RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/07/the-shame-of-shamima/

She should live out the rest of her adulthood in jail — ideally a British one.

 L ast week, the British Court of Appeals ruled that Shamima Begum — one of three schoolgirls from east London who flew to Syria in 2015 to join ISIS — has the right to return to the United Kingdom, in order to appeal the government’s decision to revoke her citizenship.

The 20-year-old ISIS bride was discovered last year by Anthony Lloyd, the Times of London correspondent, who managed track her down to the Kurdish-run refugee camp in northeast Syria. Begum had left ISIS, was nine months pregnant (with a baby who would shortly die), and had lost two other children to malnutrition. She was informed by another journalist that the Home Office had revoked her citizenship.

The picture of Begum — young, mourning, exhausted, and far from home — would ordinarily have evoked pity. But she made the fatal mistake of opening her mouth.

In the course of the interview, Begum casually told Lloyd how “unfazed” she was upon finding the heads of captives in the bins. Sky News’s John Sparks asked what it was like to live with and under the Islamic State, to which she replied, “at first it was nice” and that things only “got harder” when “we lost Raqqa” to U.S.-backed troops (we being ISIS). As for second thoughts, she only had those towards “the end.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16274/persecution-christians-june-2020

A Christian teenager was sexually assaulted by his Muslim employer in early June. The boy’s father and brother were then beaten for trying to seek justice for him. — Persecution.org, June 19, 2020, Pakistan.

“These Muslim Fulani herdsmen have been attacking our communities because we are Christians. Their desire is to take over our lands, force us to become Muslims, and if we decline, they kill us….” — Ibrahim Agu Iliya, Morning Star News, June 3, 2020, Nigeria.

Police killed a man after he cited his Christian faith as reason not to falsify his testimony, as police were urging him to do….Police were trying to get Younas to recant his eyewitness testimony against a Muslim family accused of murder…. When beating him did not yield results, they tried to bribe him…. “During the attack, one of the officers shouted, ‘We will teach him a lesson for insulting us!'” — Persecution.org.; June 25, 2020, Pakistan.

“Is it wrong to have another religion? Is Christianity wrong?” — Fitri Handayani, a woman who converted from Islam to Christianity, describing her ordeals at the hands of her family, YouTube; June 17, 2020, Indonesia.

“These are our houses. In ten years, none of you will be left here and then your homes will be ours anyway.” — Kurdish representative in Qamishli to Christian family; World Council of Arameans (Syriacs); June 17, 2020, Syria.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16275/iran-make-believe-diplomacy

Now, however, it seems that, for the first time, the Khomeinist ruling elite is beginning to understand that it can neither reshape the world nor join it on its own antediluvian terms.

Unable to admit that reality, the Tehran ruling elite is trying to conjure a fantasy world in which the Islamic Republic retains some relevance.

Zarif is trying to square the circle by defining a place for an Islamic Republic that wants to be part of a world order which it hopes to destroy.

To please his hate-America audience, Zarif insists that the US no longer has a leadership position.

Zarif’s expose contains no mention of “exporting revolution”, the regime’s perennial obsession. In other words, the Islamic Republic no longer hopes to make the region like itself. Yet it is too early to say that it may be starting to think of becoming like the rest of the region.

How does the Khomeinist leadership in Tehran see the contemporary world?

The question has intrigued Iran-watchers for decades.

One reason for being puzzled is the fog of slogans that covers the reality of Iran’s behavior.

Besides that opacity, we have the reality of a bifocal foreign policy divided between a faction that dreams of reshaping the world and another that craves admission to it.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16264/france-cathedrals-fire

“The desecration continues to grow in Europe. Recent acts on statues of the Virgin Mary in French churches show how much these gestures are the result of barbaric hatred. They call for reactions. Catholics can no longer remain silent”. — Cardinal Robert Sarah, January 10, 2020.

“We must try everything, while it is still possible, to save our civilization. Our civilization is the Greek, Roman, Judeo-Christian heritage”. — Alain Finkielkraut, author, L’Opinon, December 17, 2013.

If France keeps failing to protect its Christian identity, France as we know it will cease to exist; it will become a different place entirely.

A leading curator of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, Keith Christiansen, was criticized for posting on Instagram a painting of Alexandre Lenoir saving France’s monuments from the ravages of the French Revolution. Christiansen wrote:

“Alexandre Lenoir battling the revolutionary zealots bent on destroying the royal tombs in Saint Denis. How many great works of art have been lost to the desire to rid ourselves of a past of which we don’t approve. And how grateful we are to people like Lenoir who realized that their value — both artistic and historical — extended beyond a defining moment of social and political upheaval and change”.

Christiansen was criticizing the current removal and desecration of historic monuments. He could not have known that, a few weeks later, another French cathedral would be vandalized and an ancient organ, which had survived Lenoir’s revolutionary zealots, destroyed by the blaze.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-china-learned-from-cold-war-america-11595618253?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

China thinks that power is the arbiter of world affairs, and that technology is power. That’s something it learned from Ronald Reagan. He won the Cold War with a military buildup that catalyzed an economic revolution. Military research and development produced countless inventions of the Digital Age, from fast and cheap microchips to the internet. The Soviet Union folded in the face of America’s superior arms and entrepreneurial growth. China watched and learned.

It’s fashionable to talk of a “new Cold War” and China as another Soviet Union. It’s nothing of the sort. We face a strategic rival that wants to play America’s winning hand in the Cold War, through massive support for dual-use technologies, guided by a Communist legislature that includes more than 100 billionaires. And this strategy is hardly a secret; Huawei’s plan to seize the control points of the Fourth Industrial Revolution is promulgated in streaming video on the company’s website.

