RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-price-of-failure-in-venezuela/

Nicolás Maduro and Juan Guaidó are engaged in a struggle for the future of Venezuela. Their rivalry is not merely personal. It also has an ideological dimension. Maduro, heir to socialist authoritarian Hugo Chávez, draws strength and support from the world’s autocracies, including Cuba, Russia, China, and Iran. Meanwhile, the United States and some 50 other countries recognize Guaidó, a 35-year-old democrat, as the legitimate president. The duel between these various international antagonists serves as a reminder that the outcome in Venezuela will have consequences beyond that impoverished country’s borders.

Maduro has lost support across the globe, in the streets, and among some members of his regime, who transfer money and even family out of the country. He maintains a monopoly of deadly force through his control of the security forces, including the paramilitary colectivos, and through the help of his sinister allies, who assist him in controlling the flow of information into and out of Venezuela. Dislodging him requires the persistent threat of force combined with diplomatic isolation and economic constriction. That is what the Trump administration has sought to achieve in the five weeks since it recognized Guaidó.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13800/turkey-missing-priests

“Prior to the kidnapping, the bishops were on their way to Aleppo to secure the release of two other abducted priests…. When Paolo Dall’Oglio, an Italian Jesuit priest, went to Raqqa to secure their release, he too was kidnapped, and is still missing. I believe he was murdered.” — Erkan Metin, an Istanbul-based Assyrian human-rights lawyer.

Metin noted that the Assyrian and other Christian peoples indigenous to the region are still awaiting justice for the kidnapped priests and other Christian victims of persecution in Syria.

“Unlike Turkey, which has failed to investigate the crimes committed against the clergymen, there is an ongoing investigation in the U.S. on their kidnappings and another is being conducted by Russia… and the U.N. is investigating the financing of terrorism in Syria.” — Erkan Metin, an Istanbul-based Assyrian human-rights lawyer.

It has been six years since two archbishops and other members of the Christian clergy went missing in Syria; their whereabouts still are unknown. Yohanna Ibrahim, head of the Syriac Orthodox Church of Aleppo, and Boulos Yazigi, head of the Greek Orthodox Church, also in Aleppo, were abducted from their car in 2013. Their driver was later found killed.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13803/offend-extremists

What is striking and controversial are the repeated interventions into the debate made by the government’s own ‘extremism commissioner’, Sara Khan. Over recent years Khan has been a hugely admirable figure. The founder and leader of the women’s group ‘Inspire’, Khan has shown a generation of British people – including, most importantly, young Muslim women – that it is possible to be resilient against the fanatics in their faith and also to argue for the rights of women. She has been an unarguable force for good, and has had to withstand appalling pressure from Islamist groups in the UK.

“It is, I think, completely misconceived to suggest that we should change our foreign policy because it might cause some people to take up arms against us. That’s a form of blackmail….” — Michael Howard, former Conservative party leader

In 2006 a small group of peers, MPs and Islamist groups sent an open letter to the then-Labour government. The signatories included the subsequently jailed Lord Ahmed of Rotherham, the subsequently disgraced (over expenses fraud) Baroness Uddin and the then-MP, now Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan. This letter suggested to the UK government of the day that British foreign policy “risks putting civilians at increased risk both in the UK and abroad.” This is a commonly heard argument of course, and is especially commonly heard from various extremist groups.

Britain, in recent days, has had a rare distraction from its seemingly endless Brexit debate. The distraction, however, has not been an altogether welcome one. It involves the case of Shamima Begum, one of a number of girls who left their school in Bethnal Green in London in 2015 to go and join ISIS.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/feb/25/standi

The Russian- and Cuban-supported Maduro regime is getting bolder in attempts to crush the people of Venezuela — now working blocking aid coming across the border to the starving citizens and shooting at the truck drivers.Some of that aid is American, to the irritation of Sen. Bernie Sanders, who doesn’t believe in revolution to remove a socialist. Agreeing that Nicolas Maduro is not a nice man, Mr. Sanders called for a “free and fair election” instead. “That is a decision of the Venezuelan people.”Actually, revolution appears to be the decision of the people — and support for the revolution is the appropriate American position.

