RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15469/austria-coalition-agreement-serfdom

Most of what the People’s Party and the Greens grandly announce in their pact paves the road to an illiberal democracy, even a totalitarian country, by introducing a dictatorship of political correctness.

“[There is a] major restriction, if not ultimately, the abolition of the most important fundamental and human right, freedom of expression. Freedom of expression is the central basis and prerequisite for any democracy based on the rule of law. This is exactly why Turkey or Russia are not democracies — there are elections there, but people are constantly being locked up for [their] opinions.” — Andreas Unterberger, Austria’s most widely read political blogger, January 3, 2020.

Now, a number of institutions, funded by taxpayer money, will be established to monitor those people whose opinions are no longer acceptable…. the measures introduced in the coalition agreement which target only “right-wing extremism or extremists” will lead to a new wave of turning people in that is reminiscent of a very dark era in Austrian history.

“This is the first time since 1945 that the fight against thoughts has become official government policy in Austria.” — Andreas Unterberger.

While most of the world’s attention was focused on the death of a terrorist leader, Iran’s Qasem Soleimani, and the ensuing missile retaliation in the Middle East, a small country in the heart of Europe was once again ruled by an elected coalition government. Following snap elections in late September 2019, the Austrian population exhibited great patience until the start of a new decade, when, on January 2, the Austrian People’s Party and the Greens proclaimed, to paraphrase the Vatican: “Habemus gubernationem!” (We have a government!)

Given that the two parties entering this government are polar opposites in terms of political orientation, left vs. right, it is not surprising that the negotiations for a “viable” and lasting government took 100 days until their successful conclusion. Moreover, given what the Greens stand for — the climate, preventing “right-wing extremists” (namely the Austrian Freedom Party) from entering government ever again, and transparency — it would seem irreconcilable with the People’s Party’s goals: migration and law and order. At first, only the Austrian and European mainstream media and the European Union enthusiasts in Brussels were optimistic about this new coalition. The latest polls, however, indicate rising approval among the population.

How long this enthusiasm will last, remains to be seen. Chancellor Sebastian Kurz praised the 326-page coalition agreement as “incorporating the best of both worlds”, and although it contains the proverbial “good, bad and ugly”, regretfully only little can be considered good. In fact, most of what the People’s Party and the Greens grandly announce in their pact paves the road to an illiberal democracy, even a totalitarian country, by introducing a dictatorship of political correctness. As argued by Andreas Unterberger who runs Austria’s largest political blog:

“[There is a] major restriction, if not ultimately, the abolition of the most important fundamental and human right, freedom of expression. Freedom of expression is the central basis and prerequisite for any democracy based on the rule of law. This is exactly why Turkey or Russia are not democracies – there are elections there, but people are constantly being locked up for [their] opinions.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/01/beware-fools-gold-diplomacy-bruce-thornton/

The killing of Qassem Soleimani by a U.S. drone strike, and Iran’s accidental downing of a Ukrainian commercial airliner, have both humiliated the mullahs and exposed their lethal incompetence. Continuing protests by Iranian citizens against the feckless and corrupt regime reveal deepening fissures in the Iranian political order, as President Trump’s “maximum pressure” on Iran’s economy continues to bite deeper.

But while we should be pushing harder on the tottering regime, the same old voices of idealistic internationalism are calling for “diplomatic outreach” and “negotiations” to rewrite the nuclear deal. President Trump’s goal of that pressure, at least rhetorically so far, is also to renegotiate the nuclear deal and give it teeth, though he has put the burden on Iran to take the first step. And Britain, France, and Germany have triggered the nuclear agreement’s “dispute mechanisms” which could lead to broader “snap-back” sanctions on Iran. They too are calling for a renegotiated agreement.

But instead of yet again mining the fool’s gold of diplomacy, we should resist this glittering fraud. Diplomatic “engagement” with Iran will achieve nothing other than to give Iran time to spin its centrifuges, and inch closer to a nuclear weapon and the missiles to deliver them.

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

A growing viral threat in China reminds us that there’s a very thin line between civilization and disaster. Moreover, it tells us that our government should be focusing on disease preventing and not on whether boys should be using girls’ bathrooms. But first, a little history to put things in perspective.

The world’s biggest die-off in recorded history – known as the Black Death, the Great Morality, the Pestilence, or the Great Plague – got its start thanks to a period of global cooling following the life-giving force of the Medieval Warming Period (950-1100 A.D.). During the warming period, land became more productive, and the population grew and expanded into formerly barren lands. (Greenland was once actually green.) When the climate began to cool, though, crops diminished, leading to starvation and weakened immune systems. War was normative.

The plague started in China, as rodents fled areas that were drying out in the cooling world. In 1347, Genoese traders were in the port city of Kaffa on the Crimea (now in Ukraine), when the Mongol hordes, who were looking for greener pastures, laid siege to the city. The plague-ridden Mongol army engaged in biological warfare by catapulting corpses into the city. The Genoese traders who escaped carried the plague to Sicily, and from there it spread to the rest of Europe. Best guesses are that 75 to 200 million people died.

