RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/tens-of-thousands-protest-venezuelan-president-maduro-11548264274?mod=hp_lead_pos

By Maolis Castro in Caracas, Venezuela, and Juan Forero and Kejal Vyas in Bogotá, Colombia

President Trump took on Venezuela’s leftist authoritarian president and his regime’s Russian and Chinese backers on Wednesday by recognizing the opposition leader of the oil-rich country’s congress as its legitimate head of state.

The U.S. move came just minutes after Juan Guaidó, the National Assembly’s 35-year-old leader, declared himself interim president and took an oath of office before a crowd of tens of thousands in the capital.

President Nicolás Maduro responded by vowing to stay in office and said he was severing diplomatic relations with the U.S.

“The people of Venezuela have courageously spoken out” against Mr. Maduro “and demanded freedom and the rule of law,” Mr. Trump said. He said he would “use the full weight of United States economic and diplomatic power to press for the restoration of Venezuelan democracy.”

http://newageislam.com/radical-islamism-and-jihad/tashny-sukumaran

Religion is a tricky subject for Kuala Lumpur-based freelancer Muhammad Ali. Born to a conservative Muslim family, he became an atheist but cannot express his beliefs publicly in Malaysia. The multiracial country is largely Muslim and apostasy from Islam is a criminal offence in some states, while the law decrees that only a sharia court can decide if a person is Muslim – their own agency counts for nothing.

Several years ago, there was a proposal to introduce the death penalty for leaving the religion, although this was swiftly dispensed with when the Pakatan Harapan coalition formed government, dethroning the more conservative Barisan Nasional last May.

In nearby Indonesia, where most of its 260 million people are Muslim, non-believers who comment on Islam and atheists vocal about their views face the spectre of blasphemy laws.

How both Southeast Asian countries handle the matter of Muslims leaving their faith became a topic of interest after Saudi Arabian teenager Rahaf Mohammed al-Qunun barricaded herself in a Bangkok hotel room two weeks ago and lobbied for asylum. She said she had renounced Islam and fled from her family; apostasy in the kingdom can be punishable by death. Canada has since taken her in.

In Malaysia, besides the threat of prison, apostates face re-education in rehabilitation camps or whipping by state religious authorities. For Muhammad and many other atheists, this means “always looking over my shoulder”.

In 2017, he and his friends were viciously doxxed after a photo of them at an atheist gathering was shared online, with a federal minister even going so far as to say apostates – or murtads – had to “be hunted down”.

https://www.businessinsider.com/r-

BERLIN (Reuters) – Berlin has revoked Iranian airline Mahan’s right to operate in Germany, a senior government source told Reuters on Monday, giving both safety concerns and the suspicion that the airline was being used for military purposes as reasons.

The government suspects the airline, which has been on a United States sanctions list since 2011, is used for military purposes by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards as well as for terrorist activities.

Several European Union countries accuse Iran of carrying out spying operations or planning attacks on the continent. The government source said that the flight did not constitute general sanctions against Iran.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/russias-missile-defense-draws-a-new-iron-curtain-against-u-s-military-11548255438?mod=hp_lead_pos5

HMEIMIM AIR BASE, Syria—North from Syria, along the borders of Eastern Europe and rounding the Arctic Circle to the east, Russia has built a ring of air defenses that threaten the reach of the U.S. military, forcing Washington to rethink its place as the world’s undisputed air power.

Russia’s S-400 antiaircraft missile system, a nettlesome and potentially deadly aerial shield, is changing the calculus of the U.S. and its allies in potential hot spots, beginning with its deployment in Syria.

Radar employed by the S-400, which Russia claims can detect the latest stealth aircraft, casts a net around western Syria that stretches from Turkey to the Mediterranean Sea to Israel.

While it hasn’t been tested in battle, S-400 radar tracking has shooed away aircraft of the U.S.-led coalition in Syria “as soon as they see on their electronic indicators that they are being watched,” Lt. Gen. Viktor Gumyonny, commander of Russia’s air-defense forces, told a TV interviewer.

