RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://melaniephillips.substack.com/

The fall of Bashar Assad in Syria has prompted understandable elation at the departure of a tyrant responsible for the killing of some 600,000 of his citizens.

The revelations of his gruesome prison and torture chambers, and the evidence emerging of the hideous way that so many were treated, can only arouse horror, revulsion and pity.

The Assad regime was also a menace to Israel. The Syrian route was essential for transporting Iranian weapons to Hezbollah in Lebanon, while Tehran set up weapons production centres on Syrian soil.

Assad’s flight, however, does not mean that Syria has now emerged from darkness into light. Assad was deposed by Islamists. All are engaged in a jihadi holy war against Jews and the “infidel” west.

The main such grouping, Hayat Tahrir al Sham (HTS), developed from Al Qaeda and is designated by the United States as a foreign terrorist organisation. It is led by Ahmed al Shara, who also goes by the nom de guerre Abu Mohammed al Julani.

He has been posing as a moderate — trimming his beard, wearing westernised fatigues and declaring tolerance for all of Syria’s different faiths. He has also said: “Syria will not wage a new war with Israel.”

This should fool no one. Jihadi warriors who believe that they must purge the world of unbelievers don’t suddenly abandon this supposedly sacred task.

Al Shara is a fanatical Islamist. He served five years in various US detention facilities in Iraq, and Washington still has a $10 million bounty on his head.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/12/10/hts-is-no-liberation-movement/

The overthrow of Bashar Al-Assad’s despotic regime in Syria this weekend has been cheered on by the UK government as well as much of the mainstream media.

Speaking on Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg on BBC One, deputy PM Angela Rayner said that she ‘welcomed’ the news of Assad’s fall. Yesterday, foreign secretary David Lammy celebrated the Syrian president’s toppling, telling MPs that Assad is a ‘monster’, a ‘drug dealer’ and a ‘rat’.

In a sense, the government’s response is understandable. No one should mourn the end of the Assad dynasty’s brutal decades-long rule. Furthermore, Assad’s fall deals another significant blow to his despotic backers, the Islamic Republic of Iran and Russia, depriving both of a key strategic ally. Lammy’s geopolitical analysis leaves a lot to be desired at times, but he is right to say that Assad’s defeat is a humiliation for both Moscow and Tehran.

Yet too often, this understandable happiness over the fall of the Syrian dictator has morphed into an endorsement of the Islamist forces that toppled him. Sir John Sawers, the former head of MI6, even went so far as to describe Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the group that led the offensive against Assad, as ‘a liberation movement’.

It’s enough to make you wonder if parts of the British state have mislaid their critical faculties. The HTS-led forces now vying to replace Assad should be viewed much more cautiously.

After all, HTS, which had previously been confined to the Idlib province in Syria’s north-west, is a Sunni Islamist paramilitary group. Its leader, Abu Muhammad al-Jolani, was once aligned with the Islamic State (ISIS), and headed up HTS’s predecessor movement, al-Nusra Front, the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda. In 2017, the US State Department put up a $10million reward for information that could lead to his capture. This came after its decision in 2013 to classify him as a ‘specially designated global terrorist’. Likewise, the British state lists HTS as a proscribed terrorist organisation, although the government has now mooted removing it from the list.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/in-the-uk-fantasy-cant-quite-replace-reality/

Britain, once the seat of a global empire and a proud civilization, is undergoing a world-historical societal transformation before our very eyes, and yet few have taken notice. In fact, even as this formerly great nation and erstwhile leader of the Western world suffers through its death agonies and last days as a free society, some are even celebrating its imminent demise. And still others are going even farther: amid the death throes of British civilization, they’re still up to their old game of posturing and playing the victim, as if they, not Britain, were in mortal peril. They even claim to have been victimized at the hands of dying Britain itself, as the nation of Shakespeare, Henry V and Churchill still had the will or the strength to get the better of anyone.

The Spectator on Saturday reviewed a new play called “Expendable,” which is playing until Dec. 21 at London’s renowned West End theatre The Royal Court. The play, according to The Spectator, is “an urgent bulletin from the front line of the grooming gang scandal in the north of England.” The Royal Court website is no less effusive, saying: “Playwright Emteaz Hussain‘s Expendable spotlights the often-overlooked voices of Pakistani women, delving into the shortcomings of law enforcement, politicians, and the media.”

Spotlighting the criminally overlooked voices of Pakistani women sounds like a capital idea. They could tell us about how the Qur’an directs men to beat women from whom they “fear disobedience” (4:34). They could tell us about how it devalues a woman’s testimony (2:282) and inheritance rights (4:11), and allows for the marriage, and even the divorce, of prepubescent girls (65:4). They could tell us about honor killings, the jailing of rape victims, and more.

All that, however, is not what “Expendable” is about. “The setting,” The Spectator tells is, “is a kitchen in Yorkshire where Zara is trying to keep her family together after her son, Raheel, was outed as a rape suspect by a national newspaper.” It’s not just the shame of the charge, it’s the attendant harassment: “White thugs dump parcels of excrement on their porch and Zara cowers under the kitchen table, too scared to answer the door. The racists have mounted a mass demonstration, supported by the cops, which causes local bus services to be cancelled.”

https://www.jns.org/the-day-after-chorus-was-always-singing-out-of-tune/

The fall of the 54-year Assad regime in Syria (the last 24 of which have been ruled by Hafez’s son, Bashar) isn’t the only major event in the Middle East that took the world by surprise. On the contrary, jaw-dropping developments have been rife in the region for the past 14 and a half months.

