RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15239/take-nato-seriously

The second major challenge the NATO summit will face is Turkey. Following the 2016 coup attempt, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan purged his army. As a result, many senior Turkish officers assigned to NATO asked for asylum in Belgium.

Turkey has the second-largest army in NATO, but it is no longer a fully democratic country, nor it is a reliable ally. As long as Erdogan’s Islamist AKP party dominates Turkish politics, the country will remain a significant problem for the Alliance.

It will be illuminating to see what the London Summit brings.

In May 2017, the new $1.23 billion NATO headquarters was inaugurated in Brussels, in the presence of US President Donald Trump. With its state-of-the-art facilities, it was supposed to be “an emblem of a strong, adaptable Alliance… a 21st century headquarters for a 21st century Alliance”, according to NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg.

In November 2019, in an explosive interview with The Economist, French President Emmanuel Macron declared NATO to be “brain dead”, thereby triggering a flood of angry reactions.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/at-least-20-killed-in-mexico-gunbattle-near-texas-border-11575252949

MEXICO CITY—Dozens of cartel gunmen engaged in a two-day battle with Mexican security forces that left at least 20 people dead in a small town across the border from Texas, officials said Sunday.

The clash is the latest incident in a surge of violence hitting Mexico, exacerbating doubts about the ability of Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador to control organized crime groups.

Last week, President Trump said he planned to declare Mexico’s cartels foreign terrorist organizations. In November, gunmen ambushed and killed three mothers and six of their children, all U.S. citizens living in a fundamentalist Mormon community in northern Mexico. Mexico’s attorney general’s office said Sunday it had detained various suspects in the killings.

Mexican officials criticized Mr. Trump’s proposal as opening the door to U.S. interference in its domestic affairs. U.S. Attorney General William Barr is expected to meet with Mexico’s Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard to discuss security issues later this week.

On Saturday, a caravan of gunmen in trucks, many marked with the initials of the Northeast Cartel, drove into the small town of Villa Unión, about 44 miles from the city of Eagle Pass, Texas, according to officials. The gunmen shot up municipal offices and other buildings.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/cuba-imprisons-a-humanitarian-11575229476?mod=opinion_major_pos7

When Nelva Ortega Tamayo visited her husband José Daniel Ferrer in a Cuban prison in early November, she found him emaciated, hunched over and covered with bruises. He had a laceration on his face.

The Cuban dissident had been in custody for five weeks; the dictatorship had yet to announce charges against him. But his wife, who is a medical doctor, came away convinced that her husband was in grave danger of losing his life. Her concern is justified.

This isn’t Mr. Ferrer’s first time behind bars. He was named a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International during a 2003-11 incarceration. Now he is again jailed, and again drawing global attention.

Last week the European Parliament approved a joint resolution condemning the 49-year-old’s “arbitrary detention” and calling for his “immediate release.” The European body further denounced the dictatorship’s use of torture and expressed concern over continuous “attacks against peaceful dissidents, independent journalists, human rights defenders and political opposition.”

The resolution noted that there are an estimated 120 Cuban political prisoners. Three fellow members of the Patriotic Union, which was founded by Mr. Ferrer in 2011, were arrested with him. The whereabouts of two of them—José Pupo and Fernando González—remain unknown.

Dr. Ortega Tamayo had only five minutes with her husband at the Aguadores prison near Santiago de Cuba. But it was long enough to assess his condition.

https://www.jns.org/netanyahu-warns-europe-over-iran-sanctions-relief-efforts/

“History and your own people will judge you harshly” for choosing to appease Tehran, says Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned European nations on Sunday that they were making a big mistake by trying to salvage the nuclear deal with Iran through a special mechanism that would bypass U.S. sanctions on the Islamic republic.

In a video message posted on YouTube, Netanyahu implored European nations to abandon their efforts to strengthen economic ties with Iran and instead join the U.S.-led “maximum pressure” effort, launched by the Trump administration a year ago after Washington withdrew from the nuclear deal.

“These European countries should be ashamed of themselves. Have they learned nothing from history? Well, apparently not. They are enabling a fanatic terrorist state to develop nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles, thereby bringing disaster to themselves and upon everyone else,” said Netanyahu.

“Now is the time to change course. Now is the time to ratchet up the pressures on Iran, not to lessen them. Now is the time to join the United States and increase sanctions against Iran. To those who favor appeasement of Iran, I say this: History and your own people will judge you harshly. Change course.”

http://thejewishvoice.com/2019/11/27/intifada-intifada-go-back-to-the-ovens/

The Toronto Sun newspaper reported in its Nov. 22 issue that anti-Israel extremists on the York University campus shouted “Intifada, Intifada, go back to the ovens!” Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau denounced the violence stating: “What happened that night was shocking and absolutely unacceptable. Anti-Semitism has no place in Canada. We will always denounce it.” Trudeau clearly saw that there is no difference between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism. He is correct.

These sickening calls to kill Jews happened while Herut Canada was sponsoring a Nov. 20 evening program with “Reservists On Duty” which describes itself as “a non-profit organization established in 2015 by IDF veterans who felt a duty to expose and counter the BDS movement and new forms of anti-Semitism erupting on US college campuses.”

Herut Canada’s student leader, Lauren Isaacs has stated: “These were, in fact, riots. Not peaceful protests.” She goes further and says “the explosiveness of the event at York University is very telling about the culture of Antisemitism and intolerance towards Israel that exists on most university campuses nowadays.”

