.

As the whereabouts of the convicted men is unknown, they are unlikely ever to serve their sentences. The evidence uncovered by Bulgarian prosecutors, however, pointing to Hezbollah’s involvement in the attack has been sufficient to persuade European Union officials to place the organisation’s so-called military wing on its terrorism blacklist.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/09/when-conventional-wisdom-gets-downright-dangerous/?utm_source=

T he problem with conventional wisdom is not that it is always wrong. The rub is that the majority of “experts” unthinkingly and habitually mouth its validity until they ensure that it becomes static, unchanging, and immune from reexamination and dissent — an intolerant religious orthodoxy that finally become dangerous.

The recent Middle East breakthroughs are a perfect example. Both the Obama and Trump administrations sought quite different ways of navigating through the nearly 75-year-old “Middle East problem,” usually framed as the Israeli–“Palestinian” question.

Obama, in radical fashion, sought to empower and elevate Iran. The so-called Iran deal, the dropping of sanctions, the nocturnal infusions of cash, the exemptions for clear violations of the deal’s protocols, the nefarious work of Hezbollah — all that and more was excused on the theory that a growing Persian Shiite Iranian nexus from Tehran to the Mediterranean was inevitable and would “balance” both Israel and the so-called moderate Sunni Arab states. That realignment might prevent a Middle East war and end the leverage of America’s former Arab allies and Israel over us.

What destroyed the fantasy was not just its sheer idiocy — ensuring that a revolutionary, anti-Western theocracy would soon get nuclear weapons and become “moderate” while empowering its terrorist minions in their destructive agendas in Syria, Lebanon, and the Gulf states, as well as Europe and Latin America.

Instead, we see the futility of embracing Iran in its corollary — the old saw that the Palestinians were still central to the Obama administration’s gambit. That is, an empowered Iran, as the self-described revolutionary and chief patron of the Palestinians, would use its new clout to pressure Israel to offer concessions to the Palestinians, without any corresponding recognition of the Jewish state or reduction in Palestinians’ anti-Zionist bellicosity.

The Arab world then would be forced to rival Iran to regain its anti-Israel credentials, further bolstering the power-broking ability of the much-courted Palestinians. Eventually, Israel would concede and usher in a defiant and completely autonomous West Bank nation. Palestine Inc. would then reciprocate Israeli magnanimity by concluding peace with the Jewish state now confined within its 1967 borders. And so Middle East peace would reign.