RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-last-days-of-taliban-head-mullah-omar-11552226401?cx_testId=16&cx_testVariant=cx&cx_artPos=0&cx_tag=contextual&cx_navSource=newsReel#cxrecs_s

Mullah Mohammad Omar, the founder of the Taliban, lived in hiding near a U.S. base in southern Afghanistan until his death, according to a new research-group report that contradicts long-held theories by U.S. officials about the notorious one-eyed leader.

The consensus among experts, including at the Central Intelligence Agency, was that Mullah Omar fled to Pakistan after the U.S. ousted the Taliban following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks orchestrated by al Qaeda, which operated in Afghanistan under the Taliban’s protection.

The new report provides a detailed picture of Mullah Omar’s final years spent mostly in seclusion in Afghanistan, not Pakistan. The report contends he lived with his bodyguard, Jabbar Omari, receiving infrequent visits from a messenger who traveled every few months between his location and the Taliban’s decision-making body in Quetta, Pakistan.

The report was published by the Zomia Center, a research group in New York affiliated with New America, a Washington-based nonpartisan think tank. The research relies on interviews with some previously inaccessible sources, including current and former members of the Afghan government, the Afghan intelligence agency, the Taliban and Mullah Omar’s bodyguard, Mr. Omari, who protected him until his death and now lives under house arrest in Kabul.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/03/50_per_barrel_continues_us_oil_boom_bankrupts_saudi_arabia.html

The U.S. oil boom at a $50 a barrel price continues to profitably accelerate, while Saudi Arabia oil production with an $80-85 a barrel break-even cost continues to shrivel.

Reuters reported a 2018 average wellhead break-even price of $40.95 for America’s 5 top shale oil production regions of Eagle Ford, Bakken, Permian Midland, Permian Delaware, and Niobara. Even adding a 10 percent corporate overhead cost, the breakeven price is about $45 a barrel is still profitable on $50 a barrel oil.

With the price of West Texas Intermediate averaging $64.90 per barrel in 2018 and $56.07 currently, the U.S. Energy Information Agency reported American production hit an all time high of 12.1 million barrels per day (b/d) last week. EIA forecasts U.S. production average will grow to 12.4 million b/d in 2019 and 13.2 million b/d in 2020.

But according to the International Monetary Fund Director of Middle East and Central Asia department Jihad Azour, the 2019 per barrel breakeven price Saudi Arabia needs to balance its budget is “around $80-$85 dollars.” Azour forecasts that with Riyadh planning to increase entitlement spending by $20 billion this year, its breakeven cost will move higher.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13861/mullahs-pushed-off-the-gravy-train

If you are one of the 3,400 mullahs who work as Friday Prayer Leader (Imam Jum’ah) in the Islamic Republic of Iran, you better start getting worried, very worried. The reason is that you may soon find yourself disembarked from the gravy train and your cushy seat given to a spring chicken novice.

Last week eight “imams” were disembarked, among them heavyweights from Tabriz, Shiraz, Rasht and Ahvaz. And, if Tehran rumor-mills are right, 25 more are already scheduled for disembarkation. Judging by the “Supreme Guide” Ali Khamenei’s latest message to the nation, an ambitious “change of generations” scheme is to be implemented in the months ahead.

People, especially the younger generation, are not interested in the shopworn anti-American discourse seasoned with empty pseudo-Islamic slogans. The anti-American discourse sounds even more hollow when the Islamic Majlis publishes claims that some 15,000 children of senior Islamic Republic officials, including many mullahs, are in the United States for further studies and that hundreds of top Khomeinist officials are either US citizens or hold American “Green Cards” (permanent residence documents.) Reports of top officials and mullahs or their families traveling to the West for holidays, medical services and shopping further contribute to the falseness of official Friday sermons.

In the past few weeks, sermon texts coming from Tehran have been peppered with patriotic themes about the Iranian “nation” rather than the “ummah” and Tehran’s attempts at dominating several Arab countries justified, in the words of Quds (Jerusalem) Force chief Gen. Qassem Soleimani, as “moves necessary to protect our national territory.”

In the final analysis, however, a change of personnel and official discourse may not be enough to save a tired system in deep crisis. The core question in the debate about Iran’s future remains: change within the regime or regime change?

