RUTHFULLY YOURS

The brave women in Iran who inspired the world and became the face of a revolution by removing their face veils in protest to the theocratic government are now being beaten, tortured, and charged with “inciting prostitution” in Iranian prisons.

Iranian police sent an official warning that traveling and spending time in public places without a religious hijab would carry a penalty of one to two months in prison which could be reduced to a lower sentence, but encouraging people not to have the veil would put them in jeopardy of one to ten years in prison and could not be converted into a substitute penalty. This criminal charge, “inciting corruption and prostitution,” is not only dangerous but demeaning.

Two women arrested for protesting the hijab have been already been informed that they face charges of “inciting corruption and prostitution” for their protest. Narges Hosseini was put on trial last week before an Ershad (Moral Guidance) court in Tehran on this charge. Shaparak Shajarizadeh, who is being held in solitary confinement in a prison near Tehran, faces the same charge.

In addition to facing the prostitution charge, Shajarizadeh has also been subjected to torture and beatings, according to her lawyer. She was also injected with an identified substance several times by force against her will.

“This is a deeply retrograde move by the Iranian authorities in their ongoing persecution of women who dare to speak out against compulsory veiling,” Magdalena Mughrabi, Amnesty International’s deputy director for the Middle East and North Africa, said in a statement. “It places many women at serious and immediate risk of unjust imprisonment while sending a chilling message to others to keep quiet while their rights are being violated.”

Vida Movahed and Azam Jangravi, two other women arrested for peaceful protests against compulsory veiling, are currently out on bail. Maryam Shariatmadari and Hamraz Sadeghi remain in detention.

According to Amnesty International, police have become increasingly brutal in their crackdown on the forced hijab. Women who take off their headscarves in public and wave them on the end of a stick have been beaten and gruffly treated by authorities.

Last Thursday, another hijab protester’s video went viral on Persian social media. Shariatmadari stood atop a concrete structure waving her hijab, but a police officer recklessly pushed her off. Her friends have reported that the fall resulted in injuries requiring surgery, but the woman is being held in prison without access to adequate medical care. CONTINUE AT SITE

Europe’s biggest problem with Hungary is that Europe doesn’t have any good ways to deal with a problem like Hungary. A brief visit here ahead of April’s elections shows the extent to which that truth is challenging the European Union’s central beliefs about itself.

Prime Minister Viktor Orban on April 8 will win his third consecutive term since 2010—his fourth term overall, including his first stint from 1998-2002. The main question is whether his Fidesz party can eke out a two-thirds supermajority in Parliament, which would enable Mr. Orban to amend the constitution at will.

This feels like another blow to democracy. Mr. Orban said in 2014, in a speech that rang alarm bells around the West, that he aspires to build an “illiberal state” on the model of Singapore, China, Russia or Turkey. He’s succeeding. Press freedom has deteriorated as the government has withdrawn its taxpayer-funded advertising from unfriendly outlets, and as ownership has been consolidated in the hands of Orban loyalists. In rural areas, independent newspapers have disappeared.

The major media are turning into propaganda arms for Fidesz, and Mr. Orban is using them to Orwellian effect by creating a foreign bogeyman to rally patriotic fervor. The bogeyman is George Soros, the left-wing Hungarian-born American financier. On a random Wednesday in February, the front pages of at least three big newspapers contained attacks on Mr. Soros for supposedly conspiring in various ways against Hungary. These particular fusillades didn’t appear overtly anti-Semitic, but that’s common enough too.

American and British conservatives may spar with Mr. Soros on policy, but sometimes the enemy of your enemy is also your enemy. Mr. Orban is using the anti-Soros sentiment he has stirred up to justify clamping down further on Hungarian civil society. The so-called Stop Soros Law under debate would impose a 25% tax on foreign donations flowing into civil-society groups and other nongovernmental organizations, whether Soros-funded or not.

Do these illiberal factors alone explain why Fidesz is cruising to an all-but-unopposed victory? No, because, let’s be honest, the rest of Hungarian politics is a mess. CONTINUE AT SITE

South Africa is going the way of Zimbabwe, once the breadbasket of Africa and a stable and productive nation which is now a hell hole of famine, epidemic and crime…..One day historians will write of the terrible outcome of Africa’s decolonization and home rule….rsk

No country ever became rich through its government’s seizure of private property (exhibit A: the Soviet Union), but politicians in South Africa want to give it another go.

That’s the disheartening news from Cape Town this week, where the National Assembly voted 241-83 on Tuesday to start a process to amend the constitution and allow land expropriation without compensation. A parliamentary committee will review the motion and report by Aug. 30.

Land long has been a fraught issue in South Africa, where during the apartheid era blacks were barred from buying property in white areas. Post-apartheid, the government bought land and offered compensation to South Africans whose property had been forcibly seized after 1913.

Many of those claims are now settled, and more than 90% of claimants chose to receive cash instead of land titles, a reflection of the country’s rapid urbanization. According to a 2016 Institute of Race Relations survey, less than 1% of South Africans think land is one of the country’s “serious unresolved problems.” Unemployment, public services, housing and crime rank far higher.

