RUTHFULLY YOURS

Gianni Infantino is the second FIFA president to visit the Islamic Republic, but neither of them “pushed for letting women inside the stadiums. Iran is the only country in the World Cup that bans women from their stadiums and any attempt to watch the games means risk of getting arrested.” — OpenStadiums, Iranian women’s organization.

Infantino has both the power and the duty to hold Tehran accountable in this literal and figurative arena. That he exercised neither, preferring instead to appease Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, is outrageous. In spite of his being touted falsely in the West as a “moderate,” Rouhani is a key part of the problem in Iran, not a solution to it.

Infantino deserves a swift penalty kick out of his job.

A week before International Women’s Day on March 8, thirty-five women and girls dressed as men were arrested in Iran while attempting to sneak into a popular annual soccer match. The women, the youngest of whom was 13, were forcibly removed from the premises of the Tehran Derby and “transferred to a proper place.”

The ban on women attending any sports event in Iran, other than all-female matches in which the players are required to wear full Islamic dress, is but one of many issues at the root of the current mass protests across the country against the oppressive and repressive ayatollah-led regime, which came to power nearly four decades ago. Over the years, sports have been used by both male and female anti-regime activists as a symbol of freedom, as it was one of the first areas after Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution, which ousted the Shah and ushered in the reign of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, to be considered by the ruling mullahs as a dangerous expression of secularism.

The reason that this year’s Tehran Derby was of particular interest – and not only to sports fans — was the attendance of world soccer’s top official, Gianni Infantino. As Infantino is the president of FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association), his arrival at the match was seen by freedom-seeking Iranians as an opportunity to force their government to lift the ban on women spectators.

Many years ago, Elvis made a movie Fun in Acapulco. As they say, the movie didn’t have much of a plot but Ursula Andress is worth whatever it costs to watch it online.

We can safely said that no one is making a movie about fun in Playa del Carmen these days.

As you probably know, there is a lot of talk about “el muro” — the border wall — down in Mexico. Sadly, the political class should be talking about the chaos in the country and how this is impacting their economy.

This week we read that the U.S. closed a consulate office indefinitely. This is from news reports:

“The State Department abruptly closed the U.S. consulate in the popular tourist destination of Playa del Carmen late Wednesday evening and ordered U.S. government employees to stay out of the area.

They warn other Americans either in the region or thinking of traveling to it about a “real crime threat” from local drug cartels…”

Maxime Bernier is right: Identity politics dissolves community, reduces a country to subsets of clans, and obscures the diversity of individual lives

There is much to choose from this week, including the infantile wailing and moronic ignorance of social-justice hooligans driven crazy mad (Pavlovian response) by Jordan Peterson giving a lecture, by invitation, at Queen’s University. (Three cheers for Queen’s president and the law faculty for inviting Dr. Peterson.)

Then there is Justin Trudeau inviting the fanatically anti-Alberta-oil Bill Nye to Ottawa for a public chat on science, the highlight of which was the signal revelation of the centrality of breastfeeding to the scientific method — delivered by our PM. When baby wails and the milk flows, can Planck’s constant be far behind?

As well: Jaspal Atwal, failed Sikh assassin, holding what he ludicrously called a press conference. The only takeaway: his lawyer is scarier, though not necessarily more competent.

More fertile than them all however was the brisk, chippy, and entitled Twitter blast levelled by Liberal MP and person of colour, Celina Caesar-Chavannes (Whitby, Ont.), at Conservative MP Maxime Bernier (Beauce, Que.).

Bernier had criticized an earlier tweet by Ahmed Hussen in which the Immigration Minister said the federal budget was historic for “racialized Canadians.”

Bernier said he deplored that tweet’s “awful jargon,” the pitch to “racialized” Canadians, and put out a plea for “colour blindness,” character over skin colour. His critics, Bernier said, implied (he was) a racist because “I want to live in a society where everyone is treated equally and not defined by their race.”

The parliamentary pigeons were duly agitated. Instanter, Caesar-Chavannes fired off her Twitter blast:

“… please tell this highly privileged man that the ultimate goal of fighting discrimination is equity & justice and not, as he states … to create a colour-blind society.”

That wasn’t going to boil the kettle, so there followed another, more imperious swipe: “@MaximeBernier … colour blindness as a defence actually contributes to racism. Please check your privilege and be quiet.”

There is a growing movement among the women of Iran to defy authorities and remove their headscarves, or hijabs.

Women remove their hijabs in the street and attach them to poles, waving them like flags. Some post their defiant acts on social media.
Amy Mek @AmyMek
Iranian Police push woman off box who is protesting Hijab
While Brave Iranian women protest the sharia misogynist slave Hijab, western libs pretend Hijab is symbol of freedom & fashion.In Iran, to walk around without the Hijab could mean over a year in a prison with TORTURE!

