RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13667/multiculturalism-britain-january

More than 5,000 people signed a petition to boycott Marks and Spencer toilet paper: they alleged it was embossed with the Arabic word for God. Marks and Spencer, in a statement on Twitter, denied the claims: “The motif on the aloe vera toilet tissue, which we have been selling for over five years, is categorically of an aloe vera leaf and we have investigated and confirmed this with our suppliers.”

The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe urged Britain to make it a legal requirement for Muslim couples to register their marriages civilly before or at the same time as their religious ceremony, because Sharia marriages alone “clearly discriminate against women in divorce and inheritance cases.”

The Guardian reported that hundreds, and possibly thousands, of young girls in Britain are being subjected to so-called breast-ironing, an African practice whereby mothers or grandmothers use a hot stone to massage across the breast repeatedly in order to “break the tissue” and slow its growth. The objective is to stop unwanted male attention.

January 1. A 25-year-old Somali man stabbed three people — including a police officer — at Victoria Station in Manchester. BBC producer Sam Clack, who was waiting for a tram when the attack took place, reported: “The guy, his exact words were, he said: ‘As long as you keep bombing other countries, this sort of sh*t is going to keep happening.’ The suspect also screamed “Allahu Akbar!” (“Allah is the greatest!”) as he was bundled into a police van. Assistant Chief Constable Russ Jackson nevertheless said that officers were “retaining an open mind in relation to the motivation for this attack.” The suspect was eventually detained under the Mental Health Act.

To visit Greenwich is to grasp in an afternoon’s stroll the Britain that was once and is now no more. General Wolfe, whose addition of Canada to the Empire is celebrated here, was brought down by a French musket ball. Today, prostration before the EU is Theresa May’s instinctive first position.

Stepping back and forth between the world’s two longitudinal hemispheres is fun in a quirky sort of way. Of course it requires you to be positioned right above the Prime Meridian. And that, in turn, means you must have decided to spend a London afternoon over in Greenwich, a few miles down-river along a now much cleaned-up Thames and more or less across from Canary Wharf. If you’d somehow been asleep for a quarter of a millennium, and were wholly unaware of Britain’s Empire years, you’d soon be set straight when you visited Greenwich. It’s magnificent!

My wife and I spent a day this past weekend re-acquainting ourselves with this London borough where you’ll find the National Maritime Museum (magnificent!), the Old Naval College (which in its original incarnation had been a retirement home for Royal Navy sailors and is partly a Christopher Wren creation with a splendid chapel), the seventeenth-century Queen’s House, a Greenwich Market first established over three centuries ago and, of course, the Royal Observatory. It’s at the last of those listed attractions where one can hop between hemispheres.

Remember, the east-west division of the world is wholly arbitrary in a way that the north-south split is not. The equator is a fact imposed on the world. Where to draw the up-down line to split the world’s west from its east is a function of nothing more than who happened to be drawing the line and what they prefered. At the height of the British Empire, the world’s largest-ever, the people doing the preferring were in London. And so the Prime Meridian runs right through the Royal Observatory at Greenwich. That is why, before political correctness infected everything from banning temporal reference to the shorthand of ‘Before Christ’ to toilets and ‘renewable energy is cheaper if you just ignore the $3 billion in subsidies it gets each year’, we used to talk in terms of Greenwich Mean Time. Everything was based on that, and the arbitrary line drawn there to separate east from west.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/high-ranking-venezuela-air-force-general-rejects-maduro-supports-guaido/

The first defection of a high ranking military officer from the Venezuelan armed forces said in a video that he “doesn’t recognize the dictatorial authority of Nicolás Maduro,” and added “The people have suffered enough.”

General Francisco Yanez of the Venezuelan air force endorsed opposition leader Juan Guaidó, who declared himself president two weeks ago.

NPR:

“To order the armed forces to keep repressing the people is to continue killing more people from hunger, diseases and god willing combat between ourselves,” he said. “The people have suffered enough.”

Then Yanez invited the citizens to peacefully defend Guaidó in the streets. “To my armed fellow men,” he pleaded, “I ask you not to turn your back on the people of Venezuela.”

He is the first of the nation’s military brass to voice strong support for Guaidó, who declared himself interim president in January after denouncing the integrity of Venezuela’s presidential elections.

Yanez told the Associated Press that he would not issue other statements until he was authorized by “the commander-in-chief of the legal armed force,” Guaidó.

General Yanez is currently alone. The Venezuelan military, carefully courted and nurtured by both former President Chavez and current President Maduro, are not likely to switch loyalties in great numbers any time soon.

Several factions of Venezuela, including its Military Aviation and the Academy of Aviation, used Twitter to denounce the general. They tweeted a photo of Yanez in his uniform with the word “TRAITOR” scrawled across. The Air Force Command also accused him of switching sides because his father is facing an investigation into corruption.

Although hundreds of generals serve in the Venezuelan military, the announcement represents a victory for Guaidó, NPR’s Philip Reeves reports. The young leader has asked armed forces to still their guns, and hopes to weaken their loyalty to Maduro.

