RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14963/tale-of-two-coups

The good news is that it is wholly unlikely that either of the “two coups” will succeed. The increasingly transparent nature of the opposition’s underhanded tricks to reverse the outcome, will in fact, be their undoing.

The president was requesting that Zelensky cooperate with the US Attorney General in investigating possible crime and corruption from 2016. It is the president’s job as the Chief Executive to investigate such matters, as well as required by the Treaty with Ukraine on Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters, signed September 30, 1999. No outcome was recommended.

There are also allegations that the entire attempted coup to unseat President Trump is actually an effort to head off an exposure of widespread criminality in the previous administration.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy has reminded the House of Representatives that while the US Constitution does not explicitly require a vote by the entire House to launch an impeachment enquiry, neither does it support one “by a unilateral decree of the Speaker.” The Democrat-controlled House has so far tabled McCarthy’s resolution — twice. And in the traditionally “wrong” Congressional committee — Intelligence rather than Judiciary — to boot.

There are now apparently claims in the US by “multiple whistleblowers”… As [former prosecutor] Andrew McCarthy recently observed, however: “Remember your elementary math, though: Zero is still zero even when multiplied…..”

“Trump is the real whistleblower.” — Stephen Miller, White House senior policy adviser, Fox News Sunday, September 29, 2019.

The public sorely need their faith restored: that their rights as voters, along with fair play, will ultimately win out.

There appears to be a curious symmetry connecting both the blocking of Brexit, and the continued attempts to bring down a free and fair American election. The same or different types of “deep state” involved on either side of the Atlantic is debatable, but the repeated attempts at a coup d’état against both the American President and the British Prime Minister have a lot in common, not least the desire to thwart the openly expressed wishes of the US and British electorates.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14961/iran-friends-gaza

In other words, Islamic Jihad’s promise is one of unending toxicity: to go on poisoning the hearts and minds of generation after generation of Palestinians – as well as to continue investing millions of dollars in building tunnels and amassing weapons to ensure that the fight against Israel continues forever.

“The policy of resistance and jihad is the genuine policy to liberate all Palestine, and the Palestinian people will not abandon this path. We will not accept any agreement that contradicts the project of jihad and liberation. Under no circumstances will we give up one inch of the land of Palestine.” — Senior Hamas official Salah Bardaweel.

For [Hamas and Islamic Jihad] , a ceasefire means further amassing weapons and preparing their people for war without worrying about Israeli military action. When will the international community pull its head out of the sand in which it has so long been buried and understand that with organizations such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad running the show, the Gaza Strip will remain the humanitarian disaster that is so bitterly blamed on Israel?

As Egypt, Qatar and the United Nations pursue their efforts to spare the two million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip another war with Israel, the Islamic Jihad organization is promising its people more suffering, violence and bloodshed. The terrorist organization is also promising to continue the fight until it achieves its goal of annihilating Israel.

The Iranian-funded Islamic Jihad’s latest pledges came as the organization, the second largest group in the Gaza Strip after Hamas, celebrated this week the 32nd anniversary of its founding.

Tens of thousands of Palestinians participated in a major Islamic Jihad rally in Gaza City under the banner “Our Jihad [holy war] – The Promise Will Soon Be Fulfilled.” The promise, of course, refers to Islamic Jihad’s pledge to “liberate Palestine, from the [Mediterranean] Sea to the [Jordan] River – a well-known euphemism for the destruction of Israel.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14953/turkey-migrants-europe

Turkey’s Erdoğan government will be invading northern Syria to slaughter the Kurds, America’s loyal allies against ISIS; release captured ISIS fighters, and doubtless seek to stay permanently in control of the area. The horror is that it will be doing all this with the tacit blessing of the US.

“I am saying this today: We have not got the required support from the world — particularly from the EU — to share the burden of the refugees we have been hosting, so we might have to [open the gates] to get the support.” — Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Takvim, September 5, 2019

“If we open the floodgates, no European government will be able to survive for more than six months. We advise them not to try our patience.” — Turkish Interior Minister Süleyman Soylu, Anadolu Agency, July 21, 2019.

