RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2019/05/sas-marshall-plan-for-gen

“The gender fluidity cult’s foundation is sheer irrationality after all; gender is to be seen, they contend, as a “social construct” and this notwithstanding that they know what we all know: that every cell in every one of our bodies betokens that we are indisputably forever male or forever female from the moment of our conception (save perhaps for the rare, rare, phenomenon of hermaphroditism).  If such people can think themselves out of the basic structure of biological reality perhaps they were able to think their way out of the common sense of propriety involved in staging such an event in the presence of and focussed upon the minds of infant children.”

Steven Marshall is both Premier and Arts Minister of South Australia, so if anyone bears responsibility for the latest manifestation of the Safe Schools attack upon childhood innocence in this Liberal-governed state it is, I am sorry to say, him. We are in the middle of a bi-annual event here in Adelaide called the DreamBIG Children’s Festival, backed the Liberal government. It is jointly funded by the Arts ministry and the Education ministry and used to be called the “Come-Out” festival but that spoke too indiscreetly, I suppose, about the activist purposes of the bureaucrats who organised it.

This year, and specifically marketed to children under the age of eight, the programme included something called Drag Queen Story Time.

Yes, I am telling you the truth. It was staged in the august State Library in the heart of Adelaide. I went along, with intentions I will describe in a moment, and witnessed two of the performances. They involved two middle-aged men dressed as frumpy fairy tale Queens (one with devil’s horns) reading stories — haltingly and without charm or any kind of narrative tension — to pre-school and very young school-age children in the presence of their parents.

At the end of each session an opportunity was provided for the kiddies to meet and pose for photographs with the drag queens. Again, I am sorry to say I am telling you the truth. The photographs I took — one of which is at left — tell you I am. (Apologies, too, for my substandard lensmanship. Below, if you scroll all the way down, you’ll see another example of drag queen story time time, this one from the US. ‘The hips on the queen go swish, swish, swish‘. Why is it we adopt bad ideas and trends so readily from across the Pacific?)

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14252/erdogan-istanbul-election

Turkey’s Supreme Electoral Board, consisting of judges apparently under government pressure, cancelled the result of the Istanbul mayoral election on the pretext that some officials serving at the polling stations were not civil servants, as required by the law. “The Board’s decision brings Turkish democracy one big step closer to death,” wrote Kemal Kirişçi, senior fellow at TÜSİAD, Turkey’s biggest business association.
“It appears that losing Istanbul entails too many risks for the AKP for the matter to be left to its own resources. Many are convinced that if the AKP were to lose Istanbul to the opposition, after having held it – with its precursor – for 25 years, a hornet’s nest of vested interests, corruption, and abuse of power would be revealed.” — Semih Idiz, a columnist for Sigma Turkey, an Ankara-based think tank.
Even if Erdoğan wins Istanbul in the re-run, he will have lost the last few remaining crumbs of his international credibility.

During most of his nearly 17-year-long term as Turkey’s leader, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s self-aggrandizing, assertive foreign policy and his Islamist and nationalist one-man-rule have earned him popularity and votes in a country where average schooling is a mere 6.5 years. Erdoğan believed — and made the average Turk believe — that Turkey is a major world power. He claimed that his rule made miracles in the economy. Therefore, since his Justice and Development Party (AKP) came to power in 2002, he has not lost a single election. Everything was coming up roses all the time. Not anymore.

“Who wins Istanbul wins Turkey,” has been Erdoğan’s dictum since 1994, when he won mayoral elections in Turkey’s biggest city (home to nearly 15% of Turkey’s 57 million voters and accounting for 31% of its GDP). Twenty-five years later, his candidate for mayor of Istanbul, former prime minister Binali Yıldırım, lost in the local election — the first defeat in Istanbul for Islamists since 1994. Game not yet over, Erdoğan ruled.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/05/pitfalls_along_the_road_to_socialism.html

All over Europe, elections are teaching Brussels that Greeks like being Greek, Brits, Brit, and French, French. Nobody much cottons to being “European,” where some Belgian bureaucrat says what you will and won’t do in your small town where another language is spoken and people don’t like paying huge salaries to self-important nobodies in gray flannel suits.

The population of Europe is discovering it really doesn’t like the creeping socialism of the European Union, though many probably don’t even realize that that’s what they’re mad about. It isn’t even full-blown socialism yet, but everybody knows that’s the destination, and the shine has worn off. Happens every time on the long and winding road to socialism.

