RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2019/12/fellow-terrorist-london-bridge-also-released-early-daniel-greenfield/

Usman Khan, the Pakistani Muslim terrorist who went on a stabbing spree near London Bridge, had been sent to jail in 2012 for his role in a massive terror plot, before being released in 2018. Another of his comrades, who was also released, had plotted his own terror attack.

A terrorist jailed with London Bridge knifeman Usman Khan over a plot to kill Boris Johnson and attack London landmarks left prison only to begin planning a Lee Rigby-style murder.

Mohibur Rahman, 35, was one of nine terrorists, also including Khan, who were handed long sentences in 2012 for a plan to blow up famous sights in the capital including the London Eye and the London Stock Exchange.

Rahman was released in 2015 but while serving part of his sentence at Belmarsh top security prison in South-East London he became friends with two men from the West Midlands, Khobaib Hussain and Naweed Ali.

The trio formed a group that they called ‘The Three Musketeers’ and used that name to communicate with each other on encrypted social media apps.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2019/12/pakistani-muslim-london-stabber-was-let-out-after-daniel-greenfield/

The rule for Muslim terrorists in Europe is if at first you don’t succeed, file appeals, wait for the system to fail, and kill a bunch of people anyway.

That was what allowed Pakistani Muslim terrorist Usman Khan to wreak havoc with a stabbing spree in London.

Usman Khan was convicted on terrorism charges but let out of prison early. He attended a “Learning Together” conference for ex-offenders, and used the event to launch a bloody attack, stabbing two people to death and wounding three others.

Unsurprisingly, the conference didn’t help. Neither did the reported ankle bracelet. Keeping him in jail would have prevented this.

But he did win an appeal.

Khan, along with a number of others, was jailed in 2012 for plotting schemes including blowing up the London Stock Exchange.

However Khan, from Persia Walk in Tunstall, and others successfully had their sentences reduced to 16-year prison terms in 2013 – with Khan released on licence in 2018.

Khan’s barrister, Joel Bennathan QC, insisted that Khan’s indefinite term, from which he may never be released, was simply too tough for one so young. He also claimed the crown court judge was ‘wrong to promote his offence to a high level of sophistication.’

So the lesson here is that “deradicalization” is a scam that gets people killed.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/nov/30/isis-claims-responsibility-london-bridge-attack/?utm_source=onesignal&utm_campaign=pushnotify&utm_medium=push

The Islamic State officially claimed responsibility for Friday’s terror attack in London.

A statement Saturday from its news agency Amaq was translated and posted to Twitter by Rukmini Callimachi of the New York Times.

Attacker Usman Khan — who recently was released from prison after serving six years for plotting to blow up the London Stock Exchange — was acting in its name, the terror group said.

Khan “carried out the attack in response to calls to target the nationals of Coalition countries,” the ISIS statement said.

Two people were stabbed to death and several others injured before police shot Khan dead on the London Bridge.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15151/france-control-migration-policy

“The number of asylum applications in France increased by more than 20% in 2018 while it is declining everywhere else in Europe. Why is it declining elsewhere and increasing in France? Maybe we need to ask the question, why is this ‘French Eldorado’ being promoted everywhere?” — MP Emmanuelle Ménard, French Member of Parliament.

Critics noted that Philippe’s measures will not resolve the underlying problem — that the French government refuses adequately to secure the country’s borders to prevent illegal migrants from entering France in the first place.

“The government has decided nothing. There will always be 255,000 legal aliens per year, plus 100,000 asylum seekers, plus all the illegal immigrants that no one has even considered counting, plus thousands of unaccompanied minors.” — Marine Le Pen, leader of the National Rally party.

Meanwhile, illegal immigration to and through France continues unabated.

French police recently cleared more than 2,000 migrants from makeshift encampments in northern Paris. The crackdown comes after the government announced a series of measures to curb illegal immigration.

The migration crackdown appears to be aimed at blunting the rising popularity of the anti-mass-migration party National Rally and its leader Marine Le Pen. She has dismissed the government’s actions as a “political swindle” that will increase, not decrease, immigration.

On November 28, police began removing hundreds of migrants from a camp at Porte d’Aubervilliers in the 19th arrondissement in northeastern Paris. The clearance operation was delayed by a week due to an insufficient police presence to guarantee security. An estimated 2,000 migrants are living in the camp in squalid conditions.

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/11/29/the-end-looks-near-for-irans-ayatollah-regime/

Since November 15, protests have swept through Iran, erupting in at least 165 cities. Ostensibly triggered by a gasoline price hike of up to 300%, the unrest soon found a new focus: the overthrow of the ruling regime in its entirety.