Guaidó passed an amnesty measure for them in the National Assembly. Supporters in the streets have handed out copies of the law to soldiers and police, though analysts say Maduro receives loyalty from top-ranking officers by giving them big paychecks and control of lucrative assets. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13582/pope-silence-persecution-christians

Unfortunately, Pope Francis’s stance on Islam seems to be coming from a fantasy world.

“Authentic Islam and the proper reading of the Koran are opposed to every form of violence”, the Pope claimed, not quite accurately. It is as if all of the Pope’s efforts have been directed to exonerating Islam from any of its responsibilities. He seems to have been doing this even more than observant Muslims — such as Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, American author and physician M. Zuhdi Jasser, former Kuwaiti Information Minister Sami Abdullatif Al-Nesf, French-Algerian author Razika Adnani, Paris-based Tunisian philosopher Youssef Seddik, Jordanian journalist Yosef Alawnah, and Moroccan author Rachid Aylal, among many others — have been doing.

“Pope Francis could in no way be ignorant of the heavy problems caused by the expansion… at the very heart of the Christian domain… Let us note this again… the last religion that arrived in Europe has an intrinsic impediment to integrating into the European framework that is fundamentally Judeo-Christian…” – Boualem Sansal, Algerian author, in his best-selling book “2084.”

Pope Francis now faces the potential risk of a Christian world physically swallowed by the Muslim crescent — as on the Vatican logo chosen for the Pope’s upcoming trip to Morocco. It is time the appeasement is replaced.

4,305 Christians were killed simply because their Christian faith in 2018. This is the dramatic number contained in the new “World Watch List 2019” just compiled by the non-governmental organization Open Doors. It reveals that in 2018, there were 1,000 more Christian victims — 25% more — than the year before, when there were 3,066.

These days, 245 million Christians in the world are apparently persecuted simply for their faith. Last November, The organization Aid to the Church in Need released its “Religious Freedom Report” for 2018 and reached the a similar conclusion: 300 million Christians were subjected to violence. Christianity, despite stiff competition, has been called “the most persecuted religion in the world”.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13630/persecution-converts-christianity

“[F]or millions of Christians — particularly those who grew up Muslim or were born into Muslim families — openly following Jesus can have painful consequences. They can be treated as second-class citizens, discriminated against for jobs or even violently attacked.” — Open Doors, World Watch List 2019.

“The root of the problem is that the existence and functions of Protestants and other non-Muslim groups are seen as a threat by the government institutions. And therefore, it is believed that all their activities should be banned.” — 2008 Report: “The Question of Places of Worship for the Protestant Community of Turkey,” prepared by the Legal Committee of the Alliance of Protestant Churches of Turkey.

Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan are all secular on paper. Yet, “the police, secret service and local authorities strictly monitor religious activities, with state authorities regularly raiding non-registered churches. In general, the Islamic culture makes life for Christian converts particularly difficult, but indigenous Christians with a Muslim background bear the brunt of persecution from the state and family, friends and community.” — Open Doors, World Watch List 2019.

“While Christians are indeed experiencing a ‘life of hell’ in North Korea, overthrowing Kim Jong-un’s regime could not only lead to a quick halt to this persecution but also to a rise of Christianity — as has happened recently in Russia… Unlike the persecution of Christians in Communist nations, persecution of Christians is perennial, existential, and… far transcends any ruler or regime. It unfortunately seems part and parcel of the history, doctrines, and socio-political makeup of Islam — hence its tenacity and ubiquity. It is a ‘tradition.'” — Raymond Ibrahim.

According to the human rights organization Open Doors, the number of Christians in the world subjected to persecution — 245 million — is 14% higher than it was a year ago.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13668/iran-pink-lines

Europeans, including British Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt, delude themselves in believing that by “working with Iran” they could prevent the Islamic Republic from “crossing the red lines.”

The problem is that the Islamic Republic does not cross those real or imaginary “red lines”. Like the now-defunct Soviet Union in its time, the Islamic Republic’s strategy is to cross only “pink lines”. The Islamic Republic has no troops in Yemen but manages to keep that tragedy going by helping Houthi rebels hang on to the patch of territory they hold.

In the EU countries, Tehran is careful not to cross “red lines”. But, it crosses “pink lines” when it can through mosques, hussainiyahs, religious endowments and fake charities. In Britain alone, the Islamic Republic controls at least a dozen tax-exempt “charities”, often used for financing violent groups across the globe or simply for money laundering.

Talk to any senior European Union official and you are sure to hear the Islamic Republic in Iran designated as “a threat to regional stability.” German Chancellor Angela Merkel endorses Israeli Premier Benjamin Netanyahu’s assessment of Iranian behavior as “unacceptable.”

French President Emmanuel Macron insists that Iran should carry out UN resolutions by closing its ballistic missile project. And, yet, EU’s Iran policy, assuming such a thing exists, is plagued by contradictions.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2019/02/02/theresa-may-invokes-jeremy-corbyns-support-pledges-battle-britain/

Theresa May has invoked the support of Jeremy Corbyn to insist the EU must offer concessions on her Brexit deal, as she pledges to “battle for Britain” when she travels to Brussels to re-open negotiations.

