RUTHFULLY YOURS

Noah, my 10-year-old son, was reading over my shoulder a powerful story about the state of medicine in Venezuela by Nick Casey in Sunday’s New York Times. We scrolled through images of filthy operating rooms, broken incubators and desperate patients lying in pools of blood, dying for lack of such basics as antibiotics.

“Dad, why are the hospitals like this?”

“Socialism.”

“What’s socialism?”

I told him it’s an economic system in which the government seizes and runs industries, sets prices for goods, and otherwise dictates what you can and cannot do with your money, and therefore your life. He received my answer with the abstracted interest you’d expect if I had been describing atmospheric conditions on Uranus.

Here’s what I wish I had said: Socialism is a mental poison that leads to human misery of the sort you see in these wrenching pictures.

The lesson seems all the more necessary when discredited ideologies are finding new champions in high places. When Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez died in 2013, an obscure U.K. parliamentarian tweeted, “Thanks Hugo Chavez for showing that the poor matter and wealth can be shared. He made massive contributions to Venezuela & a very wide world.”

The parliamentarian was Jeremy Corbyn, now leader of the Labour Party.

Let’s not stop with Mr. Corbyn. In its day, Chavismo found champions, apologists and useful idiots among influential political figures and supposed thought leaders. In Massachusetts there were Joseph P. Kennedy and Rep. Bill Delahunt, who arranged a propaganda coup for the strongman by agreeing to purchase discounted Venezuelan heating oil for U.S. consumers. The Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel extolled Chávez for defying the Bush administration and offering “an innovative four-point program to renew and reform the U.N.”

Up north, Naomi Klein, Canada’s second-most unpleasant export, treated Chávez as heroically leading the resistance to the forces of dreaded neoliberalism. Jimmy Carter mourned Chávez for “his bold assertion of autonomy and independence for Latin American governments and for his formidable communication skills and personal connection with supporters in his country and abroad to whom he gave hope and empowerment.” CONTINUE AT SITE

Iran has arrested eight people in a crackdown against women who “promote immoral and un-Islamic culture and promiscuity,” by appearing on Instagram without wearing the mandatory hijab head covering.

The Associated Press reports the arrests came after a two-year sting operation, which identified 170 participants in this conspiracy to defy Islamic law, including 58 models and 59 photographers. In addition to the eight arrests, 21 criminal cases have been opened. Iranian media said “those targeted saw their businesses shut down, as well as their pages on Instagram and Facebook removed.”

According to Channel NewsAsia, the eight people arrested were all models, and the arrests actually occurred in March, but the Iranian government is just now publicizing the crackdown. Some of them have been released on bail, while others face “heavy charges” such as “spreading prostitution.” Based on this account, some of the models are avoiding punishment by essentially claiming they were tricked into participation.

One of the prominent women caught in this dragnet was model Elham Arab, who was shown talking to a prosecutor on Iranian television, with “her blonde hair hidden under a black chador.” Her Instagram account has evidently been shut down, she could not be reached for comment, and the AP wasn’t certain what charges she faced, or if she had been given access to a lawyer.

Channel NewsAsia quotes Javad Babaei, head of Iran’s cybercrimes court, claiming that about 20 percent of Iran’s Instagram traffic is “run by the modeling circle.”
Babaei accused this organization of “making and spreading immoral and un-Islamic culture and promiscuity,” and vowed the judiciary would “confront those who committed these crimes in an organized manner.”

The Iran nuclear agreement “was a great example of diplomacy,” stated former American ambassador to Iraq and Turkey, James F. Jeffrey, at an April 12 Middle East Policy (MPEC) Council Capitol Hill panel. While this presentation concerning “The Saudi-Iranian Rivalry and the Obama Doctrine” continued MPEC’s Iran deal promotion, the panelists’ arguments remained as depressingly unconvincing as before.

Jeffrey’s fellow former American ambassador (to Oman) and MPEC’s Chairman of the Board of Directors, Richard Schmierer, proclaimed:

[The] historic nuclear deal…addressed the fundamental and destabilizing challenge of a potential Iranian nuclear weapons capability, but it also opened the possibility of a more deep-seated change in Iran: the possibility that Iran’s leaders would use the economic benefits and the potential renewed economic access to the international community deriving from the nuclear agreement to change the country’s behavior.

