RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.algemeiner.com/2019/08/12/pro-israel-politician-wins-guatemalas-presidential-election/

In 1948 Guatemala was one of the first nations to recognize Israel. Dr. Jorge Garcia Granados was Guatemala’s ambassador to the United Nations….rsk

A prominent Guatemalan supporter of Israel who once said, “He who is Israel’s enemy is Guatemala’s enemy,” won the country’s presidential election with 58.5 percent of the vote, results on Monday confirmed.

Conservative candidate Alejandro Giammattei emerged victorious in the vote in the second round of elections on Sunday, beating his rival Sandra Torres, a former first lady.

Giammattei pledged that citizens “will find a president close to the people.”

The president-elect is a noted supporter of Israel in Latin America. He has pledged to keep Guatemala’s embassy in Jerusalem and expressed his opposition to Iran’s proxy terrorist group Hezbollah, which operates extensively in the region.

He said in a campaign interview that he wanted Guatemala to emulate “the great successes that Israel has had, especially in such important issues as food production, in order to make our lands more productive.”

“This cooperation is urgent for our country,” he added.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14320/uk-returning-isis-terrorists

While the UK government is seemingly intent on prosecuting those who have fought against ISIS, what has it been doing about the at least 425 returned ISIS terrorists themselves?

Prosecuting around 400 ISIS terrorists means Britain would “lose a generation”? What about the loss of security that these terrorists pose to the rest of British society?

Killing, torturing, raping and abusing Yazidis, Christians and others for sport was something that looked “bright and attractive”?

The law does not appear to apply to ISIS terrorists the same way it applies to those young Britons who went to fight against them. The United Kingdom’s moral compass seems to be entirely broken.

The West has mercilessly let down persecuted minorities in the Middle East, while showing great concern for the well-being of returning ISIS terrorists, their children and their spouses. There seems to have been no such concern for the victims of ISIS terrorists, particularly the Christians and Yazidis.

In the Netherlands, the Dutch immigration service has been sending Yazidi asylum seekers back to refugee camps in northern Iraq, and arguing that they have sufficient access to food and other facilities, Dutch media outlet Trouw recently reported. By contrast, in February, Dutch Minister of Justice Ferdinand Grapperhaus said that the Netherlands is “looking into” the option of trying to move Dutch women and children living in refugee camps in Syria to safe areas where they can return to the Netherlands.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14699/germany-iran-israel

Germany has, in fact, been decidedly hostile to Israel in recent years… Germany continues to provide millions of euros annually to organizations that promote anti-Israel BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions) and “lawfare” campaigns, anti-Zionism, antisemitism, and violence, according to NGO Monitor.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said in 2008 that Israel’s security is “non-negotiable” and Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said in 2018 that he went into politics “because of Auschwitz.” In practice, however, Germany consistently appears to prioritize its relations with Israel’s enemies.

Instex, an initiative of German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas, would enable European trade with Iran despite U.S. sanctions. It would facilitate barter-based trade with Iran in products such as pharmaceuticals and foods, but Tehran has repeatedly insisted that Instex must include trade in oil for the mechanism to make economic sense.

Seven months after its formation, Instex remains non-operational, in part because Iran still does not comply with international legal standards to prevent money laundering and terrorist financing.

A senior German diplomat appointed to head an EU barter system that would enable European companies to sidestep U.S. sanctions on Iran stepped down after giving an interview in which he criticized the existence of Israel and praised Tehran’s ballistic missile program.

The episode — the latest of a series of occurrences that have laid bare the anti-Israel foundation of Germany’s foreign policy — is an embarrassing setback for the German government and will complicate its efforts to salvage the Iran nuclear deal.

https://youtu.be/ZfljAZ04wzQ

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14633/iranian-intolerance

What, one has to ask, does Iran’s Islamic regime have to fear from the country’s Christians, Baha’is, Zoroastrians, Sufis, Sunni Muslims, or Jews? Yet its treatment of these minorities is so repressive that it seems not unreasonable to ask if the clerics might be afraid of what they consider challenges to their fantasy of pure Islamic identity.

So why this persecution? Because they represent a challenge to the radical shari’a law doctrines of the clergy, who impose Ayatollah Khomeini’s religio-politico system of Velayat-e Faqih (rule by the theocratic Islamic government).

“If they [Muslims] had gotten rid of the punishment for apostasy, Islam would not exist today.” – Islamic leader Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi.

