RUTHFULLY YOURS

MOSCOW—Thousands of demonstrators took to the streets of cities across Russia on Sunday to protest official corruption in the most significant challenge to President Vladimir Putin in years.

Sunday’s marches were called by leading opposition figure Alexei Navalny, who was detained during the protest in Moscow, according to supporters and local media.

“There are things in life worth being detained for,” Mr. Navalny said on Twitter.

Crowds chanting “Russia without Putin” and carrying placards decrying official corruption converged on Pushkin Square in the Russian capital, where they faced off with ranks of Interior Ministry police in riot gear.

Police officials told news agency Interfax that 7,000 to 8,000 people participated and around 500 were arrested. The radio station Echo of Moscow, drawing on unofficial estimates, put the number of participants in Moscow much higher.

The demonstrations are a sign of public dissatisfaction in Russia despite the consistently high approval ratings Mr. Putin receives in opinion surveys.

In Washington, the State Department sharply condemned the Russian crackdown, including the arrest of Mr. Navalny, other protesters, human rights observers and journalists.

“The Russian people, like people everywhere, deserve a government that supports an open marketplace of ideas, transparent and accountable governance, equal treatment under the law, and the ability to exercise their rights without fear of retribution,” State Department spokesman Mark Toner said. CONTINUE AT SITE

Video#38: http://bit.ly/2lSMHoS; Entire online seminar: http://bit.ly/1ze66dS

Irrespective of – and unrelated to – the Palestinian issue, the Middle East is boiling, firing the 14-century-old Sunni-Shia intra-Muslim confrontation, exacerbating intra-Arab violence in Syria, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain and threatening to explode in every Arab country. The Arab Tsunami, which has erupted independent of the Palestinian issue, has been leveraged by Iran’s Ayatollahs, in order to advance their supremacist, megalomaniacal goal of dominating the Persian Gulf, the Middle East and beyond, notwithstanding the Palestinian issue, which has never played a substantial role in shaping the stormy intra-Arab and intra-Muslim relations and the Middle East agenda.

2. Contrary to Western preoccupation with the Palestinian issue, the Middle Eastern agenda dramatically transcends the Palestinian issue, which is neither the cruxof the Arab-Israeli conflict, nor a crown-jewel of Arab policy-making and nor a core cause of the 1,400-year-old turbulence, violent intolerance, instability, unpredictability, subversion and terrorism in the Middle East. The Palestinian issue is completely irrelevant to the tectonic Arab Tsunami, which has engulfed the Middle East from the Persian Gulf to Northwestern Africa.

3. The intensifying Arab Tsunami, which erupted in 2010, causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands people, the dislocation of millions, and threatens to topple every sitting Arab regime, has exposed the myth of the supposed centrality of the Arab-Israeli conflict, in general, and the Palestinian issue, in particular. None of the recent – as well as past – domestic and regional upheavals in the Middle East has been directly, or indirectly, related to the Arab-Israeli conflict or the Palestinian issue. Contrary to conventional “wisdom,” the Palestinian issue has always been a side – and not a main – dish on the tectonic Middle East menu, which has been dominated by intra-Muslim and intra-Arab explosive ingredients.

4. No Arab country has ever considered the Palestinian issue a top priority, warranting shedding blood, sweat or tears. Arab policy-makers have always talked the talk on behalf the Palestinian issue – in order to divert attention away from critical domestic and regional failures – but have never walked the walk, financially or militarily. They adhere to the Arab saying: “On words one does not pay custom.”

5. The top priority for Arab leaders, personally and nationally, is homeland security and countering-terrorism, in the face of intensifying, clear and present domestic and regional lethal threats. Therefore, they are preoccupied with the Muslim Brotherhood – the largest transnational Islamic terror organization – and additional Islamic terror organizations. The Muslim Brotherhood – not the Palestinian issue – has plagued Egypt since 1928. The Muslim Brotherhood, and its ideology, nurtured the Taliban, Al Qaeda, ISIS and other Islamic terror organizations.

6. Therefore, President Al-Sisi has followed in the footsteps of President Sadat, who resisted President Carter’s pressure to place the Palestinian issue at the center of the 1977-79 Israel-Egypt peace process. Sadat was concerned about the destabilizing impact of a Palestinian entity, as evidenced by the subversive track record of Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas in Egypt (1950s), Syria (1966), Jordan (1970), Lebanon (1970-1983) and, worst of all, in Kuwait (1990).

