RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.jns.org/uk-jewish-leaders-to-meet-london-police-chief-amid-row-over-anti-israel-protests/

(April 21, 2024 / JNS) The U.K. Board of Deputies of British Jews will meet later this week with Mark Rowley, commissioner of London’s Metropolitan Police, after requesting an urgent meeting “to repair a grievous loss of confidence” over his mishandling of anti-Israel protests in the capital, The Sunday Times reported.

“The Metropolitan Police have made a series of high-profile errors in their responses to these demonstrations,” the Board of Deputies said after the leader of a group that fights antisemitism was stopped from crossing a street by a Metropolitan Police officer for appearing “quite openly Jewish.”

“The entirely avoidable mistakes have had a devastating effect on the previously high level of trust held by the U.K.’s Jewish community in the police,” the Board of Deputies said.

On April 13, Gideon Falter, who heads the U.K.-based Campaign Against Antisemitism was prevented by a policeman from crossing a street as an anti-Israel protest passed.

“This is a pro-Palestinian march. I am not accusing you of anything, but I am worried about the reaction to your presence,” the officer told him in a video Falter’s group posted to X on April 18.

“I don’t want to stay here. I want to leave,” Falter explained to the officer, who nevertheless blocked him when he attempted to get by.

Another officer told Falter he would be arrested if he remained in the vicinity “because your presence here is antagonizing them.”

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/04/19/hamas-apologism-has-taken-australia-by-storm/

Since the 7 October pogrom in Israel, it has become increasingly clear that hostility towards Israel is no longer confined to its Islamist enemies. It is increasingly prevalent in Western democracies, too.

This has certainly been true in Australia. Indeed, just days after Hamas committed atrocities in southern Israel, mobs stood on the steps of the Sydney Opera House, chanting ‘Gas the Jews!’. It set the tone for subsequent pro-Palestine protests, each one serenaded by the hateful chant, ‘From the river to the sea’. Israel has rarely been more threatened, and it has certainly never been so alone.

Of course, there have been anti-Israel pile-ons from activists over the years. But what had been less apparent in Australia was Hamas apologism, or a refusal to condemn the terrorists. Until now, that is.

This month, the Labor government, panicked about the prospect of losing seats to the pro-Palestine Greens, said that it intends to recognise a Palestinian state. Speaking last Tuesday, foreign-affairs minister Penny Wong said that statehood is ‘the only hope to break the endless cycle of violence’. She also said this was the best way to damage Hamas.

The response from Nasser Mashni, president of the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network, to Labor’s position was revealing. He was provided with four opportunities by Sky News host Tom Connell to repudiate Hamas and agree that its involvement in the future governance of Gaza would be intolerable. Mashni dodged and equivocated on each occasion.

‘What we need to do is move beyond this fascination or infatuation with Hamas’, Mashni said, seemingly bewildered that a group that had carefully planned and executed the murder, kidnapping and rape of 1,200 defenceless civilians – ranging from babies to the elderly – was somehow relevant to a discussion on the future of Palestine. Towards the end of the interview, Mashni laid his cards squarely on the table: ‘The problem is not Hamas – the problem is Zionism, it’s settler colonialism.’

https://amgreatness.com/2024/04/18/are-irans-nine-lives-nearing-an-end/

The theocracy of Iran has been the world’s arch-embassy attacker over the last half century.

So it has zero credibility in crying foul over Israel’s April 1 attacks on its “consulate” in Damascus and the killing of Iran’s kingpin terrorists of the Revolutionary Guard Corps there.

Remember, the world was first introduced to the Iranian ayatollahs by their violent takeover of the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1980.

Iranian surrogates next bombed the American embassy in Beirut and the Marine barracks in 1983.

In fact, Iran has attacked US and Israeli diplomatic posts off-and-on for decades, most recently in 2023, when Iran helped plan an attack on the US embassy in Baghdad.

For this reason and several others, Iran’s justification for sending 170 drones, 30 cruise missiles, and 120 ballistic missiles into Israel on the grounds that Israel had bombed an Iranian diplomatic post is completely ridiculous.

One, Iran has never honored diplomatic immunity. Instead, it habitually attacks and kills embassy personnel and blows up diplomatic facilities across the world.

Two, on April 1, the Israelis attacked a pseudo-“consulate” in Damascus which was hosting grandees of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps as they planned terrorist attacks on Israel.

Without Iran, the Middle East might have had a chance to use its enormous oil and natural gas wealth to lift its 500 million people out of poverty rather than to be mired in constant tribal and religious anti-Israeli, anti-American, and anti-Western terrorism.

During the Iraq War, Iran’s Shiite terrorists and its massive supplies of deadly shaped-charge explosive devices killed hundreds of Americans. It routinely hijacks container ships in the Straits of Hormuz and stages near collisions with American ships and planes.

