RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15647/iran-election-result

In many respects the ayatollahs only have themselves to blame for this dire outcome. Prior to the poll they attempted to fix the election in their favour by refusing to allow large numbers of potential candidates, many of whom were highly critical of how the country is being run, even to contest the election.

This maneuver meant that around half of all candidates, including 90 serving members of the outgoing parliament, were disqualified prior to the election, prompting a nationwide boycott over what many Iranians regarded as a sham election.

The result is, as the outcome from the parliamentary elections has graphically illustrated, that growing numbers of ordinary Iranians are now desperate to see fundamental changes in the way their country is run, changes that can only take place when the ayatollahs finally admit that they can no longer have the support they need to keep their repressive regime in power.

Iran’s ruling regime is facing a credibility crisis in the wake of this week’s parliamentary election results, as the vast majority of Iranians demonstrated their contempt for the way their country is being run through the simple expedient of refusing to vote.

Prior to the vote, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the country’s Supreme Leader, made an impassioned plea to voters to demonstrate their support for the regime by casting their vote for the regime’s designated candidates, warning that boycotting the election would provide US President Donald Trump with a propaganda victory.

“Anyone who cares about Iran’s national interests should participate,” he declared, adding that Iran’s “enemies want to see what the results of the US maximum pressure are” — a reference to the punitive sanctions regime that has been imposed on Tehran by the Trump administration.

https://www.jewishpolicycenter.org/authors/shoshana-bryen/

Some of us have snow days; Israeli children have “rocket days” – if you need an explanation, you haven’t been paying attention. Children in southern Israel had a rocket day Monday (Feb.24th), which was fortunate because a Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) rocket slammed into a kindergarten playground. It was only one of dozens launched from the Gaza Strip this week.

The fact that the rockets are PIJ, not Hamas, is, in fact, an important point.

While Hamas’s main enemy is the Palestinian Authority (PA), which it ousted from Gaza in a bloody and brutal war in 2007, the State of Israel provides a 20-mile wide physical barrier between the two. But PIJ is in Gaza and it has become increasingly unhappy with what it perceives to be Hamas’s “softness.” In December, the Israeli Security Cabinet was considering a long-term truce with Hamas. Israel-Hamas Truce talks, brokered by Egypt, have been a staple rumor for years, but this one gained traction in 2020 after PIJ commander Baha Abu al-Ata was assassinated.

Israel holds Hamas responsible for whatever happens in Gaza – which is appropriate – but it is also true that Hamas has never actually governed Gaza; it doesn’t know how and doesn’t want to. The goal for Hamas was to build an asymmetric force to challenge Israel. It tried tunneling under the border fence, rioting at the fence, shooting hundreds of rockets over the fence at Israel. With kites – and an “incendiary falcon” – in 2018, Hamas burned over 7,400 acres of land, an area equal to half of Manhattan. Tire burning produced an ecological catastrophe because tires have carcinogens that are released when they burn. (It isn’t clear whether Hamas considered the health effects on the Palestinian civilians who breathe the same air as Israeli civilians.) The kite fires burned cultivated fields and nature preserves and killed thousands of animals.

https://www.nysun.com/foreign/argentina-reversing-progress-on-probe-of-big/91029/

Justice? Not as far Argentina’s new government is concerned. Buenos Aires is eager to walk back any progress made in investigations into the 1994 bombing of a Jewish center in Buenos Aires — the worst terror act in the country’s history — or the suspicious death of the man who was set to break the case open.

Previous probes yielded ample evidence that Iran was behind the attack on the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina, which killed 85 people, as well as an earlier terrorist act, the 1992 bombing of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, when 29 civilians perished. The new Argentinian government would rather ignore it all.

And no wonder. Since December, Kristina Kirchner is Argentina’s vice president, a demotion for the woman who was president between 2007 and 2015. At that time, after the Interpol already issued red notices for the arrests of Iranian officials and Hezbollah operatives, Mrs. Kirchner was set to form a joint investigative commission with Tehran.

Before he died, Kirchner’s foreign minister, Hector Timerman, who sealed struck in 2013 a Memorandum of Understanding with Tehran, scoffed once when I told him the proposed joint investigation sounded as credible as O.J. Simpson’s vow to find the “real killers.” Meanwhile the Interpol’s red notices were put on ice while Argentina sought to widen its trade with Iran.

