RUTHFULLY YOURS

Central Bank of Iran (CBI) governor Seif Valiollah mentioned that Iran has a reputation for not being exactly transparent on countering financial support for terrorist operations. He further blamed the regime’s willingness to facilitate money-laundering schemes as another factor discouraging investment from abroad, and indirectly criticized the overweening influence of the huge business conglomerates run by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) on the Iranian economy.

Nasser Hakimi, another CBI official blamed Iran’s own banks for access problems with the Society for Worldwide International Transactions (SWIFT) network.

Several of Iran’s key banks had not yet purchased or installed the required software and financial identifier codes that would enable SWIFT to become operable in Iran.

Central Bank of Iran (CBI) officials have admitted that the regime’s own financial policies, and not the United States, are responsible for some of the country’s banking problems. CBI governor Seif Valiollah admitted recently that Tehran’s failure to reap more economic benefits from the JCPOA agreement is, at least in part, Iran’s own fault.

These revelations by Iran’s top banking officials refute charges by Iranian hardliners that the United States has been orchestrating a toteyeh bozoorg (“grand conspiracy”) to deny Iran access to international banking networks.

CBI officials and others have detailed the shortcomings of Iran’s own banking system. These CBI statements challenge the skewed comments in the Iranian press that America’s refusal to grant foreign banks access to U.S financial services is what is responsible for Iran’s bank problems. Some of the negative commentary came from economists disappointed with President Rouhani’s management of the economy.

Anti-Semitism, poetically dubbed “the oldest hatred, forever young,” is rearing its ugly head in a rapidly unfolding scandal within the United Kingdom’s Labour Party. To clean house and/or try to contain the fallout, Labour chair Jeremy Corbyn has initiated an independent inquiry. On May 2, a British paper reported that fifty members of the Labour party have been “secretly suspended” in the past two months over anti-Semitic remarks. But there have been public suspensions and resignations as well. On May 3, Naz Shah stepped down from the Home Affairs Committee, pending the results of Labour’s investigation into her past anti-Semitic social media posts. On May 2, Labour suspended three councillors (Ilyas Aziz, Shah Hussain, and Salim Mulla) for anti-Semitic remarks discovered in their social media. On March 15, Vicki Kirby, who was elected vice chair of the Parliamentary Labour Party following being suspended in 2014 for anti-Semitic writings on Facebook, was suspended a second time for posting anti-Semitic remarks (this time, on Twitter). On April 28, former London mayor Ken Livingstone was suspended following a statement he made claiming Hitler was a Zionist. Other recent suspensions include Khadim Hussein (March 23) and Mohammad Shabbir (April 27).

These perpetrators of the anti-Semitism that has been reported so far are mostly posting on social media, and thus projecting their hatred with ease around the world. They include common canards that: equate Israel’s policies towards the Palestinians and Nazi treatment of the Jews; propagate the blood libel; advocate for the expulsion of Jews out of Israel; and maintain that Israel created and controls the Islamic State. Here are some examples, from the political elite in Britain that were introduced above:

Calls for the Relocation of Israel

“Jews and Muslims lived together in the Middle East, in peace pre 1948. Perhaps it would have been wiser to create Israel in America it’s big enough. They could relocate even now.” -Ilyas Aziz, July 2014
A post of an image on Facebook titled “Solution for Israel-Palestine Conflict” that had Israel superimposed in the United States, with the statement “relocate Israel Into the United States,” with comment “problem solved” –Naz Shah, August 2014

[The “peace pre 1948” reference ignores the lethal Arab riots against Jewish civilians, including in the British Mandate for Palestine (1920, 1921, and 1929), Morocco (1875, 1903, 1907, 1912), Algeria (1934), Iraq (also known as the Farhud, 1941), Egypt (1945), Libya (1945 and 1948), Aden (1947), and Syria (1947); the Arab leadership’s genocidal incitement against Jews during Israel’s War of Independence; and the dhimmi/lower class status institutionalized for Jews throughout the Arab world, all which predate Israel’s conquest of the territories in 1967, and the rebirth of the modern state of Israel. Calls to relocate Israel deny the Jews their historic and internationally-recognized right to Israel where it is currently. Aziz’s and Shah’s quotes above also imply that Israel instigated its wars against the Arabs, which is patently false.]