The Iranian people who have been fighting for their freedom all these years deserve our immediate help.

The regime that currently rules Iran was set up after a revolution in early 1979, and after forty years remains in power. It will have escaped no one’s attention that relations between Iran and the West, notably the United States, have never been healthy and in recent months have deteriorated further.

The United States has placed increasingly harsh sanctions on its clerical foe, including some on Iran’s hard-line Supreme Leader (Rahbar-e A’zam), the ageing but still powerful Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. These sanctions are justified on several grounds: Iran’s massive involvement in Middle East conflicts beyond its borders (For example, in Syria Yemen, Iraq, Lebanon, Venezuela and the Gaza Strip); its financial, moral, and physical support for major terrorist bodies such as Hizbullah, Hamas, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad; its funding and arming of its own Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), now designated as a terrorist entity by the US; its carrying out of executions of dissidents, homosexuals, religious minorities, among others, making it responsible for over half of all recorded executions worldwide; its enforcement of strict codes of modesty on women, who can be arrested merely for wearing a hijab badly or not at all – a policy that was reinforced in 2016 and 2019 through the recruitment of thousands of morality police; its mass arrests, imprisonments and murders of dissidents, human rights activists, religious minorities, and others, with little or no evidence and without access to defence, and its rejection of diplomatic efforts to secure the release of the innocent British-Iranian woman Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe because its government refuses to recognize the international standard of dual citizenship.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14574/pakistan-forced-conversion

“The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan reports that the police often turn a blind eye to reports of abduction and forced conversions thereby creating impunity for perpetrators. The police will often either refuse to record a First Information Report or falsify the information, thereby denying families the chance to take their case any further.” — Report conducted in 2018 by the University of Birmingham’s Commonwealth Initiative for Freedom of Religion or Belief, United Kingdom, 2018.

“Local police and political leaders… are often accused of being complicit in forced marriage and conversion cases by failing to properly investigate them. If such cases are investigated or adjudicated, the young woman is reportedly questioned in front of the man she was forced to marry, which creates pressure on her to deny any coercion.” — Annual Report of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, 2019.

“The most important reason for this [abduction and conversion] is the desire to increase Pakistan’s Muslim population, which stems from the Islamic teaching that that a person who converts one non-Muslim to Islam will be granted a place in paradise.” — Sardar Mushtaq Gill, Pakistani human rights lawyer and head of the Legal Evangelical Association Development (LEAD-Pakistan).

“The judiciary are often subject to fear of reprisal from extremist elements, in other cases the judicial officers’ personal beliefs influence them into accepting the claims made that the woman/girl converted on her own free will.” — Report conducted in 2018 by the University of Birmingham’s Commonwealth Initiative for Freedom of Religion or Belief, United Kingdom, 2018.

“Higher authorities also have done little to nothing to pass legislation specifically criminalizing this issue….International pressure on Pakistan is an important element of seeking to end this abuse. Without motivation coming from outside the country, it is very unlikely the Pakistani government will listen to minority leaders and civil society to pass laws combating this issue.” — William Stark, South Asia regional manager at the International Christian Concern.

On July 12, Hindus and Sikhs gathered in the Sindh province of Pakistan to protest the kidnapping of young girls, their forced conversion to Islam and subsequent marriage to their abductors. Demonstrators at the rally also railed against the government of Prime Minister Imran Khan for not safeguarding minority rights in the Muslim-majority country.

https://saraacarter.com/unrwa-donors-put-off-by-sex-lies-nepotism-but-not-terrorism/

Last August the Trump Administration closed the US taxypayers’ checkbook to a 70-year old bloated and chronically mismanaged international aid program: The United Nations Refugee Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). A handful of nations are now following President Trump’s lead.

But the reason those nations are rethinking the $billions in international aid which has enabled the Arab Palestinian leadership to focus on – including the diversion of that international aid towards efforts to – eliminating Israel, rather than on infrastructure, education and health care, is a sizzling report of illicit sex, nepotism, retaliation and discrimination.

WHY THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION CUT OFF UNRWA FUNDING

When the United States announced its decision to end siphoning taxpayer’s funds into UNRWA, the State Department spokesperson called the Agency an “irredeemably flawed operation” which had been “in crisis mode for many years.”