In 2015 an investigator, Alberto Nisman, accused Mrs. Kirchner of scheming with the Iranians to allow the Hezbollah and Iranian operatives to escape justice for their alleged role in the AMIA bombing. The night before Nisman was scheduled to present detailed evidence of his findings to Argentina’s congress, he was found dead in his apartment’s bathroom with a single gunshot to the head.

Mrs. Kirchner and her supporters in the press quickly spread the notion that Nisman committed suicide — a strange act for a man about to make public a case marking the culmination of his life’s work. Consequent investigations completely demolished the suicide theory.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/02/iran-election-low-turnout-shows-regimes-weakening-state/

The regime’s continued rogue behavior has left the country increasingly isolated.

What if you held a national election and no one turned out? That’s the situation currently confronting Iranian officials, who are grappling with the aftermath of a truly disastrous outcome in last week’s parliamentary elections.

According to the official Fars News Agency, just 42 percent of Iranians voted in the country’s latest parliamentary elections, which took place on Friday. That’s the lowest percentage ever recorded in the 41-year history of the Islamic Republic. (By way of comparison: The turnout for Iran’s last parliamentary elections, in 2016, was approximately 60 percent.) Yet there’s good reason to believe that even those official numbers are inflated, and perhaps significantly so. Outside reports, relying on internal Iranian media sources, indicate that actual voting tallies fell far below the official 42 percent figure, forcing the regime to keep polling stations open longer than planned to scrape together even a minimum number of legitimate votes.

If you’ve been paying attention to events in Iran, that lackluster showing shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. Over the past two years, persistent protests in practically every major Iranian city — and at virtually every stratum of Iranian society — have showcased a population that has become profoundly disaffected with the country’s clerical regime. These protests have flared anew in recent weeks, following the Iranian government’s accidental January 8 downing of a Ukrainian airliner amid heightened tensions with the United States. That event helped to convince many Iranians that their government is dangerously incompetent, and a real hazard to their own safety.

The regime in Tehran responded in predictable fashion: by trying to tighten its hold on political power. Ahead of Friday’s parliamentary vote, Iran’s government disqualified more than 7,000 applicants from running. That in and of itself is hardly new; Iran’s religious institutions have long been used to weed out politicians deemed insufficiently loyal to the country’s governing religious ideology. But this time, the ranks of those disqualified included dozens of parliamentarians who had previously passed clerical muster and were now standing for reelection. Apparently, Iran’s ayatollahs are now unable to tolerate even a semblance of pluralism within the country’s secular institutions.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15558/sweden-victimized-children

“The suspects are also victims in some sense, but this is still something we have to deal with, that children also commit crimes”. — Police Chief Carin Götblad, Expressen, February 5, 2020.

Parents are afraid to report the crimes committed by other children against their children… In August 2019, 13-year-old Filip and his family had no other choice than to move from the city of Uppsala after a gang of minors made his life there unbearable. He was abused, robbed and his life was threatened by gangs, with Swedish authorities telling him not to report it to the police as this would make things “worse” for him.

Last year there were 257 reports of explosions — including attempted explosions — an increase of 59% compared to 2018, according to SVT Nyheter. Yet, only seven people have been convicted for any of those 257 crimes.

“For the first time now, more crimes — in absolute terms — are committed by persons of foreign background than by persons of Swedish origin… The most crime-prone population subgroup are people born [in Sweden] to two foreign-born parents”. — Report by Det Goda Samhället (“The Good Society”), summer of 2019.

The number of children who rob other children has increased by 100% in only four years, according to a new study by Swedish police about reported violent crimes in which children under the age of 15 are both the victims and the perpetrators. In 2016, there were 1,178 robberies against children under 18 years of age. In 2019, the number had increased to 2,484. The number of violent crimes where the suspect is a child under 15 years of age has also gone up dramatically: In 2015, there were 6,359 reported violent crimes where the suspect was a child under 15. In 2019, that number had increased to 8,719 reported violent crimes.

The crimes involve “Violence to the head, kicks, gun threats, burning with lighters, threats to kill, threats to bomb the school, stabbings with food knives, bites and children who have been scratched, dragged, thrown and locked up by other children”.

The lowest age of a suspected perpetrator was seven. There has also been an increasing number of girl gangs. One girl was violently assaulted by a gang of five girls who kicked her, beat her and spat at her. The girl said she thought she was going to die.

https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/The-ugly-antisemitism-at-the-Aalst-carnival-618653

The ugly face of antisemitism was literally on display in Belgium this week. The annual carnival in the Belgian city of Aalst went ahead on Sunday, with more and worse antisemitic tropes and themes than in the past. This was done on purpose. Last year, the Aalst carnival lost its UNESCO cultural heritage status over the “recurrence of racist and antisemitic representation.” The city chose to drop its status from UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity rather than drop the parade’s antisemitic elements. The mayor, rejecting the condemnation, reportedly said: “Let Aalst be Aalst.” And it was.

