RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15514/international-migrants-day

The project of multiculturalism in Europe, including the integration of people from the Middle East and Africa, has fared extremely poorly until now and no amount of denial from the UN or the World Economic Forum, including leveling accusations of “hate speech” and “fake news” at its critics can alter that fact.

Many migrants have made it clear that they have no wish either to contribute to, or become part of, the European societies into which they have migrated. Parallel societies… have sprung up all over Western Europe.

In Germany, authorities believe that it will take decades to get rid of the Middle Eastern family crime clans that have spread their criminal activities throughout the country. Sweden also is reeling from the many shootings and explosions that migrant crime gangs are responsible for throughout the country.

None of these grave issues was even hinted at by the UN’s and the World Economic Forum’s “experts” on migration in their statements on International Migrants Day. Instead, they encouraged states to clamp down on critics in the name of “hate speech”. What are they afraid of?

When the UN marked International Migrants Day on December 18, 2019, the theme was “social cohesion.” António Vitorino, director general of the UN’s International Organization for Migration (IOM) wrote in an op-ed entitled “Social Cohesion: Recognizing Migration is a Benefit that Works for All”:

“This year on International Migrants Day, the IOM has chosen to focus on social cohesion, in recognition not just of migrants, but of the communities in which they can and do flourish…

“Too often, when we speak of migration, we debate whether it is good or bad, costs too much or pays out too little… But to view migration as an accounting practice is to reduce it… It is an evolving…yet integral part of our societies, enriching them in multiple, intangible ways…

“Today’s political climate is challenging; oftentimes migrants make for an easy scapegoat for all the ills of society, rather than one element of a cure…we need to constantly remind the international community of the reality – both historic and contemporary – that when well managed migration works, closed societies can become open, and political tensions fade away.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15631/turkish-cypriots-turkey

For the Turks, Turkey is the homeland and Cyprus is the “baby homeland.”
In January 2018, several thousand Turkish Cypriots marched against what they said was Turkey’s unwanted influence that has emboldened hard-right groups to try to silence opposing views.
Erdoğan’s government has been generously sending Turkish taxpayers’ money to religious foundations, associations, NGOs and Quranic schools in Turkish Cyprus via the Turkish Aid Delegation. Turkey also built a (Sunni Muslim) theology academy at the same time as it ignored local criticism against it.
“There have been mosque constructions in all areas in northern Cyprus, including former Greek Orthodox churches. All that effort has upset Turkish Cypriots.” — Yusuf Kanlı, a prominent Turkish Cypriot columnist, to Gatestone Institute, February 18, 2020.

A famous tweet by an unknown Turk and shows how pathetically crazy some Turks can get in their never-ending wars with the rest of the world:

“We should bomb Turkish Cyprus to show the world what a psychopathic nation we are. The world should ponder what the crazy Turks would do to the others if they did this to their ‘baby'” — @spleenistanbul

“Turkish Cyprus” here is the breakaway statelet of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC), recognized only by Turkey — also known among the Turks as the “baby homeland.” Since Turkey invaded the northern third of the island in 1974 in response to a coup by Greek Cypriots that aimed to annex Cyprus to Greece, the “Cyprus cause” has been emblematic in reflecting Turkey’s militarist and nationalist sentiment.

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

Once upon a time, manufacturers marketed their product based upon the product’s merits. In recent years, companies have been selling, not their products, but their politics. So, what’s a company to do when a disfavored buyer purchases the product in the free market? According to Britain’s social justice warriors (“SJWs”), the company is still responsible and must be punished.

Yorkshire Tea is just what it says it is: a company that sells tea. Its roots go back to 1886 and it is the most popular traditional black tea brand in Britain. In 1962, the current owners took over the company, rebranded the tea from “Taylors” to “Yorkshire Tea,” and have been selling the tea ever since. The company is still family-owned and has been holding its own against teas from Unilever, Tata (Tesco), Twinings, and Typhoo.

The company is still old-fashioned enough to advertise its product’s virtues and ties to lovely Yorkshire, often quite humorously:

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/02/promising-news-we-hope-britain-bruce-bawer/

Not to put too fine a point on it, but Britain is a basket case. In many jurisdictions, the police appear to be less interested in solving murders than in intimidating – and even arresting – law-abiding citizens who have criticized Islam on Twitter. Meanwhile new Pakistani “grooming gangs” are still being uncovered, and the numbers – the number of non-Muslim girls who turn out to have been raped, the number of men who have raped them, and the number of years this has been going on without anyone doing anything about it – are staggering. Yet given the scale and horror of these crimes, the public reaction to them has been bafflingly muted. One observer recently commented that if the British had any cojones, the grooming-gang scandals would have sent them out into the streets en masse, demanding the arrest and incarceration of every politician, journalist, social worker, and police officer who knew about the gangs for years and did nothing.

