RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://pjmedia.com/trending/anti-american-propaganda-disappearing-from-north-korea/

One unexpected benefit from the recent thaw in relations with North Korea has been the Hermit Kingdom’s removal of most anti-U.S. propaganda from cities and towns.

The vulgar anti-American posters have been replaced with largely positive messages praising the new relationship with South Korea.

New York Post:

In their place are cheery messages touting praising the prospects for Korean reunification and the declaration Kim signed in April with South Korean President Moon Jae-in promising “lasting peace,” according to reports.

Still the most isolated country in the world, very few North Koreans have access to news and information from the outside world. So state propaganda plays a huge role in shaping their views.

Murals, banners and posters displayed throughout the capital, Pyongyang, have for decades depicted the U.S. as a brutal, imperialist aggressor hell-bent on destroying the North Korean regime. South Korea and Japan were also frequently targeted as willing allies of the U.S.

But things started to take an Orwellian turn in the run-up to Kim’s June 12 summit with President Donald Trump, with the old posters vanishing since then.

“All the anti-American posters I usually see around Kim Il-sung Square and at shops, they’ve all just gone,” Rowan Beard, a tour manager at Young Pioneer Tours, told Reuters. “In five years working in North Korea, I’ve never seen them completely disappear before.”

Infamous posters and postcards showing North Korean missiles on their way to Washington are a thing of the past. Also removed are the anti-American trinkets that used to be sold to tourists as souvenirs. In their place are items showing themes of Korean reunification.

The change extends to the country’s government-controlled media. News reports that once depicted the U.S. as hostile, and its involvement in places like Syria as proof of imperialism, are no longer critical. The Financial Times said the main newspaper, Rodong Sinmun, hasn’t featured a direct attack on Trump since March, when he agreed to meet with Kim.

The paper was filled with pictures of the two together at the summit, and is no longer reporting anti-U.S. news. Other international events, like Kim’s visit last week to China, are being reported right away, rather than after a waiting period, and in more neutral language.

“This is fascinating,” Peter Ward, North Korea expert and writer for NKNews, told the BBC. “Generally speaking, neutral or positive coverage is normally reserved for countries that Pyongyang has friendly relations with.” CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.wsj.com/articles/russian-airstrikes-hit-southwest-syria-breaking-a-ceasefire-deal-1529853026

The Syrian regime’s main military ally, Russia, carried out airstrikes Sunday in the country’s southwest, defying a cease-fire pact with the U.S. and Jordan, as forces aligned with President Bashar al-Assad pushed to capture one of the last opposition strongholds.

The Russian strikes, which have been accompanied by regime barrel bombs and mortar shells, are the latest signs of the high-stakes military maneuvers unfolding in a volatile corner of southwest Syria. Forces aligned with President Assad have threatened a ground offensive, dropping leaflets that demand the surrender of rebels in the area. At least five civilians have been killed in the bombardment, which also destroyed a hospital and emergency rescue center, according to antigovernment activists.

For weeks, the U.S. has warned the Syrian regime not to violate a cease-fire agreement brokered last year with Russia and Jordan that stretches across the Syrian provinces of Daraa and Quneitra.

But the U.S. appears intent on not getting dragged into a confrontation between the rebels and Mr. Assad’s Russian and Iranian-backed forces. On Saturday night, as Russian airstrikes were beginning, U.S.-allied rebels were told by the Americans not to expect a military intervention on their behalf, according to several rebel commanders.

The State Department expressed concern about the airstrikes and said it had been in touch with the Russian government and “parties on the ground.” CONTINUE AT SITE

https://bit.ly/2K6CIsb

The UN Human Rights Council (HRC), on the one hand, and human rights, on the other hand, constitute a classic oxymoron, as underlined by the country-membership of the Council.

Moreover, since its establishment in 2006, and just like its predecessor, the UN Commission on Human Rights, the HRC has been dominated by non-democratic regimes, which have been hostile to the US.

