RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16690/turkey-historic-crimes

“In our civilization, conquest is not occupation or looting. It is establishing the dominance of the justice that Allah commanded in the [conquered] region…. This is why our civilization is one of conquest.” — Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, MEMRI.org, August 26, 2020.

“Turkey will take what is its right in the Mediterranean Sea, in the Aegean Sea, and in the Black Sea…. This is why we are determined to do whatever is necessary politically, economically, or militarily. We invite our interlocutors to put themselves in order and stay away from mistakes that will open the way for them to be destroyed.” — Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, MEMRI.org, August 26, 2020.

“The most savage treatment was always reserved for those visibly proclaiming their Christianity: clergy and monks ‘were burned to death, while others were flayed alive from head to toe.'” — Raymond Ibrahim, historian, Frontpage Magazine, August 7, 2019.

In 2018, the Speaker of Turkey’s parliament, İsmail Kahraman, described Turkey’s military offensive against northern Syria as “jihad.” “Without jihad,” he added, “there will be no progress.” During the same offensive, Turkey’s Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet) also called for “jihad” and declared in a weekly sermon that “armed struggle is the highest level of jihad.”

The Turkish government has, in recent years, escalated its rhetoric of neo-Ottomanism and conquest.

On August 26, for instance, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan gave a speech at an event celebrating the 949th anniversary of the Battle of Manzikert. This battle resulted in Turks from Central Asia invading and capturing the then majority-Armenian city of Manzikert, within the borders of the Byzantine Empire.

Parts of his speech were translated by MEMRI:

“In our civilization, conquest is not occupation or looting. It is establishing the dominance of the justice that Allah commanded in the [conquered] region.

“First of all, our nation removed the oppression from the areas that it conquered. It established justice. This is why our civilization is one of conquest.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-world-still-watches-america-11604360015?mod

For the 58th time since George Washington headed to New York for his first inauguration, U.S. voters are choosing the president, and again the eyes of the world are firmly fixed on the spectacle.

This is partly because American policy still matters. Will Donald Trump or Joe Biden be strong enough to manage a deteriorating U.S.-China relationship—and smart enough to still preserve the elements of cooperation that benefit both parties? What role will the president play in the global recovery from the pandemic? Will he embrace international institutions like the World Trade Organization and agreements like the Paris climate accords, or will he undermine them? How will he deal with rancorous countries like Russia, Turkey and Iran? Will he side with traditional allies in Europe and the Middle East, or will he look for new relationships in an era of shifting geopolitics? Will he open America’s borders to migrants, or will he try to slam them shut?

Not only U.S. voters care about these issues. So do people around the world whose lives will be directly affected by the choice Americans are making this fall.

The world’s love-hate relationship with the U.S. is about more than military might and policy ideas. For all the talk about decline and the supposed collapse of American soft power, the U.S. remains the unrivaled diva on the global stage—the most arresting figure, if not always the most sympathetic one, whose antics keep all transfixed.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/europes-covid-hospital-lesson-11604361293?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

Europeans are back under lockdown as another virus surge threatens to overwhelm their hospitals, which even before the pandemic were sick and malnourished. This is a side effect of government-run health care and a warning to the U.S.

More than half of the ICU beds in France and two-thirds in Paris are occupied by Covid patients. “At this stage, we know that whatever we do, nearly 9,000 patients will be in intensive care by mid-November, which is almost the entirety of French capacities,” President Emmanuel Macron explained last week as he ordered a second national lockdown.

Hospitals across Europe are close to their limits. The Netherlands is sending some patients to Germany, but Chancellor Angela Merkel warned last week that “if the tempo of infections stays the same, we will reach the capacity of our health-care system within weeks.”

Some U.S. hospitals are also dealing with a Covid surge, and more could be stretched if it continues through the winter. Field hospitals have been set up in Wisconsin and El Paso. But hospitals in hardest-hit regions currently have far more capacity than those in Europe.

Covid patients occupy 27% of ICU beds in South Dakota and 38% are still available. Virus patients take up about 40% of hospital beds in El Paso—still less than in Europe’s hot spots. Other areas of Texas that were slammed harder during the summer now have spare capacity. Covid patients occupy only 4% or so of hospital beds in San Antonio, Houston and Austin.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/11/why-are-you-killing-christians-trump-asks-nigerias-raymond-ibrahim/

Raymond Ibrahim is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.  This article was first published by the Gatestone Institute.

