RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

ttps://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/11946/western-goodists-syrians-palestinians

The West is drowning in a sea of double standards and moral relativism in which murderers and tyrants are allowed to wallow in their crimes, while global indignation is turned only against the sole democracy in the Middle East: Israel.
Israeli hospitals have never stopped treating Palestinians, even during wars in Gaza. In Syria, by comparison, Bashar Al-Assad continues to bomb the country’s hospitals.
Instead of scapegoating Israel, perhaps these “goodists”, if they really care about helping oppressed people, as they claim, will finally promote a freedom flotilla to liberate Gaza from Hamas’s tyranny and Syria from Assad’s butchery?

It all happened around the same time, 200 kilometers apart. In one photo, Israeli schools were involved in a national drill in the event of a missile attack. In the other photo, a real missile attack in Syria caused 200 deaths, many of which were of children. On one side, you have Israel, a democracy forced to protect its children. On the other side, you have Syria, a brutal dictatorship where the civil war has caused more than 400,000 deaths.

Last month, an Israeli plane was shot down by Syrian anti-aircraft fire. If the Syrian regime, backed by Iran and Russia, is willing to kill 200 innocent Syrians, just think what they would do to other countries’ citizens, if they had the means. Yet, going by media reports of the incident, one would think that Israel had been the aggressor.

How many resolutions has the United Nations dedicated against Syria the last year? Two. How many resolutions against Israel? 21. Both accurate reporting and international law have become distorted into serving as the enemies of humanity and civilization.

The website Iran Front Page proudly announces: “The first edition of International Hourglass Festival, dedicated to anti-Israel art and media productions, will be held in the Iranian capital Tehran in April.”

Last week a press conference on the festival was held in Tehran. During it Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, identified as “the Secretary-General of the International Conference on Supporting Palestinian Intifada and an international advisor to Iran’s Parliament Speaker,” explained that “the ‘Hourglass Festival’ is a symbol of the imminent collapse of the Zionist regime of Israel, as predicted by the Leader of Iran’s Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei.”

Amir-Abdollahian further explained that he “cannot publicize the Islamic Republic’s plan to realize the Leader’s prediction that the Israeli regime will collapse within 25 years, but it will definitely happen.”

What will the Hourglass Festival be like? Its executive secretary, Mahdi Qomi, offers a preview, saying it “will be held in 11 sections”:

Audio-visual productions, graphic design (poster, cartoons, etc.), mobile apps, mobile and web-based games, social media and websites, animation, motion-graphics, start-ups are among the fields in which the festival accepts entries.

​“The contours of the new regime are still unclear,” explained the Washington Post, “but an old one is certainly passing.” And the headline told the tale even better: “Italy’s election is another blow to the European establishment.”

The big loser was European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, who feared a “worst scenario.” The two big winners were “the anti-establishment Five Star Movement, founded less than a decade ago by a comedian, which won about 32 percent of the vote, and the League, a far-right, anti-immigrant, Euroskeptic party.”

In similar style, CNN headlined, “Italy’s voters choose populists, deliver stinging rebuke to Europe.” As the piece contended, “Italy was plunged into political uncertainty” with no party or coalition with enough votes to rule alone. A “right-wing coalition of parties won the most seats of any bloc in parliament with about 37% of the vote,” and the big winner in that group was “the anti-immigrant and xenophobic League.”

This result “will be met with alarm by European leaders who feared that big wins for Italy’s anti-establishment parties would spell further trouble for a continent already struggling to cope with the destabilizing rise of populist and far-right movements in France, Germany and elsewhere.” CNN quoted a tweet from “French far-right leader” Marine Le Pen that “The European Union is going to have a horrible evening.”

In its headline, the New York Times offered “4 Takeaways From a ‘Throw the Bums Out’ Italian Election.” As the piece explained, “migration matters” and “the mainstream parties have no answer.” The Italian economic recovery has been weak and Brussels was not much help, “further harming the center-left.”

Italian elites are “considered generally corrupt and inefficient,” explained Mark Leonard of the European Council on Foreign Relations. “Few wanted to vote for mainstream parties that were the authors of the stagnation of the last decade.” For Matthew J. Goodwin of the University of Kent, the Italian election fit a common European pattern: the demise of traditional social democratic parties; the rightward shift of voters. As the Times noted, “the Italians voted largely for parties that are euroskeptic.”

So you think President Trump is doing badly? Some of the smarter leaders on the world scene are coming to other conclusions, which is to say the Trump revolution is spreading.

Late last year, Chile held a presidential election, and in its result, Chilean voters finally dumped its corruption-plagued, soggy socialist government, up ’til now led by Michelle Bachelet, and re-elected center-right past president, Sebastián Piñera, instead.

