RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15630/iran-pseudo-democratic-election

The difficulty was that the leadership of the revolution had no intention of creating a Western-style society in which economically and socially Westernized Iranian middle classes would feel at home. One way to deceive them was to continue with a tradition of elections dating back to 1907.

For decades later, a new middle class has emerged, President Hassan Rouhani refers to it as “the well-off 30 percent”, people who are prepared to live a double life in which economic comfort, not to say prosperity, is combined with lack of political freedoms and restrictive social norms….In this double life, the new middle class passes part of the year abroad, mostly in Western Europe and North America, where it can wear what it likes, eat what it likes and live like its Western counterparts.

[O]ver 3,000 high-ranking officials have permanent resident permits for the United States and Canada…. Thousands of the children of this new middle class attend Western universities, mostly in the US and Canada…. In Western Europe and North America tens of thousands of former Islamic officials and their associates own property and substantial investment portfolios.

A Majlis reflecting the reality of a corrupt, incompetent and brutal regime in full is less harmful than one designed to hide the nature of the Islamic Republic and promote forlorn hopes of moderation and reform.

Iranians went to the polls on Friday to elect a new Islamic Consultative Assembly, an ersatz parliament designed to give an autocratic regime a pseudo-democratic varnish. At the same time, voters were invited to participate in by-elections to fill vacancies in the Assembly of Experts, a grouping of mullahs supposed to supervise the performance of the “Supreme Guide”.

With the final official results not yet available, it is not clear how many of the 60 million people eligible to vote bothered to take part in an exercise that many regard as insulting and futile. A number of polls, including some conducted by the government, predicted a turnout no higher than 50 percent. A Ministry of the Interior poll put the number of those who intended to vote in Tehran at 24 percent.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2020/03/09/escape-from-wuhan/#slide-1

An account of the coronavirus quarantine in China

The onset of the crisis in Wuhan startled me like a jump scare in a horror movie. You’ve seen the kind I mean. The audience is led to believe that the monster, psycho killer—or what have you—pursuing the intended victim is still distant. Then whatever it is stands up from behind, leaps out in front, bursts through the floor, or otherwise appears and delivers the jolt. 

In mid January, my girlfriend visited the hospital for an ordinary illness. She came back on edge about the new disease, which had alarmed the staff. She had to cancel her usual trip home for Chinese New Year, too. She was told that if she visited her family, who lived in a smaller town (by Chinese standards!) near Hubei Province, she would be quarantined for two weeks, as a precautionary measure. The same would be done to anyone who arrived from Wuhan. She advised me to avoid the subway at peak hours.

Ominous signs mounted after that. More and more I saw surgical masks—usually blue, sometimes white—on the faces of people walking on Guangba Street where I lived. These were different from cloth breathing masks, the ones used for filtering out pollution, that had, in a casually dystopian way, been incorporated into fashion. Those I think make people look like characters from the 1990s video game Mortal Kombat. The preponderance of these new masks on people’s faces was a rough barometer of the intensifying climate of fear.

On Wednesday, January 22, the proportion of people on the streets I saw wearing the masks jumped up precipitously from about 25 percent the day before to about 80 percent. Pharmacies were selling out of them. When I sat down in a coffee shop that evening, someone took my temperature with an electronic thermometer you pointed at the target’s ear, to make sure I wasn’t running a fever. They were doing this with all of the patrons. Other businesses were, increasingly, doing the same thing. This is getting weird, I thought.

The next day, the real shock came. 

https://gatesofvienna.net/2020/02/geert-wilders-the-koran-is-full-of-jew-hatred/

In the following video Geert Wilders, the leader of the Party for Freedom (Partij voor de Vrijheid, PVV) in the Netherlands, speaks out in the Dutch parliament, taking government ministers to task for refusing to acknowledge Islam as a major factor in the growth of Jew-hatred in the Netherlands:

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/25236

“Islamic ideologues work in the same way on both shores of the Mediterranean: what they did twenty or thirty years ago in the Maghreb, they do it today in France. If these Islamist ecosystems continue, they will speak for our Muslim companions. In the event of an extreme right reaction or electoral victory, we will be in a civil war scenario”.