The speed with which the protests spread was a clear indication that the explosive society was just waiting for an opportunity to call for regime change. In the first two days, the protests spread to over 100 cities, with unified chants of “death to the dictator.” “death to Rouhani,” “death to Khamenei,” and “neither Gaza nor Lebanon, I give my life for Iran.”

The public’s thirst for change and penchant to stand up to the regime far exceed that seen in the 2018 uprising. On day one, people closed streets, tore down or burned posters of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, and attacked government buildings. According to the state-run Fars News Agency affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corp (IRGC), in only one province, 100 state-owned banks and 56 other government locations were set ablaze in the first two days; that is double the number in the entire country in 2018. According to our information, over 1,300 government buildings, banks, Bassij headquarters, and clerical seminaries have been attacked and set ablaze, unprecedented in the past three decades.

Sensing a growing fissure within the three branches of his regime, Khamenei spoke on day two, endorsing the price hike and ordering the security forces to crack down. In the first two days, at least 61 people were killed, more than all those killed in 2018.

Tehran doubled down on the use of violence after Khamenei’s ominous speech, killing at least 251, injuring over 3,700 and arresting more than 7,000 as of this writing. But the brute force failed to stop the protesters, and by the second day the regime shut down the internet despite a massive international backlash and financial losses estimated at $370 million a day.

Still, the unrest continued.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14505/self-censorship-artists

The Index on Censorship has identified what appears to be an overly cautious approach to commissioning new artwork. “Artists will create the work that gatekeepers and commissioners will adopt….”

“I love my freedom. I’m aware of the very real threat to that freedom from Islamic fascism and I’m not going to pander to them or justify it like many people on the left are doing.” — The artist Mimsy, whose artwork was removed from an exhibit entitled Passion for Freedom at the Mall Gallery, London, on the grounds that it might be “potentially inflammatory”.

This kind of censorship among artists, however, unfortunately, only contributes to the ever-shrinking space of free expression. Some artists, evidently, only approve of certain kinds of free expression. They never appear to consider that a similar boycott might happen to themselves, if they happen to fall afoul of current political orthodoxy.

“Ai Weiwei should be the first to know that this kind of thinking is totalitarian…. Political art represents both the struggle and the vaccine against the culture of silence found in any society. The political artist breaks down taboos so that the roads are opened for the exchange of thoughts and ideas between individuals and between citizens and rulers. Therefore, political art is necessary. And so this exhibition is necessary.” — Jon Eirik Lundberg, curator of the Læsø Art Hall, Denmark.

Index on Censorship, a London-based organization that campaigns for free expression worldwide, recently launched a new support service for artists, Arts Censorship Support Service.

The service is apparently intended to “push back against censorship and keep the space for artistic freedom of expression as wide open as possible”, according to an interview by ArtsProfessional with Associate Arts Producer Julia Farrington of the Index on Censorship.

The Index on Censorship has identified what in general appears to be an overly cautious approach to commissioning new artwork. “Artists will create the work that gatekeepers and commissioners will adopt, and so [the new service] is a lot to do with making the decision makers, the commissioners, confident in taking on and challenging their own self-censorship and organisational censorship,” Farrington said. According to her, the pressure that can be exerted on arts organizations when producing controversial or challenging work has been greater than ever, in part due to a climate of online hostility.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/11/the-uyghur-emergency/

The Chinese government has rounded up more than a million Uyghurs and other minorities, throwing them into concentration camps.

When people talk about what the Chinese government is doing to the Uyghur people in northwest China, they tend to refer to the Nazis. They can be excused.

In April 2018, Jerome A. Cohen raised the specter of the Nazis. He is considered the dean of China scholars in the United States, born in 1930. He is a very careful, judicious man. He would not use the N-word — “Nazi” — lightly. But he said that what was happening to the Uyghurs reminded him of his relatives in Austria and Germany. Some 40 of them were killed.

At the beginning of this month, Fred Hiatt of the Washington Post had an article headed “In China, every day is Kristallnacht.” He noted that you are not supposed to bring up the Nazis, because the Holocaust was a unique event. Yet, in a discussion of northwest China, the Nazis are hard to avoid.

The government has rounded up more than a million Uyghurs and other minorities, throwing them into concentration camps, or “reeducation” camps. These camps constitute a Chinese gulag archipelago.

Among the Uyghurs, there are a relative handful of militants, as there are among the Rohingyas (the minority people whom the Burmese government has brutalized). This gives the government an excuse to go after everyone — think of Lidice, multiplied untold times.