RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15349/interesting-year

International organizations, starting with the United Nations itself, appear less relevant than ever.

Classical media have also lost much of their power and relevance….

In the United States, female presidential wannabes dominated the Democrat Party’s list of candidates. This feminization shifts the emphasis away from the traditional goals of the nation-state that highlighted prestige, glory, economic growth, and hard power to social goals such as welfare, education, health, and help for real or imagined “victims of society.”

Iran is also heading for a transition as a regime of geriatrics that has lost much of its legitimacy finds it more and more difficult to frustrate the ambitions of a mostly young, creative, and determined nation.

As 2019 ends, the phrase that comes to mind is “what an interesting year!” And, the word “interesting” in this context should be taken in its traditional Chinese meaning, which is full of risks and dangers.

The year now ending confirmed a trend that started earlier in the decade, marking a slow, but undeniable, retreat from globalization which, at the start of the new century, was believed to be the panacea for all our ills. The new trend, taking shape in many countries, is that of nationalism highlighted by a return to the nation-state as the most effective model of political organization.

https://leonupsidedown.blogspot.com/
Here is some news that none of the mainstream media (MSM) feels worthy of news coverage but I certainly feel that it does. Let me know after you read this if you agree or not.

While our national state sponsored broadcaster in Canada, the left winged CBC, has decided that it was of the utmost importance to cut a 10 second cameo appearance of President Trump out of the movie Home Alone 2 (yes folks, that’s why we pay them the big bucks), they failed to report on a high school in Nova Scotia that has for a long time now, posted pictures of some of their heroes (certainly not mine and hopefully not yours): Karl Marx and Che Guevara! 

Thanks to my colleague Jeremy Valentine, who lives out east, we are all now privy to what passes as history in our Canadian schools where opinion replaces fact and feelings trump everything. 

Despite Jeremy’s numerous attempts to notify the school, the department of education and the mayor of the city of Truro where this school (Cobequid Educational Center) is located, of this terrible ‘mistake’, he’s received no replies to my knowledge.  Worse still, the pictures remain prominently displayed so that children can be brainwashed to think that these men are heroes. I urge you all to contact the school (notice I embedded the link to it above) and let them know what you think of this dreadful practice. 

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15041/germany-insecurity

Fifty-seven percent of Germans say that “increasingly being told what to say and how to behave” is getting on their nerves. — Survey on self-censorship in Germany, (conducted by Institut für Demoskopie Allensbach for the newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung), May 2019.

“We have seen the consequences of this decision [unrestricted migration] in terms of German public opinion and internal security – we experience problems every day. We have criminals, terrorist suspects and people who use multiple identities… While things are tighter today, we still have 300,000 people in Germany of whose identities we cannot be sure. That’s a massive security risk.” — August Hanning, former president of Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service.

“Evidently, many people nowadays view Islam more as a political ideology and less as a religion and therefore not deserving of religious tolerance.” — Yasemin El-Menouar, Bertelsmann Stiftung’s expert on religion, July 19, 2019.

“At least since the events at the Cologne cathedral square on New Year’s Eve in 2015 people apparently feel more and more unsafe,” said Oliver Malchow, the chairman of one of Germany’s two largest police unions. He was referring to the mass sexual assaults committed mainly by Arab and North African men at the Cologne cathedral square on New Year’s Eve more than four years ago. Malchow was also referring to new statistics, which show that approximately 640,000 Germans now have licenses for gas pistols — a large increase since 2014, when around 260,000 people had such a license. A gas pistol fires loud blanks or tear gas cartridges and is only potentially lethal at extremely close range.

The new statistics, according to Malchow, showed a “latent sense of insecurity” in the population. The number of real firearms owned privately also reportedly increased in 2018 — by 27,000 over the previous year. In Germany now, 5.4 million firearms are privately owned, most of them rifles.

