RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12749/portugal-marxism

It is time for the people of Portugal to take a break from their concern over soccer scores to wake up to the dangerous attempt — within their own parliament — to turn their lovely sunny country into a bastion of neo-Marxism.

Since the dramatic October 4, 2015 legislative election in Portugal, which resulted in the fall of the newly-formed conservative government after less than two weeks, the country has been run by a far-left coalition.

On one hand, this is not surprising, given Portugal’s long-standing socialist tradition; like many European countries, it has managed to balance a free-market economy with heavy government taxation and powerful labor unions.

On the other hand, the ruling coalition now has the contribution of a toxic partner — the “Bloco de Esquerda” (“Left Bloc”) — which has been demanding implementation of its extreme social, economic and foreign policy agenda in exchange for political support. Since its formation in 1999, through the convergence of the neo-Marxists, Trotskyists, feminists and environmentalists, this bloc entered the scene like a political Trojan Horse, and gradually took root in academia and other cultural institutions, to the point at which it now wields actual parliamentary power.

This power has taken the form of an intensification of a neo-Marxist agenda, ranging from a near-successful attempt to legalize euthanasia, disproportional defense of animal rights, gender modification for anyone 16 and older, and a series of draconian anti-private-sector measures. Yet, not a word from Portuguese media platforms.

While other European countries are at a crossroads, seeking to regain control of their social structure and borders following years of extreme liberalism, Portugal is backtracking — falling prey to a group that organizes youth camps with indoctrination seminars, and holds conferences on topics such as: “Private Property is Theft: The Need for the Socialization of Productive Assets,” and “Boycott Israel; Free Palestine.”

https://amgreatness.com/2018/07/26/reforming-nato-is-the-only-way

Donald Trump recently ignited yet another firestorm by hedging when asked whether protecting the newest NATO member, tiny Montenegro, might be worth risking a war.

Of course, the keystone of NATO was always the idea that all members, strong and weak, are in theory equal. A military attack against one member, under Article V of the NATO charter, meant an attack on all members.

Such mutual defense is the essence of collective deterrence. An aggressor backs off when he realizes his intended target has lots of powerful friends willing to defend it.

But what happens when an alliance becomes so large and so diverse that not all of its members still share similar traditions, values, agendas or national security threats?

NATO’s original European members considered themselves kindred neighbors under the nuclear umbrella of the United States.

With the inclusion of West Germany in 1955, NATO’s original mission was altered somewhat. It was no longer tasked just with keeping the United States in and the Soviet Union out, but also with raising Germany up rather than keeping it down.

NATO collective defense was designed to offer breathing space against the superior forces of the Soviet Red Army—until the United States could bring in reinforcements or threaten to use its superior nuclear forces against would-be aggressors.

The alliance worked because the United States accepted that Europe needed American help to deter enemies in order to avoid repeats of the disasters of 1914 and 1939. With the exception of Turkey, the older members of NATO were generally seen as sharing the geographical space of Western Europe.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/270848/french-judge-protects-muslim-killer-elderly-woman-daniel-greenfield

Vichy lives.

ONE NIGHT IN APRIL last year, in the largely working-class neighbourhood of Belleville in Paris, a 27-year old man stole into the apartment of a neighbour, Sarah Halimi, the 65-year old retired director of a Jewish kindergarten, an orthodox Jewish widow with three adult children.

Malian-born Kobili Traoré brutally attacked the sleeping woman before throwing her from the window of her third-floor apartment. Witnesses heard him cry, “Allahu akbar” as he pushed her body onto the balcony, and then, “I killed the devil” as she fell.

The police, who had been called earlier by another family in the building, did not attempt to enter the apartment; afraid that this was a terrorist attack they waited outside the building for reinforcements. By the time reinforcements arrived, Halimi was dead. She had been tortured for an hour before she was killed; the living room was covered in blood.

The usual excuse for the Muslim killer was mental illness.

Yes, he hit her screaming ” Allahu akbar ” and suras of the Koran: first with the phone’s handset, then with his fists. Yes, he threw it well over his third floor balcony. But, he assures, he remains unable to explain why he has committed such an act of barbarism. “I do not know, I do not remember,” slips the young man with each question asked on the motive of the murder. He repeats: “I can not describe what was going on in my head.”

Maybe the suras of the Koran can help. Or his attempt to cover up his crime by shouting that the victim had committed suicide.

But don’t worry, the judge will protect the poor killer.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/07/death-of-the-romanovs-first-victims-of-soviet-ideology/One hundred years on, it’s worth remembering the first victims of the evil Soviet ideology.

