RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18855/arabs-iran-deal-war

“A few days ago, US officials announced that it was Iran, not America, that had given up core demands. They lie. Iran has not given up on anything essential. On the contrary, Iran has obtained the essential demands it wants.” — Sayed Zahra, deputy editor of Bahrain’s Akhbar Al-Khaleej, August 31, 2022.

“[T]he most dangerous concession made by the US was to waive the inclusion of Iran’s expansionist terrorist role in the region, its threats to the security and stability of Arab countries, the terrorist subversive role that Iran’s proxy militias play in the Arab countries, and the issue of the Iranian missile program.” — Sayed Zahra, Akhbar Al-Khaleej, August 31, 2022.

“He [Obama] did not hide his hatred of Arabs and his admiration for Iran. What Biden is doing today is following the same path, with full conviction on his part.” — Sayed Zahra, Akhbar Al-Khaleej, August 31, 2022.

“Syria has been taken hostage by a regime that is affiliated with the Iranians and Russians…. The Iranian regime…does not differ from the Taliban regime or from Islamic State (ISIS). Terrorism, destabilization, and domination of people are almost the only goals of such regimes.” — Ibrahim Allush, Syrian author, Enabbaladi, August 28, 2022.

“Washington has been very late in holding Iran accountable, or at least trying to hold it accountable for the systematic sabotage that it has practiced and is practicing in Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Gaza. This is the largest international sabotage operation that the Security Council has not been able to consider. None of the Security Council resolutions related to the region’s crises mentions Iran, even though its role is essential in tampering with the four countries and destroying their institutions.” — Abdul Wahab Badrakhan, Lebanese journalist, Al-Watan, August 28, 2022.

“President Biden’s administration is trying to create an image in the eyes of the Americans that Iran’s return to the nuclear agreement will bring it under control. Washington appears to be in a weak and precarious position, especially in light of the absence of an armed option.” — Emil Amin, Egyptian author, Asharq Al-Awsat, August 27, 2022.

“[I]f these billions flow into the coffers of the Revolutionary Guard Corps and the Quds Force, how will Washington guarantee the security of these countries [Gulf states, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen] ?” — Mashar Al-Thaydi, Saudi commentator, Asharq Al-Awsat, August 26, 2022.

The Arabs… appear convinced that that pouring billions of dollars on the mullahs will eventually bring terrorism and violence to the US and the other Western powers involved in the new deal, if not a major war.

The talk about an imminent revival of the nuclear deal between Iran and the Biden administration and other Western countries has raised serious concerns among many Arabs. They state that they are especially worried about the billions of dollars that Iran’s mullahs will receive once the deal is done. The Arabs say they have no doubt that the money would be used by the mullahs to promote more terrorism and violence and expand Tehran’s terrorist proxies in the Middle East, including Hezbollah, the Houthis, Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and various militias in Iraq.

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/britain-new-prime-minister-jeremy-corbyn-liz-truss/

Many years ago, when the earth was young and leaving the European Union was a position espoused only by those trying to stay on the right side of Bill Cash at a drinks party, former British MP Ken Clarke stood for the Tory leadership against Iain Duncan Smith. He said one memorable thing while making his doomed bid for the captaincy — which was that the Tories needed to decide whether they were going to be a political party or a debating society.

What I understand him to have meant by that was that ideological purity buttered no parsnips in politics. For most of its history, its friends and its enemies alike would agree that Britain’s Conservative party has been a magnificent machine for winning and retaining power. While the Left frittered its energy denouncing ideological deviationists, reciting parrot-like dogmas about collective ownership, and purging its own ranks, the Tories were pragmatists. They believed something firmly until it became a vote-loser; and then they found a way of believing something else. I don’t say that as a sneer but as a sincere compliment. Toryism has tended to recognize that there’s no point in having a brilliant scheme for government if you can’t get into government in the first place. Tony Blair struck gold when he had the humility to copy that page of his rivals’ homework.

Liz Truss, who on Monday was selected by Conservatives to be their next party leader and Britain’s newest prime minister, has been doing the same thing on the face of it. She can’t invent and promulgate Trussism until she has her bottom planted on Boris Johnson’s old chair in No. 10. And she can’t plant her bottom thither without the support of the 160,000-odd paid-up members of the Conservative party who select the party’s leaders.

Some people grumble that her policy platforms have been a bit vague, and what specifics we have had — such as her hastily revised scheme to cut public sector pay — are getting pushback from the supposed experts. One police chief has called her policing policy “meaningless.” Economists have been skeptical about her confidence that all it will take is a few tax cuts to put a tiger back in the national tank. She has pledged to help those about to be clobbered by rocketing energy bills, though she’s done so by promising what you might describe as “an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is.”

