RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21375/china-spies-move-to-cuba

The Chinese military is firmly embedded in a country not far from Key West, Florida.

At the moment, Cuba needs Chinese cash and might therefore accede to granting China greater access to the island.

[Secretary of State Marco] Rubio, however, is focused on the Caribbean basin, as the itinerary for his first trip shows. Moreover, the new secretary of state is apparently willing to use raw American power to strong-arm countries.

Forget Europe or the hotspots of East Asia and the Middle East, Marco Rubio’s first foreign trip as secretary of state took him to one Caribbean and four Central American states. The tour tells us that the Trump foreign policy is focusing on the region closest to the American homeland.

That is bad news for the leftists and hardline regimes in the Western Hemisphere, especially the Republic of Cuba and its new patron, the People’s Republic of China. The Chinese military is firmly embedded in a country not far from Key West, Florida.

In June 2023, the Wall Street Journal reported that China and Cuba had agreed in principle to establish a new eavesdropping site on Cuban soil. The Biden administration termed the story inaccurate, but two days later the White House declassified intelligence showing that Chinese signals intelligence collection facilities had been operating in Cuba since at least 2019.

Washington had repeatedly tried to downplay Chinese involvement on Cuban soil, and the declassification was, as a practical matter, misleading. It is not clear when China first started collecting signals intelligence, commonly termed SIGINT, in Cuba, but it was evident that the effort began more than a decade before 2019.

“Rumors of China’s intelligence presence on the island appear to have begun with Chi’s visit,” states a report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), referring to a trip by then Chinese Defense Minister General Chi Haotian in 1999.

R. Evan Ellis of the U.S. Army War College told Gatestone Institute that the Chinese may have been engaged in this activity in Cuba since 1993. Some believe that the Chinese military moved into the Lourdes facility, the Soviet Union’s largest listening post outside its territory, soon after the fall of the USSR.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21373/destroying-europe-the-eu

The truth is that the reduction in CO2 emissions in Europe is almost exclusively due to industry leaving Europe. That is the dirty little secret of the Green Deal: Europe is reducing its CO2 emissions to the extent and in proportion to the destruction of its industry.

The EU elite has lost control of the narrative. Europeans are turning away from the lies and myths of the Green Deal en masse.

Given the absence of precise definitions, the censors do whatever they want…. In practice, these censors massively quash so-called “right-wing” content, while leaving the abundant anti-Semitic, Islamist and Marxist literature untouched.

[T]he EU is, in reality, a Potemkin democracy. It looks like a democracy, but is in fact an authoritarian bureaucracy. There is no election by the citizens of a parliament worthy of the name, no transparency, no recourses and, it seems, no way of eliminating the organization or any part of it. European citizens can vote as they please, but it is a self-appointed elite within the European institutions who decide the future of Europe. These “elites” will do anything to keep themselves and their ideology in power.

In addition, Qatar has massively infiltrated the European Parliament, buying parliamentarians to promote its interests and its Islamist vision of the world.

Can one measure the sense of alienation that must be felt by Europeans, forced to finance a corrupt bureaucracy working against their interests?

When it comes to migration, the economy, free speech and democracy, the EU is not the solution to any problem. The EU is the problem.

The founding idea of the European Union was to build, through shared prosperity, solidarity and a sense of shared destiny among the nations of Europe. That was why three communities were formed: the economy, coal and steel, and nuclear energy. Until around 2000, in terms of growth and innovation, the European economy, year in, year out, was on par with the American one.

Of that initial — and fairly brilliant — gesture of “peace through prosperity,” literally nothing remains. None of the EU’s current leaders cares about the financial well-being of Europeans. Coal is regarded as the devil’s fuel, and nuclear energy is abhorred by Europe’s elites, who say they prefer the inefficient and erratic wind turbines. Since 2000, the European economy has been mired in stagnation, which has worsened since 2008 and threatens to reach its height in the coming years — ending in the destruction of Europe.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21369/trump-muslim-brotherhood-terrorists

For Trump to make genuine progress in bringing peace and stability to the region in his second term, though, his administration must first focus on the root cause of much of the unrest blighting the region.

