RUTHFULLY YOURS

After decades of frozen ties, China and the Vatican seem to be witnessing a slow but significant change in relations. While divergences remain, including on the issue of who gets to appoint bishops, experts and religious leaders have seen progress in the overall tone of dialogue.

Over 8,000 kilometers away from each other, the Vatican City seems incompatible in many ways with Beijing, the hearts of the Catholic faith and the biggest Communist nation, the country with the smallest population in the world and the country with the largest.

Since 1951, the two sides have lacked official diplomatic connections. As the two countries welcomed new leaders in recent years, some have hoped for a thawing in ties.

These hopes have gained momentum since October 2015, when the Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, said that China and the Holy See were engaged in a “positive” dialogue. Cardinal Parolin also confirmed that a papal delegation would visit Beijing, adding that they would discuss normalization of relations.

Less than four months later, a Chinese delegation visited the Holy See in late January.

Early in February, American Cardinal Theodore McCarrick traveled to China – a trip in which the cardinal said he would visit some “old friends.” While the cardinal insisted in an exclusive interview with the Global Times that he was not visiting in his “official capacity,” his trip has shown that ties are growing more comfortable.

Cardinal McCarrick, former archbishop of Washington, DC, is the first cardinal from a Western country to visit the Chinese mainland since Sino-Vatican ties turned sour, South China Morning Post reported. He has reportedly visited China eight times since the 1990s.

In light of recent sanctions relief, the Islamic Republic of Iran is investing in the murder of Israelis and anti-regime critics.

On Wednesday, the Iranian ambassador to Lebanon Mohammad Fathali proclaimed that Iran supports the “Jerusalem intifada” and plans to pay families of Palestinian terrorists who target Israelis, the Jerusalem Post reports.

“Continuing Iran’s support for the oppressed Palestinian people, Iran announces the provision of financial aid to families of Palestinian martyrs who were killed in the ‘Jerusalem intifada’,” Fathali said in front of the leaders of several Palestinian factions during a news conference in Beirut.

The Iranian official confirmed that every terrorist’s family will receive $7,000 for attacking Israelis and $30,000 if a family’s home is demolished by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). The financial assistance will be transferred via the Palestinian branch of the Shahid Institution, established in 1992 in Iran.

Fathali also called for Israel’s destruction, receiving praise from Hamas.

“The martyrs’ blood will release the entire Palestine, from the river to the sea,” said the ambassador.

Hamas foreign relations chief Osama Hamdan extended his appreciation for Iran’s ongoing sponsorship of Palestinian terrorism, acknowledging that the Iranian initiative is not the first time support of this kind has been offered.

http://jamieglazov.com/2016/02/25/survivor-tells-of-horrific-torture-in-irans-gulag-on-the-glazov-gang/

This special edition of The Glazov Gang was joined by Arash Hampay, an Iranian Human Rights Activist.

Arash discussed surviving Horrific Torture in Iran’s Gulag, sharing the nightmare he endured in the Islamic Republic’s jails.

To help Arash and all the suffering victims under the Islamic Republic (and Islam) that he represents, contact Anni Cyrus at her Facebook Page and also at her group Live Up to Freedom.

Don’t miss it!

Things are very bad in South Africa. When the scourge of apartheid was finally smashed to pieces in 1994, the country seemed to have a bright future ahead of it. Eight years later, in 2002, 60 percent of South Africans said life had been better under apartheid. Hard to believe — but that’s how bad things were in 2002. And now they’re even worse.

When apartheid ended, the life expectancy in South Africa was 64 — the same as in Turkey and Russia. Now it’s 56, the same as in Somalia. There are 132.4 rapes per 100,000 people per year, which is by far the highest in the world: Botswana is in second with 93, Sweden in third with 64; no other country exceeds 32.

Before the end of apartheid, South African writer Ilana Mercer moved, with her family, to Israel; her father was a vocal opponent of apartheid, and was being harassed by South African security forces. A 2013 piece on World Net Daily quotes Mercer as saying, with all her anti-apartheid chops, that “more people are murdered in one week under African rule than died under detention of the Afrikaner government over the course of roughly four decades.” The South African government estimates that there are 31 murders per 100,000 people per year. Or about 50 a day. That would make South Africa the tenth most murderous country in the world, outpacing Rwanda, Mexico, and both Sudans. And that’s using South Africa’s official estimates — outside groups put the murder rate 100 percent higher. Choosing not to trust the South African authorities is a safe bet — South Africa’s government, which has been led by Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress since the end of apartheid, is outstandingly incompetent and corrupt.

Palestinian propagandists constantly disseminate false accusations that Israel steals Palestinian water. Those allegations have been thoroughly refuted many times and are to be catalogued under the rubric of typical Palestinian propaganda lies.