Let’s look at some of the “pride” of the parade this year: Israel’s Ambassador to Belgium Emmanuel Nahshon took photos from the carnival and tweeted them. He shared photos of a sign featuring a crossed out image of “Shlomo Shekelberg,” a recognizable antisemitic meme on social media in the form of a stereotypical Jewish man with a kippah, beard and enormous nose deviously rubbing his hands together.

As The Jerusalem Post’s Lahav Harkov wrote, a float with an image of the Western Wall appeared with the slogan: “Well, you would also complain if they’d cut your penis.” Another Western Wall image included caricatures of ultra-Orthodox Jewish men, again with exaggerated large noses, and a bare-breasted woman wearing the traditional shtreimel hat and peyot (sidelocks) that haredi men wear, saying. “I’m just jealous” and “I don’t have a big nose.”

Harkov noted that some revelers were dressed as insects with fur-lined shtreimels and fake peyot and slogans suggesting that they are parasites. There were also clowns with shtreimels and peyot. Some parade-goers wore lampshades patterned like tallitot (prayer shawls) on their heads.

Some revelers were dressed in Nazi uniforms.

One participant held a sign with the “rules of the carnival,” including “no Jews,” “no joking with Jews,” “certainly not speaking the truth about the Jew” and “your drugs and black money will be for us.”

In other words, this was an absolutely deliberate antisemitic assault. There is no way that these tropes and themes were accidentally or unintentionally insulting due to ignorance or a misunderstanding. It takes a very twisted mind to justify such blatant Jew-hatred as legitimate freedom of expression. All that can be said is that the mayor and citizens of Aalst, and all those who took part in the carnival, believe that this is their heritage and they have a right to be proud of it.

Welcome to Europe 2020.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/politics/priti-patel-has-upset-home-office-chapocracy-bully/?WT.mc_id=tmgliveapp_iosshare_At5B9G1587mV

When I met the new Home Secretary at the Conservative Party Conference back in September, she was remarkably buoyant, determined to get on with the job the voters expected her to do – and clearly aghast at the state of the department she had taken over.

Reviews had been commissioned at vast expense and resulted in exactly nothing. The newsagent’s daughter was staggered by all the waste. Priti Patel twitched that mischievous little smile of hers and told me that in nine weeks, she hoped to achieve more than had been achieved in the previous nine years.

Well, we know how that worked out, don’t we? Or, at least, we can have a good guess.

For the past week, Home Office civil servants – not particularly civil and certainly no one’s servant – have been briefing furiously against their boss, who is accused of “bullying, belittling officials in meetings and creating an atmosphere of fear”. Yesterday, we learnt that two senior civil servants have been forced out and transferred to other departments.

On top of that came the highly damaging allegation that MI5 did not trust Patel and was limiting the information they showed her. We were led to believe that intelligence chiefs “regularly roll their eyes” at her interventions in meetings. So not just a horrid bully, then, but thick as well.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/02/25/coronavirus-just-the-latest-example-of-u-n-incompetence-and-failure/

Short of abolishing it and starting from scratch, it’s difficult to imagine how the U.N. could be fixed. America’s discretionary contributions should go only to programs that are consistent with our interests and values.

The World Health Organization, a part of the United Nations, has proposed an official name, COVID-19, for the illness caused by the Wuhan coronavirus, after the city in China where it emerged. (The new designation stands for coronavirus disease 2019, as the illness was first detected toward the end of last year.)

The director-general of WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, noted that the name was chosen “to avoid stigma”—or as the woke might say, microaggressions—thus, the new name makes no reference to any of the people, places, or animals associated with the coronavirus.

Under international guidelines, WHO “had to find a name that did not refer to a geographical location, an animal, an individual or group of people, and which is also pronounceable and related to the disease,” the director-general said on Twitter.

Characteristically, the World Health Organization couldn’t even get this simple thing right.

Simultaneously, a working group of the International Committee on the Taxonomy of Viruses announced it would recommend the virus itself be called SARS-CoV2, because of its relatedness to the coronavirus that emerged in 2002 and caused Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome.