RUTHFULLY YOURS

In a strained bit of humorous idiocy, a flak at the Washington Post spins Emmanuel Macron’s win and Marine Le Pen’s thumping as an “embarrassment” for President Trump.

Aaron Blake, writing for “The Fix,” betrays the MSM’s obsession with pinning anything and everything negative or failed on Trump. Crows Blake:

I argued on this blog that Trump’s comments about Le Pen amounted to an endorsement. He had said that she was the best candidate when it came to the most important issue: the security of her country. And he clearly suggested that her popularity was rising after the terrorist attack, a claim that in retrospect looks haphazard, at best, and foolhardy, at worst.

Sorry, Aaron, but this merits a “Dope Alert.” Most Americans couldn’t give a hoot that the president said nice things about La Pen or even suggested her election as good. Most Americans care about their kids, jobs, and safe streets. Trump’s utterances on the subject matter only to inbreds who breathe the rarified air in DC, New York, and Boston. Or guys like you who get paychecks pulling this inanity from their rears.

Nowhere in Blake’s brilliant analysis did he mention Barack Obama’s profound embarrassment for endorsing Hillary Clinton, whose loss wasn’t predicted by the MSM or all those very smart guys and gals in coastal blue redoubts. After all, Le Pen, trailing badly in the polls, was expected to be hosed. Hillary was practically measuring the drapes in the Oval Office. Who has more egg on his face, Aaron?

Actually, it’s the French who have the most soufflé on their faces. In Le Pen’s concession speech, she acknowledged that the French voted for “continuity.” That they did, but not in any good way. Macron, who served in Hollande’s government, was repackaged and rebranded as an “independent” with a fresh take on France’s growing troubles. He’s actually just old shoes in a new box.

The 39-year-old Macron is a quick, clever invention of France’s globalist, EU-devoted elite. No? Well, he strode to the podium on Election Eve to proclaim his victory to the EU’s anthem, “Ode to Joy.” How’s that for an “In-your-face” gesture? And get this: the guy who composed the “Ode,” Ludwig Van Beethoven, is a German, no less. We all know about the evidence-rich Trump-Putin conspiracy in our own elections. Might Macron taking the stage to a German ditty reveal Angela Merkel’s conspiracy with him in the French contest?

A big problem for France is that its economy is practically stagnant. It has been for decades (that’s correct, “decades”). But who would blame big, central, bureaucratized government for an economy’s woes? Or a bevy of entrenched interests that profit handsomely from a government-dominated economy? Not the EU’s Jean-Claude Juncker.

Reported the Guardian on April 30:

There is a familiar rhythm to French politics. President gets elected amid a wave of optimism. President says root and branch reform of the economy will lead to stronger growth and falling unemployment. President fails to deliver the promised transformation. Economy continues to struggle. President gets booted out of office.

In the past 30 years, François Mitterand, Jacques Chirac, Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande have won elections for the mainstream parties of the centre left and centre right but France’s economic problems have not been resolved. It says something about how poor performance has been under Hollande that growth of barely more than 1% in 2016 was good by recent standards.

France’s unemployment rate hovers around 10% (higher than its pre-EU rate of 8%). Germany’s stands at about 4%. French youth unemployment — that’s under 25-year-olds — is about 25%. Germany’s is much lower. Idle minds make for the devil’s workshop.

As the Guardian points out, the French have developed an inferiority complex vis-à-vis their German allies, who are outperforming them economically. Without getting too much into the weeds, Macron wants Frau Merkel to “reflate” the German economy and boost consumer spending. He wants monetary reform to prop-up the Euro, too.

Iranian voters head to the polls later this month to elect their next president, without much of a choice. The contest is shaping up as a race between several Islamic hard-liners and one hard-liner whom the Western media prefer to cast as a moderate.

The unelected Guardian Council eliminated more than 1,600 candidates, including 137 women, who are constitutionally prohibited from holding that office. The Council deemed only six candidates morally sound, which in Iran means thoroughly committed to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the nuclear program and the destruction of Israel.

Among the challengers, Ebrahim Raisi has garnered the greatest attention. The 56-year-old cleric is a protege of Mr. Khamenei, and our sources say he enjoys the support of elements of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the security apparatus.

Rumors out of Tehran suggest he could succeed the ailing Mr. Khamenei, and he certainly sounds like he has emerged from central theocratic casting. Shortly after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, he was appointed a revolutionary prosecutor—at age 19. A decade later he was one of the prosecutors who oversaw the summary execution of thousands of opponents of the regime.