If General Secretary Tveit seriously wanted to help Palestinians, he should explain why Israelis enjoy so much more water per capita — to contrast the brilliance of Israel’s elimination of its former water problems with the utter incompetence of the Palestinian Authority to deal with its own problems. And to exhort the Palestinians to learn from Israel instead of vainly slandering Israel.

Israel now recycles 80% of waste water. Desalination plants have been erected along the Mediterranean coast, so that now Israel has an abundance of water. All this costs money, so Israelis pay more for their water and there is a punitive water price for anything above a legally defined level of domestic per capita water. Under the Palestinian Authority, it is the opposite. Up to 30% of their water has been estimated to go lost in their water delivery systems. Waste water is released to pollute the PA’s land, and some flows downhill to pollute Israel as well. Large numbers of Palestinians either do not pay water bills or simply steal water by illegal connections.

February 12, 2016, was a day of fresh hope for the suffering Christians of the Middle East. Pope Francis of Rome and Patriarch Kirill of Moscow met in Havana, Cuba, to issue a joint message to the world. After pledging themselves to change the history of schism between Eastern and Western Christianity, they placed the contemporary merciless persecution of Christians at the top of their agenda:

“Our gaze must firstly turn to those regions of the world where Christians are victims of persecution. In many countries of the Middle East and North Africa whole families, villages and cities of our brothers and sisters in Christ are being completely exterminated. Their churches are being barbarously ravaged and looted, their sacred objects profaned, their monuments destroyed…”

“Polyculturalism, as Emmanuel Todd insists, is a crock. The theme of Western civilisation—which is a high point in the upswing of civilisation in general, Walt Disney’s Pocahontas (I and II) notwithstanding—denotes the deliverance of the individual from tribal or feudal subjugation. In the West, at least, I am still free, whatever my ethnicity, class, religious inclination, gender (or transgender) and so on, to settle with humanity and the world as I find it. I am free to enjoy and explore the universe as far as I am humanly able. I do not have to blow up the Buddhas of Bamiyan to accommodate the lunacy of my millennialist madness. I do not have to believe that the Islamic State has nothing to do with Islam. I do not have to spend my university years in a “safe space”.”

Nothing can be more certain than that the tribalisation of Australia will lead to a backlash, just as the bohemian revolution might have expected when its advocates and warriors made the elevation of “culture” above civilisation a key element of their plan to re-make society
If a Cold Warrior who died a half-century ago were to return today he might be surprised. Two ideologies are currently at war with Western civilisation, but neither of them is Marxism-Leninism. It is the dictatorship of bohemia—not the dictatorship of the proletariat—that is upon us. And while we allow an unreconstructed bohemian-leftist ruling class to call the shots, the West will continue to appease the other great anti-bourgeois movement of our era, Islamic revivalism.

Roger Sandall’s seminal The Culture Cult: Designer Tribalism and Other Essays (2000) nominates Jean-Jacques Rousseau as bohemia’s “exemplary original”. According to Sandall, Rousseau’s rejection by French society instigated his hostility towards intellectual virtuosity and the greatest thinkers of the time. Whereas the sophisticated Parisians were false and perverse, asserted Rousseau, the mythical “Noble Savage” was natural and dignified. The revolt of the civilised against civilisation had begun.

Ressentiment also informed the views of the German philosopher and critic Johann Gottfried Herder. Many speak of Herder’s passion for “cultures” as a sign of the man’s open-mindedness and affection for humanity; but not Sandall, who draws the portrait of a provincial intimidated by the erudition of the French philosophes. Herder’s assertion that every last primitive clan has “its own irreplaceable contribution to make to the progress of the human race” was less a celebration of diversity than a tribal dagger aimed at the heart of civilisation. Sandall’s designation of Herder as “the father of multiculturalism” is not intended as a compliment.

Peter Berkowitz, a member of the board of the National Association of Scholars, is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.

TEL AVIV—In exercising its right of self-defense in the Six Day War, Israel seized from Syria the Golan Heights, a strategically important plateau that looms over northeastern Israel, rising sharply from the eastern bank of the Sea of Galilee to a height of more than 3,000 feet. Since June 1967 a powerful consensus has prevailed in the international community, including the United States, that the Golan is occupied territory.

The Syrian civil war, which has been raging for almost five years, has done little to disturb the consensus. But the chaos in Syria has weighty legal and political ramifications that should impel the international community to revise its understanding of the Golan’s status.

Modern Syria, which was born in 1946, has ceased to exist. Bashar al-Assad—who hails from the minority Alawite community, an offshoot of Shia Islam—retains the title of president of Syria though he now controls less than 25 percent of his former country. Despite recent advances by government troops, the Islamic State and other Sunni Islamists continue to dominate much of the territory Assad once governed.

