RUTHFULLY YOURS

Iran Human Rights (FEB 3 2017): According to reports compiled by Iran Human Rights, the Iranian authorities hanged 87 people in the month of January 2017, including two juvenile prisoners and six prisoners who were executed in public. Out of the 87 executions, only 19 of them were announced by official Iranian sources. Most of the executions which were carrieed out in Iran in January 2017 were for drug related charges.

According to research conducted by Iran Human Rights, executions tend to significantly increase in the months leading to an election in Iran but significantly decrease or stop a couple weeks before the election. Iran Human Rights is deeply concerned that a new wave of executions have started in Iran and worries that the number of executions will increase following the “Fajr Decade” celebrations.

Iran Human Rights urges the international community, especially European countries, to pay attention to the execution crisis in Iran, and calls on all countries which have diplomatic relations with the Iranian authorities to call on the Iranian authorities to stop executions.

“In the month of January, we witnessed an average of one execution every nine hours, including two juvenile offenders and six public executions. Lack of reactions from the international community to these executions encourages the Iranian authorities to execute even more people in the months leading to the 2017 presidential election,” says Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam, spokesperson for Iran Human Rights.

Critics of Germany’s open-door immigration policy are warning that the recent surge in Germany’s Muslim population — which surpassed six million in 2016 for the first time — has already changed the face of the country forever.

The price for reversing Germany’s demographic decline appears to be the further Islamization of Germany under the guise of multiculturalism.

With a fertility rate of 1.6 births per woman, well below the replacement rate of 2.1, Germany will require a permanent influx of 300,000 migrants per year in order keep the current population level stable through the year 2060, according to the report.

“We are importing Islamic extremism, Arab anti-Semitism, national and ethnic conflicts of other peoples, as well as a different understanding of society and law. German security agencies are unable to deal with these imported security problems, and the resulting reactions from the German population.” — Leaked German intelligence document.

More than a decade ago historian Bernard Lewis warned that if current migration trends continue, Europe will be Islamic by the end of the 21st century. Germany’s political elites are at the vanguard of making that prediction come true.

Germany will need to take in 300,000 migrants annually for the next 40 years to stop population decline, according to a leaked government report.

The document, parts of which were published by the Rheinische Post on February 1, reveals that the German government is counting on permanent mass migration — presumably from Africa, Asia and the Middle East — to keep the current size of the German population (82.8 million) stable through 2060.

The report implies that Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision to allow into the country some 1.5 million mostly Muslim migrants between 2015 and 2016 was not primarily a humanitarian gesture, but a calculated effort to stave off Germany’s demographic decline and to preserve the future viability of the German welfare state.

If most of the new migrants arriving in Germany for the next four decades are from the Islamic world, the Muslim population of Germany could jump to well over 20 million and account for more than 25% of the overall German population by 2060.

Critics of Germany’s open-door immigration policy are warning that the recent surge in Germany’s Muslim population — which surpassed six million in 2016 for the first time — has already changed the face of the country forever.

The Trump Administration needs to see to it that UN Security Council Resolution 2334 is rendered null and void.

UNSC Resolution 2334 also implies that Jerusalem’s Jewish Quarter, Western Wall and Temple Mount are all occupied territory, when in fact, it was Israel that liberated them from the illegal Jordanian conquest of them in the war of 1948.

Given the history of violence which the Palestinians indulge in against the Jews, it would seem a counter-productive precedent to reward decades of terrorism and uncivilised behaviour with a state. It would also leave the Palestinians, who deserve a responsible and accountable leadership, under the domination of two corrupt and brutal governments, the Palestinian Authority and Hamas.

A study of the various proposals Israel has made to Palestine from time to time shows the key obstacle to peace is not the Palestinians’ demand for any piece of land but their refusal to recognize the existence of the Jewish state, or presumably any state but an Islamic one.

The U.S. could also move its embassy to Jerusalem. This would send the Palestinian leadership and others in the region a strong message that Washington will support both historical facts and countries that comport themselves with civilised behaviour.

In the long-continuing conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, conventional wisdom has it that peace can be achieved through realistic negotiations between the parties to the conflict.

The previous Obama administration displayed a clear tilt towards one party to the conflict, the Palestinians, at the cost of the other, Israel.

Last month, Washington’s abstention from voting on United Nations Security Council (UNSC) Resolution 2334 led to its passage. This resolution condemns Israeli settlements in “Palestinian Occupied Territories.” Resolution 2334 also implies that Jerusalem’s Jewish Quarter, Western Wall and Temple Mount are all occupied territory, when in fact, it was Israel that liberated them from the illegal Jordanian conquest of them in the war of 1948. The resolution effectively states that any Jewish presence beyond the 1949 armistice lines, or Israeli construction in Judea, Samaria or Jerusalem, is illegal.

