RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16618/turkey-religious-sects

The school curriculum teaches boys that the female sex is inferior and second-class, while it teaches girls to be a slave to a man. — Professor Esergül Balcı, Report from Izmir September 9th University, September 5, 2020.

In 2010 a scandal in Siirt in southeast Turkey revealed serial rapes in this conservative little town, including cases of adults raping minors and minors raping toddlers, even killing one…. “This is a small town,” the mayor said… “Almost everyone is related to everyone.”…. No one was prosecuted.

When, in 1925, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey, banned all Islamic sects, dervishes, lodges and other religious cults dating from the Ottoman times, he publicly said, “The Turkish Republic cannot be a republic of sheiks, dervishes and their disciples. The only right sect is the sect of civilization.” Almost a century after the birth of a modern nation, nevertheless, the Turkish Republic has indeed become a republic of sheiks, dervishes and their millions of disciples.

The findings of an academic from Izmir’s September 9th University are worse than scary. The following is from Professor Esergül Balcı’s alarming report:

Islamic sects, cults and orders in Turkey have flourished in coalition with [President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s] Justice and Development Party (AKP) as their members have successfully built networks in public service.
The number of madrassas [Islamic schools] has risen sharply [since the AKP came to power in 2002].
The Treasury’s financial support for schools run by Islamic sects has reached TL 1 billion [approximately $126 million].
About one million pupils attend schools run by sects.
A total of 2.6 million Turks have some kind of connection with a religious order.
There are primarily 30 sects, their 400 branches and 800 madrassas.
Parents enroll children as young as three years old at religious schools. A third of Turkey’s 10,000 private schools have links with at least one sect. So do 2,800 of the country’s 4,000 private dormitories.
The school curriculum teaches boy students that the female sex is inferior and second-class, while it teaches girls to be a slave to a man.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/trouble-in-putins-neighborhood-11603149025?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

Changes to the Russian constitution approved earlier this year allow Vladimir Putin to remain president well into his 80s. While he has consolidated power at home, one of the little-remarked events of the year has been the authoritarian’s inability to stop disorder in Russia’s near-abroad.

In 2005 Mr. Putin said “the demise of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” More than a decade later, the former KGB officer mused that if he could go back in time he would prevent the 1991 collapse. The USSR isn’t coming back, but the Russian Federation still tries to maintain stability on its periphery through deep economic, military and cultural ties with former Soviet Republics.

This project hasn’t been going well, even in countries that generally view Moscow favorably. The latest headache comes from Russian ally Kyrgyzstan. Opposition parties accused ruling elites of voter fraud after Oct. 4 parliamentary elections, and chaos continued even after the results were annulled last week.

President Sooronbai Jeenbekov announced his resignation Thursday. The nationalist Sadyr Japarov, newly sprung from prison, has become prime minister and acting president. But a Kremlin spokesman said Thursday that Russia would pause economic support for Bishkek because “there is no government as such, as far as we see.” Mr. Putin has reason to worry about instability in the resource-rich country, which hosts a strategically important Russian air base.

https://asiatimes.com/2020/10/covid-19-launches-the-fourth-industrial-revolution/

Deploying diagnostic tech, detecting patterns with AI, Asian countries suppressed pandemic with little testing

China has a big edge on the rest of the world when it comes to AI and data analysis. Photo: AFP/Peter Steffen/DPA

Some wars are won by attrition with roughly similar casualties on both sides. Others are unequal contests in which superiority in technology or organization leaves the losing side with most of the casualties.

Ancient battles with edged weapons, in which the side that turns and runs takes most of the damage, reflect superior organization.

Modern battles with unequal outcomes mostly reflect superior technology – Prussia’s breech-loading cannon in 1870, Japan’s long-range naval artillery in 1905 or Israel’s avionics advantage in 1982.

But the superior organization also achieved unequal outcomes in modern warfare, for example, Germany in 1940, Japan in Singapore in 1942 and Israel in 1967.

Covid-19

China has won what probably will be recorded as the decisive battle for hegemony with the United States over Covid-19, employing a combination of superior organization and technology. China, South Korea and Taiwan demonstrated the effectiveness of Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies using artificial intelligence and big data.

Germany and Japan, which did not employ electronic contact tracing or apply AI to the analysis of patterns of contagion, did almost as well in controlling the disease with conventional public health methods.

Unlike China, Taiwan and South Korea, though, Germany and Japan have not succeeded in returning economic and civic life to normal.