“Why are you killing Christians?” US President Donald J. Trump apparently shocked his Nigerian counterpart, Muhammadu Buhari, by asking this question the first time they met in the White House in April 2018. The Nigerian president admitted this, according to a September 8, 2020 report, toward the end of a recent talk with his cabinet members:

[W]hen I was in his office, only myself and himself, with Allah as my witness, he looked at me in the face and said ‘why are you killing Christians?’ I wonder, if you were the person how you would react? I hope what I was feeling inside did not betray my emotion…

He should not have been shocked. Several international observers characterize what Nigerian Christians experience not just as “persecution” but as a “pure genocide.”

Since 2009, “not less than 32,000 Christians have been butchered to death by the country’s main Jihadists,” according to a May 2020 report. Hundreds more have been killed since then. Earlier this year, Christian Solidarity International issued a “Genocide Warning for Christians in Nigeria” in response to the “rising tide of violence directed against Nigerian Christians and others classified as ‘infidels’ by Islamist militants….”

Under Buhari, who became Nigeria’s president in 2015, the carnage of Christians has only accelerated. According to a March 8, 2020 report, titled, “Nigeria: A Killing Field of Defenseless Christians,”

Available statistics have shown that between 11,500 and 12,000 Christian deaths were recorded in the past 57 months or since June 2015 when the present central [Buhari-led] government of Nigeria came on board. Out of this figure, Jihadist Fulani herdsmen accounted for 7,400 Christian deaths, Boko Haram 4,000 and the ‘Highway Bandits‘ 150-200.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16718/space-dominance-china

Some believe the US space program should emphasize climate change research. If there is no overall increase in space spending, there will be less money for, among other things, defending American assets in space.

Brandon Weichert of The Weichert Report said in an interview with Gatestone that there might be a move to “staff the Space Force with people inimical to its mission.”

America is… in many respects behind Russia and China in the ability to fight “over great distances at tremendous speeds, ” as Space Force’s General John Raymond said in September.

Moreover, there are other policy proposals that would degrade America’s ability to defend itself…. Unfortunately, there are many who still believe America can come to agreement with China.

In space, almost everything has a dual purpose. Fisher, for instance, reports that China will put a laser on its upcoming space station for the announced purpose of eliminating space junk. Of course, such a laser is also capable of killing American satellites.

Other dual use items are Russia’s co-orbital “Space Stalkers.” In peacetime, they can be used to repair satellites. In wartime, Weichert says, “they can physically push U.S. satellites out of their orbits.” That would render America’s forces, and America itself, “deaf, dumb, and blind on land, at sea, in the air, and within cyberspace.”

In any event, neither Russia nor China honors agreements, especially arms control treaties.

China will be launching satellites almost every other week starting next March. In one instance the gap in next year’s frenetic schedule of launches will be only five days.

This year, through the end of September, China launched 29 satellites, more than any other nation. The U.S. was a close second with 27.

Beijing aims to widen its lead. Most observers worry that the Chinese regime is determined to get to the moon before U.S. astronauts return there, but another troublesome development is that China will quickly be filling up orbits with satellites.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16722/iran-mullahs-turmoil

Iran’s currency, the rial, lost more than half its value so far just in 2020.

Iran’s regime is currently running a $200 million budget deficit per week and it is estimated that if the pressure on Tehran continues, the deficit will hit roughly $10 billion by March 2021. This deficit will, in return, increase inflation and devalue the currency even further.

Iran’s militia groups are subsequently receiving less funding to pursue their terror activities. This shortfall may be why, for the first time in more than three decades, Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, made a public statement asking people to donate money to his group.

Iran’s ruling mullahs desire to maintain the JCPOA. It not only provided their regime with many benefits including economic relief and global legitimacy; at the same time, it ignored Tehran’s military adventurism in the region, its ballistic missile program and its support for terror groups across the Middle East. Most importantly, the JCPOA also paved the way for Tehran ultimately to become a nuclear state.

The “maximum pressure” policy against Iran’s ruling mullahs is working and must absolutely continue.

The Iranian regime is in turmoil thanks to the “maximum pressure” policy implemented by US President Donald J. Trump against the ruling mullahs.

Iran’s currency, the rial, lost more than half its value so far just in 2020. That decline makes it one of the most worthless national currencies in the world. As of October 25, the rial traded on unofficial markets at 300,500 to the US dollar. The rate has pushed the Iranian authorities to agree on removing four zeros from its currency, which has gone into a virtual free-fall. Two years ago, one US dollar was worth nearly 30,000 rials.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/macron-and-the-islamists-11604098346?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

France has been rocked in recent weeks by three terror attacks, the latest on Thursday in Nice. That stabbing in a church, which killed three, followed the beheading of teacher Samuel Paty two weeks ago outside his school near Paris. A knife attack last month outside the former office of the Charlie Hebdo magazine injured two.

