Displaying posts categorized under

WORLD NEWS

How Civilizations Will Be Decided by Giulio Meotti

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18928/how-civilizations-will-be-decided

Fewer babies will be born in all of Europe than in Nigeria alone.

More than half the increase of the global population projected by 2050 will be concentrated in just eight countries, mostly in Africa, according to The Economist Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines and Tanzania. Nigeria will have more inhabitants than Europe and the United States.

This crisis is not a projection, it is happening right now. By 2050, 60% of Italians will have no brothers, sisters, cousins, uncles or aunts. The Italian family, with the father who pours the wine and the mother who serves the pasta to a table of grandparents, grandchildren and grandchildren, will be gone, as extinct as dinosaurs.

Yemen, on the other hand, a failed country in the middle of a terrible civil war, will show a population increase that is double Italy’s.

“In 1887 there was only one Muslim registered in Melilla, he was originally from Casablanca and worked as a servant; today Muslims exceed 40 percent of the population and are approaching the majority”, reported the newspaper El Pais…. Ceuta and Melilla are what most of Europe’s cities will look like in 20-30 years. Melilla is now the first Spanish city that has surpassed a 50% Muslim population due to immigration, family reunification and a high birth rate.

The Western world has provided more wealth and convenience to more citizens than any other civilization in history. We are practically inundated with resources, but we are running out of people, the only truly indispensable resource.

“Islam to become Russia’s predominant religion by 2050?” — Pravda, July 21, 2008

By 2050, more than half the increase of the global population projected will be concentrated in just eight countries, mostly in Africa, according to The Economist: Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines and Tanzania. Nigeria will have more inhabitants than Europe and the United States.

In addition, Islam will have overtaken Christianity as the first world religion. It never happened before in world history. The Islamic population of the European Union, depending on the migratory flows, could reach 75 million within a generation — like an entire Muslim Germany or, if one prefers, like Denmark, Austria, Hungary, Greece, Belgium, Holland, Portugal and Sweden combined. Does that sound better?

“They have not managed to change us. It is we who will change them. Look at the development of the population in Europe, where the number of Muslims increases like mosquitoes. Each Western woman in the E.U. produces, on average, 1.4 children. Each Muslim woman in these same countries produces 3.5 children. By 2050, 30% of the European population will be Muslim… Our way of thinking in Islam stands in opposition to the Western way of thinking. Today it is our way of thinking that comes in and shows itself stronger than theirs….” — “Mullah Krekar”, Norwegian imam, Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet, March 13, 2006

The population of Birmingham will soon be half Muslim…. [The Birmingham Mail reveals that] the number of Muslim children in the city has surpassed the number of Christian children. “In addition to Birmingham, Islam is now the dominant religion among children in Leicester, Bradford, Luton, Slough and the London boroughs of Newham, Redbridge and Tower Hamlets.” – Quote from business-live.co.uk, September 21, 2014

Do we fantasize that immigration at this rate will be able to integrate happily into host societies and that the migrants will become like us? Do we hope that before long, Europeans will return to having more children? What if we are wrong and these projections become reality? Are we resigned to the disappearance of our civilization?

“Great demographics, great power”, Nicholas Eberstadt, the American political economist summed up in Foreign Affairs. Crumbling demographics, crumbling powers …

Fewer babies will be born in all of Europe than in Nigeria alone.

The Golden Road to Samarkand by Amir Taheri

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18940/shanghai-cooperation-organisation

The Russian media, echoing President Vladimir Putin’s speech at the summit, say the SCO is designed to end “the unipolar world “by creating a “multipolar system”.

The Chinese media offer a different version. The SCO is meant to offer a new political system for the whole world as an alternative to the Western democratic model.

To the Islamic media in Tehran, celebrating the Islamic Republic’s admission to the club after 11 years of supplication, the SCO is an extension of the “Resistance Front” created to contain and defeat the American “Great Satan.”

The SCO’s identity as a club of queer fellows has been further emphasized by the admission of a host of new members all of whom have territorial disputes with each other.

Some Western commentators have dubbed the SCO “a new power bloc”. That may be jumping the gun a bit. SCO members are more dependent on trade with the European Union, the US, Canada, Japan, South Korea and Australia than with each other.

The Samarkand club represents some 40 percent of the world’s population and over 20 percent of the global GDP, not to mention four of the 9 nations with nuclear arsenals. Yet, it seems unlikely to become an anchor of stability in Eurasia; its members are more interested in petty schemes than grand ideas of peace and cooperation.

But what is it for? This is the question that the media in Russia, China, Iran and half a dozen countries were posing all last week in the wake of a summit in Samarkand that brought their leaders together as members or aspiring members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO).

