RUTHFULLY YOURS

Why is this ongoing post colonial tragedy in Africa ignored by legislators? A documentary was made in 2013 “Congo-The Road to Ruin” read about it: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/23/opinion/congo-the-road-to-ruin.html
During the final mass of his Latin American tour this past week, Pope Francis highlighted one of the most devastating crises currently affecting Christians: the ongoing atrocities being committed by Joseph Kabila’s unconstitutional government in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). In an emotional appeal in Lima, the leader of the Catholic Church demanded that Congolese authorities do everything possible to stop the constant escalation of violence against peaceful protesters.

Over the 12+ months that President Kabila has refused to step down since his term officially ended, Pope Francis and the Catholic Church have been among the strongest voices calling for Kabila to allow free and fair elections to choose his successor. When Kabila visited the Vatican in September 2016, as concerns intensified that he would delay the elections then scheduled for December of that year, Francis pointedly received him in his library, rather than the reception room in which he usually greets heads of state. The pope used their conversation to urge Kabila to ensure a peaceful transition of power.

Yet in more than a year since that meeting, a transition of power has yet to take place. Instead, Kabila has taken progressively more extreme measures to cling to power, from attempts to change the constitution to increasingly violent crackdowns on protests. In late 2016, the influential and widely respected Catholic Church of Congo brokered an agreement to allow Kabila to remain president until the end of 2017, provided that he refrain from amending the Constitution or staying in office beyond December 31, 2017. The passage of that date marked not only Kabila’s failure to stick to his side of the bargain, but one of the Congolese authorities’ most egregious violations of human rights yet.

The massive uprisings in Iran from earlier this year may be over, but women across the country are still protesting the state enforcement of the hijab. On Monday, at least six women removed their hijabs in an act of protest, and one was arrested in Tehran, reportedly on the very spot where another woman protested at the beginning of the uprising. Worse, two people attempting to film her protest also got arrested.

“I took my scarf off because I’m tired of our government telling me what to do with my body,” a 28-year-old protester reportedly told feminist author and New York Times columnist Mona Eltahawy.

Mona Eltahawy
✔ @monaeltahawy
Replying to @monaeltahawy

#Iran https://twitter.com/faranak_amidi/status/958008395797233664 …

Mona Eltahawy

✔ @monaeltahawy

“I took my scarf off because I’m tired of our government telling me what to do with my body,” 28yo woman protestor.
At least one of the 6 women protesting Monday was arrested by police, a shopkeeper who witnessed the arrest said. #Iran

Eltahawy reported that six women stood on street corners with their hijabs waving in the wind. Photos of at least three women circulated on Twitter. CONTINUE AT SITE

The Palestinians’ mock trial and “execution” of Trump and Pence gives the Palestinians a green light to target Americans physically. More interesting still is that members of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s ruling Fatah faction participated in the mock trial and “execution” of the US president and the Vice President.

Strikingly, this event took place inside a refugee camp that is run by the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA). More precisely, the execution took place outside a school run by UNRWA. Trump and Pence were “hanged” with the UNRWA flag flying atop the school in the background.

The US and other Western countries would do well to take the Palestinian campaign of threats and incitement extremely seriously – and severely counter these threats. Submission to the intimidation will simply result in even more intimidation, more violence and more threats.

Palestinian incitement against the US has reached new heights. While the Palestinians have never been fans of the US, the past few weeks have revealed the extent to which they truly loathe Americans. The US, it is worth noting, funds the Palestinians to the tune of nearly $800 million every year — $368 million every year to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA); and $400 million every year to the Palestinian Authority (PA), with $363 million from USAID and $36 million every year for security.

This is how the Palestinian incitement machine works: PA leaders and officials set the tone, while ordinary Palestinians take to the streets to express their hatred of the US.

Hardly a day passes in the West Bank and Gaza Strip without a photo or effigy of President Donald Trump and US flags being burned before local and foreign journalists and camera crews.

