RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16906/george-kurdahi-lebanon-peace

When someone with George Kurdahi’s weight and stature openly states that it is up to the Arab countries to decide whether they want to make peace with Israel, this sends a message to millions of Arabs that the idea of establishing relations with Israel may not be a bad one after all.

This, needless to say, is a refreshing change, especially because it is coming from a country such as Lebanon, which is effectively ruled by Hezbollah and the mullahs in Iran.

“If the weapons [of Hezbollah] undermine the State of Lebanon and are an obstacle to the return of many Arabs to Lebanon, then there needs to be re-examination of the situation. Hezbollah must reconsider its positions so that we can ensure a prosperous future for Lebanon.” — George Kurdahi, one of the Arab world’s most influential TV presenters, YouTube, December 26, 2020, Lebanon.

Kurdahi may have “shocked” his audience by speaking out in favor of peace with Israel and by criticizing the Palestinians and Hezbollah. His words, however, hardly surprised those who read and listen to what many Arabs in the Gulf have been saying about the Palestinians and Hezbollah, as well as peace with Israel.

These Arabs also have a clear and powerful opinion of Hezbollah: a manipulative and murderous terrorist group that serves as proxy for the mullahs in Iran and poses a real threat not only to Israel, but to Lebanon and other Arab countries as well.

George Kurdahi is one of the Arab world’s most influential TV presenters. On December 26, 2020, he surprised many of his fans by stating that Arab countries are entitled to normalize their relations with Israel.

The Lebanese-born Kurdahi, ex-host of the Arabic version of the game show “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” also angered many Arabs and Muslims by criticizing the Iran-backed Hezbollah terrorist organization and the Palestinians. Until recently, Kurdahi was considered a supporter of Hezbollah and an opponent of relations with Israel.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16913/morocco-israel-peace

“30 years is long enough to place ballot boxes.” — Sami Gailani, blaming the UN for the conflict in the Western Sahara that had been frozen for 30 years; Euronews; November 17, 2020.

“There is no Sahrawi people as there is a French, American or Moroccan people,” stated the political scientist Alexandre Greenberg. “The only institution that claims to represent the Sahrawi people is the Polisario Front, a Marxist guerrilla group armed by Algeria.”

Through these agreements, stemming from the Trump doctrine, which redraw the map of an Arab world more united in the face of Iranian threats and Turkish ambitions, a modern myth is shattering — that of “international law” represented by the false omnipotence of the United Nations.

The agreement forged by His Majesty King Mohammed VI and the United States is a feat of great statesmanship — a firm diplomatic triumph for peace in the Middle East.

In December 2020, Morocco became the fourth Arab-Muslim country — after the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Sudan — to announce the normalization of relations with Israel, including direct flights from Tel Aviv to Rabat.

The relationship between the two countries has long been rooted the large number of Jews who had lived in Morocco before and after the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. Moroccans who immigrated to Israel in the two decades following its establishment became one of the most important components of the new state’s population. Today, they and their descendants comprise nearly one million people, whom Morocco’s King Mohammad VI can consider distant supportive sympathizers.

Unlike Algeria and Tunisia, whose successive governments have never considered opening negotiations leading to the recognition of Israel, Morocco, under the aegis of its sovereigns, is the only Arab country whose constitution formally recognizes Judaism as a referent of identity, alongside Muslims and Christians.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/tyler-o-neil/2021/01/02/irans-president-just-said-trumps-life-will-end-in-a-few-days-n1300591

U.S. troops suspect that Iran may attempt to take revenge on President Donald Trump for the death of Quds Force General Qassem Soleimani on the anniversary of the airstrike that killed Soleimani. This week, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani sent a cryptic warning to Trump, gloating about Trump’s loss in the 2020 election and warning that the American president’s life “will end” in “a few days.”

In a speech during a cabinet meeting on Wednesday, Rouhani warned, “As I said after the martyrdom of Martyr Soleimani, I emphasise again that if you cut off Martyr Soleimani’s hand, we will cut off your leg from the region and we will continue the resistance until that day.”