His rhetoric has invited comparisons with former President and Holocaust-denier Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. “The ominous triangle of the United States, Britain and the Zionist regime is the most hated phenomenon among peoples the world over,” Mr. Raisi has said. He has also predicted that “one day soon the filthy stain of arrogance will be wiped not only from Jerusalem but also from the Noble Sanctuaries”—the latter a reference to the Saudis, who administer some of the holiest sites in Islam.

Mr. Raisi also believes the Iranian regime’s borders extend across Syria, “which we consider our frontier for defending the Islamic Republic’s security and identity.”

Mr. Raisi and others will try to oust incumbent President Hassan Rouhani, who is often styled as a moderate despite his record in and out of office. Mr. Rouhani spearheaded the bloody crackdown against the 1999 student uprising and helped oversee a campaign of assassinations targeting dissidents abroad in the 1990s.

As for Mr. Rouhani’s presidential record, domestic repression has intensified. The leaders of the pro-democracy Green Movement remain under house arrest despite campaign promises to free them. Religious minorities continue to face systematic harassment and discrimination, and at least half a dozen American and British dual citizens remain under arrest as hostages.

Beyond Iran’s borders, the regime has continued to promote instability, underwriting Bashar Assad’s Syrian slaughter, deepening military cooperation with Vladimir Putin and funding Shiite terror proxies from Yemen to Lebanon. In all these cases, Mr. Rouhani has been powerless or unwilling to change course.

As for relations with the U.S., Messrs. Rouhani and Raisi both support President Obama’s nuclear deal. That accord has granted Tehran a much-needed financial reprieve even as it will leave the regime a threshold nuclear power by the time it sunsets. Hope for averting that outcome will not come through the artifice of Iran’s presidential election.

Protocol has its uses, not least at the United Nations. But when it comes to lavishing on murderous tyrants the same pro forma felicitations accorded to the elected leaders of free nations, it’s time for Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to clean up the act of the UN Protocol and Liaison Service — which reports to him.

What’s the problem? There are many problems, actually, and they stem from the UN’s morally incontinent practice of doling out to all member states — whether totalitarian or democratic; North Korea or Costa Rica — the same perquisites, including a lot of diplomatic swag for the most monstrous dictators on the planet.

Lest that sound too abstract, let’s turn to one of the latest outrages. This cameo starts with a UN communique to war-wracked Syria, where last month the state news agency, SANA, reported that President Bashar al-Assad had just received “a cable of congratulations from United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on the occasion of Syria’s independence day.” According to the SANA dispatch, (boldface mine) Guterres in this cable “expressed his warmest congratulations to the Syrian people and government on this occasion.”

For anyone even remotely familiar with the doings of Assad and the condition of Syria, that message sounds more than a tad out of touch. Assad is a despot who inherited power upon the death of his despotic father 17 years ago. During the first decade of his rule, operating as Iran’s chief mascot in the Middle East, Bashar Assad presided over a terror-sponsoring state (a patron of the terrorist groups Hezbollah and Hamas), employed the help of North Korea in building a clandestine nuclear reactor with no evident purpose except to produce nuclear bomb fuel (the Al Kibar reactor, destroyed by an Israeli air strike in 2007) and — with his secret police, torture chambers, dungeons and related atrocities — oppressed his own countrymen so thoroughly and brutally that in 2011 they rebelled.

As we all know, Assad refused to give up power. He talked about elections, and offered a complete sham. He fought back, as head of a merciless tyranny. He has by now used everything from barrel bombs to chemical weapons against his fellow Syrians. In the UN’s official protocol list, Assad has kept his place as Syria’s official head of state — a position he has retained at the cost of a war that has brought the deaths of more than 400,000 people, misery for millions of refugees, the rise of ISIS and the return of Russia to the Middle East as the weapons-bearing godfather of Damascus.

In this context, it was hard to believe that Guterres would send a message of “warmest congratulations” to Assad, whatever the topic. Surely this report from SANA was just another piece of propaganda from the Syrian regime? CONTINUE AT SITE

How could Marine Le Pen have lost in a landslide?

Why, after the Brits chose Brexit, and Americans chose Trump, did the Dutch fail Wilders, and the French fail Le Pen?

How could a country that has been hit by several major terrorist attacks in recent years, and that has undergone a more profound social transformation owing to Islamic immigration, vote for business as usual?

Wilders, buoyed by the Brexit and Trump victories, said that 2017 would be a “Year of the Populist.” So far, alas, it’s not turning out that way.

