RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-22/modi-the-favorite-as-vote-counting-begins-in-india-s-election?srnd=premium

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has surged to a majority on his own in India’s general election, with his Bharatiya Janata Party establishing a commanding lead in vote counting.

“India wins yet again,” Modi said in a tweet. “Together we grow. Together we prosper. Together we will build a strong and inclusive India.”

BJP supporters have begun celebrating in the streets as the party extended its lead in more than 299 seats — easily ahead of the 272 seats needed to form government and more than the 282 the party won in 2014. The opposition Congress party is ahead in 51 seats, official election commission results show as of 2:46 pm local time.

After the initial euphoria over the prospects of a landslide victory, gains in Indian assets are evaporating fast. The Sensex, the benchmark equity index, is close to erasing its climb to a record.

The outcome is a validation of Modi’s hardline Hindu nationalism and populist economic policies, and a major setback for Congress leader Rahul Gandhi, whose party has failed to make significant inroads following its trouncing in the polls in 2014, when it won just 44 seats.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14254/iran-kidnap-kill-americans

A leading Republican lawmaker, Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas), also the ranking Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, has pointed out that recent intelligence obtained about Iran’s threat was extremely detailed.

These are simply preemptive measures that any rational state would take in the face of those clear threats. They were being taken to save the lives of American citizens and prevent the world’s official leading state sponsor of terrorism from destabilizing the region.

What do critics of the Trump administration expect the American government to do…? Do these critics want the Trump administration to ignore Iran and its terror groups until another terrorist act like 9/11 occurs? Or is it possible that these critics, deep-down, do not care about U.S. national security and the lives of ordinary citizens?

While plans were being concocted to harm or murder Americans, it is mind-boggling that people — even entire governments — were criticizing the Trump administration for preparing preemptive measures against multiple credible threats from the Iranian government and its forces.

While people were squabbling over the choices the Trump administration was making, the Iranian leaders, known to have mastered conducting asymmetric warfare, were giving directives to kidnap and kill American soldiers.

A leading Republican lawmaker, Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas), also the ranking Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, has pointed out that recent intelligence obtained about Iran’s threat was extremely detailed.

“To the extent I can discuss it, it was human intelligence,” he said, and added that, “One of the Hezbollah cells is known for its kidnapping and killing operations, and their directive was to go in and kill and kidnap American soldiers.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/05/brexit-party-poses-an-existential-threat-to-the-tories/

Theresa May is probably on the way out, but the European parliamentary elections suggest a bigger threat is on the horizon for the Conservative party.

Theresa May’s departure from Downing Street and the premiership has been promised so many times and not materialized once that I react to the latest version of it like the Charlie Ruggles character to a rival suitor in the great Lubitsch comedy, Trouble in Paradise: “See here. You keep saying you’re leaving and then you stay. Why don’t you say you’ll stay and then leave?”

Last week it certainly looked as if May would finally gratify the wishes of almost all Tories outside Parliament (and now, it seems, most inside Parliament too) and resign as prime minister in early June. She and Graham Brady, the chairman of the 1922 Committee of Tory backbenchers, agreed on a statement that kind of promised she would go but also left open the delicate question of when:

The prime minister is determined to secure our departure from the European Union and is devoting her efforts to securing the second reading of the withdrawal agreement bill in the week commencing 3rd June 2019 and the passage of that bill and the consequent departure of the United Kingdom from the European Union by the summer. We have agreed that she and I will meet following the second reading of the bill to agree a timetable for the election of a new leader of the Conservative and Unionist Party.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/05/islamophobia-definition-debate-united-kindgom/

A proposed definition of Islamophobia gives relatively few clues about how it would be applied.

What criticisms of Muslims can be censured, sanctioned, or prosecuted? What kind of statements will we deem Islamophobic? The debate is starting to happen in the United Kingdom, and it will surely happen soon in American universities, corporations, and perhaps our legislatures. We ought to start thinking it through.

In the United Kingdom, the All Party Parliamentary Group of Muslims proposed a working definition of Islamophobia that runs this way: “Islamophobia is rooted in racism and is a type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness.” This definition has been rapidly adopted by smaller parties in the U.K., such as the Liberal Democrats, but rejected by the Tories and the government of Theresa May. It’s also been criticized by Martin Hewitt, chairman of the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC), who says such a definition, if it spread, could hamper anti-terror investigations.

Would such a definition, if adopted, apply to any of the following statements?

“They seek to enslave the bodies of women.”

“[H]e prefers theocracy to democracy. He preaches a message of enduring hatred and personifies the kind of politics that is inimical to everything the Labour party stands for. ”

https://www.jihadwatch.org/2019/05/exclusive-interview-with-jewish-couple-in-paris-beaten-by-muslim-home-invaders

The last of the remaining Jews living in Aubervilliers were brutally beaten and robbed in their own home. A Jewish couple in Paris was assaulted and robbed in their own home in the projects earlier this month raising the concern that the attack was the latest in a series of “home invasions” targeting Jews. A Muslim gang of four saw the *mezuzah on the door and stormed in. The Jewish couple were brutally beaten and robbed. Seine-Saint-Denis is increasingly a Muslim no-go zone. Once home to a thriving Jewish community, Seine-Saint-Denis has been ethnically cleansed.

I have an exclusive interview with the couple. Photos are exclusive as well.

