RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14053/iran-winning-yemen

“The Yemeni revolution will not be confined to Yemen alone. It will extend, following its success, into Saudi territories.” — Iranian Lawmaker Ali Reza Zakani, trusted adviser to Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

“If the Shia rebels gain control of the Bab al-Mandeb Strait, Iran can attain a foothold in this sensitive region giving access to the Red Sea and the Suez Canal, a cause of concern not only for its sworn rivals Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the Gulf states, but also for Israel and European countries along the Mediterranean.” — IDF Lt.-Col. (Ret.) Michael Segall.

“Hard-line elements [in Iran] appear to see the continuation of the conflict [in Yemen] as a relatively low-cost and low-risk means of sustaining political, economic, and military pressure on the Saudis. Saudi Arabia’s intervention has reportedly cost between $5 billion and $6 billion a month, while Iran’s expenditures in Yemen probably total only millions a year.” — Gerald M. Feierstein, Middle East Institute.

“The Houthis’ intransigence confirms their loyalty to Iran’s negotiating tactics. These usually begin with implicit approval of negotiating solutions, followed by complete retraction in order to force the international community to make more concessions and impose a fait accompli on the Yemeni government….” — Yemeni Foreign Minister Khaled al-Yemany.

A ceasefire deal aimed at ending Yemen’s civil war is collapsing amid disputes between the warring parties over how to implement the agreement. A resumption of hostilities would, according to aid groups, accelerate Yemen’s descent into famine and threaten as many as 15 million people — more than half the population — with starvation.

Yemen’s four-year conflict is generally viewed as a proxy war between Saudi Arabia, which backs the internationally-recognized Yemeni government, and Iran, which backs tribal-based Shiite rebels, known as Houthis.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14050/china-caribbean-sea

About 55 miles east of Palm Beach, Florida on Grand Bahama Island, a Hong Kong-based business is spending about $3 billion on a deep-water container facility, the Freeport Container Port.

The concern is that the port will become another debt-trap, like the port of Hambantota in Sri Lanka. There are concerns that Hambantota will eventually become a Chinese naval base. Will the Pentagon have to contend with Chinese warships at Freeport?

The Chinese military is already in the Caribbean, in Cuba, apparently to collect signals intelligence from the U.S. Washington splashes plenty of cash around the Middle East, for instance, but American policymakers need also to be concerned, urgently, about critical needy locations closer to home.

There’s a “Red Storm Rising” just miles from America’s shores. “In point of fact, the entire hemisphere is on fire,” said Lou Dobbs on his widely watched Fox Business Network show on April 4. “China and Russia are engaging us in almost every quarter in this hemisphere. Russia and China in Venezuela, but China throughout the hemisphere and throughout the Caribbean.”

Throughout the Caribbean, China’s influence is growing fast. Trade and investment have made Beijing a power. Chinese motives are not solely commercial, however, and do not appear benign.

https://www.city-journal.org/children-as-political-puppets

On a pleasant spring evening, at about 7:00, I was walking back to my flat in Paris when I heard the sound of chanting and tambourines being struck in unison. Some of the chanting was unmistakably that of young children, though it was mixed with that of adults.

It came from a political demonstration against a law proposed by the Minister of Education. The proposed law sounded mostly uncontroversial: the age at which children must go to school was to be lowered to three years, but since nearly 97 percent of them do so anyway, this hardly represented a vastly increased burden on the education system. Other proposed changes also sounded less than earth-shattering, though they seemed to be directed toward reducing the influence of teachers’ unions in an extremely centralized system.

Children as young as six and eight held up placards saying that they demanded schools in which there was freedom of thought or that commercialism should be kept out of education. Children are precocious these days, but are they really able, at age six or eight, to argue for freedom of thought or against the entry of market forces into education?

A teacher handed me a flyer that said, “To put an end to this proposed law, parents and school staff are organizing to lead the combat.” No mention was made of the children, who made up half the crowd. I wanted to ask the teacher whether she thought it right to use children in this way: to make them shout slogans and wave banners. They do this kind of thing in North Korea—but in France?

https://www.theepochtimes.com/christchurch-jewish-blame-and-the-global-scourge-of-muslim-jew-hatred_2847735.html

Brenton Tarrant committed a heinous, cowardly act of mass murder when he gunned down 50 defenseless Muslims at two Christchurch, New Zealand, area mosques on March 15, 2019.

