RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12606/tehran-lobbyists

The pro-Khomeinist chorus builds its case on an abstract notion in which, in dealing with the Islamic Republic, the choice is only between surrendering to its every whim or total military invasion.

The same lobbyists discourage any attempt by the major powers to adopt a policy aimed at helping, persuading and cajoling Iran into restoring its identity as a nation-state and behave like one by closing the chapter of a revolution that has plunged Iran and a good chunk of the Middle east into conflict and uncertainty.

As the clock ticks towards 8th of August, the deadline fixed by US President Donald Trump to unveil the next stage of his policy towards Iran, a choir of Western politicians, academics and businessmen is formed to urge him to stick to the policies of his predecessors since 1979. That, in turn, has encouraged elements in the Tehran leadership to argue against any change of policy and/or behavior by the Islamic Republic on a range of issues, as spelled out in US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s 12-point statement, including the attempt to “export” revolution to Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Bahrain and Yemen among others.

Last Tuesday Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammed Javad Zarif replied to Pompeo with a 15-point desiderata of his own, indicating Tehran’s choice of a delaying tactic.

The pro-Khomeinist chorus builds its case on an abstract notion in which, in dealing with the Islamic Republic, the choice is only between surrendering to its every whim or total military invasion.

In her latest book “Fascism: A Warning” former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright reduces policy in Iran to a simple question: “Do we want to repeat the adventure in Iraq?”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270580/western-europes-disconnect-islamic-antisemitism-ari-lieberman

This past week, a Swedish court found two “Palestinians” and a Syrian guilty of attempting to set fire to Sweden’s second largest synagogue through use of petrol bombs. The terrorist attack occurred on December 9, 2017 in the city of Gothenburg, and though no one was hurt, some 20 people present in the synagogue at the time of the attack were briefly forced to seek shelter in the synagogue’s cellar.

Two of the perpetrators received two years in prison for their respective roles in the hate crime while a third was sentenced to one year and three months. The punishment meted out by the court represents a travesty of justice and is nothing short of farcical. In the United States, a similar crime would have resulted in far greater punishment.

Under the New York Penal Law for example, this form of arson would have generated a term of between 5 to 25 years. In other words, had these criminals committed the crime in New York, their minimum sentence would have been more than double than what was handed down by the Swedish court. The meek and utterly pathetic Swedish sentence demonstrates a persistent unwillingness on the part of Sweden’s political and judicial echelons to address the growing problem of anti-Semitic hate crimes committed by Sweden’s migrant population.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12567/european-terrorism-batman-syndrome

“It is the ‘Batman syndrome’: the hero refuses to kill, he systematically saves his enemy who escapes and kills new victims until the hero catches up with him, and so on”. — Causeur magazine.

“These crimes will continue so long as the Republic leaves the enemy in peace”. — Ivan Riofoul, Le Figaro.

In the end, there might be still a region called “Europe”, but it may no longer enfold European culture.

The European Union lost €180 billion (USD $210 billion) in GDP due to terrorism between 2004 and 2016. The United Kingdom (€43.7 billion) and France (€43 billion) suffered the highest losses, followed by Spain (€40.8 billion) and Germany (€19.2 billion), according to a Rand Corporation study.

“Beyond those who have been directly physically affected by terrorist attacks, the extensive coverage of terrorist attacks through multiple media and social media channels has substantially increased the amount of people and companies that could be psychologically affected. This subsequently affects their economic behaviour”.

New statistics have also come from the Britain’s anti-terrorism office. 441 people have been arrested in the UK for terrorism in the last year alone, and 4,182 since the attacks of September 11, 2001. The threat of terrorism is exhausting Europe.

According to the Spanish “black book” of terrorism, 658 Europeans have been murdered in terror attacks on European soil, while 1,029 Europeans have been killed by them abroad. Half of the French army has been deployed within the French Republic to protect the civilian targets, such as schools, monuments, and religious sites. Europe’s armies are exhausted from patrolling the streets, to the point that NATO planners now fear that, over time, European armies “may get better at guarding railway stations and airports than fighting wars”. An officer who recently returned from Afghanistan for guard duty in Belgium said: “We are standing around like flowers pots, just waiting to be smashed”. Germany also sent troops into the streets for the first time since the Second World War.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12590/yazidis-need-help

There are two types of aid urgently needed by Yazidis at Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camps in northern Iraq, according to Saad Babir, media director of Yazda: psychological support for the victims of genocide, and basic services such as healthcare, food, water, electricity, heat, new tents — and even firetrucks and ambulances. Many Yazidis have died in IDP camps due to a lack of the latter two.