A defense can be made there — and has been — that Truss is doing what politicians always do: she is campaigning in poetry that she might govern in prose. You come up with a series of resonant slogans that don’t tie you down to a specific policy position — “Build Back Better,” “I’m Backing Britain,” “For the Many, Not the Few,” or what have you — wave a few flags and hope for the best. Once you’ve promised your core supporters the moon, you set about gently revising their expectations after you’re safely ensconced in the reality-based world of actual government.

I don’t, by the way, presume here to editorialize on why a Truss premiership will be a Bad Thing, still less to describe the horrible face I made as I read the list of her rumored cabinet appointments. Obviously Liz Truss isn’t specially interested in appealing to soaking wet liberal centrist dads like me — and fair enough. That’s not the game she’s in. She might throw the likes of us a bone come a general election, but we’re a way off that yet. If people like me are complaining that she wants to cut taxes so people can keep more of their own money, rather than spend other people’s money on handouts to the needy, that’s probably a sign she’s doing something right by her natural constituency.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/09/04/the-tyranny-of-pride/

Imagine there was a political movement so powerful and so intolerant that you might be visited by the cops for making fun of it. A movement so dominant that desecrating its symbols came to be treated as a kind of blasphemy. A movement so fawned over by the elites that any town or village that refused to bow down to it – to wave its flag and shout its slogans – risked being written off as unsafe, and essentially as unclean. A movement so embedded in the ruling class that every wing of the establishment, from the political set to the military to the financial elite, was duty bound to display its insignia.

Well, such a movement exists, right here in 21st-century Britain. And it isn’t Toryism or ‘Brexshit’ or any of the other ideologies the liberal elite is constantly telling us to fear. It’s Pride.

We’re living under a tyranny of Pride. Its eyesore rainbow flag dominates every major highway during Pride month. Back in June London looked like a city under occupation, with vast boulevards like Regent Street festooned in this ugly new standard. Scores of them fluttered as far as the eye could see, in perfect and sinister militaristic formation. The capitalist class drapes itself in the Pride flag, too. Banks splash it across their windows, Morgan Stanley staff march behind it in the street. Even the armed wing of the state now comes in Pride colours. Cop cars have been repainted in the hues of this ideological rainbow. Top officers wear Pride-themed insignias and lanyards. The Ministry of Defence’s vast headquarters in London have been illuminated in the Pride colours. The Royal Air Force even did a flyover of the Pride march in London last year, with 10 fighter jets pumping out rainbow-coloured contrails to the whooping and cheering of the crowd below. How long before they start dropping Pride-painted bombs on their missions overseas?

And woe betide anyone who refuses to wave the Pride flag or – sin of sins – violates it in some fashion. Ockbrook and Borrowash Parish Council in Derbyshire was branded a sinful backwater when it refused to fly the flag last year. ‘Anger as Pride Month flag snubbed by Derbyshire council…’, reported a horrified BBC. As for profaning Pride and its sacred symbols – that is so serious it can become a police matter. A few weeks ago a man in Hampshire was visited by cops, and put in handcuffs, for the blasphemy of retweeting a meme showing four Pride flags arranged to look like a swastika. The literal speech police who knocked on his door accused him of ‘causing anxiety’.

Defiling Pride is to the 21st century what desecrating an image of Christ was to the 14th. Modern-day liberals puff themselves up as superior to little religious people, and yet they are far more rashly hostile to acts of iconoclasm. Most Christians let out a weary sigh when their beliefs or their book are mocked by the woke (who would never, of course, say an untoward word about Islam). It is the secular right-on who kick off when their holy symbols are befouled.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18742/turkey-terrorist-threat

Erdoğan said that Turkey would freeze Finland and Sweden’s NATO membership bids if the Nordic countries do not come into line with Turkey’s “fight against terrorist organizations.”

That might be a tough task for Finland and Sweden. In 2019, Erdoğan notoriously called half of Turks (those who do not vote for him) terrorists. The same year, Erdoğan declared the pro-Kurdish People’s Democracy Party a terrorist entity. In parliamentary elections in June 2015, that party won 13% of the national vote and 80 seats in the Turkish parliament. Nevertheless, in 2021, Erdoğan stated that the students who peacefully protested his appointment of a rector to Boğaziçi University were “terrorists.”

If Sweden and Finland do not fight wholeheartedly everyone Erdoğan deems a terrorist, does that mean he will veto their membership?

Kavala was acquitted on all charges but, as Erdoğan publicly insists that he is a “traitor,” he was not released from prison. Upon his acquittal, a prosecutor instantly produced a new indictment against him.