“One of the effects of this stupid and disgraceful act was that Trumpism ended and in a few days, the life of this criminal will end and he will go to the dustbin of history, and we are very happy about this and we believe that the period after Trump will be a better condition for regional and global stability,” the Iranian president added, according to an Iranian government official English translation of the remarks.

While it is possible Rouhani meant that Trump’s political life will end, the official Iranian translation suggests the president was referring to Trump’s physical life.

Rouhani’s remarks came just as Iranian officials had pre-emptively blamed Trump for a confrontation that had yet to occur. Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif accused President Donald Trump of attempting to fabricate a pretext to attack Iran before incoming President Joe Biden replaces him. Such an accusation seems rather suspicious.

“Instead of fighting Covid in US, [Trump] & cohorts waste billions to fly B52s & send armadas to OUR region. Intelligence from Iraq indicate plot to FABRICATE pretext for war,” Zarif claimed on Twitter Thursday.

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/tehrans-hope-for-a-happy-nuclear-new-year-opinion

The revelation by the FBI last week that Iranian cyberwarriors are behind the death threats against American officials circulating online since the US presidential election on November 3 should not have come as a surprise. One aim of the regime in Tehran and its PR soldiers is to sow internecine discord among its enemies.

To those wearing rose-colored glasses about the dawn of utopia in the United States – thanks to the upcoming inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden and his sidekick, Kamala Harris – the fact that one of the multiple websites set up by social-media-savvy forces in the Islamic Republic targeted such figures as Christopher Krebs makes no sense.

On November 17, US President Donald Trump fired Krebs from his post as head of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency for refuting claims of massive electoral fraud on the part of the Biden campaign. It would stand to reason, then, that Iran would have no bones to pick with him.

On the contrary, the mullahs and their puppets in Tehran have made their deep hatred for Trump clear for the past four years, well before he withdrew from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) – the favorable nuclear deal that it reached in 2015 with world powers, led by the administration of former president Barack Obama.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16907/germany-un-security-council

A closer examination of Germany’s voting patterns at the UN over the past several years, however, reveals a troubling double standard on a range of issues, especially on human rights, which the German government claims to be “a cornerstone” of its foreign policy.

The record shows that during its stint on the UN Security Council, Germany voted for dozens of resolutions — many of which smack of anti-Semitism — that singled out Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East.

Moreover, Germany turned a blind eye as multiple serial human rights abusers, including China, Libya, Mauritania, Sudan and Venezuela, among others, were elected to the UN Human Rights Council, the UN’s highest human rights body.

In 2020, Germany voted 13 times to condemn Israel, but failed to introduce a single resolution on the human rights situation in Cuba, China, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Pakistan, Venezuela — or on 175 other countries, according to UN Watch, a Geneva-based, independent non-governmental watchdog group.

“While nearly all EU countries backed 13 out of 17 UNGA resolutions singling out Israel this year, they failed to introduce even one resolution for women’s right [sic] activists jailed and tortured in Saudi Arabia, dissident artists arrested in Cuba, journalists thrown behind bars in Turkey, religious minorities attacked in Pakistan, and opposition members persecuted in Venezuela, where more than five million people have fled government repression, hunger and economic collapse.” — UN Watch, December 16, 2020.

Germany pursued a similar policy of approving anti-Israel resolutions at the UN in 2018, 2017, and 2016, when Germany voted for an especially disgraceful UN resolution, co-sponsored by the Arab group of states and the Palestinian delegation, that singled out Israel as the world’s only violator of “mental, physical and environmental health.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16886/turkey-nazi-sympathizer

Sadly, Hüseyin Nihal Atsız still has many fans in Turkey.

“As the mud will not be iron even if it is put into an oven, the Jew cannot be Turkish no matter how hard he tries. Turkishness is a privilege, it is not granted to everyone, especially to those like Jews… If we get angry, we will not only exterminate Jews like the Germans did, we will go further….” — Hüseyin Nihal Atsız, in his National Revolution (Milli Inkılap) journal, 1934.

Today, behind many of Turkey’s continued aggressive policies such as its anti-Armenian, anti-Greek, anti-Cypriot, anti-Jewish, anti-Kurdish, anti-Western, and anti-Israeli activities lie the racist views of Atsız and the like. Millions of Turks have for decades been poisoned with Atsız’s Nazi-like views.