Some insightful sage noted that you can vote your way into socialism but you have to shoot your way out. That’s what waits at the end of the road Europe is on. Strife. Once it breaks into the open, citizens will suddenly understand why they haven’t been allowed to own private firearms. It’s a lesson Venezuelans have learned the hard way and that many Americans still don’t get.

But Europe will probably have to get hungry first. Literally hungry, and not “literally” in the Joe Biden sense. Perhaps before that, Europe will get literally cold as Moscow starts playing with the natural gas spigot, just to show who’s really boss. Certainly, before that Europe will run low on gasoline and will have to wait in line for a few expensive liters to get home from the job that just laid them off.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14281/genocide-of-christians

Many of the world’s most persecuted Christians have nothing whatsoever to do with colonialism or missionaries. Those most faced with the threat of genocide — including Syria’s and Iraq’s Assyrians or Egypt’s Copts — were Christian several centuries before the ancestors of Europe’s colonizers became Christian and went missionizing

The BBC report highlights “political correctness” as being especially responsible for the West’s indifference….

Among the worst persecutors are those that rule according to Islamic law, or Sharia — which academics such as Georgetown University’s John Esposito insist is equitable and just. In Afghanistan (ranked #2), “Christianity is not permitted to exist.”

“Christian persecution ‘at near genocide levels,'” the title of a May 3 BBC report, cites a lengthy interim study ordered by British Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt and led by Rev. Philip Mounstephen, the Bishop of Truro.

According to the BBC report, one in three people around the world suffer from religious persecution, with Christians being “the most persecuted religious group”. “Religion ‘is at risk of disappearing’ in some parts of the world,” it noted, and “In some regions, the level and nature of persecution is arguably coming close to meeting the international definition of genocide, according to that adopted by the UN.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14269/iran-options-defiance

To start with, we must realize that the crisis in question isn’t caused by any of the traditional causes of conflict between nation-states…. In other words, the conflict isn’t a classical international one. The reason is that Iran no longer behaves as a nation-state but as a vehicle for an ideology.

The madness that is Khomeinism has always had its method, which includes abject surrender when pressed too hard and brazen aggression when pressure is eased.

Contrary to claims by the pro-mullah lobby in Washington, the choice isn’t between surrender to Khomeminist madness and full-scale invasion of Iran. Only when the threshold of tolerable pain is reached the “Supreme Guide” may well reconsider his options. We are not there yet.

According to an old adage, every crisis also contains an opportunity. And the current crisis between the Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States may be no exception. Intense sabre-rattling on both sides, combined with what one might call “diplomacy of gesticulations,” have reignited interest in what was a half-dormant conflict. That renewed interest could be used for persuading both sides, and others interested in the “Iran problem”, to re-visit the root causes of the conflict. And, having done so, try to find realistic ways of defusing the situation.

But before that could be done, a number of steps must be taken.

To start with, we must realize that the crisis in question isn’t caused by any of the traditional causes of conflict between nation-states. Iran and the US do not have a border problem, they are not fighting over access to natural resources and do not seek to snatch market share from one another. Nor are they in conflict over the oppression of one side’s kith-and-kin by the other. The two are not fighting over water resources, access to open seas or calculations about national security.

From the New York Times: https://intransit.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/08/20/a-wonderful-museum-of-terror-in-budapest/

It is a museum dedicated to remembering the terrible things done first by the Nazis and then later by the Soviet-backed Communist Party in this now vibrant democratic country. Housed in a former headquarters of the Communist Secret Police, in the very center of Budapest, it is a fitting site for such memorial.

The House of Terror is a brilliant amalgam of history museum, performance art and touching architectural memorial to all the people — Jews, liberals, intellectuals — who died or suffered under Hungary’s sequential reigns of terror. Their small framed portraits are discreetly displayed on the outside of the building, their names etched in its interior walls.

In a city now known for cafes, rock festivals and indulgent baths one might regard the House of Terror as an unnecessary downer — a reminder of the ugly things that happened in this now hedonistic capital. Why, my teenagers asked me last week, were we wallowing in this uncomfortable history when we could be taking in some of the world’s hippist bands at the Sziget Music Festival or luxuriating in the Gellert baths?

But to me the House of Terror more meditative than depressing: asking us to remember the lessons of history and to contemplate how is it that humans can sometimes be so blind and cruel.