In an interview with CBN News, Taleblu, explained what’s fueling the actions of these women.

“Young Iranian women are casting off their veils as a show of defiance against both the corrupt and discriminatory political and religious system in Iran,” he said.

He added, “This anti-Hijab movement is actually not new. It began in 1979, mere months after Khomeini returned to Iran and began Islamizing the country. Since 1979, Iranian women have found creative and brave ways to contest this policy of mandatory veiling. This is only the latest iteration of that push back.”

The ayatollahs are trying hard to control the Internet and access to outside news sources. But it appears they are fighting a losing battle:

Since December, more than 30 Iranian women have been arrested for publicly removing their scarves in defiance of the Islamic regime’s strict law.

As the global media has highlighted ad nauseam, Poland recently passed through the legislature a bill that seeks to criminalize the holding of the Polish state complicit for the German Nazi crimes of the Holocaust and the attendant German atrocities during WWII. Currently the bill is being looked at by Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal after Polish President Andrzej Duda sent it for review to make sure it complies with the Polish Constitution.

This bill, known as “Ustawa IPN” (“Institute of National Remembrance Law”), was motivated by Poles’ desire to correct historical inaccuracies regarding Poland’s image and the purported role Poland played during this dark time in history. Poland suffered more than any other country during this period as the Nazi plan was to extinguish Polish-ness and Poland from the map in the hegemonic expansion of the Third Reich, in addition to their “Final Solution” vis a vis European Jewry.

Widely accepted estimates of loss of life in Poland suggest six million Poles perished – three million Jewish and three million non-Jewish Poles. No Polish family was left untouched by the Nazi death machine. As a result, when Poles hear the words “Polish death camps” or “Polish Holocaust” they bristle. Only in recent years did the international media formally change their style guides to strike “Polish death camps” from the press lexicon (and in a fitting display of how widespread this ignorance was, even such a supposedly liberal, sensitive, worldly, cosmopolitan, nuanced ivory-tower academic elite as Barack Obama used the term, referencing Auschwitz in a speech in 2012, to such widespread consternation that it served as a final straw on this issue).

Poland was literally the only country in Nazi-occupied Europe that never demonstrated any complicity with the fascist Nazi occupiers (we all remember the Vichy regime in France and the Quisling one in Norway, which were closer to the norm than the exception in continental Europe). Poland operated a government in exile in London, never had a single SS volunteer, and saw penalties for hiding Jews more severe than anywhere else (whole families, such as the Ulma family in Markowa, Poland, were executed for doing the right and honorable thing).

The government in exile made it a crime for Poles to give up Jews to the Nazis, under penalty of death, and the “Council to Aid Jews” (Zegota) was set up by the Polish resistance in 1942. Poland had more “Righteous Among the Nations” than any other nation according to Yad Vashem – which makes sense as Poland was ground zero for European Jewry for many centuries, which in turn is why Hitler’s Final Solution was so predicated on a network of death camps being built in Poland. To this day there are more stories of the hiding and saving of Jews by Poles in Poland being continually unearthed and honored.

This evening, I attended a panel discussion at Jewish Book Week in London entitled “Trump on trial”. The three panel members were all distinguished writers who viscerally loathe US President Donald Trump. What follows is an account of highlights of this discussion which I provide without further comment.

The first panellist was historian Simon Schama, who immediately after Trump’s election called it a “cataclysmic moment” and said “democracy often brings fascists to power, it did in Germany in the 1930s”.

The second was Guardian journalist Jonathan Freedland whose new thriller To Kill the President, written under the name Sam Bourne, imagines an assassination plot hatched against a volatile demagogue in the White House – who does things like tweet, lie and grab a female aide by her genitals – for fear that he intends to launch a nuclear attack.

The third was novelist Howard Jacobson, whose latest novel Pussy, written in a “fury of disbelief” about Trump’s election, is a “comic fairytale” about a man called Prince Fricassus who imagines himself to be the Roman Emperor Nero, fantasises about hookers, is idle, boastful, thin-skinned and egotistic and has no manners, curiosity, knowledge, idea or words in which to express them – and who may therefore be the very man to lead his country.

Noting that the panel contained no Trump defender, the chairman Jonny Geller asked the three to identify two good things or successes that Trump had achieved.

Schama replied that Trump was liquidating positive governance in America. He was appointing to critical government agencies people whose “only qualification” was they would destroy them. Thus for example Scott Pruitt, who was appointed head of the Environmental Protection Agency, was “abolishing regulation on toxic chemicals”; Education Secretary Betsy de Vos “doesn’t believe in public education”. Trump was a “deeply disgusting, reprehensible, dangerously unbalanced individual. The only good thing he does is once in every four days he plays golf”.