The U.S. had been shouldering the bulk of UNRWA’s astronomical financial burden for decades despite U.S. pleas that other nations – particularly Arab nations, step up and take on a greater proportion of the cost. In 2017, the U.S. donated in excess of $364m. The contribution of the next four highest donors, the EU, Germany, UK and Sweden combined did not equal the amount the US contributed. There were only three Arab nations amongst the top 25 donor states, and their combined donations equaled less than a quarter of that of the U.S.

The State Dept. Spokesperson announcing US cessation of UNRWA funding also blasted the Agency for its “endlessly and exponentially expanding community of entitled beneficiaries.” The population UNRWA serves has ballooned to more than five and a half million, from its initial 860,000 displaced by the Arab war against Israel’s independence in 1948.

In addition to the financial vortex known as UNRWA, there are two unique aspects of the Agency that demand attention. The first is definitional, the second is its exclusivity.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14666/hamas-islamic-jihad-missiles

It seems, then, that for Islamic Jihad and Hamas, the ceasefire understandings, reached under the auspices of Egypt and the UN, are meant to give the Gaza-based groups a chance to continue building their military capabilities without having to worry about Israeli retaliatory measures.

Iranian media quoted Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as expressing satisfaction over the “progress” the Palestinians have made in the past few years. The “progress” Khamenei is talking about is not related to the building of a new hospital or school or a medical breakthrough in the Gaza Strip. Instead, the “progress” the Palestinians have achieved — according to Iran’s Supreme Leader — is that “while the Palestinians used to fight [Israel] with rocks, today they possess precise rockets.”

The Egyptian and UN mediators, in failing to call out the leaders of Hamas and Islamic Jihad for their deception and conflicting messages, are permitting the two groups to deploy the ceasefire with Israel as a cover to prepare for the next war.

The leaders of Hamas and Islamic Jihad and their patrons in Tehran… are dead-set on inflicting as much damage on Israel as possible. As per standard operating procedure, the biggest losers of all in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip will be the Palestinians.

As Egypt, the United Nations and other parties are pursuing their efforts to prevent an all-out military confrontation in the Gaza Strip, Hamas and its allies are forging ahead in their development of various types of weapons with which to attack Israel.

The Iranian-backed Islamic Jihad, the second largest armed group in the Gaza Strip after Hamas, recently revealed how it has managed to upgrade the rocket launchers that are being used to attack Israel.

According to the Islamic Jihad’s military wing, Al-Quds Brigades, it began developing its rocket launchers in 2007, when Hamas violently seized control of the Gaza Strip after overthrowing the regime of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14630/india-caste-discrimination

In spite of these laws, the more than 160 million so-called “ex-untouchables” continue to be subjected to discrimination, oppression and violence.

“…this history of religious freedom has come under attack in recent years with the growth of exclusionary extremist narratives—including, at times, the government’s allowing and encouraging mob violence against religious minorities. Those have facilitated a pervasive and ongoing campaign of violence, intimidation, and harassment against non-Hindu and lower-caste Hindu minorities.” — United States Commission on International Religious Freedom: Annual Report, 2019

Prime Minister Narendra Modi must take effective steps to eliminate the discriminatory caste system not only in word, but in deed. He also needs to provide proper education and empowerment programs for the many impoverished and illiterate “untouchables.” Otherwise, India’s affirmative action policies, geared towards reserving slots for lower castes in government jobs, are of little practical significance.

To combat the evils of an age-old caste system — a form of hierarchical oppression enabling people born to upper-caste groups to discriminate against members of lower castes, particularly “untouchables” (Dalits) — the founding fathers of the democratic Republic of India, established in 1950, adopted a Constitution that guarantees all citizens equality before the law.

Articles 15 and 16 of the Indian Constitution forbid discrimination “against any citizen on grounds only of religion, race, caste, sex, place of birth or any of them… No citizen shall, on grounds only of religion, race, caste, sex, place of birth or any of them, be subject to any disability, liability, restriction or condition…”

Article 17 is even more specific:

“‘Untouchability’ is abolished and its practice in any form is forbidden. The enforcement of any disability arising out of ‘Untouchability’ shall be an offense punishable in accordance with law.”

India’s Constitution also directs the state to promote the educational and economic interests of weaker sectors, and protect them from all forms of exploitation (Article 46). As a result, New Delhi has instituted a policy resembling American “affirmative action,” reserving 15% of government jobs for members of scheduled castes.

In spite of these laws, the more than 160 million so-called “ex-untouchables” continue to be subjected to discrimination, oppression and violence.