RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/07/turkey-openly-declares-commitment-jihad-non-raymond-ibrahim/

While monuments to heroic Americans of a former age—including abolitionists who died fighting slavery—get toppled and dishonored, a land-grabber, mass-slaver, terrorist, and pedophile—Ottoman sultan Muhammad II—was recently honored by the president of Turkey.

During his recent public address celebrating the July 10, 2020 decree to transform the Hagia Sophia, which for a millennium had functioned as Eastern Christendom’s greatest church, into a mosque, Turkish president Erdoğan repeatedly saluted Sultan Muhammad (1432-1481), also known as al-Fatih (“the Conqueror”), for violently transforming Christian Constantinople into Islamic Istanbul. 

Of the apparently intolerable decades when Hagia Sophia served as a museum (1935 to the recent decision), Erdoğan began by quoting a Turkish poet:

Hagia Sophia, O magnificent temple, do not worry: the grandchildren of Muhammad al-Fatih will overthrow all the [Christian] idols and convert you into a mosque; they will perform their ablutions with tears and prostrate; tahlils [recitations of the Islamic credo] and takbirs [cries of “Allahu akbar”] will replenish your empty domes … Your minaret balconies will light up in honor of Allah and his Prophet Muhammad. The whole world will think that Muhammad al-Fatih has resurrected.  This will be Hagia Sophia; this will be a second conquest, a new resurrection”

Erdoğan’s and much of Turkey’s adoration of and desire to emulate Muhammad al-Fatih—this, to quote Erdoğan, “happy, blessed servant of Allah,” who in fact behaved like an ISIS chieftain—should (but won’t) be cause for alarm.

Consider: Sultan Muhammad’s sole justification for conquering Constantinople was that Islam demands the subjugation of “infidels,” in this case, Christians. He had no other “grievance” than that.  In fact, when he first became sultan, he “swore by the god of their false prophet, by the prophet whose name he bore,” a bitter Christian contemporary retrospectively wrote, that “he was their friend, and would remain for the whole of his life a friend and ally of Constantinople.” Although they believed him, Muhammad was taking advantage of “the basest arts of dissimulation and deceit,” wrote Edward Gibbon. “Peace was on his lips while war was in his heart.”

During the siege of Constantinople, he regularly exhorted his followers with jihadi ideology, including by unleashing throngs of preachers crying, 

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16278/turkey-warpath

The Erdogan regime has been militarily targeting Syria and Iraq, sending its Syrian mercenaries to Libya to seize Libya’s oil, and continuing to bully Greece. It is now provoking ongoing violence between Armenia and Azerbaijan.

“Until the Syrian people are free, peaceful and safe, we will remain in this country.” — Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Reuters, July 21, 2020.

“Crimes committed against Yazidis [in Syria] include forced conversion to Islam, rape of women and girls, humiliation and torture, arbitrary incarceration, and forced displacement.” — Yazda.org, May 29, 2020.

One of Turkey’s main targets also seems to be Greece…. If such an attack took place, would the West abandon Greece?

Turkey is currently involved in quite a few international military conflicts — both against its own neighbors such as Greece, Armenia, Iraq, Syria and Cyprus, and against African nations such as Libya and Yemen. These actions by Turkey suggest that Turkey’s foreign policy is increasingly destabilizing not only several nations, but the region as well.

In addition, the Erdogan regime has been militarily targeting Syria and Iraq, sending its Syrian mercenaries to Libya to seize Libyan oil and continuing, as usual, to bully Greece. Turkey’s regime is also now provoking ongoing violence between Armenia and Azerbaijan.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/will-scandal-finally-sink-trudeau-11595795221?mod=opinion_lead_pos10

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has miraculously survived scandals that would have destroyed many political careers. These include three instances of wearing blackface, a decades-old allegation of groping a woman, and two ethics violations.

Now Mr. Trudeau is about to make his third trip to Canada’s ethics commissioner in five years—and it’s a controversy that could lead to his political demise.

The latest scandal involves WE Charity. Originally known as Free the Children, it was founded in 1995 by two well-known Canadian human-rights activists, brothers Marc and Craig Kielburger. WE has raised awareness of the plight of children in underdeveloped nations. It has fought to strike down abusive child-labor laws, improve education and promote healthy nutrition and access to clean drinking water.

Ottawa recently awarded the charity a contract worth 19.5 million Canadian dollars (around US$14.5 million) to administer the C$912 million Canada Student Service Grant program. WE had earlier received C$120,000 from several government contracts and C$5.2 million in government grants during Mr. Trudeau’s tenure. Mr. Trudeau asserted WE’s “extensive practice” with third parties and other charities made it “the best and only organization able to deliver on the scale.”

While few challenged the prime minister’s or WE’s motives, this changed when the charity’s ties to the federal Liberals—and Mr. Trudeau’s family—were revealed.

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.