Now that the stage is properly set, here’s the news from China today, and it’s way better than the news from China in the 14th Century:

An outbreak of a never-before-seen coronavirus in the Chinese city of Wuhan dramatically worsened over the last few days—the case count has more than tripled, cases have appeared in new cities, and authorities have confirmed that the virus is spreading person to person.

The World Health Organization announced Monday that it will convene an emergency meeting on Wednesday, January 22, to assess the outbreak and how best to manage it

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15466/iran-nuclear-deal-what-next

“It’s unlikely that the parties will be able to reach a serious resolution, and the EU knows it….” — Tom Rogan, Washington Examiner, January 17, 2020.

“Trump has distinguished himself from his predecessor. The world’s most famous dealmaker appears not to be angling for a deal, and for good reason — there’s no deal to be had because there’s nothing left to negotiate. [Former U.S. President Barack] Obama set it up that way.” — Lee Smith, Tablet Magazine, January 13, 2020.

“The JCPOA guaranteed that the Iranians would all but have a bomb within 10 years — or by the end of the second term of Obama’s successor…. The point of the deal was not to stop Iran from ever building a bomb but to prevent the Iranians from doing so until Obama left office.” — Lee Smith, Tablet Magazine, January 13, 2020.

“The nuclear deal with Iran is over — it failed. You cannot and must not continue to negotiate with the Islamic regime, you cannot trust it. Such talks are useless. Governments should stop defending the regime through such talks, keeping it alive.” — Mina Ahadi, Chairwoman of the Central Council of Ex-Muslims in Germany, Bild, January 14, 2020.

Britain, France and Germany, the three European signatories of the Iran nuclear deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), have activated the agreement’s dispute mechanism in an effort to force Tehran into compliance with its commitment to curb its nuclear program.

The three European countries — also known as the E3 — triggered the so-called Dispute Resolution Mechanism (DRM) on January 14, a week after Iranian authorities announced that they would no longer be bound by any of the agreement’s restrictions in terms of the numbers or type of centrifuges that they can operate or the level of uranium enrichment that they can pursue.

The DRM (Paragraphs 36 and 37 of the JCPOA) starts the clock on a process that could result in the return of international sanctions on Iran. The deal’s signatories now have up to 30 days to resolve their differences, although that time period can be extended by consensus. If the dispute cannot be solved, the matter could be brought before the UN Security Council and could result in the re-imposition of sanctions that had been lifted under the deal. That effort, however, could also easily be blocked by a Chinese or Russian veto.

Iranian authorities said that they were justified in violating the deal because the United States broke the July 2015 agreement by withdrawing in May 2018. In a statement, the E3 foreign ministers rejected Tehran’s argument:

“We do not accept the argument that Iran is entitled to reduce compliance with the JCPOA. Contrary to its statements, Iran has never triggered the JCPOA Dispute Resolution Mechanism and has no legal grounds to cease implementing the provisions of the agreement.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15465/turkey-christians-kidnapped

Since January 11, an elderly Assyrian Christian couple, Hurmuz Diril (71) and his wife Şimoni (65), have been missing from the Assyrian village of Mehr, Kovankaya in the province of Şırnak, in Turkey’s southeast.
If the kidnapping of the Diril couple were to terrorize the remaining Assyrian community in Turkey into fleeing the country, it would mark the complete annihilation of yet another native community in the region. Such a tragedy should not be allowed to happen.
Western governments should help to find this elderly couple and see to it that those responsible are held to account.

Since January 11, an elderly Assyrian Christian couple, Hurmuz Diril (71) and his wife Şimoni (65), have been missing from the Assyrian village of Mehr, Kovankaya in the province of Sirnak, in Turkey’s southeast. In wintry, sub-zero conditions, their children, followed by military special units, have been searching for them.

“We found out that my parents were missing when I and my relatives… went to our village on January 12. My father’s uncle last saw them in the morning of January 11…. And my brother last spoke to them on January 7,” the couple’s son, Father Adday Remzi Diril told the newspaper Cumhuriyet.

Father Diril is an Assyrian-Chaldean priest in Istanbul and well known for his life of service to more than 7,000 Iraqi Christian refugees displaced throughout Turkey.

“A neighbor of ours in the village initially did not tell us my parents were kidnapped because he was scared,” Diril told the Mesopotamia News Agency, “but later said they had been kidnapped by armed men.”

An investigation concerning the missing couple is underway; the prosecutor’s office in Sirnak has issued a gag order regarding the matter. The Turkish authorities, Diril said, are in touch with the family. The weather conditions, though, have been treacherous and the search so far unsuccessful.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/01/britain-commits-su

The UK’s Mailonline reported Friday that according to a “damning” new report, “sex attacks on young girls by Asian grooming gangs were ignored by police fear of stoking racial tensions, a damning report has ruled.” “Asian” is British media code for “Muslim.”