“When I was in the camps, I noticed that when UN officials came in to do an assessment, the Yazidi people were not able to tell them the truth about what was happening for fear of retaliation from the country’s leaders.” — Dawood Saleh, Yazidi author and activist.

“We wrote many reports to the UN, for it to consider Yazidis in the camps refugees, due to their dangerous situation, but our pleas were rejected. The UN has not reported on the situation accurately and sufficiently to enable Western countries to help Yazidis more.” — Dawood Saleh.

On June 13, Mark Green, administrator of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), finally offered some good news for the persecuted Christians and Yazidis in Iraq. In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal entitled: “Help Is on the Way for Middle Eastern Christians,” he wrote:

“Every day of delay brings persecuted communities that much closer to extinction. In Iraq alone, nearly 90% of Christians have fled in the past 15 years, emptying entire villages that had stood for more than a thousand years. The Yazidi population has been similarly decimated. Without immediate additional support, these groups may be forced to continue their unprecedented exodus, perhaps never to return to their ancient homes.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270563/my-attendance-rally-palestine-hugh-fitzgerald

I recently attended a Rally for Palestine in the main square of a medium-sized French city close to Marseille. There were flags aflutter of the State of Palestine, two booths full of anti-Zionist propaganda, French middle-aged leftists, committed to the cause, concolorous in their political views with their American cousins of circa 1970, all granola and granny glasses. There were pamphlets of testimonies by “Palestinians” describing the unbelievable behavior of the Zionists, when they started the 1948 war, and then the 1956 Sinai war, and then the 1967 war, and the 1973 war, and several wars made on the peaceful citizens of Gaza — all entirely unprovoked attacks by the monstrous Israelis. There were flags of Palestine for sale. There were photographs of Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas. There was something — I couldn’t make out the title — by Noam Chomsky. But what attracted my attention the most were the four outline maps of “Palestine” that were spread out on the ground, depicting an ever-expanding seizure of Arab land by the Zionist “settlers.”

The first map of “Palestine” showed it in 1946 as almost entirely Arab, with a handful of diminutive Jewish islands in an Arab sea.

The other three maps told a tale of inexorable Zionist expansion. The second map showed Palestine according to the U.N. Partition Plan of 1947. Palestine is still overwhelmingly Arab, but with a little more land area — still discontinuous bits — than in the 1946 map, assigned to the Jews. Then a map showing Israel just before, and then just after, the Six-Day War. No discussion of what caused the Six-Day War. No display of the Sinai as part of the territory Israel won in that war, or mention of how it was given back to Egypt by the Israelis.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/mexico-what-went-wrong-economy-based-on-exporting-poor-people/

Mexico gets a massive cash influx in remittances, American corporations get cheap labor, Democrats get voters . . .

Mexico in just a few days could elect one of its more anti-American figures in recent memory, Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

Obrador has often advanced the idea that a strangely aggrieved Mexico has the right to monitor the status of its citizens living illegally in the United States. Lately, he trumped that notion of entitlement by assuring fellow Mexicans that they have a “human right” to enter the United States as they please. For Obrador, this is an innate privilege that he promised “we will defend” — without offering any clarification on the meaning of “defend” other than to render meaningless the historic notion of borders and sovereignty.

Obrador went on to urge his fellow Mexicans to “leave their towns and find a life in the United States.” He has naturally developed such a mindset because he assumes as normal what has become, by any fair standard, a historically abnormal relationship.

Obrador is determined to perpetuate, if not enhance, the asymmetry. In the age of Trump, Obrador also reasons that the furor and hysteria of the American media toward the president represents a majority and a domestic grassroots pushback against the Trump administration — apparently because of Trump’s “restrictionist” view of enforcing existing immigration law. Polls, however, suggest otherwise, despite their notorious embedded anti-Trump bias.

http://carolineglick.com/europe-seeks-to-pin-down-president-trump-and-america/

National Security Advisor John Bolton said last Wednesday that while discussion of President Donald Trump’s decision to leave the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) has centered on the administration’s revulsion with its institutional anti-Israel bias, the move was really about restoring American control over U.S. foreign policy.

