RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/07/beginning-end-whites-south-africa-katie-hopkins/

“It’s been a rough month,” says Jess.

Coming from a one-man mountain with more shrapnel scars than most, things must be looking bleak in South Africa.

And it’s worse than any of us can imagine. Eighty-four farm attacks since lockdown began, twelve white farmers slaughtered from their land. The footage of the aftermath of one of the attacks circulating on Telegram and sent to me — too brutal to share. Only monsters could do such things to the elderly in their own homes.

As many of us celebrated the 4th of July this weekend, there were three murders in two days, one of them so unspeakably cruel that even those hardened to the news of torture of farmers by black gangs have found themselves white-knuckled at the speed of the horror.

When these massive men like Jess feel it, we need to stop and listen. They are the first people I would run to if I needed protecting: strong, sturdy, unflinching. These strong South Africans are part of the land, they have it coursing throughout their blood just as the sunshine and water spills through the crops and trees on their soil.

Hearing the horrible news I want to grab my little daysack — sitting ready with my passport and power plugs — pull on my boots and go. I am desperate to head back to their country, somehow leap into the struggle and to help the murdered be heard. For now I share their pictures with you, hopelessly trying to reanimate them as individuals, instead of more bodies on a pile.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2020/07/nihilism-and-national-security/

“The aim is to trap our society in a pincer movement, assailed by external and internal forces, in which we will be rendered impotent by self-doubt and self-hatred. As our sovereignty is stripped away, we are to be reduced to a cowed and subordinate status, much as the CCP is seeking to do in Hong Kong.”

A spectre is haunting Western societies, and it’s not just Chinese imperialism. It’s the spectre of Nihilism, permeating every corner of our intellectual and moral culture, and critically weakening our capacity to defend ourselves. At a time when sharply increasing international tensions are prompting an unprecedented increase in defence spending to counter external threats, it’s essential that the corresponding internal threats be addressed as well.

The ultimate destination of Nihilism is civilisational collapse, a cultural and political abyss into which America is now gazing, and we may follow. As Gerard Baker laments in the Wall Street Journal:

Much of the country’s political leadership, almost its entire academic establishment, most of the people who control its news and cultural output, and a good deal of its corporate elite view the US as an irredeemably malignant force for enslavement and oppression, a uniquely evil power founded on an ideology of racial supremacy. These Jacobins demand that Americans repudiate most of the nation’s history, tear down the icons of its creation and engage in a collective cultural expurgation of its sins.

Nihilism can be defined as the ideological position that all prevailing values, beliefs, systems of knowledge, conventions, and institutions are without rational, ethical, or philosophical foundation, lack any legitimacy and are systematically oppressive. For nearly two centuries, Nihilism has been associated with the radical intelligentsia and masses of alienated and under-occupied university students, other young people, and the disaffected masses generally.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16126/austria-free-speech

The European Commission against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI) ignores that there may be a context and a reason for “portraying newcomers as a threat to security”. It does not consider the proliferation of Islamic terrorism in Europe or research showing that terrorists have migrated into Europe disguised as asylum seekers, who have gone on to perpetrate deadly terrorist attacks.

“According to the study, six of the 16 mosque associations examined (37.5%) pursue ‘a policy that actively impedes integration into society and to some extent exhibits fundamentalist tendencies.’ Half of the 16 mosques examined ‘preach a dichotomous worldview, the pivotal tenet of which is the division of the world into Muslims on one side, and everyone else on the other.’ Six of the mosques were found to practice ‘explicit denigration of Western society’.”

None of this context exists for ECRI, which appears to operate in a vacuum, unencumbered by real world facts.

Instead, ECRI commends Austria for having “several measures in place… which aim to combat hate speech by developing a counter-narrative.”

The European Commission against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI) recently published its sixth monitoring report on Austria.

ECRI, which describes itself as “independent”, is the human rights monitoring body of the Council of Europe — not to be confused with the European Union. The Council of Europe is composed of 47 member states, including all of the 27 European Union member states.

ECRI is an unelected body with members designated by their governments (one for each member state) who are supposed to have “in-depth knowledge in the field of combating intolerance…. and recognised expertise in dealing with racism, xenophobia, antisemitism and intolerance”. It was founded in 1994 by the heads of state of the Council of Europe with the mandate, among other things, to “review member States’ legislation, policies and other measures to combat racism, xenophobia, antisemitism and intolerance, and their effectiveness”.

Thanks in large part to the efforts of ECRI and the Council of Europe, Europe now has a huge web of hate speech laws and policies. Gatestone has previously reported on ECRI’s monitoring of Germany and of Switzerland.

In its sixth monitoring report on Austria, ECRI wrote that “progress has been made and good practices have been developed in a number of fields”.