How does Iran get away with nonstop anti-Western terrorism, its constant harassment of Persian Gulf maritime traffic, its efforts to subvert Sunni moderate regimes, and its serial hostage-taking?

The theocrats operate on three general principles.

One, Iran is careful never to attack a major power directly.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20583/jihadist-caliphate

Not only are Jews under threat, but Christians and all “unbelievers” in the radical jihadist agenda as well.

Although an “ostrich” mentality towards these genocidal objectives prevails among Western decision-makers, the reality is quite different: The driving ideology behind Hamas’s murderous intent is exemplified by the “Doomsday Clock” located in Palestine Square, Tehran, Iran. Inaugurated by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in 2017, the clock counts down the time towards Israel’s anticipated destruction in 2040, sixteen years from now. Iran’s barrage of missiles and drones launched at Israel on April 13, 2024, was presumably another step toward fulfilling that destructive intent.

Even though Iran remains essentially responsible for the actions of its agents, it has yet to suffer any consequences despite its direct attack on Israel on April 13-14. All the while, taking full advantage of US appeasement and unencumbered by meaningful sanctions, Iran races ahead with development of nuclear weapons for the sole purpose of eliminating Israel and, thereafter Jordan and ultimately the “Great Satan,” the United States from the world map.

On April 1, 2024, Abolfazl Bazargan, an Iranian international relations expert, made it clear, with a straight face, that “…for the purpose of bringing about peace – you have to create nuclear deterrence, even if only one (bomb).” Peace, however, seems to mean “after jihad has obliterated all opposition and established an Islamic Caliphate.” This objective is couched in rational terms to appease West powers, the sympathetic world leaders, who might be persuaded that it is fair and right that Iran possess a nuclear weapon just as Israel, the US, UK, North Korea, and other nations possess such weapons. The underlying jihadist ideology of world hegemony is concealed under a veneer of rationalism, social justice, victimhood, and fairness.

“It’s a belief that goes a long way in explaining the dehumanization of the Jews: It’s much easier to brutalize and slaughter, the way Hamas did on October 7, if you think that Jews are apes and pigs. In our rational Western way of thinking, all of this is unfathomable.” — Idit Bar, expert on Islamism, Times of Israel, February 2, 2024.

Refusing to directly confront Iran as the source of Middle Eastern terror — and instead rely on diplomatic “conflict resolution” that enables Iran to buy time — amounts to a form of appeasement. At this time, preparation for war is the best deterrence, especially in the current circumstances of a misguided faith in “talking.”

It was an attitude of pusillanimous appeasement by UK Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain of Nazi Germany in 1938, with the Munich Agreement, that directly resulted in Hitler’s unrestrained march on neighbouring countries, thus inaugurating WW2. In like mode, US President Joe Biden’s acolytes now appease Iran’s Ayatollahs, an approach that commenced under President Barack Obama. Once again, the consequences for the West and the world at large will be horrendous.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/the-left/2024/04/hate-zionists-apply-for-your-grant-today/

Clementine Ford, I’m sorry to report, has found a new way of making a pest of herself. Since Hamas’ pogrom of October 7, Ford has become one of Australia’s most prolific anti-Israel activists, a project she has undertaken with all the rigour and restraint we have come to expect from the feminist termagant.

This was all on display, for example, when Ford helped dox the names and details of about 600 Jewish artists and creators, an act that led, of course, to harassment and death threats. It was also around this time that Ford herself was outed as a devoted pal of Laura Allam, the Palestinian activist currently facing charges of stomping on the head of her kidnapped victim. “I love YOU”, gushed Ford to Allam on Instagram, which, to be fair, was a rare departure in her behaviour on that social media platform. More often, Ford is shouty and deranged, fond of directing her venom at Jewish women who object to Hamas’ psychopathic campaign of rape and murder. Ford has labelled these “Zionist women”, in politer moments, as pathetic crybabies.

None of this, I’m even sorrier to report, has disqualified Clementine Ford receiving government grants. To its discredit, Screen NSW has provided her with $30,000 to co-create a TV series called Smile Bitch, which, I predict, most viewers will find unwatchable.

As usual, it gets worse. Clementine Ford isn’t some weird outlier here. A penchant for anti-Israel fanaticism, I have come to suspect, is much more likely to assist prospective applicants in their quest to be awarded with taxpayer funds. For example, Elsa Tuet-Rosenberg recently introduced herself to the Australian public as one of Ford’s fellow doxxers. As The Australian reported, Ms Tuet-Rosenberg used the incident to show off her talent for organising and delegating, as she split up her various lists of Jews into categories like ‘Artists’, ‘Sports Zios’, and the like. She then exhorted her social media followers to “let these f***ing Zionists know no f***ing peace.” This seems to be about the extent of her vocabulary, though, as she has also posed for photos where she sports both a maniacal rictus and a t-shirt with profanity-laden imprecations against Zionists and Israel.

https://quillette.com/2024/04/11/queen-of-the-gender-crits/

EXCERPT

Indeed identity politics has become as central to the SNP’s creed, if not more so, than taking Scotland out of the UK. In a reversal of Whisky Galore-type stereotypes, in fact, the Scots have now taken on the role of witch-finders, sniffing out heretical thoughts under the cover of a supposedly liberal ideology. A vast amount of parliamentary time has been wasted on bad and unnecessary legislation advocated by trans activists, including a bill to remove all safeguards from the process that allows people to change their legal gender. The UK government salvaged the day by blocking the reckless Gender Recognition Reform Act last year, but the SNP had another trick up its sleeve.

The Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act came into effect on April 1—April Fools’ day, as critics were quick to point out. It’s been on the statute books since 2021, but implementation was delayed because no one could say with any certainty what it actually criminalised.

Officially described as an act “to make provision about the aggravation of offences by prejudice; to make provision about an offence of racially aggravated harassment; to make provision about offences relating to stirring up hatred against a group of persons” and various other “connected purposes,” the law extends existing protections against racial hatred to cover age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, transgender identity and variations in sex characteristics. Women are not explicitly protected. And so the female half of the population will have to wait for a separate piece of legislation that addresses misogyny at an unspecified time in the future.

At a moment when trans activists physically disrupt feminist events, and scour social media for posts they can present as transphobic, the scope for trivial and malicious complaints is endless. Opponents of the legislation warned that the Act would have a chilling effect on freedom of speech, not least because a new offence of “stirring up hatred” has no clear definition, yet attracts a sentence of up to seven years in prison. The Act has been denounced as a “clype’s charter” (clype being a Scots word meaning a sneak); and that is exactly what it has proved to be, prompting around 8,000 complaints to the police in the first week following the Act’s implementation. 

A new offence of ‘stirring up hatred’ has no clear definition, yet attracts a sentence of up to seven years in prison.

In a development that surprised no one, the Scottish First Minister, Humza Yousaf, who steered the bill through Parliament when he was Justice Secretary, has been accused of watering down protections for “gender-critical” women (which is to say, those who believe in a biologically-based definition of womanhood) to avoid upsetting trans activists. Susan Smith, director of the feminist organisation For Women Scotland, claimed on BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour that Yousaf and his fellow SNP politicians broke a promise that she and a colleague would be involved in drawing up training materials because he thought “it would upset the trans lobby if those examples were given in the guidance to the police.” And, as everyone predicted, one of the first targets when the legislation came into operation was another English novelist who has made Scotland her home.

J.K. Rowling has lived in Edinburgh since 1993, before she published her first Harry Potter novel. Her increasingly stellar fame was initially seen as an ornament to the city and she became one of Scotland’s foremost philanthropists, setting up a charity in 2006 that supports children in orphanages in Eastern Europe, Africa, and Latin America. More recently, after Edinburgh’s rape crisis centre appointed a trans-identified male as its CEO, Rowling set up and funded Beira’s Place, a women-only service for victims of sexual violence. In any sane world, such generous acts would have won plaudits from government ministers. Not in Scotland, however, where the SNP is convinced that even the mildest resistance to the intemperate demands of gender warriors is tantamount to heresy.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20561/defining-jihadism

There is no need, therefore, to abandon the terms jihadism and jihadist out of political correctness or fear of offending Muslims. When appropriately defined, those terms are helpful in grasping the terrorist and insurgent threats and challenges posed by al-Qa’ida, the Islamic State and similar groups — far more so than khawarij, a term that does not have immediately clear meaning for wider audiences, is historically inaccurate, and sounds like a sneaky effort to cloud a very real threat.

Recently, the Daily Wire revealed that an internal newsletter from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence featured an article arguing for “changing terminology related to counterterrorism,” because “certain phrases to identify international terrorism… are hurtful to Muslim-Americans.” One of the supposedly “problematic phrases” is the term “jihadist.” An alternative suggestion given in the newsletter to denote jihadists is the word khawarij.[1]

If one wanted to find stereotypical “woke” discourse and political correctness, one would be hard pressed to find a better example than this. Unfortunately, the suggested change in terminology only creates more obstacles to an accurate understanding of contemporary terrorism and insurgent activity associated with the Islamic State (ISIS) and al-Qa’ida.

For a start, the term khawarij (which can be translated in the broadest sense as “outsiders”) is not immediately understandable to broader audiences or those without knowledge of historical and present-day usage of the term in Arabic-language and Islamic discourse. In this regard, the use of the term recalls the British government’s official adoption of the derisive Arabic acronym “Da’esh'”(standing for “the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham”) to refer to the Islamic State — an acronym that is by now familiar to Arabic-speakers but is meaningless to most English-speakers.