Such scenes have become commonplace since Trump’s December announcement recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.

Until recently, such scenes of rage were reserved for Israeli leaders and the Israeli flag. The Palestinians, however, have now added the US to their list of enemies — they do not like Trump’s announcement on Jerusalem and see him as being “biased” in favor of Israel.

Pandamonium ensued on Thursday when a French supermarket chain announced that it was slashing the price of Nutella by 70 percent. A half-dozen Intermarch supermarkets were overrun with customers hustling to get their beloved nutty spread, with long lines forming outside stores and violence reported at several locations.

The chain usually sells Nutella for 4.50 euros ($5.60 US). After the discount, the price dropped to 1.41 euros. One employee exclaimed, “70 percent off? That’s a steal!”

“People just rushed in, shoving everyone, breaking things. It was like an orgy,” one employee told AFP. “We were on the verge of calling the police.”

At a store in L’Horme, an employee described the tense scene to Le Progres: “We were trying to get in between the customers, but they were pushing us,” he said, adding that one customer received a black eye in the tussle.

Le Progres reported:

In Saint-Chamond, the store is quite small, it is an Intermarché Contact. But the 300 pots left in a quarter of an hour too. “It was fighting. We sold what we sell in three months. On the crate carpets, there was only Nutella,” says an employee, who says he has never known that in sixteen years.

“We need another system, we would prefer not to do it. It’s more of a nuisance than anything else. We are just intermediate, there is no margin and besides it was not our usual clientele. Our clients, they were crying because they had nothing, “adds the employee, who speaks of” Berezina “.

At the Intermarché de Saint-Cyprien, people fought, they threw themselves on the person who carried the Nutella pots on a pallet.

In Rive-de-Gier, the cell phones were out to film the riot: “They are like animals. A woman had her hair pulled, an elderly lady took a box on her head, another had a blood

Intermarche told AFP that it was “surprised” by the demand and apologized to customers who were inconvenienced.

Ferrero, the company that makes Nutella, said they weren’t involved in the decision to cut the price of their product.

“The company Ferrero wishes to recall that this promotion was decided unilaterally by the brand Intermarché,” Ferrero said in a statement. They added that the company “deplores this operation and its consequences that create confusion and disappointment in the minds of consumers.”
Watch the video below:

French journalist Éric Zemmour facetiously suggested that France should forget about bombing Raqqa and should instead bomb Molenbeek.

Even the New York Times, of all places, ran an exposé about the ineffectiveness of Belgium’s anti-terror efforts, pointing up the chronic laxity, buck-passing, and turf-confusions that characterize every level of its government.

Shut up. Zip it. It is a pathetic and cowardly way of responding to reality, but it is, alas, a widespread behavior pattern in Western Europe today – and, at least in certain milieux in poor little Belgium, it has been all but raised to a sacrament.

In the 15 years that followed the Napoleonic Wars, a messy series of events — international conferences, great-power land swaps, treaties, riots, military skirmishes, and, finally, a brief revolution — resulted in a redrawing of borders in the Low Countries and the establishment of a new country called Belgium. Even in the best of times, it was hardly a country, fatally divided into a French-speaking south and a Flemish-speaking north, whose residents had little sense of shared identity. If, when the European Union came along, the Belgians embraced the idea so ardently — and welcomed the transformation of their own capital into the capital of the EU — it was largely because they had far less of a sense of nationhood than their Western European neighbors, and felt, or hoped, that the EU would artificially supply something ineffable that their own history and culture had failed to give them.

Even now, when the citizens of many Western European countries have been brought up to be ashamed of their national flags, some of these Europeans, at least, still exhibit intermittent signs of national pride: witness the crowds across the UK who, every year, sing “God Save the Queen”, “Jerusalem”, and “Land of Hope and Glory” during the broadcast of the Last Night of the Proms, or the spectacle of the French Parliament breaking spontaneously into “La Marseillaise” after the Charlie Hebdo massacre. Such displays are few and far between in Belgium. It seems appropriate that, while the official proportions of the Belgian flag are 13:15, most of the flags flown over government buildings are 2:3. In other words, they do not even bother getting the proportions of their own flag right.