On December 16, the Istanbul metropolitan municipality, led by Turkey’s main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), named a park in Istanbul after Hüseyin Nihal Atsız, a racist anti-Semite and one of Turkey’s most prominent Nazi sympathizers. The request was made by members of another Turkish opposition party, “The Good Party” (Iyi). Atsız (1905-1975) was known for “measuring skulls” to determine people’s “amount of Turkishness.”

In March, a member of the Good Party presented a motion to the Istanbul municipal assembly, calling for a park in Istanbul’s Maltepe district to be named after Atsız. The motion stated that Atsız spent most of his life in the Köyiçi region of Maltepe, and the subject was put on the assembly’s agenda in November. After the motion was passed by the assembly, the park in the Yalı Neighborhood officially received Atsız’s name.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/europes-disgraceful-betrayal/

Really? This is from National Review, reflexively against Trump. Joe Biden and his foreign policy team will do exactly what the Euros are doing with China…..rsk

According to top EU officials, the new Comprehensive Agreement on Investment between Europe and China is a wonderful panacea of important measures that includes greater market access to European companies in China and pledges to implement the Paris climate agreement.

And, they say, “China has committed to effectively implement [International Labor Organization] Conventions it has ratified, and to work towards the ratification of the ILO fundamental Conventions, including on forced labour.”

No one believes that for a second.

European officials have rushed to cement the trade deal before the end of 2020, and before Joe Biden takes office. In the process, they’ve deliberately overlooked the Chinese Communist Party’s disdain for human rights and its widespread atrocities, including forced-labor practices, in Xinjiang. Although it once seemed that opposition to the deal spurred by concerns for China’s Uyghur minority might have scuttled the negotiations, the two sides completed their talks and signed the agreement earlier today.

Now it awaits approval by the European Parliament, which could vote the proposal down — and a number of the body’s members have already spoken out against the arrangement. Reinhard Butikofer, the Green Party member who runs the Parliament’s China delegation, tore into it on Twitter. The “language on ILO and forced labor is not worth the ink,” he wrote. In another tweet he compared the deal to putting lipstick on a pig. More than a few of his colleagues are expected to express their agreement with him.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/12/2020-year-european-islam-bruce-bawer/

This year the biggest story in Western Europe, as around the world, was the Chinese virus and lockdown. Yet the issue of Islam didn’t go away. More cars and churches went up in flames. Muslims continued to expand no-go zones, to engage in gang violence, to bash Jews and gays, to rape infidel women and “groom” infidel girls, to collect hefty welfare payments from supine governments, and to accrue political power that they use to push for Islamization in a range of cultural spheres. While Jews fled Europe to escape Muslim harassment, Muslims kept pouring in, and people smuggling was arguably more of a problem than ever.

Forced marriages and honor killings persisted. In a year when a record number of non-Muslim women across the Western world woke up and decided that they weren’t women after all, and perhaps weren’t even men either, but belonged rather to one of scores of newly minted gender categories, countless Muslim women in Western European sharia enclaves, who enjoyed no such flexibility, remained under the heel of the same rigid system of patriarchal oppression that had characterized Islam for centuries, and received no support whatsoever from the media darlings on the gender barricades.

Criticism of Islam, already verboten in newspapers, plays, you name it, became even more radioactive, with a UK publisher canceling a book – itself not about Islam – simply because its author had tweeted an inconvenient truth about the prophet Muhammed. In January, a previously unknown French teenager, Mila O., slammed Islam on Instagram and joined the ever-growing club of the instantly notorious whose members are forced underground and obliged to live with bodyguards 24/7 (even as cowardly politicians and commentators malign them).

While the year saw no acts of jihadist terror in Europe on the scale of the 2017 Barcelona and Manchester Arena attacks, there were a few somewhat smaller incidents, such as stabbings in Nice on October 29 and a mass shooting in Vienna on November 2 – all of which the media spun with the usual sleight of hand, turning Muslims from perpetrators into victims. On November 13, for example, a contributor to the Guardian named Shada Islam lamented that such acts “put…Muslims back in the spotlight” – as if this were the worst thing about them.