RUTHFULLY YOURS

TEHRAN, Iran—Iran’s Revolutionary Guard has built a new attack drone that is similar to a U.S. unmanned aerial vehicle captured five years ago, Iranian media reported Saturday.

The semiofficial Tasnim news agency says the “Saegheh” (Thunderbolt) drone is similar to the RQ-170 Sentinel spy drone. Iran’s state-run Press TV says the long-range drone can carry four precision-guided bombs. Neither report gave figures for the drone’s range.

Iran claimed to have shot down an RQ-170 drone used by the Central Intelligence Agency in December 2011 and broadcast footage of the recovered aircraft. It also claims to have captured three American ScanEagle drones.

Iran said last year that it had successfully tested its replica of the RQ-170.

Also on Saturday, Tasnim published photos of what it said was a U.S.-made MQ-1C drone captured recently by the Revolutionary Guard. It didn’t say when or how the drone was captured.

Three Muslim men slaughtered a 15-year-old Christian student, Wajaesh Shono. One of the murderers was the boy’s schoolteacher. — Pakistan.

A Muslim mob killed and beheaded a Christian pastor’s wife based on a false accusation of “blasphemy.” — Nigeria.

His father and stepmother became furious when they learned of the boy’s conversion. They began… starving him, in keeping with Islamic law recommendations for apostate women and children. — Uganda.

As usual, Egyptian TV reported the one-sided attacks from the Muslim majority on the Christian minority as “clashes.” After arriving, the police stood back and allowed the mob to continue rioting, plundering and setting more Christian homes and vehicles on fire. — Egypt.

A Christian woman who escaped ISIS said the militants “married and divorced” her as many as nine times every night to justify the act of raping her. — Iraq.

Christians reciting the rosary inside St. Anthony Church in Ventimiglia, Italy were told by refugee-volunteers to keep their prayers down as they were bothering newly arrived Muslim migrants. — Italy..

At the height of one of the worst months for Christians under Islam, June, 2016, both the U.S. government and “mainstream” media continued to ignore the plight of Christians.

Despite the U.S. government acknowledging that ISIS is committing genocide against Christians in Iraq and Syria, statistics showed the number of refugees the Obama administration has welcomed since the start of 2015:

From Syria: 5,435 Muslims; 28 Christians
From Iraq: 11,086 Muslims; 433 Christians

As for the mainstream media, the death of a gorilla was covered six times more than the Muslim slaughter of Christians for their faith, according to a report.

Is Japan a democracy or a Shinto democracy?

The president of the United States was suggesting to Europe’s rich club of nations that it must admit as full member not a democracy but a “Muslim democracy.”

Obama did not understand that Turkey could never join the EU before it has fully transformed from being a Muslim democracy into a democracy.

Apparently, Erdogan thinks that the U.S. is ruled as Turkey is ruled. He does not understand that the president of the U.S. cannot phone a judge and order an arrest warrant for a foreign national.

Can there be democracies and democracies with religious prefixes? Is the United States a democracy or a Christian democracy? Is Israel a democracy or a Jewish democracy? Is Japan a democracy or a Shinto democracy?

In a 2010 interview with the Italian daily, Corriere della Sera, U.S. President Barack Obama referred to Turkey as a “great Muslim democracy.” In the same interview, he said that: “The U.S. always expressed the opinion that it would be wise to accept Turkey into the European Union.” All that was music to Turkish ears. But in reality, the president of the United States was suggesting to Europe’s rich club of nations that it must admit as full member not a democracy but a “Muslim democracy.” Obama did not understand that Turkey could never join the EU before it has fully transformed from being a Muslim democracy into a democracy.

South Africa is a country in suspense, waiting for the fallout from a series of interlinked decisions. First, the liberal opposition Democratic Alliance (DA) last month won Johannesburg, Pretoria, Port Elizabeth and Cape Town in the local elections, a huge blow to the ruling African National Congress (ANC). Second, the country is waiting on tenterhooks for the credit rating agencies to re-rate the country’s creditworthiness in November: most fear relegation to junk status. Third, President Jacob Zuma, a crony capitalist par excellence, is trying to hand as many favours as possible to his allies, the Gupta family. This is being resisted by his finance minister, Pravin Gordhan, and a showdown between Zuma and Gordhan cannot be long averted. Finally, there is the question of the presidential succession, to be decided by an ANC conference in 2017. Rumours fly that Zuma has already accepted $200 million from Vladimir Putin to commission a string of Russian nuclear power stations; that fearing jail, he is planning to retire offshore; and that he will push his ex-wife, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, into the presidency to succeed him. And so on.

One could write: “Apart from that, normal politics goes on.” In one sense that is true — we have rioting students burning down university buildings, affirmative action causing a flight of white cricketers and rugby players — but mainly it’s not true simply because the ANC, which has ruled the country since 1994, is disassembling before one’s eyes. There is an almost complete absence of leadership. Zuma remains largely passive when in-country, and he’s often out. The police, doubtless on his instructions, endlessly harass and threaten the finance minister, Pravin Gordhan. Not only do individual cabinet ministers squabble in public and make unilateral decisions without any semblance of cabinet co-ordination but even subordinate state agencies sometimes make large policy announcements, apparently chancing their arm to see what they can get away with. Many of the ministers are clearly buffoons, while ANC deputy secretary-general Jessie Duarte has made announcements that suggest complete economic illiteracy. But then the president himself has said he doesn’t really believe in markets and relies on Marx’s labour theory of value, which even Marxist economists stopped using in the 1950s.

Just when you thought the United Nations could not sink any lower, a UN panel has issued a report recommending that the United States pay “reparations” to African-Americans for its “legacy of colonial history, enslavement, racial subordination and segregation, racial terrorism and racial inequality.” The report accuses the United States of maintaining “institutional and structural racial discrimination and racism against people of African descent.”

The panel that issued this claptrap is the self-styled Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent, which reported on the visit of three of its members to the United States from January 19-29 2016. The Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent reports to the UN’s dysfunctional Human Rights Council, which the Obama administration decided to join and American taxpayers are thus helping to pay for.

The Working Group members met with representatives from various federal agencies, including the Department of State, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Labor, the Department of Justice and the Environmental Protection Agency. They also met with officials of the White House working on African-American issues, staff of the congressional black caucus, a member of the United States Senate and various state and local government officials. Finally, they met with hundreds of unidentified “African Americans from communities with a large population of people of African descent living in the suburbs, as well as with lawyers, academics and representatives of non-governmental organizations.”

The Working Group’s report channeled the language of the Black Lives Matter movement. In fact, the report’s authors went out of their way to praise Black Lives Matter.

The report charged that currently in the United States “a systemic ideology of racism ensuring the domination of one group over another continues to impact negatively on the civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights of African Americans today.” The fact that the country twice elected an African-American as president and that two African-Americans have served as the U.S. Attorney General during the last seven plus years seems to have eluded the report’s authors.

While acknowledging some progress since the long gone Jim Crow era, the Working Group chose to focus in its report on what it characterized as “alarming levels of police brutality and excessive use of lethal force by law enforcement officials, committed with impunity against people of African descent in the United States.”

The report’s authors shamelessly concluded that today’s “police killings and the trauma that they create are reminiscent of the past racial terror of lynching.”

Never mind that thousands of innocent blacks have been murdered by black criminals, not by the police who are trying to protect innocent lives in high crime neighborhoods.

Never mind that in many instances of police shootings resulting in the deaths of African-Americans, independent investigations have concluded that the police were dealing with armed perpetrators whom the police had reason to believe posed an imminent lethal threat.