Erdogan’s threats are not new… and his claims are flawed…. Ankara has not lived up to its commitments.

“The most important question is why the refugee camps are not open to civil monitoring. Entry to refugee camps is not allowed. The camps are not transparent. There are many allegations as to what is happening in them. We are therefore worried about what they are hiding from us.” — Cansu Turan, a social worker with the Human Rights Foundation of Turkey (TIHV), to Gatestone Institute, August 2016.

“Turkish authorities are detaining and coercing Syrians into signing forms saying they want to return to Syria and then forcibly returning them there.” — Human Rights Watch, July 2019.

In a betrayal of staggering magnitude, the White House announced yesterday that the United States has effectively given Turkey a green light to massacre America’s Kurdish allies in northern Syria who fought against ISIS on America’s behalf.

US President Trump apparently assured Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in a phone call on Sunday October 6th that if Turkey invaded the Kurds’ homeland in northern Syria and rescued ISIS fighters captured by the Kurds, US troops would not intervene. According to White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham, US troops “will not support or be involved in the operation.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2019/10/allahu-akbar-knife-wielding-syrian-invades-german-daniel-greenfield/

Surely this gentle knife-wielding soul only wanted to help the Jews celebrate by running into their synagogue and shouting, “My god is greater than yours” in Arabic.

(This phrase coincidentally originated in Mohammed’s ethnic cleansing of the Jews.)

It would be Islamophobic to think otherwise. That’s the conclusion that the German authorities seem to have reached, as Benjamin Weinthall at the Jerusalem Post reports.

Two guards protecting a Berlin synagogue in the district of Mitte detained a Syrian man who apparently sought to enter the building with a knife on Friday.

But not for long.

According to a report in the Bild newspaper, the Damascus-born man said “Allahu akhbar”’ or “God is Great” – a phrase frequently uttered before or during radical Islamist terrorist attacks.

The guards drew their firearms and police were notified. A police spokeswoman said the guards kept their weapons holstered but the man ignored them. The security guards said “Knife away and stop immediately.”

The Bild reported that the Syrian man did not drop the knife and repeated sentences in Arabic. The guards remained at distance with their firearms out until police appeared and sprayed an irritant gas in the face of the man.

The authorities arrested the man and no additional weapons were found on him or in his apartment. There were no injuries.

The police released the man from custody.

Of course they did.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/10/turkish-dissident-faces-ten-years-prison-blasphemy-frontpagemagcom/

Canan Kaftancioglu, a Turkish politician and critic of Islam, has received a ten-year-long prison sentence for “blasphemy against Islam.” If the Court of Cassation upholds the verdict, Kaftancioglu will have to serve time in prison.

Canan is the executive director of the Istanbul branch of Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi (CHP), the secular opposition. Islamists have suffered a crushing defeat in Istanbul, the largest city in Europe and the fourth largest city in the world, thanks to Canan’s relentless efforts. Canan has multiple college degrees and a long history of human rights advocacy, including working for TIHV (Turkish Human Rights Foundation). She has written her dissertation about “Torture Victims in Forensic Medicine.” Her father was assassinated by Islamists.

Islamists are furious because they lost Istanbul, and Canan has now become their scapegoat – given her courageous and colorful rhetoric. Canan once quipped on Twitter: “men with small dicks want to build big mosques.” She posted pictures of herself eating pork (forbidden in Islam) and acknowledged the historical reality of the Armenian Genocide. She once wrote, “stop praying, Muslims: there is no room left in paradise.” She expressed support for Kurdish dissidents, accused the current Turkish government of serial murder, and wrote that “being human is a higher dignity than being Turkish.” She is a Socratic provocateur, perhaps. But her irreverent statements serve a higher purpose: to protest human rights violations. She is the proverbial canary in the coal mine.

