RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://pjmedia.com/trending/pompeo-us-preparing-a-series-of-actions-against-venezuela/

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told Fox News that the U.S. is preparing a “series of actions” against Venezuela’s leaders to increase pressure on the government.

Reuters reports:

“You’ll see in the coming days a series of actions that continue to increase the pressure level against the Venezuelan leadership folks, who are working directly against the best interest of the Venezuelan people,” Pompeo said. “We’re determined to ensure that the Venezuelan people get their say.”

Pompeo gave no details on what those actions might be.

Last year, Washington imposed sanctions prohibiting trading new debt and equity issued by the Venezuelan government and its state oil company PDVSA. It has imposed several rounds of sanctions on government officials, including on Maduro.

Venezuela’s economy has collapsed under Maduro, with annual inflation running at 200,000 percent, and staple foods and basic medicine increasingly difficult to obtain, which has led to mass emigration.

Pompeo’s warning comes ahead of the annual United Nations General Assembly in New York next week attended by heads of state from around the world. Maduro has not attended the meetings since 2015 and this week said he may not attend the gathering because of concerns about his safety. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/09/fort_trump_and_the_future_of_eastern_europe.html

‘Fort Trump’ said the Polish president Andrzej Duda, during a White House press conference last week, would be an appropriate name to call the first American military base in Poland. Whether this Polish dream comes to pass or not is yet to be seen, but the strategic rationale behind it is anything but the joke U.S. pundits took it to be. It is, in fact, an encapsulation of the dilemma facing Eastern Europe and with it, NATO and the United States.

Barely concealed behind it is a multitude of challenges that must be addressed without delay if a serious crisis in Europe and the alliance is to be avoided. At the bottom of it is the seemingly unavoidable conflict over Muslim immigration. Virtually all of Eastern Europe refuses to accept any of them and is quite open about it. Politically-correct Western Europe, Germany first and foremost, is scandalized and wants to force the Eastern Europeans into repeating their own disastrous mistakes. And it does not help reminding them that Muslim integration has failed miserably in their own country with 64.8% of German Turks voting for Erdogan after 60 years of living in Europe. Nor does telling them that barely a century ago, much of the Balkans was under Ottoman rule, complete with infidel taxes and slave markets. Or that last year Poland alone issued 235,600 work permits to immigrants and is currently hosting over a million migrants, 40,000 of them from Vietnam.

Secondly, and here is where Fort Trump fits is, Poland and all of Eastern Europe simply do not trust the Western Europeans to defend them if push comes to shove. And it is enough to take a look at German military power in 2014 to realize that they are right. In that year, only 42 of 109 German Eurofighter planes were combat ready, as were 39 of 89 Tornado aircraft, while the Bundeswehr’s once mighty tank force had shrunk by 90%. And with 1.2% of GDP going to defense, it has certainly gotten much worse in the meantime. Is it any wonder that the Poles and all the rest of them, who have not forgotten what Russian domination means, will only feel safe if they have GIs stationed on their soil? Whether this is feasible now or in the future is another question, but it is important for Americans to understand why East Europeans feel the way they do and why the gulf between them and Western Europe seems to be widening.

Finally, there is an immediate issue that must be resolved if the alliance is not to suffer irreparable damage. It is a German-Russian deal called Nord-Stream 2 that is unquestionably directed against the interests of Eastern Europe. Perhaps it is worth recalling that the Nord Stream 1 pipeline to bring gas directly from Russia to Germany was called by the Polish foreign minister at the time “the Molotov-Ribbentrop pipeline.” This one deserves that appellation even more. By bypassing all of Eastern Europe, it stands to do great economic damage to Ukraine and other pass-through countries. It is a blatantly political Putin project and while Merkel continues to pretend that it is not, this is hypocrisy pure and simple. It is high time for Trump to say publicly that this project shall not pass.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13014/persecution-christians-march

If any measure of peace between Muslims and Christians is to prevail, no church can exist in the village, local Muslims said. “The only houses of worship that can ever be built in this village are Muslim places of worship for Allah.” — Watan International, Egypt.

“The Al Shabaab are now hunting down the children in Mogadishu, and we have moved the care center to a bit safer location…. The children look devastated and malnourished, so we as a secret church do appeal to our brothers and sisters in the free world to consider extending a hand to these persecuted children.” — Pastor of an underground church, Somalia.

“[I]t seems that the Muslims intentionally wanted to pick a fight with us.” — Pastor of King Jesus Church, Pakistan.

Muslim Slaughter of Christians

Pakistan: In a Lahore hospital, a throng of Muslim doctors, security guards, and medical staff beat Christian family members — one to death — because they tried to prevent another doctor from beating their pregnant sister. According to Anil Saleem, the pregnant woman’s brother, once they took her to the emergency labor ward at Services Hospital:

“Kiran [the pregnant woman] went to the doctor on duty, Dr. Saira, who was playing with her cell phone while sipping on tea. Dr. Saira told Kiran to wait outside until she finished her tea. We waited for some time, but since Kiran was experiencing severe pain, she again went inside the ward to request for immediate attention.”

