https://youtu.be/VzpaMf3pZGU
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14827/christians-massacred-media-ignore
“In the same week as the awful attack on the mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand… more than two hundred Christians were killed in Nigeria. There was hardly any mention of the latter in the news. There were no marches for martyred Christians, no tolling of church bells ordered by governments, no ‘Je suis Charlie’ t-shirts… no public outrage at all.” — Fr. Benedict Kiely, Crisis Magazine, September 4, 2019
NASA’s satellites observed the Amazon fires, prompting world leaders to pledge to protect the rainforest. But the burning, chopping and murder of Christians is not tracked by satellites and their suffering is not seen on our televisions and newspapers. Actually, it seems in the West as if the persecution of Christians does not even exist.
The Vatican and Pope Francis have a choice: to shed light on these persecuted Christians or be accused of willful blindness…. The Vatican should dedicate the next synod to them.
“In the Amazon rainforest, which is of vital importance for the planet, a deep crisis has been triggered by prolonged human intervention, in which a ‘culture of waste’ (LS 16) and an extractivist mentality prevail”, the Vatican stated.
“The Amazon is a region with rich biodiversity; it is multi-ethnic, multi-cultural, and multi-religious; it is a mirror of all humanity which, in defense of life, requires structural and personal changes by all human beings, by nations, and by the Church.”
That is why a Synod of Bishops for the Pan-Amazon region has been scheduled to meet in Rome from October 6 to 27. In an interview with Italian paper La Stampa, Pope Francis said that one of the biggest challenges to the Amazon region is the “threat to the life of the populations and territory which derives from the economic and political interests of the dominant sectors of society.”
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14828/moscow-divided
Putin has also succeeded in establishing Russia as the key player in war-torn Syria by marginalizing not only Iran but also Turkey and the United States. Putin adulators are especially proud of his success in playing the Iran card against the United States while squeezing the Tehran mullahs for unprecedented concessions.
The impression one gets in Moscow these days is that reality may have started to bite at the edges of the hubris nurtured by Putin’s opportunistic tactics and the weakness of the Western, especially European, response.
Well-to-do Russians, the backbone of Putin’s system, are sore about the fact that they are no longer treated as welcome friends in the Western world, to which they think they belong. The less privileged Russians are equally unwilling to find their nation grouped together with a number of “Third World” countries such as Syria, Iran, Venezuela and North Korea.
In Russia, August is often regarded as the uncertain season closing the short summer and opening the path to the long duet of autumn and winter. It was, therefore, no surprise in a recent visit to Moscow to see that sense of uncertainty reflected in the political mood of the Russian elites.
To be sure, the uncertainty one notices is still in filigree. Officials and intellectuals supporting the current government are still full of self-confidence, not to say bombast, defending President Vladimir Putin’s “strongman” politics. Nevertheless, conversations regarding the political situation in Russia soon reveal three sources of uncertainty, perhaps even anxiety.
The first is an as yet tentative concern that though Putin’s current presidential term has some four more years to conclude, it is not at all certain that the current ruling elite could find someone of similar stature to carry the torch. In other words, Putinism may end as other “isms” formed around a charismatic leader, something like Gaullism, Peronism or even Titoism.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/09/brexit-new-referendum-proposal/
For those seeking to undo the voters’ decision, the clock never runs out.
London — The European Union is the new Hotel California: You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.
Any hopes that the British government might actually go ahead and achieve Brexit, after more voters supported it than have ever voted for anything in the entire history of this formerly great country, were pretty well dashed this week when Prime Minister Boris Johnson suffered a spectacular series of defeats in the House of Commons, capped by the utterly humiliating departure of his own brother Jo, a Remainer, who quit both his brother’s government and his seat in the Commons rather than be an ally for the Brexit Johnson has repeatedly promised would occur, “do or die,” on October 31. Jo Johnson said he was putting “the national interest” ahead of party and family.
After many in his own party deserted him, and, more to the point, deserted the country, by joining the pro-EU coalition in Parliament, a bill set to become law on Monday will require Johnson to go on bended knee to the EU to seek a second extension. After that outcome is secured, a general election looms.
In proving that it is terrified of a no-deal Brexit, Parliament has effectively stripped the United Kingdom of all its negotiating leverage and made it probable that nothing like a clean break with the EU will occur. What Britain will wind up with will evidently either be continued EU membership or some sort of sham Brexit like the one that was repeatedly rejected when Theresa May tried to sell it to the Commons.
