RUTHFULLY YOURS

“I want to tell all those who have fueled the arms race over the last 15 years, sought to win unilateral advantages over Russia, introduced unlawful sanctions aimed to contain our country’s development: all what you wanted to impede with your policies have already happened. You have failed to contain Russia.”

Thus spake Vladimir Putin in his annual state of the union address Thursday. The Russian strongman and KGB veteran brought along a video of the weapons his regime military-industrial complex had developed.

“It can attack any target, through the North or South Pole,” Putin said. “It is a powerful weapon and no missile defense system will be able to withstand.” According to Putin, an admirer of the late Josef Stalin, Russia can deploy nuclear-armed cruise missiles that can “avoid all interceptors.”

Bombs falling from the sky again, Russia is on the rise again, as the militant leader might say, and new boats are sailing once more. Putin also touted Russia’s nuclear-armed underwater drone with an “intercontinental” range and capable of targeting aircraft carriers and coastal military bases.

This was all ready to go and “nobody else” has anything similar. According to the Russian strongman, the new Doomsday Machine is a response to U.S. withdrawal from a treaty banning missile defense and U.S. efforts to develop a missile defense system.

U.S. experts told reporters that Putin’s cruise missile has “crashed a few times,” the underwater drone is still in the research stage, and neither system was currently deployed. On the other hand, the menacing new hardware was hardly the most troubling part of the speech.

“We would consider any use of nuclear weapons against Russia or its allies to be a nuclear attack on our country,” the former KGB man said. “The response would be immediate.” Russia’s major allies used to be Bulgaria, East Germany and such. They are now Syria and Iran, so that is the key takeaway.

Russian ally Bashar al-Assad, son of Hafez al-Assad, who ruled from 1971-2000, is currently deploying chemical weapons against rebels and civilians alike. Assad ally Russia is doing nothing to halt Syria’s use of such weapons. The Syrian regime also harbors Islamic State fighters and Jabhat al-Nusra, the Syrian affiliate of al Qaeda, which like ISIS seeks a global caliphate.

The Islamic Republic of Iran, another key Russian ally, in 1979 invaded the U.S. embassy and held 52 Americans hostage for 444 days. Iran’s Islamic regime is also the major sponsor of terrorism in the world. At the nadir of their foreign aggression and domestic repressions, Soviet Russia and National Socialist Germany never ever infiltrated terrorists to murder American civilians.

This willingness to indulge even the most anti-liberal beliefs and behaviour finds many of its roots in the general disdain many left-wingers and liberals seem to feel for Western democracy, human rights and individualism. But that does not explain why so many people, often decent people, are drawn to defend Islam, Islamic patriarchy, Islamic discrimination against women, violence and more, even when such defence is obviously anti-liberal in the extreme.

I have never known a liberal to say a bad word about a more prevalent and arguably more damaging imperialism: Islamic imperialism. There have been many more imperialist Muslim empires than European ones.

One might have thought that historical facts such as these would provoke human-rights activists to put the Muslim empires into the same category as the later European ones. Not a word of it. Nor do liberals mention another issue that should be close to their hearts: the Islamic slave trade.

Feminists are far from the only so-called left-wing or liberal group to betray their own basic principles out of a bizarre admiration for Islam, whether its history, its values, or its self-proclaimed victimization. Real liberals believe in human rights, women’s rights, racial equality, free speech, and more, rejecting extremism on both the right and left. However, the left in the UK and elsewhere seems to have abandoned those principles and betrayed the very people they had previously supported.[1]

This willingness to indulge even the most anti-liberal beliefs and behaviour finds many of its roots in the general disdain that many so-called left-wingers and liberals seem to feel for Western democracy, human rights and individual freedom. This disdain, however, does not explain why so many people — often decent people — are drawn to defend Islam, Islamic patriarchy, Islamic discrimination against women, or violence in the name of Islam, especially when such defence is obviously anti-liberal in the extreme. Examples are not hard to find, for instance feminists who urge Muslim women to submit to the veil and abandon their rights as free women in favour of Muslim men and their power over them.

What possesses so many Westerners to regard Islam, Islamic religion, Islamic law, and Islamic intolerance through rose-tinted spectacles that obscure the obvious and blind observers from seeing what is in front of them?

Another of the most notable examples is the virtually universal attitude toward imperialism. We might all agree that imperialism is a thing of the past and that, for the most part, it has brought considerable suffering on indigenous peoples who found themselves under British, French, Belgian, Spanish or Portuguese rule. No country in the modern West would seek to bring back an imperial system that, mercifully, was dealt a death blow by the First and Second World Wars. This change, however, does not prevent Marxists and others of a similar ilk from claiming that imperialism continues to this day, through the power exerted by strong nations in the West such as Israel or the U.S. Even the United Nations has been condemned as “a tool of imperialism”.

Mystifyingly, however, I have never known a liberal to say a bad word about a more prevalent and arguably more damaging imperialism: Islamic imperialism.[2] From the year 632 until 1918, there have been many more Muslim empires than European ones.