The doctor instantly began cursing the pregnant woman for bothering her. “When my sister protested against the rude behavior, the doctor started slapping her, throwing her on the floor. She asked my sister how dare a Chuhri [a derogatory term for Christians] question her order?” On hearing the commotion, Anil, his brother, brother-in-law and a cousin entered the ward. Once she saw them, Dr. Saira shouted to the other doctors and security guards to lock the ward’s doors from the inside and “teach these Christians a lesson,” continued Anil: “Around 15 to 20 paramedical staff and security guards and eight to 10 young doctors … lunged at us with iron rods, chairs, leather belts and other things and started beating us.” The men were severely injured.

https://wp.tomgrossmedia.com/mideastdispatches/
IN HER NOVEL, J.K. ROWLING WARNS AGAINST ANTI-ZIONISM/ANTI-SEMITISM
IS 1984 HERE?
CRIMES UNDER THE LEADERSHIP OF A NOBEL LAUREATE
A BRAVE MAN IS POISONED

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13009/erdogan-germany-soccer

Two German national soccer team players of Turkish origin had a photo-op with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and gave signed club shirts as gifts to him. One of the shirts bore the message (in Turkish): “With respect to my president. Yours faithfully”.
After the first exit poll, thousands of Turks in German cities took to the streets, honked car horns and waved Turkish and AKP flags, celebrating Erdogan’s election victory until well after midnight.
“When do you finally realize that the most important requirements for integration are not language and upward mobility, but emotional bonds and identifying with the country in which one lives?” — Hamed Abdel-Samad, German-Egyptian political scientist.

This summer, the German public began to realize that there are hundreds of thousands of Germans of Turkish origin who revere as their leader not German Chancellor Angela Merkel, but Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

In a country where Erdogan is arguably the most-despised foreign leader, this revelation was probably bound to create a dust-up. For years, Erdogan’s human rights violations, his slander against Germany (where he sees “Nazi practices” at work) and the imprisonment in Turkey of German citizens on trumped-up terrorism charges have been regular news in the German media. The fate of German-Turkish journalist Deniz Yücel, arrested by the Turkish police in February 2016, then held in solitary confinement in a Turkish prison for almost a year, has caused as much public outrage in Germany as the imprisonment and subsequent house arrest of Pastor Andrew Brunson has in the United States. Cem Özdemir, a former chairman of Germany’s Green Party — who in 1994 became the first member of the German parliament who had Turkish roots — has called Erdogan a “hostage taker”.

So it was not surprising, shortly before the soccer World Cup, when two German national soccer team players of Turkish origin had a photo-op with Erdogan, that there was a national outcry.

In a meeting at London’s Four Seasons Hotel on May 15, Mesud Özil (Arsenal London) and Ilkay Gündoğan (Manchester City), two midfielders who had been called up by Germany’s coach, Joachim Löw, for the World Cup in Russia, gave signed club shirts as gifts to the Turkish president. The shirt given by Gündoğan — who holds only German citizenship — bore the message (in Turkish): “With respect to my president. Yours faithfully”. Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) immediately distributed the pictures through its media channels and used it in its election campaign.

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2018/09/genocide-lite-massacre-meaning/

Vehemence is the tribute egotism pays to guilt: ‘I ought to feel the wrongs of the world deeply because that is how good people feel them: therefore, if I express myself strongly enough, I will be seen as good.’ The stronger the words, even when grossly misused, the more radiant the projected virtue.

A young Frenchman whom I know had just returned from a year in Australia. For many young French people a year in Australia has become almost a rite de passage, their favoured destination for such a rite. And the young Frenchman did not regret his choice before he knuckled down to the serious business of having a career that he did not really want and would not really enjoy. Such is the fate, perhaps, of most of mankind, or at least of educated mankind.

Naturally I asked him how he had liked Australia. He had liked it very much. What he missed about France, though, was the sense of history, missing in Australia. I said that Australia had a very interesting history, though of course not a long one by European or Asian standards.

“You mean the genocide?” he said.

He was an intelligent young man, but not the kind to devote much attention to the details of history as against a general feeling of its presence or absence. And he knew that there had been a genocide in Australia, a fact that he had absorbed by a process of cultural osmosis rather than by more scholarly means.

I said that I thought there had been no genocide in Australia, that the claim that there had been such a genocide was misleading. It was true that the fate of the Aboriginal population had been in many respects an awful one, and no doubt very bad things had been done by settlers, but there was a tragic dimension to the encounter which required no genocidal intent to produce its results.

It turned out that we were talking at cross-purposes. He did not mean by genocide the attempt to kill an entire race of people, such as occurred in Rwanda. He meant something more along the lines of the effective destruction of a culture or extinction of a way of life by, for example, removal of children from their parents and bringing them up in a completely different culture, speaking a different language.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12975/killing-free-speech

The OIC’s media strategy encourages “accurate and factual portrayal of Islam. Emphasis should be directed at avoidance of any link or association of Islam with terrorism or the use of Islamophobic rhetoric… such as labeling criminal terrorists as ‘Islamic’ fascists, ‘Islamic’ extremists.”

That part of the strategy has already had much success across the Western world, where authorities and media do not want to label Muslim terrorists as Islamic, but routinely describe them as “mentally ill.”

The OICs highly ambitious plans to do away with freedom of speech go severely underreported in the West. Mainstream journalists do not appear to find it dangerous that their freedom of speech should be supervised by the OIC, while Western governments, far from offering any resistance, appear, perhaps for votes, to be cozily going along with everything.

The Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) is trying to curb your freedom of speech — yet again[1].

In June, the first “I 1st Islamic-European Forum for examining ways of cooperation to curb hate speech in the media,” initiated by the OIC, ironically but sadly took place at the Press Club Brussels Europe.

The director of the information department of the OIC, Maha Mustafa Aqeel, explained that the forum is part of the OIC’s media strategy[2] to counter “Islamophobia”:

“Our strategy focuses on interacting with the media, academics, and experts on various relevant topics, in addition to engaging with Western governments to raise awareness, support the efforts of Muslim civil society bodies in the West, and engage the latter in developing plans and programs to counter Islamophobia.”