Piñera’s finest moment during his last presidency was in 2010, at the helm of the Chilean mining crisis, when 33 miners were trapped more than two miles underground amid few hopes for their rescue. Piñera had been told by his advisers just to keep the cameras away, because it was a losing political picture. He defied them, visited the campsite out in the remote Atacama desert up north, heaped resources onto the rescuers, and the spectacular rescue that followed, which was the result of his keen interest and willingness to defy the odds, was all his.

He’s now done something similar as he prepares to start his new term. According to El Mostrador, a Santiago-based Chilean newspaper (in Spanish), he’s called in the ICBMs of the economics world into his cabinet, the Chicago Boys, who are the embodiment of free-market economics. The Chicago Boys took their ideas straight from Milton Friedman in the 1970s, predating both Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, and their free-market reforms turned Chile into a first-world country. Chile is the home to the famous Chilean Model of private savings accounts for pensions that the left screams about, because that reform did more than anything to transform Chile.

El Mostrador reports that multiple people with high-firepower economic degrees are being lined up for Piñera’s cabinet as he takes office this month. Here is a Google translation, with a few clarifications in brackets from me:

The Chicago Boys in the cabinet and undersecretaries of the next term of office of Sebastián Piñera are Cristián Larroulet, as head of the Second Floor of La Moneda; Juan Andrés Fontaine, who will be in charge of the MOP [Ministry of Public Works] this time; José Ramón Valente, the doctrinaire future holder of Economy; Rodrigo Cerda, acting as Director of Budgets; and Alfredo Moreno, in the position of Minister of Social Development.

The South African Parliament passed a measure in a landslide vote to confiscate farmland owned by whites without compensation.

A similar program instituted in neighboring Zimbabwe—once known as Rhodesia—resulted in hundreds of white farmers being slaughtered and the agricultural sector of the economy collapsing.

The fate of white farmers will be dependent on the actions of South Africa’s new president, Cyril Ramaphosa, a big supporter of expropriation without compensation, who said in 2016 that he was “not calling for the slaughter of white people—at least for now.”

How comforting.

Daily Mail:

The country’s constitution is now likely to be amended to allow for the confiscation of white-owned land without compensation, following a motion brought by radical Marxist opposition leader Julius Malema.

It passed by 241 votes for to 83 against after a vote on Tuesday, and the policy was a key factor in new president Cyril Ramaphosa’s platform after he took over from Jacob Zuma in February.

Mr Malema said the time for ‘reconciliation is over’. ‘Now is the time for justice,’ News24 reported.

‘We must ensure that we restore the dignity of our people without compensating the criminals who stole our land.’

Well, the ancestors of the “criminals,” anyway. The Marxist dimwit can’t really believe that people who have tilled the land for generations are actually criminals, can he?

Some sympathizers with extremist Muslims even try to insist that these messages are merely examples of “cultural differences”. The goal of these sympathizers seems to be to mislead a vulnerable populace into thinking that they should not worry about these chants or about the open and passionate threats against their communities.

This dumbing-down is especially intriguing because the same people who attempt culturally to explain, justify or minimize the meaning of “Death to America” and “Death to Israel” have never lived under Islamic rule or even studied those fundamentalist states. Yet they take it upon themselves to explain the meaning of these chants as if they know better than the people issuing them.

Ultimately this conditioning of the Western culture allows the extremist Muslims to expand their agenda slowly and covertly, while those who raise the alarm are shoved to edge of society and ostracized as “racists” or “Islamophobes,” while the public remains lulled into a slumbering state.

One of the most astonishing misconceptions I have come across in the West is the habit that some people — especially many media outlets — have of attempting to trivialize radical Islamists chants such as “Death to America”, “Death to Israel”, and “Death to Britain”. Even government officials tend to reduce these outbursts of hatred from the threats they really are to common banter.

Some of the so-called leftists, as well as agents of the extremist Muslim groups in the West, or spokesmen for the Islamic Republic of Iran, try to explain that these chants do not mean what they say, and what most people probably assume they say. Some sympathizers with extremist Muslims even try to insist that these messages are merely examples of “cultural differences”. The purpose of these sympathizers is seemingly to mislead a vulnerable populace into thinking that they should not worry about those chants or about the open and passionate threats against their communities.

This dumbing-down is especially intriguing because the same people who attempt culturally to explain, justify or minimize the meaning of “Death to America” and “Death to Israel” have never lived under Islamic rule or even studied those fundamentalist states. Yet they take it upon themselves to explain the meaning of these chants as if they know better than the people issuing them.