RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15463/iran-old-recipe

The latest protests, however, are clearly focused on a demand for regime change, even by some former “reform-seekers”. All this means that the regime’s classical recipe for survival isn’t working as before.

For the first time, more and more Iranians are beginning to contemplate regime change not as merely a desirable slogan but as a practical strategy to lead the nation out of the impasse created by Khomeinism.

No matter what gloss the ruling clerics might try to put on current events in Iran, one point is clear: their Islamic Republic is in trouble. Deep trouble.

This is, of course, not the first time that the system hastily put together by a bunch of mullahs and their leftist allies hits a bump on its road to nowhere. Even in its first year the Islamic Republic faced huge protest movements in Tehran and other major cities and had to use force to crush rebellions by Iranian-Kurdish and Turcoman communities.

According to best estimates, to remain in place the Islamic Republic has executed more than 15,000 people and driven more than 8 million Iranians into exile. And all that not to mention the eight-year war that the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini provoked with Iraq under Saddam Hussein. Despite all that the regime managed to survive, thanks to a number of factors.

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

The Royal Divorce – that is, Prince Harry’s and Megan Markle’s breakup from the royal family — is now final. After sparking a crisis in the House of Windsor, the young Sussexes (Harry, Megan, and wee Archie) are off to make it on their own.

On Saturday, Queen Elizabeth issued a short statement saying she will always love them, Meghan did a great job during her short stint as a royal, and there’s an agreement for them to go away:

Following many months of conversations and more recent discussions, I am pleased that together we have found a constructive and supportive way forward for my grandson and his family.

Harry, Meghan and Archie will always be much loved members of my family.

I recognise the challenges they have experienced as a result of intense scrutiny over the last two years and support their wish for a more independent life.

I want to thank them for all their dedicated work across this country, the Commonwealth and beyond, and am particularly proud of how Meghan has so quickly become one of the family.

It is my whole family’s hope that today’s agreement allows them to start building a happy and peaceful new life.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15256/hate-speech-laws

There is a tendency, to censor certain viewpoints because they might “offend” others. The problem is, it is not the inoffensive things that need protecting; it is only the offensive things that do…. Freedom of speech exists precisely to protect the minority from the tyranny of the majority.

“[T]he freedom of Speech may be taken away, and, dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep, to the Slaughter.” — US President George Washington, 1783.

How come it is all right to publish the original source, prescribing murder, but that it is “hate speech” to point out that quote?

“Sometimes, when one points out these rules, people will respond: ‘Well, the Bible says such-and-such.’ The point is not that these things are written in Islamic scripture, but that people still live by them.” — Bruce Bawer, February 8, 2018.

Restrictions against “hate speech” often do not really ban hate speech; instead they may actually be protecting certain forms of hate speech against legitimate inquiry.

In November 2019, Germans celebrated the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany 30 years earlier. That same month, Chancellor Angela Merkel, in a speech to the German federal parliament (Bundestag), advocated more restrictions on free speech for all Germans. She warned that free speech has limits:

“Those limits begin where hatred is spread. They begin where the dignity of other people is violated. This house will and must oppose extreme speech. Otherwise, our society will no longer be the free society that it was.”

Merkel received great applause.

Critics, however, would claim that curtailing freedom in order to protect freedom sounds a bit Orwellian. One of the first acts of any tyrant or repressive regime is usually to abolish freedom of speech. Merkel should know this: she lived under a repressive regime — in the communist dictatorship of East Germany, where she studied at Karl Marx University.

The First Amendment to the United States Constitution protects freedom of speech, specifically speech critical of the government, and prohibits the state from limiting free speech. The First Amendment was placed first in the Bill of Rights because the American Founding Fathers realized that freedom of speech is fundamental to a free society. US President George Washington said:

“For if Men are to be precluded from offering their Sentiments on a matter, which may involve the most serious and alarming consequences… reason is of no use to us; the freedom of Speech may be taken away, and, dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep, to the Slaughter.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15456/sahel-region-islamic-state

Even if violent attacks are now mostly concentrated around the border of Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso, the unstable area subject to terrorism covers a huge area — equivalent to half of Europe or the United States — and is spread over five countries…. Because it involves such a huge territory, and because Europeans simply do not have the air support and intelligence capabilities of the United States, American support in the fight against terrorism in the Sahel is critical.

US President Donald J. Trump would understandably like the Europeans to do more to fight the Islamic State in the Middle East and Africa. He is right. Europe is more directly concerned by the destabilization of these regions than the United States. The continent is still dependent on the Persian Gulf for its energy supply, and a destabilization of the Sahel countries would lead to vast new migratory pressures on Europe. Most European Union countries, however, starting with Germany, refuse to draw conclusions about the consequences of the situation and increase their military spending and involvement in operations abroad.

