RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.thefp.com/p/saudi-arabia-sportswashing-football-liv-golf?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

I’ll never forget the moment Saudi Arabia arrived in global soccer. It happened at the World Cup last November, when the team faced Argentina—the overwhelming favorite to win. 

At halftime they were losing 1–0 and nobody was paying attention. I was finishing my halftime snack in the Pearl Lounge at Doha’s Lusail Stadium: a bowl of caviar in one hand and a glass of Taittinger champagne in the other. Then, suddenly, the Saudis scored a goal in the second half—and plutocrats clad in keffiyehs and thobes tipped over their plates of wagyu steak as they stampeded back to their seats. Saudi Arabia went on to beat the soccer legends 2–1, causing the biggest upset in World Cup history.

That game was just the beginning. In recent weeks, Saudi Arabia has embarked on an extraordinary and record-breaking shopping spree, spending billions to acquire marquee-name players. The most recent foray is an attempt by Saudi soccer club Al-Hilal to sign French striker Kylian Mbappé, by most measures the best player in the world, for a quite staggering world record $332 million, plus a one-year contract worth $776 million. Money like this has never been seen in soccer before. Unsurprisingly, the bid was accepted by Mbappé’s club, Paris Saint-Germain, but the soccer star, so far, has refused the deal. 

Either Saudi Arabia really wants to be the global epicenter of soccer, or they really want to distract the world with their attempts to do so. 

Most Westerners believe it’s the latter, accusing the kingdom of “sportswashing.” Saudi Arabia is well aware of their reputation: they’re a country that oppresses women, executes dissidents, and disembowels Washington Post columnists. But—and this is a big but—if they buy enough soccer stars and sponsor enough sports tournaments, then maybe “human rights atrocities” won’t be the first thing mentioned when people discuss Saudi Arabia.

At least that’s the theory. But is it working? Can you buy enough star athletes to make the world forget (or at least ignore) all of your tyrannical excesses? And is that even what they’re doing at all? 

What’s crystal clear is that the Saudis have been building up to this investment spree for some time, dipping into their Public Investment Fund (PIF) of more than $700 billion to pay for it. In 2019, the country hosted British heavyweight boxing champion Anthony Joshua’s fight against the Mexican American fighter Andy Ruiz Jr. Then in 2021, it hosted its first Formula 1 race, at the newly minted track in Jeddah. That same year, it made its biggest move so far by buying Newcastle United, a storied Premier League soccer team from the northeast of England. 

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19819/turkey-erdogan-fidan-kalin

Turkey’s two key appointments are new foreign minister and former intelligence chief, Hakan Fidan; and the newly-appointed intelligence chief, Ibrahim Kalın, also an Erdoğan confidant.

Both men have interesting and impressive careers. How both of them have become the only two people who make policy and share power with Erdoğan is illuminating, especially where their careers intersected under the president.

During that meeting, Fidan told the others that if they decided to go to war with Syria he could easily arrange a false flag operation: “Easy for me. I can send four men into Syria, they send eight missiles [into Turkish soil], and there you go.”

The appointments mark formalizing executive cabinet jobs for two most important men in Erdoğan’s most inner circle.

As Turkey’s post-election dust is settling down, the international community has turned its attention to two key appointments announced by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who on May 28 won his 17th election victory in 21 years, and entered his third decade in power.

Turkey’s two key appointments are new foreign minister and former intelligence chief, Hakan Fidan; and the newly-appointed intelligence chief, Ibrahim Kalın, also an Erdoğan confidant.

Both men have interesting and impressive careers. How both of them have become the only two people who make policy and share power with Erdoğan is illuminating, especially where their careers intersected under the president.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/another-nato-summit-another-tranche-of-happy-talk/

Last week the annual Nato summit gathered in Vilnius. Like last year’s, the meeting was dominated by the Ukrainian crisis, and was accompanied by the usual cheerleading from foreign policy mavens and globalist media. Also like previous summits, this one didn’t seriously address the problems and weaknesses of the Alliance.

Ukrainian officials who attended the meeting were visibly and vocally disgruntled. One beef is the festering issue of Ukraine’s membership in Nato, promised 15 years ago after Putin’s unpunished territorial predations in Georgia. The long, formal process of meeting requirements hasn’t even begun yet, apart from certain conditions agreed upon at the summit that Ukraine must meet. Nato still made empty promises to Ukraine about membership, even though there’s no chance that all 31 Nato nations will give their approval, and membership requires the consent of every member.

There are several arguments for and against Ukraine’s membership, but one of the weakest against it is the claim that giving Ukraine Article 5 protection––an attack on one member is an attack on all––might ignite a nuclear war with Russia. Yet this provision, regularly and reverentially touted by Nato’s cheerleaders, is what James Madison called a “parchment barrier” riddled with loopholes. Notice the crafty wording of this provision: each state will respond to an attack “by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force”  [emphasis added].

