RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://pjmedia.com/spengler/chutzpah-in-strasbourg/

ORBAN IS THE MOST POPULAR LEADER IN EUROPE

Chutzpah, an Aramaic word for unbridled effrontery, came to America via Yiddish. It’s the man who enters a revolving door after you and comes out first. It’s the fellow who murdered his parents and asks for clemency because he’s an orphan. And now it’s the backers of an unelected supranational European government casting a vote of censure against Hungary. The European parliament in Strasbourg said this week that it

Regrets that the developments in Hungary have led to a serious deterioration of the rule of law, democracy and fundamental rights over the past few years, inter alia, freedom of expression, academic freedom, the human rights of migrants, asylum seekers and refugees, freedom of assembly and association, restrictions and obstructions to the activities of civil society organisations, the right to equal treatment, the rights of people belonging to minorities, including Roma, Jews and LGBTI people, social rights, the functioning of the constitutional system, the independence of the judiciary and of other institutions and many worrying allegations of corruption and conflicts of interest, which, taken together, could represent an emerging systemic threat to the rule of law in this Member State.

The notion that minorities, religious, sexual or otherwise, are under threat in Hungary is at variance with the facts; in the case of the Jews, as I reported in this space some months ago, it is diametrically opposite to the facts. Jewish life flourishes in Budapest as in no other European capital.

Prime Minister Orban’s crime in the eyes of the European Parliament may be just the opposite: He was elected for a third term last April 8 by a two-thirds majority, which makes him the most popular leader in Europe. In fact, he may be the only popular leader in Europe; I cannot think off-hand of another European head of government with a popularity rating of more than 40%. Germany’s two ruling parties, the Christian Democrats and Social Democrats, together poll at just 46%. France’s Emmanuel Macron stands at 31%. The two Italian populist parties, who have mutually incompatible agendas and entirely different constituencies, poll at around 30% each. Spain is ruled by a minority party. Britain’s Theresa May polls around 25%.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/09/united-nations-must-recognize-christian-genocide-iraq-syria/

The designation of ‘genocide’ would free up the flow of much-needed aid to some of the world’s most persecuted people.

This week, the United Nations Human Rights Council began its third (and last) regular session of the year, where a major ally of persecuted Middle Eastern Christians will again implore the U.N. to recognize the genocide of Syrian and Iraqi Christians.

At the 39th UNHRC session, which runs from September 10 to September 28, the European Centre for Law and Justice will be presenting an appeal to the Council to recognize ISIS’s ongoing, rampant persecution of Christians in Iraq and Syria as a “genocide,” as it’s enshrined in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

The European Centre for Law and Justice (ECLJ) is the American Center for Law and Justice’s European affiliate, and it has been a consistent advocate for persecuted minorities in the Middle East. Their testimony at this session will be their seventh declaring that ISIS is committing genocide against Christians and other religious and ethnic minorities. Before this, their most recent testimony was May 25, when they requested that the U.N. appoint a special adviser to lead an investigative team to collect and preserve evidence of the genocide.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/09/irans_shaky_foundations.html

Current U.S. 5th Fleet exercises designed to ensure freedom of navigation in the Persian Gulf and Red Sea are a welcome sight.

The Islamic Republic of Iran has spent years extending its claims across the Middle East, the Persian Gulf, and the Red Sea. It has sponsored wars and militias in Iraq, Syria, Yemen plus terror organizations in Lebanon and the Gaza Strip, along with farther-flung activities in Africa and South America. That, plus its huffing and puffing, have made the mullahs look ten feet tall.

Iran claims to have designed and built a new jet fighter plane.
It claims security control of the Persian Gulf and Strait of Hormuz and threatens to block oil exports from other countries if Iran is constrained by sanctions. Iran has ordered the U.S. Navy out of the Gulf.
It announced a military pact with Syria that it claims will give it access to all of Syrian territory.

But the regime is on shaky ground.