As revealed in his own alleged manifesto, Tarrant’s ideological paradigm is a bigoted ethno-nationalist, Marxist-Leninist communist state—i.e., the People’s Republic of China (PRC)—“the nation with the closest political and social values to my [Tarrant’s] own.”

The PRC’s brutal behavior on a grand scale—forcibly interning and “re-educating” an estimated 1.5 million Xinjiang province Uyghur Muslims—comports neatly with Tarrant’s ideologically driven violence.

Tarrant alone bears ultimate responsibility for the carnage he wrought. Moreover, predictably hysterical claims by the Jew-hating Turkish President Erdogan—echoed by supposedly more staid Muslim organizations, “expert” media commentators, and “academics”—that Tarrant somehow represents systemic Western Islamophobia, grotesquely distort the global context of both Muslim versus non-Muslim (especially Christian) and internecine Muslim violence.

https://www.city-journal.org/global-criminal-networks

Imagine that your son or brother has joined a protest against government corruption. During the demonstration, police arrive and force them onto a bus. You rush to the site of the event; you ask about him, but no one tells you anything. You keep searching, your anxiety mounting because you know the depth of the corruption in the city: police and the mayor often collaborate with local drug traffickers. You comfort yourself, remembering that your son or brother was with a large crowd. As the days pass, however, you realize that they weren’t taken into custody by the police; your son or brother has vanished. Two, then three, years pass, and you’re told that it’s too dangerous to keep looking, because “important” people were involved—the mayor, in fact, may have ordered local drug traffickers to kidnap the demonstrators.

What level of corruption is required for the kidnapping and disappearance of 43 students, as happened on September 26, 2014, at the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College, State of Guerrero, Mexico—and getting away with it? It’s a corruption that goes beyond the traditional definitions that scholars advanced in the 1990s when defining administrative and systemic corruption, in which, say, a local political leader or police chief might receive kickbacks and bribes in exchange for going easy on crime. An international commission of experts investigating the Ayotzinapa events found something far more complex: the perpetrators “didn’t hide their identities,” and there had been possible coordination between the Guerreros Unidos crime syndicate, which was presumed to have killed the students, and at least 18 police patrol units from various municipalities, one state patrol unit, and government officials at various levels. Though some authorities received real-time information about the kidnapping, they didn’t act to protect the students. The commission also noted that Ayotzinapa is a hotspot for heroin trafficking to Chicago—but it is just one of 2,446 Mexican municipalities affected by the convergence of massive corruption and transnational criminal forces that traffic in drugs, arms, minerals, and human beings.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14042/qatar-europe-islamism-finance

“We have been reporting Doha’s ideological and religious penetration for years. In the form of investments and financial operations, Qatar extends its proselytizing network every day, with serious damage to European societies…” — Souad Sbai, the Moroccan-born president of Italy’s Averroes Studies Center.

Qatar has been funding mega-mosques across Europe. Qatar’s goal is apparently to Islamicize the European diaspora.

“[Qatar’s] English-language stations produce slick propaganda against Qatar’s enemies, dressed up in Western liberal rhetoric. Al Jazeera’s latest venture – its social media channel, AJ+ – is aimed at young, progressive Americans. Its documentaries on the evils of Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the Trump administration are sandwiched between glowing coverage of transgender rights campaigns and emotional appeals for the plight of asylum seekers on America’s southern border – seemingly incongruous topics for a broadcaster controlled by a Wahhabi regime… Qatar is now the largest foreign donor to American universities.” — Daniel Pipes, president of the Middle East Forum.

In October, Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini visited Qatar, the “energy giant”, where he praised the emirate for “not sponsoring extremism anymore”. Unfortunately, the opposite is true. Qatar, “the other Wahhabi state”, apparently is interested not only in its economic relationship with Europe, but also in exporting its brand of political Islam.