Yes, the Brits voted for Brexit. But they continue to let their media get away with using the word “Asians” to obscure the specifically Islamic roots of honor killings, forced marriages and the rape of infidels. Yes, supporters of Tommy Robinson, who played a key role in bringing the grooming gangs to light, have turned out in large numbers to cheer him on more than one occasion, but when he ran for a seat in the European Parliament he was trounced, suggesting that his popularity is not as widespread as one might have hoped. Indeed, for “respectable” figures in Britain, Robinson remains an untouchable: MPs such as Jacob Rees-Mogg may be estimable in certain ways, but not a single member of the House of Commons has ever dared publicly to praise Robinson, and only one of the 794 members of the House of Lords – that would be Lord Pearson – has stood up for him. I keep running across, and being initially impressed by, British YouTubers who present themselves as bold, outspoken enemies of political correctness, only to see them go out of their way, at the first opportunity, to distance themselves from Robinson, whom they reflexively smear as a racist and Islamophobe.

Rabbi David Rosen arrived in Riyadh to participate in an interfaith meeting in Saudi Arabia.

By World Israel News Staff

A rabbi named David Rosen became the first Jewish clergyman from Israel to be hosted by the king of Saudi Arabia in his Riyadh royal palace.

The meeting happened last week, Times of Israel reported, as part of a gathering held by the King Abdullah International Center for Interreligious and Intercultural Dialogue (KAICIID). Rosen is a member of KAICIID’s board of directors.

The Times quoted Rosen as saying that the meeting represented the first-ever interfaith group hosted by King Salman.

Rosen also serves as director of interreligious affairs for the American Jewish Committee and was the only Jewish member on the nine-person KAICIID board that met with King Salman last week.

Islam, Buddhism, Christianity, and Hinduism rounded out the faiths with representation on the KAICIID board in Riyadh.

A British-born immigrant to Israel, Rosen also sits on the Israeli Chief Rabbinate’s Commission for Interreligious Dialogue.

https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2020/02/can-macron-halt-the-rise-of-islamic-extremism/

Emmanuel Macron has unveiled his plan to combat the rise of Islamic extremism in France. Stressing that his fight was not against the religion but political Islam, ‘which has no place’ in the Republic, the president outlined a series of measures in a speech last week. Notably, his plans involve an end to the hosting of imams from countries such as Turkey and Algeria, and more rigorous control on foreign financing of mosques from the likes of Qatar.

Macron stopped short of introducing an ‘Islam of France’, which had been mooted two years ago, but his intention is to eliminate the malevolent influence of outsiders.

But is it too late to stop what Macron described as the ‘Islamist separatism’ of France, a process that began in the 1980s when François Mitterrand’s Socialist government turned a blind eye to the ‘re-islamisation’ of the suburbs by men who took their inspiration from the Iranian revolution?

The alarm was first raised in 2002 with the publication of Les Territoires perdus de la République (The Lost Territories of the Republic) by Georges Bensoussan, in which he exposed the extent of this re-islamisation.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/iran-still-reeling-nearly-two-months-after-suleimani-assassination/

The U.S. assassination of Quds Force commander Qasem Suleimani on January 3 was a dramatic event—but how much did it really set Iran back? After all, he was only one official; couldn’t Iran just replace him and move on?

Almost two months later, a report in The Guardian says that’s not so, and that Iran—and the Revolutionary Guard of which Suleimani’s Quds Force was the spearhead—is still trying to recover.

“There were 11 bodies pulled from the wreckage,” said one [apparently Iraqi] official. “We are talking about the entire inner sanctum of the Quds Force. This wasn’t just Hajj Qassem [Suleimani] and Abu Mahdi [al-Muhandis]. This was everyone who mattered to them in Iraq and beyond.”

Another source, a western intelligence agency, was more circumspect, suggesting that those killed may have been less decisive in the Iranian nexus than the Iraqis believed.

But even if that Western intelligence agency is right, The Guardian goes on to say:

From the bunkers of south Beirut to the battlefields of northern Syria and the combustible streets of Iraq, the loss of Suleimani and his entourage has derailed much of Iran’s momentum in the region….

“Two senior sources in Beirut” told The Guardian that Hizballah leader Hassan Nasrallah “agreed to help fill the gaping hole left by the deaths of Suleimani and Muhandis. But there were limits to what he could do. He had lived a life even more in the shadows than the Iranian general for the past 14 years. And a drone strike from a night sky was unlikely to make him feel safer.”