No one expected, or planned for, this battle. Indeed, when it began neither side saw it as a battle. Nor is China the only winner: All of East Asia displayed more or less the same prowess in suppressing the pandemic, along with Germany, the sole winner among the major Western economies.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/10/ayaan-hirsi-ali-interview-jason-d-hill/

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somalian-born, Dutch-American scholar, former politician, author and activist, is also one of the world’s leading public intellectuals. She is known for her critiques of Islam, and her intransigent devotion to freedom of speech. She is the author of numerous books. Her latest is Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now.

Hirsi Ali is also a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and the founder of the AHA Foundation which is a non-profit organization for the defense of women’s rights. The organization fights against female genital mutilation and forced marriages.

Hirsi Ali’s life is proof that grit, tenacity and an exalted vision for one’s life can result in the achievement of greatness. Born in Mogadishu, Somalia in 1969 and raised as a devout Muslim before later leaving the religion, Hirsi Ali spent her childhood among her birthplace, Saudi Arabia and Kenya where she learned English. She fled Kenya for Germany pending an arranged marriage she had no choice in formulating. Alone, but armed with a heroic spirit and a belief in life’s better possibilities, she quietly boarded a train from Bonn to Amsterdam. There, she ended up in a refugee camp, was granted asylum, and worked for a while cleaning factories. Hirsi Ali learned and mastered Dutch from scratch within a year. She eventually earned a university degree in political science and, at age 33, was elected to the Dutch parliament.

She fled Holland after receiving death threats for working on the film Submission with Theo Van Gogh, who was shot eight times and murdered by a 26-year-old Dutch Moroccan Islamist terrorist.

In Heretic, Hirsi Ali makes several uncompromising statements about Islam. She writes that violence is inherent in Islam, and that Islam is not a religion of peace. She submits that this does not mean that Islamic belief makes Muslims naturally violent. Rather, the call to violence and the justification for it are explicitly stated in the sacred texts of Islam. Hirsi Ali argues that this theologically sanctioned violence is there to be activated by a number of offenses including but not limited to apostasy, adultery, blasphemy and threats to the honor of family and Islam itself.

A dignified human being with a rarefied mind, and possessed of an almost preternatural calmness, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, while preparing for the publication of her new book Prey, granted me the pleasure of this interview.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16623/belarus-human-rights

Belarusians want an end to Lukashenko’s 26-year long rule of Soviet-style authoritarianism with unfree elections, a censored media and widespread repression of political dissent. Both the US and the EU have described the recent election as neither free nor fair.

Lukashenko, however, clinging onto power, has framed the protests as “foreign interference”. The claim serves both as an excuse to crack down on the protests and to ensure the support of Russia.

Since the election [on August 9], more than 10,000 people have been detained and at least 244 people have been implicated in criminal cases on various charges related to the protests, according to Viasna human rights center leader Ales Bialiatski.

Now that Lukashenko is being pressured both internationally and at home, he is completely beholden to Putin, who is likely to take full advantage of this position by conditioning his help and support on Lukashenko’s acceptance of further “integration” with Russia. Ultimately, this could lead to a “soft” power grab by Putin – no need for military invasions — in which Putin could finally bring about the close “integration” from Belarus — “coming closer together” socially and economically — that Putin has previously sought.

For two months, Belarusians have turned out in force every Sunday, drawing up to 200,000 protesters against the August 9 presidential election, which gave President Alexander Lukashenko, a crushing if highly dubious victory.

Belarusians want an end to Lukashenko’s 26-year long rule of Soviet-style authoritarianism with unfree elections, a censored media and widespread repression of political dissent. Both the US and the EU have described the recent election as neither free nor fair.

Lukashenko’s main challenger, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, who received nearly 10% of the vote, was detained after contesting the election results and fled to Lithuania, She had said that she was ready to serve as a temporary “national leader” and hold new free and fair elections. For that purpose, she and other members of the opposition formed an opposition council, a move that prompted prosecutors to open a criminal case against the council with the claim that it had been set up as an illegal attempt to seize power. Since the council’s creation in mid-August, most of its leaders have been detained, several of them abducted and then expelled from the country. One of the last free members of the council, Maxim Znak, was dragged out of his office by masked men on September 9, detained and charged with “incitement to undermine national security”.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16660/islam-crisis

Other Arabs said that Muslims have only themselves to blame for the “crisis” in their religion. They are referring to the use of Islam, by many Muslims, to carry out terrorist attacks and other atrocities against Muslims and non-Muslims.

