RUTHFULLY YOURS

Khamenei is sending a strong signal to Washington that Iran’s reintegration in global financial system does not mean that the Iranian regime will change its hostility towards the U.S. and Israel.

“The Persian Gulf is the Iranian nation’s home and the Persian Gulf and a large section of the Sea of Oman belong to this powerful nation. Therefore, we should be present in the region, hold war games and display our power.” – Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei

In addition, Khamenei is sending a message to the Iranian people that the current process of implementing the nuclear agreement, lifting sanctions, and partial economic liberalization does not mean that Iran is going to liberalize its politics and allow freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and more political participation.

Some politicians and policy analysts argue that Iran’s sanctions relief and the continuing implementation of its nuclear program would push Iran towards moderation in dealing with the United States and Israel, as well as scaling down Iran’s expansionist and hegemonic ambitions. The realities on the ground suggest otherwise.

As Tehran’s revenues are rising, anti-American and anti-Semitic rhetoric by Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, are escalating.

The Iranian regime continues to view the U.S. and Israel as their top geopolitical, strategic and ideological enemies. According to Iran’s Mehr News Agency, on May 1, Khamenei welcomed the Secretary General of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Ramadan Abdullah Shalah, and his accompanying delegation in Tehran:

“Ayatollah Khamenei reaffirmed that with this perspective in regional issues, Iran sees the United States as the main enemy with the Zionist regime standing behind it. He pointed to extensive, unprecedented sanctions of the U.S. and its followers against the Islamic establishment in recent years and dubbed the objective of them as discouraging Iran from continuing its path; ‘but they failed to achieve their goals and will fail in future as well.’ ”

Khamenei is sending a strong signal to Washington that Iran’s reintegration in the global financial system does not mean that the Iranian regime will change its hostility towards the U.S. and Israel.

A few months ago I wrote a piece titled Putin’s moral clarity on radical Islam at the UN – Did I just say that? To be sure it was a bit of surrealism – just check out the title! Amongst many other inclusions, in the article I quoted Putin’s speech at the UN, during which he describes the dangers of ISIS and the poor results of US foreign policy in terms of various dangers emerging as a result of our (Obama’s) failed Middle East efforts. Well it’s time to look at how the Middle East, global events, and my predictions played out from when it was first posted.

Let’s recap what has transpired since I wrote that….Putin has control over Santa’s Village and the North Pole. His air force has invaded our sovereign air space – both the continental US territory, and our US Navy. He has turned part of Syria into a Russian outpost. Iran has enjoyed an influx of money, as European interests invest in that energy rich nation. The fine friendly folks of Tehran have advanced their missile capacity, and are continuing nuclear development, as well as other forms of advanced weapons. Iran’s proxies continue the strategy of death by a thousand cuts on Israel. Iran has outplayed Obama deftly, and is reaping the benefits without any sacrifice. ISIS is a global franchise holder with offices across the Western world preparing to attack at opportune moments – whether bringing an airliner down, or attacking public transportation centers or office buildings, ISIS has had significant success. It is destroying historic landmarks of incalculable value, raped and murdered children, slaughtered families, and embarked upon a policy of genocide against Christians that has gone largely unnoticed by Obama, and ignored by the media. The US military budget is being cut, and our capabilities degraded. Obama has put boots on the ground in Iraq while the media largely turn a blind eye. Palestine is getting away with atrocities against Israel – while the UN and team Obama, along with team Bernie continue providing political cover.

While Al Qaeda and its various franchisees still have influence, and pose a great threat in certain regions, not the least of which are Yemen, Eastern Africa, and parts of North Africa (you know, the places Obama and Hillary claimed were becoming democracies, and closer friends with the US), ISIS has emerged as a leading danger to the West and US, having infiltrated major global capitals, and inspired or carried out major attacks in historically important cities such as Paris and Brussels. Christians, Jews, (and Muslims who do not subscribe to the ISIS brand or dogma), have a target on them. Crucifixion has returned, and ISIS uses it deftly to warn adversaries, especially Christians, of their fate under the growing Caliphate in the region.

Putin and Prime Minister Netanyahu were, and are correct about the growing threats of ISIS – you know, the folks President Obama referred to in one speech as the “JV” and in another speech as “killers with good social media.” Putin revealed a clarity about a clear and present danger that Obama has yet to demonstrate, starting with the basics, like acknowledging or naming “radical Islam” as a problem, and identifying the terrorists, the various jihadist groups within the broader family of radicalized Moslems – ISIS, Al Qaeda, Boko haram, and AQIM and the list of subsidiaries and free agents of various permutations of fanatic terrorists worldwide.