But “deems necessary” invites a liberal interpretation about how any nation can respond; and “including armed force” makes a military response just one option among numerous less costly ones. That means actually funding and mobilizing a nation’s military can be replaced by speechifying at the UN, issuing blustering diplomatic demarches, or sending money or weapons and other materiel––just what the Nato nations have been doing in the case of Ukraine. This suggests that even if Ukraine had been a Nato member, the alliance’s response wouldn’t have been much different from the current one.

Exacerbating Ukraine’s frustration is the delays in the Nato nations’ provision of weaponry and ammunition. Yet those nations’ stockpiles of both are dangerously low, and as historian Niall Ferguson put it earlier this year, Nato nations’ “military industrial complex has withered away,” making it a challenge to ramp up production of armaments. It’s so bad in the U.S. that the Biden administration announced it would send shrapnel-spewing cluster bombs instead of artillery rounds, weapons most of the world’s nations have proscribed by treaty.

https://melaniephillips.substack.com/p/banking-on-a-witch-hunt?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

The most striking aspect of the shocking treatment of Nigel Farage, the godfather of Brexit whose account with the quintessentially establishment Coutts bank was closed because it said his views “do not align with our values,” was that it also said his views “were at odds with our position as an inclusive organisation”.

So in pursuit of inclusivity, the bank excluded Farage. Clearly, logic doesn’t figure as one of its values. Nor does the bank appear to grasp the meaning of language.

Coutts is owned by another bank, NatWest. That’s run by Dame Alison Rose. Last year she declared:

Our focus on diversity, equity and inclusion is integral to our purpose of championing the potential of people, families and businesses. And NatWest Group’s employee-led networks are playing a huge part in creating a truly inclusive culture at the bank.

In practice, this entailed behaving towards Farage like the Soviet secret police. This is now becoming the new normal in a culture where words such as “equality”, “inclusivity’ and “non-discrimination” have turned values hitherto considered the bedrock of a civilised society into the charge sheet for a witch-hunt.

A 40-page dossier released to Farage has revealed the true reason for his exclusion from the bank. It lists his comments about Brexit, his views on LGBT rights and his friendship with Donald Trump and the former Wimbledon player Novak Djokovic as being among many reasons why he was not “compatible with Coutts”. 

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19816/pakistan-blasphemy-case

Mohd Abdul Gaffar, a retired Pakistan Air Force officer from Green Town, reported that as he was returning home after morning prayers… he discovered a small pamphlet containing blasphemous content on the boundary wall of his house. The contents of the pamphlet were highly disrespectful towards Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) and other revered figures. The pamphlet also contained derogatory comments against the holy Quran and even praised the recent burning of a Quran in Sweden.

Past incidents include those… where several people were murdered, some burned alive, while dozens of Christians are still languishing in prison, awaiting their fate. It is worth noting that all those accused of committing blasphemy (who were not murdered by lynch mobs) were eventually proven innocent in court and freed.

It is believed that, regrettably, certain individuals in Pakistan are exploiting the incident of the Quran burning in Sweden as an excuse to fuel the flames of hatred and seek revenge against local Christians, who are peaceful, believe in respect for all religions, and have no connection to the Swedish incident.

It is crucial for the Pakistani government to take necessary steps to stop the ongoing misuse of the Penal Code’s blasphemy sections against Christians and other religious minorities in Pakistan.

Another blasphemy incident has occurred in Pakistan, leaving local Christians deeply concerned for their safety. It is believed that, certain individuals in Pakistan are exploiting the incident of the Quran burning in Sweden as an excuse to fuel the flames of hatred and seek revenge against local Christians, who are peaceful, believe in respect for all religions, and have no connection to the Swedish incident.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/07/16/have-we-forgotten-the-russian-way-of-war/

“I think I am not exaggerating when I say that the campaign against Russia has been won in fourteen days.”

General Franz Halder, June, 1941, Chief of Staff, Oberbefehlshaber des Heeres

Masters and commanders of history who have sworn that they have defeated an incompetent, disorganized, and corrupt Russian army are legion. For a time they seemed to have been correct. But there is a pattern to their encounters with the Russian army that is germane to the current Ukrainian offensive.

In 1707, Swedish King Charles XII appeared like he could successfully invade Russia in the manner that he had defeated Russian armies. But by 1709, he had wrecked the Swedish army against a numerically superior enemy that seemed to grow despite losing battles.

Napoleon won more battles than he lost in Russia, took, and burned Moscow—and destroyed his own French army in the process. The famous invasion chart of Charles Joseph Minard graphically demonstrated how his Grand Army shrunk each day it advanced further into Russia.

