RUTHFULLY YOURS

The LGBT establishment has, it seems, been hijacked by a politicized elite that cares little about the rights of their brethren in the Islamic world.
LGBT activists and celebrities have never once promoted a boycott of the Islamic regimes that stone, execute and jail their homosexual citizens. Why do they not orchestrate a campaign to boycott Iranian, Indonesian, Palestinian and Turkish goods?

Whenever Islamic radicalism has been defeated after its reign of horror and fear, what follows among ordinary citizens are scenes of hope and liberation.

Syrian women burned the burqas the Islamic State forced them to wear, after the militants were being driven out from the city of Manbij. “Damn this stupid invention that they made us wear,” one woman said as she set fire to the garment. “We’re humans, we have our freedom”.

When the Taliban tyranny in Afghanistan ended, women’s faces also began to reappear on the streets; and men, forced by the Taliban to grow beards, flocked to buy razors.

Why hasn’t the West raised the question of gay rights under Islam? Go ask the LGBT establishment.

“Fight the nationalism that invokes walls and borders”. This was the platform in 2017 of Rome Pride, the annual event of Italy’s LGBT movement; it called for “resistance” against “populism” and yelled slogans such as “Make Italy Gay Again”. But as the English magazine The Spectator noted, “the battle for gay rights stops at the borders of Islam”. The Islamic State knows this well and, borrowing the slogan used by President Obama after the Supreme Court declared same-gender marriage legal, ISIS took to using the hashtag #LoveWins. Islamic supremacists laugh at our weakness.

During the summer, in cities across the West, the LGBT movement celebrated two weeks of marches and parades for “Rainbow Pride.” At Chicago’s “Dyke March,” the organizers ejected marchers who carried rainbow flags with the Jewish Star of David. They were labelled “offensive” for this “inclusive” event, despite the fact that hundreds of gay Palestinians have found refuge in Israel.

Who still takes Human Rights Watch seriously? Well, I know the Guardian does, because it was that paper, the flagship of the British left, that alerted me the other day to the fact that HRW had issued its annual report. A quick search showed that the report had also made headlines in other major media, such as Newsweek and ABC News.

The report, of course, is nominally about human rights around the world. But it’s been a long time since HRW, founded in 1988, was really about human rights. For a long time now, it’s been hiring staffers with radical political backgrounds who are quick to berate Western democracies, especially the U.S. and Israel, while turning a blind eye to brutal Third World regimes, especially Islamic ones. Exemplary of HRW’s perverse perspective was its years-long campaign of defamation against British gay-rights activist Peter Tatchell, who won its wrath by speaking up about the execution of gays in Iran.

The individual behind the slander of Tatchell was Scott Long, then director of HRW’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trangender rights program. Long didn’t just reprove Tatchell; to quote Tatchell, he “grossly misrepresented and denigrated my campaigns in defense of gay people persecuted by Iran and in opposition to Islamist fundamentalism.” In a breathtakingly unscrupulous 2009 essay, Long issued a series of flagrantly dishonest charges against Tatchell that Tatchell convincingly refuted, one by one, on his own website. Despite widespread criticism of Long for his savaging of a highly regarded gay-rights hero, HRW took five years to finally apologize to Tatchell and give Long the heave-ho.

In 2009, HRW suffered a major embarrassment. Robert L. Bernstein, its founder and longtime chairman, who had stepped down in 1998, wrote a New York Times op-ed reproving HRW for what it had turned into. HRW, he recalled, had been established “to pry open closed societies, advocate basic freedoms and support dissenters.” Yes, he granted, “open, democratic societies have faults,” but they also have ways of fixing them. Closed societies don’t – which is why HRW’s founders “sought to draw a sharp line” between the two and “prevent the Soviet Union and its followers from playing a moral equivalence game with the West.” But in the eleven years since his departure from HRW, lamented Bernstein, HRW had increasingly ignored this crucial open/closed distinction.

SAKIET SIDI YOUSSEF, Tunisia—More than seven years ago, a Tunisian fruit vendor set himself on fire and set in motion a wave of revolution that ousted authoritarian leaders across the Arab world and helped trigger three civil wars.

Now increasing numbers of young Tunisians are again taking to the streets, protesting rising prices and a new government budget that increased taxes on basic goods. The protests reflect deep public frustration over the country’s economic woes, and activists say at least some people were compelled to take part after hearing about the suicide of an unemployed repairman.