For Jeffrey, this diplomatic success resulted from concrete economic and military measures “backed up by really tough sanctions that cut Iran’s oil exports by over 50 percent”; spoken in reference to President Barak Obama’s efforts to end Iranian nuclear weapons proliferation. Additionally, the nuclear agreement was supposedly “backed up with the red line that this one people actually believe, that the United States, including Obama, would act” in case of Iranian proliferation.

Since 1987, the Gaza-based terror group has kept itself in the international spotlight
through acts of violence against the Jewish State of Israel. It was designated as terrorist by the Unites States in 1997. In 2006, under the guise of the “Change and Reform” party, it won the elections for the Palestinian Authority and 2007, after violent confrontations with Fatah, took over the Gaza Strip. Since then, it has escalated its attacks against Israel.
Who helps finance Hamas ongoing terrorism against the ‘Zionist entity?’

Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood branch in Gaza, was established in December 1987, days into the Palestinian Liberation Organization’s (PLO) first Intifada against Israel. This Sunni terrorist organization, it controls territory and rules its constituents in the Gaza Strip through hardline Sharia law. Unlike the Islamic State (ISIS), which flaunts its radicalism – through their brutal abuse of women and children and indiscriminate slaughter of civilians, mostly other Muslims in Iraq and Syria, mega-attacks in Europe, and a sophisticated social media apparatus, Hamas manages to portray itself as a victim.
Why? Because unlike impatient ISIS, whose agenda is to eliminate all infidels to create the global Islamic Caliphate now, Hamas, which prioritizes the destruction of the Jewish State of Israel, has been the recipient of direct and indirect support of some Muslims states, as well as supposedly Western-oriented organizations such as the EU, the U.N. and even the U.S. These are joined by international Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated and anti-Israeli groups and the international media. Under the guise of humanitarian aid, all have joined to assist the Hamas terrorist regime in Gaza politically and financially.

I am not British. But I wish I were because now and in the foreseeable future Britain has a unique role to play in the world. And if I were British, I would think about Britain’s future in the following way. Between the late 1970s and the early 1980s, both the United Kingdom and the […]

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/8050/palestinians-abbas-succession Hamas is convinced that the Palestinian Authority (PA) will never allow elections to take place in the West Bank because of the likelihood that Hamas would win. The PA argues that Hamas will never allow a free election in the Gaza Strip because it does not tolerate any competition. After Arafat died, Arafatism lived […]

Say what you will about newly minted London mayor Sadiq Khan, but the man has chutzpah. When likely Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump said that he would make an exception to his hypothetical Muslim travel ban and welcome Khan to the United States, Khan demurred. “Donald Trump and those around him think that Western liberal values are incompatible with mainstream Islam,” the Muslim mayor said. “London has proved him wrong.”

Khan’s assurances about “mainstream” Islam in Britain are undermined by thefindings of an extensive recent survey of British Muslims. The study, conducted in connection with an April 2016 documentary, “What British Muslims Really Think,” shows that hundreds of thousands of Khan’s countrymen hold viewsutterly incompatible with those of free societies on matters of jihadism, politics, and culture. Consider that, of the 1,081 individuals surveyed to represent the views of Britain’s more than 3 million Muslims:

Only 74 percent completely condemn “suicide bombing to fight injustice”;

Only 66 percent completely condemn stoning those who commit adultery;

Only 53 percent completely condemn violence against those who mock Muhammad;

Only 34 percent would contact police if they believed someone close to them was involved with jihadism;

23 percent believe Sharia law should replace British law in areas with large Muslim populations;

52 percent believe homosexuality should be illegal;

31 percent believe polygamy should be legal;

39 percent believe women should always obey their husbands;

35 percent believe Jews have too much power in the UK.

These indicators only confirm how seeds of Islamist supremacism have spread throughout British society; chilling episodes over the last decade have made the dangers clear. Britons remember, of course, the 7/7 jihadist attacks in London in 2005, but much more recently, at least 1,500 British Muslims have emigrated to join ISIS, and outspoken Islamist cleric Anjem Choudary has been charged with supporting the group. In 2014, the Rotherham Borough Council released a report detailing a sexual-abuse scandal in which at least 1,400 children from 1997 to 2013 were “raped by multiple perpetrators, abducted, trafficked to other cities in England, beaten and intimidated.” Reportedly, those who knew of the crimes remained silent for fear of being called racists, as the perpetrators were Muslim immigrants.