Londoners head to the polls on Thursday to decide who should succeed Boris Johnson as their next mayor. With the Paris and Brussels attacks fresh on voters’ minds, Islamism and terror have emerged as central themes of the campaign. And Sadiq Khan, the Labour candidate, is struggling to distance himself from his party’s growing radicalism.

The former lawyer has vowed to be “the British Muslim who takes the fight to extremists.” Yet the Labour Party under leader Jeremy Corbyn has veered sharply to the left on these matters, and Mr. Khan has been an enabler of that transformation.

For days Labour’s “anti-Semitism row” has dominated U.K. headlines. The proximate cause was a series of TV interviews by Ken Livingstone, the Labour mayor of London from 2000 to 2008. Coming to the defense of a Labour MP accused of anti-Semitism, Mr. Livingstone claimed that Hitler had been a Zionist. “A real anti-Semite,” he said, is someone who hates all Jews, not just those in Israel.

Mr. Khan quickly distanced himself from Mr. Livingstone, who has since been suspended from the party. “Sadiq has said repeatedly that he is disgusted at the growing problems of anti-Semitism within the Labour Party,” a spokesman told me. He added that Mr. Khan opposes the so-called boycott, divest and sanction movement targeting the Jewish state, adding that “we must not turn our face against Israel.”

The party’s mainstream blames Mr. Corbyn for this state of affairs. They’re right—up to a point. Mr. Corbyn came from the party’s red-flag-waving fringes. Labour reflects Mr. Corbyn’s ideological preferences now that he has moved to the center of party power. But other, more respectable Labour figures paved his path. Sadiq Khan was one of those figures, rising to prominence toward the end of former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s tenure as a voice of the party’s anti-antiterror wing.

Mr. Khan in 2004 shared a platform at a pro-Palestinian conference with Daud Abdullah of the Muslim Council of Britain, which at the time boycotted Holocaust Memorial Day. Another speaker was Ibrahim Hewitt of Interpal, which in 2003 was added to the U.S. Treasury’s list of Specially Designated Global Terrorist organizations for funneling funds to Hamas, an allegation the U.K. pro-Palestinian charity denies. CONTINUE AT SITE

Lingchi língchí; ling-ch’ih, alternately transliterated ling chi or leng t’che), translated variously as death by a thousand cuts, (shā qiān dāo/qiāndāo wànguǎ), the slow process, the lingering death, or slow slicing, was a form of torture and execution used in China from roughly AD 900 until it was banned in 1905. It was also used in Vietnam In this form of execution; a knife was used to methodically remove portions of the body over an extended period of time, eventually resulting in death.

Death, in the context of this column, means Islam. Islam is a death worshipping cult. Death is the end of Islam for anyone who encounters it, Muslim or non-Muslim. One exists and lives for the sole purpose of dying to meet Allah in Paradise. Allah owns your life and it is your duty to obey his every command and whim, even if it means….death.

“Death to America!” is the familiar chant of Muslim demonstrators, from New York City to London to Berlin and Cologne, from Cairo to Gaza to Damascus, from Kuala Lumpur to Sydney and Kabul. Death is what is intended by the Muslim Brotherhood. It states that quite explicitly in the 1991 Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal of the Brotherhood in North America. Here is what it says:

In order for Islam and its Movement to become “a part of the homeland” in which it lives, “stable” in its land, “rooted” in the spirits and minds of its people, “enabled” in the live [sic] of its society and has firmly-established “organizations” on which the Islamic structure is built and with which the testimony of civilization is achieved, the Movement must plan and struggle to obtain “the keys” and the tools of this process in carry [sic] out this grand mission as a “Civilization Jihadist” responsibility which lies on the shoulders of Muslims and – on top of them – the Muslim Brotherhood in this country.