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/09/robert_mugabe_socialist_curse_of_humanity_is_gone.html
Zimbabwe’s preening socialist strongman, Robert Mugabe, a man who left his once prosperous country a hellhole, is gone, and his end didn’t come soon enough. He went out as one of the world’s worst curses against humanity.
Here’s the New York Times announcement:
Robert Mugabe, the first prime minister and later president of independent Zimbabwe, who traded the mantle of liberator for the armor of a tyrant and presided over the decline of one of Africa’s most prosperous lands, died on Friday. He was 95.
The death was announced by his successor, President Emmerson Mnangagwa.
“It is with the utmost sadness that I announce the passing on of Zimbabwe’s founding father and former President, Cde Robert Mugabe,” he wrote on Twitter on Friday, using the abbreviation for comrade. “Mugabe was an icon of liberation, a pan-Africanist who dedicated his life to the emancipation and empowerment of his people. His contribution to the history of our nation and continent will never be forgotten.”
What a shame he died in his bed. In more serious times, he would have gone out like Mussolini.
But just the fact that he was able to hang on for as long as he did draws attention worth looking at.
A truly good summary of his life and times appears in the London Telegraph’s obituary of the man this morning:
Robert Mugabe, the former president of Zimbabwe who has died aged 95, began his 37 years in power as a Nobel Peace Prize nominee credited with creating Africa’s most successful multiracial state.
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14816/us-taliban-negotiations-qatar
One can understand President Donald Trump’s wish to leave Afghanistan. There are, however, ways to leave without losing people, respect, and allies. Mr. Trump, instead of leaving unilaterally, while reinforcing the democratically elected government in Kabul without boots on the ground, is unfortunately empowering his Taliban enemy by protracted negotiations, where America makes successive concessions and ultimately throws its Afghan allies under the bus.
Afghan officials are the first to sense that the sellout of the Kabul government is impending, and are scurrying to defect to the Taliban (in July alone there were 800 defections).
As opposed to what many Americans think, Qatar did the US no favors in building the base in the mid-1990s. It needed an American base for its own self-protection and this dependence still persists. Without this base, this Lilliputian energy Gulliver would be taken over by its neighbors (whether Iranian or Saudi) within a day. The US military establishment ignores this reality to its own detriment, and behaves as if America is in Qatar’s debt rather than the reverse.
Qatar is already threatening to limit potential operations against Iran from Al-Udeid, should they be needed, and Qatar’s Tamim told Rouhani that “only countries [placed] along the coast [of the Persian Gulf] should keep security in the region.”
What is happening in Afghanistan is already beyond grief. The United States is negotiating with the Taliban, without the Taliban first agreeing to a cease-fire as a precondition for talks, and although President Trump has emphatically announced his determination to withdraw from the country, American soldiers are still being killed (in recent days, three American servicemen died). [1]
One can understand President Donald Trump’s wish to leave Afghanistan. Whether the US can sustain its strategic and economic leadership in the context of an isolationist policy, is a legitimate debate. This is the president’s and Congress’s purview. There are, however, ways to leave without losing people, respect, and allies. Mr. Trump, instead of leaving unilaterally, while reinforcing the democratically elected government in Kabul without boots on the ground, is unfortunately empowering his Taliban enemy by protracted negotiations, where America makes successive concessions and ultimately throws its Afghan allies under the bus.[2] Afghan officials are the first to sense that the sellout of the Kabul government is impending, and are scurrying to defect to the Taliban (in July alone there were 800 defections).[3]
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/09/the_europeans_keep_rejecting_liberty.html
Modern continental Europe keeps trying to solve its political problem — and then to impose its solution on everyone within reach. Recognizing this historical process can help us understand European anti-Americanism, strongest perhaps in Germany. America created the Europeans’ political predicament, and we keep preventing them from adopting the solutions they come up with.
America created the Europeans’ political problem by the magnificent example of the American Revolution and the astonishing, world-changing success of America. In an interesting version of the story of the emperor’s new clothes, rule by hereditary monarchs, hereditary aristocracies, and established churches was suddenly revealed to be absurd and indefensible.