The Mail added that “a chief inspector from Rotherham was found to have admitted South Yorkshire Police force turned a blind eye to the harrowing cases of abuse…The unnamed senior police officer said: ‘With it being Asians, we can’t afford for this to come out.’” The father of one of the victims recounted: “She’d been missing for weeks and he [the chief inspector] was talking as though she was an adult doing it of her own free will. He said it had been going on for 30 years and that in his day they used to call them ‘P*** shaggers’. I told him she was a child and this was child abuse.”

Indeed it was. But Muslims were a protected class in Britain, and could break laws with impunity, as authorities were too worried about charges of “racism” and “Islamophobia” to go after them.

In just one city, Rotherham, British officials “described their nervousness about identifying the ethnic origins of perpetrators for fear of being thought as racist; others remembered clear direction from their managers not to do so.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/01/whitewashing-swedish-nightmare-bruce-bawer/

Poking around YouTube the other day, I stumbled across a 2018 documentary that was written and hosted by Johan Norberg, a 46-year-old Swedish economist who is a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute, the libertarian think tank in Washington, and who is one of his country’s leading boosters of free trade and free markets. This was hardly Norberg’s first venture into the documentary form: in 2003, Britain’s Channel 4 aired Globalisation is Good, in which Norberg celebrated the prosperity created in Taiwan and Vietnam through the outsourcing of factory jobs from the U.S. – but neglected to breathe a word about the catastrophic impact of that outsourcing on millions of American workers.

Norberg’s 2018 documentary is entitled Sweden: Lessons for America? In it, he traces Sweden’s economic ups and downs over the last couple of centuries: once a dirt-poor land in the grip of guilds and regulations, Sweden embraced the free market and low taxes – resulting in a century of burgeoning prosperity – only to “screw it up” in the 1960s by introducing a big-government welfare state that charged Pippi Longstocking author Astrid Lindgren a 102% income rate and Ingmar Bergman 139%. (He fled to Germany.) From 1976 to 1995, Sweden went downhill; interest rates hit 500%; IKEA moved its headquarters abroad. But the story, as Norberg tells it, has a happy ending: the 1990s brought reforms – deregulation, lower taxes, school vouchers, widespread privatization of public services, no minimum wage – that resulted in a first-rate climate for entrepreneurship and innovation and a “very productive private economy” that yields enough wealth to fund generous welfare benefits and pensions. America, we’re urged in Norberg’s conclusion, should look to Sweden as a model.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15464/iranian-women-western-feminists

Before 1979, Iranian women had freedom. They want it back.

If Iranian feminists who refuse to wear the hijab are brave, their Western counterparts, who wear pink hats, have wretchedly abandoned them.

Why is Iranian barbarism so easily condoned in the West?

Thirty years ago, the Berlin Wall was torn down by ordinary citizens who wanted to reclaim their freedom of movement. Today, the wall of the Iranian regime could be torn down by these ordinary women who want to reclaim the freedom to wear what they like. They are bravely refusing to walk on flags of Israel and the U.S. — and enjoying the wind in their hair again.

In October 1979, in a rare interview with Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the late Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci charged that the veil was symbolic of the segregation into which the Islamic revolution women had cast women. “Our customs,” Khomeini answered, “are none of your business. If you do not like Islamic dress, you’re not obliged to wear it because Islamic dress is for good and proper young women.”

“That’s very kind of you,” Fallaci replied. “And since you said so, I’m going to take off this stupid, medieval rag right now.” Fallaci removed her veil and left the room without saying another word. Iranian women, emulating Fallaci, are now leading protests against the regime.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15457/persecution-of-christians-october

In another incident, Fulani herdsmen intentionally maimed Grace… , a Christian woman, by cutting her hand off. She was alone on her farmstead when the terrorists invaded the village. According to a source, “her attackers told her to place her hand on a log of wood before cutting it off.” — Punch; October 16, 2019; Nigeria.

“Saudi citizens who convert to Christianity face risk of execution by the state for apostasy if their conversion becomes known.” — Barnabas Fund, October 14, 2019; Saudi Arabia.

“If the West strikes against Muslims anywhere in the world, enraged fundamentalists in Pakistan often attack the churches…. Muslims believe that converting one person to Islam earns them eternal life. If an initial effort fails, people turn to kidnapping…” — Aid to the Church in Need; October 4, 2019; Pakistan.

The Slaughter of Christians

Uganda: A Muslim mob set fire to the home of former Muslim, Ali Nakabale, 36, for converting to Christianity. Four of his family members—including his two children, a six-year-old son and a nine-year-old daughter—were burned to death in the blaze. His wife, apparently enraged to learn that Ali had become a Christian, reportedly prompted the arson attack. “I had just visited my aunt only to receive sad news of the burning of our house,” Nakabale said. “Upon arriving home, I found the house destroyed by fire that burned my four family members, including my two children.” His mother and stepfather were also killed in the blaze. “On reaching the mortuary, I found their bodies burned beyond recognition.”

“We saw fire emanating from the house of Hamidah with loud chants from Muslims saying, ‘Allah Akbar [Allah is greater],'” reported a neighbor. Earlier, when his wife learned that his son and he had become Christian, she had beated the boy. On “[t]he same day my wife walked out of the marriage and left the home,” said Ali. “We got scared because we knew that our lives were in danger.”