A recent annual poll, conducted in September, confirms Malchow’s estimate: Every year since 1992, R+V, Germany’s largest insurance firm, has been asking Germans what they fear most. “This year, for the first time,” according to a report in Deutsche Welle, “a majority said they were most afraid that the country would be unable to deal with the aftermath of the migrant influx of 2015”. Fifty-six percent of those polled said they were scared that the country would not be able to deal with the number of migrants. This September marked exactly four years since Chancellor Angela Merkel opened Germany’s borders and allowed in almost a million migrants. However, Ulrich Wagner, professor of social psychology at the University of Marburg told Deutsche Welle:

“It’s really got more to do with the fact that politicians and media discuss this issue a great deal — which triggers fear… For example, in the latest study, fear of terrorism has clearly gone down. We simply don’t discuss this issue as much as we used to, and that means that people feel safer.”

What the professor appears to imply is that you can solve a crucial societal issue, not by debating its ramifications and publicly seeking to find solutions to it, but by not talking about it, thereby lulling the public into a false sense of security by pretending that the problem does not exist.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15348/libya-instability-turkey

Turkey, which signed a military and economic accord with the Libyan government in November, could deprive Greece and the Greek Cypriots of large swaths of their oil and gas exploration areas and force Egypt and Israel to negotiate with Turkey over the construction of natural gas pipelines to Europe.

The threat posed by extremists in Libya and Tunisia is not one that Europeans can ignore, as evidenced by the attack on British tourists in Sousse and the more recent attack by Tunisian Anis Amri in Berlin.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan opened the way on December 26 for direct military intervention in Libya: he announced a parliamentary vote in early January on sending troops to support the UN-backed Tripoli government against General Khalifa Haftar. Instructors, equipment and Turkish special forces are already operating in Libya alongside pro-government militias. Erdogan said that Turkey would also be willing to send aerial and naval assistance if circumstances require it.

Sending Turkish troops will complicate the situation in an already fragile country, torn by internal dissent since the ouster and killing of the dictator Muammar Gaddafi in 2011.

The map of foreign intervention in Libya is important: In the east of the country, forces from Saudi Arabia and Egypt support Gen. Haftar, the separatist who heads the Libyan National Army — not the country’s national army. Arrayed against them are Turkey and Qatar, supporting the recognized government headed by Fayez al-Sarraj, but his government is not supported by the legislature. Then there is Russia. It has dispatched militia forces known as the Wagner Group, which have already carried out operations in Syria, are also operating in several African countries — supporting and assisting Haftar’s forces. France has joined the group of countries that support the rebel general, while Italy backs Sarraj’s recognized government.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/12/academics-ignore-iranian-colonialism/

Behavior they decry when done by Europeans is overlooked when practiced by the Islamic Republic.

Academics today are obsessed with colonization, empire, and cultural hegemony, along with postcolonialism, ethnic studies, and intersectionality. Scholarship in many fields has come to be dominated by hegemony-fighting, indigenous-supporting anti-imperialists who attack anyone who disagrees with them. When a journal called Third World Quarterly published an article in 2017 about the benefits of colonialism, the uproar from the social-justice professors led to the article’s being withdrawn and 15 members of the editorial board resigning amid threats.

So if the profession is so adamant about the evils of colonialism, why is it ignoring Iran?

When strong countries exert their (unfair) advantages over weaker ones, imposing their values and cultures and manipulating indigenous economies, academics are among the loudest and most creative critics. Even the most benign influence of a powerful country over a weaker one is excoriated — hence the long obsession with something called “cocacolonization.” Legions of scholar-activists are busy enlisting history to shed light on the present, drawing parallels between a benighted European era of colonization and an ongoing American or Israeli one, looking under rocks for signs of Western, American, and Trumpian oppression and proclaiming a new American empire. Fair enough — but why ignore the Iranian attempts to do exactly to others what they accuse others of having done to Iran?