The Russian media, echoing President Vladimir Putin’s speech at the summit, say the SCO is designed to end “the unipolar world “by creating a “multipolar system”.

Orbán’s Warning for Europe Sohrab Ahmari

https://compactmag.com/article/orban-s-warning-for-europe

If the United States were a serious power, it would pay heed to the warnings issuing from Hungary about the economic calamity facing Europe. Instead, Team Biden has dispatched a same-sex-married liberal activist as its envoy to Budapest in an apparent attempt to tweak the Hungarians’ conservative sensibilities. It’s the sort of stunt that would elicit little more than eye rolls—but for the fact that we live in deadly serious times.

At the ruling Fidesz party’s annual “picnic” last weekend in Kötcse, a village two hours’ drive southwest from the capital, the message was dire: The United States is driving its trans-Atlantic allies to ruin by globalizing a local, intra-Slavic conflict in Ukraine. And European leaders are going along, obstinately sticking with sanctions that have failed to force a rethink in Moscow, let alone “collapse” the Russian economy or trigger a palace coup against Vladimir Putin.

“Sanctions work when deployed by stronger actors against the weak,” Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán told me as we sat down for a brief interview on the sidelines of the Kötcse conference. “Europe isn’t the stronger actor when it comes to energy. And so the sanctions aren’t working.” It seems like an obvious enough point, but these days, it takes the gruff rationality of the “black sheep” of the European family to voice the obvious.

Western leaders make-believe as if Moscow is some small-time Mideast “rogue regime,” which they can bring to heel by cutting it off from global trade and financial flows. There are only two problems. One is that this isn’t 1999 anymore: What Fareed Zakaria condescendingly called “the rise of the rest” means the rest of the world doesn’t salute when Washington and Brussels hand down sanctions diktats—“the rest” can afford to disobey.

‘Europe Should Be Grateful to Erdoğan’ by Burak Bekdil

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18856/erdogan-turkey-russia

Erdoğan is bringing NATO member Turkey more and more into Russia’s orbit.

Turkey is once again blackmailing the U.S. that “it would further deepen its defense cooperation with Russia if Congress blocks its request to buy 40 F-16 Block 70 fighter jets from the U.S.”

“Europe Should Be Grateful to Erdoğan”: The quote is the praise Russian dictator Vladimir Putin bestowed upon Turkey’s Islamist strongman Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Translated into realpolitik, what Putin is saying is: “Russia is grateful to Erdoğan’s anti-Western ideology.” He is right. Erdoğan is bringing NATO member Turkey more and more into Russia’s orbit.

Erdoğan is overtly challenging the alliance of which his country is a member. Here is a brief account of how Erdoğan steered Turkey further away from Western interests, in favor of his Eurasian adventurism, in just a couple of months:

In early July, Erdoğan told a group of top party executives that Putin, during a meeting in Tehran, suggested a deal in which Turkish drone maker Baykar, whose chief engineer is Erdoğan’s son-in-law, cooperates with Russia. “Putin told me that he wants to work with Baykar,” Erdoğan said.
At the end of July, a Russian state-owned company was caught transferring money to a subsidiary that is building a $20 billion nuclear power plant on Turkey’s Mediterranean coast, thereby alleviating concerns that the project could be delayed by war sanctions. Rosatom Corp. sent around $5 billion to the Turkey-based builder, formally known as Akkuyu Nuclear JSC.
The beginning of August. Putin proudly announced that the trade between Russia and Turkey doubled in the first five months of 2022, and had surged 57% in the last year.
After a face-to-face meeting with Putin in the Black Sea resort of Sochi, Erdoğan said that Turkey would now pay Russia in rubles for its natural gas purchases. Meanwhile, Erdoğan happily accepted Putin’s invitation to join the September meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) in Uzbekistan. The SCO, launched in 2001, consists of Eurasian member states and declares its mission as combating radicalism and other security concerns in China, Russia and four ex-Soviet Central Asian republics.
As part of the Sochi deal, Erdoğan announced, five Turkish banks adopted Russia’s Mir payments system, another blow to Western sanctions on Russia. Turkey had earlier abstained from joining the U.S. and Europe’s sanctions on Russia after it invaded Ukraine.
In a joint statement after the Sochi summit, Erdoğan and Putin “reaffirmed their determination to act in coordination and solidarity in the fight against all terrorist organizations in Syria.” Shortly after that statement, the Turkish government stepped up its lethal drone attacks against U.S.-allied Kurdish forces in northern Syria ahead of a threatened full-scale invasion. A Turkish drone attack was reported to have killed four people in a town on the Syria-Turkey border.
Dmitri Peskov, Putin’s spokesman, said that “Military-technical cooperation between the two countries is permanently on the agenda, and the very fact that our interaction is developing in this sensitive sphere shows that, on the whole, the entire range of our interrelations is at a very high level.”
A few days after Peskov’s opaque statement, Dmitry Shugayev, the head of the Federal Service for Military-Technical Cooperation, said that a contract had been signed to deliver a second shipment of the S-400 missile system to Turkey, with the production of some components to be localized [some parts made locally] in Turkey. Now that is a real challenge.