7. Moreover, in 2016, President Al-Sisi – just like all pro-US Arab leaders in Jordan, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf States – expands intelligence, counter-terrorism and overall geo-strategic cooperation, operationally and technologically with Israel, a global role-model of counter-terrorism, in defiance of Palestinian opposition. They believe that when smothered by the lethal sandstorms of Islamic terrorism and Iran, one must leverage the mutually-beneficial ties with Israel, rather than be preoccupied with the Palestinian tumbleweed.

8. Iran’s policy of megalomaniacal supremacy, terrorism, subversion and hate-education, and its determination to become a nuclear power, are driven by the 2,000-year-old ambition to dominate the Persian Gulf, Indian Ocean, Middle East and beyond, and not by the Palestinian issue.

9. The disintegration of the Arab Middle East, especially Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen, is a derivative of the endemic, tribal, religious, ethnic, geographic and ideological intra-Muslim fragmentation, not the Palestinian issue.

10. The next video will connect the Middle East dots.

It was a careful choice of words, Bernard Lewis being nothing if not careful. In 2004, the West audibly gasped when its preeminent scholar of Islam famously told the German newspaper Die Welt,“Europe will be Islamic by the end of the century,” if not sooner.

Listen carefully. He did not say that Muslims will be the majority population in what is still recognizably Europe. No, Professor Lewis said “Europe will be Islamic.”

We are not talking about Muslims here. We are talking about Islam. Lots of individual Muslims desire peaceful coexistence, even assimilation. But Islam’s aim is to prevail. So, yet again this week, Lewis’s foreboding has been brought to the fore by a jihadist mass-murder attack, this time in London.

As we go to press, five innocent people are dead after Khalid Masood, a terrorist acting on unambiguous scriptural commands to war against non-Muslims, rammed his rental Hyundai SUV into dozens of pedestrians on Westminster Bridge, many of them tourists taking in the iconic views of Parliament. About 50 people suffered injuries, some of them grave, so the death toll may yet rise.

Masood, a burly 52-year-old weightlifter with a long criminal record that included vicious stabbings, then crashed the car through the gate at Westminster Palace, home of the West’s most venerable democratic legislature. He alighted brandishing two long knives, which he used to kill Keith Palmer, a police officer who, pursuant to British policy, was unarmed despite being assigned to provide security at one of the world’s foremost terror targets. Masood was finally shot dead by a protection officer attached to England’s defense minister.

There immediately began the ritual media pondering over Masood’s motive. Yes, what could it possibly have been?

I’m going to stick with the patently obvious.

Masood was born as Adrian Russell Ajao on Christmas Day, 1964, in Kent county, just outside London. His 17-year-old single mother remarried two years later, and he was known as Adrian Elms (his stepfather’s surname) until converting to Islam when he was about 40. Prior to that point, while fathering three children with his wife, he had several arrests, some for violent attacks. During at least one of the resulting stints in prison, like many inmates, he began indoctrination into Islam.

Auditors of the ongoing conquest of the West by Islam, the nightmarish bogeyman, can’t help but notice that most Western governments, charged with protecting their citizens from Islamic jihad, are cowards too afraid to identify their enemy (other than the citizenry), or are in sympathy with it, but also are too sensitive to being accused of censorship when they wish to have information suppressed or erased from public knowledge. That term, censorship, is so fraught with ominous, negative connotations, that governments avoid it like the plague. Instead they work by proxy, and require private communications entities like Google to do the dirty work.

And if these entities do not or refuse to do the dirty work, and let slip unpalliative facts or ideas or videos, they will be punished instead.

Unlike in George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty- Four , in which the government (or the Party), if it detected or accused one ofthoughtcrime, would hustle you off to Room 101, where you would be tortured and made to become a lover of and true believer in the Party’s aims, agenda, and methods, and then memory of your existence would subsequently be erased by the government’s extensive “fake news” apparatus. Breitbart London has this revelation. It’s interesting that Winston Smith, the protagonist in Orwell’s novel, was employed by the Party to create the very thing he was an expert at doing: creating fake news. An urge to discover the truth got him converted and erased.