Lauren Isaacs is right and the U.S. Jewish establishment and its leaders must be forced to stop responding to this challenge in the same business-as-usual way that they have been for the last 10 years. The hatred of Israel on campus is growing unabated and pro-Israel students need better support.

https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/politics/article/3040107/hundreds-gather-chater-garden-thank-us-president-donald

Rallyists wave American flags and carry messages criticising Communist Party of China as they march to US Consulate
Some fear the act may adversely affect Hong Kong economy, but still say it is important to fight for human rights and democracy

Hundreds of people gathered at Chater Garden on Sunday afternoon to thank US President Donald Trump for signing the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act that could lead to diplomatic and economic sanctions on the city.

The rally, “Thank You US”, organised by a localist group called Hong Kong Autonomy Action (HKAA), saw people waving American flags and marching to the US Consulate in Central.

“We thank the US for signing the act. It will continue to put pressure on the Hong Kong government. Thank you for not forsaking us,” a member of the HKAA, who gave his name as Tony, said at the rally.

The rally also carried strong messages against the Communist Party of China.

Last week, Trump signed into law the legislation that could impose diplomatic action and economic sanctions against Hong Kong, much to the anger of China which said it constituted meddling in the country’s internal affairs as it warned that it would result in consequences.

Dutch police arrested a homeless man on Saturday over a knife assault in a busy shopping street in The Hague in which three teenagers were wounded. 
The 35-year-old suspect was detained in the centre of the city a day after the stabbing, which caused panic as shoppers hunted Black Friday bargains.

Police had earlier said they were investigating “several scenarios” and that it was “too early to speculate” about whether there was a possible terror motive.

The attack happened just hours after a terror suspect stabbed two people to death in London.

“Following the stabbing incident in Grote Marktstraat, a 35-year-old man has just been arrested in the centre of The Hague. The man has no fixed place of residence,” police said on Twitter.

“He will be transferred to a police station where he will be questioned.”

The victims were a 13-year-old boy and two 15-year-old girls, none of whom knew each other, police said. They were all treated in hospital but released overnight.

The male attacker ran off after the stabbings at a department store in the city centre, triggering a huge manhunt involving police helicopters.

Images on social media showed shoppers running in panic away from the scene, on a nighttime retail street lit by Christmas fairy lights.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15228/pope-francis-imam-al-tayeb

“I have a family of Christians who do not want to convert, what do we do with them?”, a jihadist in Iraq asked his superior.

According a new report by Aid to the Church in Need, “over 245 million Christians [are] living in places where they experience high levels of persecution,” 4,305 Christians were killed for their faith from 2017 to 2019, and 1,847 churches and other Christian buildings were attacked in the same period. The report states that “within a generation, Iraq’s Christian population has shrunk by more than 90 percent.”

Christians in Burkina Faso are now being forced to “flee, convert or die”…. British Baroness Cox recently discovered, on a fact-finding mission to Nigeria, mass murders of Christians by Muslim extremists (more than 1,000 Christians killed since January and more than 6,000 since 2015).

“The astonishing ignorance of these basic teachings on the part of Pope Francis and his advisors doesn’t make for a more harmonious world: it makes for a more dangerous one. Those who buy into their fantasy view… are in for a rude surprise when they encounter the real thing”. — William Kilpatrick, Crisis, September 25, 2019.

In Cyprus, Turks have converted 78 churches into mosques. Turkey’s President Tayyip Erdogan himself has called to convert — again — Hagia Sophia into a mosque.

The West and its religious leaders need to stop repenting and face reality. For the Pope, the head of more than a billion Catholics, it means using his dialogue with Islam to challenge it and ask its leaders, such as Al-Tayeb, to stop threatening Christians. Now, please, in 2019, not in 1209, at the time of the “Song of Roland”.

Two recent incidents in the same week highlighted Pope Francis’s upside-down vision about a religion.

Recalling a scene from the famous 11th-century poem “The Song of Roland”, in which Christians in Spain threatened Muslims “to choose between baptism or death”, Pope Francis recently said, “We must beware of fundamentalist groups; each (religion) has their own. Fundamentalism is a plague and all religions have some fundamentalist first cousin”. A few days before that, Pope Francis received the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar, Ahmed Al-Tayeb.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15231/iran-samson-samsung

The daily Kayhan, commonly believed to reflect Khamenei’s views, is even calling for gallows to be erected to hang “evil-doers” in public, regardless of the numbers involved.

Khamenei’s “Samson option” reminds one of Hermann Goering, the German Nazi grandee who boasted that whenever he faces a cultural problem he cannot understand he reaches for his gun.

One could call this “the Samsung option” as Jahromi, who masterminded the cutting of the Internet for several days to break the uprising’s momentum, has a plan to make it difficult if not impossible for millions of poor Iranians to use mobile phones and have access to the Internet. In other words, “Samsung” ought to be treated as a weapon only reserved for the 30 percent of the population that, according to Rouhani, are “content with the good life they have.”

As the latest wave of protests in Iran begins to subside, at least for the time being, the Khomeinist ruling elite still appear unable to decide what caused the uprising and how to deal with its consequences.

One faction, led by “Supreme Guide” Ali Khamenei, offers a standard analysis that has become the hallmark of the regime’s approach to all things political. Khamenei says the uprising was the result of “a deep, broad and very dangerous foreign conspiracy” and nothing else. Moreover, he insists that the only way to deal with its consequences is with an iron fist.

The daily Kayhan, commonly believed to reflect Khamenei’s views, is even calling for gallows to be erected to hang “evil-doers” in public, regardless of the numbers involved.