RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270440/riots-jordan-put-gulf-states-edge-ari-lieberman

The oil-rich Gulf States – Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates – are not known for easily parting with their petro-dollars. But this miserly instinct dissipates when the Sheikhdoms perceive a direct threat to the stability of their respective governments. On Sunday, the three nations led by Riyadh pledged to provide Jordan with a cash infusion of $2.5 billion to help the arid kingdom prop up its free-falling economy. Separately, the European Union announced that it would provide Jordan with $23.5 million. The hefty Gulf State bailout is testament to how seriously they view the problem.

Jordan has recently experienced a spasm of popular unrest and widespread demonstrations, sparked by tax increases and painful austerity measures implemented by King Abdullah II’s prime minister, Hani Mulki, to deal with growing debt. In 2016, cash-strapped Jordan secured a $723-million loan from the International Monetary Fund. The economic reforms instituted by PM Mulki were tied to this loan but proved to be widely unpopular.

Jordanians watched as subsidies on basic food items were eliminated and standards of living declined while taxes increased. Paychecks got smaller while everything became more expensive. This was enough to push Jordanians over the edge. As the riots spread to every province and major town, Abdullah moved quickly to quell the unrest by firing his prime minister and reversing previously implemented tax hikes and austerity measures.

The move has ameliorated tensions and demonstrations have tapered off for now but the underlying problems highlighting the monarchy’s fragility remain. Jordan is a poor, mostly desert country that produces nothing and relies principally on handouts for its existence. Unemployment hovers at a staggering 18 percent and the national debt continues to rise.

https://edwardcline.blogspot.com/2018/06/a-night-in-globalist-box_12.html

Make sure you’re not retiring in dirty pants, or having an Islamophic seizure, or Carr the globalist floor walker will sentence you to a night in the box. Or more months or years, so you can get your mind right, and “tolerant” and submissive. I refer to the arrest and instant imprisonment of Tommy Robinson, on May 25th, without so much as a show trial – public or secret – for thirteen months in a prison allegedly housing a low population of Muslim prisoners who could nevertheless plot his murder.

This points to an act of government called a “bill of attainder.” Britain, as well as the U.S., has a history of such exercises of state power. I touch on bills of attainder in my article, “Magna Carta in the Dustbin” from May 29th, but will elaborate on the subject here.

Robinson was arrested ostensibly for a “breach of the peace,” but was actually charged with violating the terms of a prior arrest in Luton, for filming members of a grooming rape gang outside the Canterbury courthouse. Overall, Prime Minister Theresa May just wanted to shut him up about the grooming gangs her government had failed to combat lest she and her government be accused of racism and bigotry; most of the victims were white British girls and the rapists were Pakistani; Islamic racism was permitted for “diversity’s” sake. It leaves open the unasked question: So, who were the racists?

https://www.wsj.com/articles/immigration-standoff-shakes-merkels-fragile-government-1528912541

BERLIN—A rebellion over immigration in German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative bloc is threatening the stability of her fragile coalition.

Ms. Merkel’s weekend decision to veto a plan by her interior minister aimed at controlling and reducing illegal migration—and the minister’s refusal to back down—has shattered an uneasy truce between conservative backers and opponents of her liberal asylum policy.

At issue is one measure in a 63-point action plan by Interior Minister Horst Seehofer —one that would instruct border police to turn back migrants found to have applied for asylum in other countries of the European Union’s border-free area.

After Ms. Merkel opposed the measure, Mr. Seehofer, in a rare revolt by a minister against the head of the German government, on Tuesday canceled the planned presentation of his plan, declaring the measure integral to any attempt at bringing illegal immigration under control.

There appeared to be few avenues left on Wednesday for Mr. Seehofer other than to compromise or resign—an unprecedented break in the conservative movement that would leave the government without a parliamentary majority.

Residents gather at the Bavarian Transit Center Manching/Ingolstadt for asylum-seekers in Ingolstadt, Germany. Photo: Alexandra Beier/Getty Images

The standoff has reignited a dispute that erupted in 2015 when Ms. Merkel opened the country’s borders to hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers, some of whom had become stranded in Eastern Europe. About 1.4 million entered the country in the wake of her decision and while the flow has slowed, around 10,000 continue to stream in each month.

The chancellor’s open-door policy came close to tearing her conservative movement apart and the split was only mended after Mr. Seehofer, then governor of Bavaria and the chancellor’s most vocal in-house critic, agreed to join her new government in March. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.wsj.com/articles/help-is-on-the-way-for-middle-eastern-christians-1528931329

When Islamic State captured the Iraqi town of Telskuf four years ago this week, terrorists desecrated the local Chaldean Catholic church and beheaded congregants on the altar. The slaughter was only one episode from the genocide ISIS waged on Christians and other vulnerable religious groups across its so-called caliphate, nearly exterminating some of the region’s most ancient faith communities.

The U.S. stands with the persecuted religious and ethnic communities of the Middle East. And the federal government won’t rest until these oppressed people receive the help they need to thrive again. That’s the message I will deliver personally to Christian and Yazidi leaders when I visit Iraq this month. On behalf of President Trump, I will assure them that American assistance will soon turn from an inconsistent trickle into a steady stream.