On the very day of the attack, The Independent again reported Theresa May’s cross-eyed designation of Islam as a “great faith”

The Prime Minister has said the “Islamist” attack on Parliament was not “Islamic” and Islam is a “great faith”.

Adding: “This act of terror was not an act of faith. It was a perversion; a warped ideology, which leads to an act of terrorism like that and it will not prevail.”

Children and women are being raped by human traffickers inside the Camp de la Linière, a migrant camp in the northern French city of Dunkirk; they are forced to have sex in return for blankets, food or the offer of passage to Britain. A volunteer worker referred to the children as being like “little steaks” because they were considered so appetizing and vulnerable to traffickers.

The breakdown in law and order in Muslim neighborhoods in Paris is being fueled by impunity for criminals and a lenient judicial system, according to Hugues Moutouh, a former advisor to the Interior Ministry.

“You can pass on my respects to the Grand Mufti, but I will not cover myself up.” — French presidential candidate Marine Le Pen, cancelling a meeting with the Grand Mufti of Lebanon.

The report implies that deradicalization, either in specialized centers or in prisons, does not work because most Islamic radicals do not want to be deradicalized.

February 1. The Interior Ministry reported a 45% decline in attacks against Jews and Muslims in France in 2016, but a 17.5% increase in attacks against Christians. The ministry said there were 1,125 attacks against Jews and Muslims in 2016, down from 2,034 attacks in 2015. It also reported 949 attacks against Christians in 2016, up from 808 attacks in 2015. Attacks against Christians jumped by 245% between 2008 and 2016.

February 2. Undercover police wearing burqas and qamis (traditional Arab gowns) were filmed apprehending a drug dealer in the Marseille’s Bricarde district, a notorious no-go zone. Police confirmed the “totally normal camouflage technique” after the cellphone video was posted on social media. A local resident complained: “This gives the impression that you basically have to be Muslim or look like a Muslim in order to blend in.” Another resident said:

“I think that trying to blend into the crowd in order not to attract attention is a good way of catching traffickers. What’s more, the police are not really respected on the council estates, which have become no-go areas. Even the police are scared to go there, which isn’t right. So it’s hardly surprising that when they come they have to disguise themselves — although I can understand why lots of people are criticizing them for it.”

February 3. Abdallah El-Hamahmy, a 29-year-old Egyptian national, attacked four French soldiers at the Louvre in Paris. He was carrying two backpacks when he approached the soldiers, who were on patrol at the entrance to the Carrousel du Louvre shopping mall, beneath the museum. When they told him that he could not bring his bags into the mall, he lunged at them with a machete and began shouting “Allahu Akbar.” After a brief struggle, one of the soldiers opened fire, leaving El-Hamahmy in critical condition. El-Hamahmy had arrived in Paris legally on January 26 after obtaining a one-month tourist visa in Dubai. Prime Minister Bernard Cazeneuve called the attack “terrorist in nature.”

Iran will hold another Potemkin election in May, and we can already predict the media narrative if one of the so-called hard-liners wins the Iranian Presidency. The blame will lie with the Trump Administration for failing to show sufficient respect for “moderate” incumbent Hasan Rouhani. Except Mr. Rouhani’s rule hasn’t been moderate.

Witness the latest repression targeting the mullahs’ usual suspects. Tehran’s Prosecutor-General on Sunday announced it had sentenced a couple to death because they had founded a new “cult.” The announcement was short on details, but the charges could mean anything from running a New Age yoga studio to a political-discussion club.

The authorities have also detained Ehsan Mazandarani, a reporter with the reformist newspaper Etemad (“Trust”), according to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists. The nature of the charges against Mr. Mazandarani isn’t clear, and his relatives say he is on hunger strike in Tehran’s Evin Prison. He had previously served most of a two-year sentence on trumped-up security charges.

Mr. Mazandarani’s detention followed last week’s arrest of dissident reporter Hengameh Shahidi, who also faces “national-security” charges. Ms. Shahidi has been an adviser to Mehdi Karroubi, one of two pro-democracy candidates in 2009’s fraudulent election. Mr. Karroubi and opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi have been under house arrest since 2011. Having hinted at freeing them during his campaign, Mr. Rouhani has kept mum on their cases since coming to office in 2013.