For example, the anti-US, pro-Ayatollahs member-state Venezuela has robbed its opposition-led legislature of any effective power, jailing political opponents and prosecuting civilians in military courts. The Democratic Republic of Congo is ruled by a ruthless president who is holding on to power beyond the constitutionally mandated two-term limit, repressing, silencing and murdering opponents. Pakistan features a proliferation of military courts with death sentences for members of the opposition, unaccountability for human rights violations, the absence of a free press, no tolerance of religious minorities and women’s rights and is fertile ground for anti-US Islamic terrorism. In Afghanistan, neither the government nor the Taliban opposition adheres to human rights, which has resulted in a massive toll of murders and executions, many of them carried out by government-supported illegal gangs. Another member of the HRC, Burundi, which has been accused by the HRC, itself, of crimes against humanity and refuses to cooperate with the HRC investigation. Burundi is ruled by a president, whose term has been extended beyond constitutional limits, and whose security organs have followed a routine of kidnapping, torture, arbitrary arrests, executions and the “disappearance” of citizens. The repressive Cuban regime has sustained arbitrary arrests of opposition leaders, human rights leaders and free press activists.

Other member-states of the HRC – despite their non-democratic regimes and questionable-to-horrendous track records on human rights – are Rwanda, Senegal, Togo, Ivory Coast, Angola, Iraq, Ethiopia, Ecuador, Tunisia, Qatar, China, etc.

http://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/06/let-women-carry-mace/

Another woman is dead at the hands of an alleged rapist and, once again, those who should know better blame toxic masculinity and the way boys are raised. While this guff obscures the sins of a turn-’em-loose bench, it won’t dissuade a single criminal. Pepper spray and electro-shockers just might.

Masa Vucovic, Jill Meagher and now Eurydice Dixon – three young women who lost their lives in Melbourne. Their headline names are known better than many other, equally innocent victims killed or brutalised for the same reason: they were women. They were daughters, sisters, partners of loving men, each unfortunate to have met their killers in a park, on the fitness run, or simply while strolling home.All were killed by human garbage, bipedal filth whose lusts knew no bounds. Their lives were extinguished for reasons which, to any decent man, are abhorrent, disgusting and inspire only contempt for their attackers. The sooner and the longer they are consigned to prison and left there to rot the better.

I do not wish to be unkind to Victoria Police, but the legacy of former chief commissioners who turned the force into a blue-uniformed social work department — guard dogs re-trained as comfort dogs – lingers like a fog to hide and obscure what should be every law enforcement agency’s primary mission to protect life and property. When push-in robberies see sporting goods stores sell out of baseball bats while senior police convene multiculturally photogenic community summits and burble of outreach to disaffected youths, the public isn’t getting the protection it is entitled to expect and the police force duty-bound to provide.

Not that senior police are alone in refusing to grasp the nettle of their chartered responsibility, for others are equally keen to push preferred barrows. When Jill Meagher was raped and butchered, Melbourne’s Sydney Road was packed with a protesting crowd, most of whose members would have turned out in the belief that such crimes must be stopped and that, unlike her murderer and serial rapist Adrian Ernest Bayley, their perpetrators must not be set free by the courts. What they attended turned out to be something very different — a denunciation of “victim blaming”, which no one had done, and a demand that “men”, all men, be reformed, not just the tiny minority of testosterone-infused monsters who make late-night parks unsafe.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12574/iraq-banker-mullah-militia-cook

The young technocrats around Muqtada al-Sadr get their ideas, especially on economics, more from Milton Friedman’s texts than Muhamad-Baqir al-Sadr’s “Our Economy”.

The next step should be to also accept ideological and political diversity. I believe that in the past 15 years, Iraq has made significant progress in that direction.

In a system of down-to-earth politics, Iraq would be liberated from utopian illusions that have caused it so much tragedy, and focus on bread-and-butter issues closer to the concerns of both our banker friend and his cook.

“How is Iraq?” we asked a friend just back from Baghdad the other day.

“Bad, very bad, my friend,” was the reply. “Even my cook has an opinion about how to form the new government.”

The Iraqi friend is a prominent banker who spent his youth in exile in the West and returned home only after the fall of Saddam Hussein. However, he seems to have retained the traditional mindset of many of us Middle Easterners, who see ourselves as victims of despotism and yet fear any system in which even the cook has an opinion.

To be fair to our friend, the current political scene in Baghdad isn’t exactly reassuring. The general election failed to produce an outright majority and the formation of a new government could take weeks if not months.

We are used to seeing governments formed and reshuffled in hours, if not minutes, with narrow elite of “usual suspects” playing musical chairs in and out of ministerial posts. In that system, any hitch in forming a government could be dealt with by having some ministers shot, as did Saddam Hussein in his heyday, or exiled into ambassadorial posts with a golden handshake.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/06/24/ms-merkels-malady

Germans like to apologize. During a brief trip to Munich last year, tensions between locals and newly arrived migrants often flared into fizzing commotions of swinging fists, splatting saliva, and the kind of primal chest-beating one cravenly enjoys from the safety of a Barcalounger and in high-definition on a screen, but rarely relishes up close and personal.