Turkey had earlier been expelled from the U.S.-led, multinational partnership that builds the F-35 fifth-generation fighter jet, and been taken under the scope of the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act.

Charles in Charge How will an already fractious Britain fare under an ardently Islamophilic king? Bruce Bawer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/charles-in-charge/

“In any event, could Charles ever possibly be the kind of monarch his mother was – perfectly proper, totally disciplined, always at a lofty but at the same time somehow humble remove? Well, his manifest grief over her death has certainly won him a great deal of good will, both at home and abroad. And his promise to put his pet causes behind him, the good (support for traditional architecture) along with the bad (climate change and, good God, homeopathy) was a relief. But there’s reason to fear that he won’t be keeping that promise for long. In a September 17 address to a gathering of “faith leaders” at Buckingham Palace, he spoke of his “duty to protect the diversity of our country by protecting a space for faith itself.” He came very close to apologizing for his own Anglicanism and for the Anglican oaths he would take at his coronation. From any other freshly installed king, this little speech might sound like routine stuff; but Charles isn’t just any king. He’s a king, alas, with a long history of intense admiration for Islam.”

Yes, I watched the queen’s obsequies on Monday from start to finish – first the funeral at Westminster Abbey, then the committal service at Windsor, and in between the magnificent procession through the fabled streets of London. And yes, I was moved. And impressed. Never in our lifetimes has there been such a remarkable ceremonial display. It made the opening and closing ceremonies of any given OIympics look like the grand opening of a carwash. And for me the day’s events, which I viewed mostly on GB News, were greatly enhanced by the contributions of various historians and royal know-alls, above all the brilliant David Starkey.

Born and raised in America, I never had much truck with royalty. Yes, I was fascinated by the history of the English monarchs – especially the Tudors, Starkey’s specialty. But except for a brief, weird flirtation, back when I lived in Amsterdam, with the Dutch queen Beatrix, who has since abdicated, I always had a proper republican allergy to the idea of ordinary people – “subjects”! – bowing down to their purported betters. The whole set-up wasn’t just inequitable and outrageously unfair to taxpayers – why should British citizens support a so-called “royal family” who live not just in one 775-room palace but in several of them, apparently for variety’s sake? – but also to the royals themselves, who are doomed by an accident of birth to live exceedingly unnatural lives combining privilege on an unimaginable scale with a degree of inhuman deprivation, on a number of fronts, that would be considered cruel and unusual punishment if imposed on death-row murderers.

Iran Acquires 2.5 Million Acres of Venezuela by Lawrence A. Franklin

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18892/iran-acquires-25-million-acres-of-venezuela

The land grant will ostensibly be used to grow staple crops… Iran’s current use of Venezuela, however…, combined with Iran’s militia, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), raise the possibility that Iran and its surrogate terrorist groups, such as Hezbollah and Hamas , might be using the vast acreage for military and terrorist operations.
The land grant will ostensibly be used to grow staple crops…allowing water-starved Iran to better feed its population. Given Iran’s current use of Venezuela, however… a branch of Iran’s armed forces, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), and its terrorist ally, Hezbollah, could be using the acreage for military and terrorist operations.
The Maduro regime has apparently been so welcoming to Iranian intelligence agents that some of Hezbollah’s long-established Latin American network at the tri-border nexus of Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay has been overtaken by Hezbollah activities on Venezuela’s Margarita Island, [a tourist area] northeast of the country’s mainland.
Iran, along with the Chinese Communist Party, is in the process of strengthening Venezuela’s military against the US, for instance by deliveries of combat drones , considered a threat by Columbia.
Iran’s alliance with Venezuela most importantly provides Tehran with opportunities to target US interests in Latin America and potentially the southern United States.
China, Russia and Iran were reported to be running war drills in Latin America last month. According to The Centre for a Secure Free Society, this is a “strategic move that seeks to preposition forward deployed military assets in Latin America and the Caribbean.”
Iran, along with Venezuela, seems to be using its influence with Latin American regimes to develop an anti-US coalition in America’s backyard. In addition, Commercial satellite imagery in late May, 2021, confirmed the presence of seven Iranian naval attack boats on the deck of the Makran, an Iranian fast attack craft.
Iran’s massive interference in Venezuela’s affairs should raise concerns about the hemisphere’s democracies and whether Caracas is still sovereign.
Iran and Venezuela also appear to have established an air bridge between Tehran and Caracas. The flights are manned by an Iranian crew and enable both regimes to maintain secrecy in the possible global transport of weapons and terrorist operatives.
Tehran’s cooperation with Venezuelan intelligence agencies, although less visible, is also intense. The Islamic Republic’s support for Hezbollah terrorist operations is pervasive throughout Latin America.
Occasionally Iranians have been apprehended by US border guards illegally crossing America’s long, porous border with Mexico. These illegal aliens could be fulfilling passive missions such as filling up Iran’s Hezbollah cells in the U.S., while others could be commissioned to execute intelligence or terrorist-support operations.
Latin America’s Iranian Hezbollah network appears poised to strike democratic interests throughout the hemisphere.