Writing in The Telegraph, Mrs May states that although the Labour leader refused to support her in the Commons last week, he also believes that the controversial Irish backstop “needs to be addressed with Brussels”.

Mrs May suggests that she will seek either an “alternative” to the backstop, or a time limit or unilateral exit mechanism to prevent the UK from being trapped in EU’s structures indefinitely – both of which have already been publicly rejected by Brussels.

But pledging that she will return to the city with “new ideas and a renewed determination” Mrs May also calls for unity in the Commons, stating: “If we stand together and speak with one voice, I believe we can find the right way forward.”

And she insists she remains “determined” to deliver Brexit “on time”, on March 29, despite public and private calls from MPs and ministers for a delay.

She warned campaigners for a second referendum to “put your efforts behind securing a better Brexit for all of us. Because the UK is leaving the EU.”

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2019/02

Britons voted on a very simple question: Leave the EU or stay? Now, after unsatisfactory negotiations, not to mention deliberate prevarication, there is talk of a second referendum that would see Remain once again on the ballot. If no resolution is found, is the the Queen not obliged to defend the people’s will?

Bill Shorten has promised a plebiscite on the “Australian Republic” in his first term, a pledge that fills this lapsed republican with anxious dismay — lapsed because the debate about the Australian Head of State has been so corrupted that, were a republic to come about, it would be a divisive moment, not a uniting one. With the current head of the Australian Republican Movement a grandstanding social justice warrior and all-round goose on constitutional matters, the only way to avoid the upwelling of poisonous social-media vituperation and the brandishing of identity politics is to spurn the debate altogether.

What prompts this thought about our own situation is the current impasse in Britain with regard to implementing the will of the people as expressed in the Brexiteers’ victory at the ballot box. I wonder, does the Monarch have a role to play? Parliament exists to give effect to the will of the people, whose interests the Queen was crowned with the responsibility to defend. If the Commons acts against the express and unequivocally stated desire of her subjects then it undermines one of Britain’s and, indeed, all the Western democracies’ fundamental tenets: representative government.

Let’s first examine if the British Parliament is acting against the will of the people. In 2016, after the largest voter turnout in UK history, the decision was made to leave the EU. There were no if or buts, no caveats. The referendum question was simplicity itself:

Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272731/voice-isis-abu-ridwan-al-kanadi-captured-lloyd-billingsley

On January 13, US-backed Kurdish forces captured an Islamic State jihadi who identified himself as Mohammad Abdullah Mohammad, a Canadian from Toronto and reportedly the English-language narrator of Islamic State propaganda. The ISIS fighter had been sought for some time, but in Canada the focus of the story became the Islamic State’s displeasure over the jihadi’s capture.

“ISIL supporters upset about capture of prominent Canadian jihadi, say it’s demoralizing,” headlined a January 28 National Post story by Adrian Humphries. ISIS-friendly Al-Muhajreen identified the fighter as Abu Ridwan Al-Kanadi and described his capture as “sad news for all mujahideen of the Islamic State.”

When news of Ridwan’s capture began to circulate, Humphries wrote, “the apparent joy from the enemies of ISIL, also known as ISIS, upset jihadi supporters.” They said it all served the interest of the “Crusaders and the enemies of the Islamic State.”

In the penultimate paragraph readers learn that Ridwan is “believed to be the same man as the masked narrator of a notorious ISIL propaganda video that features the mass execution of captured Syrian government soldiers. The narrator appears to take part in the firing squad. The same man is believed to be behind several recorded claims of responsibility by ISIL for deadly terror attacks on the West as well as reading news reports on ISIL radio networks.” So only in the walk-off do readers get key details about Ridwan, now 35 years old.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13660/france-unrest

The third group is extremely large: it is the rest of the population. The upper class treat them as regrettable dead weight and expect nothing from them except silence and submission. Its members often have a hard time making ends meet. They pay taxes but can see that a growing portion is being used to subsidize the very people who drove them out of their suburban homes.

For the moment, Macron does not seem to want to recognize that these people even exist.

When Macron lowered the taxes of the wealthiest but increased the taxes of these “peripherals” by means of a fuel tax, it was seen as the last straw — in addition to his arrogant condescension.

“Today, most of those who protest do not attack the police. But instead of acting to bring down the violence, the police are receiving orders pushing them to be very violent. I do not blame the police. I blame those who give them orders”. — Xavier Lemoine, the mayor of Montfermeil, a city in the Eastern suburbs of Paris where the 2005 riots were extremely destructive.

Saturday, January 26th 2019. “Yellow vests” protests were being organized in the main cities of France. Mobilization was not weakening. Support from the population had decreased slightly but was still huge (60%-70%, according to polls). The main slogan has remained the same since November 17, 2018: “Macron must resign”. In December, another slogan was added: “Citizens’ initiative referendum”.

The government and French President Emmanuel Macron have been doing everything they can to crush the movement. They have tried insults, defamation and have said the demonstrators were both “seditious people” wishing to overthrow the institutions and fascist “brown shirts”. On December 31, Macron described them, as “hateful crowds”. The presence of some anti-Semites led a government spokesman (incorrectly) to describe the entire movement as “anti-Semitic”.