In the short term, an American withdrawal would have disastrous consequences. US air support is absolutely crucial in the fight against terrorism…. The ideal would be for these five African countries to be able to fend for themselves in the fight against terrorism with Western material and logistical support, but without deploying troops from outside the African continent. I am a fervent advocate of letting Africa solve its problems as much as possible within an African framework, but it must be acknowledged that in several conflicts, this is still not realistic and possible.

On January 13, French President Emmanuel Macron convened a summit of the G5 Sahel, a group of five Sahelian countries (Chad, Burkina Faso, Niger, Mali and Mauritania) that are affected by Islamist terrorism. The location of the summit, the small city of Pau in the south of France, was not chosen at random: it hosts the base of France’s 5th Combat Helicopter Regiment. Seven of the thirteen French soldiers who died in a November 25, 2019 helicopter accident in Mali belonged to this unit. Since 2013, France has lost 44 soldiers in the Sahel.

According to the Africa Center for Strategic Studies:

“The Sahel has experienced the most rapid increase in militant Islamist group activity of any region in Africa in recent years. Violent events involving extremist groups in the region have doubled every year since 2015. In 2019, there have been more than 700 such violent episodes. Fatalities linked to these events have increased from 225 to 2,000 during the same period. This surge in violence has uprooted more than 900,000 people, including 500,000 in Burkina Faso in 2019 alone.”

https://amgreatness.com/2020/01/16/mendacity-hubris-and-the-tragedy-of-afghanistan/

The very same collection of intelligence, national security, military, diplomatic, and political experts rubbing their hands in eager anticipation of Trump’s ouster is responsible for mismanaging our longest war, a debacle that continues to cost American lives.

A cynic might start to suspect that the current impeachment fervor roiling Capitol Hill is nothing more than a ruse by Washington’s aristocracy to camouflage revelations about their own incompetence, corruption, and abuse of power over the past few decades.

Could it be, a cynic might wonder, that all the accusations leveled against President Trump merely are projections to deflect from the bad behavior of Beltway royalty?

After all, Trump lies, we are told. Trump is clueless when it comes to the delicate affairs of war and diplomacy, we are warned. His recklessness jeopardizes national security and World War III, we are cautioned, is just around the corner.

State Department snobs, supremely confident in their own skills and irreplaceable value to the nation, demeaned the president during the House’s impeachment inquiry. Former and current inhabitants of the intelligence community are key accomplices in the attempt to oust Trump from the White House. Opinion columns authored by former national security officials routinely describe the president as the world’s biggest threat to world peace. (More on that next week.)

And they ease any fears about the president’s instinctive approach to foreign relations with promises that these very stable geniuses on both sides of the aisle will be back in business once Donald Trump vacates the Oval Office.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/01/ignoring-child-rape-britain-bruce-bawer/

It started in Rotherham, South Yorkshire, where the scandal made headlines in 2012, and where about 1500 victims have since been identified. Then came Rochdale, in Greater Manchester. There followed revelations from Lancashire, Birmingham, Surrey, Leeds, Bradford, and Gloucestershire, with the number of victims in each of these areas numbering in the hundreds or more.

Now an inquiry in Manchester proper has shown that – surprise! – that city isn’t immune to the predations of grooming gangs, either.

Commissioned by Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham, the inquiry found that at least 57 girls, many of whom lived in government-run children’s care homes, “were raped and abused by up to 100 members of a Manchester grooming gang sixteen years ago – but despite police and social workers knowing what was happening they weren’t stopped.” The girls, wrote Jennifer Williams in the Manchester Evening News on January 14, “were hooked on drugs, groomed, raped and emotionally broken.” Much of this, moreover, went on “‘in plain sight’ of officials”; indeed, “Greater Manchester Police dropped an operation that identified up to 97 potential suspects,” at least eight of whom went on to commit more assaults, and in August 2018, the city’s Chief Constable “refused to reopen the dropped operation.” At least one of the rape victims, Victoria Agoglia, who “had repeatedly told social workers she was being injected with drugs and raped,” was given no help whatsoever, and ended up dying in 2003, at the age of fifteen, of a heroin overdose, with the then coroner, Simon Nelson, concluding (in the face of massive evidence to the contrary) that “her death could not have been foreseen by the authorities,” and with records showing that Agoglia had, at age 13, been dismissed by social workers as a prostitute.

https://www.jns.org/opinion/the-west-mourns-the-jewish-dead-but-what-about-the-living/

At Yad Vashem in Jerusalem on Jan. 23, some 46 political leaders and royals, including Britain’s Prince Charles, will be attending the fifth World Holocaust Forum to commemorate Holocaust Remembrance Day and the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.

