RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12464/iran-hollowing-out

The analogies with the former East Germany suggest that Iran, too, is ripe for regime change. They also suggest that a change may come in weeks, months or years, depending on chance events and particularly on whether the local authorities and their security forces, at least in some areas, get tired of killing people.

What is likely to push such developments forward? The answer is that the new American policy, whether by chance or intent, may be as good as anything.

On December 28, 2017, major protests against the Iranian regime broke out in Mashhad and quickly spread to numerous other urban centers. Mostly merely noisy at first, some turned violent and eventually the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) suppressed the phenomenon, killing some and arresting thousands of others. Protests have continued, but news about them is scanty. How are they to be evaluated?

There are interesting parallels with the twilight of the East German regime. By a coincidence, the Iranian regime is in its fortieth year and the East German regime suddenly collapsed just after its leaders had held a large-scale pompous celebration of its fortieth anniversary in the capital, East Berlin.

At its downfall, the government and security apparatus of the so-called “German Democratic Republic” appeared to be, as always, thoroughly in control, yet it took only a few chance events to start a domino effect that swept it away. There was the swell of holidaymakers who drove their polluting “Trabis” into Hungary or Czechoslovakia and thence via Austria into West Germany, because those East European countries had stopped preventing them. Beginning on September 4, 1989, there were the Monday marches that set out after the morning “Prayer for Peace” in Leipzig’s St. Nicholas Church.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12463/cyprus-ethnic-cleansing

“Why is there not peace yet? How can we make peace when we have rabid murderers living among us? Instead of prosecuting them, we enable them to appear on TV and to boast about their murders…. If you do not even bring to account a murderer who says, ‘killing was my art,’ who will you bring to account?” — Şener Levent, the editor-in-chief of the Turkish Cypriot newspaper Afrika.

So far, these “rabid murderers” have not been held accountable for the slaughter of innocent Greek Cypriots: the ethnic cleansing of northern Cyprus. The greater issue is that he and his partners in crime were aided and abetted by the Turkish authorities. All of those responsible need to be tried at international criminal tribunals — the sooner, the better.

Is Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan, who keeps talking about Cyprus as a security threat to the eastern Mediterranean, trying to deliver a message? Erdogan has long been warning Cypriot and international companies exploring energy resources in the region not to “trust the Greek side in Cyprus.”

The Turkish president’s repeated verbal attacks on Greek Cypriots also shed light on a recent interview, broadcast live on Turkish Cypriot TV, with 84-year-old Turgut Yenağralı — a former member of the paramilitary Turkish Resistance Organization (TMT), founded in 1957 and known for its criminal activities in Cyprus.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/06/resist-us/

Without impartial justice, the UK puts at risk a foundation of any free society. Indeed, official policy has already removed the chocks and encouraged that descent to gather pace. Regardless of Tommy Robinson’s past, I am very worried by his imprisonment. So should we all.

I am very uneasy about the arrest and incarceration of Tommy Robinson. Yes, he has operated on the fringe of legality. Indeed, he carries a number of convictions which can be seized upon to paint him as a figure deserving of little sympathy, if any. On this occasion, he was in apparent breach of a probation order in relation to a previous conviction for contempt of court. Standing outside the court, he was picked up by seven police and bundledinto a paddy wagon for “breaching the peace”, a transparently ridiculous charge as is clear in the You Tube video. Before the judge, he was found guilty of breaching his probation, summarily convicted, sentenced to thirteen months imprisonment and bundled without further ado into prison.

Undoubtedly, as Janet Albrechtsen has pointed out, Robinson was guilty as charged. But here we come to the heart of our worries. The vast majority of British people still assume the law is blind and impartial. But a growing minority now sees the law as weaponised, a potent item in the Left’s arsenal with which it is waging and winning its culture war. The total media blackout imposed by the judge (lifted on appeal), left the sinister impression that Robinson was being “disappeared” with an efficiency any Argentine general from the bad old days might well have admired. The message could not have been more explicit: report on what the court did to Robinson and you will end up occupying an adjoining cell. Is there any other way to describe that ruling but as government-sanctioned intimidation.

http://www.settimananews.it/religioni/millions-of-shadows-of-christians-china/

They may number even two or three hundred million, and are growing fast. They are the self-styled Christians in China, who don’t clearly know what they are.

All read the Bible; some claim to be related to Christ, like Hong Xiuquan, the leader of the destructive Taiping Rebellion in the 19th century, which killed 20% of the Chinese population. Most add to the Bible and the Gospels their own tracts, drawing explanations from Buddhist or Taoist traditions. Lots claim to have dreams and visions of God and the apostles, and thus cure people of their ailments for free or small donations, whereas state hospitals charge stiff bills for any patient.