Two distinguished members of Greece’s parliament, whose party has a good chance of defeating the current leadership, are breathing new life into the political system and reinvigorating crucial partnerships with Israel and the United States.

“The positions of the Palestinians are maximalist and dangerous, since they actually propose the Islamization of the city. Palestinian Islamist organizations, like Hamas and Islamic Jihad, have repeatedly launched threats against the non-Muslim population of Jerusalem. Islamists visualize a Jerusalem without churches and synagogues. On the other hand, the Israeli Knesset has recognized since 1980 the multi-religious character of Jerusalem and is committed to the unimpeded access of all believers to places of worship…” — MP Makis Voridis, a former minister from the New Democracy party, writing in the Greek daily Kathimerini.

On his return from a recent two-day trip to Israel — where he met with high-level officials — Adonis Georgiadis, the vice president of Greece’s opposition party, New Democracy, declared his support for recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

In an interview with Skai Radio on March 7, Georgiadis called it “almost funny to discuss whether Jerusalem is a Jewish city or not.”

“[It] was founded by the Jews… in ancient times. You can read Flavius Josephus or read Diodoros Siceliotis and see the references to the city of Jerusalem, where there was the High Priest of Solomon’s Temple and that it was the city of the Jews. This is the reality.”

Brave Iranian women are risking their lives in the fight for freedom. We owe them our support.

In Iran, women and girls in recent weeks have been removing their veils, waving them in the air like flags of freedom. With this gesture, they’re staging a nonviolent protest against the mullahs’ regime and the law, imposed after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, that requires women to wear the hijab.

The campaign started just before the New Year, as part of a larger anti-government protest, after a photo of a young woman, dressed in black and silently waving her white hijab on the end of a stick, went viral. That young woman was Vida Movahed, a 31-year-old mother of one, and the image of her bravery inspired many of Iran’s women to join her in solidarity and protest.

Vida Movahed took off her headscarf on Enghelab Street in Tehran. “Enghelab” is the Farsi word for revolution, so the movement she inspired was soon dubbed “The Girls of Revolution Street.” Day by day, with the help of social media, the movement has grown. There had been seeds of protest before, most notably in the online social movement My Stealthy Freedom, in which Iranian women shared images of themselves without the compulsory hijab. And online activist and exiled Iranian Masih Alinejad had started the hashtag #WhiteWednesdays to protest the forced hijab. But the hijab-waving of Vida Movahed brought that movement from the Internet to the streets, at great personal risk for those who dare to participate.

One of the most beautiful towns in England, Lewes is relatively unspoiled by the twentieth-century British architectural incompetence that has proved so destructive of urban grace, spreading the most hideous ugliness almost everywhere as a kind of metonym for social equality. From Lewes’s streets can be seen the lovely, rolling downs of Sussex, and it is curious how the sight of green hills from the center of a town or city (still possible in Dublin, for example) soothes the mind. Among Lewes’s most famous residents were Thomas Paine, author of The Rights of Man, and Charles Dawson, the man most likely to have forged Piltdown Man, the hoax human fossil whose inauthenticity was not exposed until 40 years after its “discovery” in 1912. To my great delight, Lewes’s High Street has three excellent secondhand or antiquarian bookshops.

I had been invited down to a literary event, the Lewes Speakers Festival, to talk about my recently published memoir of life as a prison doctor, The Knife Went In. I was to be the penultimate speaker, followed by a controversial conservative journalist, Katie Hopkins, who was to talk about her own recently published memoir, Rude.

The event ended in violence.

The festival organizer, Marc Rattray, had informed me in advance that there might be trouble from demonstrators who would want to prevent Hopkins from speaking. No doubt it is a measure of how detached I am from the ordinary life of my country that I had until then scarcely heard of her, for she is either loved or abominated by millions of my fellow countrymen. (I would have guessed, if put to it, that she was an actress or a pop singer.) Some love her because she says things that many think but dare not say, while others abominate her, accusing her of bigotry and spreading hatred—hatred directed at the wrong people, that is.

To say that she is unafraid of controversy or criticism is to understate the case. They are her stock-in-trade. Whatever her other qualities, she is certainly valiant. Now 42, she suffered most of her adult life from severe nocturnal epilepsy, enduring many dislocations of her shoulder as a result, until she underwent a successful operation to remove the epileptic focus in her brain. Many people with such a condition would have retired from life, as it were, especially when the state makes it possible for them to do so, but Hopkins carved out an eminent, or at least a prominent, career in journalism for herself instead.

Donald J. Trump

✔ @realDonaldTrump

Kim Jong Un talked about denuclearization with the South Korean Representatives, not just a freeze. Also, no missile testing by North Korea during this period of time. Great progress being made but sanctions will remain until an agreement is reached. Meeting being planned!