Kano, Nigeria (CNN)The Nigerian government has released the names of the 110 missing girls, some as young as 11 years old, who have not been seen since a raid on their school in Dapchi last week.
Fighter jets, helicopters and surveillance planes have all been deployed in the search for the girls, who vanished after suspected Boko Haram militants attacked the Government Girls Science Technical College.
According to a list of names released by the authorities Tuesday, the missing are aged between 11 and 19. The names have been verified by a panel of school administrators and government officials, according to a statement by Alhaji Lai Mohammed, Nigeria’s Minister of Information and Culture.
As of Monday evening, the Nigerian Air Force had flown a total of 200 hours while searching for the girls. Nigeria’s Chief of Air Staff, Air Marshall Sadique Abubakar, has been relocated to Yobe State, where Dapchi is located, to personally supervise the search, the government statement said.

The school is only 275 kilometers (170 miles) from Chibok, where Boko Haram militants kidnapped nearly 300 girls from a school in 2014.

If efforts to expose Iran’s and Hezbollah’s roles in the Argentinean bombings are successful, the information will elucidate for regional leaders the dark side of Iran’s ties to sub-state terrorist groups to increase even further its influence in Latin America.

For decades, Iran has seemingly been employing both normative diplomatic ties and criminal links to export its Islamic revolution to the Western Hemisphere. By using similar methods of subversion, Iran appears already to have penetrated other Latin American nations, including Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Brazil and some island countries in the Caribbean.

Iran’s activities in Latin America are a direct challenge to U.S. primacy in the Western Hemisphere. Iran, it seems, wants to replace the U.S. as the power ally of Latin American countries.

While Iran’s nuclear, ballistic missile, and expansionist policies in the Middle East are well known, most of the Islamic Republic’s operations in Latin America appear to have been proceeding underway, below the radar, for several decades.

During a joint news conference on February 4 in Buenos Aires with Argentina’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Jorge Faurie, U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson pledged to combat Hezbollah’s fundraising in Latin America, which is used to finance its terrorist operations. This indicates that U.S. intelligence and enforcement agencies could be closely following Iranian and Hezbollah incursions into Central and South America. The Department of Justice, for instance, recently announced that it had established a Hezbollah Financing and Narcoterrorism Team (HFNT) to monitor and prosecute the criminal activities of Hezbollah, Iran’s allied terrorist network in the region.

Last week, Russia escalated its military profile in Syria by dispatching its top of the line fighter bomber to the war-ravaged country. Based on publicly available Israeli satellite imagery and eyewitness accounts, the Russians have deployed between 2 to 4 Su-57 fighter bombers to Khmeimim Airbase. In addition to the Su-57, the Russians also deployed advanced Su-36 fighter jets, and an A-50U airborne command and control plane.

The Su-57 is a fifth generation fighter bomber, and according to Russia, is said to possess stealth characteristics and performance features similar to the U.S. F-22 Raptor and the F-35 Lightning II. The Israeli Air Force has adopted the F-35 (which it calls the Adir) as its premier fighter and has outfitted the plane with an indigenously designed avionics package. The Su-57 is almost certainly the product of stolen U.S. technology, obtained through corporate espionage, cyber penetrations and surprisingly, open sources. The Russians have over the years developed a penchant for stealing or otherwise appropriating Western technology. Regardless, the F-22 and F-35 are still considered far superior to the Russian plane.

But if Russian reports regarding the aircraft’s performance are accurate, the Su-57 platform poses a serious challenge to U.S. and Israeli aerial operations. Both Israeli F-35s and U.S. Raptors are active over the cluttered skies of Syria.

In June 2017, a U.S. F/A-18E Super Hornet shot down a Syrian Su-22 after it dropped bombs on Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) positions. The SDF is an anti-Assad militia which is working with the U.S. to defeat ISIS and also operates as an effective bulwark against Iranian expansion. On December 14, two U.S. F-22s intercepted two Russian-piloted Su-25s and a third Su-35 which flew into coalition airspace on the east side of the Euphrates River.

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.

Turkish propagandists also have been twisting facts to try to portray Greece as the aggressor.

Although Turkey knows that the islands are legally and historically Greek, Turkish authorities want to occupy and Turkify them, presumably to further the campaign of annihilating the Greeks, as they did in Anatolia from 1914 to 1923 and after.

Any attack against Greece should be treated as an attack against the West.

There is one issue on which Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and its main opposition, the Republican People’s Party (CHP), are in complete agreement: The conviction that the Greek islands are occupied Turkish territory and must be reconquered. So strong is this determination that the leaders of both parties have openly threatened to invade the Aegean.

The only conflict on this issue between the two parties is in competing to prove which is more powerful and patriotic, and which possesses the courage to carry out the threat against Greece. While the CHP is accusing President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s AKP party of enabling Greece to occupy Turkish lands, the AKP is attacking the CHP, Turkey’s founding party, for allowing Greece to take the islands through the 1924 Treaty of Lausanne, the 1932 Turkish-Italian Agreements, and the 1947 Paris Treaty, which recognized the islands of the Aegean as Greek territory.

In 2016, Erdoğan said that Turkey “gave away” the islands that “used to be ours” and are “within shouting distance.” “There are still our mosques, our shrines there,” he said, referring to the Ottoman occupation of the islands.