RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21566/iran-pakistan-murders

Pakistanis are asking why these terrorists, these enemies of peace, continue to find shelter inside Iran. For years, groups like the BNA and its sibling, the Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA), have launched attacks…

Behind the scenes, officials acknowledge the seriousness of the moment. There is discussion not just about diplomacy, but about deterrence.

The Iranian regime, meanwhile, remains cagey. Their official statement condemned the attack but offered little detail about any arrests or investigations.

The international community has remained muted. Western governments — so quick to condemn terrorism elsewhere — have yet to speak out. There have been no statements from the UN.

In Islamabad, the Foreign Office is reportedly considering a range of responses, from diplomatic measures to more direct action…. Among cabinet members, there is now open debate: What is the cost of silence? What is the risk of restraint?

ISLAMABAD — The workshop was nothing more than a room carved out of metal and concrete. A few oil drums, rusted toolboxes, and eight tattered mattresses stood lined up against the wall. These were not barracks or hideouts—just a makeshift dormitory for eight Pakistani laborers who had crossed into Iran looking for honest work. That night, they were exhausted after working through the day repairing broken-down trucks in the remote Iranian village of Haiz Abad. They had no enemies, no weapons — just calloused hands and quiet dreams of returning home with enough money to feed their families. But as they slept on April 12, darkness brought something other than rest.

The eight men — citizens of Pakistan, fathers, sons, brothers — were found with their hands bound, and their bodies riddled with bullets. Executed. Slaughtered. Their corpses were discovered in the same positions in which they had gone to sleep, the narrow room now soaked in red. The murderers? The Baloch Nationalist Army (BNA) — a terrorist outfit long known to have sanctuaries inside Iranian territory — was quick to claim responsibility. They had carried out the massacre on Iranian soil. And Iran’s regime, days later, still has no answers, no arrests, no accountability.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21565/iran-endless-negotiation

The Iranian regime’s primary objective remains preserving its power. The mullahs see their nuclear program as the key to their survival.

Any agreement should aim for nothing less than the total and permanent dismantlement of Iran’s nuclear capabilities. This means no enrichment, no reprocessing, no heavy-water reactors, and no stockpiles – anywhere on the planet — of enriched uranium.

The dismantlement and enforcement processes must not be outsourced to any international organizations or foreign governments…. Ensuring compliance must lie directly with the United States and its most trusted regional ally, Israel. Both countries have the intelligence capabilities, military readiness and political will to ensure that any nuclear dismantlement is not only thorough but irreversible.

Rounds of negotiations, verbal commitments or limited restrictions are invitations to cheat. The mullahs’ plan is one of delay and deception. America’s plan must be not to let them.

The Trump administration, after signaling a preference for dialogue over confrontation, is engaging in renewed a diplomatic effort to end Iran’s nuclear program. President Donald J. Trump has made clear that he is not seeking war. “I would prefer to make a deal,” he stated recently, “because I’m not looking to hurt Iran.”

Given the devastating costs of war, focusing on negotiation rather than on military intervention is a noble and responsible course of action. The Iranian regime, however, is not new to such diplomatic games of chess. The mullahs have mastered the art of prolonging negotiations: appearing cooperative while covertly advancing their strategic interests, especially developing ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons, and operating proxies in the region, such as Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis, not to mention Iran’s own Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as well as smaller militias.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm-plus/questions-for-carney/

Before Canadians cast their votes on April 28 they might run a few questions by Prime Minister Mark Carney, starting with the man Carney has already replaced. For example, did Prime Minister Justin Trudeau ever do anything with which you disagreed? Carney hasn’t made that clear, and there’s more to it.

During the Covid pandemic, the Trudeau government froze the bank accounts of protesting truckers. Does you approve of that action? Does it square with your concept of free speech and civil liberties?

Do you share Justin Trudeau’s admiration for China’s “basic dictatorship?” Did the People’s Republic of China ever do anything with which you disagreed? The PRC maintains police stations in 30 countries, including Canada. Is that a wise policy? Has Canada ever collaborated in any way with China’s military?

Do you agree with David Frum that Pierre Trudeau was “a bad man and a disastrous prime minister?” As Frum explained, Pierre Trudeau “traveled to Josef Stalin’s Soviet Union to participate in regime-sponsored propaganda activities.” Was that a wise choice on Trudeau’s part? Why did the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service destroy secret files on Pierre Trudeau? Can the CSIS be trusted?

According to Justin Trudeau, “Fidel Castro was a larger than life leader who served his people for almost half a century.” Do you agree with Justin? Did Fidel Castro ever do or say anything with which you disagreed? Why does Justin Trudeau look so much like Fidel Castro?

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/04/17/how-do-the-lawyers-defending-hamas-sleep-at-night/

I didn’t know what to expect when I decided to read the now-infamous application to ‘de-proscribe’ Hamas. This is the application lodged by a British law firm last week to remove Hamas from the UK government’s list of banned organisations under the Terrorism Act. The lawyers have asked home secretary Yvette Cooper to make it legal to openly support Hamas in the UK, given that the act makes expressing support for any proscribed organisation a criminal offence.