The 3.5 million-man Wehrmacht expeditionary force consistently crushed the Russian army for nearly two months following its invasion of June 22, 1944—killing nearly 3 million Russians. Such catastrophic losses would have broken any Western army.

But by December 1941, the Germans could no longer win the war in the east.

One might object that it is a truism that invading the vast landscape and enduring the harsh weather of Mother Russia is a prescription for disaster; yet Russian armies do poorly when they invade other countries and fight as aggressors outside of their homeland.

Yes and no.

Certainly, the preemptive Russian attack on Kyiv proved an utter disaster. Who can forget the scenes of last winter when sitting-duck, long columns of stalled Russian vehicles were picked off in shooting-gallery fashion by brave Ukrainian ad hoc units? But note saving Kyiv was the mere beginning not the end of the war.

Resilience and recovery from disasters are the historical trademarks of the Russian army.  From May to September 1939, a Russian army under the soon to be heralded General Zhukov fought a large Japanese force on the Mongolian-Manchurian border. Despite the battle hardened and military ascendant imperial Japanese military, the Russians withstood every Japanese assault, and eventually destroyed 75 percent of Japanese forces.

On September 17, 1939,  a duplicitous Soviet Russia invaded Poland from the west, under the agreements of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939.

The large Russian force hit a Polish army reeling from nearly three weeks of relentless hammering from a German invasion that had attacked from three directions. Although the belated advance of the Russian army was not especially impressive, its victory was foreordained.

The three-and-a-half month Finnish-Russian “Winter War” of 1939-40 is usually referenced as an example of the gritty heroism of the outnumbered Finnish army and the general ineptness of the invading Russian behemoth that outnumbered the heroic Finns by more than two to one. When the tattered Russian army finally ground down the Finns and forced them to negotiate, they had suffered nearly 400,000 casualties, perhaps five times Finnish losses.

The Russian invasion was poorly planned, inadequately supplied, incompetently led, and characterized by low morale. And yet the invasion was eventually mostly successful given the numerical and material advantages of Russia—and Moscow’s seeming indifference to its massive losses. Its trademark war of attrition eventually proved too costly for tiny Finland.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19807/palestinians-apartheid-lebanon

“The procedures and restrictions imposed on the entry of building materials into the Palestinian camps in Lebanon are in contradiction with the principles of human rights.” — Hassan al-Sayyida, a researcher and human rights activist at the Palestinian Association for Human, palinfo.com, July 10,2023

This is the second case within a year in which a Palestinian has been arrested on charges of a “construction violation.” On July 28, 2022, the Lebanese authorities arrested another Palestinian woman, Amal Mousa, also on the pretext of building a house without a permit. Mousa was released only after she was forced to demolish the foundations of her house.

Israel, too, has demolished illegal houses — but for Arabs and Jews…. Israel is not even doing much about the massive illegal building by Arabs, who have reportedly seized 30% of the land unpoetically called “Area C”: land that by mutual agreement in the Oslo Accords belongs wholly to Israel. One can go to the edge of Jerusalem and see literally countless illegal skyscrapers built by Arabs as well as smaller illegal buildings that extend south for miles. “At present [2022]…there are 81,317 illegal Arab-built structures in this area….” according to the research group Regavim. Moreover, Israel never arrests or keeps anyone in prison because of a construction violation.

[T]here is an urgent need to build new houses for the Palestinians in Lebanon, “especially since the existing houses are not sufficient and do not meet the demographic increase in the population”… [M]any Palestinians, as in the case of Um Wissam, are forced to build houses on top of the roofs of their homes. — The Palestinian Association for Human Rights, refugeesps.net, July 10, 2023

Palestinians in Lebanon “face substantial challenges to the full enjoyment of their human rights. They are socially marginalized, have very limited civil, social, political, and economic rights, including restricted access to the Government of Lebanon’s public health, educational and social services and face significant restrictions on their right to work and right to own property.” — UNRWA, reporting that the Palestinians are still prevented from employment in 39 professions such as medicine, law, and engineering; unrwa.org, updated September, 2020

“Palestinian refugees [in Lebanon] consistently report experiencing discrimination in hiring practices and opportunities for employment. They are faced with informal restrictions on the types of jobs and industries they can be hired for due to additional bureaucracy around contracts and work permits and discrimination.” – UNRWA, reporting that the Palestinians in Lebanon are still prevented from employment in 39 professions such as medicine, law, and engineering; unrwa.org, updated September, 2020