The Monroe Doctrine defined America’s interests in the hemisphere, including recognizing and not interfering with existing colonies in the Western Hemisphere but closing the hemisphere to future colonization. And laying down the marker that any attempt to oppress or control any nation in the hemisphere would be viewed as a hostile act against the United States. The doctrine lived 190 years, mostly for better and sometimes for worse, until 2013 when Secretary of State John Kerry announced, “The era of the Monroe Doctrine is over.”But power permits no vacuum. Venezuela is what happens when the United States withdraws and others — in this case Russia, Cuba and Iran — enter to stake their claims.

http://standpointmag.co.uk/february-2019-features-giles-udy-jeremy-corbyn-britain-road-to-socialism

When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 it seemed that communism, as a force in politics, was finally dead. The ideas that had inspired radicals around the world had lost their shine. As Marxism seemed discredited, market economies prospered. Only an older generation of greying revolutionaries remained to tend the faltering flame of world revolution. While they continued to squabble over minutiae of revolutionary history, the world moved on. By the turn of the millennium British students, once the vanguard of radicalism, were decried for their political apathy. The 2001 9/11 terrorist attacks ended that.

Fear took over from complacency. As the 2003 Iraq war loomed, the fractious British Left, in a rare moment of unity, formed the Stop the War Coalition and brought a million people out on the streets. Few of the unwitting participants knew that the march’s organisers’ ultimate goal was the overthrow of parliamentary democracy; none could have guessed that, 15 years later, the movement’s first two leaders, the British Communist Party member Andrew Murray and left-wing activist Jeremy Corbyn, would be within reach of forming the first communist government in British history, Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party, Murray appointed as his “Special Adviser”.

The crash of 2007 shook Western confidence still further. Left-wing commentators such as Guardian journalist Seumas Milne, an old communist comrade of Murray’s, openly voiced nostalgia for the “huge social benefits” enjoyed under Soviet communism in the USSR and Eastern Bloc. Milne is now Corbyn’s Director of Strategy and Communications.In 1920 Lenin urged British communists to enter the Labour Party to subvert it from within. In 1936, Trotsky told his followers to do the same, but successive generations of Labour leaders resisted this “entryism”, most famously in Neil Kinnock’s 1980s campaign against the Trotskyite group Militant. Two young members of a group which tried to thwart Kinnock’s campaign were Corbyn and Jon Lansman, later the founder of Momentum. That failure, reinforced by Tony Blair’s New Labour reforms, convinced many leftists that the only option left was bring the government down by extra-parliamentary action. This was the context when John McDonnell, now Corbyn’s Shadow Chancellor, made his call for “insurrection”, a general strike and street protests in 2013.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/a-young-woman-from-libya/

I’ve done a podcast, a Q&A, with Asma Khalifa: here. She is in Mexico City, participating in a meeting of the Oslo Freedom Forum. Asma is an extraordinary person. She is a young woman from Libya, a Berber. She is a democracy leader and human-rights activist.

Last year, I heard her tell a very moving story. I asked her to tell it again, on this podcast. During the Libyan Civil War, she sided with the rebels against the dictator Muammar Gaddafi. After a close friend of hers was killed — executed, along with many others — she decided to join up: as a field nurse. She witnessed many terrible things.

She did not like what was happening to her. She was engulfed in hatred. “That’s not me,” she said. So she asked a doctor to assign her to a particular ward of a military hospital: a ward where enemy soldiers — Gaddafi’s forces — were kept. Almost no one went there.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/sweeney-agonistes-tommy-robinson-turns-the-tables-on-the-bbc/

Tommy Robinson’s courageous truth-telling about Islam has not only resulted in years of harassment by the British authorities, an endless cascade of death threats, and, last year, a thoroughly unjust prison term that might have spelled his demise, but also, of course, a pattern of coverage by the mainstream media that has been almost uniformly deceitful and poisonous. When he heard that the BBC series Panorama, which is the UK’s answer to 60 Minutes, was planning a story on him with the working title “Tommy Takedown,” and that its producers were collaborating with the vile group Hope Not Hate (HNH), which is Britain’s version of the Southern Poverty Law Center — i.e., a shady far-left smear machine masquerading as a noble monitor of bigots, fascists, and hate groups — he decided to go on the offensive.

