RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14091/ayatollah-plays-his-joker

The summoning of Iraqi mercenaries showed that Khamenei isn’t quite sure of the regime’s military and security apparatus and, when the chips are down, relies on his foreign legion.

Soon, however, it became clear that “Islam’s bravest soldier since Imam Ali,” Major-General Qassem Soleimani, owed part of his reputation to bluffing and his talent for self-aggrandizement.

Western gullibility has contributed to overrating a brutal regime and a mediocre leader, thus helping spread the fear that such regimes and leaders rely upon for their survival.

For years, “Iran experts” in the West have regarded the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as the “deep government” in the Islamic Republic. However, the events of the past weeks, marked by floods that wreaked havoc in 22 of Iran’s 31 provinces, may warrant a second look at that theory. The floods showed that, in real terms, Iran has no government and that the IRGC is more of a business-cum-security conglomerate than a government, deep or shallow.

The first week of chaos and confusion showed that, despite boasts by its commanders, the IRGC was unable to organize a credible rescue operation. IRGC chief Gen. Muhammad-Ali Aziz-Jaafari was even unable to travel to the affected provinces. Then came small but ominous protests by flood-stricken people against the IRGC, blaming it, rightly or wrongly, for causing the floods by jerry-building dams and railway lines.

https://www.aol.com/article/news/2019/04/20/sri-lanka-bomb-attacks-kill-at-least-138-people/23714940/

COLOMBO — Easter Sunday bomb blasts at three Sri Lankan churches and three luxury hotels killed 138 people and wounded more than 400, hospital and police officials said, following a lull in major attacks since the end of the civil war 10 years ago.

In just one church, St. Sebastian’s in Katuwapitiya, north of Colombo, more than 50 people had been killed, a police official told Reuters, with pictures showing bodies on the ground, blood on the pews and a destroyed roof.

Media reported 25 people were also killed in an attack on a church in Batticaloa in Eastern Province.

The three hotels hit were the Shangri-La Colombo, Kingsbury Hotel and Cinnamon Grand Colombo. It was unclear whether there were any casualties in the hotels.

Nine foreigners were among the dead, the officials said.

There were no immediate claims of responsibility for the attacks in a country which was at war for decades with Tamil separatists until 2009 during which bomb blasts in the capital were common.

Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe called a national security council meeting at his home for later in the day.

“I strongly condemn the cowardly attacks on our people today. I call upon all Sri Lankans during this tragic time to remain united and strong,” he said in a Tweet.

“Please avoid propagating unverified reports and speculation. The government is taking immediate steps to contain this situation.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14082/greece-no-go-zone-athens

“[T]he neighborhood has… platoons, companies, battalions, Kalashnikovs. I don’t know any more if we, as a police force, have the political mandate to clear the area. This region is a matter for the army now.” — Stavros Balaskas, vice president of the Greek Federation of Police Officers, April 6, 2019.

“…[T]here are now too many illegal immigrants in Exarchia who are drug traffickers [and] gun traffickers… they have essentially taken over the whole place.” — Michalis Chrysochoidis, a former Greek Minister of Citizen Protection, who was responsible for the 2002 dismantling of the “November 17” domestic terrorist organization, April 8, 2019

In Exarchia, these groups — which conduct criminal activities and terrorize local residents — have, in effect, created a “no-go zone,” where even police are afraid to enter.

An assault on members of the Hellenic Coast Guard during a drug raid in Athens on April 4 highlights a growing problem in Greece. Some opponents of the far-left Syriza-led government attribute the increasing drug traffic in the country to a dangerous alliance between political anarchists and illegal immigrants. The anarchists might be considered the Greek equivalent of the “far left”. According to Reuters:

“Many self-proclaimed anarchists – the word stems from the Greek ‘anarchia’ or absence of authority – say they are pacifist, but certain groups have few qualms about using violence. Six years of recession have fuelled a new wave of left-wing militancy, according to officials, anarchists and court testimony.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/indias-government-considers-a-muslim-ban-11555629051

Will India remain a secular state committed to treating all faiths equally, or will it morph into an explicitly Hindu nation whose Muslim minority is kept in its place? A debate about migrants will help settle this fraught question.