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13851/christians-persecution-january

Police “behaved with the priests as they would with killers.” — Human rights lawyer, Minya, Egypt.

“The common factor among all [church] closures, however, is that they were done to appease fundamentalists and extremists to the detriment of the Copts. It appears to indicate that extremists now hold the upper hand, and appeasing them is the easy way out of problems…” — The local Christian bishopric, Minya, Egypt.

When it comes to offering asylum, the UK “appears to discriminate in favour of Muslims” instead of Christian minorities from Muslim nations. Statistics confirm this allegation: “out of 4,850 Syrian refugees accepted for resettlement by the Home Office in 2017, only eleven were Christian, representing just 0.2% of all Syrian refugees accepted by the UK.” — Nicholas Hellen, Barnabas Fund, January 20, 2019, United Kingdom.

A New Zealand government spokesman said that refugees were considered for resettlement on the basis of “their protection needs and not religious affiliation.” However, considering that the Islamic State regularly targets people based on their “religious affiliation” suggests that Christians, Yazidis, and other minorities have more “protection needs” than Muslims.

Massacres Inside Churches and Attacks on Them

Philippines: On Sunday, January 27, Islamic militants bombed a Roman Catholic cathedral during Mass. At least 20 people were killed and 111 wounded. Two explosives were detonated about a minute apart in the vicinity of the Cathedral of Our Lady of Mount Carmel in Jolo at around 8:45 a.m. According to one report, “The initial explosion scattered the wooden pews inside the main hall and blasted window glass panels, and the second bomb hurled human remains and debris across a town square fronting the cathedral.”

Photos on social media showed human bodies and remains strewn on the street just outside the building. The officiating priest, Fr. Ricky Bacolcol, “was still in shock and could not speak about what happened,” to quote a colleague. After the first bomb detonated, army troops and police posted outside the cathedral rushed in, then a second bomb went off. Fifteen of the slain were civilians; five military men; 90 of the wounded were civilians. The cathedral, located in a Muslim-majority area, was heavily guarded: it had been hit before. In 2010, grenades had been hurled at it twice, damaging the building; and in 1997, Bishop Benjamin de Jesus had been gunned down just outside the cathedral. The Islamic State claimed the attack, and adding that the massacre had been carried out by “two knights of martyrdom” against a “crusader temple.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13846/sweden-more-migration

Sweden’s reintroduction of the right to family reunion for people granted asylum in Sweden without refugee status, entitles so-called “unaccompanied children” to bring their parents to Sweden. Many of these “unaccompanied children” turned out to be adults, not minors. (The dentist who contributed to exposing this inconsequential detail was subsequently fired).

Mehdi Shokr Khoda, a gay 19-year old Iranian, who converted to Christianity in Sweden after he fled from Iran in 2017, probably wishes that Swedish authorities would apply their “humanitarian approach” to his particular case. The Swedish migration authorities rejected his asylum application, claiming that Khoda is “lying” about his situation. Since the Islamic Revolution in 1979, Iran has executed “between 4,000 and 6,000 gays and lesbians”, according to a 2008 British WikiLeaks dispatch.

As for Sweden’s humanitarian impulses — or lack thereof — regarding persecuted Christians, there are an estimated 8,000 Christians under deportation orders hiding in Sweden, according to attorney Gabriel Donner, who has assisted an estimated 1,000 Christian asylum-seekers facing deportation.

Sweden’s new government, which was finally formed in January after months of delay, is introducing policies that will lead to more immigration into Sweden — despite the main governing party, the Social Democrats, having run for office on a promise to tighten immigration policies.

The right to family reunion for those people granted asylum in Sweden who do not have refugee status is being reintroduced — a measure that is estimated to bring at least 8,400 more immigrants to Sweden in the coming three years. According to the Minister of Migration, Morgan Johansson, this measure will “strengthen integration,” although he has not explained how.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13841/iran-executions-amputations-floggings

Europe ravenously throw sanctions on a country that has been home to Jews for more than three thousand years, yet tries to find ways to keep on doing business with a country such as Iran that is not only trying to establish its hegemony throughout the Middle East, but is also the serial violator of just about every human right imaginable. The only conclusion one can come to is that Europe would evidently still like to kill the Jews and is happy to support those wishing to kill them.