The process of settlement is a “Civilization-Jihadist Process” with all the word means. The Ikhwan must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and “sabotaging” its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions. Without this level of understanding, we are not up to this challenge and have not prepared ourselves for Jihad yet. It is a Muslim’s destiny to perform Jihad and work wherever he is and wherever he lands until the final hour comes, and there is no escape from that destiny except for those who chose to slack. But, would the slackers and the Mujahedeen be equal.

So, how is Islam “eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within”? By working every little gambit to dissolve Western institutions, principles, traditions, and norms, and replace them with Islamic ones, first as “co-equals,” and eventually as the dominant ones

By applying a thousand little, barely noticed and hardly earth-shattering concessions by the West to Islamic demands for “respect” or the enforcement of Islamic religious observation or deference to Muslim sensibilities and prejudices, the Brotherhood agenda is on schedule. There will always be the spectacular, headline-grabbing massacres to remind us that Islam declared war on the West long, long ago and that the bombings and beheadings and stabbings are not forgotten as the end-all of life for infidels and those who do not submit to Islam. Islam means, after all, submission.

This year commemorates the 80th anniversary of the notorious Nuremberg Laws, the Nazi racist enactments that formed the legal basis for the Holocaust. Ironically, it also marks the 70th anniversary of the Nuremberg Trials, which provided the legal basis for prosecuting the Nazi war criminals who murdered millions of Jews and others following the enactment of the Nuremberg Laws.

There is little dispute about the evil of the Nuremberg Laws. As Justice Robert H. Jackson, who was America’s chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials, put it: “The most odious of all oppressions are those which mask as justice.”

There is some dispute, however, about the Nuremberg trials themselves. Did they represent objective justice or, as Hermann Göring characterized it, merely “victor’s justice?” Were the rules under which the Nazi leaders were tried and convicted ex post facto laws, enacted after the crimes were committed in an effort to secure legal justice for the most immoral of crimes? Did the prosecution and conviction of a relatively small number of Nazi leaders exculpate too many hands-on perpetrators? Do the principles that emerged from the Nuremberg Trials have continued relevance in today’s world?

Following the Holocaust, the world took a collective oath encapsulated in the powerful phrase “never again”, but following the Nuremberg Trials, mass murders, war crimes and even genocides have been permitted to occur again and again and again and again. Cambodia, Rwanda, Darfur, the former Yugoslavia and now Syria. Why has the promise of “never again” been so frequently been broken? Why have the Nuremberg principles not been effectively applied to prevent and punish these unspeakable crimes? Will the International Criminal Court, established in 2002, be capable of enforcing the Nuremberg principles and deterring future genocides by punishing past ones?

Whether the captured Nazi leaders — those who did not commit suicide or escape — should have been placed on trial, rather than summarily shot, was the subject of much controversy. Even before the end of the war, Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau had proposed that a list of major war criminals be drawn up, and as soon as they were captured and identified, they would be shot. President Roosevelt was initially sympathetic to such rough justice, but eventually both he and President Truman were persuaded by Secretary of War Henry Stimson that summary execution was inconsistent with the American commitment to due process and the rule of law.

It was decided, therefore, to convene an international tribunal to sit in judgment over the Nazi leaders. But this proposal was not without considerable difficulties. Justice must be seen to be done, but it must also be done in reality. A show trial, with predictable verdicts and sentences, would be little better than no trial at all. Indeed, Justice Jackson went so far as to suggest, early on, that it would be preferable to shoot Nazi criminals out of hand than to discredit our judicial process by conducting farcical trials.