Some Chinese officials argue they can’t be regarded as Christians at all, but just the latest wave of the centuries-old Chinese syncretic tradition of pulling every faith and belief under one roof. But the new styled Chinese Christians claim to be so, perhaps in part because the label brings with it a more tolerant approach from the authorities, who are not against the spread of Buddhism and Christianity, but take much harsher measures against Islam, for fear of Muslim extremists.

In the past syncretism occurred over a period of 500–600 years to Buddhism, which became sinicized by drawing on homegrown Taoism since the first century AD. The same is happening now in China with Christianity; only the time frame is much shorter. Christianity went from about 2–3% of the total population in the late 1990s to presently being possibly as much as 20–30% of the population. The popularity of the Pope is apparently also helping all of this.

Many people hear about the Pope and the Catholic Church and claim to be Catholic, although they may have never attended Catholic mass.

https://www.city-journal.org/html/why-china-cant-afford-trade-war-15951.html

China and the United States have agreed not to impose tariffs on one another—that is, not to engage in a trade war—at least while they negotiate a trade settlement. If the White House is to be believed, China has agreed to increase “significantly” its purchases of American goods, especially agricultural products. This is welcome news: China-U.S. trade, for all the restrictions and conditions placed on it (mostly by Beijing), reflects an economically symbiotic relationship. A trade war would damage both countries. But Chinese concessions up front are also significant because tacitly they acknowledge weakness, even as China tries to present an image of trading dominance.

Beijing’s clearest difficulty lies in its export-oriented growth model, which many in the West erroneously see as a strength. Because China overemphasizes manufacturing, it produces surpluses that get wasted unless its state-owned firms can sell them. Without buyers, stacks of rebar, jet engines, and the like will rust in factory yards, and iPhones and millions of team-logo t-shirts pose a storage problem. The structure depends on prosperity elsewhere to absorb Chinese products. Reports on China’s recent economic growth surge underscore this dependency: even China’s own statistical bureau pointed to the acceleration of growth in the United States and Europe as the cause of its spurt.

Observers who fear Chinese manufacturing capacity point to the West’s vulnerability in this area. Because the United States and other developed economies have lost so much productive power to China, they would face shortages should Beijing decide to withhold supplies. Chinese refusal to export its products would hurt the West, perhaps even precipitating a recession, but inflicting this pain would come at great cost to China. Its export-oriented manufacturing would stagnate, and so, accordingly, would its export-dependent economy. Socially, China would suffer as well. Beijing fears a recurrence of the riots that rocked the nation during the great recession of 2008-09.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/nicaraguas-political-crisis-descends-into-dark-days-1528235963

MANAGUA, Nicaragua—A surge of violence has snuffed out economic activity and dimmed prospects to peacefully resolve a political crisis here that began as a protest against tax increases and turned into a revolt against Nicaragua’s longtime leader Daniel Ortega.

Since mid-April, more than 100 people have been killed in confrontations with police during mass protests and what human-rights groups say are paramilitary gangs aligned with Mr. Ortega’s government.

Among them were 15 people killed at a peaceful Mother’s Day protest march last month in Managua and 11 people by paramilitary groups and police in the predominantly indigenous city of Masaya this past weekend, including a 15-year-old protester who witnesses say was executed by a policewoman.

On Tuesday, violence flared in the quaint colonial city of Granada, home to hundreds of American retirees.

“We are going through very dark days,” said Humberto Belli, a former education minister. “The people are out in the street demanding that Ortega leave, but he has shown an unexpected ability to kill. We see more blood every day—three, four, five people killed on a daily basis. This has no end.”

The Organization of American States on Tuesday approved a mildly worded resolution calling for an immediate end of the violence and asking all parties to participate in peaceful dialogue. The resolution, co-sponsored by the U.S. and Nicaragua, was much weaker than declarations made Monday by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who accused Nicaraguan police and armed pro-government groups of killing dozens of protesters.

https://ruleofreason.blogspot.com/

I sent this query to Theresa May at 10 Downing Street, London, a few days ago:

Is Theresa May a closet Muslim? Is she okay with female genital mutilation? Honor killings or murders? The rapes of white British women and girls? Is she okay with Hamas? Hezbollah? Censorship? With not giving Islam the raspberries? Not calling Islam totalitarian and evil? Would she have recommended to Hitler that members of The White Rose be executed? Or that Tommy Robinson be murdered by Muslim prisoners?

From all the evidence of the imposition of speech controls on Britain imposed by May, impositions punishable with arrest and imprisonment if the controls are violated, one can only make an educated guess that she is a closet Muslim. Sharia law is in the cards.