Turkey and Israel: Dating with Hate by Burak Bekdil

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18900/turkey-israel-hate

Israel is normalizing diplomatic relations with a country whose unchallenged leader for the past two decades once described Zionism as a crime against humanity. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s political formation was based on a militant expanse of anti-Zionism as a raison d’être. Erdoğan is just as anti-Israeli today as he was 40, 30, 20 and 10 years ago.

There is too much evidence unmasking Erdoğan’s fake peace with the Jewish state.

Erdoğan’s peace with Israel is not peace. It is a tactical move to flash to Washington: I am being a good boy, give me the F-16s, do not sanction me as further sanctions may terminate my rule at the ballot box next year. Turkey’s official annual inflation rate running at 80%…. Erdoğan’s chances for re-election in June 2023 are getting slimmer every day.

Ankara and Jerusalem have not yet announced (as of August 30) who their new ambassadors will be. Whoever they will be, they should keep a bag packed for a fast departure.

Blessed are the peacemakers: it sounds so nice that Turkey and Israel have decided to be friends again. After a four-year hostile chill in relations has thawed gradually in recent months, the former allies have agreed to restore full diplomatic relations, exchanging ambassadors. Nice? Very nice! Champagne to celebrate the peace? Sloooow down.

US Must Treat Iran Like Russia by Con Coughlin

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18910/treat-iran-like-russia

[I]t is vital that the US and its allies confront the reality of Iran’s expanding military operations around the world.

While Tehran had denied the reports [that Iran had provided Russia with military-grade drones], Ukraine’s defence ministry posted images of what appeared to be parts of a destroyed drone with “Geran-2” written on the side in Russian. The wingtip appeared to match that of a Shahed-136.

This is, by any standard, amounts to a truly momentous escalation in Iran’s military activities: it is the first time Iranian military equipment has been deployed on European soil.

The fact that evidence has emerged demonstrating that Iran is actively supporting Russia’s unprovoked aggression against Ukraine makes a mockery of this argument.

If Iran is prepared to deploy sophisticated military equipment such as drones on European soil, then it is clear the ayatollahs would have no hesitation about firing their long-range ballistic missiles, potentially armed with nuclear weapons, at European targets.

Iran’s willingness to become directly involved in the deadliest conflict Europe has witnessed since the end of the Second World War represents a significant escalation in the threat Tehran poses to the outside world, one that Western powers ignore at their peril.

Israeli Defence Minister Benny Gantz, addressing The Jerusalem Post Conference in New York last week, revealed a map showing more than ten facilities that Iran has constructed in Syria in recent years to produce mid- and long-range precision missiles that can be used to target Israel.

This is not the action of a country that, as the Iranians repeatedly insist, is interested in peace, and should serve as a wake-up call to Western leaders to confront Iranian aggression in the same way they have confronted Russia over its decision to invade Ukraine.

The West must now provide the same level of support to all those countries — which now include Ukraine — that find themselves the targets of unprovoked acts of aggression by Tehran.

One of the most important lessons learned from the 1930s was that what starts in one place, such as Austria or Sudetenland, can almost be guaranteed not to stay in that place.

Now that even the Biden administration has been forced to admit defeat in its ill-considered attempts to revive the Iran nuclear deal, it is vital that the West does not let its guard slip on Iran’s malign activities across the globe.

Throughout the year-long negotiating process in Vienna over Iran’s nuclear ambitions, which the Biden administration now concedes have ended in stalemate, Tehran has sought to give the impression that it is interested in negotiating a deal, while at the same time ramping up its aggressive military activities in the Middle East and beyond.