The challenge of the Nuremberg tribunal, therefore, was to do real justice in the context of a trial by the victors against the vanquished — and specifically those leaders of the vanquished who had been instrumental in the most barbaric genocide and mass slaughter of civilians in history. Moreover, the blood of Hitler’s millions of victims was still fresh at the time of the trials. Indeed, the magnitude of Nazi crimes was being learned by many for the first time during the trial itself. Was a fair trial possible against this emotional backdrop?

Even putting aside the formidable jurisprudential hurdles — the retroactive nature of the newly announced laws and the jurisdictional problems posed by a multinational court — there was a fundamental question of justice posed. Contemporary commentators wondered whether judges appointed by the victorious governments — and politically accountable to those governments — could be expected to listen with an open mind to the prosecution evidence offered by the Allies and to the defense claims submitted on behalf of erstwhile enemies.

There was a time — a blessedly long one, stretching across the second half of the 20th century — when anti-Semitism was, as Norman Podhoretz put it, “the hate that dare not speak its name,” a rare, suppressed, sub-rosa sentiment unacceptable to serious people in the Western world.

Alarmingly, though, as the world marks Holocaust Remembrance Day this year, the hate has returned above ground with a vengeance. Anti-Semites are once again making themselves heard throughout the Western world — on college quads, in parliament halls, in presidential campaigns, online, and offline, from the usual corners of the Middle East to Continental Europe and the U.S.

Consider all that’s happened just in the last few months:

Up to 50 members of Britain’s Labour Party have been suspended for anti-Semitic comments in recent weeks. It’s not just notorious Jew-baiter Ken Livingstone, who claimed last week that Hitler “support[ed] Zionism,” but Member of Parliament Naz Shah, who called in 2014 for Israel to be relocated to the United States and has likened Zionists to al-Qaeda.

Anti-Semitism, of course, is nothing new for Labour. There was Shah Hussain, a councilor in a northern English town, who in 2014 accused an Israeli soccer player of “doing the same thing that hitler [sic] did to ur race in ww2.” There was Nottingham City Councilman Ilyas Aziz, who in 2014 called on Jews to “stop drinking Gaza blood.” And let’s not forget Salim Mulla, a councilor in Blackburn with Darwen, who in 2015 wrote that “Zionist Jews are a disgrace to humanity.”

The epidemic of racism on the British left has proven so virulent that Labour’s sister party in Israel is considering suspending ties. The best response Labour’s far-left leader Jeremy Corbyn has been able to muster is the dubious claim that only a “very small number of people . . . have said things that they should not have.” Corbyn, it bears noting, once called Hamas and Hezbollah his “friends,” and even today refuses to renounce that stance. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that anti-Semitic attacks in England spiked by 60 percent last year.

Of all French soldiers currently engaged in military operations, half of them are deployed inside France. And half of those are assigned to protect 717 Jewish schools.

This massive deployment of armed forces in our own cities is a departure from history. It is a moral disarmament, before a military one.

Why does anyone choose to fight in a war? Civilized nations go to war so that members of today’s generation may sacrifice themselves to protect future generations. But if there are no future generations, there is no reason whatever for today’s young men to die in war. It is “demography, stupid.”

On March 11, 2004, 192 people were killed and 1,400 wounded in a series of terrorist attacks in Madrid. Three days later, Spain’s Socialist leader, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, was elected prime minister. Just 24 hours after being sworn in, Zapatero ordered Spanish troops to leave Iraq “as soon as possible.”

The directive was a monumental political victory for extremist Islam. Since then, Europe’s boots on the ground have not been dispatched outside Europe to fight jihadism; instead, they have been deployed inside the European countries to protect monuments and civilians.

“Opération Sentinelle” is the first new large-scale military operation within France. The army is now protecting synagogues, art galleries, schools, newspapers, public offices and underground stations. Of all French soldiers currently engaged in military operations, half of them are deployed inside France. And half of those are assigned to protect 717 Jewish schools. Meanwhile, French paralysis before ISIS is immortalized by the image of police running away from the office of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo during the massacre there.