Recently, in the middle of last month, May answered a question in Parliament about freedom of speech as a “cherished” British liberty by qualifying her alleged value of it by stressing the role of “tolerance” as a kind of twin that puts a necessary gag the freedom. The implied object of the question was why criticism of Christianity was taken as a norm, but criticism of Islam was not.

May answered:

“We value freedom of expression and freedom of speech in this country. That is absolutely essential in underpinning our democracy. But we also value tolerance to others. We also value tolerance in relation to religions. This is one of the issues that we’ve looked at in the counter-extremism strategy that the government has produced. I think we need to ensure that, yes, it is right that people can have that freedom of expression. But in doing so, that right has a responsibility, too. And that is a responsibility to recognize the importance of tolerance to others.”

Tolerance? Of what? Tolerance of Islam, to May, must mean not criticizing it or any of its primitive, medieval, and patently misogynic practices, such as FGM and rape at whim and by Koranic right. Throwin

https://pjmedia.com/trending/trashing-tommy-robinson/

“What we cannot complain is that Tommy Robinson is being detained illegally,” asserts British journalist James Delingpole in a Monday article for Breitbart.

Now, Delingpole is supposed to be one of the good guys when it comes to this sort of thing. In the same article, in fact, he maintains that he is friendly with Robinson, who on May 25 was arrested while streaming live on Facebook from outside Leeds Criminal Court, where several Muslims were being tried for mass child rape. Tommy was then brought before a judge who sent him straight to prison for having violated the terms under which he was released by another judge last year. Delingpole says he admires Tommy and considers him brave. At the same time, alas, Delingpole charges that Tommy is “an adrenaline junkie who sometimes pushes it that bit too far.”

First, anent “adrenaline junkie”: I’d suggest that a lot of the great men and women of history were probably adrenaline junkies. I think Trump is one. Thomas Edison barely slept. Neither did Nikola Tesla. Or Leonardo da Vinci.

“Pushing too far”? Tommy’s “offense” last year was trying to videotape alleged Muslim pedophiles outside a courthouse in Canterbury.

On that occasion, he was brought before a female judge who, when asked about the very real danger of him being beaten up — or worse — if sentenced to prison, said: “So what?” Yes, that’s what she actually said. Every day, in the same courts, they treat accused mass rapists with more respect.

So I ask: how far is “too far” when you’re sounding the alarm about a nationwide child-rape epidemic that authorities up and down the line have conspired to cover up, that is still going on, that is (although one is not allowed to say so) a byproduct of Islamic theology, and that the mainstream media, even after they’ve finally been forced to face up to the reality of it, prefer to treat as if it were a series of parking violations?

As for Robinson being “detained illegally”: I, for one, certainly wouldn’t say that his detention is illegal. No, it’s entirely legal. That’s precisely the problem.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12438/egypt-azhar-antisemitism

Signed by politicians from the right and left, as well as Jewish, Muslim and Catholic leaders, the declaration asks that “the verses of the Quran calling for the killing and punishment of Jews, Christians and unbelievers be [denounced as] outdated by theological [Islamic] authorities, as were the incoherencies of the Bible and the Catholic anti-Semitism abolished by Vatican II, so that no believer can rely on a sacred text to commit a crime.”

“He [Abbas Shoman, Deputy to the Grand Imam of Al Azhar] also asked the signatories of the manifesto to understand that the Quran is the right way and “if they insist on their misguided understanding [of it], they should go to hell with their wrong understanding.” — El Masry al Youm, Egyptian daily.

One wonders how, after having been taught Islamic supremacy all their lives, imams could even try to understand such a manifesto. Sheikh Shoman’s remarks may just indicate his own indoctrinated anti-Semitism.

Saying that “Islamist violence has nothing to do with Islam” does not make it so. Like or not, it does.

Whether one likes it or not, the image of the Jews depicted and disseminated extensively by Quran is that they are inherently evil and enemies of Islam, enemies of “the religion of truth,” and of all Muslims. When anyone, such as a moderate Muslim or non-Muslim, draws attention to this dismaying fact, such as its direct connection to an indoctrinated hatred of “all” Jews, and when anyone calls for a justified examination or reform of these views, he immediately faces accusations of “Islamophobia.” He is then overwhelmed by dozens of false rationalizations and supposed justifications in a way that indicates a deeply-rooted avoidance by senior Muslim scholars and institutions — and even many mainstream Muslims — of the truth that Quranic verses are full of hatred of Jews. All of the Jews, no exceptions:

Al-Bukhari (3593) and Muslim (2921) narrated from the hadith of Ibn ‘Umar (may Allah be pleased with him) that he said: I heard the Messenger of Allah (blessings and peace of Allah be upon him) say: “The Jews will fight you and you will prevail over them, then a rock will say: ‘O Muslim, here is a Jew behind me; kill him.'”