RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/02/uks-dumbest-terrorist-tests-dumbest-justice-system-daniel-greenfield/

On a summer day in the UK, Mohiussunnath Chowdhury left his Luton home, took an anime sword that he had sharpened, typed “Windsor Castle” into his phone, and then followed the directions on the map.

“Tell everyone that I love them and that they should struggle against the enemies of Allah,” the aspiring Muslim terrorist had declared. “The Queen and her soldiers will all be in the hellfire.”

Instead of finding Queen Elizabeth II at the Windsor Castle, Mohiussunnath found that it was a pub offering “great real ales” and “fresh food”. The infidel phone had tried to divert the devout Muslim. Despite the Berkshire pub’s offerings of “grilled loin of pork” and Jägermeister, he didn’t attack it.

The Uber driver got back into his car, took along his anime sword, and this time made sure that the directions were pointing him to Buckingham Palace, not some sort of hellish booze palace. But the Queen wasn’t even there, the soldiers were on guard, and the police intercepted him outside the gates.

“It’s all a bit f____d up,” Mohiussunnath said, got out his anime sword, and shouted, “Allahu Akbar.”

The anime sword, unlike a real sword, had an enormous handle, which made it impractical to wield, and all too easy for the police to grab on to. The cops were able to wrestle it away from him even while he kept shouting, “Allahu Akbar”. Two cops suffered cuts before using tear gas to bring him to his knees.

Was it over? No, it was just getting started. The only thing more incompetent than Mohiussunnath was the British justice system which couldn’t convict a terrorist if he were attacking Buckingham Palace.

Literally.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/02/the_knife_attack_in_london_what_happens_in_israel_doesnt_stay_in_israel.html

In 2015, Israel once again came under terrorist attack from Palestinians desperate to erase Jews from the land they’ve inhabited continuously for 3,800 years. Unlike past terrorist attacks, which mostly relied on suicide bombs in restaurants and buses or on rocket attacks from afar, this was a more personal type of terrorism: Palestinians walking down the street or shopping in stores would suddenly pull out long knives and savagely stab anyone within reach. It was called “the knife intifada.”

But what happens in Israel doesn’t stay in Israel. In some ways, you can consider Israel a testing ground for terrorist tactics that Jihadists intend to use against others around the world – and it’s clear with Sunday’s “terrorist-related” knife attack in the Streatham neighborhood in London that the knife intifada has fully arrived in England.

The Palestinians haven’t been shy about using knives to wage war on Jews. Here’s a grim photograph from 1947 — before there was an Israel, before there were 1967 lines, and before the PLO had even formed — showing an Arab stabbing a Palestinian journalist, while the British soldiers took a photograph, but did not bother to help:

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/02/brexit-supporters-overcome-decades-establishment-opposition/#slide-1After decades of opposition from the establishment — from Obama to Blair to the BBC and the IMF — the Brexiteers won the day

William F. Buckley Jr. entitled one of his anthologies of conservative thought “Did You Ever See a Dream Walking?” In it, he expressed his hope that the ideas in it would become reality.

Last Friday, I attended a party in London where leading Brexit supporters celebrated their nation’s departure from the European Union. Several of them privately told me they never thought that such a day would ever arrive. But the left-wing Guardian newspaper paid the Brexit rebels their due in 2016. It noted that they’d “worked for little else, with no reward, and with no sign that they would ever prevail.” The paper compared the Brexit “sect” to medieval monks who copied their manuscripts “waiting for the Dark Ages to come to an end.”

Friday’s party, organized in part by Churchill biographer Andrew Roberts and held at a private club in Mayfair, was full of toasts and speeches reminding the world of the great odds that battlers for Brexit had overcome. Rising just before the clock struck 11 p.m., the point at which Britain formally left the EU, Roberts brought the house down by declaring:

We faced an establishment that hadn’t been so unanimous on any single issue since appeasement and Munich. It was the BBC, Barack Obama, Tony Blair, David Cameron, the powers of Oxford and Cambridge, the civil service, the Bank of England, the Confederation of British Industries, Goldman Sachs, and even the International Monetary Fund which warned Brexit would lead to a 10 percent decline in GNP — a decline greater than that during World War II.

