RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20724/france-election-uncertainty

The election [French President Emmanuel Macron] unnecessarily provoked could produce a hung parliament in which no party has a majority.

That could make France ungovernable for at least a year, as the president cannot dissolve the parliament within a year of a previous dissolution.

It is still too early to decide how French President Emmanuel Macron might be remembered by history. But one distinction he is unlikely to win is that of “master of timing.” Yet his entourage claims that his decision to call an early general election was a master stroke in good timing.

This is how the argument goes:

With the ultra-right National Rally topping the polls in the European Parliament election earlier this month, Macron saw the danger that it would also win the next presidential election in 2027. So he decided to bring the parliamentary election forward so that the ultra-right’s youthful standard-bearer Jordan Bardella would get the premiership and more than two years in which to be exposed as a disagreeable and incompetent figure, thus allowing Macronists to keep the presidency with a new candidate of their own.

But what if things don’t happen the way Macron the super-strategist fantasized?

In the European election, Bardella’s list won what many see as a “stunning victory” with over 31 percent of the votes and 30 of the 81 French seats in the European Parliament.

Macron’s coalition received only 14.6 percent of the vote, translated into 13 seats. A normal reaction would have come in the form of “too bad, but so what?”

European Parliament elections have never been part of the mainstream of the French political process. These elections are held on a single-round proportional representation basis, which magnifies the rewards.

Held under a different electoral system, parliamentary elections in France do not mirror Euro-elections.

Here, a two-round voting system means 577 separate constituency elections affected by a variety of factors beyond a straight ideological duel.

To win a majority and thus get to name a prime minister, a party or coalition of parties must win at least 289 seats.

No party or coalition of parties has won that many seats in the first round of any parliamentary election in France.

That means you need coalition partners to secure a majority in the second round. Without that, the votes you get in the first round are simply wasted ballots.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20722/iran-speed-nuclear-program

The United Nations’ International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) recently issued an unusually jarring warning, highlighting a development in Iran’s nuclear program. IAEA inspectors confirmed that, for the first time, Iran has commenced the process of feeding uranium gas into three cascades of advanced IR-4 and IR-6 centrifuges at its Natanz enrichment facility.

By waiving sanctions on Iran, the Biden administration has effectively provided financial support amounting up to an estimated $100 billion to the mullahs. Worse, the Biden administration has turned a blind eye to Tehran’s destabilizing and aggressive policies, both within the region and without.

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has explicitly articulated his vision for Israel’s destruction in his 416-page book, Palestine. This manifesto serves as a detailed guide to eliminating Israel, often referred to in Iran as “The Little Satan,” and vehemently condemns the United States, referred to as “The Great Satan.”

By acquiring nuclear weapons, the regime could also equip its proxies — Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis — with these weapons to use against Israel. Using its proxies as its “human shields” allows Iran’s regime to maintain plausible deniability, so it can continue hiding behind them while escalating the real threat to Israel, which is Iran itself.

The Biden administration needs urgently to take decisive action to curb Iran’s aggressive nuclear advancements. The US needs to stop its current practice of waiving sanctions on Iran and start reimposing — and enforcing — severe sanctions on the country’s oil and gas industry. The US also needs to cut off the financial flow to the regime by imposing secondary sanctions: any country that does business with Iran may not do business with the United States.

US failure to act will only rapidly lead to a nuclear-armed Iran, significantly upending global stability and providing a potential vacuum for America’s adversaries to fill.

The United Nations’ International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) recently issued an unusually jarring warning, highlighting a development in Iran’s nuclear program. IAEA inspectors confirmed that, for the first time, Iran has commenced the process of feeding uranium gas into three cascades of advanced IR-4 and IR-6 centrifuges at its Natanz enrichment facility. These cascades, which consist of multiple centrifuges working in unison, increase the efficiency of uranium enrichment by spinning the uranium gas at extremely high speeds, allowing Iran to enrich it at a much faster rate and significantly reducing the time required to produce nuclear weapons.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20710/jihadists-brutalize-non-muslim-women

Today, June 19, the United Nations will observe the annual International Day for the Elimination of Sexual Violence in Conflict. Yet, it took the UN five months to document and condemn Hamas’ sexual crimes on October 7.

These crimes are reminiscent of the crimes ISIS (Islamic State) committed against Christians and Yazidis during and after their violent takeover of large parts of Iraq and Syria in 2014.

Sexual assault as a military tactic has commonly been used by Islamic terrorists since the seventh century, worldwide.

More than 2,600 abducted Yazidi women and children are to this day still waiting to be rescued from the hands of ISIS terrorists.

Teenage girls abducted by Islamic State terrorists in Iraq and Syria were sold in slave markets “for as little as a pack of cigarettes,” the UN envoy on sexual violence, Zainab Bangura, said.