This is the scenario outlined on Le Figaro by Bernard Rougier, academic and Arabist author of the new book “Les territoires conquis de l’Islamisme”. This is the scenario on which Emmanuel Macron spoke on Tuesday. He explained that French Muslims have their place in the national community, they are French among the French, but that [their intention is that] there will be laws of Islam on French soil.

Macron said that the republican ideal is not an empty space but a historical reality whose density is urgently needed and everyone must be respected. Macron said it from Mulhouse, in Alsace, where Islamists are working on a space that takes charge of all aspects of life by placing them under Islamist control, a real enclave – financed by Qatar and Turkey.

Macron launched a campaign against political Islam and what he calls “Islamist separatism” in some French cities, announcing measures to strengthen controls over the external financing of mosques, to end the nomination by Algeria, Morocco and Turkey of 300 imams per year in France and ban Turkish and Arabic courses. Imams, Macron said, are often related to Salafism or the Muslim Brotherhood and “preach against the republic”.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15601/anti-jewish-hatred

Just as in the 1930s, National Socialist anti-Semitism and far-right anti-Semitism — and their consequences for the Jews — were of no interest to anyone, the anti-Semitism growing today seems of no interest to anyone.

None of the countries represented at the ceremony to commemorate the Holocaust, except the United States, appeared interested in the threats to Israel or the genocidal intentions of its enemies.

If, seven decades ago, the existence of the new State of Israel had depended on the countries represented this year in Jerusalem… the war that resulted would effectively have been a second Holocaust.

The ceremony held in Jerusalem on January 23 for the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp created the opportunity to remind the world about the Holocaust. The commemoration of the only attempt totally to exterminate an entire people by industrial means, which was among the worst crimes in history, offered the international leaders who attended the opportunity to reaffirm the need to fight anti-Jewish hatred at a time when, throughout the world, it is rapidly gaining ground.

“The industrial mass murder of six million Jews, the worst crime in the history of humanity, was committed by my countrymen”, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier humbly said.

One nevertheless feels the need to ask whether those international leaders who attended are actually ready to align their actions with their words.

Almost all the speeches there defined anti-Semitism in a vague way, and when the words became more specific, they pointed only at National Socialism (Nazism) and the “far right”.

People nostalgic for Nationalist Socialism still exist, as well as far-right political movements, of course; so the world, it seems, does need to remain vigilant. Today, however, in the West, political parties that openly supporting National Socialism, or right-wing movements that promote antisemitic ideas, do not, bluntly, exist. Since the end of World War II, there have been no anti-Semitic murders committed in Europe by people from the “right.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/global-terror-finance-watchdog-set-to-sanction-iran-11582240405

A global terror-finance watchdog agency is set to blacklist Iran, broadening a U.S. effort to isolate Tehran financially and potentially straining the already sanctions-battered Iranian economy.

Iran’s blacklisting by the Paris-based Financial Action Task Force is expected to take place Friday and comes after European governments decided to join the U.S., according to American and allied officials.

The task force’s decision will place financial transactions with Iran under additional scrutiny and escalate the pressure on the dwindling number of banks and businesses still dealing with the Islamic Republic to cut their ties.

The blacklisting marks a step forward in the U.S. campaign to use sanctions to compel the Iranian government to end its support for terrorist groups and eliminate its nuclear weapons program. Most Western banks have already severed links with Tehran in response to the U.S. sanctions, which have also drastically cut Iran’s oil sales—its largest revenue source—weakened its economy and helped fuel street protests against the government.

European governments declined to join the U.S. pressure campaign in an effort to save the multination Iran nuclear accord, from which the Trump administration withdrew in 2018.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15629/france-crackdown-political-islam

“The problem is when, in the name of a religion, some people want to separate themselves from the Republic and therefore not respect its laws.” — French President Emmanuel Macron, February 18, 2020.

“Turkey today can make the choice to follow that path with us or not, but I will not allow any foreign country feed a cultural, religious or identity-related separatism on our Republic’s territory. We cannot have Turkey’s laws on France’s soil. No way.” — French President Emmanuel Macron, February 18, 2020.

“What we must put in place is not, as I have sometimes heard from some people, ‘a plan against Islam.’ That would be a profound mistake. What we must fight is the separatism….” — French President Emmanuel Macron, February 18, 2020.