I was driven to read the application in full after seeing a bizarre interview on Talk earlier this week with one of the lawyers involved, barrister Franck Magennis. He seemed affronted when the presenter asked him how he sleeps at night. A perfectly reasonable question, given that Magennis acknowledged it was his decision to represent Hamas, an organisation responsible for the largest pogrom of Jews since the Holocaust. Hamas is not a client he was professionally obliged to take on.

In response, Magennis accused the presenter of putting ‘a target on [his] back’ by falsely conflating him and his client. He even suggested that the presenter ‘may receive a call from the police’. (It is worth noting that, on 7 October 2023, Magennis changed his profile picture on X to a bulldozer crashing through a border fence and tweeted ‘Victory to the intifada’, although this has since been deleted.)

As a criminal lawyer who defends just about anybody, I know a bit of what this barrister is talking about. I am not a murderer because I defend murderers. Everyone should be entitled to legal representation. If the Nazi leadership could rely on Britain’s top legal brains during the Nuremberg trials, then there is no reason, in principle, why Hamas should not avail themselves of the best and brightest, either. So I decided to take the application seriously, and read it in good faith.

It turns out the ‘application’ spouts Hamas propaganda from the very first line. It reads: ‘For more than a century, the British state has been responsible for colonisation, ethnic cleansing and apartheid in Palestine.’ This is hardly the impartial, objective language of the courtroom. It takes Hamas’s warped view of history and repeats it unquestioningly. It refers to Israel, quoting a former British governor of Palestine, as a ‘little loyal Jewish Ulster’. It casts Israel as illegitimate, claiming that requiring Hamas to accept Israel’s right to exist would be an ‘unreasonable demand’. In other words, Hamas should be entitled to continue to fight for the eradication of the only democracy in the Middle East and the world’s only Jewish State. It refers to Israel in quotation marks, to ‘signal that it is a colonial term, reflective of a racist attempt to impose an ethno-exclusionary state on a pluralistic and ethnically diverse population’. These are the kinds of things you’d expect to hear from a batshit student in a sixth-form common room, rather than a lawyer in a courtroom.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21551/texas-recognizes-pakistan-day

The problem is that at the same time as Texas was celebrating “Pakistan Day”, in Pakistan, Christian citizens were being arrested and sentenced to death for “blasphemy,” and Muslims were abducting young Christian girls to sexually abuse, forcibly “marry,” and coerce into converting to Islam.

Pakistan’s national and provincial parliaments have given their consent to these atrocities…. Christians, Hindus and other non-Muslim communities in Pakistan have been enduring increased levels of violence and persecution….

Under Pakistan’s blasphemy laws, anyone found guilty of insulting Islam, its prophet or other religious figures can be imprisoned and sentenced to death…. The police are often biased and refuse to file reports from Christians and Hindus.

The Texas House of Representatives might instead have dedicated March 23 to Pakistan’s abduction victims and abused children.

“The introduction of a ‘Single National Curriculum’ in schools denigrates religious minorities and enforces the teaching of the Quran and subjects like Mathematics and Science in an Islamized manner. Thus, religion is permeating school education… Radical Islamic groups are flourishing… Such groups are innumerable and even a ban will only make them re-organize, re-brand and re-emerge. The default option for dealing with radical Islamic movements (who are able to mobilize millions for street demonstrations) is appeasement and even accommodation…” — Open Doors, December 2024.

“Occupations that are deemed low, dirty, and degrading—such as cleaning sewers or working in brick kilns—are reserved for Christians by the authorities. Many believers are referred to as ‘chura’, a derogatory term meaning ‘filthy’. Christians are also vulnerable to being trapped in bonded labor.” — Open Doors, 2024.

Have Pakistani Texans done anything to help the victims of these horrific human rights abuses in Pakistan or raised awareness of them in any way while in the US? In what areas have they effectively cooperated with the US government? Have they used their resources to fight Islamic terror groups; if so, to what extent? Has Pakistan been a great US ally? What has the government of Pakistan actually done to deserve being celebrated with an official day by the Texas House of Representatives?

https://quadrant.org.au/news-opinions/qed/china-and-those-not-so-rare-earths/

“As ideology dictates renewable electricity sources, and conflict looms, these rare earths are fundamental. Demand for graphite, lithium, cobalt and manganese is surging but, without meeting the increase in future demand for REE’s, we cannot keep the lights on, never mind fight a war.”

As demand increases and China restricts supply, rare earth availability is causing increasing political tensions. Donald Trump is looking for supplies in Greenland, in Ukraine, and in Australia.

Rare earths, also known as rare earth elements (REE’s), are a set of 17 nearly indistinguishable, lustrous heavy metals, most with unpronounceable names. As it happens, it is something of a misnomer to describe them as rare because they are actually quite common. Cerium, for example, is the planet’s 25th most abundant element, even more plentiful than copper.