The 2011 uprising sparked the Arab Spring and resulted in broader freedom of expression and democratic elections in Tunisia. But the revolution hasn’t produced prosperity or dismantled the police state set up under former President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, who was ousted in the rebellion.

The repairman, Radwan Abbasi, lived in a tiny concrete home with his mother in this town near the Algerian border. He had searched for work for years, and came home angry on Jan. 5 after visiting a local employment office, his mother said. The next morning, he rose at dawn, bought bread and made coffee, and was later found hung from a tree at an intersection near his home, his mother and neighbors said. CONTINUE AT SITE

When Great Britain told the United States in February of 1947 that it could no longer protect Greece and Turkey, President Harry Truman and his top aides realized that America would have to step up to protect freedom or cede the Mediterranean and maybe Europe and other regions to the Soviets.

The result was the Truman Doctrine to help “free peoples” resist “attempted subjugation,” the Marshall Plan to revive an economically prostrate Europe, and NATO to protect Europe from a Soviet move.

But what Truman instinctively understood is what today’s Americans desperately must re-learn: that global power abhors a vacuum, that only America can protect freedom abroad, and that a U.S. retreat will prove harmful to America itself, as Freedom House’s new report on global freedom makes clear.

“Democracy is in crisis,” Freedom House President Michael J. Abramowitz writes in “Freedom in the World, 2018,” cataloguing the 12th straight year of democratic setbacks that out-numbered gains and that “extended a period characterized by emboldened autocrats, beleaguered democracies, and the United States’ withdrawal from its leadership role in the global struggle for human freedom.”

That democratic setbacks, autocratic gains and a U.S. withdrawal occurred simultaneously is no coincidence. While America’s retreat is hardly the sole reason for democracy’s global crisis, it is a key driving force behind it. And it’s a crisis that we will allow to continue festering at our own peril.

Like its police and the firefighters, France’s prison guards say they live in a permanent climate of violence and fear. And their exasperation is growing.

“Before, every morning, I was afraid to discover a guy hanging in his cell. You know what I’m dreading today? To be slaughtered, stripped, put a blade in my back. In the name of Islam and ISIS. Every day, on my way to work, this fear gnaws at my belly.” — ‘Bernard,’ a French prison guard.

“In the old days, aggressive behavior was linked to the difficulties of everyday life. Now hatred and violence are unleashed [by Islamists] against [our] authority, our society and its values.” — Joaquim Pueyo, MP, former director of Fleury-Mérogis prison

Instead of understanding that the famous deradicalization centers have not been useful because deradicalization did not take place, they persist in thinking that the solution to the war is appeasement. Their new experiments all go in the same direction: pursuing the fantasy that “if we are nice with jihadists, they will be nice to us.”

French prison guards are on strike. In a period of less than 10 days, a number of guards in various prisons were attacked and wounded, mainly by Islamists incarcerated for terrorist offenses or petty criminals apparently on their way to becoming radical Islamists. In reaction, the guards have blocked the normal functioning of the majority of prisons.

The wave of attacks began on January 11, 2018. Three guards of Vendin-le-Vieil’s prison, in the north of France, were lightly wounded in a knife attack committed by the Christian Gantzarski, a German convert to Islam who joined Al Qaeda and masterminded the bombing of a synagogue in Djerba, Tunisia, in 2002.

On January 15, 2018, seven guards were attacked and injured by a “radicalized” inmate at Mont-de-Marsan prison, in the south of France.

Jiri Valenta is a nonresident senior fellow at the BESA Center for Strategic Studies at Bar Ilan University, Israel and author of “Soviet Intervention in Czechoslovakia, 1968” (Johns Hopkins, 1990).

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/11786/czech-elections-us-interests

Czech President Milos Zeman adamantly refuses to obey the European Union immigration quotas, even in the face of EU lawsuits.

As for the widely bruited charge that he is pro-Russian: In 1968, this writer, a former classmate of Zeman’s in the Prague School of Economics, together defended the Prague reforms before hostile academic audiences in Leningrad and Moscow just weeks before the Soviet invasion. Expelled from the Communist Party, for his opposition to the Soviets, Zeman was also thrice in two decades fired from his job. In contrast, his opponent in the run-off, Jiri Drahos, repeatedly traveled to West under the watchful supervision of the Czech secret police.