“Since October 7th, the media has suppressed your [Israelis’] story, even going so far as to claim it never happened while others justified it as warranted resistance to Israeli oppression. Someone please tell me where children bound and shot to death with their guts cut out constitutes a warranted resistance… We live in a time where intelligent people are being silenced so that stupid people are not offended…. The media is actively suppressing the events of October 7th to rewrite history according to their chosen narrative…. It all boils down to likes, views, and revenue for them.” — Steve Maman, founder of The Liberation of Christian and Yazidi Children of Iraq.

“[On October 7], humiliation, mutilation and murder took place during those rapes. Woman raped in front of their loved ones and then shot. Knives inserted into their private parts. Scalped heads. Nails inserted into woman’s private areas. Indescribable pain must have taken place before death…. Attacking innocent people and subjecting hostages to torture is not an act of freedom fighting…. The global response to victims of radical Islam has consistently been one of silence, allowing such atrocities to continue unchecked, perpetuating a cycle of violence.” — Steve Maman.

Regarding the Israeli women who were brutally raped by Hamas terrorists and their supporters, many of those women’s organizations have engaged in total denial, refusing to believe Israeli women and all the evidence in front of their eyes…. What their silence and denials have actually done is only to cover up and further the crimes of Hamas and other terrorist groups. In April 2024, the NGO CyberWell released a report on the widespread online denial of Hamas’s October 7 sexual violence…. The Women’s Alliance for Security Leadership, for instance, still has not issued a statement.

Many feminist and human-rights groups — such as Amnesty International and the National Organization for Women— have said little about the sexual crimes Gazans committed against Israelis. The United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (also known as UN-Women) waited until December 1, nearly two months after the October 7 massacre, to make a superficial statement of condemnation.

Among others, UN-Women released a statement on October 13 equating the Hamas brutalities with Israel’s self-defense. Likewise, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) neglected to explicitly condemn Hamas’s atrocities. And the international #MeToo movement completely failed to mention Hamas — or the Israeli victims.

When it comes to abused and raped Israeli women, those women’s rights and human rights organizations have chosen to be on the side of rapists and murderers and to enable jihadist terrorism.

http://(www.africanjewishalliance.org

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Many Americans are unaware that terror attacks, like the October 7 massacre of Israelis, are committed every few days in Africa against innocent Christians and moderate Muslims. In Nigeria, Sudan, and other African nations, Islamists routinely converge upon villages while burning, raping, murdering, abducting, and enslaving the innocent inhabitants.

Because they have been shockingly ignored and under-reported in the West, these ongoing atrocities in Africa have been called a “silent genocide.”

The African-Jewish Alliance was formed to bring awareness to the shared origin of these crimes against humanity: the Islamist supremacist ideology which motivates Hamas in Gaza, Boko Haram in Nigeria, the Janjaweed and its derivatives in Darfur, and many other actors throughout Africa. All operate in the same manner: raids, murder, torture, burning, rape, and abduction of innocents for ransom or use as slaves. The slaughter and kidnapping of Israeli Jews is but one arm of a global jihadist movement that extends to Africa and beyond.

On June 25 and 26, the African-Jewish Alliance will host a groundbreaking summit in which representatives from the African and Jewish communities will join U.S. officials and journalists in raising awareness of this silent genocide, as well to expose the ideological connections between the “free Palestine” movement in the U.S. and Islamic terrorism in Africa and Israel.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/a-new-europe/

This is perhaps nothing more than wishful thinking, but my sense is that in Europe, when it comes to Islam, things may just possibly be coming increasingly to a head. I suspect that the monstrous Hamas attacks of October 7 awakened the imaginations of millions of Europeans who, although on some level surely knowing better, had lulled themselves into passivity with the notion that those surly-looking Muslims living in their midst, some of whom occasionally spoke out loud about conquering Europe in the name of their prophet, couldn’t possibly mean what they said or be as dangerous as they looked. Surely, moreover, the far from peaceable pro-Hamas protests that have taken place every weekend in any number of major cities around Europe have impressed upon people who, until recently, had their heads firmly stuck in the sand, that over the last few decades they had imported into their countries huge numbers of people who not only loathed and looked down on them but who might very well be prepared, early on any given morning, to do to them more or less what Hamas did to innocent Israelis on October 7.

Which brings us to the recent elections for the European Parliament (EP). Now, the parliament itself, for all its air of self-importance, is a rather meaningless and impotent organ, a rubber-stamp legislature whose function within the European Union brings to mind the role of the Supreme Soviet back in the USSR. Traditionally, European citizens, recognizing its irrelevance, have tended not to bother voting in EP elections. Even this year, the voter turnout was nothing to write home about. Nonetheless, those people who did bother to cast their ballots produced a set of results that have caused an earthquake from one end of the continent to the other. The French President immediately called for new elections. The Belgian Prime Minister resigned, reportedly in tears.