The brave women in Iran who inspired the world and became the face of a revolution by removing their face veils in protest to the theocratic government are now being beaten, tortured, and charged with “inciting prostitution” in Iranian prisons.

Iranian police sent an official warning that traveling and spending time in public places without a religious hijab would carry a penalty of one to two months in prison which could be reduced to a lower sentence, but encouraging people not to have the veil would put them in jeopardy of one to ten years in prison and could not be converted into a substitute penalty. This criminal charge, “inciting corruption and prostitution,” is not only dangerous but demeaning.

Two women arrested for protesting the hijab have been already been informed that they face charges of “inciting corruption and prostitution” for their protest. Narges Hosseini was put on trial last week before an Ershad (Moral Guidance) court in Tehran on this charge. Shaparak Shajarizadeh, who is being held in solitary confinement in a prison near Tehran, faces the same charge.

In addition to facing the prostitution charge, Shajarizadeh has also been subjected to torture and beatings, according to her lawyer. She was also injected with an identified substance several times by force against her will.

“This is a deeply retrograde move by the Iranian authorities in their ongoing persecution of women who dare to speak out against compulsory veiling,” Magdalena Mughrabi, Amnesty International’s deputy director for the Middle East and North Africa, said in a statement. “It places many women at serious and immediate risk of unjust imprisonment while sending a chilling message to others to keep quiet while their rights are being violated.”

Vida Movahed and Azam Jangravi, two other women arrested for peaceful protests against compulsory veiling, are currently out on bail. Maryam Shariatmadari and Hamraz Sadeghi remain in detention.

According to Amnesty International, police have become increasingly brutal in their crackdown on the forced hijab. Women who take off their headscarves in public and wave them on the end of a stick have been beaten and gruffly treated by authorities.

Last Thursday, another hijab protester’s video went viral on Persian social media. Shariatmadari stood atop a concrete structure waving her hijab, but a police officer recklessly pushed her off. Her friends have reported that the fall resulted in injuries requiring surgery, but the woman is being held in prison without access to adequate medical care. CONTINUE AT SITE

Europe’s biggest problem with Hungary is that Europe doesn’t have any good ways to deal with a problem like Hungary. A brief visit here ahead of April’s elections shows the extent to which that truth is challenging the European Union’s central beliefs about itself.

Prime Minister Viktor Orban on April 8 will win his third consecutive term since 2010—his fourth term overall, including his first stint from 1998-2002. The main question is whether his Fidesz party can eke out a two-thirds supermajority in Parliament, which would enable Mr. Orban to amend the constitution at will.

This feels like another blow to democracy. Mr. Orban said in 2014, in a speech that rang alarm bells around the West, that he aspires to build an “illiberal state” on the model of Singapore, China, Russia or Turkey. He’s succeeding. Press freedom has deteriorated as the government has withdrawn its taxpayer-funded advertising from unfriendly outlets, and as ownership has been consolidated in the hands of Orban loyalists. In rural areas, independent newspapers have disappeared.

The major media are turning into propaganda arms for Fidesz, and Mr. Orban is using them to Orwellian effect by creating a foreign bogeyman to rally patriotic fervor. The bogeyman is George Soros, the left-wing Hungarian-born American financier. On a random Wednesday in February, the front pages of at least three big newspapers contained attacks on Mr. Soros for supposedly conspiring in various ways against Hungary. These particular fusillades didn’t appear overtly anti-Semitic, but that’s common enough too.

American and British conservatives may spar with Mr. Soros on policy, but sometimes the enemy of your enemy is also your enemy. Mr. Orban is using the anti-Soros sentiment he has stirred up to justify clamping down further on Hungarian civil society. The so-called Stop Soros Law under debate would impose a 25% tax on foreign donations flowing into civil-society groups and other nongovernmental organizations, whether Soros-funded or not.

Do these illiberal factors alone explain why Fidesz is cruising to an all-but-unopposed victory? No, because, let’s be honest, the rest of Hungarian politics is a mess. CONTINUE AT SITE

South Africa is going the way of Zimbabwe, once the breadbasket of Africa and a stable and productive nation which is now a hell hole of famine, epidemic and crime…..One day historians will write of the terrible outcome of Africa’s decolonization and home rule….rsk

No country ever became rich through its government’s seizure of private property (exhibit A: the Soviet Union), but politicians in South Africa want to give it another go.

That’s the disheartening news from Cape Town this week, where the National Assembly voted 241-83 on Tuesday to start a process to amend the constitution and allow land expropriation without compensation. A parliamentary committee will review the motion and report by Aug. 30.

Land long has been a fraught issue in South Africa, where during the apartheid era blacks were barred from buying property in white areas. Post-apartheid, the government bought land and offered compensation to South Africans whose property had been forcibly seized after 1913.

Many of those claims are now settled, and more than 90% of claimants chose to receive cash instead of land titles, a reflection of the country’s rapid urbanization. According to a 2016 Institute of Race Relations survey, less than 1% of South Africans think land is one of the country’s “serious unresolved problems.” Unemployment, public services, housing and crime rank far higher.