“Austria has taken several initiatives to thwart hate speech by developing a counter-narrative. The authorities have worked with civil society to improve the detection and recording of online hate and to provide support to victims of such incidents… in… 2018, the authorities concluded an agreement with social network providers to remove hate speech within 24 hours”.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/07/china_floods_threaten_collapse_of_worlds_largest_dam.html

The China Meteorological Administration issued “No. 1 Flood” warning as a second month of rain and earthquakes risk collapse of Three Gorges Dam and the safety of 400 million.  

Southern China in June suffered its worst flooding since 1940 with the overflowing of 250 rivers impacting 15 million residents and causing at least 121 people dead or missing. The world’s largest hydroelectric dam, the 1.4 miles wide and 630 feet high Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtse River with a 5 trillion gallon capacity, fully opened its seven massive outlets to begin discharging a record 28-acre feet per second.

But after thirty-one days of rain, a record 16.8 inches falling between Sunday and Monday morning, and inflows running at 40-acre feet per second after, CMA on July 4 issued an 80 percent risk of thundershowers for each of the next 11 days.

China’s Paramount Leader Xi Jinping in his first public statement on the crisis, called on the country to “put people first and value people’s lives most in the fight against the floods”, according to Xinhua official state news agency.

Human rights advocates complained as a record 1.2 million people from 13 cities, 140 towns, and 1,350 villages were displaced as Three Gorges Dam’s reservoir filled. But some Chinese geologists also warned that impoundment water weight could create severe earthquakes risk due to amplification of the region’s historically low seismicity.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-sun-ever-sets-on-the-british-empire-11594076187?mod=opinion_lead_pos9

Sometimes life throws you a metaphor. As my neighbors and I stood, masked and socially distanced, to watch Washington’s fireworks Saturday, a thick plume of smoke spread from the staging area to obscure part of the display. Similarly, the doom and gloom hanging over American life this year clouded but didn’t quite kill the joy of the most glorious day in our civic calendar. Even in a bad year, independence is good.

Nothing is more American than Independence Day, yet from a broader perspective, the Fourth of July is merely our local version of the world’s most widespread political festival. Think of it as British Leaving Day, a holiday celebrated from Ireland to Brunei. In some places it celebrates the happy day when the Brits, civil and well-intentioned though they may be, finally packed it in and went home. In Trinidad, Tonga and Tanzania it’s one of the highlights of the year.

In other places, as in the U.S., it isn’t the day they hauled down the Union Jack and sailed away. For us, and for the Irish (who celebrate the 1916 Easter Rising), it’s the day when the colonial rulers got served an eviction notice that, after some unpleasantness and delay, they eventually obeyed.

Our forebears were so glad to see the backs of the British that some localities had British Leaving Days of their own. Boston and New York held Evacuation Day celebrations into the 20th century on the dates the British fleet left their harbors, March 17 and Nov. 25, respectively. Before the Civil War, New Orleans celebrated the anniversary of Andrew Jackson’s defeat of the British invaders on Jan. 8, 1815.

https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/the-mysterious-explosions-at-irans-nuclear-facilities/

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Three incidents, including two explosions at nuclear facilities, have shaken Iran in recent days. Were they connected? Were they caused by accidents or were they carried out by a foreign power? If the latter, were they executed via cyberattack? And what will be their domestic and international implications?

Early in the morning on June 26, Tehran was rocked by a huge explosion at the Parchin military complex, 30 kilometers southeast of the Iranian capital. Some media outlets attributed the blast to Parchin’s role in the development of nuclear weapons, which were reaffirmed when Iran’s secret nuclear research archive was smuggled to Israel and exposed in 2018. The regime’s choice of Parchin as the site at which to conduct nuclear experiments was probably due to the fact that ammunition, explosives, and solid rocket fuel were produced there.
As early as 2012, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) asked the Iranian authorities to allow its inspectors to tour Parchin following information it had received about nuclear activity at the facility. Its request was rejected. The Iranians then demolished the buildings where the suspect activity had allegedly taken place and even razed the area around them.
In September 2015, after signing the JCPOA nuclear agreement, Tehran finally allowed IAEA inspectors to tour the area and take soil samples. Despite the regime’s thorough sanitizing of the site, anthropogenic (human-processed) uranium particles were found that could only have been produced during “cold test” explosions of nuclear devices.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/china/2020/07/clive-hamiltons-brave-and-urgent-alarm/

Last year an agent for Chinese printing companies – which have the most advanced and cheapest production facilities in the world — handed Australian publishing houses a list of words and topics that could not appear in any books that were to be printed in China. The overwhelming majority of these books are for markets – including Australia — outside China itself, which has become the default printer globally.

Naturally, the names of Chinese dissidents, such as Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo, who died excruciatingly while still incarcerated in China in 2017, are high on this list. But it also includes those of the country’s paramount leader Xi Jinping and his muse and propagandist Wang Huning, predecessors Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping, and references to Tiananmen 1989, the Hong Kong protests, or the Xinjiang conflict, as well as to the island groups in the South China Sea.