But, Roberts continued: “The British people were conscious of their history, an extraordinary thing given they hadn’t been taught it in schools for the last half century. They instinctively understood the patriotic part of it. They were lions, they never were daunted, and the lions roared back in 2016.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/london-police-shoot-suspect-after-terrorism-related-knife-attack/

A man was shot dead by police in London Sunday after stabbing two people in what police are calling a “terrorism-related” incident.

Three people — two stab victims and one injured by broken glass — were taken to the hospital, with one man in critical condition. London’s Metropolitan police added that they believed the attack to be “Islamist-related.”

The attack occurred around 2 p.m. in Streatham, south London, and eyewitnesses said the man shot dead by police appeared to have a device strapped to his chest.

“I was crossing the road when I saw a man with a machete and silver canisters on his chest being chased by what I assume was an undercover police officer,” a man told the PA news agency.

An off-duty security officer who lives in the Streatham area told CNN that the body had “something that looked like a device strapped to him.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/02/wuhan_revisited.html

For a number of years in the 20-aughts, I worked in Wuhan, Hubei Province, People’s Republic of China.

China being China, and Wuhan being a provincial outpost of old China, an amalgamation of three towns incorporated under the one name, observations of life there then might be of interest now, given the tumult over the mushrooming conflagration of the coronavirus.

Because I lived on the outskirts of town, near a squealing pig farm, many buffalo in the fields, goats occasioning the streets, wild dogs inoffensively wandering about most of the open-air eateries not presumptuous enough to call themselves restaurants — a few plastic chairs and unwashed PVC tables scattered near a rough kitchen, basically — I was faced daily with the critical choice: Shall I risk whatever microbes or bacteria or whatever we might ‘catch’ or go along with the locals, who ate whatever was on offer without much of a tremor or fret.

Most of the time, frankly, I was hungry, and my colleagues and I trusted to Providence to keep us out of what the local Wuhanites called the doctor’s office, or the uncontemporary places they called hospitals, where  if you were unlucky enough to be in one of the stalls, your relatives brought you food, bed linens, and whatever else you needed that was outside the pill regimen or ‘treatment’ you were being accorded.

At night, because my brand- new apartment had been completed with a living room, a bedroom and a marble-floored Western bathroom, a major prize considering everyone else having a squat toilet, even at work, but no kitchen at all, I would  do my work, try to fight off the plagues of mosquitoes that bedeviled me every single night. Despite my burning Citronella candles as an encircling talismanic circle around my work-desk in a vain attempt to discourage the fierce buggers, every morning I’d have a field of itching bites up and down any exposed flesh.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15507/christians-persecution-global-catastrophe

Dictatorial paranoia continues to make North Korea (#1) the worst nation. “If North Korean Christians are discovered, they are deported to labor camps as political criminals or even killed on the spot.” — World Watch List 2020, Open Doors.

Otherwise, as has been the case in all statistics and reports on the global persecution of Christians, not only does “Islamic oppression” remain the chief “source of persecution” faced by Christians in seven of the absolute ten worst nations, but 38 of the 50 nations composing the list are either Muslim majority or have a sizeable Muslim population.

The targeting of Christians around the world has become more widespread than ever. Part of this is because “persecution against Christians has taken a technological turn.” ….in India (#10) — where “Hindu radicals often attack Christians with little to no consequences” — “the government plans to introduce a national facial recognition system. Similarly, China (#23)….” — World Watch List 2020, Open Doors.

Perhaps the most disturbing trend is that the number of persecuted Christians continues to grow year after year….

Will this trend ever stop and reverse, or will it continue to get worse — and possibly even spill into those nations that, for now, enjoy religious freedom and equality?

The global persecution of Christians has reached unprecedented levels: “260 million Christians experience high levels of persecution” around the world, notes the recently published Open Doors World Watch List 2020, an annual report that ranks the top 50 countries where Christians are most persecuted for their faith.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15508/iran-chinese-dream

The Chinese found out that producing and exporting goods that people wanted across the globe was easier and more profitable than trying to export a revolution that no one, perhaps apart from a few students in London and Paris, thirsted for.

