RUTHFULLY YOURS

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!

President Donald Trump has accepted an invitation to meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, the White House said Thursday, a meeting that would mark the first time a serving U.S. president has sat down with the leadership of the heavily militarized and diplomatically isolated country.

The leader-to-leader meeting, which American officials said would take place within the next “couple of months” at a location yet to be determined, is a potential turning point after more than six decades of confrontation involving North Korea, its southern neighbor and South Korea’s allies.

But it also stands to sharply raise the diplomatic stakes in one of the world’s most volatile standoffs.

American officials acknowledged that it was unusual for such a face-to-face session to be arranged without an extensive series of preparatory meetings between lower-ranking officials. But they asserted that it was justified because Mr. Kim was the only person able to make decisions in his “uniquely authoritarian” regime and that Mr. Trump was known as a deal maker.

“At this point we are not even talking about negotiations,” a senior U.S. official said, while stressing that the U.S.’s ultimate goal was complete denuclearization by North Korea, subject to stringent verification. CONTINUE AT SITE

The annual session of China’s rubber-stamp legislature opened this week, and Chinese Premier Li Keqiang announced an 8.1% increase in defense spending, the largest in three years. Lawmakers are expected to approve the military budget and constitutional changes to let supreme leader Xi Jinping serve as President indefinitely. All of this will amplify the angst in Asia about Beijing’s military buildup.

The budget of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) isn’t transparent, and the U.S. Defense Department estimates that spending is about 25% higher than Beijing’s figure. More important, Mr. Xi is remaking the military into an effective fighting force. Under previous leaders, the PLA became top-heavy with generals whose main mission was to line their own pockets. They padded the ranks with followers and offered promotions in return for bribes. An anticorruption campaign has netted 16 top generals in the past six years.

Mr. Xi has replaced them with loyalists, giving him the clout to reform the PLA. He replaced regional commands that were personal fiefdoms with theater commands that require the army, navy and air force to work together, much as the U.S. did after the Goldwater-Nichols Act in 1986. Beijing is reducing the military’s headcount and investing the savings in sophisticated weapons. Since 2015 the PLA has shed 300,000 troops. Instead of relying on human-wave attacks, it is racing the U.S. to develop artificial intelligence for the battlefield.

“The exploitation is so widespread that some Syrian women are refusing to go to distribution centres because people would assume they had offered their bodies for the aid they brought home”, the BBC explains quoting a new UN report on the humanitarian abuses.

More than half the humanitarian donations from the United Kingdom to Syria through small NGOs have ended up in the hands of ISIS and other jihadist groups, according to the think-tank Quilliam Foundation. In this way, millions of pounds, thanks to the generosity of British taxpayers, have fallen in the hands of terror groups.

Fatiha-Global, which should have brought help to Syrian refugees fleeing the war, instead diverted the funds to the Islamic State, the very terror group which had caused the refugee crisis to begin with. To top it off, the head of Fatiha-Global, Adeel Ali, was photographed with the jihadists of the Caliphate — the same jihadist group that beheaded British volunteer Alan Henning, who had come to Syria on behalf of the subsidiaries of Fatiha.

In a secularized West, charitable organizations are the modern-day saints granting us our expiatory rites. Many humanitarian NGOs even seem to cater to Western consciences filled with guilt.

Since these NGOs say they work on behalf of “humanity” and for a “better world”, while possibly assuming that states and governments act only for the sake of social efficiency or their own self-preserving interests. Yet, often these NGOs risk becoming bureaucracies as much as states do, sometimes even with similar sexual and financial scandals. At times these NGOs also can look like just a “mammoth machinery” with more employees than services; a steep, often unaccountable budget, and an ideology promoting the worst “Western stereotyping”. The weekly magazine The Spectator called them “the bad charity”.

I am forwarding this desperate plea which was just received from one of our correspondents in South Africa. He is not a beggar, but is simply hoping to be heard, and hoping that somehow someone with authority in the American government will speak up on behalf of his people. Pastor Kemble
Dear Pastor Kemble

I write to you today, with a very heavy heart, but with the hope that you might be willing to help raise awareness in the US for the desperate situation in South Africa.

As you might be aware, the ANC government in South Africa has recently passed a motion in parliament by which they intend to seize all white-owned farms in South Africa – without any compensation. It’s all part of their insidious, communist plan to ultimately destroy all white South Africans and in particular the Afrikaans-speaking white community known as the “Afrikaner”. Of course this new law will pave the way to ultimately strip the White man of all his property & possessions. Their ultimate goal is to completely annihilate us as a people. It’s as simple as that. The ANC government has essentially declared war on the Afrikaner by attempting to legalize the wholesale destruction of the white minority in South Africa.

This morning I read on Newsweek that a petition is being signed by thousands of white South Africans in which they ask President Trump to please help white South Africans to emigrate to America as refugees. I have no idea if President Trump will even respond to it, as this could become a “sticky issue” for someone who is currently committed to stopping the flow of illegal immigrants into the US; but if anyone can help, he can. This crisis needs his urgent attention as the situation for our people in South Africa is getting worse by the day. Farm attacks are especially bad, with white farmers being slaughtered without mercy. Whole families are being wiped out and nothing is being done to stop it. The liberal, government-controlled newspapers are not reporting these murders, so the rest of the world is not aware of the real extent of these gruesome crimes. Our people are really in a very desperate situation, where total annihilation is now a reality staring us all in the face.