‘What? What?” were the last words of Tsar Nicholas II, according to his murderer.

On July 17, 1918, at 2:15 a.m., the recently abdicated tsar; his wife Alexandra; their daughters Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia; their 12-year-old son Alexey; their doctor Evgeniy Botkin; chambermaid Anna Demidova; valet Alexey Trupp; and cook Ivan Kharitonov were roused from their sleep in their tightly guarded house in Ekaterinberg and led by Bolsheviks into the basement.

There, Iakov Iurovskii, under orders from Vladimir Lenin, told the Romanovs that because their relatives continued their offensive against Soviet Russia, the Executive Committee of the Ural Soviet had decided to shoot them. According to Iurovskii’s diary, Nicholas turned to face his family. Then, “as if collecting himself,” he turned around and asked, “Kакие? Какие?”

By 1917, Russia was ripe for revolution. The tsar’s slow-moving parliamentary reform and the 1905 revolution had shattered the unity of “the people.” War and food scarcity compounded the problem. In February 1917, riots broke out in Petrograd; in March the tsar was forced to abdicate. The provisional government was weak and short-lived, and the Bolsheviks came to power via a coup in October.

Who knows what one’s final thoughts are when faced with certain, murderous death. But this former emperor and current husband and father’s pain was surely tempered by his Christian faith. Days before, on July 14th, the Romanovs were paid an unexpected visit by a priest who had noted their astonishing forbearance and composure. Perhaps they had already accepted that their hope was in heaven, not earth.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12759/iran-khamenei-poem

However, one cannot ignore the fact that the man currently ruling Iran appears unsure of his impact on life, feels he is the victim of some unspecified injustice and sees a schizophrenic “id” (in the Freudian sense) that is “sometimes pure wine, sometimes deadly poison.”

“I wish I could get out of self-absorption that
Pulls me this way and that like a straw”
— Iran’s Supreme Guide, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

“From whom can I seek redress for the injustice done to me?” — Iran’s Supreme Guide, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

The annual poetry congress in Tehran, held at the beginning of July, included what state-owned or controlled media have described as an “historic literary event,” which, according to one establishment literary commentator, Muhammad-Ali Mujahedi, electrified those present.

The “event” was the public reading of a new ghazal (sonnet) by “Supreme Guide” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, whose poetical ambitions date back to his early youth more than 60 years ago. He has often said that he wished he had spent more time and energy on his poetry rather than on politics, and in anecdotal accounts of his life has cast himself as a disciple of such great contemporary classicist Persian poets as Amiri Firuzkuhi and Muhammad Qahreman, not to mention the great Mohammad-Hussein Shahriar and Rahi Mo’ayyeri.

However, still unsure of how his poetry might be received, Khamenei — who uses “Amin” as his literary sobriquet (takhallos in Arabic) — has always shied away from publishing a diwan or even reciting his poems in public. But because few poets could resist the temptation of reading their work to others, the “Supreme Guide” holds occasional private recitals of his poetry for a handful of confidants who have sworn never to reveal to others what they have heard or try to put it into print.

Thus, the event was a rare occasion, when Khamenei overcame his fear of not pleasing an audience and agreed to have his latest work recited to a group of fellow poets and aspiring poets.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270826/iran-flirts-disaster-joseph-puder

The Islamic Republic of Iran is playing with fire. To distract from its maneuvers in Syria, where along with its proxies – including the Lebanese Shiite Hezbollah terrorist group, as well as Iraqi, Afghan and Yemeni Shiite militias it controls – Iran in gunning for the Israeli border in the Quneitra province of southwestern Syria. Tehran is directing Hamas, the Islamic terror group who they fund and arm, to provoke Israel by attacking the Israeli communities around Gaza. In recent weeks, Hamas launched incendiary kites across the Gaza border that scorched a whopping 8,000 acres of farms and nature reserves causing an “ecological disaster” in Israel. In addition, over 200 rockets have been fired by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) terrorists into southern Israel in order to kill Israelis.

Last week, Hamas and PIJ agreed to an Egyptian-brokered ceasefire with Israel. These terror groups, however, continued to hammer away at Israeli civilians with more death-kites and rockets. This violation of a ceasefire undermined the understanding reached between Israel and Hamas following the “Operation Protective Edge” in 2014. Israel’s response to these provocations has been rather mild hitherto, mainly firing on the location where the incendiary kites and rockets are being launched. Israel is limiting its application of force to, perhaps, prevent a humanitarian crisis in Gaza — one entirely of Hamas’ own making. The real victims in this latest batch of attacks are the Israeli residents of southern Israel, who have endured three and a half months of terror and severe economic damages.