Here is an excerpt from the article:

“Beyond a few glaringly obvious issues, like Russian influence in Iran, and criminal money laundering, nevertheless, Putin highlights important facts.

Yes Putin is calling us out. He has announced his role as global statesman, sheriff, and arbiter. Putin is telling us, Russia is back, and he will fill “the power vacuum. ” He is saying we are foolish to arm folks who are no more virtuous than the savages they are fighting.

We would be wise to reflect upon such foolishness since Obama became POTUS in terms of “‘the mythical moderate in the Middle East.’ It is Obama’s white whale. It truly is a fool’s errand. The Arab Spring, to which Putin refers, was a glaring example of this folly.”

Is there anyone with even half a brain unable to recognize when there is a power vacuum, someone will fill it – whether in the board room or world stage. Does anyone think Obama is a strong leader? His red lines in the sand are laughable. He negotiates so poorly that it would almost appear he is trying to disadvantage US interests (think the Iran deal). By comparison, and unhappily for those of us on Team USA, Putin is all too willing to fill the leadership void. And sadly he has become a sort of ‘go to guy,’ while simultaneously remaining bad boy public enemy number one for the US State Department and POTUS. One day Obama and Kerry are nearly pleading with Putin for assistance, and the next day are chastising Putin for coloring outside the lines. Putin is the school yard bully, the school yard big brother, energy czar, military threat, and agent provocateur on the global stage all in one. Putin is part spy, part killer, part politician, and part statesman – all likely how he would describe himself.

In Sweden’s third largest city, Malmö, the children of illegal migrants receive income support payments from the government, and the unemployment rate among foreign-born men aged 18-24 years is at 41%. In Sweden, those who do not have jobs receive generous welfare payments from the local authorities, and families in the country illegally have their rent paid by the taxpayers. It is an open invitation to more migrants to come to Sweden.

The Swedish establishment tells Swedes that the more immigrants come to Sweden, the richer Sweden will become — no matter which country these immigrants come from.

The Swedish establishment is characterized by incompetence combined with an extreme left-wing ideology and a hillbilly-like mentality that refuses to see the rest of the world and the risks involved in it. The Swedish establishment has not dealt with Sweden as if it were a country, but as if it were a village.

By gross miscalculations, the Swedish establishment has eroded its own legitimacy. Today, fewer than one in four Swedes have confidence in their government. Meanwhile, the Swedish media is a major threat to Sweden’s security today: it downplays the migration crisis with ridiculous arguments.

A major threat to Sweden’s security today is the Swedish journalistic establishment: it downplays the migration crisis with ridiculous arguments.

As migrants flooded into Sweden in December 2015, Fredrik Virtanen, a writer for Sweden’s largest newspaper, Aftonbladet, wrote an article entitled, “Have refugees forced you to buy worse red wine?” It is not really dangerous, Virtanen argues, that that Sweden was accepting 160,000 migrants; such migratory movements, he wrote, do not really impact anyone’s life.

The new constitution “will emphasize Islam and faith in Allah.” — Abdulkadir Selvi, pro-government columnist.

“We are a Muslim country. That is why we need a religious constitution,” said Ismail Kahraman, Speaker of Turkey’s Parliament. He lamented that, unlike in other Middle Eastern countries, the word Allah did not appear in the current version of the Turkish Constitution even once.

“The chaos in the Middle East is the result of politics instrumentalizing religion.” — Kemal Kilicdaroglu, leader of the opposition Republican People’s Party.

“One cannot be secular and Muslim at the same time.” — Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

The Speaker of the Parliament is no ordinary office in Turkey. The speaker comes second in the state protocol only after the president (and even before the prime minister). Such is the seat occupied since November by Ismail Kahraman, an MP from the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Along with Erdogan, former president Abdullah Gul and eight AKP heavyweights (mostly cabinet ministers) Kahraman comes from the ranks of the National Turkish Student Union (MTTB in its Turkish acronym). Another MTTB bigwig, Huseyin Velioglu, later formed what became the militant Islamist group, “Turkish Hizbullah.” Especially between 1965 and 1980 when a military coup administration dissolved it, the MTTB operated as the youth organization of Turkish political Islam. Kahraman, in late 1960s and early 1970s, was MTTB’s president.

Once, the left was for the rights of women, minorities and free speech. Now, as we await the next Islamist massacre, its purpose is to weave rationalisations and sophistries into the whole cloth of a dissembling drapery tailored to obscure the obvious.
In the aftermath of every latest Islamist assault on civil society, mainstream news coverage and commentary invariably follows the same path. First, after the initial horror, there is a restriction on language: one may speak of Islam or of terror, but not in the same breath. Break this rule and expect to be charged with Islamophobia at best, rank and racist bigotry at worst. Next, the death toll of the incident is balanced against the many alleged depredations of the West which, of course, is said to be the cause of all terrorism in the first place. For intellectual support, voices crying “Perspective! Perspective!” drift down from the ivory tower. Weeks after 9/11, a Melbourne University academic was conceding that, yes, it had been a jolly nasty sort of day, but such a fuss! Smart people like herself understood that bad hamburgers kill more people than terrorists. Always, amid the moral relativism and equivalence, we are the real monsters.

To put it in a nutshell, the left’s response to terror is an aggressive denial borne of a civilizational self-hatred. In the so-called ‘quality press’, a category that most certainly includes our publicly funded ABC, such sentiments are artfully portrayed — take the ubiquitous Waleed Aly, for example, who reacted to the bomb slaughter at Boston’s marathon by dismissing it as “an irritation” and positing that it was, most likely, the work of white rednecks.

Further downmarket, we encounter publications such as New Matilda, a digital scrapbook often mistaken for a news source, whose principal merit, if I can lend the word a measure of charity, is in its headlines. Even in the current depths of its dying days, Fairfax’s subs would never have been so gauche as to headline Aly’s effort with a bluntly accurate, ‘Terrorism: nothing to worry about (except if white men did it)’. New Matilda, by contrast, prefers language to match in bluntness the imbecility of the article below. It is an editorial style that exalts in a telling precision. For example, Sam Oldham’s response to last year’s atrocity in Paris was bannered, The Awful Truth About France: The Citizens are Innocent Victims. The State is Not. Not much doubt about who had it coming. I also recall John Salisbury’s personal essay reflecting on his march from Sydney to Canberra in support of Palestinian rights. Now, however, he is sparing the shoe leather: Why I Won’t Walk to Protest Against Islamic State.

Now that you have some idea of New Matilda’s editorial and foreign policies, consider Michael Brull’s recent column, The Truth About Modern Jihad: It’s Not Really About Religion. It is nonsense, but that is New Matilda‘s stock in trade when it rises above the sleazy. This is the “news” site that rifled Barry Spurr’s private emails and splashed the stolen details of a private scholarship awarded to Tony Abbott’s daughter — all trumpeted in “the public interest”, it goes without saying. Not that association with sleaze is an obstacle to membership and influence within the New Establishment. New Matilda’s publisher and editor, Chris Graham, is an “industry nominee” on the Press Council.

You must have heard of the “the rich”, the people who pay nearly all income taxes flowing into government coffers and yet are pilloried for doing so. Never mind Labor and the Greens, the safe politics of shaking down the rich is thriving in Coalition ranks.
Budgets are getting terribly tedious. I think this because the scope for action is narrowing, as every initiative is loudly bagged these days by somebody or other. Joe Hockey took a walk on the wild side and that served him badly – which he deserved, to be fair — because he was monumentally inept.

“We all know what to do, but we don’t know how to get re-elected once we have done it.” So the Prime Minister of Luxemburg, Jean-Claude Juncker, recently said. But do politicians at large really know what to do? I don’t think they do.

Hockey was a poster child for political incompetence. Why do we think a bunch of self-promoters who are good at getting people to vote for them will be competent at running government? Sir Humphrey had it right: politicians can’t be trusted to run governments. What then is the answer? There isn’t one.

Imagine yourself as Treasurer and it is your first budget. You try to cut the deficit by screwing pensioners, denying young people unemployment pay, and charging poor people for doctors’ visits in order to underwrite gee-wiz medical research. You couldn’t write home about such ineptness. This is not an example of a politician knowing what to do and bearing the electoral pain. It is an example of a typically blundering politician who has not the least idea of what to do.

Budget deficits can only be reduced sustainably by cutting the growth in future expenditure below aspirational levels. Of course, even this can’t be done without incurring the wrath of special interests. But it possibly can be done without losing too many votes. Actually cutting expenditure is largely impossible; except for relatively minor amounts in insensitive areas.

Raising taxes doesn’t work because governments can’t resist spending the revenue. To them, an extra dollar of tax revenue is an extra dollar to splurge. That is why they are fond of trumpeting — incurable spendthrifts and debtors that they are — that additional spending has been fully funded; perish the thought that the funds might have been used to pay down debt.

ROME—Italy and Germany expressed their opposition to border-control measures within the European Union on Thursday, saying such restrictions may lead to the loss of the free movement that has helped turn the 28-country bloc into a success.

Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi and German Chancellor Angela Merkel at a joint press conference in Rome criticized an Austrian plan to construct a 250-meter (820-foot) long checkpoint at the Brenner Pass, which connects Italy and Austria.

Border-control measures could contravene the Schengen accord, which governs passport-free travel between member states.