French President Emmanuel Macron has announced new measures aimed at countering political Islam in France. The changes would limit the role that foreign governments have in France in training imams, financing mosques and educating children.

Macron also vowed to fight what he called “Islamist separatism” and to lead what he described as a “Republican reconquest” aimed at reasserting state control over Muslim ghettoes — so-called no-go zones (zones urbaines sensibles, sensitive urban zones) — in France.

In a much-anticipated policy speech, Macron, during a visit to the eastern French city of Mulhouse on February 18, said that his government would seek to combat “foreign interference” in how Islam is practiced, and the way that Muslim religious institutions are organized in France. “The problem is when, in the name of a religion, some people want to separate themselves from the Republic and therefore not respect its laws,” he said. “Here in France, there is no place for political Islam.”

Macron outlined a four-pronged strategy to combat Islamism in the country: 1) fight against foreign influences in schools and places of worship; 2) reorganize Muslim worship in France in accordance with the principles of secularism and French law; 3) fight against all manifestations of Islamist separatism and communitarianism; and 4) reassert state control over all parts of France.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/02/stab-city-katie-hopkins/

Four stabbings in four East London locations within ninety minutes and it doesn’t even make the news. That tells you a lot about the state of London (or Stab City, as it is increasingly known).

The British Capital is witness to daily violence that is as unrelenting as it is overwhelming. Under the Muslim mayor Sadiq Khan, homicides are the highest in a decade and knife crime offenses are at record highs.

It is against this backdrop that these horrific stabbings have become something of everyday life for Londoners, too mundane to trouble a newsdesk and too routine for a reader to care.

Sunday’s victims were all found in East London: Barking, Dagenham, Hackney and Ilford (shown on the map below). Not the sorts of places you’ll find tourists taking selfies, but all in the vice-like grip of powerful gangs, organized by postcode (zip code) controlling the supply and distribution of drugs on their patch.

Being part of a gang is a way of belonging for young lads brought up on inner-city estates, often without a father figure, desperate to find a way to belong. For many, being part of a gang is a tenuous means of survival.

Stabbings are meted out as a mechanism of initiation, retribution or control, as ubiquitous as the mopeds used to courier their drugs, or the drill music that forms a soundtrack to their lives.

One gang member said: “I don’t even know what this war is about anymore. All I know is if I step out of my territory people want to kill me, and if people come into mine, I want to kill them. It’s as simple as that.”

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/25221

Comparative findings revealing disproportionate rates of extreme antisemitism, and antisemitic violence, or violent threats, among Western European Muslims.

The Dutch CIDI (Centrum Informatie En Documentatie Israel) annual report for 2019 just released Monday 2/17/20, recorded 182antisemitic incidents, its highest number ever registered since 1982, when monitoring began. This figure represented a 35% increase from 2018. 

Even the CIDI’s full 99 page Dutch language report, however, provided only limited anecdotal information about a select sample of the perpetrators, rendering a quantitative determination of major (and/or relative) group responsibility impossible to assess. This glaring lacuna was “enlarged” by the report’s absence of background discussion of previously published comparative findings revealing disproportionate rates of extreme antisemitism, and antisemitic violence, or violent threats, among Western European Muslims, including confirmatory data on antisemitic attitudes within the Netherlands itself.

Wilders: “[I]t is almost nauseating. We’ve been talking about antisemitism, here in the Lower House,,, for ten minutes now. And nobody, really nobody has discussed the biggest cause of antisemitism, which is of course Islam, and Islamization.”  
Dutch Parliamentarian Geert Wilders—the Netherland’s most informed and intellectually courageous politician on the subject of Islam—inveighed against the denial of what the report’s findings actually substantiated, during a floor debate on Tuesday 2/18/20. Eschewing the craven, vacuous platitudes of his colleagues, Wilders thundered,

“[I]t is almost nauseating. We’ve been talking about antisemitism, here in the Lower House (of the Dutch Parliament) for ten minutes now. And nobody, really nobody has discussed the biggest cause of antisemitism, which is of course Islam, and Islamization”  

Observing that, “we have a million Muslims in the Netherlands right now,” and “Islam is synonymous with Jew-hatred,” Wildersdemonstrated, accurately, how “intrinsic” Islamic antisemitism was redolent within Islam’s defining text, the Koran: