RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18825/great-reset-wef

Notice that no nation has managed merely to print money and tax its citizens on the path to prosperity. Real wealth cannot simply be conjured from thin air. There must be recognized value in what a nation and its citizens possess.

More than any other source for national wealth, however, one towers above the rest: innovation. The ability of the human mind to create something new and valuable provides society with endless wealth creation…. Innovation is the magic sauce for generating wealth.

Humans struggling merely to survive in the world do not waste time, labor, or resources on projects that offer no prospect for future reward. Humans working as servants to the state under centrally controlled economies have no incentive to innovate. Only when private ownership and personal liberty combine can human innovation flourish. Freedom is the secret ingredient to innovation’s magic sauce for increasing wealth.

A country whose institutions do not respect property rights or whose customs do not value freedom will remain a barren desert for human innovation. In this way, nations have a great incentive to liberalize over time. Should they not, they quickly become financially and militarily vulnerable to more innovative and wealthier nations. Observing this simple truth, classical liberals have always understood free markets as the gateway to human emancipation. Economic self-interest, in other words, ultimately leads to expansive human rights and liberties across the planet.

Nothing about Western politicians’ embrace of the World Economic Forum’s “Great Reset” or “Build Back Better” paradigms protects property rights or liberty in the slightest. The WEF’s agenda promotes radically anti-liberal programs… [that] will smother human innovation by first depriving Westerners of their freedoms.

Wealthy free nations are a threat to the WEF’s New World Order. If censorship must be embraced to control the “narrative,” then so be it. If citizens must be denied freedom of movement under the guise of a “health emergency,” no big deal. If private bank accounts must be seized to intimidate protesters, then such threats are the price for ensuring compliance. In this way, the WEF’s plans for a controlled economy intentionally reverse centuries of liberal progress. Political leaders today are dragging the West into the past.

First, individual liberties will continue disappearing. Then, the greatest economic engine of all, innovation, will dry up. Finally, wealth will return solely to the hands of a small “ruling class” minority. This is the future the World Economic Forum hails as “progress.” It is not. It is a recipe for human bondage.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/08/iranian-state-media-features-american-prof-new-robert-spencer/

The Islamic Republic of Iran has been engaging in a bit of damage control since the stabbing of Salman Rushdie. Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, affectionately known as “The Butcher of Baghdad,” is set to come to New York to address the United Nations, and the Iranians don’t want to make the possibility that Old Joe Biden’s ultra-woke handlers would ban him from entering the country any less remote than it is now. And so Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Nasser Kanaani said Monday: “We categorically deny” any connection to the attack. “No one has the right to accuse the Islamic Republic of Iran.”

This being Iran, however, damage control is not always as smooth as we’re used to in the West. On Thursday, Iran’s state-controlled Press TV featured an American professor who said that the stabbing attack on Rushdie was the fault of…the Jews. The Press TV article was entitled “Rushdie attack might be Israeli plot to spread Islamophobia: Scholar.” Of course! Why didn’t anyone think of that before?

Press TV’s scholar was Kevin Barrett, whom it described variously as “an American writer and political analyst” and “an American author, journalist, and radio host.” Whatever else Barrett may be, he is a conspiracy-minded man who believes that he has been a victim of one himself. The bio he supplied to Amazon.com states that “From 1991 through 2006 Dr. Barrett taught at colleges and universities in San Francisco, Paris and Wisconsin.” But then he fell victim to the wicked conservatives: “In summer 2006 Dr. Barrett was attacked by a group of Republican state legislators who called for him to be fired from his job at the University of Wisconsin-Madison due to his political opinions. Since 2007 Dr. Barrett has been informally blacklisted from teaching in American colleges and universities.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18826/sweden-violent-crime

For the first time, crime tops the list of voters’ most important concerns in the run-up to the elections.

Of the more than 8,200 people the Swedish police counted as being members of criminal gangs by late 2021, almost 15% were under the age of 18.

Sweden has in just two generations gone from being one of the safest countries in the world to being one of the most dangerous countries in Europe. During the same time, mass immigration has dramatically altered Sweden’s population. 1.2 million of those eligible to vote in the elections in September 2022 were born outside Sweden…

Basem Mahmoud is an imam operating in the heavily Muslim-dominated area of Rosengård in Malmö. He has called Jews “the offspring of pigs and apes,” said he was “only quoting the Koran,” and is looking forward to “the great battle” when all non-Muslims will be forced to submit themselves to Muslims.

In a sermon in February 2022, Basem Mahmoud went on an attack against Swedish schools and social services and stated that Muslims are taking over the country. “Sweden is ours,” he said. ” It is ours, whether they [Swedes] like it or not. In ten to fifteen years, it is ours.”

Sweden has one of the world’s worst recorded rape rates. In 2018, the state broadcaster SVT revealed that 58% of men convicted in Sweden of rape and attempted rape over the previous five years were born abroad. Some of the most brutal rape cases have involved Muslim or African immigrants.

An official police report from 2019 indicated that Stockholm alone has at least 50 different criminal gangs currently operating in that city. They are also getting more aggressive and violent. Scandinavian countries traditionally did not have strong mafia groups comparable to what you can find in southern Italy. Now Sweden has dozens of different groups or clans competing against one another for control over the local market of narcotic drugs, protection money or other illegal activities. Some of them have even managed to create a criminal infrastructure, with ties to lawyers or bureaucrats. Nearly all of them have been imported to the country since the 1970s. Many of these criminals have an ethnic background from far more brutal and cynical societies in the Islamic world or Africa. Soft Scandinavian prisons do not deter them.

Unfortunately, such problems are no longer confined merely to major cities. They are spreading to smaller towns and even rural areas across Sweden. Kalmar, a relatively small medieval town of historical importance, has experienced multiple deadly gang shootings.

Swedes who want their family to be safe from violent crime are running out of places to move to. Unless they decide to leave their homeland behind entirely, as some are already doing.

Sweden will hold general elections on September 11, 2022. At the same time, the country is rocked by a wave of violent crime that is unprecedented in modern Scandinavian history.

For the first time, crime tops the list of voters’ most important concerns in the run-up to the elections. “It’s going to be a very unique type of Swedish election with a very unusual issue at the top of the agenda,” Henrik Ekengren Oscarsson, professor of political science at Gothenburg University, told newspaper Dagens Nyheter. Forty-one percent of those surveyed said that law and order are the most important issues in society, as well as the most important political issues.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18823/turkey-supporting-terrorists

Since 2016, Turkey has carried out four major military campaigns in Syria, two of them — the 2018 “Operation Olive Branch” and the 2019 “Operation Peace Spring” — being against Kurdish-controlled areas. The military invasions have forcibly changed the demographic balance of the regions, driving out Kurds, Yazidis and Christians from their lands.

For more than two months, Erdoğan has been saying that a new military offensive is imminent. If he does invade Syria, the group that will benefit is ISIS.

Meanwhile, as Turkey’s government accuses Sweden and Finland of “supporting terrorists,” convicted Hizbullah terrorists have been released from Turkish prisons. Erdoğan releases the terrorists from prison and in return Hizbullah supporters vote for him. The Erdoğan regime enables Hizbullah just as it enables ISIS and other Islamist groups in Syria.

Turkish Hizbullah is a terrorist organization established in 1978. It has engaged in murder and torture, particularly targeting secular Kurds in southeastern Turkey in the 1990s… Hizbullah’s leaders were heavily influenced by Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution and reportedly received training in Iran. Turkish Hizbullah’s main effort is to establish an independent Islamic state under strict sharia law in southeastern Turkey.

According to a 2000 report in the Turkish Daily News, “… the Hizbullah terrorists recently apprehended by the police admitted in their testimonies that they have received military training and all required support in Iran and detailed the names and the descriptions of the Iranian guards who acted on behalf of the Iranian government.”

“I did all these actions for Allah, for Islam. If I go out right now, I’ll do it again without blinking an eye. In fact, I have done other actions that were not stated in the indictment and that the prosecutor could not solve. Our war is for salat [the five daily Islamic prayers].” — Kemal Gülşen, one of the released terrorists, sozcu.com.tr, May 16, 2022.

“I took part in every level of Hizbullah. Allah has given us the task to make Islam dominant on earth. I don’t regret anything. We have become a bomb ready to explode…” — Cemal Tutar, the head of the military wing of Turkish Hizbullah, who killed 109 people by pulling the trigger himself, and among those released, sozcu.com.tr, May 16, 2022.

The “terrorist organization” Erdoğan targets is the Kurdish People’s Defense Units (YPG) that fought against ISIS in Syria and that is a US ally.

Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has once again objected to the demands for NATO membership of Sweden and Finland, saying that Turkey “will not take a positive stance” unless the two countries respect their promises regarding the “fight against terrorism.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/08/sweden-big-step-forward-islam-bruce-bawer/

Increasingly, the modern history of Sweden reads like something concocted by a stand-up comedian with a taste for black humor. Take, for example, the official claim that Sweden has “the first feminist government in the world,” complete with a distinctly “feminist foreign policy.” Yeah, it’s so feminist, as I noted in February 2019, that when a gaggle of Swedish diplomats traveled to Iran, the women all wore headscarves and refrained from shaking hands with their bearded hosts. Moreover, although violent Muslim immigrants are making more and more neighborhoods so dangerous that, as I quoted one woman saying in 2017, people “sleep with a hammer beside the bed,” Muslim immigration levels remain high, and while retired Swedes who spent their adult lives voting for this madness are, as I wrote last year, “warehoused in old shipping containers” – which sounds like a sick joke, but isn’t – new Muslim arrivals “get townhouses.”

Last March some Ukrainian women and children were staying at a refugee hostel in Örebro when, at about 3 A.M., a gang of male Somali immigrants broke in, obviously up to no good. Thankfully, as I reported at the time, the Ukrainians were able to save themselves by running to their rooms and locking the doors, but some were so shaken that they wished they’d never left home. Why trade one war zone for another? And in May I wrote about the “Koran riots” – mass outbreaks of Muslim violence in several Swedish cities (car burnings, Molotov cocktails, etc.), all of it in furious response to thoroughly peacefully protests against, well, Muslim violence. 

Now comes the latest chapter in this bleakly comic tale. On September 11, Sweden will hold parliamentary elections. This will represent the first national test for the Nuance Party (Partiet Nyans), which a fellow named Mikail Yüksel founded three years ago after being expelled from the Center Party for belonging to the Gray Wolves, a gang of Turkish neo-fascist jihadist types. Targeting Muslim voters, the Nuance Party has grown quickly – and why not? Where else will you find candidates who want to introduce harsh measures to fight Islamophobia, to anonymize housing applicants (so you can end up renting the spare room next to your daughter’s bedroom to one of those would-be Somali rapists mentioned above), to make the European Union less of a “Christian club” by admitting Turkey and Bosnia, to increase pressure on EU countries (such as Hungary) to take Muslim refugees, to compel proportional representation of ethnic groups in the police departments and counterterrorism services, to introduce blasphemy laws and limit free speech, to forbid the removal of Muslim children from their homes by child-protective services (which often remove them, mind you, because they’re being raped by members of their extended families), to build more mosques, to permit Muslim apparel absolutely everywhere, and to ban Koran burning and offensive commentary about Islam.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/08/salman-rushdie-and-wests-jihad-denial-bruce-thornton/

Recently an Iran-inspired jihadist attempted to murder author Salman Rushdie, who was stabbed ten times and remains in critical condition. The origins of this crime go back to 1989, when the leader of the Islamic Revolution in Iran, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, issued a fatwa that promised millions of dollars (eventually $3.3 million), instant martyrdom, and a trip to paradise for anyone killed while murdering the apostate Rushdie, who allegedly insulted Islam in his 1988 novel The Satanic Verses.

The subsequent response of the West to this grotesque violation of free speech exemplified the willful blindness to jihad that would characterize the Nineties and continue even after the spectacular carnage of the 9/11attacks. Given the persistence of the EU and the Biden administration in offering appeasing concessions to Iran in their desperate attempt to restart the failed nuclear deal, our foreign policy establishment is still blind to the reality of the West’s oldest enemy.

Khomeini’s fatwa didn’t just mark Rushdie for assassination, but included the publishers of the novel and bookstores selling it: all “are condemned to death. I call on all valiant Muslims wherever they may be in the world to kill them without delay, so that no one will dare insult the sacred beliefs of Muslims henceforth. And whoever is killed in this cause will be a martyr.”

Iran’s current leader, Ali Khamenei, in 2017 confirmed the fatwa: “The decree is as Imam Khomeini issued.”

The faithful responded to the fatwa’s call, initiating a series of deadly attacks across the globe. The same year as the fatwa, 12 people died in Mumbai, and 6 Pakistanis in riots over the book. The translator of the novel in Japan was murdered, and the Italian translator stabbed. The Turkish translator survived an arson attack on a hotel that killed 37 others, and the Norwegian publisher was shot and critically injured.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/08/rushdie-stabbing-reminds-us-iran-still-worlds-david-harsanyi/

Last week, a man stormed the stage at the Chautauqua Institution and stabbed British author Salman Rushdie in the neck as he was being introduced. The topic under discussion was “the United States as asylum for writers and other artists in exile and as a home for freedom of creative expression.” Chances are exceptionally high that this was the work of a jihadi.

The story attracted shamefully fleeting attention. For those too young to remember, “The Satanic Verses” was published back in September 1988. And because of the book’s purportedly impertinent treatment of the prophet Muhammad, it was banned in Rushdie’s native India and dozens of other nations — including virtually every Muslim-majority country in the world. Though Rushdie would later become a powerful advocate of free expression, he initially turned on his own book, apologizing numerous times for its contents. “I profoundly regret the distress that publication has occasioned to sincere followers of Islam,” he said in one statement, asking his publisher to hold back release of the paperback edition of the book. As a matter of self-preservation, his position was understandable.

And, still, it was all to no avail. Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against Rushdie, contending that even if the author “became the most pious man of all time” it was the duty of every Muslim to “employ everything he has got” to murder the writer.

For the first time in postwar history, terrorism was aimed at suppressing free expression in the liberal Western world. In the United States, two bookstores in Berkeley, California, were attacked. The Riverdale Press in New York was firebombed after publishing an editorial defending the right to read the novel and criticizing the bookstores that pulled it from their shelves. Rushdie’s Japanese translator Hitoshi Igarashi was fatally stabbed. In Europe, the Italian translator of “The Satanic Verses,” Ettore Capriolo, was also stabbed in his apartment in Milan, and the Norwegian publisher of Rushdie’s book, William Nygaard, was shot three times, but both survived. In Belgium, an imam and his aide were murdered after expressing moderate positions on the affair. Big booksellers in London were firebombed in April 1989, and there were two more explosions connected to the selling of the book and a handful of unexploded devices in other bookstores. Rushdie, author of the masterpiece “Midnight’s Children” among many other fantastic works, was forced to employ round-the-clock protection by bodyguards, compelled to spend the next decade in hiding.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18819/china-chinese-support

To make matters worse, the Chinese state has been open about its hostility to the United States. Among other things, in May 2019 People’s Daily, the Party’s self-described “mouthpiece” and therefore most authoritative publication in China, declared a “people’s war” on America.

Many of those “different social systems”—especially the United States—are squeamish when it comes to singling people out because of their race. Yet American policymakers cannot ignore the fact that the Communist Party’s appeal to overseas Chinese is overtly race-based.

In February… the Justice Department ended its Trump-era “China Initiative,” which concentrated law enforcement efforts on Chinese espionage. Yet given Xi Jinping’s call on overseas Chinese to work for the Chinese Communist Party, it is time to reinstitute that program and devote more resources to it.

Can Americans of Chinese descent be loyal to both America and China?

No. China’s Communist Party has made itself an existential threat to America and every other society…. The promotion of tianxia [ruling “All under Heaven”] means, among other things, that the Party views the U.S. government as illegitimate and America as nothing more a tributary society or colony.