“[I]t is difficult to deny that the Palestinian refugees living in Lebanon have been subjected to systematic discrimination and to the violation of their basic human rights. The Palestinian refugees have been forced into abject poverty by the Lebanese government’s denial of their rights to remunerated employment, social security, public health care, public education and property ownership. The argument that Palestinian integration into Lebanese society would either cause them to lose their right of return or would upset Lebanon’s sectarian balance is just a pretext the Lebanese government uses to discriminate against the Palestinians, whom many Lebanese blame for causing the Lebanese civil war. The Palestinian refugees are not asking for citizenship; they are simply asking to be afforded the rights given to other refugees around the world.” — The Palestine-Israel Journal , 2008

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/07/17/welcome-to-canada-the-doctor-wont-see-you-now-but-the-undertaker-will/

Earlier this month, Boy Prime Minister Justin Trudeau asked Taylor Swift to take her tour to Canada, where she so far has no concert dates. “We hope to see you soon,” he tweeted. If she does, she’d better hope none of her crew becomes ill. A person could expire while waiting to see a doctor in Canada.

The Vancouver-based Fraser Institute, which has long documented Canada’s miserable government-run health care system, estimates the cost of waiting for care “for patients who were in the queue in 2022 was almost $3.6 billion … an average of about $2,925 for each of the estimated 1,228,047 Canadians waiting for treatment.”

The real toll is actually worse than that. Fraser’s “conservative estimate” does not place an “intrinsic value on the time individuals spend waiting in a reduced capacity outside of the work week.” When evenings and weekends are entered into the calculation, minus eight hours of sleep each night, the estimated cost of waiting reaches “$10.9 billion, or about $8,897 per person.”

In 2022, it took 12.6 weeks for the average Canadian to land an appointment with a specialist after a referral from a general practitioner. Another 14.8 weeks would elapse after that appointment before treatment by the specialist could begin. Fraser said that ​​taken together, “the total median wait time in Canada for medical treatment was 27.4 weeks in 2022 – the longest in the survey’s history.”

As one might expect, the delays are deadly, and are becoming deadlier. Research from Second Street (a think tank that tells “the stories of Canadians from all walks of life and how they’re affected – for better or worse – by government decisions”) found that a record number of Canadians died awaiting care during the country’s 2021-22 fiscal year.

“​​At least 13,581 patients died while waiting for surgeries, procedures and diagnostic scans,” the report says. “This year’s total is up from last year’s total of 11,581.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19805/persecution-of-christians-june

The genocide of Christians at the hands of Muslims continued to rage throughout the month. Muslim “Fulani jihadists” slaughtered 2,500 Christians and “burned down or wantonly destroyed” 18,200 churches in just the first six months of 2023. Fifty million Christians have further been “forced out of their ancestral homes and lands into displacement and homelessness.” — news.band, June 3, 2023 – Nigeria

“All I can say is that war has been declared on Christians in Mangu [Plateau State, Nigeira]. The terrorists are just attacking and killing Christians in most of the communities around Mangu… Christians here really need help.” — Markus Artu, a member of the Mangu Local Government Council, after 150 Christians were killed in the first three weeks of June; Morning Star News, June 27, 2023 – Nigeria

On June 7, the mutilated body of Shazia Imran Masih, a 40-year-old Christian widow, was found. Earlier, four Muslims had “abducted, gang-raped and killed” her “for refusing to convert to Islam and marry the primary suspect.” – Morning Star News, July 7, 2023 — Pakistan

“The accused are very influential, and they have been persistently threatening us….” — Zafar Masih, a member of a local evangelical church, Moring Star News, July 3, 2023– Pakistan

“Indonesia’s Joint Ministerial Decree of 2006 (SKB) makes requirements for obtaining permits nearly impossible for most new churches. Even when small, new churches are able to meet the requirement of obtaining 90 signatures of approval from congregation members and 60 from area households of different religions, they are often met with delays or lack of response from officials. Well-organized radical Muslims secretly mobilize outside people to intimidate and pressure members of minority faiths.” – Moring Star News, June 23, 2023– Indonesia

“We…. are not building a church. So what’s the problem? When we pray, where is the problem?” — Elysson Lase, Christian woman, Morning Star News, June 23, 2023 — Indonesia

Egypt’s “contempt of religion” law — supposedly meant to protect the sanctity not just of Islam, but of Christianity and Judaism as well, is a farce…. [T]his law exists solely for the benefit of Islam….” – Report, wataninet.com, June 19, 2023 — Egypt

“Some of the more enlightened [Muslims] and Copts responded by asking why the alleged response by Abanoub Imad were to be considered as a reason to arrest him and put him under trial [even if he did indeed post them], when it was simply a reaction to insults against Christianity? Why are those who insulted Christianity in the first place not to be tried as well? And why are Christians always the only ones to be held accountable for contempt of religions, even though there are countless pages/sites that insult Christianity non-stop?” – Report, wataninet.com, June 19, 2023 — Egypt