The West should tell Erdoğan it is ISIS, not men like Kavala, that is the terror threat to civilization.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s ideological family tree is inherently anti-Western– hence, anti-US and anti-NATO. This author’s most recent article, “NATO Family Picture in Madrid: This Will Not Be Erdoğan’s Last Blackmail,” was posted on July 7. Only 11 days later, on July 18, Erdoğan said that Turkey would freeze Finland and Sweden’s NATO membership bids if the Nordic countries do not come into line with Turkey’s “fight against terrorist organizations.”

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/gwendolynsims/2022/09/04/mass-stabbing-in-canada-kills-10-wounds-at-least-15-more-n1626920

Ten people were killed and over fifteen more were hospitalized early Sunday morning in a mass stabbing in at least 13 locations in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan. Canadian authorities are actively conducting a manhunt for at least two suspects.

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) released a statement on the stabbings and suspects:

At this point in our investigation, we have located 10 deceased individuals and are investigating 13 locations in the communities of the James Smith Cree Nation and Weldon in Saskatchewan.

Several additional victims have been injured, 15 of which at this point have been transported to various hospitals. There may be additional injured victims who transported themselves to the various hospitals. We ask any injured person who hasn’t already spoken to police to please contact 310-RCMP

At this stage in the RCMP investigation, it’s believed some of the victims were targeted by the suspects while others were attacked randomly. Authorities are searching for suspects Damien Sanderson and Myles Sanderson:

Damien Sanderson is described as a 31-year-old male, 5 foot 7, 155 pounds, with black hair and brown eyes. Myles Sanderson is a 30-year-old male, 6 foot 1 and 240 pounds with brown hair and brown eyes. Their pictures are available on our social media channels and websites…

…They are considered armed and dangerous. They are believed to be in a black Nissan Rogue SUV with Saskatchewan license plate 119 MPI. At this point, we don’t know if they have changed vehicle[s] since this morning. Their location and direction of travel are unknown. This is why we need everyone in the province to stay vigilant and report any suspicious activity by calling 911 immediately.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18853/macron-pessimistic-moment

“Prepare for the end of abundance!” This is the message that French President Emmanuel Macron offered in his first post-holiday pronouncement last month. Though supposedly addressed at the French people, Macron’s lamentation seemed to have the entire “Western world” in mind.

In its current version, the nomos [organizing principle] trying to seize control in almost all Western societies could be described as “victimism”.

In victimism the state is seen as a cash machine distributing money among the victims, while apologizing to them. In the past few years. Western states, both in Europe and North America, have distributed countless trillions…

Some philosophers, among them the German Jürgen Habermas, have tried to give victimism a Christian varnish. In their reading, the Western world, long after having adopted “secularism”, remembers Christianity as a school of frugality, empathy for the downtrodden and atonement of sins symbolized by Christ as the ultimate victim.

The trouble with that reading is that it is closer to the Greek concept of the scapegoat, than to the Christian concept of redeemer.

“Prepare for the end of abundance!” This is the message that French President Emmanuel Macron offered in his first post-holiday pronouncement last month. Though supposedly addressed at the French people, Macron’s lamentation seemed to have the entire “Western world” in mind.

According to him the era of easily available capital and seemingly endless natural resources, notably oil and natural gas, is already over. The “Western world” must learn to live in a different way.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18845/iran-nuclear-deal-lies

These are the effects of the proposed nuclear deal brokered by the EU, Russia and China. Why is it brokered by the EU, Russia and China? Because the United States was outrageously banned from direct negotiations by Tehran. It is not outrageous that Iran demanded it, but that the US tolerated its own exclusion.

[T]he deal that is about to emerge will be even worse [than the 2015 deal]. The argument of the “bad” dealers is that it buys time for the West, with Micawberish optimism that “something will turn up”. This thinking is clear from President Biden’s preposterous hope that he can “lengthen and strengthen” the deal once it has been struck.

While in office, Obama declared that Iran would not be allowed to build nuclear weapons on his watch. He must have known that the only way to prevent that was through military action or perhaps crippling sanctions, but was unwilling to do either and the result was the JCPOA, which kicked the problem down the road onto someone else’s watch.

Tehran can legitimately commence operation of advanced uranium enrichment centrifuges in two years, all the while working flat out to develop nuclear-capable ballistic missiles that, along with Iran’s terrorist activities, are not covered at all in the agreement.

The “buying time” argument, and indeed an argument for any agreement, only works if you do not understand Iran and are naive enough to believe the regime will honor what it agrees to.

The reality that the optimistic and the unschooled fail to grasp is that the regime in Tehran will ignore constraints imposed by the deal that it does not like.