The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party wants to fast-track Indian citizenship for non-Muslim migrants from neighboring countries while pointedly excluding Muslims. This foolish idea may win the BJP votes in the current election, but at the cost of undermining interfaith harmony, seeding long-term domestic instability, and tarnishing India’s reputation for tolerance.

Earlier this year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government failed to pass a proposed law that would make it easier for Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Zoroastrian and Christian migrants from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan to become Indian citizens. But as India’s six-week-long election grinds on, the issue has returned to center stage as part of a broader bid by the BJP to consolidate Hindu votes by raising the pitch of anti-Muslim rhetoric.

At a campaign rally in West Bengal last week, BJP President Amit Shah likened Muslim migrants from Bangladesh to “termites” who “are eating the grain that should go to the poor.” He promised that a BJP government would toss out all “infiltrators,” except for Hindus, Buddhists and Sikhs.

A promise to welcome oppressed religious minorities is hardly objectionable. Hindus and Sikhs who happened to find themselves stranded in Islamic Pakistan after it was carved out of British India in 1947, and to a lesser extent Hindus and Buddhists in Bangladesh, have long faced persecution. In both countries, the proportion of non-Muslims has declined precipitously since partition, to under 4% in Pakistan and about 10% in Bangladesh. If India won’t throw these people a lifeline, who will?

Moreover, nobody can seriously argue that majority Sunni Muslims face persecution for their faith in Pakistan or Bangladesh. Even if they did, India could not realistically be expected to throw open its doors to hundreds of millions of people.

But it’s one thing to welcome persecuted Hindus and Sikhs to their historic homeland, and quite another explicitly to reject persecuted Muslims merely for their faith. In a constitutionally secular, multireligious nation like India, upholding the principle of nondiscrimination matters.

Mr. Shah’s remarks may apply only to illegal migrants, but they end up legitimizing a combustible idea: that only followers of so-called Indic religions can be truly Indian. This echoes the hard-line Hindu nationalist view that the country’s 172 million Muslims and 28 million Christians live in India only on sufferance.

This idea is morally repugnant and wildly impractical. Like many countries, India faces a challenge in integrating its Muslim minority and curbing fundamentalist strains of the faith that sometimes act as a conveyor belt to terrorism. This entails pushing back against radical Islam, the interpretation of the faith that seeks to order all aspects of modern life by medieval Islamic precepts. But it also requires reassuring the moderate majority of Muslims that India will treat them fairly.

It’s no coincidence that the BJP targets its incendiary message toward parts of the country where some Hindus already feel threatened by demographic change. According to the 2011 census, Muslims account for about a third of the population of Assam. The state is in the midst of a messy attempt to identify migrants who settled there after 1971. In West Bengal, where Mr. Shah made his comments, more than a quarter of the population is Muslim.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14090/spain-islamist-hate-speech

“The external enemies want to tell us how to run our country…. Angela Merkel and her fellow travelers, George Soros, the immigration mafias, believe that they can tell us who can and cannot enter our country. They demand that our boats pluck so-called castaways out of the sea, transfer them to our ports and shower them with money. Who do they think we are?” — Ortega Smith, Secretary General of the Vox party, Spain.

“These…. groups stand out not because of prejudice (‘Islamophobia’ or racism) but due to their being the least assimilable of foreigners, an array of problems associated with them, such as not working and criminal activity, and a fear that they will impose their ways on Europe…. Other concerns deal with Muslim attitudes toward non-Muslims, including Christophobia and Judeophobia, jihadi violence, and the insistence that Islam enjoy a privileged status vis-à-vis other religions” — Daniel Pipes, historian, “Europe’s Civilizationist Parties,” Commentary, November 2018.

