RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15268/iran-plan-gaza-ceasefire

The protesters are saying, in other words, that the Iranian people are fed up watching their country deliver hundreds of millions of dollars to Palestinian and Lebanese terrorist groups instead of improving the economic situation in Iran.

Iran is apparently determined to pursue its goal of exporting its “Islamic Revolution” to as many Arab countries as possible, including the Palestinian arena. Another Iranian goal: the elimination of Israel.

This is how Iran’s leaders see the situation: “We are not sending these groups and militias cash and guns so that they can strike ceasefire deals.”

That is why it is safe to assume that even if the Egyptians manage to secure any kind of a ceasefire between the Palestinian groups and Israel, the leaders of Tehran will do their utmost to obstruct such an agreement.

Iran seems concerned that its Palestinian allies in the Gaza Strip may reach a long-term ceasefire with Israel. That is probably why Iran summoned leaders of Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) to Tehran after reports in the Arab media suggested that the Egyptians have made significant progress in their efforts to achieve a long-term ceasefire between the Gaza-based Palestinian factions, including Hamas and PIJ.

According to the reports, the leaders of Hamas and PIJ who visited Cairo agreed to a long-term ceasefire with Israel. Both groups reportedly told the Egyptians that they would commit to the proposed ceasefire only if Israel halts targeted killings of Hamas and PIJ operatives.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/12/germany-vs-muslim-criminal-clans-stephen-brown/

It’s a story for which police have no solution.

Since the beginning of the year until last October there have been 237 police actions against mostly Muslim Arab and Kurdish criminal clans in Berlin alone. In the last one, 400 federal policemen searched clan members’ residences and business premises.

Clan criminality involves itself in Shisha-Bars, gambling offices and amusement arcades. But their more illegal activities concern protection money, bodily injury, extortion, drug dealing, money-laundering, control of the red-light scene, making false documents, murder and contract murders.

A senior state prosecutor stated that there are 20 to 25 clans in Berlin of whom seven to eight are criminal. All areas of Berlin are affected as well as all German states. Each clan also has hundreds of members with most living from welfare.

“Their male members play a considerable roll in drug dealing and red-light criminality,” stated a state prosecutor. “However, there are also family members who are quiet that support the criminal structure.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2019/12/11/security-establishment-will-terrified-prospect-prime-minister/

PM Corbyn would be a ‘useful idiot’ to the enemies of Britain

Boris Johnson and the Tories are not the only ones who will be having sleepless nights about the prospect of Jeremy Corbyn entering Downing Street. The possibility that Mr Corbyn, aided and abetted by the Liberal Democrats and Scottish Nationalists, could end up becoming Britain’s next prime minister will be viewed with deep concern by the various agencies responsible for safeguarding our national security.

Numerous warnings have been issued about Mr Corbyn’s profound unsuitability for assuming responsibility for the defence of the realm, from his well-documented history of associating with avowed enemies of the state, like the IRA and Iran, to the prospect of  Britain being excluded from the exclusive Five Eyes intelligence-sharing network in the event of the Labour leader becoming prime minister.

Sir Richard Dearlove, the former head of MI6, has gone so far as to denounce Mr Corbyn as being a threat to national security, as well as being totally unfit to lead the country. Now we discover senior members of Mr Corbyn’s own Labour front bench privately entertain serious misgivings about the national security implications of him becoming prime minister, after Shadow Health Minister Jonathan Ashworth was secretly recorded giving a less-than-flattering depiction of his leader.

Asked by a friend about the risk Mr Corbyn posed, Mr Ashworth, who has personal experience of working at No 10, conceded that the Whitehall machine “will pretty quickly move to safeguard security”.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15246/turkey-murder-of-women

The cause of 50% of the killings was not determined, but 16% of the women were killed because they wanted to make decisions about their lives, such as wanting a divorce, rejecting offers of reconciliation or even for not answering the phone when called by their men. 13% of the women were killed for “economic reasons.”

According to the Turkish women’s-rights platform, “We Will Stop Femicide,” 652 women were killed by men in the year-and-a-half period prior to November 2018 — 36 of whom were murdered in October of that year.

“One of the reasons why such a large number of women fall victim to violence is the reluctance and even prevention of relevant institutions to implement current laws.” — The Central Women’s Committee of Turkey’s Human Rights Association (HRA), “Violence against women is a result of discriminatory policies,” August 26, 2019.