Within Islamic discourse today, the term khawarij is often thrown at those who are deemed too extreme in their beliefs. It may be as an insult, for example, against the Islamic State by al-Qa’ida, or from other Sunni Muslims against the Islamic State and al-Qa’ida. Even the Islamic State uses the term khawarij to describe groups it deems too extreme: most notably, the faction dubbed Jama’at Ahl al-Sunna lil-Da’wa wa al-Jihad, which broke off from the Islamic State in the West Africa region and continues to fight against the Islamic State.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20551/jordan-hamas-muslim-brotherhood

The Jordanian authorities have accused the Muslim Brotherhood and its offshoot, Hamas, of seeking to destabilize security inside the kingdom.

Behind both Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, of course, is the terrorist-sponsoring emirate, Qatar, and its propagandizing television bullhorn, Al-Jazeera.

Jordan’s leaders are doing exactly what many other Arab regimes and heads of state have long been doing: radicalizing their people and inciting them to violence against Israel as a means of distracting them from problems at home.

The Arab leaders want their people to be busy hating Israel. Otherwise, the people might demand democracy, transparency and accountability from the corrupt Arab rulers.

Their Jordanian majesties apparently seem to have forgotten that if Israel were not protecting them, their own Palestinian population would have overthrown them or assassinated them long ago, as they did to the king’s grandfather, King Abdullah I.

[Queen Rania] has also apparently forgotten is that it is Hamas that is using its own citizens as human shields and stealing and hoarding the humanitarian aid in the hope that the blame will be assigned to Israel – as it all too often unfortunately is.

“It is no longer a secret that there are two parties that have interests in creating tension in the region and moving to a new front: the Muslim Brotherhood and Iran. They share the same agenda: destabilizing the Arab states. Since the beginning of the Gaza war, we have seen that the Hamas leadership is trying to mobilize the Jordanian street and is trying to drag the Jordanians into the war by any means.” — Munif Al-Harbi, Saudi political analyst, aawsat.com, April 1, 2024.

If Jordan’s King Abdullah and his wife want to avoid chaos in their kingdom, and a rather unpleasant outcome for themselves, they would do well to stop playing into the hands of the radical Islamists by inciting the Jordanian people to violence against Israel.

However, behind the incitement to violence that is empowering the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas — and destabilizing the area — lies the silky hand of Qatar.

Jordan’s leaders are doing exactly what many other Arab regimes and heads of state have long been doing: radicalizing their people and inciting them to violence against Israel as a means of distracting them from problems at home.

The Jordanian authorities have accused the Muslim Brotherhood and its offshoot, Hamas, of seeking to destabilize security inside the kingdom. The accusation came in the aftermath of recent demonstrations in the capital Amman and other parts of Jordan in support of Hamas and in condemnation of Israel. The demonstrators are demanding that Jordan shut down the Israeli embassy and cut all ties with Israel.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20549/rwanda-30-years-after-genocide

Many of them had taken refuge in the local church, and others in a plot of land opposite the communal house, where there were several thousand frightened people, thinking that the authorities were going to protect them. Instead, the authorities conveniently decided to kill them on the spot. The soldiers and police, armed with rifles and grenades, and the militiamen with machetes and spiked clubs, surrounded the refugees and began firing into the crowd, throwing grenades and machetes.

What is certain is that he killed every day for a month… and that he never ran out of ammunition. How did he feel? “At first it was fear,” he tells us, “but then the fear disappeared, there was no joy either, it became a habit to kill. It was a job ordered by the authorities and we did our duty.” He took orders and obeyed, like Adolf Eichmann and the other Nazi executioners of the Final Solution.

Brainwashing

In 1994, Jean-Claude, a Hutu policeman later turned “Tutsi hunter,” was 26 years old and one of 14 police officers in the commune of Nyamata, an hour outside Kigali, one of the areas worst affected by the genocide.

Four years earlier, the Rwandan Patriotic Front had attacked Rwanda from Uganda. The movement was made up of mainly Tutsis, living in exile since 1959, whom the Rwandan regime had not wanted to let return to the country.

In 1990, after that attack, Jean-Claude and his colleagues, on the orders of the authorities, began harassing the Tutsis in the commune, arresting them for no reason and beating them up. In 1992, dozens were killed and their homes burnt down…. Until 1994, during meetings, the authorities had kept repeating that the Tutsis were “snakes” and “cockroaches,” and that the Rwandan Patriotic Front would, according to their truncated vision of history, “bring back serfdom” (of the Hutus by the Tutsis), a powerful theme in the imagination of the regime.

The Rwandans were fed the message that the Tutsis, all the Tutsis, who had been second-class citizens since 1959, were allies of the exiled group that had attacked them. When Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana’s plane was shot down on the evening of April 6, the authorities were quick to spread an accusatory discourse: “Here is the proof that what we told you was true, they killed our President.”