In response to the Muslim Brotherhood’s violent ideology, a number of pro-Western Arab regimes, such as Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, have designated the organisation as a terrorist entity.

The need for the world’s major Western democracies to take firm action against the Muslim Brotherhood has become even more urgent following the October 7 attacks, with militant groups inspired by the Brotherhood’s ideology said to be responsible for provoking anti-Jewish riots on American university campuses and staging weekly hate marches in many European capitals, such as London.

[Ed] Husain, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, is among a number of Middle East experts arguing in favour of the incoming Trump administration designating the Brotherhood as a terrorist organisation. He argues that such a move would “force Europe to reconsider the financial, media and mosque networks used by Iran and the Brotherhood in their own countries to project power back into the Middle East.”

At the same time Trump should confront the Gulf state of Qatar over its blatant double standards in supporting terror groups such as Hamas, whose leaders have drawn heavily on the Muslim Brotherhood’s dogma, while at the same time pretending to be an ally of the West.

[Qatar’s state-owned media] described the worst terrorist attack in Israel’s history as a “heroic operation,” a “miracle” and a “historic turning point” that restored the honour of the Muslim nation, while placing the Palestinian cause back on the world’s agenda.

Qatar played a similar role during the Afghan conflict, when its willingness to provide Taliban negotiators with a base in Doha ultimately resulted in the Taliban regaining power in Kabul, re-establishing its uncompromising Islamist rule over the Afghan people.

While the Qataris maintain that their mediation efforts on the Gaza conflict are aimed at ending the bloodshed, their real motive is to ensure that Hamas, the group whose terrorist infrastructure they have helped to finance, survives the conflict, enabling it to maintain its threatening presence on Israel’s southern border. This mission of Qatar’s is a goal about which President Trump’s envoy, Steve Witkoff, and even President Trump himself, might not be aware.

Given Qatar’s overt sympathy for the Hamas cause, at the very least the Trump administration should undertake a serious review of its dealings with Doha, and consider relocating the US military’s Al Udeid Air Base from Qatar to a more friendly location in the region, such as the United Arab Emirates.

If US President Donald Trump is really serious about making a positive impact on the Middle East, a good place for him to start would be to designate the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood movement as a terrorist organisation and scale down Washington’s ties with the Gulf state of Qatar.

Since he won re-election, there has been much speculation that Trump, architect of the ground-breaking Abraham Accords, intends to use his second term in office to negotiate a wide-ranging peace deal aimed at bringing lasting stability to the Middle East.

Before he had even taken office, Trump was credited with helping to finalise the Gaza ceasefire deal, after he threatened that “all hell will break out” if Hamas did not release the remaining Israeli hostages held in captivity.

More recently, he has called on Egypt and Jordan to accommodate displaced Palestinians in Gaza in order to “clean out” the enclave after significant areas of the territory have been reduced to rubble following 15 months of intense fighting between Iranian-backed Hamas terrorists and Israel.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/a-day-in-the-life-of-a-christian-under-pakistans-blasphemy-laws/

In Pakistan, blasphemy laws carry a death sentence. These notorious statutes are often used abusively for settling personal scores, making personal gains or for satisfying grudges that one neighbor may have against another.

The country’s blasphemy laws are also used to target minority groups, and Christians are disproportionately affected. Indeed, roughly a quarter of all blasphemy accusations target Christians. Business rivals accuse Christian men of blasphemy as a means of destroying their business and reputation.

In 2020, a Christian man was sentenced to death for having allegedly sent “blasphemous” text messages to his former supervisor. He has been held in custody since 2013.

While the death sentence is seldom carried out, people accused of blasphemy are vulnerable to attack or murder by rampaging Muslim mobs. In June 2024, for instance, an elderly man was killed by mob violence after being accused of desecrating the Quran.

In its 2024 report, the human rights organization Open Doors found that anti-Christian violence in Pakistan has been at the maximum possible level for many years. Violence against Christians does not only include widely publicized attacks against the Christian community, such as in the city of Jaranwala in August 2023, but also small scale, localized, and increasingly persistent killings and attacks on Christians and churches, often spurred on by the country’s notorious blasphemy laws, which have been expanded in scope and punishment.