Tehran will continue to develop the nuclear capability that it sees as its right — deal or no deal — at the speed it wants until it is physically stopped from doing so. Whatever shape Biden’s deal takes there are only downsides for the West and the Middle East and only upsides for Tehran.

More than that, according to Israeli prime minister Yair Lapid, Tehran will receive $100 billion a year as a result of lifted sanctions.

Released from sanctions, Iran will be used as an economic refuge by Moscow to evade its own international sanctions.

Under the draft deal, Iran will be able to retain the uranium that it has been illicitly producing since the original JCPOA, enriched beyond any requirements for a peaceful nuclear programme…. [I]t seems likely that Russia — despite its own repeated nuclear threats — will be handed control of this existing uranium stockpile.

This chilling scenario — for which the world will pay a very high price — is about to be made more likely by the ill-judged actions of governments in America and Europe, which lack the resolve and courage to apply sufficient economic pressure and military deterrence to put a stop to Iranian nuclear ambitions. Instead, as they did in response to Russian aggression, they are again opting for appeasement, the opium of the faint-hearted.

As Western governments quake in the face of Russian nuclear threats, they are on the verge of striking a deal that will give Iran that same power over them.

https://bit.ly/3eeK0Kp

*”Iran is fighting a global war and calls on oppressed Muslims and non-Muslims to unite under Islam and the Islamic Republic of Iran to overthrow the evil regimes [the “infidel” West led by the US and the “heretic” Sunni regimes]. The Islamic Revolution knows no borders [hence, the right of Iran to interfere in many conflicts in the Middle East and beyond]; it applies to the whole world (Literature and Humanities, Grade 12, 2021‒2022, page 110).

School curriculum reflects ideology

The school curriculum of Iran’s Ayatollahs is consistent with their constitution, domestic repression of ethnic and religious minorities, the subjugation of women, and the proliferation of anti-US terrorism in the Middle East, Africa and Latin America. It provides a roadmap for an apocalyptic commitment to a global, anti-US Islamic revolution.

While US and Western policy makers rely heavily on statements and commitments made by Iran’s Ayatollahs in the negotiation rooms and in the public arena, the Ayatollahs’ school curriculum reflects most authentically their fanatic, religious and megalomaniacal anti-US strategy, tactics and vision: toppling the Sunni “apostate and heretic” regimes and bringing the Western “infidel” (especially “The Great American Satan”) to submission.

Moreover, Iran’s Ayatollahs have mastered the art of the Quran-sanctioned Taqiyya: dissimulation, doubletalk and deception-based statements and agreements, aimed at shielding the “believers” from the “infidels,” to be abrogated once conditions are ripe.

Furthermore, the school curriculum of the Ayatollahs has become an effective production-line for terrorists and suicide bombers.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/09/man-falsely-credited-ending-cold-war-dies-robert-spencer/

Reuters was up front about it, headlining their obituary this way: “Last Soviet leader Gorbachev, who ended Cold War and won Nobel prize, dies aged 91.” CNN lamented that “Mikhail Gorbachev’s tragedy is that he outlived the thaw in the Cold War between Moscow and the US, after doing more than anyone to engineer it.” The same alleged news network headlined another story on their fallen hero: “Mikhail Gorbachev, former Soviet president who took down the Iron Curtain, dies.” The BBC was just a trifle more circumspect, going with the headline: “Mikhail Gorbachev: The Soviet leader who helped end the Cold War.” Gorbachev did indeed help end the Cold War, but chiefly by doing something that Reuters, CNN and the Beeb don’t deign to mention: Gorbachev helped end the Cold War by losing it.

The Leftist intelligentsia that runs the propaganda organs known as CNN, the BBC and Reuters, along with the rest of the establishment media, will never admit it, but the man who actually ended the Cold War was Ronald Reagan. As Rating America’s Presidents explains, Reagan became president in the era of détente, when it was generally agreed that the best way to deal with the Soviet Union and global Communism in general was to play down differences, turn a blind eye to the human rights abuses endemic to socialist states, seek accords that would ease tensions, prevent the use of nuclear weapons, and allow the two sides to continue in much the same way indefinitely. The détente era reached its apex on June 18, 1979, when Jimmy Carter and Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev signed the SALT II Treaty, and then, as the world watched agog, Carter embraced and kissed the Communist despot.

President Reagan set a different tone. He was a public critic of détente as disadvantageous to American interests. On June 8, 1982, in a speech before the British House of Commons, he contradicted the conventional wisdom that the Soviet Union was here to stay and boldly predicted its demise. Reagan said, “The march of freedom and democracy…will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash-heap of history, as it has left other tyrannies which stifle the freedom and muzzle the self-expression of the people.”