Although we [“Chinese-Americans”] technically do not have an obligation to prove our loyalty to America, we must, as a group, understand that a hostile power is trying to weaponize us. Xi Jinping has openly called on us to become a subversive force, to help him destroy the country we now call home.

It is time, therefore, for us to begin cleaning our own ranks…. Moreover, it means not shouting “racism” every time law enforcement arrests someone of Chinese descent.

We may think it unfair, but we now have to make a choice.

After all, our country—the United States of America—is in peril because a foreign state—the People’s Republic of China—is attacking it and hoping to use us to take it down.

The Communist Party of China refers to us as “overseas patriotic forces.” People in our communities will want to know to which country we feel patriotic.

“Promoting the great unity of the Chinese people is the historic responsibility of China’s patriotic united front work in the new era,” said Chinese ruler Xi Jinping at the end of last month to Communist Party cadres in Beijing. “To do the job well, we must… truly unite all Chinese people in different parties, nationalities, classes, groups, and with different beliefs, and those who are living under different social systems.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18815/free-speech-rushdie-fatwa

If only more people could follow his example, instead of taking the path of appeasement in the name of cultural sensitivity, the long years of murder and mayhem wrought by the Islamists on the West might come to an end.” –Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Unherd, August 7, 2022

[A] terrible and different reality: the fatwa is gaining ground…

Islamic extremists in 2012 published a terrifying “most wanted list”, like those of the FBI. Title: “Yes we can. A bullet a day keeps the infidel away…. ” What happened to the faces and names on that list? They have been killed, they left the public arena to protect themselves or died under police protection.

We do not even know they exist: our fearful conformist press never tells their amazing stories. They live among us, in Paris, London, Oslo, Copenhagen, Berlin, Amsterdam and all the other European capitals. They live according to a strict security device: they have to tell the police in advance what they will do during the day, who they will see and where they will go and, if anyplace is not considered safe, these victims are forced to change plans.

“Anyone who criticizes Islamism must expect to be violently attacked in this country and without anyone being offended.” — Jan Aleksander Karon, journalist, tichyseinblick.de, August 20, 2022

“Give us his head,” the Islamists shouted outside a British school in Batley. They wanted to kill a teacher whose name we do not even know and who was forced to leave school after heavy death threats. What was he guilty of? Having shown in class some of the Mohammed cartoons during a lesson on freedom of expression.

All decent people should stand with Salman Rushdie and against his persecutors. Is it now a little bit clearer that radical Islam is today one of the biggest threats to Western culture and that we are not winning but instead becoming like turkeys celebrating Thanksgiving?

“Salman Rushdie is a champion of free speech, bravely standing up for Western ideals when so many shy away from the fight. If only more people could follow his example, instead of taking the path of appeasement in the name of cultural sensitivity, the long years of murder and mayhem wrought by the Islamists on the West might come to an end… I know all too well the threat Islamism poses. After I came out as an apostate, I was forced into a bubble of protection that still surrounds me to this day. I have 24-hour security. I still receive death threats. My friend, the sweet, vulgar, brilliant Theo Van Gogh was murdered simply for making a film with me. His attacker used a knife to stab a letter into Theo’s chest: it said that I would be next”.

That is how Ayaan Hirsi Ali reacted to the attempt to assassinate Salman Rushdie in Chautauqua, New York.

Many of the slogans, paraphrases on “free speech” and demonstrations of solidarity to the author of The Satanic Verses hide a terrible and different reality: the fatwa is gaining ground, and more and more people have to live under protection due to criticism of Islam. In the words of the Algerian writer Boualem Sansal writing for L’Express this week:

“[T]o speak only of France, the police will soon no longer be enough, it will be necessary to recruit battalions or form a new body of bodyguards, who know Islam and can recognize under which dress it is presented.”

Islamic extremists in 2012 published a terrifying “most wanted list”, like those of the FBI. Title: “Yes we can. A bullet a day keeps the infidel away…” What happened to the faces and names on that list? They have been killed, left the public arena to protect themselves, or died under police protection.