RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272731/voice-isis-abu-ridwan-al-kanadi-captured-lloyd-billingsley

On January 13, US-backed Kurdish forces captured an Islamic State jihadi who identified himself as Mohammad Abdullah Mohammad, a Canadian from Toronto and reportedly the English-language narrator of Islamic State propaganda. The ISIS fighter had been sought for some time, but in Canada the focus of the story became the Islamic State’s displeasure over the jihadi’s capture.

“ISIL supporters upset about capture of prominent Canadian jihadi, say it’s demoralizing,” headlined a January 28 National Post story by Adrian Humphries. ISIS-friendly Al-Muhajreen identified the fighter as Abu Ridwan Al-Kanadi and described his capture as “sad news for all mujahideen of the Islamic State.”

When news of Ridwan’s capture began to circulate, Humphries wrote, “the apparent joy from the enemies of ISIL, also known as ISIS, upset jihadi supporters.” They said it all served the interest of the “Crusaders and the enemies of the Islamic State.”

In the penultimate paragraph readers learn that Ridwan is “believed to be the same man as the masked narrator of a notorious ISIL propaganda video that features the mass execution of captured Syrian government soldiers. The narrator appears to take part in the firing squad. The same man is believed to be behind several recorded claims of responsibility by ISIL for deadly terror attacks on the West as well as reading news reports on ISIL radio networks.” So only in the walk-off do readers get key details about Ridwan, now 35 years old.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13660/france-unrest

The third group is extremely large: it is the rest of the population. The upper class treat them as regrettable dead weight and expect nothing from them except silence and submission. Its members often have a hard time making ends meet. They pay taxes but can see that a growing portion is being used to subsidize the very people who drove them out of their suburban homes.

For the moment, Macron does not seem to want to recognize that these people even exist.

When Macron lowered the taxes of the wealthiest but increased the taxes of these “peripherals” by means of a fuel tax, it was seen as the last straw — in addition to his arrogant condescension.

“Today, most of those who protest do not attack the police. But instead of acting to bring down the violence, the police are receiving orders pushing them to be very violent. I do not blame the police. I blame those who give them orders”. — Xavier Lemoine, the mayor of Montfermeil, a city in the Eastern suburbs of Paris where the 2005 riots were extremely destructive.

Saturday, January 26th 2019. “Yellow vests” protests were being organized in the main cities of France. Mobilization was not weakening. Support from the population had decreased slightly but was still huge (60%-70%, according to polls). The main slogan has remained the same since November 17, 2018: “Macron must resign”. In December, another slogan was added: “Citizens’ initiative referendum”.

The government and French President Emmanuel Macron have been doing everything they can to crush the movement. They have tried insults, defamation and have said the demonstrators were both “seditious people” wishing to overthrow the institutions and fascist “brown shirts”. On December 31, Macron described them, as “hateful crowds”. The presence of some anti-Semites led a government spokesman (incorrectly) to describe the entire movement as “anti-Semitic”.

https://www.jewishpolicycenter

Since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Congress and the presidents alike have had no sustained policy review to establish militarily achievable objectives, coherent political goals, or even a workable definition of “the enemy” to guide lawmakers and military leaders.

Republicans and Democrats both removed governments with no plan for succession or the societal stresses and open warfare that would ensue. Without an updated Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF), we “plinked terrorists” in various countries with drones or airplanes, assassinating at least four American citizens, and killing others as “collateral damage.”

American soldiers have been killed fighting in various countries, including several in Africa. We are spending billions “training” various militaries and militias and hoping they will fight who and how we want them to. Iran’s backing of rebels in Yemen is called the “Saudi war” to avoid dealing with the implications. The “Israel-Palestinian conflict” is to be resolved by creating an extra Arab state while the Palestinians definitively and publicly want to resolve it by eliminating the Jewish one.

