RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14162/finland-iran

Just a little more than ten years ago, Finland’s flagship telecommunications company, Nokia, was found to have sold to Tehran surveillance technology, which was used a year later to suppress dissident demonstrators’ use of social media.

“[T]here are two documented instances where [the Finnish company] Cargotec-tied cranes have been used for public executions.” — United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI) press release.

How Finland behaves today is eerily reminiscent of its behavior with the Soviet Union during the Cold War. During that time, Finnish politicians, academics and journalists practiced self-censorship. They knew whom not to talk about, let alone criticize. Today it is criticism of Islam that is aggressively prosecuted under the guise of combating “hate-speech” or “disparaging of religious groups”. It is the same M.O., just a different place and time.

There is a special saying in Finland describing a person’s naïvety: it is called being “blue-eyed”. Unfortunately, there is not a saying that describes the same trait for an entire political class.

Successive Finnish governments could be accurately described as extremely “blue-eyed,” especially during the last decade or so in their relations with Iran.

Part of the problem seems to lie with Finnish politicians, who seem truly to believe that having a dialogue — any dialogue — regardless of who is on the opposite side of the table, is better than having no dialogue at all. So you can easily end up with the equivalent of a businessman trying to reach an agreement with Al Capone, while each holds completely different assumptions about the underlying terms of an agreement, including whether agreements are even meant to be kept.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273607/tommy-robinson-mep-bruce-bawer

Tommy Robinson’s announcement on April 25 of his candidacy for the European Parliament met with precisely the kind of media response you would expect. In the Guardian, Josh Halliday gave the term “far-right” a workout. He described the For Britain party, whose founder Anne Marie Waters introduced Tommy at his campaign kickoff event in Wythenshawe, a largely working-class Manchester neighborhood, as “far-right.” Halliday made sure to point out that Tommy had “founded the far-right English Defence League” – but omitted to mention that Tommy had left the EDL precisely because it had become “far-right.” And Halliday noted that local MP Mike Kane had “signed a joint letter with Christian, Jewish and Muslim faith leaders saying Tommy’s ‘far-right political views are not welcome in our town.’”

In the same letter, Kane, a Labourite who serves as Shadow Minister for Education, and the “faith leaders” – a Baptist preacher, a Roman Catholic priest, an Anglican rector, a Muslim imam, and a Jewish rabbi – explained that they would not welcome Tommy because Wythenshawe is a “welcoming” place. Neither the signatories nor Halliday seemed to be aware of the blatant self-contradiction. The letter further noted that Wythenshawe contains “thriving Chagossian and Keralan communities, among others, living and working here. If we were to welcome this man we’d be dismissing the valued contribution these people have made to the area.” In fact Chagossians, an Indian Ocean people, are Christians, and most people from Kerala, a state in the south of India, are Hindus. Tommy’s problem, of course, is with the ideology of Islam, in accordance with which jihadists have murdered countless Christians and Hindus.

https://www.nysun.com/foreign/new-party-emerges-in-britain-to-rescue-brexit/90665/

It Leads the Polls for European Parliament, Our Diarist Reports

The British Prime Minister is a wrecking crew of one. Theresa May scuttled Britain’s March 29 exit from the European Union. Her preferred withdrawal option places the UK in a worse position in relation to the EU. Not content to wreak havoc in foreign relations, she is effectively destroying the Conservative party.

This is a moment to harken to Newton’s third law — “to every action there is always opposed an equal reaction.” It’s starting to look as if the third law applies in politics too, and is now in full force in Britain. Mrs. May has midwifed the Brexit party.

With Nigel Farage at its head, the Brexit party was formed when Britain failed to exit the EU as Britons — and Parliament — ordained. In a few short weeks it will contest the European Parliament elections and fight a polite but firm guerrilla campaign for Brexit in Brussels. Tories truculence at home augurs that Mr. Farage must take the fight to Westminster as well.“We want the European election to be the first step of a massive change that re-steps entirely British politics and actually makes it look more like the country,” Mr. Farage told the London Sun. “MPs will realize that if they carry on trying to stop Brexit, they’ll lose their seats at the next General Election.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/can-china-dislodge-russia-in-central-asia-11556577788

Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan

A trip to the picturesque capital of this mountainous landlocked republic in Central Asia feels a bit like traveling through time. The brutalist architecture and the monumental scale of the avenues and city squares show just how deeply the Soviet Union left its imprint, and the scarcity of Western-style shopping malls and food chains shows how slowly the local economy has grown since the Soviet collapse.

Bishkek also offers a window into the future of Chinese power. The five countries in Central Asia—Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan—stretch from the Tien Shan mountains to the Caspian Sea. They contain majestic mountains, fertile valleys and vast reserves of minerals, oil and gas. They are also central to China’s ambitious attempt to transform international trade so that land routes across Asia replace the sea routes between Europe and Asia.

Many Western observers think China’s rise to primacy in Central Asia, where Russia has traditionally dominated, is inevitable. Russia’s economy is stagnant, while the appeal of China’s vast market, its cheap consumer goods, and its multibillion-dollar commitment to build a rail and road network throughout the region all tend to pull these countries away from Moscow and toward Beijing.