Turkey was once an imperfect but functional democracy. Now it is an increasingly theocratic state under the totalitarian presidency of Tayyip Erdogan. Erdogan’s presidential achievements include electoral fraud, persecution of religious minorities, war crimes in Africa, massacring Kurdish civilians, unparalleled corruption, banning Wikipedia and Twitter, centralized online censorship, stacking the courts, persecuting academics, and terrorizing journalists. Swedish lawmakers pressed charges of genocide against him. Various commentators have called him a tyrant, a terrorist, and a war criminal. He has been condemned by international organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14958/nigeria-genocide-christians

“It’s tough to tell Nigerian Christians this isn’t a religious conflict since what they see are Fulani fighters clad entirely in black, chanting ‘Allahu Akbar!’ and screaming ‘Death to Christians.'” — Sister Monica Chikwe, reported by John. L. Allen Jr., Crux, August 4, 2019.

“Hundreds of indigenous Numan Christians in Adamawa state were attacked and killed by jihadist Fulani herdsmen. When they tried to defend themselves the Buhari govt. sent in the Airforce to bomb hundreds of them and protect the Fulani aggressors. Is this fair?!” — Femi Fani-Kayode, former Minister of Aviation, Daily Post (Nigeria), December 6, 2017.

Such is the current state of affairs: a jihad of genocidal proportions has been declared on the Christian population of Nigeria, and spearheaded by that nation’s president and his fellow Fulani tribesmen, even as Western media and analysts present Nigeria’s problems as products of economics — or “inequality” and “poverty,” to quote former US President Bill Clinton on the supposedly true source that is “fueling all this stuff.”

Muhammadu Buhari, the Muslim president of Nigeria — who reached that position in part thanks to former US President Barack H. Obama — continues to fuel the “genocide” of Christians in his nation.

Most recently, Father Valentine Obinna, a priest of the Aba diocese of Nigeria, attributed the ongoing slaughter of Christians to the planned “Islamization of Nigeria”:

“People read the handwriting on the wall. It’s obvious. It’s underground. It’s trying to make the whole country a Muslim country. But they are trying to do that in a context with a strong presence of Christians, and that’s why it becomes very difficult for him [Buhari].”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14957/iran-politics-military

The nature of political power, in any system, is that those who secure a share of it always want more.

The military chiefs, more specifically the top brass of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), have always promoted their ambitions through the vast media empire they control inside and outside Iran. What is new is that today they are advancing their bid for power directly and more openly.

Does this mean that we now have two generals testing the waters for a direct bid for power?

The hat, the turban, and the cap are of little use when the head is rotten.

As Hassan Rouhani’s presidency drifts towards what promises to be less than a brilliant end, speculation is starting about the next phase in the power struggle that has been a permanent feature of the Khomeinist regime from the start.

Some Iran-watchers argue that the regime’s true backbone consists of the military-security establishment using the “Supreme Guide” Ali Khamenei as a frontman. While that view reflects an aspect of the Iranian reality, it would be wrong to conclude that the military chiefs would remain content with the present arrangement. The nature of political power, in any system, is that those who secure a share of it always want more.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14956/turkey-ergodan-has-badly-overplayed-his-hand-in

Mr Erdogan, who has been the main driving force behind efforts to cause the Saudis maximum discomfort, now has an abundance of problems of his own, challenges which could spell the end of his 16-years in charge. After Mr Erdogan’s Islamist AKP party lost badly in last April’s mayoral election for control of Istanbul, the Turkish leader now finds himself trying desperately to salvage Turkey’s battered economy, where the currency is in free fall, foreign debts remain vast, and inflation and joblessness are alarmingly high.

Many Turks blame their country’s plight on Mr Erdogan’s obsession with pursuing his radical Islamist agenda, which includes supporting groups like the Muslim Brotherhood.

Many prefer him to concentrate instead on addressing their domestic concerns, a view the Turkish president would be well-advised to take on board if he intends to remain in power.

A year after the brutal murder of Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi, attempts by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to exploit the controversy to boost his own political standing have back-fired.

Ever since Mr Khashoggi was murdered moments after entering the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul in October last year to obtain documentation for his forthcoming marriage, Mr Erdogan has skilfully exploited the incident to cause maximum embarrassment to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, whom he regards as one of his major regional rivals.

Ankara has been at loggerheads with Riyadh ever since the Muslim Brotherhood, a key ally of Mr Erdogan, came to power in Egypt in 2012, a move bitterly resisted by the Saudis, who regard the Brotherhood as a terrorist organisation.