China already leads in 5G broadband, building three times as many network towers as America on a per capita basis. Americans tend to think of broadband as a consumer technology and 5G as a faster way to download videos. China views 5G as the enabler of a Fourth Industrial Revolution, just as railroads launched the First Industrial Revolution. (The second and third were powered by electricity and computing, respectively.) Made possible by 5G are game-changing technologies like self-programming industrial robots, remote robotic surgery, autonomous vehicles, and smartphones that do medical diagnostics and upload data to the cloud in real time—not to mention deadly drone swarms and other military applications.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/07/katie-hopkins-video-sharia-overthrowing-my-country-frontpagemagcom/

In this new American Truth Project video, Katie Hopkins discusses how Sharia Is Overthrowing My Country from Within,  unveiling how Britain is surrendering to a totalitarian ideology. Don’t miss it!

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16273/palestinians-arab-racism

Lebanon’s anti-Palestinian sentiments show that it has no intention of helping the Palestinians who are living there. On the contrary, the statements of Bassil and other Lebanese politicians demonstrate that Lebanon is eager to rid itself of its Palestinian residents, the sooner the better. Like most Arab countries, Lebanon cares nothing about the suffering of the Palestinians. Other than lip service, it is not prepared to make the slightest effort to assist them.

“Palestinians in Lebanon do not enjoy several important rights; for example, they cannot work in as many as 39 professions and cannot own property (real estate).” — United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), unrwa.org.

Lebanese law considers Palestinians workers as “foreign workers” and bans them from working in professions such as medicine, law, and engineering, and even as barbers and taxi drivers.

The international community evidently has no problem with Arab racism and discrimination against the Palestinians. Indeed, why should the international community, specifically the UN, care about this — after all, it is a situation about which Israel cannot be held responsible.

From time to time, Lebanese officials and politicians like to take a shot at the Palestinians by reminding them that they are unwelcome in Lebanon, an Arab country that has long been subjecting them to apartheid and discriminatory laws, policies and measures.

The latest Lebanese official to spew “racist” remarks against the 475,075 Palestinians living in 12 refugee camps in Lebanon is Gebran Bassil, leader of the Free Patriotic Movement, a political party whose support base is overwhelmingly from Lebanon’s Christian community.

Bassil, a former minister of foreign affairs and emigrants, is married to Chantel Aoun, the daughter of Lebanese President Michel Aoun.

Palestinians are now accusing Bassil of waging a “racist and malicious campaign of incitement” against them after he was recently quoted as saying that the presence of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon threatens its security and stability.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/lebanon-hyperinflates/

Yesterday will go down as a dark day in Lebanon’s history. That is when Lebanon was entered into the Hanke-Krus World Hyperinflation Table. When I measured Lebanon’s inflation rate yesterday, it was a sizzling 52.6 percent per month. That was the 30th consecutive day in which Lebanon’s monthly inflation rate exceeded 50 percent. So, on July 22, 2020, Lebanon entered the record books with the dubious distinction of recording the world’s 62nd episode of hyperinflation — the only episode to ever occur in the Middle East and North African (MENA) region. Now there are two ongoing hyperinflations: Lebanon’s, where the annual inflation rate is 462 percent, and Venezuela’s, where the annual rate soars at 2,219 percent.

Just how has Lebanon found itself in such an inglorious position? For years, the Lebanese government, the central bank (Banque du Liban), and savers played a game. The government spent more than it collected in taxes and financed its resulting deficits by paying sky-high interest rates on the debt it issued. The central bank bought some of the debt and kept the official pound-U.S. dollar exchange rate pegged at 1,500. The peg was designed so that those who purchased the government’s debt would have confidence that it would retain its purchasing power in U.S. dollar terms when it matured. Banks offered relatively “high” interest rates to depositors and were also part of the game. For a surprisingly long period of time, the money poured in from domestic savers, the Lebanese diaspora, and other foreign investors. They were all chasing yield and blind to the nature of the game.

Eventually, though, it became apparent that the government’s mountain of debt had become so large that the dollar-denominated portion could not be repaid in full. It also became clear that the government could not even repay the Lebanese pound-denominated portion in full unless the pound was officially devalued. At that point, the government faced an investors’ strike and was forced to default on a maturing foreign bond on March 9. The default triggered a sharp depreciation of the pound in the black market and a surge in inflation.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/my-escape-to-america-shows-the-price-of-dissent-in-south-sudan-11595545759?mod=opinion_lead_pos10

I arrived safely in Washington Thursday after a harrowing journey from Nairobi, Kenya. I was forced into hiding after receiving word several weeks ago from senior government officials in South Sudan that President Salva Kiir had ordered the National Security Service, led by Gen. Akol Koor Kuc, either to abduct me from Kenya or murder me.

I knew this was no idle threat. Previously, I had been a political prisoner in South Sudan, convicted in a show trial for “disturbing the peace” and sentenced to two years in prison. My real offense: daring to criticize Mr. Kiir’s failed leadership. In January 2017, two other dissidents were abducted from Nairobi and murdered, leading the U.S. to impose sanctions on six South Sudanese officials.

I’m grateful to President Trump and the U.S. for providing refuge to me, my wife, and our three young children. While the South Sudanese government has always claimed it works within the bounds of the law, I disagree. My story is only one example of Mr. Kiir’s cruelty. He has never had to face the voters of independent South Sudan, working instead to build a powerful and repressive security apparatus with one mission—to keep him in power. The U.S., which has engaged in concerted diplomacy and invested more than $12 billion in humanitarian assistance since the country’s independence in 2011, must insist on free elections. South Sudanese should vote no later than December 2021, with appropriate precautions for Covid-19 and monitoring to ensure that the vote is fair and transparent.