“I am strongly against any closure” of the Brenner Pass, said Mrs. Merkel at the joint news conference, stressing that Europe needs to find common responses to migration issues. “We can’t abandon whoever defends our borders. We need to remain loyal to each other,” she added.

Thousands of migrants that have reached Italy use the Brenner Pass to head to countries such as Germany and Sweden, where welfare benefits are more generous. Some migrants also aim to settle in Austria and this has alarmed Vienna.

Free movement of people and goods could be put at stake as the EU faces its biggest migration challenge since the end of World War II, the German chancellor warned.

“We either defend our [EU] external borders or we will return to nationalism and lose our freedom of movement of businesses and people,” Mrs. Merkel said.

On Thursday, Mr. Renzi said that about 26,000 migrants had reached Italy via sea so far this year, about 1,000 more than in the same period in 2015.

The Italian premier reiterated Rome’s strong opposition to the Austrian border-control plans.

“We have expressed our clear disagreement with the Austrian positions on the Brenner Pass. They are wrong and anachronistic,” Mr. Renzi said. CONTINUE AT SITE

Love the headline….now Hamas terrorists are just militants??? Here is article 15 from the Hamas Charter: “The day the enemies conquer some part of the Muslim land, jihad becomes a personal duty of every Muslim. In the face of the Jewish occupation of Palestine, it is necessary to raise the banner of jihad. This requires the propagation of Islamic consciousness among the masses, locally [in Palestine], in the Arab world and in the Islamic world. It is necessary to instill the spirit of jihad in the nation, engage the enemies and join the ranks of the jihad fighters.” rsk

TEL AVIV—Israeli forces and Hamas fighters traded direct fire for the first time since the two sides went to war in 2014, Israel’s military said Thursday, as tensions escalated along Israel’s border with the Hamas-run Gaza Strip.

Israeli jet fighters carried out airstrikes against Hamas targets Thursday morning in response to 10 exchanges of fire with Israeli soldiers in the past three days, said Israeli military spokesman Lt. Col. Peter Lerner.

Hamas continued to fire mortar shells at Israeli forces until late afternoon, the military said. But no further exchanges were reported in the evening.

The tensions were compounded by what Israel said was its discovery earlier Thursday of a Hamas tunnel extending into Israeli territory from Gaza.

Hamas began firing in response to Israel’s efforts to locate the tunnel on the Gaza border, Col. Lerner said, and a search for other tunnels was continuing.

“Tunnels that have been built on the border between Gaza and Israel are for infiltration,” he said. “We aren’t willing to have tunnels leading into Israel.”

Moussa Abu Marzouk, a senior leader of the Islamist movement, blamed Israel for the latest outbreak of violence, saying Hamas fighters had fired on Israeli soldiers only after Israel made moves to reduce the width of an unofficial buffer zone that divides Gaza from Israel.

Palestinian media reported that Israeli airstrikes largely hit open, unpopulated areas. A Palestinian women was hit by shrapnel from an airstrike and died from her injuries, Hamas’s semiofficial Safa news agency reported.

Mr. Marzouk said Egyptian officials were mediating between Israel and Hamas to try to restore the open-ended cease-fire that ended the nearly seven weeks of fighting in 2014.

The Israeli military spokesman denied Egypt was undertaking mediation efforts. He said Israel had no desire for full-scale fighting with Hamas. CONTINUE AT SITE

A 20-year-old asylum seeker from Iraq confessed to raping a 10-year-old boy at a public swimming pool in Vienna. The Iraqi said the rape was a “sexual emergency” resulting from “excess sexual energy.”

Those who dare to link spiraling crime to Muslim mass migration are being silenced by the guardians of Austrian multiculturalism.

According to data compiled by the Austrian Interior Ministry, nearly one out of three asylum seekers in Vienna was accused of committing crimes in 2015. North African gangs fighting for control over drug trafficking were responsible for roughly half of the 15,828 violent crimes — rapes, robberies, stabbings and assaults — reported in the city during 2015.

Austria received 90,000 asylum requests in 2015, the second-highest number in the EU on a per capita basis, but this pales in comparison to what may lie ahead. Interior Minister Wolfgang Sobotka warned last month that up to one million migrants are poised to cross the Mediterranean from Libya to Europe.

The brutal gang rape of a woman by three Afghan asylum seekers in central Vienna on April 22 has shocked the Austrian public and drawn attention to a spike in migrant-related rapes, sexual assaults and other crimes across the country.

The migrant crime wave comes as the anti-immigrant Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) has surged in opinion polls. The party’s candidate, Norbert Hofer, won the first round of Austria’s presidential elections on April 24, and is on track to win the presidency in the second round, run-off election scheduled for May 22.

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.