The key to Tommy’s plan was Lucy Brown, a former employee whose job with him had ended in a shouting match. After their split, she was offered £5,000 by HNH to badmouth Tommy for a cover story, and had to contact a lawyer to prevent a major daily from falsely claiming she’d accused Tommy of sexual allegations. When Panorama reporter John Sweeney asked her to talk to him for what he promised would be a “definitive documentary” uncovering Tommy in all his “horribleness,” Brown got in touch with Tommy and agreed to wear a hidden camera when she met with Sweeney to discuss his plans.

http://thefederalist.com/2019/02/26/doctors-insist-canadian-14-year-old-needs-no-parent-consent-trans-hormone-injections/

Clark* first found out that his 12-year-old daughter Maxine was being treated as a boy by her school when he saw her new name in her class’s grade seven yearbook. “Quinn” was the new name her counselor had helped her pick out, and Maxine’s school district in Delta, British Columbia, Canada, had decided that “Quinn” should be treated, for all intents and purposes, as a boy.

The district apparently felt justified in leaving Maxine’s father completely out of the loop. Maxine’s school district was operating by the BC Ministry of Education’s Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity (SOGI) Policy, according to which Clark had no right to know his daughter’s “preferred sex, gender, or name” at school.

Presented with a fait accompli from the school district and a daughter who was becoming increasingly passionate about her transgender identity, Clark found himself in a difficult situation. He did not want to reject his daughter’s newfound passion outright but, at the same time, he was cautious about her moving into transgenderism too quickly.

Ever since her parents separated in 2013, Maxine had struggled emotionally to cope, experiencing behavioral problems and depression which Clark felt left her “very vulnerable” and searching for a place to belong. During the same school year that she took on a transgender identity, Maxine had apparently also gone through a lesbian phase. Clark couldn’t help but wonder if her new transgender identity might likewise come and go.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/holding-its-tongue-on-democracy-eu-presses-arab-leaders-to-stem-migration-11551121873?cx_testId=16&cx_testVariant=cx&cx_artPos=4&cx_tag=contextual&cx_navSource=newsReel#cxrecs_s

SHARM EL SHEIKH, Egypt—European Union officials used a first-of-its-kind summit here this week to press Arab leaders to create stability and stem migration but played down calls for democracy, reflecting a desire for calm after years of border tumult.

The two-day meeting between the EU and the Arab League ended Monday without a formal agreement on migration or security cooperation. The assembled leaders issued a declaration that calls for unspecified efforts to address issues ranging from climate change to wars in Yemen, Libya and Syria.

But the gathering in this Red Sea resort town reflected European leaders’ desire to seek new partners to halt to migration across the Mediterranean Sea following years of war and an influx of refugees after the Arab Spring revolts of 2011.

EU leaders such as European Council President Donald Tusk gathered with autocrats the bloc once shunned, including Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Al Sisi, and asked for help. EU leaders have in the past loudly called out leaders like Mr. Sisi for brutal crackdowns on political opponents, including torture and killings of civilians.

But Mr. Sisi and other leaders here have reasserted their hold on power after the tumult of 2011 uprisings.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-saudis-hedge-their-american-bets-11551138149

It is, in its way, the most shocking spectacle in world politics since the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union: Even as Beijing is stepping up its persecution of Muslim Uighurs, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia cozied up to Chinese President Xi Jinping on his trip to China last week.

More than a million Uighur Muslims are said to be held in Chinese concentration and “re-education” camps, where beatings and mass rapes are reliably reported to be perpetrated against detainees. Yet the crown prince of the leading Sunni Islamic state signed almost $30 billion in trade agreements with China, hailed the long problem-free relationship between the two countries, pledged support for the Belt and Road initiative, and announced that Saudi Arabia respected China’s need to protect its domestic security in its own way.

God may be great, but Xi Jinping, apparently, is greater. Or at least more useful.

Saudi Arabia is not the only Muslim power kowtowing to China. Pakistan has also fallen strangely silent when it comes to the concentration camps now dotting the landscape in Xinjiang. A country that regularly whips itself into fits of murderous rage over the supposed plight of Muslims in Indian-controlled Kashmir remains rigorously calm about the massive religious repression by its more powerful neighbor.