This is one of the myriad intriguing and concerning anecdotes replete in the new book by Clive Hamilton, co-written with Mareike Ohlberg, Hidden Hand: Exposing How the Chinese Communist Party Is Reshaping the World.

The challenges that are aligned globally against freedom, democracy and the rule of law – public values which 30 years ago appeared, as the Soviet Union disintegrated, to have “won” — are today legion. But the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has emerged in the last few years as by far the most significant, due to its immense economic and military capacity, its unparalleled and unconstrained surveillance and control technologies, its purposefulness… and its great institutional success. This was underlined on July 1 by the publication of the extraordinarily comprehensive and far-reaching “security” legislation effectively bringing Hong Kong fully within the PRC’s direct control – marking another great step forward by Xi, whose progress has persisted, unhindered in its thrust by the occasional burst of Western rhetoric or of temporarily inconvenient trade gestures.

The USSR posed nothing like the challenge China does today. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) consumed a vast amount of time and energy in reviewing what went wrong for its former “big brother” Russian party, and concluded essentially that it failed because it conceded ground, it liberalised, it lost control of history, including by permitting criticism of its great dictator Joseph Stalin.

Xi Jinping, the Chinese party’s general secretary since November 2012, has instead doubled down on core communist values. On July 23 next year, he will lead the celebration of the centenary of the party – whose period in untrammelled power, 70 years, has already surpassed that of the Russian party.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16174/iran-spies-assassinations

The Iranian regime has been involved in assassinations, terror plots, and terrorist attacks in more than 40 countries.

While the Iranian regime continues its assassinations and terrorist plots in the West, the EU and the UN — which it is time for the US to defund — remain silent.

Another spy from the Iranian regime, Mohammad Davoudzadeh Loloei, 40, has been sentenced to prison in a European court — this time, Denmark — for being an accessory to the attempted murder of one or more individuals who are opponents of the Iranian regime. What is unusual is that this is all taking place while Europe’s leaders continue to pursue a policy of appeasement with the ruling mullahs of Iran.

According to Roskilde District Court, in Denmark, Loloei had collected information on a dissident, so far unnamed, and given it to Iran’s intelligence service, who planned to murder the man. The information included photos of the target’s house, street and surroundings. “The court found that the information was collected and passed on to a person working for an Iranian intelligence service, for use by the intelligence service’s plans to kill the exile,” the court’s statement read.

The public prosecutor, Soeren Harbo, pointed out that the Iranian spy has received a permanent entry ban and would also be expelled from Denmark after serving his sentence. Harbo added that “It’s a historic case. And it’s a powerful message to (foreign) intelligence services: they have to handle their conflicts among themselves and stop involving us.”

Remarkably, this case involving the Iranian regime’s intelligence service carrying out espionage and attempting to assassinate its opponents abroad is not a rare one. The Iranian regime has been involved in assassinations, terror plots, and terrorist attacks in more than 40 countries.

Last fall, in November 2019, another dissident, Massoud Molavi, who ran a social media channel on Telegram criticizing the Iranian regime and exposed corruption in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, was gunned down while walking on the streets of Istanbul.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16195/slavery-africa-middle-east

For the intersectional activists, the US is the world’s biggest oppressor — not China, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, or Iran.

“What the media do not tell you is that America is the best place on the planet to be black, female, gay, trans or what have you. We have our problems and we need to address those. But our society and our systems are far from racist”. — Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Twitter, June 9, 2020.

“The new anti-racism is racism disguised as humanism (…) It implies that every white person is bad… and that every black person is a victim”. — Abnousse Shalmani, born in Tehran, now living in Paris, to Le Figaro, June 12, 2020.

“America looks different if you grew up, as I did, in Africa and the Middle East”. — Ayaan Hirsi Ali, The Wall Street Journal, June 26, 2020.

It is high time for the United States to stop funding the United Nations…. The United Nations is now being used to perpetuate injustice, not stop it.

Real slave traders and racists — those who believe Western societies and values should not exist at all — most likely look at the current Western self-flagellation and cheer their approval.

The United States abolished slavery 150 years ago, and has affirmative action for minorities. It is the country that elected a Black president, Barack Obama — twice! Yet, a new movement is toppling one historic monument after another one, as if the US is still enslaving African-Americans. Activists in Washington DC even targeted an Emancipation Memorial, depicting President Abraham Lincoln, who paid with his life for freeing slaves.

Today slavery still exists in many parts of Africa and Middle East, but the self-flagellating Western public is obsessively focused only on the Western past of African slavery rather than on real, ongoing slavery, which is alive and well — and ignored. For today’s slaves, there are no demonstrations in the streets, no international political pressure, and virtually no articles in the media.