The doorbell rang in the small Hazan apartment in the projects of the deprived Paris suburb of Aubervilliers. Shalom Hazan was expecting his brother so he thought nothing of opening the door. Like a scene out of ‘Death Wish’, four Muslim men in their twenties stormed into his home and spent the next 30 minutes beating Mr. Hazan and his wife.

Their faces covered (like the burka), the four demanded money, “We know you have money.” That old anti-semitic trope. Hazan lives in the projects in a tiny apartment. He has a mezzuzah on the doorpost outside his home the only mezuzahs in the building because Shalom Hazan and his wife Joelle are the only Jews remaining in the building.

63 year old Hazan tried to fight them off. While three goons pummeled him, the fourth attacked his wife while shouting “show us where the money is or we will kill your husband!” They took everything —Shalom Hazan and Joelle Hazan have lived in this tiny apartment since in 1985. Back then it was a Jewish neighborhood, safe. As Muslims moved in, they Jews were forced out. The projects that the Hazans live in was at one time 90% Jewish. Now Shalom Hazan is the last Jew. He has decided he too must leave. He is terrified and so is his wife.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14253/russia-eu-elections

Russian President Vladimir Putin is actively cultivating a network of contacts in EU member states with the aim of building a pro-Russian bloc in the next EU parliament, one that will be active in calling for the sanctions to be lifted.

Concerns about Russian influence have also been raised in France, Italy, Greece, the Netherlands and Germany, while questions remain as to whether Moscow tried to interfere in Britain’s 2016 referendum on leaving the EU.

Elsewhere Moscow has worked hard to forge closer relations with Hungary and Bulgaria, two former Soviet satellites that appear to prefer maintaining good links with Russia over their support for the EU.

As part of his effort to broaden his ties with pro-Russian states, Mr Putin is now focusing on the Czech Republic, where the Kremlin is actively engaged with the country’s pro-Russian president, Miloš Zeman, as well as Andrej Babiš, the controversial prime minister…. Certainly, from Moscow’s perspective, adding the Czech Republic to the burgeoning list of EU states and political parties with pro-Russian sympathies can only strengthen its efforts to undermine the EU’s efforts to maintain a united front against Russia.

No one is working harder to achieve a successful outcome from this week’s European Union elections than Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Even though there is little prospect of Russia ever wanting to join the family of EU nations, that has not stopped Mr Putin from intensifying his efforts to expand his influence over those countries that are members of the European trade bloc.

Consequently, at a time when Moscow is desperate to have the sanctions lifted that have been imposed in response to various Russian acts of provocation, such as last year’s Salisbury poisoning, Mr Putin is investing much time and energy to ensure that a strong pro-Russian lobby is elected to the new EU parliament following Thursday’s Europe-wide ballot.

The EU, together with the US, has been at the forefront of the international campaign to hold Moscow to account for its role in the Salisbury attack in March 2018, when a team of Russian GRU intelligence officers have been accused of attempting to murder former Russian Sergei Skripal with Novichok nerve agent. The attack resulted in the strengthening of the sanctions originally imposed against Moscow in the wake of Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014, as well as its interference in eastern Ukraine.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14211/turkey-erdogan-armenian-genocide

“What Erdogan refers to as ‘relocation’ was actually the genocidal deportation of civilian populations –mainly women, children and the elderly — to the very interior of Asia Minor. These populations were not simply relocated to another place, contrary to what the Turkish state claims. They were sent to concentration and extermination camps or remote places in the interior to be slaughtered or to die from exposure, exhaustion, hunger or epidemics — either on the way to, or at the place of, their destinations.” — Vasileios Meichanetsidis, an Athens-based genocide scholar and editor of the 2012 book, The Genocide of the Ottoman Greeks, in an interview with Gatestone Institute.

At a symposium in Ankara on April 24 — the 104th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide — Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan repeated his distortion and denial of the 1915 mass murder of Christians at the hands of Ottoman Turks. “The relocation of the Armenian gangs and their supporters who massacred the Muslim people, including women and children, in eastern Anatolia, was the most reasonable action that could be taken in such a period,” Erdogan said. This quote was then posted on the official “Turkish Presidency” Twitter page.

“Erdogan’s statement was factually flawed, deceptive and insulting,” Vicken Babkenian, an independent researcher for the Australian Institute for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, told Gatestone in a recent interview.

https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/21/politics/china-us-trade-war-rare-earths-intl/index.html

Hong Kong (CNN)Chinese President Xi Jinping’s actions this week have been rich with symbolism.

On Monday, he laid a wreath at a monument dedicated to the Long March, a fabled retreat during the Chinese civil war which helped cement Mao Zedong’s rise to power. Could this be a sign that a similar protracted struggle will be needed in the expanding trade war with the the US?
Perhaps not. But the correct interpretation of another of Xi’s actions was much clearer, spelled out for all by state media.
In Jiangxi province, in southeastern China, Xi visited a company which specializes in rare earth minerals. Such elements are vital to the production of high-tech devices including smartphones, lasers, missile systems, superconductors and a whole host of others.

China accounted for 80% of all rare earth minerals imported by the US between 2014 and 2017, according to the United States Geological Survey, and they were among the few items not hit by US tariffs in Washington’s most recent trade war escalation.
Xi was accompanied in his visit to Jiangxi by Liu He, the vice premier who has led trade negotiations. And while China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs has tried to downplay the symbolism of the pair’s visit, analysts and state media were in little doubt what message was being conveyed.
Global Times, a nationalist tabloid, said Xi’s visit had “offered huge support to the critical industry that has been widely viewed as a form of leverage for China in the trade war with the US.”