The “jet fighter plane” in the Iranian video is a 1950s-era American F-5F.
The United States Navy is in, and will remain in, the Gulf, and, in fact, the last Iranian harassment of U.S. Navy ships was in mid-2017, after the Navy received orders to respond to unsafe Iranian activity around American ships.
The military pact appears mainly a way for Iran to try to recoup its multibillion-dollar losses in Syria by claiming contracts for reconstruction when the war ends. It isn’t clear who the Iranians think will actually pay for reconstruction.
And, pact or no pact, Israel is maintaining red lines preventing an Iranian military buildup. Israel has acknowledged some 200 raids into Syria.

Seth Frantzman reported for the Jerusalem Post on September 9, 2018 about a precision Iranian ballistic missile attack on Kurds deep inside of Iraq which hit the exact building–some accounts say exact room–where Kurdish opposition leaders were meeting. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps was sending a message to others besides Kurds with this strike.

Like their otherwise centuries’ old rivals for regional hegemony–Turks and (mostly Sunni) Arabs as well–the one thing all three are in agreement about is the denial of political and even basic human rights to some forty million native people who pre-date at least the Turks and Arabs in their region by millennia. Both of the latter have outlawed Kurdish language and culture. The twenty two million Kurds in Turkey–about a fourth of the latter’s total population–have been renamed “Mountain Turks” by Ankara; and besides Saddam Hussein’s Anfal Campaign in “Arab” Iraq in the 1980s, which took some 200,000 Kurdish lives, the title of the Kurdish scholar, Ismet Cherif Vanly’s book, The Syrian ‘Mein Kampf ‘Against The Kurds (Amsterdam, 1968), says all you need to know about how Syrian Arabs have dealt with them as well.

The Iranians have continued hanging Kurdish dissidents again this week. All three nations have slaughtered either tens or hundreds of thousands of Kurds during the past century.

Please pay close attention to these excerpts from the JP report…

“The big picture then is an Iranian missile threat throughout the region… US allies have missile defense technology to confront the Iranian threat. Israel has a layered system of missile defense including Iron Dome, David’s Sling and the Arrow program, while Saudi Arabia has used Patriot missile batteries to stop the Houthi missiles. This has proven effective. It is also why the IRGC decided to test out its missiles by targeting defenseless Kurdish groups in northern Iraq.” Those defenses, of course, could be overwhelmed by huge numbers of missiles being fired at the same time.

Note, please, that very last line in the quote above about “defenseless” Kurds. Now let’s really begin…

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12998/hungary-eu-censure

“We need a new European Commission that is committed to the defense of Europe’s borders.” — Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.
“A few months ago … there was an election in Hungary. The Hungarian people decided what should happen, and during the election campaign we discussed all of the issues — including CEU, the NGOs, and all of the important political issues. And the people decided on these issues. And now the European Parliament is taking upon itself the task of overruling the decision made by the people of Hungary and forcing the Hungarian government to implement what they are attempting to impose on us in place of the people’s decision.” — Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.
“Hungary and the Hungarian people have been convicted because we have proven that migration is not needed and that it can be stopped.” — Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjártó.
“Hungary’s decisions are made by the voters in parliamentary elections. What you are claiming is no less than saying that the Hungarian people are not sufficiently capable of being trusted to judge what is in their own interests. You think that you know the needs of the Hungarian people better than the Hungarian people themselves…. This report applies double standards, it is an abuse of power, it oversteps the limits on spheres of competence, and the method of its adoption is a treaty violation.” — Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.

The European Parliament has voted to pursue unprecedented disciplinary action against Hungary over alleged breaches of the European Union’s “fundamental values.” The EU has accused the Hungarian government of attacks against the media, minorities and the rule of law.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has denied the charges, and said they are a retaliation for his government’s refusal to take in migrants from the Muslim world.

The censure represents another salvo in a showdown between pro- and anti-EU forces over populism and nationalism ahead of European Parliament elections in May 2019.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12997/germany-migration-dissent

Hans-Georg Maassen, the head of Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, BfV, has dismissed claims that right-wing gangs chased non-Germans during the late August demonstrations in Chemnitz after the fatal stabbing of a German by a group of migrants. That news flew in the face of Chancellor Merkel’s repeated use of the charge of a “hunt on foreigners” in describing the incidents.
According to the domestic affairs spokesperson for Merkel’s Christian Democratic party, Maassen “would answer parliamentarians’ questions about his comments at special meetings next week. In these “hearings,” politicians are expected to bring more pressure to bear on the intelligence chief, in an apparent attempt to make him recant his statements.
Maassen is not the only one in the crosshairs of the mainstream politicians. Rattled by the recent wave of protests against country’s open-door immigration policy, establishment parties across the political spectrum are calling for the populist anti-immigration Alternative for Germany party (AfD) to be placed under police surveillance.
In early September, authorities in the states of Lower Saxony and Bremen placed their regional chapters of Young Alternative, the AfD’s youth wing, under surveillance citing “suspected ties to extremists.”