Then there is the crackdown on Christians. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps late last month arrested two Iranian Catholics in northwestern Iran and seized their Bibles and prayer books. The incident came to light in a Fox News report last week.

It isn’t clear if the two Catholics, a mother and son, are converts, though that seems likely. Historic Christian communities such as Assyrians and Armenians are afforded second-class protection under Iranian law, while apostasy by Muslims is punishable by death. Despite some early rhetoric about tolerance, Mr. Rouhani has been unwilling or unable to improve conditions for religious minorities.

There is also the status of some half a dozen U.S. and U.K. dual citizens who have been taken hostage by the regime while visiting Iran. These include father and son Baquer and Siamak Namazi, both U.S. citizens, and Nazenin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a British citizen who is serving a five-year sentence on secret charges.

Nearly four decades after it was born, the Islamic Republic remains an unbending tyranny. The Trump White House shouldn’t spend energy hunting for moderate negotiating partners in the Islamist regime because there aren’t any. They’re under arrest.

The outrageous report released this week by the U.N. Economic and Social Commission for Western ‎Asia — which concludes “beyond a reasonable doubt that Israel is guilty of policies and practices that ‎constitute the crime of apartheid” — should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with its co-author, ‎Richard Falk.‎

This is not the first time that the former U.N. special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian ‎Territories has given bias a bad name. Indeed, throughout his career, the American legal “scholar” has ‎shown a deep loathing for Western democracies, including his own, while not even attempting to ‎disguise his deep attraction to and affinity for evil Islamists. ‎

Though infamous since 2001 for blaming the U.S. for the 9/11 attacks, linking the Boston Marathon ‎bombings to America’s Mideast policies and warning that Israel was committing genocide, Falk was ‎busy apologizing for bloodthirsty radicals and their regimes long before that.‎

In January 1979, when he was still a professor of international law at Princeton, Falk accompanied ‎former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark and Don Luce, a prominent member of Clergy and Laity ‎Concerned (established in 1965 by the National Council of Churches to “struggle against American ‎imperialism and exploitation in just about every corner of the world”) on a private, eight-day fact-‎finding mission to Iran. At the end of the trip, the trio stopped over in France to meet Ayatollah ‎Ruhollah Khomeini, who had been living in exile for 14 years.‎

Right around this time, the ousted, cancer-ridden Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi fled the country. ‎Two weeks later, on February 1, Khomeini returned to his native land to take the helm of the new ‎Islamic Republic of Iran.‎

On February 16, Falk published an op-ed in The New York Times called “Trusting Khomeini.” In it, he ‎waxed poetic about the Muslim cleric, who would turn Iran into the nuclear weapons-hungry ‎theocracy that it is today. “The depiction of him as fanatical, reactionary, and the bearer of crude ‎prejudices seems certainly and happily false,” Falk wrote.‎

He then went on to praise Shiite Islam. “What is distinctive, perhaps, about this religious orientation is ‎its concern with resisting oppression and promoting social justice,” he said, concluding: “Having ‎created a new model of popular revolution based, for the most part, on nonviolent tactics, Iran may ‎provide us with a desperately needed model of humane governance for a Third World country.”‎

This “humane governance” began with the backing of students who took over the U.S. Embassy in ‎Tehran and held dozens of its staff hostage for 444 days, while then-U.S. President Jimmy Carter tried ‎to negotiate their release by “understanding the grievances” of Tehran’s mullahs.‎

Not many people have ever heard of Souk El Gharb, a sleepy Lebanese village perched on a mountain top overlooking Beirut but in 1983, this village was the scene of ferocious fighting between the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) and an assortment of Syrian-backed leftist and Muslim anti-government militias. For a while, the LAF, backed by the United States, was holding its own against the militias, beating back several coordinated attacks and even mounting offensives of their own.

But the LAF was doing more than just winning; it was unifying the nation splintered after many years of civil war and Palestinian occupation. The bulk of the Palestine Liberation Organization – a foreign entity that had occupied nearly half of Lebanon for 10 years – had just been expelled by the Israel Defense Forces and a multi-national force (MLF) composed of U.S. Marines, French and Italian troops took up positions in and around Beirut to promote stability in the nation’s capital. Israel’s 1982 invasion and the presence of the MLF gave Lebanon a chance to re-assert its sovereignty.