Through your reputation, I know you to be a bold and fearless preacher, one who won’t hesitate to call a spade, a spade. From my side, I just want to raise as much awareness in the US for our people’s desperate plea and our desperate situation. Would you be willing to help me in raising awareness of the South African crisis in some way? Perhaps you can also arrange for a petition to be drawn up in the US, so that the US government are forced to take note of what’s happening in South Africa and to speak-up on this terrible injustice being committed. Ultimately, I’m hoping that President Trump himself would speak up about this tragedy, as even a criminal government like the ANC would tread carefully around a man like President Donald Trump if he openly & publicly condemns this horrific injustice against the Afrikaner. They would be forced to sit-up and take heed of his disapproval and hopefully re-think this despicable criminal act.

The controversial writer claimed on Twitter she was now out of the country following her detention but joked that they must have ‘missed her on the way in’.

In a tweet she wrote: “Thank you for all the kind emails & concern. I am out of South Africa – together with my documentary footage the #ANC don’t want you to see.”

Also in the post was a link to an article she had written for Canadian outlet Rebel Media as well as a picture of an email from the Department of Home Affairs.

The email stated that the “Deputy Minister requested that the above person (Hopkins) be prevented from entering South Africa due to her strong racist views.

“Please proceed with V-list placement.”

The V-list is a list of people prohibited from entering the country.

In her article for Rebel Media however, Hopkins claims: “They detained me under section 29(1)(d) of South Africa’s Immigration Act — which bans: ‘A member of or adherent to an association or organisation advocating the practice of racial hatred or social violence.'”

She added: “But I am a member of no such organisation and I deplore both racism and violence.

Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, is in the United Kingdom this week to meet two female leaders: Queen Elizabeth II and Prime Minister Theresa May. He will see for himself that women have as much to contribute to public life as men.

In Saudi Arabia, governed by Shariah (Islamic law), a woman must live under the authority of a male guardian, her wali al-amr. The Quran (4:34) says, “Men are the protectors and maintainers of women, because Allah has given the one more [strength] than the other, and because they support them from their means.” The General Presidency for Scholarly Research, an official body in charge of Islamic legal opinion, has issued a fatwa construing the verse strictly: “A woman should not leave her house, except with her husband’s permission.”

Saudi women do not have freedom of movement and never become fully independent legal persons. Regardless of age, they need permission from a male guardian to travel overseas, apply for a passport, marry, or be released from prison. The guardian is usually a woman’s father or husband, but can also be a brother, cousin or even son. Imagine the humiliation of a middle-aged woman having to ask a young son’s approval for important and mundane life decisions.

Guardians’ reach doesn’t stop at the border. Last April, 24-year-old Dina Ali Lasloom was held up by Filipino authorities as she changed planes at Manila International Airport. Ms. Lasloom had left Saudi Arabia against her family’s wishes. Her Saudi uncles appeared and whisked her back to Riyadh. An airline official told Human Rights Watch he heard Ms. Lasloom begging for help before being carried out in a wheelchair with duct tape on her mouth, feet and hands. The Saudi government said this was “a family matter,” and she has not been heard from since.

Could things finally be changing? Around the time Ms. Lasloom was returned to Saudi Arabia, King Salman loosened the guardianship law, permitting women to access services such as health care without the approval of a male relative. Since then, he and the crown prince have promised women the right to vote, work, drive and even join the military. But those rights don’t amount to much with the male guardianship regime in place.

As part of his tour of the U.K. and U.S., the crown prince is hoping to persuade investors to back his Saudi modernization plan, Vision 2030. He stood up to Wahhabi clerics to allow concerts and sporting events in the kingdom, and he confronted the country’s wealthy elite last November, detaining those suspected of corruption at the Riyadh Ritz-Carlton. CONTINUE AT SITE

Another Russian agent in exile, another poisoning in England. Former Russian intelligence officer Sergei Skripal, 66, and his daughter Yulia, 33, were found unconscious on a bench in Salisbury on Sunday and are in critical condition. Mr. Skripal was a double agent for the British intelligence service MI6. He was sentenced to 13 years for spying, but he and other agents were exchanged in Vienna in 2010 for 10 Russian agents arrested in the U.S. The Skripals have been living openly in Britain.

Scotland Yard called the attack “a major incident involving attempted murder by administration of a nerve agent.” A police officer who found the Skripals fell seriously ill. The poisoning echoes the attack that killed Kremlin critic Alexander Litvinenko in November 2006. A British inquiry concluded that the operation to slip polonium into his tea in a London hotel “was probably approved’’ by Vladimir Putin. Yet Britain made only modest protests, and the accused killers, Andrei Lugovoi and Dmitri Kovtun, remain at large in Russia despite British demands for extradition.

The obvious suspicion is that the Russians wanted Mr. Skripal dead, and his son and brother have died in unexplained circumstances in the last two years. Mr. Putin is a former KGB agent, so you can draw your own conclusions about the role of the Kremlin. As a demonstration of Russian ruthlessness, the poisoning is more evidence of the nature of the Moscow regime.