The Islamic Republic’s ‘morality’ murder and US appeasement By Ruthie Blum

https://www.jns.org/opinion/the-islamic-republics-morality-murder-and-us-appeasement/

 The killing of Mahsa Amini in Tehran last week should serve as a reminder to the United States about the regime that it’s desperate to enrich with tens of billions of dollars in exchange for another disastrous nuclear deal. And the angry street protests that have erupted around the Islamic Republic since then should signal to the P5+1 that now is the time to help weaken, not strengthen, the grip of the ayatollahs on the populace.

Amini, a 22-year-old woman from Saqez in Iran’s Kurdistan Province, was on a trip with her family to the country’s capital on Tuesday, when she was arrested by the “morality police” for not having her head covered properly. According to eyewitnesses, she was beaten as soon as she entered the van that was transporting her to the station for “education.”
By Friday, she was dead. One can only imagine the kind of torture she endured before she was taken to the Kasra Hospital in northern Tehran. Photos that emerged of her lying in a coma matched the medical center’s statement that when she was admitted on Sept. 13, she showed “no vital signs.”

This notice was removed from the hospital’s social media pages after hardliners called its staff “anti-regime agents.” In parallel, police denied having beaten Amini to death, insisting that she had passed away from a heart attack.
Compounding the lie that nobody bought—least of all her family, who said that she had been perfectly healthy and never suffered from cardiac problems—President Ebrahim Raisi, as much of an Islamist extremist as his mullah handlers, reportedly requested that the Iranian Interior Ministry open an investigation into the incident. The charade would be laughable if it weren’t so typically evil.

Ditto for the response of the regime—a member of the U.N. Women’s Rights Council—to the demonstrations that ensued upon news of Amini’s demise and continued throughout her burial in Saqez on Saturday. During the funeral, women removed their hijabs and mourners chanted “Death to the dictator,” referring to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Ironically, reports that Khamenei was severely ill with a bowel obstruction, along with rumors that he may even have died, were countered on Saturday with an appearance by the octogenarian cleric at a religious ceremony.

Why the World Economic Forum’s Plutocracy Should Be Dissolved by J.B. Shurk

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18908/world-economic-forum

No matter how noble its stated intentions, the “Great Reset” is at its heart a program for driving political power away from individual citizens and toward the controlling interests of a small international class of financial elites…. For citizens to reclaim power, they must not only embrace the basics of free markets once again but also rekindle a fondness for questioning the motivations of political authorities.

It is not just kings, generals, and popes who possess great power. Wherever a person, group, or institution is capable — through enticement, coercion, or brute force — of bending an individual’s free will, the structures and instruments of power exist. A local school board, after all, may well have more immediate and intimate influences over a person’s family than the United Nations Human Rights Council and its revolving door of despots who tend to promulgate international resolutions shielding their own crimes.

Limited regulation keeps the costs of market transactions low. Respect for private property and fair and impartial application of commercial laws encourage capital investment. Refraining from taxing the fruits of an individual’s labor fosters an exponentially more productive labor force. Providing populations with the tools to pursue and obtain knowledge and skills at minimal expense promotes not only an educated workforce but also politically competent citizens.

The small number of multinational corporations that control most television and print news sources around the globe also control the sociological levers capable of manufacturing or shifting public opinion. Power in any form — political, economic, cultural, spiritual… must always be guarded against as a potential foe.

“The welfare of the people has always been the alibi of tyrants….” — Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion and Death.

The great mass murderers of the twentieth century attest to this truth. Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, and Mao killed tens of millions, but they did so, they assured the world, not for their own glory but for the benefit of “the people.”

It is no secret that money influences politics, no matter how profusely politicians may assert their civic independence from the lobbyists and benefactors filling their campaign war chests.

Tens of thousands of laws, rules, and regulations make it nearly impossible for any entrepreneur to navigate markets without inadvertently committing infractions or becoming a future target of an ever-growing army of regulatory code enforcers. Citizens are taxed on their wages, incomes, purchases, property, investments, improvements, sales, etc., and should they still possess anything of worth upon their ultimate demise, some agent of the State is likely to take one final cut of their bequeathed estates. The same unit of labor is thus taxed repeatedly along the government’s conveyor belt of confiscation.

Notably, today’s plutocrats have little interest in truly free markets…. The World Economic Forum, for instance, demands governments take urgent action to combat or address climate change, cybersecurity, online misinformation, artificial intelligence, overpopulation, the use of hydrocarbon energy, farm ownership, food supplies, the elimination of private vehicle ownership, and the imposition of citizen control protocols to defend against future pandemics. Regulation of people and markets is now of paramount importance to those with wealth and power.