Yes, there are positive signs. The Sweden Democrats are on the upswing. And Wilders did gain seats in the Dutch Parliament.

But if you’ve witnessed the reality of Islamization in cities like Rotterdam and Paris and Stockholm, you may well wonder: what, in heaven’s name, will it take for these people to save their own societies, their own freedoms, for their own children and grandchildren?

I’m not the only one who’s been obsessing for years over this question. I’ve yet to see a totally convincing answer to it.

One way of trying to answer it is to look at countries one by one. For example, the Brits and French feel guilty about their imperial histories, and hence find it difficult to rein in the descendants of subject peoples. The Germans feel guilty about their Nazi past – and the Swedes feel guilty about cozying up to Nazis – and thus feel compelled to lay out the welcome mat for, well, just about anybody. The Dutch, similarly, are intensely aware that during the Nazi occupation they helped ship off a larger percentage of their Jews to the death camps than any other Western European country, and feel a deep need to atone.

Postmodernism, of course, is a factor. According to postmodern thinking, no culture is better than any other – and it’s racist to say otherwise. No, scratch that – other cultures are, in fact, better than Western culture. Whites, by definition, are oppressors, imperialists, and colonialists, while “people of color” are victims.

And Muslims are the biggest victims of all.

Not that that makes any sense. Over the centuries since the religion was founded, Muslim armies have gained control over much of north Africa, the Middle East, and large parts of Europe. Islam itself, by definition, is imperialistic. And whenever Islam has conquered non-Islamic territories, it has proven itself to be profoundly oppressive, offering infidels exactly three options: death, subordination, or conversion. But to say these things has become verboten.

Living in a Muslim neighborhood of Amsterdam in early 1999, I read up on Islam and realized very quickly what Europe was up against. Two and a half years later, when the terrorist attacks of 9/11 occurred, I assumed pretty much everyone else would get it, too.

But it didn’t work that way. Yes, some people did get it almost instantaneously, in both America and Europe. They caught up on a lot of reading, did a great deal of soul-searching, and underwent a major philosophical metamorphosis.

But even after other horrific attacks occurred – in Madrid, London, and elsewhere – a lot of people refused to accept the plain truth. The plainer the truth got, in fact, the more fiercely they resisted it. And as skilled propagandists began to represent Muslims as the mother of all victim groups, many Westerners were quick to buy into it all.

How, again, to make sense of this?

Yes, the mainstream media have played a role, routinely whitewashing Islam, soft-pedaling the Islamic roots of jihadist terror, and staying silent about the dire reality of everyday Islamization. But no one who actually lives in western Europe has any excuse for ignorance about these matters. The truth is all around them. Even in the remotest places, however dishonest the mainstream media, the truth can be found on the Internet.

But – and this is a fact that some of us are thoroughly incapable of identifying with, and thus almost thoroughly incapable of grasping – some people don’t want to know the truth. And if they do know the truth, they want to un-know it. CONTINUE AT SITE

Four U.S. citizens are currently detained in North Korea and a number of others have been held and released there since 2009.

SEOUL—North Korea’s state media said officials detained a U.S. citizen tied to a Christian-backed university in North Korea, two weeks after arresting one of his colleagues.

Saturday’s arrest of Kim Hak-song for committing “hostile acts” brings the number of known U.S. citizens detained in North Korea to four, adding another twist to troubled relations between Washington and Pyongyang as the U.S. seeks to slow the North’s nuclear and missile program.

According to Sunday’s report by North Korea’s official Korean Central News Agency, Mr. Kim works for the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology, a university founded in 2010 by James Kim, a Korean-American Christian businessman.

Two weeks ago, North Korea detained Tony Kim, a Korean-American accounting professor at PUST, as he was preparing to depart North Korea at Pyongyang’s main international airport, citing “hostile acts.”

PUST, while not officially Christian, hires largely Christian faculty, and says on its website that “churches can support PUST through prayer and through spreading the news about this project among congregation members.”

North Korea has arrested a number of U.S. citizens doing Christian-related work in the isolated country. Kenneth Bae, a Korean-American missionary, was sentenced to 12 years’ hard labor for hostile acts, and was freed after two years in November 2014.

In 2014, American Jeffery Fowle was detained and held for six months after leaving a Bible in a nightclub bathroom.

A spokesman for PUST’s leadership confirmed Kim Hak-song’s arrest on Saturday, just as he was about to leave North Korea after a visit of several weeks. The spokesman said Mr. Kim was at PUST to do agricultural work at an experimental farm operated by the university. CONTINUE AT SITE