These little flare-ups were often followed by an apology from one of the bystanders. With misty eyes, they would insist with pure conviction that such violent incursions were rare. Yet the mea culpas always seemed artificial—almost rehearsed.

That’s not to judge an entire country on the witness of a few days. Anyone having visited Germany will remark on the conviviality of its people. Their dehydrated sense of humor. And their seeming genetic need to apologize for their part in the great staining of Western, and indeed, human history.

That stain is why Angela Merkel has opened the door to more than 1.5 million refugees since 2015. That stain is why Merkel is clinging to what was the sleepiest job in Europe.

Merkel’s Götterdämmerung means her 13-year tenure could end just months after securing, albeit desperately, her fourth term. Such a grandiloquent virtue-signal also led to the Alternative for Deutschland (AfD) gaining 13 percent of the vote before forming the official opposition. In Germany, this kind of thing doesn’t happen.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/canada-attacks-religious-freedom-1529623475

Mr. Kuhn is President of Trinity Western University

Langley, British Columbia

Canada legalized same-sex marriage in 2005, amid many promises that traditional religious believers would be protected. Those promises have proved empty. Earlier this month the Supreme Court of Canada told Trinity Western University, which I lead, that it could not open a law school. Accrediting a school that upholds traditional Christian teachings on marriage could send the wrong message to Canadians who disagree with Trinity’s beliefs, we were told.

This isn’t about the quality of our educational programs. Our researchers hold millions of dollars in grants. Many members of our faculty have been recognized as 3M Teaching Fellows, Canada’s most prestigious award for excellence in educational leadership. We are consistently ranked one of the best Canadian universities for educational experience, according to the National Survey of Student Engagement.

Trinity simply is being punished for asking its faculty and students to observe traditional Christian teachings on marriage through a community covenant. In 2001 the high court ruled decisively that this policy did not disqualify the university from training public-school teachers. It seemed as if the ruling gave Trinity a secure place as one of the few private faith-based schools in Canada.

But that was then. In 2012 Trinity decided to open a law school. It would have been the only private one in Canada and the only one to offer a specialty in charity law. It was an arduous task from the beginning. Three provincial law societies—similar to state bar associations in the U.S.—said no in March 2014. Everyone agreed that Trinity’s program met all the requirements and would train competent lawyers. But law societies across the country held public meetings during which Trinity’s students and faculty were called bigots and worse.

The Law Society of Upper Canada, the nation’s oldest and largest, told the high court in Ottawa during oral arguments on Nov. 30, 2017, that accrediting any “distinctly religious” organization would violate the Canadian Charter, which is similar to the U.S. Bill of Rights. It added that when the government licenses a private organization it adopts all its policies as its own. If these arguments had been accepted, they would have spelled the end of Canada’s nonprofit sector. In their zeal to root out the supposed bigotry of traditional religious believers, these lawyers were prepared to dynamite Canada’s entire civil society.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12566/spain-anti-israel

The proliferating anti-Israel activism, driven by the rise to power of the political far-left, is establishing Spain as the EU member state most hostile towards the Jewish state.

A Madrid-based organization, Action and Communication on the Middle East (ACOM), which is fighting the anti-Israel BDS movement in Spain, said that Valencia’s motion was anti-Semitic and an incitement to hatred.

“The BDS movement in Spain acquired its current virulence with the emergence of Podemos, a ‘Chavist’ far-left party financed by Venezuela and Iran…. As Podemos gained control of the municipal governments in the main Spanish cities, the anti-Israel movement had access to multiple economic, human and organizational resources…. Podemos has driven over 90 such declarations in Spain in jurisdictions covering a population of over eight million people” — Ángel Más, president, ACOM.

Valencia, the third-largest city in Spain, has approved a motion to boycott Israel and slander it by declaring the city an “Israeli apartheid-free zone.” The move comes days after Navarra, one of Spain’s 17 autonomous communities, announced a similar measure. In all, more than 50 Spanish cities and regions have passed motions condemning Israel. The proliferating anti-Israel activism, driven by the rise to power of the political far-left, is establishing Spain as the EU member state most hostile towards the Jewish state.