Objectively speaking, this resolution amounts to anti-Semitism: it is simply counterfactual to the Jews’ history in the region. Both the Bible and archeology reveal that Jews have had a historical connection with this land for more than 3000 years.

Given the history of violence that the Palestinians indulge in against the Jews, it would seem a counter-productive precedent to reward decades of terrorism and uncivilised behaviour with a state. It would also leave the Palestinians, who deserve a responsible and accountable leadership, under the domination of two corrupt and brutal governments, the Palestinian Authority and Hamas.

One hopes President Donald J. Trump, as the leader of the democratic world, would waste no time to bury this counter-factual, anti-Semitic resolution. Nikki Haley, Trump’s appointment to the United Nations, has already condemned the controversial resolution as an “outrageous bias” against Israel, and criticized the Administration of former President Barack H. Obama for the abstention that let the resolution pass.

U.S. contributions to the UN for 2015 = $9,917,000,000

Ask: Why is the U.S. still on the UN Human Rights Council?
Ask: Why has Congress not adopted a single bill stopping any funding to the UN since Security Council 2334?

In 2017, individual members of Congress and President Trump have called for a reassessment of U.S. funding to the United Nations in order to ensure that U.S. taxpayer dollars are utilized in ways that are consistent with American values and interests.

Additionally, in the aftermath of the UN Security Council’s adoption on December 23, 2016 of resolution 2334, which declared Israel’s presence in the historic Jewish homeland and its holy sites a “flagrant violation of international law,” members of Congress have introduced a series of bills that seek to hold the UN to account for its discriminatory treatment of the Jewish state.

Members of civil society have also launched a series of initiatives challenging the current relationship of the United States with the UN and promoting a democratic multilateral alternative.

2017 Stocktaking. So far? All Talk

The last full accounting from U.S. government sources of funding provided to the United Nations is many years out-of-date. Conducted in 2010, it states that the United States contributed $7,691,822,000 annually to the United Nations in the form of assessed, voluntary and in-kind contributions.

According to United Nations sources, U.S. contributions to the UN for 2015 totaled $9,917,000,000. (UN Chief Executives Board for Coordination, Geneva) This figure has been further broken down into three (renamed) categories as follows:

Assessed contributions $3,757,000,000
Voluntary contributions specified $5,521,000,000 (this includes donations in-kind)
Voluntary contributions not specified $639,000,000.

(This UN website documents 2014 contributions and puts the total U.S. contributions for 2014 at $10,067,000,000.)

Trump’s executive order slowing down the admission of people from seven Muslim majority nations drew the expected hysterical and hypocritical criticism from the Democrats. But Republican Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham piled on as well. It’s no secret that neither pol likes Donald Trump, and both are no doubt still angry that Trump crashed their Party. But some of their criticism recycled preposterous received wisdom we’ve been hearing for decades.

“We fear this executive order will become a self-inflicted wound in the fight against terrorism,” the Senators said in a joint statement, explaining that Trump’s executive order “may do more to help terrorist recruitment than improve our security.” This is the tired “infidels made us do it” rationalization apologists for Islamic terrorism have been peddling––and jihadists exploiting–– since 9/11. The Senators’ version is as facile as asserting that Guantanamo, Sykes-Picot, cartoons of Mohammed, an obscure pastor burning a Koran, or Israeli settlements are responsible for “recruiting” jihadists.

This notion that Muslims become jihadist terrorists because of Western slights to their self-esteem is an absurd psychological argument alien to minds formed by Islam and its doctrines, and by cultures and histories very different from our own. Thus it commits the mortal sin of foreign policy and diplomacy: assuming that our adversaries and enemies think exactly as we do, and share the same beliefs about human motivation.

Since we attribute most behavior to material and environmental causes, we slight or dismiss religion and spiritual beliefs as a motivating force in people’s behavior. Or we reduce faith to an epiphenomenon of some deeper material cause such as poverty or a lack of political freedom, and so reduce religion to Marx’s “opiate” or Freud’s “illusion.” Even sillier, we treat other peoples as though they are over-sensitive children prone to “acting out” when their self-esteem is not nourished. So, like grade-school teachers, we should take every opportunity to tell Muslims how wonderful their faith is, how much we respect and honor it, and how diligent we will be in making sure that nobody dares link Islam and its traditional doctrines to “extremist” terror perpetrated by a small minority of “hijackers” and “distorters” of the “religion of peace.”