According to a new book, Qatar Papers: How the Emirate Finances Islam in France and Europe, by two French journalists, Christian Chesnot and Georges Malbrunot, Qatar has distributed 22 million euros to Islamic projects in Italy alone. This funding has had virtually a single beneficiary: the Union of Islamic Communities and Organizations in Italy (UCOII), accused of closeness to Qatar’s pet organization, the Muslim Brotherhood, the mouthpiece of which is Qatar’s media outlet, Al Jazeera, located in the capital city of Doha.

https://www.city-journal.org/global-extremist-violence

Last week, the New York Times featured an illustrated timeline of “white extremist” killings over the last nine years, with lines demonstrating citation and affiliation among the killers. According to the Times, the record shows “an informal global network of white extremists whose violent attacks are occurring with greater frequency in the West.”

The idea that white supremacist violence is a growing global threat has gained more currency recently, notably in the wake of the ghastly Christchurch mosque massacre, when an avowed white nationalist murdered 50 Muslims. New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for instance, asserted that “White supremacists committed the largest # of extremist killings in 2017.” No one will deny that racial hatred is an evil ideology, and that people who kill in the name of white supremacy commit evil—but is it true that white extremists are sowing a growing amount of worldwide mayhem?

The evidence suggests otherwise. Even a superficial glance at the record indicates that of the nearly 20,000 people killed in thousands of extremist killings in 2017, white supremacists were responsible for very few. The worst terrorist event of 2017, according to the State Department, was the explosion of a truck bomb outside the Safari Hotel in Mogadishu, Somalia, which killed more than 580 people. This violent act is believed to have been the work of Al-Shabaab, which was responsible for 97 percent of the 370 instances of extremist killings in Somalia in 2017, accounting for about 1,400 deaths—mostly civilian. The remaining violent acts were carried out by Jabha East Africa (ISIS-Somalia), a dissident Al-Shabaab splinter group.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/no-deal-brexit-yes-if-macron-vetoes-an-extension/

This week European leaders will meet in solemn conclave, with and without Prime Minister Theresa May, to determine whether or not to extend the U.K.’s membership of the European Union and, if so, for how long. Brits have until recently paid relatively little attention to this occasion since it was generally agreed that the other EU members wanted the Brits to stay in. All doubts were on the British side, where a heated debate now seems to be moving towards a cross-party Con–Lab agreement to strike a pretend Brexit that would keep Britain inside most of the EU’s economic institutions, regulations, and tariffs for an indefinite period. There’s a lot to play for still — half the Tory party hates May’s deal — but for the moment the ball is in the court of Brussels.

And for the first time, one of the Europeans may say no. Not just any old European either, but the French president, Emmanuel Macron.

The actual choice before the European Council asks should Britain be allowed to remain in the EU for a short time (i.e., until June 30) ,to sign off on May’s withdrawal deal or nearest equivalent; or a long time (another year or even longer), to enable a different deal to be negotiated; or no time at all, being shown the door on Friday. All Europeans except Macron favor some version of the first two options. If you’re interested in such matters, Wolfgang Munchau in today’s FT has an informative analysis that suggests that if Corbyn and May can agree on the general principles of leaving the EU, then the good ship BRINO (Brexit in Name Only) can sail between the Scylla of No Deal and the Charybdis of Another Referendum to reach an agreed departure date in December. Macron, however, is reportedly tired of these endless discussions and skeptical that the Brits will ever agree on a bipartisan deal that has public support and a chance of survival. He is thinking of exercising the French veto to prevent any extension at all, and so in effect bringing about a no-deal Brexit from outside.

http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/

Robert Sarah is a Guinean prelate of the Catholic Church. A Cardinal since 20 November 2010, he was appointed prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments by Pope Francis on 23 November 2014.

“I would like to explain why I, a son of Africa, allow myself to address the West. The Church is the guardian of civilization. I am convinced that western civilization is passing at present through a mortal crisis. It has reached the extreme of self-destructive hate….

How could I not emphasize the threat posed by Islamism? Muslims despise the atheistic West…. A West that denies its faith, its history, its roots, and its identity is destined for contempt, for death, and disappearance.”

Indeed,

‘”It is a false exegesis to use the Word of God to promote migration. God never wanted these rifts,” Cardinal Sarah told French publication Valeurs Actuelles before going on to blast bishops who “say fuzzy things, vague, imprecise, to escape criticism, and they marry the stupid evolution of the world.”

Sarah, head of the Vatican liturgy office, minced no words in his denunciation of the prevailing viewpoint among liberal Catholics, which states that the faithful betray Christ by wanting stricter immigration policies.