Visiting a kindergarten in Sderot (close to the Gaza border) last Monday (July 16, 2018), Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, “There is no such thing as a cease-fire that does not include the flaming kites and balloons.” He added, “I have ordered the military to stop the terror of incendiary kites and balloons.”

Last year, the new leader of Hamas Yahya Sinwar, told reporters that, “Relations with Iran are excellent, and admitted that, “Iran is the largest supporter of the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades with money and arms.” Sinwar also revealed this about the Iran-Hamas relationship: “The relationship today is developing and returning to what it was in the old days…this will be reflected in the assistance against Israel, and in the Hamas agenda to achieve the liberation.” In 2012, the Sunni radical Islamist Hamas broke with radical Islamist Shiite Iran over the butchery of hundreds of thousands of Sunni-Muslims by the Bashar Assad Alawite (breakaway Shiite sect) dictatorships and its Iranian allies, including the Shiite Hezbollah (Iran’s proxy).

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/07/danish_prosecutors_charge_imam_for_calling_for_the_killing_of_jews.html

Denmark passed a law making it a crime to incite or welcome the killing of people that took effect last year, and yesterday brought charges under it for the first time, against Imam Mundhir Abdallah. One small wrinkle: he was reading to his congregation from holy scripture. The Times of Israel reports:

Imam Mundhir Abdallah, who preaches in the Copenhagen neighborhood of Norrebro at the Masjid Al-Faruq mosque, which media have linked to radical Islam, is accused of citing a hadith or koranic narrative calling for Muslims to rise up against Jews.

“Judgement Day will not come until the Muslims fight the Jews and kill them,” Abdallah said in a Facebook and YouTube video post in March, according to a translation of the original Arabic provided by the US organization the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI).

It championed an idea at grave risk today: that those of us lucky enough to live in open societies should fight for the freedom of those born into closed ones.

Fifty years ago this paper devoted three broadsheet pages to an essay that had been circulating secretly in the Soviet Union for weeks. The manifesto, written by Andrei Sakharov, championed an essential idea at grave risk today: that those of us lucky enough to live in open societies should fight for the freedom of those born into closed ones. This radical argument changed the course of history.

Sakharov’s essay carried a mild title — “Thoughts on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom” — but it was explosive. “Freedom of thought is the only guarantee against an infection of mankind by mass myths, which, in the hands of treacherous hypocrites and demagogues, can be transformed into bloody dictatorships,” he wrote. Suddenly the Soviet Union’s most decorated physicist became its most prominent dissident.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/20/opinion/andrei-sakharov-essay-soviet

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2018/07/experimenting-children-gender-dysphoria/

Paediatricians with a total of 931 years’ experience reported only 12 cases of gender confusion, meaning just one genuine case might be expected every 76 years. Now, each year in Australia, hundreds are presenting for treatment which the ascendant orthodoxy decrees must be provided.

Four studies recently published in Pediatrics, the prestigious journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics, confirm the experimental basis of the “Dutch Protocol” of medical intervention for childhood gender dysphoria now practised throughout the Western world, including special clinics in Australian children’s hospitals. They reveal the tunnel vision of appraisal of the nature of associated mental and social disorder, when viewed through the lens of the ideology of gender fluidity. That ideology maintains there is no such binary entity as a girl and a boy: our gender exists on a variable locus on the “rainbow”. It perceives associated mental disorder to result from parental and societal frustration of fulfilment of a chosen gender distinct from chromosomal reality. This frustration is the root of the problem, and gender dysphoria is but one symptom of an underlying, innate mental disorder. The ideology of gender fluidity would lead to the conclusion that confused children should have their desired gender affirmed by the medical profession, practised by society and enforced by the law.

Known as the Dutch Protocol because it was developed in the Netherlands, the medical pathway may result in massive intervention into the mind and body of a child despite the lack of scientific basis. The newly released “Australian Standards of Care and Treatment Guidelines for Trans and Gender Diverse Children and Adolescents” publicly declare they are not based on the usual standards that justify Western medical therapy, including biological plausibility, proof of effect and absence of complications in bench studies, animal experiments and human trials. Rather, they are based on “clinical consensus … and a limited number of non-randomised clinical guidelines and observational studies”: in other words, on the “expert” opinion of the doctors running the clinics.