Zeman’s defeat would deprive Europe of a powerful voice against anti-Semitism and Islamo-fascism. Drahos, an inexperienced leader, is more likely to be malleable to Brussels’s demands on accepting quotas on Muslim immigration. The result of the Czech vote will reverberate through Europe. Consequently, Zeman’s reelection is in America’s national interest.

The significance of an upcoming, run-off, presidential election in Czech Republic is largely underestimated in Washington. But its prevalent view of it as a not too significant event in a small European country is dead wrong.

Contenders include the sitting President, outspoken and politically incorrect Milos Zeman, who garnered 39% of the vote in the first of a two-phase election. His rival is chemist Jiri Drahos, the correct, low key, former president of the Czech Academy of Sciences, who won 27%. A tight race is expected in the January 26-27 vote.

In America, Zeman’s foes are led by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, together with President Barack Obama’s State Department holdovers. They yearn for Zeman’s defeat at they do for the downfall of President Donald Trump, whom Zeman in some ways resembles.

As with Trump, one of key issues is whether Zeman is pro-Russian as maintained by his foes in U.S and Czech media. Yet even more crucial is Zeman’s hard line on Muslim immigration. He adamantly refuses to obey the European Union immigration quotas, even in the face of EU lawsuits.

A bit of Czech history is in order here. Curiously, the Prague events in last century on dates ending in the number 8, have often witnessed developments with major implications. In 1918, the founding of democratic Czechoslovakia by exiled Czech politician Tomas Masaryk intensified the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire. In 1938, British and French appeasement of Adolf Hitler at Munich and the Nazi occupation of the Czech Sudetenland adumbrated the outbreak of World War II a year later. In 1948 a Communist coup in still democratic Prague was a key impetus for the creation of NATO a year later.

In 1968 the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia aimed at quelling the infectious Prague Spring, became in the words of my mentor, Josef Korbel (Madeleine Albright’s father), “the inextinguishable spark” for future democratic revolutions. That happened in 1989 as playwright Vaclav Havel, “an outstanding dissident,” in Zeman’s words, became president of a new, democratic Czech Republic.

Amena Khan said she deeply regrets the 2014 tweets, including one in which she labeled Israel a “child murderer.”

L’Oréal made history last week when it became the first major cosmetics firm to feature a Muslim woman wearing a head covering in a mainstream international ad campaign for hair products.

The signing of Amena Khan, a British blogger on beauty, as the newest face of L’Oréal Paris generated a lot of positive publicity for the French firm, with CNN lauding the company for “breaking barriers” and “becoming more diverse” in an article that also flattered Khan for “empowering women.”

But the response was less enthusiastic in some French Jewish media like JSSNews, where Khan was denounced as “an anti-Semite of the worst kind” for her remarks on Twitter in 2014 calling Israel an “illegal and sinister state.” She also labeled Israel a “child murderer” that Allah will ultimately defeat.

According to the British government’s 2016 definition of anti-Semitism, “claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor” and “applying double standards by requiring of it [Israel] a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation” are examples of the phenomenon.

On Monday, Khan said she is stepping down from the L’Oreal Paris Elvive World of Care campaign because “the current conversations surrounding it detract from the positive and inclusive sentiment that it set out to deliver.”

“I deeply regret the content of the tweets I made in 2014, and sincerely apologize for the upset and hurt they have caused,” she wrote on Instagram.

Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau touts himself as a leader who equality and rights for the LGBTQ community. At the same time, he also embraces and promotes the growing Islamist movement in Canada, which views homosexuality as a crime punishable by lashing and even death. And the Islamists make no secret of their views. They promote them in mosques, public lecturers, articles and books often distributed free in bookstores and on city street corners.

In November 2016, Trudeau has appointed a special advisor to develop and coordinate the Canadian government’s LGBTQ agenda within and without Canada. Trudeau’s government is also “funding and implementing LGBTQ-related projects abroad supporting violence-prevention programs, awareness-raising campaigns and advocacy efforts, including initiatives aimed to combat homophobia and transphobia in education systems.” Trudeau has spoken of the “great strides in securing legal rights for the LGBTQ community in Canada. But the fight to end discrimination is not over and a lot of hard work still needs to be done. Canadians know our country is made stronger because of our diversity, not in spite of it.”