In Communist East Germany, truth-telling involved risks. The penalty for it was often loss of one’s professional career and social status, if not more. Today, challenging the state-approved narrative in Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Germany can sometimes have similar consequences.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271301/suggestion-nikki-haley-hugh-fitzgerald

It was recently revealed that the photograph posted online by an Arab propagandist, Abdullah Alsaafin, of a two-year-old girl identified as Bayan Abu Khamash, supposedly killed by Israeli bombs, had in fact been taken from Instagram, where the girl was identified as an American two-year-old, Elle Lively McBroom.

“War is deceit,” said Muhammad, and the uncovering of deceit is a legitimate defense in such a war. Now that we know the source of that photo, there are several things that might be done. Instagram or Twitter or wherever Abdullah Alsaafin has an account might be publicly appealed to, to remove his account in light of the fact that he has been caught malevolently misusing, for the purposes of propaganda, a photograph on Instagram. Instagram cannot police every misuse of its contents, but when such a blatant and dangerous example is brought to its attention, it has a responsibility to act. It should not only remove Alsaafin’s account (if he has an Instagram account; otherwise the places where he posted the false photo should remove his account), but explain that it is doing so because of his malevolent theft, with malice aforethought, of a two-year-old’s photograph.

This is one of many examples where the Arabs have used fauxtography. Recently, I was informed, Arab propagandists had posted pictures in the aftermath of the earthquake in Mexico, identifying them as scenes in Gaza. Photographs of destruction in Syria have been similarly applied. During the 2006 war in Lebanon, Hezbollah — and willing Western journalists — engaged in fauxtography of every kind. Burning tires in the smoky distance were presented as burned out buildings, an untouched Qur’an was carefully placed in the middle of rubble, and then deliberately set on fire, long after the building it was said to have been in had been reduced to rubble.

https://spectator.us/2018/09/macron-salvini-battle-europes-future/

The first sign that Matteo Salvini was destined to do battle with Emmanuel Macron came in June, a few days after he was named Italy’s interior minister. Salvini, whose party, the League, wants to cut immigration drastically, announced that a German-registered rescue ship carrying 629 aspiring migrants from Africa would not be allowed to dock in Sicily.

Macron reacted with disgust. ‘The policy of the Italian government,’ a spokesman for his political movement announced, ‘is nauseating.’ Salvini responded that if the French wanted to show their open–heartedness, they might make good on their unfulfilled pledge to feed and shelter some of the 100,000 African migrants Italy had until recently been receiving each year.

This week, what had seemed like a personal antipathy between the two men revealed itself as an all-out battle for European hearts and minds. When Libyan rebels attacked government positions in Tripoli, threatening the agreements Italy has made with the Libyan coast guard to limit departures of migrants from the shores of North Africa, Salvini mused aloud to reporters. ‘There’s someone behind this,’ he said. ‘Someone who started a war [in 2011] that should never have been started, someone who calls for elections without sounding out his allies and the people on the ground, someone who tries to force the issue by exporting democracy, which never works.’ He urged journalists eager to know what he meant by that to ‘ask Paris’.

Days earlier, Salvini had invited the Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán to Milan to issue a manifesto. It was Orbán who exhorted Europe to harden its borders during the great overland migration from war-torn Syria and points east in 2015. Standing under the awning of a pizzeria in Milan, Orbán singled out Salvini as ‘my hero and my comrade in destiny’. And he singled out Macron as his nemesis. ‘There are two camps in Europe,’ Orbán said, ‘and one is headed by Macron. He is at the head of the political forces supporting immigration. On the other hand, we want to stop illegal immigration.’