Also in 2014, a government investigation uncovered Operation Trojan Horse, an organized effort to Islamize Birmingham schools. Such episodes would not have come as a surprise to anyone who read British journalist Melanie Phillips’s 2007 book, Londonistan.

As Daniel Johnson writes of Sadiq Khan’s hometown:

Here in London, which is home to about a third of British Muslims (including thousands of migrants who live below the radar of the authorities), we have already seen the assertion of power by political Islam. The takeover of Tower Hamlets by a corrupt Islamist politician, Lutfur Rahman, may be a harbinger of things to come. Last year he was removed from office by special commissioners, but for five years Rahman and his cronies ran a borough of nearly 300,000 people, distributing a budget of more than £1 billion. . . . The Muslim “block vote” is such a formidable electoral force that for Islamists to dominate a city it does not need to have a Muslim majority.

Editor’s Note: The following is the translated text of an open letter to the Muslim mayor of Rotterdam in the Netherlands, which originally appeared on the Dutch Language website of journalist Joost Niemoller. The letter was translated by SimonXML, who provides a brief introductory note.

[From Translator]

The Dutch do not have many journalists who speak out against Islam. Joost Niemoller is one. May 5th is Dutch Liberation Day. There is a big ceremony at the Dam in Amsterdam during which the King and all the various notables lay a wreath at the national monument. It’s kind of similar to the Cenotaph in London. This year, the 4/5 May Committee, who organize it all, invited Ahmed Aboutaleb – the Muslim mayor of Rotterdam to give the main speech. It was a dreadful piece of left-wing multicultural tripe, but this open letter published on Niemoller’s website says it far better than I ever could. I could not resist sharing it, so I have done a quick translation into English.

————————————

Dear Mr Ahmed Aboutaleb,

I will introduce myself. My name is Jurrien Boiten and I am the grandson of J. H. Boiten, a resistance fighter from Assen who didn’t come home after World War II. Murdered by the Nazis in the Dora concentration camp. So I am one of the relatives of the survivors you briefly mentioned in your speech during the commemoration this year.

Please understand that May 4 and 5 are also special days for me. Then all the emotions resurface. And this year that was even more so the case. When I heard on January 26 of this year that you would give the speech at the Dam I was angry. How could it be that you were asked? But then, Ms. Gerdi Verbeet is the Chairman of the 4 and 5 May Committee and a prominent member of the Labour Party. You are too, and then the relationship becomes clear. I felt that something had been stolen from me. Anyway, you had not spoken yet, so I kept my mouth shut and waited. Your speech was going to make it clear. And it did indeed.

Unfortunately my misgivings came true.

Why was I so upset when your name was called? That has everything to do with your faith and everything you stand for. You are above all a practicing Muslim. Additionally, you are a representative of the multicultural society desired and acclaimed by the left. But above all because of your Muslim background, letting you give a speech during the commemoration for all the Jews murdered in our country during the war is trying to unite the irreconcilable. It’s like a convention of vegetarians where the president of the Association of Butchers as a speaker gives an impassioned speech against eating meat.

You want to live by the rules of the Koran. The Koran is, as you know, a book that oozes hatred of Jews and is full of prejudice about unbelievers. Even homosexuality is strictly forbidden in the Koran. The Koran in that sense is as bad as Mein Kampf. The Koran inspires the faithful to fight against any “infidel”. The barbarians of IS are the ultimate example of this. I am such an “infidel.” Your holy book calls for my destruction. And to this day you have never distanced yourself from that book. Indeed, it inspires you in your daily life.

Several studies show that the growing anti-Semitism in our country is for the most part accounted for by Muslims. How is it that Jewish institutions in our country now need continuous surveillance? The threat comes from Muslims. Why has security been increased in our country? The threat comes again from Muslims.

There is in our country now a consensus about the fact that the multicultural society has failed. But only a few people from the left still refuse to see that. And they unfortunately also sit on the 4th and 5th May Committee.

You are, as I recalled, a representative of the multicultural society. That was also the reason for the committee to invite you. Over the backs of those who died and their survivors they abused the commemoration of May 4, 2016 as propaganda to prove the “success” of a now failed project. Your presence in the eyes of the committee is evidence of the “success” of the multicultural society. Your presence would encourage immigrants and natives to commemorate together. But were these foreigners there then? The NOS [the Dutch equivalent of the BBC/CBC] had to do its utmost to show a picture of such an individual.