Starting on the top floor you walk room-by-room through Hungary’s recent history, starting with the Nazi invasion of Hungary in the 1940s. The museum makes good use of old newsreels as well as oral histories of people who survived these two eras; the sound in Hungarian, but with English subtitles. (The entire museum has excellent explanations in both Hungarian and English.)

https://voiceofeurope.com/2019/04/ex-muslim-swedes-will-lose-sweden-in-50-years/

Mona Walter is a Somali woman who came to Sweden in the 90’s. In Somalia, she had never been religious, but in Sweden she was more or less forced to go to the mosque and wear a hijab.

After a couple of years she rebelled, left Islam and became an atheist. Eventually she came to believe in Jesus and converted to Christianity.

“For many years I have tried to get the Swedes to understand what the Muslim goal is – to take over your country. The first thing they will do is demand sharia courts, just like in the UK”, she says.
But the mainstream media does not want to listen to Mona Walter. They call her controversial and most Swedes turn away from her message, which they perceive as too frightening, according to the news blog Ingrid and Maria.
“Swedes are so convinced that Swedish laws will always apply in their country. But ask any Englishman if he 30 years ago would have believed that Britain would have legal sharia courts in 2019. No one would have thought it possible.”

“If Sweden recognises Sharia courts the Muslims will have new demands, like permission to rule their own enclaves without interference from the Swedish society. The end goal is for Sharia to rule all of Sweden.”
“If there, perchance, are any blond and blue-eyed Swedes left at that point it doesn’t matter – they will all be behind niqabs and burkas by that time”, Mona states.

“What Muslim politicians want is to change the laws so that Muslims in Sweden get permission to live under Sharia law. They want to rule their own areas without having to obey the secular laws of Sweden.”
“That is the long-term goal and Islam has lots of patience. As they say: “You have the watches, but we have the time””, she continues.

A few days after the Finnish elections, Hussein Al-Taee, the son of the governor of Najaf in Iraq and a pro-Iranian regime advocate, was exposed for having spent eight years posting anti-Semitic, anti-American and homophobic comments on Facebook… For four of these years, Al-Taee served as an adviser on Middle Eastern affairs to the Crisis Management Initiative (CMI), a state-run conflict-resolution firm… currently headed by former Finnish Prime Minister Alexander Stubb.

Although Stubb publicly condemned Al-Taee’s hate-filled social media comments… he has not been asked why a pro-Iranian regime advocate was working for CMI in the first place.

In other words, Al-Taee was expressing “embarrassment” about his “prejudices, thoughts and language” — and lying about them — but did not disavow the sentiments.

Failure on the part of the “center-left” Social Democrats to oust Al-Taee would constitute hypocrisy of the highest order, or else a tacit agreement with hateful positions that the MP has not denied espousing.

A political crisis that has been brewing in Finland over the past few weeks sheds light on the ills of the so-called “center left.”

The crisis surrounds Hussein Al-Taee, a new member of parliament from the Social Democratic Party (SDP), which won a narrow victory in the April 14 elections.

A few days after the Finnish elections, Al-Taee, the son of the governor of Najaf in Iraq and a pro-Iranian regime advocate, was exposed for having spent eight years posting anti-Semitic, anti-American and homophobic comments on Facebook. For four of these years, Al-Taee served as an adviser on Middle Eastern affairs to the Crisis Management Initiative (CMI), a state-run conflict-resolution firm founded by the former Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari, and currently headed by former Finnish Prime Minister Alexander Stubb.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/french-authorities-investigate-explosion-lyon-potential-terror-attack/

French authorities are treating an explosion in the city of Lyon on Friday evening as a possible terror attack.

The explosion of what investigators believe was a parcel bomb filled with screws, nuts, and bolts injured seven people, including an eight-year-old girl, around 5:30 p.m. local time in a busy shopping area on Rue Victor Hugo. No one died in the blast. Authorities are searching for a male cyclist between 30 and 35 who was seen putting the parcel on the street outside a bakery, his face reportedly concealed by a mask and dark glasses.

French interior minister Christophe Castaner said security will be upped in public areas. President Emmanuel Macron called the disaster an “attack” and said, “As far as I can say there are no victims — there are wounded.”

“Tonight I think of the wounded in the explosion in Lyon, their families affected by the violence that has befallen their loved ones in the street, and all of Lyon. We are by your side,” Macron wrote on Twitter.

Over 250 people have died in France as a result of terrorist attacks in the last four years.