Obama, of course, was most fanatic about adhering to this fantasy. He began his presidency by going to Cairo and addressing a crowd, including Muslim Brotherhood honchos, about the glories of Islam and the West’s bad behavior toward the faithful. He scrupulously avoided using “Islamist” in speaking of terrorist acts, and he ordered our national security institutions not to mention “jihad” at all in its communications. The result? During his two terms there were three times more jihadist plots and attacks than during George Bush’s presidency. Al Qaeda, ISIS, and a plethora of other jihadist outfits now have a wider geographic base and scope of operations, and are perpetrating or inspiring attacks in Europe and the U.S. The world’s worst state sponsor of terrorism, Iran, is now a global power punching far above its weight, and shaping the Middle East according to its interests as it continues to develop nuclear weaponry.

Such “outreach” and flattery have been no more useful than they were for the Brits in the 20’s and 30’s, when the politicians, pundits, and intellectuals championing appeasement of Germany blamed the Big Four for the “Carthaginian peace” of the Versailles Treaty, which supposedly accounted for Germany’s truculence and aggression. Then and now, such efforts communicated only weakness and fear that emboldened the aggressor and led to massive slaughter.

HYDERABAD, India — When the Islamic State identified a promising young recruit willing to carry out an attack in one of India’s major tech hubs, the group made sure to arrange everything down to the bullets he needed to kill victims. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/04/world/asia/isis-messaging-app-terror-plot.html?_r=0

For 17 months, terrorist operatives guided the recruit, a young engineer named Mohammed Ibrahim Yazdani, through every step of what they planned to be the Islamic State’s first strike on Indian soil.

Mohammed Ibrahim Yazdani, left, and his younger brother Ilyas, whom he recruited to participate in the Hyderabad plot.

They vetted each new member of the cell as Mr. Yazdani recruited helpers. They taught him how to pledge allegiance to the terrorist group and securely send the statement.

And from Syria, investigators believe, the group’s virtual plotters organized for the delivery of weapons as well as the precursor chemicals used to make explosives, directing the Indian men to hidden pickup spots.
Continue reading the main story

Until just moments before the arrest of the Indian cell, here last June, the Islamic State’s cyberplanners kept in near-constant touch with the men, according to the interrogation records of three of the eight suspects obtained by The New York Times.

As officials around the world have faced a confusing barrage of attacks dedicated to the Islamic State, cases like Mr. Yazdani’s offer troubling examples of what counterterrorism experts are calling enabled or remote-controlled attacks: violence conceived and guided by operatives in areas controlled by the Islamic State whose only connection to the would-be attacker is the internet.

In the most basic enabled attacks, Islamic State handlers acted as confidants and coaches, coaxing recruits to embrace violence. In the Hyderabad plot, among the most involved found so far, the terrorist group reached deep into a country with strict gun laws to arrange for pistols and ammunition to be left in a bag swinging from the branches of a tree.

For the most part, the operatives who are conceiving and guiding such attacks are doing so from behind a wall of anonymity. When the Hyderabad plotters were arrested last summer, they could not so much as confirm the nationalities of their interlocutors in the Islamic State, let alone describe what they looked like. Because the recruits are instructed to use encrypted messaging applications, the guiding role played by the terrorist group often remains obscured.

As a result, remotely guided plots in Europe, Asia and the United States in recent years, including the attack on a community center in Garland, Tex., were initially labeled the work of “lone wolves,” with no operational ties to the Islamic State, and only later was direct communication with the group discovered.
ISIS Attacks, Outside of Its Self-proclaimed Caliphate

In at least 10 executed attacks, officials have found that the assailant was in direct communication with planners from the Islamic State.

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The Islamic State has declared its caliphate to include parts of Syria, Iraq and about a dozen other countries where it has affiliates.

While the trail of many of these plots led back to planners living in Syria, the very nature of the group’s method of remote plotting means there is little dependence on its maintaining a safe haven there or in Iraq. And visa restrictions and airport security mean little to attackers who strike where they live and no longer have to travel abroad for training.

The very act of mentioning bad behavior carried out by members of a specific group seems inherently bigoted.

One of the most important stories related to the September 11 attacks was the one that was deliberately left largely untold. That story is the response of some Muslims in America to the massacre of nearly 3,000 people by Islamic supremacists in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.