But the LAF’s good fortune was short-lived. On October 23, 1983 Hezbollah suicide bombers slammed their explosive laden trucks into the U.S. Marine and French army barracks killing 241 U.S. military personnel and 58 French servicemen. In early 1984, the MLF withdrew and the LAF quickly unraveled in the face of overwhelming firepower. Lebanon once again fell under the malign influence of Syria and later Iran, through its Shia proxy force, Hezbollah.

In May 2008 the Lebanese government made one last effort to re-assert sovereignty over the nation, which was by now almost fully under the control of Hezbollah, and by extension Iran. The government declared Hezbollah’s parallel militarized telecommunication network to be illegal. It also sought removal of Beirut Airport’s security chief Wafic Shkeir, who was a Hezbollah operative and was actively assisting Hezbollah with the movement of clandestine arms shipments and other contraband.

Hezbollah responded ruthlessly and swiftly moved to the offensive, taking over government controlled buildings and neighborhoods while the LAF watched helplessly. Lebanon’s last gasp at freedom failed and the country was now firmly under the control of Hezbollah and the mullahs of the Islamic Republic.

PARIS—A gunman opened fire inside a high school in southern France on Thursday, injuring eight people, according to the Interior Ministry.

The 17-year-old student who fired the shots at the Alexis de Tocqueville high school in the town of Grasse, near Nice, is now in police custody, said Pierre-Henry Brandet, a spokesman for the Interior Ministry. He added that the school’s principal was among the injured when the “very heavily armed” student opened fire.

All of the high-school students are now safe, Mr. Brandet said, adding that police had surrounded the school to look for possible accomplices.

Mr. Brandet said that there was no indication so far that the shooting is related to terrorism.

The assault revives concerns in a country that has been on high alert after a series of terror attacks. Grasse is only around 20 miles from Nice, where a truck attack, for which Islamic State claimed responsibility, killed 86 people in July last year.

A Philippines lawmaker filed an impeachment complaint against President Rodrigo Duterte, the highest-profile challenge yet as resistance builds against the firebrand leader.

Opposition politician Gary Alejano filed the complaint at the Philippines House of Representatives on Thursday, accusing Mr. Duterte of corruption, violating the constitution, betraying public trust and “other high crimes.”

“We are of the firm belief that President Duterte is unfit to hold the highest office of the land and that impeachment is the legal and constitutional remedy to this situation,” he said.

While the complaint itself is unlikely to pass, it raises the stakes on opposition efforts call Mr. Duterte’s credibility into question.

“It just seems rather dramatic that everything seems so coordinated at this stage,” presidential spokesman Ernesto Abella told reporters Thursday.

House Speaker Pantaleon Alvarez, a Duterte ally, called the allegations fabricated and the impeachment bid “stupid.”

Battle lines are hardening as Mr. Duterte’s term draws on. For the first few months after he came to power in June—an outsider with a sweeping mandate to rid the country of illegal drugs and bring prosperity to society’s poorest—Mr. Duterte enjoyed approval ratings as high as 80%.

Now that support appears to be unraveling, largely over his pursuit of his drugs pledge. The government’s antinarcotics campaign has led to more than 8,000 deaths, mostly at the hands of police or vigilantes. The murder of a South Korean businessman by rogue antinarcotics officers inside police headquarters—committed in October but not uncovered until January—sparked public outrage and prompted Mr. Duterte to suspend his drug campaign, saying he had to reorganize the police.

Mr. Duterte’s opponents were emboldened to accuse him of corruption. One senator, Antonio Trillanes, alleged he and his family had channeled some $50 million through their bank accounts when he was mayor of Davao City in the country’s south. Mr. Duterte has denied any wrongdoing.

Witnesses called to testify in a senate inquiry into extrajudicial killings have accused the president of ordering killings during his more than two decades as mayor. A former policeman said on Feb. 20 that Mr. Duterte personally oversaw a vigilante death squad in Davao, a charge the president denies.

Opposition politicians aren’t alone in criticizing the president. The powerful Roman Catholic Church told followers in February that the drug war amounted to “a reign of terror in many places of the poor.” CONTINUE AT SITE