Russia’s hybrid warfare tactics against the West, including election meddling and online disinformation campaigns, have drawn the most attention from lawmakers and the U.S. government. Proliferation of the S-400 system demonstrates how Russia is also investing heavily in traditional military firepower.
Airborne Defense
Russia has disclosed only some locations of its S-400 antiaircraft missile system.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13595/palestinian-political-detainees

The Rome-based International Federation for Rights and Development last week condemned the Palestinian Authority for its crackdown on political opponents and said the detainees were being subjected to systematic physical and psychological torture in Palestinian prisons.

Palestinians say that Shaheen and Fattash are among dozens of “political detainees” who are being held in Palestinian Authority (PA) prisons and detention centers in various parts of the West Bank. According to some human rights organizations, the Palestinians held in PA prisons are often subjected to various forms of torture.

In a letter to Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, a number of Palestinian human rights organizations recently demanded that the international agency speak out against the politically motivated arrests by the PA in the West Bank. It is highly unlikely, however, that the human rights organizations will receive any reply from the UN, whose various agencies continue to be obsessed only with Israel.

The UN does not seem to care about human rights violations committed by the PA against its own people. These are the type of stories that evidently do not interest either the UN or the international media because they lack an anti-Israel angle. The only “abuses” they see are those that can be blamed on Israel.

What is happening in the PA-controlled territories and prisons in the West Bank is a tiny taste of what life for the Palestinians would be like under a totalitarian regime that does not tolerate any form of criticism. In both the PA-controlled territories and Gaza, Palestinians must resort to the desperate measure of closing their mouths to food because they cannot open their mouths to demand decent treatment.

The mother and wife of a Palestinian man being held without trial in a Palestinian Authority (PA) prison in the West Bank have gone on hunger strike as part of a campaign to secure his release. Four days after they began their hunger strike, the two women were rushed to hospital for medical treatment. The women say they will not end their hunger strike unless the PA releases Abdel Rahman Shaheen, who was detained in early January.

The mother of another Palestinian being held in PA prison, Murad Fattash, has also gone on a hunger strike to protest the continued incarceration of her son, who was also detained by the PA in early January.

Palestinians say that Shaheen and Fattash are among dozens of “political detainees” who are being held in PA prisons and detention centers in various parts of the West Bank.

Most of the detainees were taken into custody for criticizing the PA and its leaders and policies. They include engineers, lawyers, university lecturers and students, journalists and political activists affiliated with opposition groups like Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the PLO’s Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13546/turkey-dissent
A mufti who works for Turkey’s state religious authority, the Diyanet, recently insinuated that a massacre of the employees of the opposition news site OdaTV would be justified.

“This is how jihad is being taught at schools.” — Title of the OdaTV article that sparked threat of massacre.

“We are a news website that draws attention to the new [Islamic] organizations whose members are being staffed in state institutions… We remind that illegal structures are once again being formed within the state… Why do the Ministry of Interior, the Ministry of Justice, and the Directorate of Religious Affairs stay silent?” — Barış Pehlivan, the editor-in-chief of the threatened OdaTV.

“The point is not that these things are written in Islamic scripture, but that people still live by them.” — Bruce Bawer, author.

Although OdaTV has not denounced or criticized Islam, it does oppose the indoctrination of school children with violent jihad. Apparently even this was sufficient cause for the Turkish mufti to threaten the outlet’s journalists with death.

A mufti who works for Turkey’s state religious authority, the Diyanet, recently insinuated that a massacre of the employees of the opposition news site OdaTV — along the lines of the 2015 slaughter of the staff of the satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo — would be justified.

Ahmet Altıok, mufti of the Siirt Province, made this veiled threat of mass murder in an interview with the İLKHA news agency. ILKHA has ties to Turkey’s Hizbullah (“party of Allah” in Arabic; not connected to Hezbollah in Lebanon), a Sunni terrorist organization responsible for many horrific murders in the country.