At this and doubtless other such memorial events, many eloquent, important and heartfelt observations will be made about the evils of Nazism and Jew-hatred. In today’s climate, however, there’s something disquieting about such memorializing.

Given the eruption of physical and verbal attacks on Jews in Britain, America and Europe, it might be said that it’s never been so important to remember the horrors of the Holocaust.

But the West is now teeming with Holocaust memorials and museums, while schools have been imparting Holocaust education since the 1980s. And yet never since the defeat of Nazism has there been such an epidemic of Jew-hatred in Western society.

Moreover, some of the countries that will be represented at Yad Vashem support people who want to kill Jews. They fund the Palestinians, who pump out murderous anti-Jewish and anti-Israel incitement.

Some of these countries have also turned a blind eye for years to the Iranian regime’s genocidal agenda towards Israel and the Jewish diaspora, and have even been trying to continue to funnel billions of dollars into Iran in defiance of U.S. sanctions.

A critical battle takes place among Middle East observers, researchers and policy makers in Western democracies: the reality-driven, politically-incorrect worldview vs. the wishful-thinking/oversimplification-driven, politically-correct worldview.

The reality-driven worldview recognizes the potency of the inherently frustrating domestic/regional features of intra-Arab/Muslim relations in the Middle East:

*Unpredictability
*Instability
*Complexity
*Fragmented societies
*Local rather than national allegiance
*Violent intolerance
*Terrorism and subversion
*Minority, repressive, one-bullet tenuous regimes, policy and accords
*Absence of intra-Arab/Muslim peaceful-coexistence
*Islam-driven goals and values (including the subservient “infidel”)
*Anti-Infidel hate education and religious incitement  
*“On words one does not pay custom”

The reality-driven school of thought hopes for a best-case scenario, but recognizes that in the Middle East it is the bad/worst-case scenario which tends to prevail, requiring extra precaution and added security requirements in order to ensure one’s survival and advance general interests.  

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15455/europe-palestinians-agenda

The foreign media and human rights organizations seem quite uninterested in Palestinians who are arrested or tortured to death by PA security forces. After all, they have not been arrested by Israel for security-related offences.

The European Union is said to be pressuring the Palestinians to hold long overdue presidential and parliamentary elections. It is not clear, however, how the Palestinians would hold new elections at a time when the PA and Hamas are busy in the West Bank and Gaza Strip locking up their political opponents.

The “political arrests” are yet another indication of human rights violations perpetrated by Palestinian leaders against their own people. Inexplicably, though, the EU appears unfazed by them. Instead of pressuring the PA and Hamas to hold elections — that in any case neither side seeks, as it would almost certainly hand a further victory to the terrorist group Hamas — it would be better for the EU to encourage Palestinian leaders, as a first step towards holding free elections, at least to cease and desist making political arrests.

Failing to hold Palestinian leaders accountable for their human rights violations casts serious doubt on the EU’s desire to hold new elections in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and their deeper, seemingly malign desires for the region as a whole.

For many years, the Palestinian Authority (PA) and other Palestinian parties have been reporting on a daily basis about Palestinians who are arrested by the Israeli authorities in the West Bank and east Jerusalem. These Palestinians are arrested on suspicion of involvement in anti-Israel security offences. There is nothing unusual about these arrests, which have been taking place for decades and are even publicly announced by the Israeli authorities.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15447/iran-negotiations-nuclear-deal

Speaking in his first interview since his impressive victory in last month’s general election, Mr Johnson said he recognised US concerns about the 2015 deal, but insisted there had to be a way of stopping Tehran from acquiring nuclear weapons. “If we are going to get rid (of the 2015 deal), we need a replacement,” he told the BBC. “Let’s replace it with the Trump deal.”

Mr Johnson’s comments came shortly after the three European signatories to the deal — Britain, France and Germany — announced that they were triggering a dispute mechanism in the deal following Iran’s recent violations of the deal.

Which means that Tehran now faces a stark choice: either it reenters negotiations and addresses the serious flaws in the deal agreed by Mr Obama, or it faces yet further international isolation.

Iran’s belated admission that it was, after all, responsible for shooting down Ukraine International Airlines flight PS752, killing all 176 people on board, could ultimately pave the way for a fresh round of negotiations on the controversial issue of its nuclear programme.

The fact that Tehran has now been forced to admit that the Ukrainian aircraft was shot down by an Iranian anti-aircraft missile, and that the disaster was not the result, as Iranian aviation experts had initially claimed, of a catastrophic engine failure, represents a major setback for the regime’s hardliners, who have ultimate authority over the country’s military.