The only problem was that continental Europe was for the most part incapable of self-rule. The attempts, for example, by Germany, Italy, and France to achieve reasonably stable regimes of rule by their own people would be comical but for the terrible human consequences of their repeated failures.
With the exception of the Netherlands and a few other European countries that, like Britain, have achieved rule by their own people, the modern history of continental Europe is the story of people trying various experiments in an ongoing effort to relieve themselves of the burden of self-rule.
For a while, it seemed certain that fascism was going to be the European solution. The Germans and the Italians took the lead, but there were at the same time homegrown fascist movements throughout Europe, even in Britain. The French earned from Homer Simpson the sobriquet “cheese-eating surrender monkeys” because of their feeble resistance to the Nazi invaders and their swift adoption of a policy of collaboration with their Nazi rulers. If it weren’t for America’s military intervention, the Nazis would likely have defeated Britain, and fascist Europe would have reached from Ireland’s western shore to Moscow and beyond.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/death-of-a-dictator-11567796547
Africa’s postcolonial era produced many tyrants, but few as destructive as Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe. The perverse accomplishment of the dictator, who died Friday at age 95, was to make a thriving country impoverished, corrupt and oppressed.
Mugabe was born in the British colony of Southern Rhodesia and studied in South Africa. He became an enthusiastic Marxist and joined his country’s independence movement in the 1960s. The former schoolteacher turned into a guerrilla commander and served more than a decade in prison. After Zimbabwe became an independent state, he was elected Prime Minister in 1980.
Widely reviled at the end of his life for his many abuses of power, he was feted across the globe earlier in his career by politicians and intellectuals who should have known better. He became a champion of anticolonialism on the left and was even knighted by Britain in 1994. By then the military he controlled had killed thousands of political opponents and civilians.
https://amgreatness.com/2019/09/05/a-fine-mess/
It comes to something when the one of the most serene and sensible of political voices stems from a newspaper dedicated to the violent overthrow of capitalism.
Yet, The Morning Star—Britain’s only Communist newspaper, and once reliant on bulk orders from the Soviet Union—this week offered much in the way of common-sense; a commodity vanishingly rare in modern Britain.
“The Morning Star believes that the referendum result should be respected, and Britain should leave the EU on October 31, with or without a deal,” the paper proclaimed, parroting almost verbatim the mantra of Prime Minister Boris Johnson, a man the same newspaper routinely daubs “fascist.”
Yes, dear reader, the beacon of democratic propriety appears to be a Leninist newspaper that papered over the barbarism of the Soviet Union and still harbors fantasies of violent revolution.
The ‘Rebel Alliance’ vs. the People
Over the past week, the formerly serious country of Great Britain perhaps seared its joke status into history.
First, Remainers armed with cheese, olives, and a good bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon, blocked London streets in picnic fashion, without threat of harm or arrest, to protest an apparent “coup.”
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274826/duped-us-travelers-cuba-infected-zika-virus-humberto-fontova
“A new analysis of Zika-infected travelers who returned to the United States or Europe in 2017 or 2018 has found that 98% had visited Cuba, which did not report any cases to world health officials at the time the country’s outbreak apparently peaked.”
“It was startling,” says Kristian Andersen, a genomic epidemiologist at Scripps Research in San Diego, California, who led the work conducted by 38 researchers from five countries. The group estimates that Cuba had 5,707 unreported cases, with most occurring in 2017 (the year, by the way, when Obama’s “opening” made U.S. travel to Cuba very chic — and very important to the Stalinist regime’s coffers, especially those of the secret police and military who majority own Cuba’s tourism infrastructure).
“Of 91 travel-associated Zika cases identified in Florida from June 2017 to October 2018, the team found that all but one infected individual was returning from Cuba. …Likewise, 63 of 64 travel-associated cases caught in Europe during that time frame involved travel to Cuba. Cuba’s unrecognized [no–it was fully recognized by the Stalinist regime which kept it hush-hush!] Zika outbreak may have ‘silently’ spread the virus to other parts of the world and continues to infect international visitors today.” (Zika News)
So what’s the big deal, some might ask? Well, “Zika virus can be passed from a pregnant woman to her fetus and can cause a birth defect called microcephaly and other severe fetal brain defects… Zika primarily spreads through infected mosquitoes. You can also get Zika through sex without a condom with someone infected by Zika, even if that person does not show symptoms of Zika.” (Center For Disease Controls.)