“In February [2018], Canadian Iranian academic and environmental activist Kavous Seyyed Emami died in Evin prison following his arbitrary arrest two weeks earlier. Authorities claimed he committed suicide and refused to release his body unless his family agreed to an immediate burial without an independent autopsy.” — Amnesty International.

The list of unspeakable human rights violations committed by Iran’s regime is lengthy; however, by far the most disturbing seems the cruelty enacted against children.

Now is the time for the EU to halt its appeasement policy with a regime that does not hesitate to flog people — publicly, as a message to others — torture any citizen they choose to target, enact cruel punishments such as amputation without a fair trial, and execute children just starting their lives. These are acts that should be condemned — not condoned through the pursuit of appeasement policies, moral depravity and raw greed.

According to a report published by Amnesty International on February 26, the human rights situation in Iran has “severely deteriorated”. Why then does the European Union continue to pursue appeasement policies with a regime that has an excruciating human rights record? Sadly, Europe — in spite its endless moral preening and self-righteousness — seems to have become the world most immoral player — if it was not already. The European Union, for instance, unjustly singles out for bullying the only liberal, democratic, human-rights-abiding country in the Middle East: Israel. Not Turkey for occupying Northern Cyprus, China for obliterating Tibet, or Pakistan for occupying Kashmir. Europe and the corrupt United Nations do not lay a glove on the real perpetrators of crimes against humanity such as China, Cuba, Russia, Turkey, North Korea, Nigeria or Sudan, to name just a few.

https://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/socialism-dies-in-the-darkness/

“A major power outage hit crisis-stricken Venezuela on Thursday, according to Reuters … a problem the government of President Nicolas Maduro quickly blamed on ‘sabotage’ at a hydroelectric dam that provides much of the country’s power.” National life ground to a standstill, telecommunications — including the Internet — stopped working, hospitals were plunged into darkness and cities of millions lay helpless without electricity.

As the outage continued into Friday spreading to every Venezuelan state, it became clear this was going to become the biggest of all blackouts yet and Maduro’s officials increasingly pointed a finger at the United States. But the national electric grid had also been teetering for a long time. “Crumbling infrastructure and lack of investments have hit Venezuela’s power supply for years.” Outages had become a way of life and there was no easy way of proving this wasn’t ‘sabotage’ but only more of the same dysfunction.

The government has blamed the outages on a variety of things — including pesky animals. In an Oct. 20 tweet, Energy Minister Luis Motta Dominguez named “rats, mice, snakes, cats, squirrels” as possible culprits in shorting out lines. He added: “In the list of animals mentioned above, of course iguanas are included.”

Critics, however, say insufficient investment by the government is the cause, following the 2007 nationalization of the electricity sector.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273085/bravest-man-africa-stephen-brown

There are few people who announce their candidacy for their country’s presidency only days after being released from prison. But anti-slavery activist and slave descendant Biram Dah Abeid is an exceptional man facing exceptional circumstances.

“I am from the servile community that makes up 50 per cent of the population (of Mauritania),” said Dah Obeid, a lawyer. “Twenty percent of the fifty percent have been born as property of other men. We were inherited by other people.”

Abeid, a prominent and fearless anti-slavery activist who has been jailed and tortured numerous times in his struggle to abolish slavery in the Islamic Republic of Mauritania, was released from prison last December 31, having been incarcerated on “an order from above.” Only days later, he again announced his candidacy, having also run for president in Mauritania’s 2014 federal election.

At that time, Dah Abeid, who heads the anti-slavery organization Initiative for the Resurgence of the Abolitionist Movement (IRA), presented Mauritanians with the extraordinary and ground-shaking sight of a slave descendant (his father was a freed slave while his mother and uncles remained slaves) under sentence of death of a sharia court and imprisoned numerous times standing for president. Nevertheless, he won eight per cent of the vote, coming in second. Abdel Aziz, a former army general, won with 81.94, not unusual for an African dictatorship.

“We are the only ones to have a different ideological position,” Dah Obeid told Le Courier de Sahel during that campaign. “We are fighting against slavery, against racism, against government waste and corruption.”

Jeremy Keenan, a professorial research associate at the School of Africa and Oriental Studies at the University of London stated the reason for Aziz’s overwhelming victory: “Mauritanian elections under President Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz are neither free, fair nor transparent.”