Journalists and analysts, such as Jonathan Spyer and Seth Frantzman, have been documenting Iran’s colonial expansion for many years. But most academics have been reluctant to turn their skills on Iran. Many prefer softer targets, such as Israel and the U.S. Earlier this month, the United Nations’ Decolonization Committee pushed eight anti-Israel measures through the General Assembly, showing where its priorities lie.

Even without its violations of other countries’ sovereignty, Iran itself is an empire, with ethnic Persians dominating the Arabs, Kurds, Balochis, Azeris, Turkmen, Lur, Gilakis, and Mazandaranis. Only a few, notably Daniel Pipes, Ilan Berman, and Shoshana Bryen, are interested in this fact.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/12/frontpage-person-year-hong-kong-protestor-daniel-greenfield/

On Christmas Eve, democracy protesters in Hong Kong ignored police warnings and began the countdown to midnight. The courageous young men wearing antlers wished the uniformed Communist regime thugs, “Merry Christmas”, and continued the fight.

While Time’s Person of the Year, Greta Thunberg, was yachting and traveling first class on trains, being feted at parties and getting giant murals painted of her, true activists were fighting against Communism

The protests over China’s brutal attempts to terrorize Hong Kong residents began in the spring and continued on into the summer, autumn and winter. Christmas is a traditionally cheerful time in this capitalist enclave of the People’s Republic which has a large Christian population who, unlike their mainlander cousins, are still free to worship, but it’s now marked by the brutality of the regime.

Christmas Eve saw clashes in shopping malls between protesters in Santa hats and gas masks, and Communist regime thugs, in and out of uniform, wielding guns, batons, and noxious sprays. While Greta’s environmentalist supporters claim that they’re opposed to consumerism, the protesters in Hong Kong were putting their bodies on the line in shopping malls to sabotage the shopping season.

Their message to Xi’s Communist regime, and to his puppets and allies in Hong Kong was that there would be no business as usual. The People’s Republic of China had avoided the catastrophic collapses that befell the Soviet Union and much of the Communist bloc by finding a balance between the economic prosperity of free market economies and the authoritarian control of Communism.

After Tiananmen Square, the Communist regime had bribed its populace with economic prosperity obtained through dirty trade tactics aimed at the United States of America and the entire world. The Hong Kong protesters are sending a message that they won’t trade shopping malls for freedom.

Protesters courageously fought so that Christmas in Hong Kong won’t be a Communist shopping mall.

https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/The-ICC-decision-on-Israel-would-make-Himmler-proud-612211 

PROSECUTOR FATOU BENSOUDA waits for the start of the trial against former Ivory Coast president Laurent Gbagbo and former youth minister Charles Ble Goude at the International Criminal Court in The Hague last month.

SS Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler, architect and director of the Holocaust, would be proud of the latest move by Fatou Bensouda, Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court. Intent on the total elimination of the Jewish race, Himmler supported Amin al-Huseini, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, in his plans to eradicate the Jews in Palestine.
Now Bensouda and the ICC have joined the international campaign aimed at eliminating the Jewish state, led by al-Huseini’s successors. In a grotesque inversion, the ICC, heir to the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal, has become a propaganda weapon of anti-Semitic hate. This represents a shameful betrayal of its honourable anti-Nazi progenitor. Its path more closely resembles that of the Nazis’ notorious People’s Court, the Volksgerichthof, than the Nuremberg trials.

Nuremberg laid low many of the Nazi monsters that perpetrated the Holocaust. The ICC chief prosecutor’s hand is now controlled by organizations linked to the 3rd Reich. The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, Al-Haq, Addameer and Al-Dameer,
Palestinian NGOs backed by EU and Swiss funds, have been lobbying the ICC to bring prosecutions against Israel for more than a decade according to the Israeli research institute NGO Monitor. All are connected to the Palestinian group PFLP whose founding leaders in the 1970s were trained in terrorism and political warfare by former SS Colonel Otto Skorzeny and Dr Gerhard Hartmut von Schubert, once of Josef Goebbels’s propaganda ministry.