President Trump ran against American military involvement in Syria and Afghanistan, and for a hard line on Iran. There is still no complete policy — and sometimes not even a particularly well-articulated policy — but it does appear that America’s focus has changed from retail to wholesale. From executing individual terrorists and recapturing pieces of territory to operating against the malign influence that funds and organizes large-scale Shiite — and Sunni — terror. From terror groups to a terror country.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/02/china_caves_to_president_trump_in_us_trade_war.html

China caved to President Trump’s Trade War demands as state-media published plans that foreign investors will no longer be subject to compulsory technology transfers.

As China’s Vice Premier Liu He was holding a televised meeting with President Trump in the Oval Office to announce big increases for U.S. agricultural exports to China, its Xinhua News Agency announced that China’s President Xi Jinping hopes to meet with Trump just before a March 5 vote by China’s National People’s Congress to ratify elimination of rules for foreign investment mandatory foreign technology transfers.

With the clock running down on Trump’s threat to increase a 10 percent tariff on $200 billion of Chinese exports to a 25 percent tariff on March 1, China is agreeing to meaningful structural trade reforms that the U.S. has been demanding for over a decade.

The move will open a wide swath of China’s internal markets that have been closed to U.S. service industry firms. The breadth of China’s “reform” regime supposedly includes elimination of non-tariff trade barriers such as eliminating state-sponsored cyber-intrusions and converting U.S. intellectual property rights, according to the Epoch Times.

With the draft legislation supposedly setting a goal of guaranteeing equal treatment of foreign companies already reviewed by the National People’s Congress Standing Committee in December, Xinhua stated: “Once adopted, the unified law will replace three existing laws on Chinese-foreign equity joint ventures, non-equity joint ventures (or contractual joint ventures) and wholly foreign-owned enterprises.”

https://quillette.com/2019/02/01/the

The day after Venezuela’s National Assembly voted to declare its president, Juan Guaidó, interim President of the Republic, I received a text from a former friend. “If the U.S. topples Vz [Venezuela],” he wrote, “I will hold you responsible.” I would have been happy to accept this responsibility had I done anything important enough to deserve it. But the idea was absurd and he knew it. If the Venezuelan regime falls—and I hope that it does—it won’t even be possible to credit (or blame) the United States. It is the Venezuelan people who finally are taking their destiny in hand and rejecting an intolerable status quo.

The message was not a serious attempt to apportion responsibility for Venezuela’s current upheaval; it was an attempt to shame me for my treacherous betrayal of the Bolivarian cause. An early supporter of the Revolution, I had traveled to Venezuela in 2013 to cover the April presidential elections. By the time I returned to the US, I was disillusioned and depressed. I decided I needed to start writing and speaking about what I had seen there. In an article I wrote for the radical magazine Counterpunch around that time, I argued that “the so-called ‘Bolivarian Revolution’ is bankrupt: morally, ideologically, and economically,” and I asked what we, as leftist solidarity activists, should do in response. “Should we continue to make excuses for incompetence, corruption, and irresponsibility and thereby make ourselves accomplices?” I asked. “Or should we tell the truth?”

Hugo Chavez, 45th President of Venezuela

I had resolved to tell the truth. Having been so wrong about something so consequential, I felt it was the least I could do. By then, Venezuela was already in a terrible mess. Many of those I had helped to convince of the possibilities offered by Bolivarian socialism were deeply suspicious of the mainstream media and deserved to hear what was going on from a writer they trusted. But, as it turned out, the people I wanted to reach didn’t want to hear such things. And the people I asked to publish my articles didn’t much want me to write about them either. As a result of my voltafaccia, former comrades and friends contacted my editors and publishers in (occasionally successful) attempts to have my articles spiked. I was denounced and slandered online and in print. Phone calls and emails to people I had thought of as friends now went unanswered. On those occasions when I encountered one of them in public, they looked the other way. Abruptly, I found myself excommunicated, and people I’d known for 30 or 40 years made it clear that they no longer wanted to be part of my life.