In his words: “We did talk about Israel [in setting out our reasons for leaving the UNHRC] because it’s singled out unfairly. But in many respects, Israel is, as the saying goes, ‘the canary in the mine shaft’ for the United States. Countries that attack Israel do so because they think it’s easier, but much of their criticism is really aimed at us.”

Bolton added, “Getting off of the council is an assertion of America’s determination to stick to its Constitution and not to recognize that there’s some ‘higher authority’ at the UN … to judge our performance or to give us advice on how to implement the constitution … That’s what this is about: self-government.”

The Trump administration’s determination to restore American power and independence in the international arena places it on a collision course with the European Union, whose perspective on the proper goal of international affairs is diametrically opposed to the administration’s.

American power abroad rests on military and economic power. Since the end of the Second World War, Europe has been militarily dependent on the U.S.

Rather than build their own military power to secure their interests and enable them to play a leading role in world affairs, European leaders have based their international position on their power as a voting bloc in international and transnational institutions, and on their collective financial power.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12522/canada-jihadis

The Canadian government is willing to go to great (and presumably costly) lengths to “facilitate” the return of Canadian jihadists, unlike the UK, for example, which has revoked the citizenship of ISIS fighters so they cannot return.

Attempts at deradicalization elsewhere have frequently turned out to be ineffective. In the UK, for example, a new government report shows that the vast majority of deradicalization programs are not only ineffective, but even counterproductive, and that those tasked with executing the programs “…would refuse to engage in topics over fears of bringing up matters of race and religion without appearing discriminatory”

In France, the country’s first and only deradicalization center closed in September 2017 after just one year, without having “deradicalized” a single individual. On the contrary, three participants reportedly behaved as if the center were a “Jihad academy”.

Canadians who go abroad to commit terrorism – predominantly jihadists, in other words – have a “right to return” according to government documents obtained by Global News. They not only have a right of return, but “… even if a Canadian engaged in terrorist activity abroad, the government must facilitate their return to Canada,” as one document says.

According to the government, there are still around 190 Canadian citizens volunteering as terrorists abroad. The majority are in Syria and Iraq, and 60 have returned. Police are reportedly expecting a new influx of returnees over the next couple of months.

The Canadian government is willing to go to great (and presumably costly) lengths to “facilitate” the return of Canadian jihadists, unlike the UK, for example, which has revoked the citizenship of ISIS fighters so they cannot return. The Canadian government has established a taskforce, the High Risk Returnee Interdepartmental Taskforce, that, according to government documents:

“… allows us to collectively identify what measures can mitigate the threat these individuals may pose during their return to Canada. This could include sending officers overseas to collect evidence before they depart, or their detention by police upon arrival in Canada.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12599/turkey-election-results

Despite Erdoğan’s clear victory, his ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) performed worse than expected.

Erdoğan may not be too happy having to share power.

The national joy over the re-election of a man known best to the rest of the world for his authoritarian, sometimes despotic rule, is not surprising in a country where average schooling is a mere 6.5 years.

Millions of anti-Erdoğan Turks are now terrified of the prospect of further torment under an Islamist-nationalist coalition show run by a president with effectively no checks and balances.

Nothing could have better explained the Turks’ joy over their president’s election victory on June 24 than a cartoon that depicts a cheering crowd with three lines in speech balloons: “It was a near thing,” one says. “We would almost become free.” And the last one says: “Down with freedoms!”

Turkey’s Islamist strongman, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, won 52.5% of the national vote in presidential elections on June 24. That marks a slight rise from 51.8% he won in presidential elections of August 2014. More than 25 million Turks voted for Erdoğan’s presidency. His closest rival, social democrat Muharrem Ince, an energetic former schoolteacher, won less than 16 million votes, or nearly 31% of the national vote.

The opposition candidate admitted that the election was fair. There have been no reports of fraud from international observers, at least so far.