“There was no finger left unbroken, no women left unbeaten for the last two seasons of a show aired on a pro-government TV channel…” — İlhan Taşcı, Republican People’s Party deputy and Radio and Television Supreme Council Member.

“In our religion, the life, dignity and rights of women are untouchable and entrusted [to men].” — Ali Erbaş, President of Diyanet, Turkey’s Directorate of Religious Affairs.

On November 25, the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, thousands of Turkish women took part in demonstrations at Istanbul’s Taksim Square. The women were protesting the increasing number of murders in the country committed by men against female family members. After reading a statement to the press, the demonstrators were attacked by police with tear gas and plastic bullets.

The murder of women by male relatives — particularly spouses or former spouses — has become a dangerous trend in Turkey. The brutal murder, on August 18, of 38-year-old Emine Bulut by her ex-husband — in front of their 10-year-old daughter — is one particularly noteworthy case.

Bulut was stabbed multiple times in the neck at a café in the city of Kirikkale, where she had gone to meet the man from whom she had been divorced for several years. In a video of the attack, which went viral on social media, Bulut is seen covered in blood, shouting, “I don’t want to die,” as her terrified child screams along with her.

In response to the attack, women across Turkey held demonstrations to condemn the killing and called on the government to guarantee their protection.

https://www.jns.org/opinion/the-ayatollahs-anxiety-is-showing/

Whether the uprising in Iran is leading to the ultimate collapse of the 40-year reign of the ayatollahs remains to be seen. But there is reason to believe that, unlike the protests of 2009-10 and 2017-18, the current unrest has weakened the regime’s grip irreparably.

One good sign is that today’s demonstrations have spread to rural areas of the enormous country, beyond the cities. And though they are being met with the same kind of violence as those that were quelled in the past, they do not seem to be abating. Indeed, even the mass arrests and gunning down of thousands of protesters by mullah-led militias and police have not succeeded in extinguishing the fire in the hungry bellies of the populace.

Another indication of cracks in the Islamic Republic’s armor is the panic that it has been exhibiting in relation to the assault on its hegemonic agenda by the United States and Israel.

The White House withdrawal from the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)—the disastrous nuclear deal pushed through at all cost by the previous administration in Washington—and simultaneous increase in sanctions has made it more difficult for the Islamic Republic to keep up the pace of its spinning centrifuges without emptying its till and the pockets of its citizenry. Which is why the latter took to the streets on Nov. 15 in the first place, initially to decry a government hike in gas prices.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15262/norway-koran-translation

This 2013 Norwegian-language “Koran” is available online. A perusal of key passages, however, shows that it bears little or no resemblance to the actual Koran.

Let us hope that the word gets around that the book they are being handed is not really the Koran at all.

To borrow a phrase from Lewis Carroll, the news about the aftermath of a public Koran-burning in Kristiansand, Norway, on November 16, keeps getting curiouser and curiouser.

As explained in previous pieces here, the 30 or more police officers who were on hand at the event, which was organized by a group called Stop the Islamization of Norway (Stopp Islamiseringen av Norge – SIAN) were under secret orders from the chief of the Norwegian police, Benedicte Bjørnland, not just to douse any flaming Koran but to keep SIAN members from setting fire to a copy of the Muslim holy book in the first place. Bjørnland had maintained that the so-called “racism clause” of Norway’s criminal law gave her the power to issue such orders, while the Minister of Justice, Jøran Kallmyr, made the puzzling comment that while burning the Koran was legal, it could “become” a crime, a statement that made no more sense in Norwegian than it does in English.

To be sure, Bjørnland and Kallmyr, when confronted on a TV debate program on November 25 by politicians of the left and right as well as by a jurist, pulled back on their claims and acknowledged the primacy of free expression – although Bjørnland, apparently unable to shake off the idea that the intactness of any given copy of the Koran should be more sacred than free speech, clung to her line that the situation was “complicated.”

Nonetheless, the case seemed to be closed. Alas, not for long. Afterwards, Deputy Foreign Minister Jens Frølich Holte felt obliged to weigh in. He wrote an op-ed in which he condemned SIAN’s Koran-burning in the name of the Norwegian government and explained that whereas Norwegians do indeed have the right to say what they wish, their government also has the right to condemn what they say. The question Holte did not address in his op-ed was this: why, in a country with more than its share of newspaper op-ed pages, online news and opinion websites, and news discussion programs on TV and radio, does the government only feel obliged to refute publicly a private citizen’s point of view when that point of view concerns the topic of just one religion?