At least this time, the Jews know the signs of danger and have somewhere to run to, somewhere they are welcome. But many members of the Labour Party, including Labour Members of Parliament, would prefer them not to have such a haven, wishing instead for the land to be “returned” in virtually its entirety to the Palestinians.

The “Left” repeatedly calls for boycotts of Israel because it is, they claim, “an apartheid state.” Israel is so totally free of apartheid that anyone who has spent ten minutes there knows the accusation to be an outright lie. So why keep on saying something untrue? That is anti-Semitism.

Two of the Labour Party’s senior members were suspended as a result of their anti-Semitic remarks, and there is talk that 50 secret suspensions have been made.

It is worth adding that existing anti-Semitism within the British establishment, not least the pro-Arab Foreign Office, means that little is done even by conservatives to tackle this Jew hatred on the left.

After the truth about the Holocaust came out in the late 1940s and 50s, being an anti-Semite was the biggest dishonour of all. No mainstream politician, whatever his or her personal views about Jews, would ever declare anything that hinted at anti-Semitism. The “far right” had gone (for a time) into oblivion. Israel was admired.

Germany paid reparations (wiedergutmachung, “making good again”) to Holocaust survivors, as did France, an equally anti-Semitic country[1] out of which came the first ideologue of a “master race,” Joseph Arthur, Comte de Gobineau (d.1882), whose books spread the message of Aryan supremacy. Oddly enough, Arthur was not anti-Semitic: Hitler and his acolytes embraced his Aryan supremacism and edited out Arthur’s philo-Semitism.

Anti-Semitism continued, of course, but most people kept it to themselves. The horror of what the Germans had done to the Jews was, for a majority of British people, a token of the rightness of our cause in fighting and defeating Germany. Jews had never been safer than they were then in the UK. That anti-Semitism might return — and viciously — reincarnated inside a mainstream, anti-fascist and supposedly anti-racist political party, was simply inconceivable.

‘The Washington Examiner on April 24th, in its article, “Obama: Germany’s Merkel is right on refugee welcome,” reported President Barack Obama’s European musings on immigration:

President Obama says German Chancellor Angela Merkel is “on the right side of history” in how she has responded to the influx of thousands of Syrian refugees surging into Europe.

At a press conference Sunday, the president said he is “proud” of Merkel and the German people for their open-door policy of migrants fleeing violence and uncertainty in their home country.

“She is on the right side of history on this,” Obama said as he stood next to Merkel in Hannover, Germany. “And for her to take on some very tough politics in order to express not just a humanitarian concern but also a practical concern, that in this globalized world, it is very difficult for us to simply build walls.”

And now many Europeans are fleeing their home countries for points that do not welcome hordes of destructive and hostile Muslim barbarians who have boasted that Germany and other Western countries are “dead meat.” Doors are opening all over the Continent. However, they are swinging doors that can snap back to strike Merkel harshly on her electoral derriere.

Obama again:

Obama’s praise comes after Merkel faced fallout in a referendum of sorts on her immigration policy. In last month’s state elections, Merkel’s party, the Christian Democrats, took a beating. An anti-immigration party made significant gains.

Obama has promised to admit 100,000 Syrian and Iraqi refugees into the U.S. this year. He faces pushback from Republicans who fear a possible security threat. GOP presidential candidates, like front-runner Donald Trump, have attacked Obama’s pledge to allow refugees into this country.

But it is not just a security threat in back of those concerns. The literal invasion of the U.S. by hordes of Muslims – especially Syrian, Iraqi, and Somalian Muslims – poses a cultural and political threat, as well. The introduction of so many hostile and assimilation-resistant Muslims is part and parcel of the Muslim Brotherhood’s overall plan to subvert the country from within, per the General Memorandum of 1991.