Christians in Pakistan are more frequently arrested and charged than acquitted, and although not all situations are linked with blasphemy accusations, those are the most prominent examples.

In 2023, Pakistan’s National Assembly passed legislation that increased punishment for some forms of blasphemy by raising the penalties from three years to no fewer than 10 years for insulting the companions, wives, and family members of Islam’s founder, Muhammad. The widening of the scope of blasphemy laws and the increase in penalties on conviction demonstrate the level of importance politics and society attach to this topic.

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/01/30/iranian-people-are-ready-to-bring-about-regime-change-does-the-west-see-it-coming/

It was like yesterday. Nearly 50 years to the day, on Dec. 31, 1977, the Shah held a state dinner for U.S. President Jimmy Carter. Watching on television from my family’s middle-class home in western Tehran, I was eager to hear Carter’s speech. Having visited the U.S. as a curious tourist the previous summer, I had learned a few things about the American political system.

In the middle of the speech, Carter toasted the Shah, saying Iran was “under your majesty, an island of stability in one of the more troubled areas of the world.” At that, I turned to my uncle beside me, who was back in Iran after years of living in California, and asked, “Where is he talking about? Americans, with their embassy and all its personnel, really don’t know what is going on in Iran?”

Though my uncle abhorred the Shah as much as anyone, he was also keenly aware of the brutality that the Shah’s notorious secret police, SAVAK, used in crushing anyone who expressed such sentiment. That evening, he tried to assure me that the president of the strongest country in the world definitely knew things that an Iranian teenager did not, and that the Shah was irremovable. Our heated argument ended without resolution after my father intervened.

That autumn, I had witnessed anti-government demonstrations by university and high-school students. As an ordinary young Iranian nothing could stop my yearning for freedom. I will never forget the first time I heard the chant “down with the Shah in the streets of central Tehran. Though the Pahlavi dynasty appeared invincible after 57 years of iron-fisted rule, it was doomed less than 14 months after Carter made his remarks.

As an anti-mullah activist, I closely follow developments in Iran, and international policies towards it. It’s clear that Western leaders remain prone to the same faulty assumptions today as they were in 1977.

Despite the visible mistakes made in dealing with the Shah before the 1979 revolution, these errors have been repeated in handling the mullahs’ regime over the past 45 years. Just as Carter labeled the monarchy an “island of stability,” many experts in the U.S. and Europe continued to relay the view that the theocratic dictatorship is here to stay, and that regime change is not feasible.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/a-real-genocide-in-sudan/

Secretary of State Antony Blinken has now announced that a “genocide” has been going on in Sudan. He blames not the regular Sudanese army, but the rebels fighting that army — the Rapid Support Forces (RSF). The media have been paying far too little attention to Sudan, where a real famine affecting close to 25 million people is now in progress. Twelve million people have been displaced in the country since 2023. As many as 150,000 people have been killed in the same period. But the international media haven’t wanted to pay attention to the real miseries in Sudan; they are determined, rather, to concentrate on the exaggerated miseries of life in Gaza, which we keep being told is “on the brink of famine,” but never quite goes over that brink. Charges including “genocide” and “war crimes” and “crimes against humanity” are bruited about whenever Israel is mentioned. But in Sudan, there is no way to blame Israel, so the media keep the focus on Gaza — the gift that keeps on giving to the legions of Israel-haters.

However, Blinken’s description of a “genocide” in the Sudan — a real genocide, not the nonexistent one that UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories Francesca Albanese, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, and Pope Francis all want to blame Israel for committing in Gaza — has brought about a sudden renewal of interest in the Sudan. One hopes, and expects, that more attention will be given to that continuing conflict and that “real genocide” in the Sudan, about which much of the media has been withholding essential information. For what has not been clearly stated is this: it’s a “genocide” committed by well-armed Arabs belonging to the RSF, who are engaged in murdering defenseless black Africans.