In Pakistan, Muslims burn the homes of non-Muslims, burn their places of worship, burn their holy books, even burn their women and children alive — and there is no law or punishment to prevent this criminal behaviour or to make non-Muslims safe.

Non-Muslim women and children are raped and forcibly converted; this is considered a religious obligation to please “Allah,” the god of Islam. These taskmasters see themselves as “Soldiers of Allah”. Even if a case of “blasphemy” is not proven against Christians, they still can be killed by an angry mob or while in police custody. Non-Muslims can also easily be sentenced to death by a court: even a single claim by Muslim against a non-Muslim is enough to “prove” him guilty.

Christian leaders and organizations, especially the Pope, have failed to give any hope to persecuted Christians. Providing a press release or sending a note is not enough. The Pope truly needs to come to help his flock, to establish policies to safeguard these persecuted people from the Islamic world.

According to the official results of Pakistan’s 2017 census, as of August 25, 2017, the population of Islamic Republic of Pakistan is 207.74 million.

The country is divided into an overwhelmingly Muslim majority of 96.28%; and the remaining 3.72% are Christian, Bahais, Buddhists, Hindus, Ahmadis, Jains, Kalasha, Parsis and Sikhs, who are identified as non-Muslim minority Pakistanis.

Religious minorities in the territory of present-day Pakistan, at the time of the partition of India in 1947, were almost 23% of Pakistan’s population. But instead of their numbers increasing, they have decreased to the current 3.72%. If the Muslim population has grown, why have non-Muslim minorities not grown also?

This 23% represents millions of people; how have they vanished?

According to the same census, from 1998 to 2017, Pakistan’s overall population grew by 57%. Presumably, non-Muslim minorities should have increased at the same rate. Instead, their numbers have dangerously fallen.

The Hindu population, for example, which, according to the 1951 census, was 12.9%, is now only 1.6%.

These numbers begin to reveal the situation of minorities in Pakistan.

President Trump had best be careful what he wishes for. Some of those Nordic types he reportedly opined would make better immigrants to the US are quite likely to bring with them a leftist culture every bit as problematic as the mores of the lavatorial hell holes he derided.

The overwhelmingly left wing US foreign policy Establishment would not normally let slip that all is not peaches and cream in Africa, that the Dark Continent is a bottomless pit which will absorb aid funds without trace of improvement for all eternity. So what gave Foreign Policy cover to report that the U.S. ambassador to Zimbabwe, a man of African ancestry, continues to be vilified in racial terms by the Zimbabwean government? It is likely the abuse was prompted by President Trump’s reported comment in which he is said to have used a pithy aphorism to describe some of the countries from which recent waves of immigrants have come.

The President, as you might recall, expressed a preference for migrants from Norway. Perhaps he was thinking of the likes of Ann-Margret, who migrated to the United States in 1946. Other Norwegians have been less pleasant — and there is a tie to Zimbabwe. Norway in the 1980s had a prime minister by the name of Gro Harlem Brundtland who secretly financed the establishment of communist regimes in southern Africa through the Norwegian Development Agency. That is one reason why the Brundtland commission on climate, forerunner to the UN climate commission, chose to convene its conferences in Harare over 1986-87.

Not to be outdone, Norway’s neighbour, Sweden, also was up to no good in Africa. Sweden pursued and fostered a secret military cooperation with Robert Mugabe and his then-head of state security, Comrade Mnangagwa, who recently replaced Mugabe as the country’s dictator. Funded by the Swedish International Development Agency (SIDA), this cooperation, starting in 1969, was top secret, even from the Swedish parliament, which authorised SIDA budgets. Similar efforts were made by Swedish socialist governments to encourage and establish communist regimes in South Africa, Ethiopia, Angola, Mozambique, Guinea Bissau and Zambia.