In his interview, Altıok said, in part:

“Be it Charlie Hebdo or Ka’b ibn al-Ashraf [an ancient Jewish poet assassinated for criticizing Mohammed] … people who continually ridiculed, mocked and insulted Muslims… will be once again convicted in the society’s conscience. I call on these gentlemen to apologize. For you know repentance before death is accepted.”

According to Barış Pehlivan, the editor-in-chief of OdaTV, Altıok’s warning was sparked by an article on the OdaTV website entitled “This is how jihad is being taught at schools.” Pehlivan said, however, that the article was “just an excuse”:

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272602/virtue-signaling-its-sickest-bruce-bawer

I heard the news last week during a quick headline break on Nigel Farage’s daily call-in show. Fifty-five men in West Yorkshire – fifty-five! – had been arrested and interrogated in connection with rape-gang allegations.

That was that. The story was summed up in a couple of sentences and lasted no more than a few seconds. Then it was back to the show.

Later I looked online for more details. Finally I found a 200-word item in the Mirror. But that seemed to be it. I couldn’t locate anything at all about the rape-gang arrests in the Daily Mail, Telegraph, or Guardian.

My first thought was that the story deserved more attention than that. My second thought was that, well, Britain has been through so many grooming-gang arrests and trials in the last couple of years, with the number of defendants and accusers climbing way up into the four figures (so far), that this latest haul is just a drop in the bucket.

My third thought was that this near-total lack of coverage was only to be expected. It’s no secret by now, after all, that the British media prefer to keep reportage on Muslim rape gangs to a minimum. The journalistic formula is simple: take exceedingly brief notice of a mass arrest, without giving the names of the suspects or including words like “Islam” or “Muslim” or “Pakistani” (if anything, use “Asian,” or, even better, identify the defendants as “Bradford men” or “Manchester men”), then – months (or years) later – report as succinctly as possible on the suspects’ convictions. This latter report might oblige you to mention the names of at least some of the convicts – Muhammed this, Muhammed that – which will, unfortunately, give away the game.

But the damage will be minimal. Instead of battering the public every day for months with luridly detailed testimony that will burn itself for all time into millions of minds and hearts – and that will add up to vivid, horrifying, and irrefutable evidence of the savage reality of Islam – you’ll restrict the whole nightmare to a couple of brief articles, published months or even years apart, which your editors will obligingly bury somewhere in the middle of the paper and which readers may not even notice (and, if they do, will soon forget).

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13579/spain-catalonia-jihadists

Police said that the jihadis were known to have committed at least 369 robberies and thefts in and around Barcelona. In addition to theft, the cell members sustained themselves through drug trafficking and document fraud.

“There is little doubt that the autonomous region of Catalonia has become a prime base of operations for terrorist activity. Spanish authorities tell us they fear the threat from these atomized immigrant communities prone to radicalism, but they have very little intelligence on or ability to penetrate these groups.” — American diplomatic cable, October 2, 2007.

“The Salafist religious centers detected in Catalonia are opposed to any reading of the Qur’an that is not the most rigorous… and at the same time are demanding a ‘purification’ of Muslim believers from foreign influences…. This religious interference results in the… prohibition, especially for female teenagers, of attending schools with male students. This supposes a deep break with the values ​​of individual freedom that are guaranteed by the laws of Europe.” — Intelligence report leaked to the Catalan newspaper La Vanguardia.

Police in the northeastern Spanish region of Catalonia arrested 18 members of a jihadi cell plotting an attack in Barcelona — and then released all but three.

The arrests have drawn renewed attention to the continuing problem of radical Islam in Catalonia, which has one of the largest per capita Muslim populations in Europe.

The cell — comprised of individuals from Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya and Morocco — was broken up on January 15, when more than a hundred police officers raided five properties in Barcelona and the Catalan town of Igualada.

The arrests were part of a year-long counter-terrorism investigation called “Operation Alexandra,” launched in May 2017 after police received a tip that local jihadis were preparing an attack.

Catalan police, known as the Mossos d’Esquadra, said that the cell included five ringleaders who were in an “advanced process of radicalization with the aim to attack.” The cell adhered to the “doctrinal principles” of the Islamic State and were “significant consumers” of jihadi propaganda.