France is no stranger to Islamist terrorism, especially after the 2015 Paris attacks that killed 130 and the 2016 Nice truck attack that claimed 86 lives. But the latest incidents have shocked the country, for coming so close together and being such a frontal assault on French values.

Mr. Paty was singled out for displaying caricatures of Mohammed in a lesson on free speech—cartoons such as those linked to the 2015 rampage at Charlie Hebdo’s office after the magazine published similar images. Thursday’s knife attack in Nice is not the first to target religious sites in the traditionally Catholic country; a priest was murdered in a church in Normandy in 2016.

President Emmanuel Macron appears to understand the relationship between Islamist rejection of French values and this terrorism. This month he delivered a major address promising a national strategy to combat Islamism, which he described as “Islamist separatism.” Proposals include making it harder for radical imams from overseas to relocate to France, and requiring religious organizations that run sports clubs and the like to pledge to support “republican values” in exchange for public funding.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/ditching-jeremy-corbyn-11604098252?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

“The new Labour leader, Keir Starmer, is working hard to purge left-wing anti-Semitism, and Mr. Corbyn’s suspension is a clear and overdue statement of what sort of party Labour wants to be. It’s also an example to parties such as America’s Democrats that also have struggled with creeping anti-Semitism among elected officials.”

Plenty of politicians have led their parties to electoral defeats, but few then have their party membership challenged. Few deserve this unique dishonor more than Jeremy Corbyn, who was suspended on Thursday by the British Labour Party he formerly led over anti-Semitism on his watch.

Mr. Corbyn was elected to lead the party in 2015, and his tenure revealed the anti-Semitic underside of far-left politics. Mr. Corbyn frequently drew the wrong kind of attention for commenting approvingly of anti-Semitic artwork on social media or, earlier in his career, writing a foreword for a book laden with anti-Jewish stereotypes. His office allegedly suppressed investigations into Labour members accused of anti-Semitism—accusations that increased as Mr. Corbyn’s left wing of the party crept into greater leadership roles.

This scandalized British voters, including many Labour members who take pride in their party’s history of opposition to racism. It contributed to Labour’s historic rout in December’s election, and it exposed the party to legal problems.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-france-security-nice/three-dead-as-woman-beheaded-in-knife-attack-at-french-church-idUSKBN27E17D

NICE, France (Reuters) – A knife-wielding attacker shouting “Allahu Akbar” (God is Greatest) beheaded a woman and killed two other people at a church in the French city of Nice on Thursday.

A defiant President Emmanuel Macron, declaring that France had been subject to an Islamist terrorist attack, said he would deploy thousands more soldiers to protect key French sites, such as places of worship and schools.

Speaking from the scene, he said France had been attacked “over our values, for our taste for freedom, for the ability on our soil to have freedom of belief”.

“And I say it with lots of clarity again today: we will not give any ground.”

In Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, state television reported that a Saudi man had been arrested in the Red Sea city of Jeddah after attacking and injuring a guard at the French consulate. The French Embassy said he was in hospital after a knife assault though his life was not in danger.

Within hours of the Nice attack, police killed a man who had threatened passersby with a handgun in Montfavet, near the southern French city of Avignon.

France’s Le Figaro newspaper quoted a prosecution source as saying the man was undergoing psychiatric treatment, and that they did not believe there was a terrorism motive.

Nice’s mayor, Christian Estrosi, said the attack in his city had happened at Notre Dame church and was similar to the beheading earlier this month near Paris of teacher Samuel Paty, who had used cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad in a civics class.

Thursday’s attacks, on the birthday of the Prophet Mohammad, came at a time of growing Muslim anger at France’s defence of the right to publish the cartoons, and protesters have denounced France in street rallies in several Muslim-majority countries.

After the Nice attack, Prime Minister Jean Castex raised France’s security alert to its highest level.

Estrosi said the Nice attacker had repeatedly shouted “Allahu Akbar” even being detained by police.

At around 9 a.m. (0800 GMT), a man armed with a knife entered the church and slit the throat of the sexton, beheaded an elderly woman, and badly wounded a third woman, according to a police source.

The sexton and the elderly woman died on the spot, the third woman managed to make it out of the church into a nearby cafe, where she died, Estrosi told reporters. None of the victims has so far been named.

“The suspected knife attacker was shot by police while being detained. He is on his way to hospital, he is alive,” he said.