The Shah had promised that he would turn Iran into “a second Japan”. Rafsanjani promised a “second China.”

Some of Rafsanjani’s close associates now tell me that he was “a bit of a coward” and lost his opportunity to do a Deng Xiaoping by being sucked into corrupt business deals. According to them, Rafsanjani didn’t realize that one starts making money for himself, his family and his entourage after one has done a Deng Xiaoping, and not before.

Today, the Tehran “deciders” constitute a small, increasingly isolated minority caught in an imagined past and fearful of the future. Worse still, many “deciders” have already put part of their money abroad, having sent their children to Europe and America. Going through a who-is-who of these “deciders” one is amazed by how many are behaving as carpetbaggers, treating Iran as a land to plunder, sending the proceeds to the West. They cannot produce an Iranian “Deng” because they don’t want to create a productive economy; all they are interested in is to get the money and run.

Could General Qassem Soleimani’s dramatic demise provide the shock therapy to persuade those who wield real power in Tehran to admit the failure of a strategy that has led Iran into an impasse? This was the question discussed in a zoom conference with a number of academics from one of Iran’s leading universities.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15509/sweden-hijab

Hejazipour said that she had decided not to have a share in this horrendous lie and not to play the game of ‘We love the hijab and have no problem with it’ anymore… It creates many limitations for women and deprives them of their basic rights. Is this protection? I say definitely not, it is solely and merely a limitation.”

“The Iranian authorities are employing the full machinery of the state to crush opposition to forced hijab, but with more than half the population against it, the tide is increasingly against them.” — Hadi Ghaemi, Executive Director, Center for Human Rights in Iran, August 19, 2019

Swedish Elle readers are obviously free to choose whomever they see fit to be “look of the year”. It is, however, perplexing that female readers in a self-proclaimed feminist nation who wears the hijab, when a study commissioned by Swedish authorities has shown that wearing a hijab for many women and children in Sweden is far from being a voluntary choice.

“Those of us who have fled gender apartheid dictatorships, where women risk their lives to protest the veil, know and have experienced what chastity laws mean… our feminist government chooses to prioritize collective religious rights over the human rights of children and women… As long as trendsetting journalists see gender apartheid as ‘culture’ …. oppression based on honor will continue”. — Maria Rashidi and Sara Mohammad, human rights activists, Dagens Samhälle, December 14, 2019.

On February 1, World Hijab Day will be marked in countries all over the world, including in Sweden. Will anyone use that occasion to stand up for the many women and children who do not want to wear one?

On January 20, Iran’s only female Olympic medalist, Kimia Alizadeh, defected from Iran. “I am one of the millions of oppressed women in Iran whom they’ve been playing for years,” she wrote.

Then, last month, the Islamic Republic’s female chess master, Mitra Hejazipour, 27, removed her hijab during a chess tournament in Moscow and was promptly removed from the national chess team.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/01/brexit_nigel_farage_takes_britain_out_of_europe_with_a_stellar_flourish.html

Brexit goes through today, and Britain is finally independent, free from the clutches of the European Union.  It’s a great event regardless of how it happens, but in this case, it was cool beyond description. 

It all ended with a pretty amazing flourish, one that told us a lot about both the European Commission and newly sovereign Britain itself.  Chief Brexiteer Nigel Farage made his last speech before the European Commission, which was a great scolding and call to shut down the whole operation altogether, which was subversive enough.  But he drove it even farther. 

Here was the great final moment:

Farage and his buddies ended the whole thing by explicitly waving the British flag of sovereignty right in the faces of all the angry little European Commission eurocrats, even as they sputtered and cut off his mic.

Metaphor, anyone?  It was the mother of all metaphors, a Britain that asserted its sovereignty in waving its symbolic flag as its soulless eurocrat masters got angry and tried to stop it, not on political grounds, not because they were afraid the other member-states might follow, but on petty rules grounds, little administrative state foot-stamping, insisting on cookie-cutter order and obedience, no exceptions, in the face of a newly freed state that just asserted that it can do what it wants.