Compared with other minerals such as iron or bauxite, however, they are thinly spread, making mining difficult, with processing requiring enormous amounts of raw ore. They do at least tend to occur together, but this makes their separation another production issue. Current methods of extraction result in toxic contamination of soil and water and, further complicating matters, deposits are usually found with thorium and uranium, meaning the 2000 tonnes of waste typically generated to produce a single tonne of REE is radioactive. This plunges environmentalists into a state ongoing cognitive dissonance: while they hail the production of CO2-free “clean-energy” minerals as key to “renewable” power sources, they must also countenance the pollution and environmental degradation extraction causes. Fortunately, consistency has never been a prerequisite for the green movement.

Rare earths have diverse applications in electrical and electronic components, lasers, glass, and industrial processes. In the modern age of so-called clean energy, their use has assumed critical importance for batteries, the magnets essential for electric vehicles and wind turbines, not to mention drones, missiles and other military hardware. The global demand for REE’s continues to soar and is expected to at least double again over the next ten years, leaving a supply gap.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/04/13/the-uks-free-speech-crisis-is-about-to-get-so-much-worse/

The UK government’s Crime and Policing Bill poses a formidable threat to free speech in the UK. The bill, which is currently at the committee stage in the House of Commons, promises to keep our streets ‘safe’ by giving courts a new power to issue ‘respect orders’. These orders are potentially so draconian and wide-ranging that they could well end up being used for very different purposes – including silencing anyone who says anything online that the authorities disapprove of.

Under the bill, police, local authorities and a number of other bodies will be empowered to ask courts for ‘respect orders’ that can either prohibit someone from doing or require them to do ‘anything described in the order’. You read that right – anything. The only condition that needs to be satisfied is that the court thinks, on a balance of probabilities, that the person ‘has caused, or is likely to cause, harassment, alarm or distress to any person’. This essentially amounts to ‘precrime’. There won’t even be a need to warn people. The court can issue an interim order without notice. Once the order (which can be indefinite in duration) is there, breaching it carries an unlimited fine or two years in prison.

This spectacularly authoritarian measure is supposedly aimed at street hoodlums, but it is not restricted in any meaningful way. It is a racing certainty that the courts will not apply any limits to its scope.

This bill is a particular threat to free speech. Already, you have to worry that police might turn up at your door over a controversial social-media post. At least at present, the poster has a reasonable chance of defending themselves. While our hate-speech laws are vaguely worded and authoritarian, at least the onus is on the authorities to investigate and prosecute.

This changes dramatically under the Crime and Policing Bill. If it passes, all the police would have to do is persuade a county court judge that people are distressed by the post in question. Then, the poster can be compelled, on pain of prosecution, to delete the offending content, not refer to the subject concerned online again and even stay off social media altogether. They might even be forced to provide an official with the passwords to all of their internet-enabled devices.

This law could be used to attack practically anyone who criticises or makes life difficult for their elected officials. It would be straightforward for, say, a local council to obtain such a ‘respect order’, telling a pesky critic to pipe down indefinitely or face possible imprisonment.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21522/sahel-islamism

Global Terrorism Index 2025, published by the Institute for Economics & Peace, reveals that the primary instigator of global terrorism during 2024 was the Islamic State (ISIS) and associated groups — such as al Qaeda, Jamaat Nusrat Al-Islam wal Muslimeen, Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, and al- Shabaab — together responsible for more than 7,500 deaths.

Although the West is experiencing escalating terrorism in countries such as Sweden, Australia, Finland, the Netherlands, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland, the Sahel region evidently remains the “global epicentre of terrorism, accounting for over half of all terrorism-related deaths in 2024.” Here, conflict deaths exceeded 25,000 for the first time, of which nearly 4,000 were directly connected to terrorism.

A perturbing factor is that in Europe, “one in five persons arrested for terrorism is legally classified as a child.”

The consequence is, of course, that with the West’s retreat, ISIS has free rein to action their visions of global influence. They are present in 22 countries at present….

Russia’s Wagner mercenary militia, although rebranded as an “Expeditionary Corps,” continues its predatory activities in the area, offering “governments in Africa a ‘regime survival package’ in exchange for access to strategically important natural resources.”

Covertly obtained Russian documents reveal how the group strives to “change mining laws in West Africa, with the ambition of dislodging Western companies from an area of strategic importance.” The upshot is accelerating anti-Western sentiment, resulting in the local states seeking to expel hitherto entrenched foreign interests.

“This is the Russian state coming out of the shadows in its Africa policy.” Russia’s patent objective is therefore to “seize control of critical resources,” and “aggressively pursue the expansion of its partnerships in Africa, with the explicit intent to supplant Western partnerships.” — Jack Watling, Royal United Services Institute, February 20, 2024.

Currently, the significant strategic, political, and economic benefits in the region are reaped by Russia, China and Turkey. The West is nowhere to be seen.

The center of world terrorist activity and violent death is no longer the Middle East. The “Sahel region of Africa is now the ‘epicentre of global terrorism,'” responsible for “over half of all terrorism-related deaths” worldwide, according to the respected Global Terrorism Index.

The sub-Saharan Sahel is largely unknown to much of the world. It can be described as the large, mostly flat, strip, nearly 600 miles wide, located between the savannahs of Sudan to the south and the Sahara desert to the north.