The message these Arabs and Muslims are sending is: We created the crisis in our religion by allowing terrorists and extremists to use Islam as a pretext for their crimes.

The views expressed by these Arabs and Muslims are reminiscent of those by Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Sisi. In 2014, he called for a “religious revolution” in Islam and appealed to leading Muslim groups to “confront the misleading ideologies harming Islam and Muslims worldwide.”

“The fact is that the biggest conspirators against Islam are the Muslims themselves, specifically those who reproduce the discourse of closed-mindedness and hatred. In this context, there is no difference between those who create, finance or carry out terrorism and those who are silent about it or justify it.” — Mohammad Maghouti, Moroccan writer, Hespress, October 13, 2020.

“[W]e have to call on France to place the Muslim Brotherhood and Hezbollah on the list of terrorist organizations.” — Nervana Mahmoud, prominent Egyptian commentator and blogger, Al Hurrah, October 11, 2020.

“The crisis that Islam is suffering from was made by Muslims with their own hands when they allowed a handful of them to adopt violence as a language for dialogue with the other. Macron was right in everything he said. His message should be considered a wake-up call. Muslims have greatly offended Islam when they showed it to be a religion that incites violence and spreads chaos in stable societies that received them as refugees and provided them with protection. Muslims made a mistake when they used their religion as a justification for attacking others. This does not give us the right to condemn others and accuse them of being hostile to Islam. Islam is in crisis because it has been distorted, mutilated, and destroyed from within. We should have said thank you to Macron rather than curse him.” — Farouk Yousef, Egyptian writer, Middle East Online, October 13, 2020.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/10/muslim-beheads-man-french-street-and-here-we-go-robert-spencer/

It happened again on Friday: a Muslim migrant from Chechnya, screaming “Allahu akbar,” beheaded a schoolteacher, Samuel Paty, on a street in a Paris suburb for the crime of showing cartoons of Muhammad to his students. The response to this gruesome jihad murder has been as predictable, and dreary, and drearily predictable, as one might expect.

In response to the murder, French President Emmanuel Macron said: “This battle is ours and it is existential. They will not pass. Obscurantism and the violence that goes with it will not win. They will not divide us. That’s what they seek and we must stand together.”

This sounds great on the first hearing. That’s the idea. But in reality, “They will not divide us” is a statement that is designed to reassure Muslims in France. Macron is saying that he will do nothing to “divide” the supposedly happily united French people. What would “divide” them? Well, something like scrutinizing the Islamic death penalty for blasphemy and challenging Muslim leaders in France to repudiate it explicitly and declare their support for the freedom of speech, and to demonstrate their sincerity by instituting programs in mosques and Islamic schools in France to teach against Sharia blasphemy laws and emphasize the importance of the freedom of speech. That would “divide us.” Macron is saying it won’t happen, as expected.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/china-threatens-to-detain-u-s-citizens-over-prosecutions-of-researchers-linked-to-chinese-military/

China is threatening to detain U.S. citizens in response to Justice Department prosecutions of researchers linked to the Chinese military, the Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday.

The Justice Department has indicted several Chinese researchers who worked in the U.S., accusing them of attempting to conceal their connections with the People’s Liberation Army. U.S. intelligence officials believe that a small number of Chinese researchers have been involved in gathering intelligence for the P.L.A. When the State Department ordered the closure of the Chinese consulate in Houston, the department also ordered China to remove all P.L.A.–connected researchers from the U.S., the Journal reported in August.

Chinese diplomats have been issuing warnings to their American counterparts that if the Justice Department continues its prosecutions of P.L.A.–linked researchers, U.S. citizens in China could run into legal troubles, people familiar with the matter told the Journal. China began issuing the threats after the U.S. arrests of those researchers.

The State Department issued a level-3 travel advisory in September for Americans planning to visit China. A level-3 advisory is the agency’s second-highest travel advisory, and is implemented “due to serious risks to safety and security” of travelers.

“The [Chinese] government arbitrarily enforces local laws, including by carrying out arbitrary and wrongful detentions and through the use of exit bans on U.S. citizens and citizens of other countries without due process of law,” the State Department’s warning states. “U.S. citizens traveling or residing in [China] or Hong Kong, may be detained without access to U.S. consular services or information about their alleged crime.”