The library in Arvika surprised patrons by offering Arabic language courses. Many Swedes wondered if offering courses in Swedish to the Arabic-speaking immigrants would not be more productive. The library, however, does not offer any such service.

The Immigration Service released a new report on April 8, entitled “Are You Married?”, which showed how its own case officers allow child marriages.

Swedish authorities have approved hundreds of polygamous marriages among immigrants, law professor Göran Lind revealed on April 4.

According to the police, the man became angry with his wife, because she was trying to learn Swedish.

April was the month when the Islamist scandals in the Green Party (Miljöpartiet) came one after the other. The Green Party sits in Sweden’s government, along with its coalition partner, the Social Democrats (Socialdemokraterna). They have made themselves known as a party favoring open borders, and with a passionate love for multiculturalism. These infatuations are precisely why the party has been a perfect candidate for Islamist infiltration. Within theGreen Party, even to ask the question whether Muslims view Islam as a political force has been considered rude and “Islamophobic.”

On April 17: Housing Minister Mehmet Kaplan was forced to resign after it was reported that he not only socialized with Islamists and fascists, but also compared Israel’s treatment of Palestinians with Nazi Germany’s treatment of Jews.

April 20: A would-be member of the Green Party executive, Yasri Khan, refused to shake hands with a female TV reporter, Ann Tiberg, causing much hoopla and eventually forcing Khan to resign.

April 22: The scholar Lars Nicander of the Swedish Defense University warned that the Green Party may have been infiltrated by Islamists: “It is obvious they are trying to get in and ascend to positions of trust,” Nicander told the daily Aftonbladet.

Green Party party secretary Anders Wallner commented on Nicander’s remarks:

“What is being put forth by Lars Nicander is something we take very seriously. Extremism has no place in our party, something our spokespersons have been very clear about.”

April 23: Semanur Taskin, spokesperson for the Green Youth in Stockholm, decided to drop out of politics. As a Swedish Muslim, she said, she felt “misunderstood and no longer secure in politics.” Taskin is also a member of an organization founded by Mehmet Kaplan — Swedish Muslims for Peace and Justice (Svenska muslimer för fred och rättvisa). The organization is best known for working for Muslim rights in Sweden; participating in “Ships to Gaza,” and criticizing all things they perceive as “Islamophobic” or the government’s work against Islamism.

Thanks to the lifting of sanctions, the prize for best Holocaust cartoon was lifted as well. Iran is now offering $50,000 for the best Holocaust cartoon, more than quadruple last year’s prize, which was $12,000.

The competition is expected to draw participants from more than 50 countries. It is sponsored by two organizations which are directly or indirectly linked to the Iranian regime: the Owj Media and Cultural Institute, funded by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and the Sarsheshmeh Cultural Center, which is supported by the Islamic Development Organization (IDO). The Iranian parliament provides the IDO’s budget.

These kinds of Holocaust events and conferences in Iran are based on the notion that Holocaust did not occur.

This week, Iran is hosting its second annual Holocaust Cartoon Competition, even as some politicians and world leaders continue to argue that Iran is becoming a stabilizing force because it is re-joining the international community, by implementing the nuclear agreement and integrating into the global financial system.

The exhibition of Holocaust cartoons will open on May 14. Iran’s Holocaust Cartoon Competition reflects the Iranian regimes’ attempts to expand its efforts to promote anti-Semitism beyond the borders of its nation.

As Iran’s revenues are rising, thanks to the lifting of sanctions, the prize for the best Holocaust cartoon was lifted, as well. Iran is now offering $50,000 for the best Holocaust cartoon, more than quadruple last year’s prize, which was $12,000. According to Iran’s semi-official IRNA news agency, the conference is expected to draw participants from more than 50 countries.

The Iranian regime seems to be using global legitimacy, granted to its leaders by many Western politicians through the nuclear agreement and business deals, to promote the core pillars of its Islamic revolution, opposing the US and rejecting Israel’s right to exist, as well as its fundamental ideals.

In addition, it is worth noting that these kinds of global conferences, which work to deny the historical fact of the Holocaust, are aimed at undermining Israel’s legitimacy, as well as its right to exist. One of Iran’s major foreign policy and ideological objectives, which rests on the religious teachings of Ayatollahs Khomeini and Khamenei, is the struggle against Israel.