“We all know about the lack of freedom, if not direct persecution, suffered by women and Christians in Islamic countries, while here they enjoy the generosity characteristic of freedom, democracy and reciprocity, of course, all of which they systematically deny….” — Santiago Abascal, President of the Vox party, “Trojan Horse,” Libertad Digital, December 2014.

“The left defends any gratuitous offense, even the most beastly ones, against Christians as ‘freedom of expression.’ At the same time, the mere fact of criticizing Islam is branded as ‘Islamophobia.’ …. Is this still Spain or are we in Iran?” — Elantir, blogger, Contando Estrelas.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/indonesias-democratic-advance-11555630087

Indonesia faced an election choice Wednesday between incumbent President Joko Widodo and Prabowo Subianto, a former general supported by radical Islamist groups. Preliminary results project a Widodo win, which is good news for the world’s largest Muslim democracy.

Unofficial “quick count” numbers from at least six pollsters show Mr. Widodo leading by nearly 10 percentage points in a popular vote which directly elects the president. The incumbent declared victory but cautioned supporters to wait for official results to be released in coming weeks. Mr. Subianto disputes the polls, but quick counts proved accurate when Mr. Subianto lost to Mr. Widodo in 2014. The former general’s spokesman says he doesn’t want violence over the election result, and voters should hold him to it.

Should the results hold, Indonesians have avoided a dangerous turn. Mr. Subianto, once the son-in-law and potential successor of former dictator Suharto, was expelled in 1998 from his special forces command after allegedly leading bloody crackdowns against democracy activists. On the 2014 campaign trail, he said that direct elections are “not in accordance with our own culture.”

https://amgreatness.com/2019/04/18/nothing-quiet-on-the-migration-front/Editor’s Note: The following is drawn from remarks delivered in late March at the Mathias Covinus Collegium International Conference on Migration in Budapest, Hungary.

Many thanks for the invitation and for giving me the floor together with this prestigious group of speakers. I would like, first, to congratulate the organizers of the conference for choosing such an important topic in the right moment—before the European Parliament elections.

Some of us are no great fans of the European Parliament because this is not a real parliament. The parliament is usually the most significant symbol of a democratic system, as it is in our nation states. This is, however, not the case of the European Parliament. Its undemocratic substance can’t be improved by increasing its competences or by changing its electoral procedures or its voting system. Democracy needs a demos and it is an undisputed fact that there is no demos at the European level. But let’s turn to the topic of our conference which is the mass migration into Europe.

I agree with the title of the conference which indicates that the mass migration is “the Biggest Challenge of Our Time.” I have only one disagreement with it: the question mark in the title is superfluous. I suppose most of us came here because we are convinced that this formulation is not a question, but a statement of an evident fact. Regretfully, not many European leaders are ready to say it aloud, clearly and convincingly. Hungarian Prime Minister Orbán is one of the few, if not the only one.

https://thefederalist.com/2019/04/18/airbnbs-anti-west-bank-policy-shows-laws-bds-matter/

Want to fight The Man? If you’re too young to have fought for civil rights, you’ve got the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement (BDS).

BDSers wrap themselves in the cloak of justice, but their high-minded rhetoric quickly devolves into hate, because at bottom, stigmatizing democratic Israel isn’t hopeful. BDS is a high-stakes game of pressure that affects individual students, performing artists, and corporations, as the movement pursues a long game of destroying Israel. As Airbnb learned when they sided with the BDS bullies last year, it’s not necessarily a wise business decision.
Airbnb’s Politicized Decision about West Bank

Last November, Airbnb made headlines when they announced that, after consulting with various experts, they would de-list approximately 200 properties in Jewish communities within Israel’s Judea and Samaria regions, better known stateside as the West Bank. The company’s rationale was that these locations “are at the core of the dispute between Israelis and Palestinians.”