President Trump already has directed U.S. armed forces to finish the fight against the ISIS barbarians, and today the group no longer holds territory in Iraq. But as Vice President Pence said at this year’s religious broadcasters convention, “Victory in combat is only half the battle.” The president directed his administration last October to end its support for United Nations programs that fail to provide aid for every group in need. Now, the U.S. Agency for International Development, which I lead, is charged with providing more effective and direct support to persecuted religious and ethnic minorities.

Four days after Vice President Pence announced the shift, I directed USAID to develop aid projects that address the challenges facing Christians, Yazidis and other minority groups in the region. To this end, USAID has redirected more than $60 million in humanitarian and stabilization assistance to provide infrastructure support and lifesaving aid in Northern Iraq. The money has helped rebuild schools, hospitals, power stations and wells, and eased the transition of those returning home. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/trump-kim-and-the-boys-in-the-camps/

President Trump did an excellent thing at the State of the Union address last January. He honored Ji Seong-ho, an almost superhuman defector from North Korea. Ji escaped the country on crutches. I saw him at the Oslo Freedom Forum a couple of weeks ago. As I wrote, “he projects an air of ebullience. I can’t help thinking he is happy to be alive.”

Trump has said some shocking things in recent hours. For example, he said the following about Kim Jong-un: “He is very talented. Anybody who takes over a situation like he did at 26 years of age and is able to run it, and run it tough. I don’t say he was nice or say anything about it. He ran it, few people at that age — you could take one out of 10,000, could not do it.”

It is unclear how old Kim is. Probably, he was 28 when he inherited the dictatorship. But that is a triviality.

He has certainly “run it tough,” if that’s the way you want to characterize Kim’s rule over North Korea. His father chose him for his dictatorial mettle. This apple did not fall very far from the tree. Kim Jong-il passed over his two older sons to anoint the youngest, Jong-un. (If you would like to read more about this, consult my 2015 book, Children of Monsters.)

Two years ago, I interviewed another North Korean defector, Jung Gwang-il. (All North Korean escapees are considered defectors, because all North Koreans are supposed to belong to the state, body and soul.) Jung was in the gulag, like so many of his countrymen. Let me give a paragraph from the piece I wrote about him. It is a horrible paragraph, and you may wish to skip it, but here it is, in the interest of truth:

In the winter, the prisoners were made to get wood from the mountain. Many were injured or killed, as the trees fell or the logs rolled down the mountain. Other prisoners would not pause to bury the dead. It would have taken too much energy in the frozen ground. They carried the bodies back to a shed next to a latrine. At night, when you went to the latrine, you could hear moaning from the shed — some weren’t dead yet. By the spring, they were all dead, of course. The bodies had formed a great gelatinous mass. And Jung and the others would have to break it apart, with shovels, and bury it.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/iran-nuclear-deal-disaster-from-the-start/

The more we learn about it — as Iranian and Obama-administration deceptions are uncovered — the more we know it was a disaster from the start.

When Donald Trump withdrew from the so-called Iran deal in early May, almost all conventional wisdom in Washington was aghast.

The Left thought nullification would fast-track Iranian proliferation, incite more Iranian terrorism and adventurism, estrange our allies, and alienate a possible new friend.

Many on the conservative side (aside from Never Trumpers who are against anything Trump is for, including their own prior policies) thought it would have been wiser to back out slowly, or at least to have waited first for the duplicitous Iranians to get caught in clear violations, or to coordinate a joint withdrawal with the Europeans.

Few of these critics ever quite understood that the deal was already a stinking corpse, long overdue for burial. Iranian cunning and the strategic thinking about the asymmetrical deal had always aimed at the following trajectory:

Ostensibly postpone a bomb now, at a time when the regime was facing growing unrest and near bankruptcy from sanctions — and thus was in no position anyway to build an arsenal of bombs and missiles.

Keep occasionally cheating to ensure the apparatus for bomb-making was successfully hibernated — and therefore easily restarted at a future date.

Enjoy hundreds of billions of dollars in new commercial income over the next ten to 15 years to quiet domestic unrest, and to bank enough cash to go fully nuclear in the future.

Forge the so-called Shiite Crescent to the Mediterranean, by dominating Bashir al-Assad’s weak Syria, exploring anti-Sunni possibilities in Yemen, and bulking up Hezbollah’s Lebanon, while stocking a huge arsenal of preemptive missiles based near Israel. Hope that Iran’s regional strategic stature would only improve over the next decade.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12390/anti-west-imam

The purpose of brainwashing their students with inciting anger and hatred clearly seems to be to instill in them the notion that they are being victimized by the West.

Some members of the so-called “victim” community, such as Islamist leaders, take advantage of this victimhood status. They use it as a shield and then become the victimizers by crushing people in their own countries.

Such ideas and values prevent ordinary people and scholars from focusing on the crimes against humanity that Islamist leaders of state and non-state entities commit.