According to a Washington Post article published on September 18, 2001, in Jersey City, New Jersey, across the river from the destroyed World Trade Center, “Within hours of the two jetliners plowing into the World Trade Center, law enforcement authorities detained and questioned a number of people who were allegedly seen celebrating the attacks and holding tailgate-style parties on rooftops while they watched the devastation on the other side of the river.”

The New York Post reported on September 15, 2001, that Muslim Americans in Patterson, NJ were also seen celebrating the attacks. Word-of-mouth reports abounded in the weeks and months following September 11 of spontaneous celebrations carried out that day in Dearborn, Michigan, in Virginia and other Muslim American communities.

The most notable aspect of the published reports of the celebrations was that there were so few of them.

After all, the notion that any Muslim Americans would celebrate the jihadist attack was certainly newsworthy.

The stories were suppressed at the time by political leaders. Then New York mayor Rudy Guiliani for instance said the celebrations shouldn’t be reported lest they lead to violent attacks against peaceful Muslims.

Then president George W. Bush rushed to defend and uphold Islam as a “religion of peace,” almost immediately after the attacks. Bush insisted that al-Qaida was a fringe movement and ideology in the world of Islam. Its Islamic supremacism did not reflect either the Islamic faith or the ideology of the overwhelming majority of Muslims.

In 2007, then secretary of state Condoleezza Rice banned US officials from using the terms “jihad,” “Islamic” and “Islamism” in describing Islamic jihad and the ideology of Islamism or in conjunction with discussions of Islamic jihad and terrorism.

Under former president Barack Obama, the war on language went into high gear. Not only were all terms relating to Islam banned from use in the federal government, the term “terrorism” was even purged from the official discourse. Obama dumped the Bush-era term, “War on Terror,” for the even more meaningless phrase, “Overseas Contingency Operations.”

Obama barred the FBI from investigating radical Islamic breeding grounds and replaced surveillance operations with a program called, “Countering Violent Extremism.” Under that program, Islamists were given federal support. The notion was that once they were empowered, they would convince their communities to reject violence.

It is not racist to accuse Muslims of wrongdoing; Islam is a religio-political system, not a race. This conflation of two very different things already causes endless confusion and miscarriages of justice. Such scattershot accusations fail to make a distinction between genuine hatred for Muslims and fair and balanced criticism of some of their behavior and their religion.

“Anti-racism… an instrument of intellectual terrorism has become today the greatest channel of the new anti-Semitism”. — Georges Bensoussan.

The CCIF’s charge of “Islamophobia” is almost certainly built, not so much about Arabs but about perceptions of a refusal by Muslim immigrants from North Africa to integrate into French society,

“To say that one drinks in anti-Semitism from one’s mother’s milk means that it is transmitted culturally. I have not spoken of a transmission through blood, which implies a genetic transmission. And I maintain that in some Arab families in France, anti-Semitism is taught. … I have not invented the Kouachi brothers, who, after the attack on Charlie Hebdo, asked the printer with whom they took refuge if he was Jewish.” — Georges Bensoussan.

“This visceral anti-Semitism proven by the Fondapol survey by Dominique Reynié last year cannot remain under a cover of silence. Conducted in 2014 among 1,580 French respondents, of whom one third were Muslim, the survey found that they were two times and even three times more anti-Jewish than French people as a whole”. — Georges Bensoussan.

Why should this be surprising? Anti-Jewish feelings in Muslim countries and elsewhere are deeply embedded, with roots in the Qur’an, the Hadith, Islamic law-books, and general social attitudes from the 7th century onwards.

If Bensoussan is convicted, the CCIF and other organisations like it will start further prosecutions of other innocent people and succeed in shutting down debate about what is the greatest single threat to the stability not only of France and Europe, but the West.

The French historian and philosopher Georges Bensoussan is best known for his studies of matters relating to the Jewish world, on topics such as the Holocaust, anti-Semitism, Zionism, and the fate of the hundreds of thousands of Jews expelled from Arab countries after the declaration of Israel’s independence in 1948 and the signal defeat of Arab armies which invaded the new state between then and 1949. He himself was born in Morocco in 1952, but moved with his family to France in his early years.

After a doctorate in history from the University of Paris I in 1981, Bensoussan became director of a journal for Holocaust history (Revue d’histoire de la Shoah) and went on to develop a training service for Holocaust education. Over the years, he has published several well-researched books on the Holocaust, Zionism, and related topics. Juifs en pays arabes: Le grand déracinement 1850-1975 (2012) covers the too-little known history of the way in which nearly a million Jews in Arab countries were reduced in fewer than thirty years to about 5,000. His intellectual and political history of Zionism, Une histoire intellectuelle et politique du sionisme 1860-1940 (2002), counters the modern use of the term Zionist as a pejorative.