On its face, this was an odd move for a business. An American for-profit corporation that serves private, paying customers went out of its way to take sides in one of the world’s most sensitive and emotional political disputes. In response, lawsuits were filed on behalf of affected hosts, would-be hosts, and travelers.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/life-in-the-biodome-capitalism-for-all-its-shortcomings-has-found-a-way-to-work-with-human-nature/

The Bloedel Conservatory, a triodetic biodome located in Queen Elizabeth Park at the highest point in Vancouver, Canada, houses more than 120 free-flying birds and 500 exotic plants and flowers in a temperature-controlled environment. It was financed by a lavish gift from timber industrialist Prentice Bloedel in the mid-20th century and built by the ten Van Vliet brothers, founders of the Double V Construction Company. The donor and builders of the impressive biodome were inspired by a sense of civic duty and love for the city; however, the biodome’s continued existence was by no means underwritten. It was nearly demolished when the Vancouver Park Board voted to close it due to “declining attendance and growing repair and maintenance costs,” but was saved by the Friends of Bloedel Association and other groups that lobbied to preserve the heritage landmark, bolstered by a providentially sharp increase in attendance numbers.

When my wife and I visited a few months back, I was astonished by the avian proliferation, innumerable species of colorful birds—Java finches, lavender waxbills, Senegal doves, reedings, parrots, mannikins, Guinea turacos, Napolean weavers—picking seed and twigs on the labyrinth of paths indifferent to the crowds that shuffled past. Mice scurried back and forth as if they owned the place, harmless and safe. Cockatoos orated on their soapboxes. The purling of the saffron finch was indescribably lovely. Receptacles for food and vessels for water were constantly being re-filled by volunteer attendants; others swept the paths and removed the droppings. The air was redolent with the rich scent of exotic perfumes. Nature had been civilized.

The Bloedel Conservatory, a triodetic biodome located in Queen Elizabeth Park at the highest point in Vancouver, Canada, houses more than 120 free-flying birds and 500 exotic plants and flowers in a temperature-controlled environment. It was financed by a lavish gift from timber industrialist Prentice Bloedel in the mid-20th century and built by the ten Van Vliet brothers, founders of the Double V Construction Company. The donor and builders of the impressive biodome were inspired by a sense of civic duty and love for the city; however, the biodome’s continued existence was by no means underwritten. It was nearly demolished when the Vancouver Park Board voted to close it due to “declining attendance and growing repair and maintenance costs,” but was saved by the Friends of Bloedel Association and other groups that lobbied to preserve the heritage landmark, bolstered by a providentially sharp increase in attendance numbers.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14068/china-aggression-south-china-sea

As protesters gathered outside the Chinese Embassy on April 10 in Manila, to express their outrage at China’s naval aggression, U.S. and Filipino troops conducted a joint military exercise in the South China Sea, aimed at preparing the Philippines to “deal with any potential island invasion.”Any such shift on the part of Manila towards Moscow should cause Washington to step up its engagement with the Philippines, to prevent Chinese and Russian attempts at controlling the South China Sea’s rich resources and China possibly seizing it as a maritime chokepoint.

A long-standing territorial dispute between Beijing and Manila over Thitu Island (also known as Pagasa), one of the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea, resurfaced in full force recently, when more than 200 Chinese boats were spotted in the vicinity of the island. Thitu Island is controlled and administered by the Philippines, and Filipino civilians and military personnel inhabit the island. Sovereignty over the island is claimed by the Philippines, China, Taiwan and Vietnam.

Increased Chinese encroachment on the Spratly Islands — and a recent “goodwill visit” of Russian Navy ships to the Philippines — should be cause for alarm in Washington.

In recent years, Beijing-Manila relations improved to the point where Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte and Chinese President Xi Jinping signed 29 cooperation agreements, including a memorandum of understanding on joint oil and gas development in the South China Sea.