The accommodation of Muslim extremists by leaders in the West not only helps them recruit more people to target Westerners, incite anti-Western, anti-Christian, and anti-Semitic sentiments, but more importantly, it tramples the millions of ordinary Muslims who seek to promote in their homelands values such as the institutions of democracy, freedom of speech, separation of religion and state, the independence of education and the judiciary, and equal justice under the law.

In my high school in Syria, which was directed by the Iranian regime through its embassy staff in Damascus (Iran has several schools in Syria and sends teachers and imams there), every student was forced to attend daily prayer at noon. We were commanded to stand behind an extremist clergyman, mimic his actions, and recite the prayer. After the prayer, we had no choice but to listen to the preaching of a fundamentalist imam who was most likely employed by the regime to advance their ideological and political interests.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/270412/poison-society-german-editorial-migrants-and-daniel-greenfield

I usually don’t do this. But I thought that this editorial from Germany’s Tagesspiegel was worth translating at least in part.

After the murder of Susanna Maria Feldman, a 14-year-old Jewish girl in Germany, Tagesspiegel takes its ‘spiegel’ and takes a hard look at the moral hazard of accommodating migrants.

The murder of Susanna F. – Poison for Society – Tagesspiegel

At the end of his remarks on the case, Müller, the head of the Police of Westhessen, finished a sentence with the word “but”, which suggests that he knows that this case has a meaning that goes beyond the specific criminal case…

Mueller spoke about the murder of Susanna , 14 years old, allegedly raped and murdered by a man who continued to live in Germany after his asylum application was rejected. An act that, like a cruel and cynical commentary on refugee policy, becomes public in just these days, in which the treatment of migrants and asylum seekers is also top priority at the political level.

The chief of police speaks of a ” repugnant crime, ” and then says “but.” “But” it was a 13-year-old refugee who had contributed significantly to solving the case. In an effort not to link the words murder and refugee, he has linked Solution and Refugee, as if it were the same thing. With that, he’s just tapped into the generalization trap he was trying to warn against.

The country looks after the murders in Freiburg and Kandel , after Maria and Mia, now turns in horror to Wiesbaden, to Susanna…

The feeling of insecurity will continue to increase, and with it the resentment of the authorities, of politicians, of all whom they believe are allowing it to take place. The anger at those refugees who instead of being grateful for food, lodging and lodging turn criminal – especially when the victims come from the society that welcomed them.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270396/strange-case-maajid-nawaz-joshua-winston

First of all, let me clearly define my terms – Islamism is essentially synonymous with terrorism in my mind, because their goals are the same. Islamism is the political element of Islam which seeks to establish a global caliphate that sees everyone living under sharia. Sharia, as we know, in spite of the lies that are continually told by the Muslim darlings of the UK’s media, does not take kindly to gays, women, and people of other faiths.

Maajid Nawaz was once part of Hizb ut-Tahrir, which I consider to be a terrorist organization for the reasons given above. Hizb ut-Tahrir is banned in all Arab Muslim countries, with the exception of Yemen, the UAE, and Lebanon. It is also banned in some other countries, too: Germany, China, Russia, Egypt, Turkey, etc. Yet Hizb ut-Tahrir still holds demonstrations in Central London to this day. This is a terrorist organization that Mr. Nawaz was part of, promoted, and helped grow to its size today. Nawaz also allegedly spent time in jail because of his participation with Hizb ut-Tahrir and his other Islamist activities.

Today Maajid is the darling of the UK’s media. Apparently being an ex-member of a terrorist organization makes one an expert on how best to spread Islam peacefully across the UK. Maajid is still a fierce promoter of Islam. He is still looking to spread it worldwide, but he’s hoping that he can reform Islam and give us the soft version, the version without all the calls to violence and the need to establish a caliphate. To that I say, good luck, and, further, you can keep it, because I’m not buying into it. I do not want Islam in any of its guises.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270354/islamic-insanity-netherlands-daniel-greenfield

On a pleasant Wednesday in Schiedam, a Dutch city near Rotterdam’s sizable Islamic population, a 26-year-old Syrian refugee stood on a balcony waving an axe and shouting, “Allahu Akbar.”

The police arrived at the modernistic dark and gray building, limned in steel and glass, where the nameless Syrian was shouting about the supremacy of his religion and its axe to all others in Schiedam.

The Dutch cops tried to calm him down. Instead he attacked a police dog which later died of its injuries. After some failed attempts at negotiating his surrender, the Syrian was shot in the leg. Paramedics loaded him into one of two yellow ambulances dispatched for the occasion and maneuvering past a police Volvo took him off to be an even bigger burden on the taxpayers of the Netherlands.

Even before murdering a police dog, the Syrian refugee had been in contact with various aid agencies. By the time he’s done being treated, evaluated, counseled, tried, defended, prosecuted and judged, he will have cost the Netherlands enough money to feed an entire Syrian city for a day.

“It is certain that he had no religious motives,” Mayor Lamers insisted. “The most important thing is that he first receives the right care, that also applies to his father. As soon as he is recovered, there will probably be a long-term admission to a clinic.”

Make that two Syrian cities for a week.