Given these credentials as a leading opponent of Europe’s oldest form of racism, one might very well expect that Georges Bensoussan would be one of the last people fit to be labelled a racist. And you would be correct. But on January 25, Bensoussan was obliged to present himself at the 17th chamber of the Tribunal Correctionel of Paris to face a charge of “provocation of racial hatred” (“provocation à la haine raciale”). A more honest description of the charge would have read “provocation of ‘Islamophobia'”. It is not racist to accuse Muslims of wrongdoing; Islam is a religio-political system, not a race. This conflation of two very different things already causes endless confusion and miscarriages of justice.

Some thirty parties will compete with each other for the favor of Dutch voters on March 15. Because there are only 150 seats in the Dutch Parliament, the largest party will not be able to get much more than 35 to 40 seats. The favorite right now to become the largest party in parliament is Geert Wilders’ Party for Freedom (PVV).

A shocking new poll has been released in the Netherlands. According to Kantar Public, PVV has opened a large lead over the second largest party in the polls, the VVD, which is currently part of the governing coalition. This makes Wilders the absolute favorite to succeed current Prime Minister Mark Rutte as the political leader of the country.

According to the Kantar Public poll, the PVV would get 35 seats in the 150-seat Dutch Parliament if elections were held today. By Dutch standards, that’s an impressive result. This is especially true because of the significant gap between PVV and the VVD. The party led by current Prime Minister Mark Rutte wold have to settle for a mere 22 seats, 19 fewer seats than they currently occupy.

Wilders is profiting from a general feeling of unease about the direction in which the country is heading and public outrage at the refugee crisis. The Dutch government has allowed the borders to remain open, thereby allowing tens of thousands of “refugees” to come to the Netherlands every single year. This while there already were significant problems caused by (mostly) Islamic immigrants who refuse to assimilate into Dutch culture and society.

Voters’ explanations make clear that the ruling VVD party has a very serious problem. Says one voter:

Enough. Enough with everything!

Another angry voter adds:

The VVD has become the party for the rich and they never deliver on their promises.

That voter refers to Rutte’s promise during the campaign of 2012 that he would give every working Dutchman a taxbreak of 1.000 euros. Once he put together a coalition with the social democrats of the PvdA, however, he actually raised taxes. Additionally, Rutte promises to halt mass immigration. As is clear, he has done no such thing.

A third voter explains his current support for the PVV by referring to Wilders’ eurosceptic attitude:

Wilders is the only one willing to address the major problems caused by Europa and mass immigration.

Is Italeave fast approaching? From the looks of it, it could be!

The future is looking increasingly bright for those of us who are rooting for the downfall of the European Union and, especially, the grand Europroject, which has caused more human suffering in Europe than almost every other megalomaniac project in history. British Prime Minister Theresa May wants to lead her country out of the EU as soon as she can and already has the backing of Parliament. That’s wonderful enough, but it gets even better: according to the latest polls, eurosceptic parties could very well win the elections in Italy.

An analysis of the political setup in Italy shows eurosceptics are on the verge of taking control of the country.

The only missing ingredient is an early election. And early elections are now the odds-on favorite.

In normal circumstances, new elections would be held in 2018. However, former Prime Minister Matteo Renzi — who leads the Italian Democrat Party (PD) — is calling for early elections. His thinking is obvious and purely Machiavellian: because he was forced to resign last year after he lost the referendum on a proposed change to the Italian constitution, he fears he’ll be replaced as leader of the PD if he gives his internal enemies more time. Additionally, the leader of the populist Five Star Movement, Beppe Grillo, is also calling for early elections because he believes that he’ll win them. Recent polls indicate he could very well be right:

As the Zero Hedge website explains, most pollsters have a reputation for overestimating the Democrats and underestimating Grillo’s Five Star Movement (M5). Considering the marginal difference between the two parties in most polls, that’s an important disclaimer. But there’s more to this story. According to Italian observers and Zero Hedge, the PD could very well break apart into a pro-Renzi faction and a faction that opposes him. The latter believe they can draw away almost half of Renzi’s voters if they create their own left-wing party, which is what they threaten to do if Renzi goes ahead and agrees to early elections.

In short, it’s increasingly likely that Italy will soon get an anti-euro government.

Add that development to the rise of eurosceptic populists in the Netherlands and it’s clear that the European house of cards is on the verge of collapsing. If that isn’t good news for those of us who support national sovereignty, I don’t know what is.