With a population exceeding 600,000, Oslo is divided into two parts by Akerselva, a modest brook that runs from the mountains in the north down into the Oslo Fjord. West Oslo is the upscale side of town, with fancy townhouses near the city center and, farther out, elegant neighborhoods full of large, handsome houses and wide, well-tended lawns. East Oslo is grungier: on the downtown end, you’ll find East Village–type districts with cool bars and clubs and plenty of graffiti, plus a couple of largely Muslim areas, Tøyen and Grønland; farther east lies Groruddalen.

A broad, flat, relatively nondescript valley (dal means “valley” in Norwegian), Groruddalen is home to more than a quarter of Oslo’s population. Think San Fernando Valley, and you won’t be far off. For a few decades now, the valley has been associated in the Norwegian mind with Islam. On August 28, 2017, Rita Karlsen of Human Rights Service (HRS), an Oslo-based think tank, noted that it had been 16 years to the day since Labour Party politician Thorbjørn Berntsen had declared: “There’s a limit to how many immigrants Groruddalen can accept. That limit is beginning to be reached. I know of people who want to move because the city of Oslo is filling entire apartment buildings with asylum seekers and refugees. . . . We must simply admit that cultural conflicts are beginning to be noticeable.” Other politicians rejected Berntsen’s concerns. The Labour Party’s then-head in Oslo, Bjørgulv Froyn, insisted that Groruddalen’s problems had “nothing to do with immigrants.” The leader of Oslo’s Conservatives, Per-Kristian Foss, agreed, accusing Berntsen of “stigmatizing a neighborhood and a population group.” Foss, who is openly gay, chose not to address the fact that it was already becoming uncomfortable for homosexuals to live in certain parts of Groruddalen.

Berntsen’s warning, issued in 2001, has proved prescient. From 2008 to 2010, more than 6,000 ethnic Norwegians moved out of Groruddalen, while almost twice that number of immigrants—mostly Muslims—moved in. In 2009, fully 67 percent of the children born in Stovner, a borough at the far eastern end of the valley, had non-Western mothers. In 2010, immigrants made up more than 40 percent of Groruddalen’s population, and Lars Østby, chief demographer at Statistics Norway (SSB), the nation’s official statistics agency, predicted that, before long, a majority of the valley’s population would consist of immigrants and their children. Yet Østby did not see this as a problem—notwithstanding the grim reality of certain urban areas in next-door Sweden, such as Rinkeby in Stockholm and Rosengård in Malmö, that had become Muslim enclaves: parallel societies where sharia trumped Swedish law and where community leaders, imams, and gangs had largely displaced the authority of the Swedish government, police, and courts.

At the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, this week, liberal billionaire investor George Soros declared that the Trump presidency is a “danger to the world” which will “disappear” in 2020 or sooner.

“Clearly, I consider the Trump administration a danger to the world,” Soros said. “But I regard it as a purely temporary phenomenon that will disappear in 2020, or even sooner. I give President Trump credit for motivating his core supporters brilliantly, but for every core supporter, he has created a greater number of core opponents who are equally strongly motivated. That is why I expect a Democratic landslide in 2018.”

Soros, a major left-wing donor, also said that his “goal” is to “reestablish a functioning two-party system” in the United States.

“My personal goal in the United States is to help reestablish a functioning two-party system. This will require not only a landslide in 2018 but also a Democratic Party that will aim at non-partisan redistricting, the appointment of well-qualified judges, a properly conducted census and other measures that a functioning two-party system requires,” he said.

“In the United States, President Trump would like to establish a mafia state but he can’t, because the Constitution, other institutions, and a vibrant civil society won’t allow it,” he argued, amping up his hyperbole. “Not only the survival of open society but the survival of our entire civilization is at stake. The rise of leaders such as Kim Jong Un in North Korea and Donald Trump in the United States have much to do with this.” CONTINUE AT SITE