Assad’s quest to retain power has produced carnage of epic proportions. When the dictator moved to crush the anti-regime, pro-democracy protests that broke out in Syria in early 2011, the country’s population numbered approximately 22 million. Since then violence has taken at least 250,000 lives, with more recent reports putting the figure significantly higher. Between 1 million and 1.5 million people have been wounded. More than 5 million refugees have fled to neighboring countries and to Europe. The Economist estimated in September 2015 that an additional 7 million people have been forced from their homes but remain within Syria’s official borders. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs believes that more than 13 million Syrians are in need of humanitarian assistance.

The leaders of both France and Italy set aside their values to appease the president of Iran.

In France, protesters demanded that President François Hollande challenge the Iranian president about his country’s human rights abuses. France’s leadership, however, raised no questions of that sort. Instead, Mr. Rouhani was welcomed as a superstar.

According to a 659-page report by Human Rights Watch, Iran’s human rights violations under Mr. Rouhani’s governance have been increasing. Social media users, artists and journalists face harsh sentences on dubious security charges.

In November, the Iranian Supreme Court upheld a criminal court ruling sentencing Soheil Arabi to death for Facebook posts “insulting the Prophet” and “corruption on earth.”

Right after signing the Iran nuclear deal with itself — Iran still has not signed it, and even if it did, the deal would not be legally binding — members of the P5+1 (the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany) have been showing their eagerness to establish improved relations with their imaginary partner.

Last month, after the lifting of international sanctions, Iran’s president, Hassan Rouhani, went on a five-day trip to Italy and France.

From the accounts of those in the Oxford University Labour Club (OULC) and elsewhere, it is clear that anti-Semitism surfaced in the Labour party at exactly the moment the party started to be led by a man who, throughout his political life, had demonstrated extreme comfort with anti-Semites.

“The decision of the club [OULC] to endorse a movement with a history of targetting and harassing Jewish students and inviting antisemitic speakers to campuses, despite the concerns of Jewish students, illustrates how uneven and insincere much of the active membership is when it comes to liberation…” — Alex Chalmers, who resigned from the Oxford University Labour Club.

The British Labour party is currently led by a man, Jeremy Corbyn, who has described Hamas and Hezbollah as “friends” and has spent his years in the political wilderness with Holocaust deniers, anti-Semites, terrorist-sympathisers and all manner of other undesirables. Now that he is the Leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition, he has tried to present himself as a more moderate force by stressing that he has spent his life fighting racism and anti-Semitism. In fact, he appears to have spent his life being remarkably content with exponents of both.

His Shadow Chancellor spent the same period in similar company, but with an even more fervent devotion to the terrorists of the Irish Republican Army.

The communications chief of this whole disastrous enterprise is one Seamus Milne, who devoted his career at The Guardian to keeping the scent around Joseph Stalin rosier than it ever ought to have been. If a fish, as the saying goes, rots from the top, who can be surprised if there is rot also from the tail up?

Last week it was the turn of the Oxford University Labour Club (OULC) to throw their wares open for public view. Thanks to the unusually principled resignation of the co-chair of the organization, Alex Chalmers, we now know that apparently a large proportion of the youth branch of the party also has “problems with Jews.” Indeed, it appears that anti-Semitism has moved from the margins to the very centre of University Labour life.

In the past two weeks a number of events have taken place in Turkey that, taken together, indicate that this erstwhile U.S. ally is spinning dangerously out of control with neither Ankara nor Washington and its European allies having the slightest clue of what to do. It started several days ago with the Turkish artillery targeting the Kurdish YPG military units n Syria, a key U.S. ally against ISIS, as they made progress in taking over formerly terrorist-occupied terrain north of Aleppo. This was followed by Turkey enabling thousands of jihadists entering Turkish territory from Syria with all of their weapons and exiting back into Syria from a different border crossing to join the battle against the anti-Assad forces. As if to show on whose side Ankara really is, a local news agency provided pictures of trucks loaded with Turkish ammunition delivered to these very people. It may be recalled that for publishing similar pictures of supplies to Syrian jihadists by the Turkish Intelligence Organization (MIT), in January 2014, two prominent journalists were accused of “treason and espionage” and are facing the prospect of life in prison. In yet another proof of Turkish collusion with ISIS terrorists, wiretaps of phone conversations between Turkish military and ISIS commanders have just been made public that show close cooperation.

The problem that Turkey and its Islamist leadership are now facing is something that has been known for a long time, but is no longer credibly deniable. Under Erdogan, Turkey has never been interested in fighting ISIS, Al-Nusra, and other Sunni terrorists. On the contrary, it has assisted them in every way possible for at least the last three years. Washington under Obama preferred to look the other way, but the latest events have faced it with a stark choice — either defeat ISIS and limit growing Russian influence in alliance with the Syrian Kurds, or continue to put up with Erdogan’s duplicitous Islamist agenda and lose the last shreds of credibility it has left in the region. With the leader of the Turkish parliamentary opposition, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, now openly calling for the leaders of the AKP to be tried for “aiding and abetting terrorist organizations,” it is high time for Washington to reconsider its failing policies.