In 2006, I published a book entitled While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West from Within. If I had written the book a couple of years later, I’d have omitted the word “radical” – and removed references within the text to “extreme Islam” and the like. Because in the meantime I had come to realize that Islam is Islam. So-called “radical Islam” isn’t some kind of aberration, some twisted deviation from the peaceful norm – it’s Islam itself, the Islam of the Koran, the Islam of the prophet. It’s what Islam looks like when it’s taken seriously and practiced by the book. In the nearly two decades since that book came out, I’ve been writing endlessly about the topic – and, along with fellow truth-tellers, being dismissed as a racist, a conspiracy theorist, an Islamophobe, and a subscriber to an apparently bizarre, far-out, cult-like set of ideas known as the “Eurabia theory.”

https://www.jns.org/far-right-gains-in-europe-good-for-the-jews/

Far-right parties made dramatic gains in the June 9 European parliamentary elections. Israel supporters celebrated, anticipating the exit of some of the worst purveyors of anti-Israel hatred. Even so, European Jewish Association (EJA) chairman Rabbi Menachem Margolin advises caution.

While acknowledging that he isn’t sorry to see “the biggest antisemites” exit Europe’s parliament and saying he understands the excitement of many about the right-wing gains, Margolin told JNS that “the rise of far-right parties is something that requires all of us to be really careful; to analyze very carefully the situation.”

While Europe’s right has expressed support for Israel, that doesn’t necessarily translate into support for European Jewish life. “Many of them and, of course, many of their supporters, hate Jews no less than they hate Muslims,” he said.

It’s “absolutely” possible there could arise a situation where a far-right party’s rise will be good for Israel but bad for the Jews of that country, he said.

While many far-right parties support Israel, almost all, with the notable exception of Hungary’s Fidesz Party headed by Viktor Orbán, oppose ritual slaughter and circumcision.

Clinging to its values is what sustained the Jewish people for 3,000 years, Margolin noted, but those values are not congruent with far-right European values.

EJA is still sifting out those political actors it can work with from those it cannot. “We need to analyze what are the policies of the different political parties,” said Margolin. “We could work with some of them, but it has to be in a very specific, very practical, very detailed way.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20707/china-plans-to-rule-world

“China owns $870 billion in U.S. Treasuries that finance our debt. And they either own or have a huge portion of the Chicago Stock Exchange, AMC movie theaters, General Electric’s appliance division, General Motors, and Smithfield Foods just to name a few. On another alarming note, folks. China owns 384,000 acres of American agricultural land. That’s a 30% increase just since 2019. And on top of that, they own land near an air force base in North Dakota. That’s a clear threat to our national security and that’s what the Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration, and Related Agencies Appropriations Bill is going to address.” — US Rep. Mike Collins, July 23, 2023.

In 2023, Texas State Senator Lois Kolkhorst filed a bill, SB 147 that would ban “citizens, governments and entities from China, Iran, North Korea and Russia from purchasing land in the state, part of what she and other Republicans have said will help stem foreign influence in Texas.”

“What I fear most Americans do not realize the ambitions and goals of Xi Jinping. He and his thugs wish to bring our great nation under his control, and he’ll do whatever he can to accomplish that goal.” — Pastor Bob Fu, founder of ChinaAid, to promote religious freedom and rule of law in China, Midland Reporter-Telegram, March 7, 2023.

“… Communist Party leaders… they are also suffering under this brutal dictator Xi Jinping. Nobody’s safe, you know, many of his right-hand men, left-hand men are being ransomed, imprisoned, forced to commit suicide. You’re talking about hundreds, many, I mean senior leaders end up now in prison or being killed, so nobody feels safe in the Communist Party regime.” — Pastor Bob Fu, CBN News, January 2024.

Such an oppressive regime based on fear, punishment, and total control of human behavior would bring an abrupt end to a free way of life. The international community needs to stand up to this ideology that virtually enslaves humanity by using methods that might seem benign — such as technology.

This year, so far, more than 24,200 Chinese citizens have entered the U.S. illegally across the southern border, plus more than 5,000 across the US northern border, for a total of more than 66,000 for 2023-24 so far. Even if just 1% of them are here to subvert America, that amounts to more than 660 potential saboteurs.

The totalitarian ideology of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) includes instilling and exploiting fear to create discipline and generally control every step its population takes.

For Communist China, America’s 170 million TikTok users are the equivalent of having 170 million spy balloons. Meanwhile, cargo cranes from China with hidden listening devices are installed in US ports, and Huawei is an open line that could “disrupt US nuclear arsenal communications.”

“All warfare is based on deception. Hence, when we are able to attack, we must seem unable; when using our forces, we must appear inactive; when we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away; when far away, we must make him believe we are near.” — Sun Tzu, The Art of War, circa 5th century BCE.