Despite all the signs during the period leading up to the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, for instance—including specific warnings passed on to the general staff of the military—the massacre was missed by the very forces charged with preventing such occurrences.

That the rapes, beheadings, immolations and abductions perpetrated that day were the worst atrocities committed against Jews since the Holocaust made the launching of “Swords of Iron” imperative. And let’s be real: The extent of the horrors provided the so-called “legitimacy” for Israel to launch the war that’s still going on today.

Not that Jerusalem ever should have needed justification to wipe out Hamas. Yet until Oct. 7, operations undertaken by Israel Defense Forces in the terrorist enclave were all short and incomplete, to put it mildly. Worse, with each ceasefire, Hamas and auxiliary monsters grew richer and more emboldened.

This was due to a combination of international backing and Israel’s conseptzia that Hamas was deterred—that fear of the IDF, work permits for Gazans and a policy of containment regarding weekly riots at the border were doing the job of keeping the peace. Or at least maintaining an illusion of quiet.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21194/israel-icc-arrest-warrants

A whistle-blower told [ICC Chief Prosecutor Karim] Khan that he knew about the sexual misconduct and Khan responded in apparent shock that he, Khan, was “finished and will need to resign.” Instead of resigning, however, he reportedly threatened both the whistleblower and the victim to not press the matter further. And then he decided to announce the application for arrest warrants….

Why, by the way, did both Khan and ICC President Piotr Hofmanski meet with Qatar’s ambassador to the Netherlands last year? Surely Qatar had nothing to do with influencing the decision to issue the arrest warrants?

The ICC arrest warrants are the final proof that the entire international system is beyond broken. Between South Africa’s baseless case against Israel at the International Court of Justice and the arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant by the ICC, justice, accountability and the upholding of international law lie in shambles, as the obsession with the world’s only Jewish state continues for the benefit of the world’s actual war criminals.

What is remarkable is that no arrest warrants to date have been issued for any of the following actual war criminals….

“The ICC is a kangaroo court and Karim Khan is a deranged fanatic. Woe to him and anyone who tries to enforce these outlaw warrants. Let me give them all a friendly reminder: the American law on the ICC is known as The Hague Invasion Act for a reason. Think about it.” — US Senator Tom Cotton, X, November 21, 2024.

On November 21, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and, apparently to pretend to look “balanced,” three Arab terrorists, one of whom was dead.

ICC Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan, originally a British barrister, appealed to all ICC member states to do the court’s bidding and arrest Netanyahu and Gallant, and said in a statement:

“[T]he judges of the International Criminal Court have found that there are reasonable grounds to believe that each [Netanyahu and Gallant] has committed the war crime of using starvation as a method of warfare and crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts, as a direct perpetrator, acting jointly with others. The Chamber also found reasonable grounds to believe that they are each responsible for the war crime of intentionally directing attacks against civilians as a superior.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21193/arabs-muslims-hamas

As far as Hamas leaders are concerned, the involvement of Iran’s other proxies in the Jihad against Israel has been insufficient. Hamas leaders were hoping to see Arab and Muslim armies march on Israel and fulfill their dream of replacing it with a jihadist terror state.

They are also aware that Iran wants to use them to expand its control over the Middle East. Iran already occupies three Arab countries – Iraq, Lebanon and Yemen, and until last week, Syria as well – and has brought nothing but death and destruction to the people there.

The “betrayal” of Hamas by Arabs and Muslims is a sign that these people are committed to stopping the Iranian regime from using them as puppets in its plan to destroy the “Zionist entity” and take over the Middle East.

For Hamas leaders, the involvement of Iran’s other proxies in the Jihad against Israel has been insufficient. Hamas leaders were hoping to see Arab and Muslim armies march on Israel and fulfill their dream of replacing it with a jihadist terror state. They were also hoping that the Arab and Muslim masses would revolt against their governments and replace them with regimes that support the annihilation of Israel and serve as puppets in the hands of Tehran’s mullahs. Pictured: Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of Iran, meets with Ismail Haniyeh, then leader of Hamas, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad leader Ziyad al-Nakhalah, on July 30, 2024 in Tehran. (Photo by the Supreme Leader’s Press Office via Getty Images)

Fourteen months after the Iran-backed terrorist group, Hamas, attacked Israel, murdering 1,200 Israelis and wounding thousands more, Hamas has finally acknowledged that it has been abandoned by many Arabs and Muslims.

When Hamas launched the October 7, 2023 assault on Israeli communities near the border with the Gaza Strip, its leaders were hoping that many Arabs and Muslims would join the fight to murder as many Jews as possible to eliminate Israel. Hamas officials expressed hope at the time that the October 7 atrocities would prompt the formation of a large Arab-Islamic battlefront against Israel. The hope was that the Iran-backed Hezbollah organization in Lebanon would launch a similar invasion of Israel, that Iran would unleash thousands of ballistic missiles against Israel, and that tens of thousands of Muslims would invade Israel from Jordan.