WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

380,000,000 Christians Persecuted for ‘Their Faith’: Where Is the Outrage? by Raymond Ibrahim

Posted By on May 11th, 2025

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21585/christians-persecuted

The top 13 of the 50 nations on the World Watch List 2025 are characterized by the worst form of persecution: “extreme.” They are: 1) North Korea, 2) Somalia, 3) Yemen, 4) Libya, 5) Sudan, 6) Eritrea, 7) Nigeria, 8) Pakistan, 9) Iran, 10) Afghanistan, 11) India, 12) Saudi Arabia, and 13) Myanmar.

[M]ost of the “extreme persecution” meted out to Christians in nine of these 13 worst nations continues to come either from Islamic oppression, or occurs in nations with large Muslim populations. Significantly, this means that approximately 70% of the absolute worst (“extreme”) persecution around the globe takes place under the aegis, or in the name, of Islam.

[T]he persecution of Christians by Muslims is perennial, existential, and far transcends this or that ruler or regime. Persecution of the “other” in Islam is part of its history, doctrines and socio-political makeup — hence its tenacity and ubiquity

“More believers are killed for their faith in Nigeria than anywhere else in the world.” — World Watch List 2025.

“[R]oughly a quarter of all blasphemy accusations [in Pakistan] target Christians, who make up just 1.8 percent of the population. Blasphemy laws carry a death sentence.” — World Watch List 2025.

“In Afghanistan, leaving Islam… and conversion is punishable by death under Islamic law. This has been increasingly enforced since the Taliban took control of the country in 2021.” — World Watch List 2025.

Even in nations that would appear to be friendly or at least neutral to Christianity, such as Cuba, Mexico and Nicaragua, Christians are being abused for their faith…

In 2024, around the world, 4,476 Christians — more than 12 a day on average — were “killed for faith related reasons.” Another 4,744 Christians were arrested or illegally detained, and 7,679 churches and other Christian institutions were attacked, often destroyed.

Overall, the global persecution of Christians has reached unprecedented levels. “More than 380m Christians suffer high levels of persecution and discrimination for their faith,” according to the World Watch List 2025 (WWL) published earlier this year by the international human rights organization, Open Doors.

Every year, the WWL ranks the top 50 nations in which Christians are the most persecuted for their faith. The data is compiled by thousands of grassroots workers and external experts. The latest edition of the WWL covers October 1, 2023 to September 30, 2024.

HISTORY Comments turned off

The Daring Polish Resistance Fighter Who Volunteered to Be Sent to Auschwitz So He Could Sabotage the Nazi Death Camp From the Inside Witold Pilecki smuggled reports about Germany’s war crimes to the Allies, urging them to stop the atrocities at Auschwitz by bombing the camp. But his warnings went unheeded Paul Hockenos

Posted By on May 11th, 2025

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-daring-polish-resistance-fighter-who-volunteered-to-be-sent-to-auschwitz-so-he-could-sabotage-the-nazi-death-camp-from-the-inside-180986559/?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us

“Pilecki’s life ended on a particularly bitter and darkly ironic note. As a man who had fought colonial and imperial lordship over Poland his entire life, he saw the Soviet occupation of his homeland after World War II as just another incarnation of foreign dictatorship. He went underground again, fighting until the Soviet-allied Polish secret police arrested him in May 1947. His own statesmen jailed and tortured him for over a year before executing him by firing squad on May 25, 1948. He was 47 years old.”

In September 1940, the Polish underground resistance fighter Witold Pilecki undertook a monumental act of bravery: He volunteered to allow the Nazi forces occupying Poland to arrest him, in the expectation that they would incarcerate him in the Auschwitz concentration camp.

At the time, the newly constructed Nazi facility in southern Poland hadn’t yet assumed its ultimate incarnation as Adolf Hitler’s seminal death camp. The internment center functioned more like a prison for convicted German criminals; a small number of Jews; and Polish oppositionists, including members of the Secret Polish Army, Pilecki’s outfit. Yet from its first days, Auschwitz bore a reputation for extreme brutality.

The Polish underground initially hoped that it could liberate Auschwitz from within the camp’s walls. The clandestine network selected Pilecki, a 39-year-old veteran and fervent Polish nationalist, to infiltrate Auschwitz, report on its operations and organize fellow prisoners with the object of overthrowing the German camp’s superintendents. Pilecki, the secret army’s chief of staff, carried out this Hail Mary mission over a period of two and a half years. Although the Polish freedom fighters couldn’t incapacitate the Nazis’ operation, Pilecki and his cohorts smuggled descriptive reports out of the facility as it morphed into Europe’s most heinous death factory, where more than 1.1 million people died, nearly one million of them Jews.

Over the course of 1942, Pilecki correctly grasped why the Nazis were enlarging the camp complex by adding gas chambers and crematoriums. He repeatedly urged the Polish exile government in London to convince the United Kingdom’s Royal Air Force to bomb Auschwitz, even if it meant killing innocent victims in the camp, including himself. Pilecki’s reports provided some of the earliest evidence of the Nazi death camps and their function in what the Nazis labeled the “Final Solution,” or the extermination of Europe’s Jews, known since as the Holocaust.

Pilecki’s credentials made him a logical candidate for this harrowing job of subterfuge and sabotage. Born in 1901 to patriotic Polish Catholics living in the Russian Empire, the teenage Pilecki served as a scout for Polish self-defense units during World War I. After the global conflict ended in 1918, he fought in a cavalry unit in the Polish-Soviet War, a 1919 to 1921 conflict between Polish nationalist forces and the Soviet Red Army over territory in present-day Ukraine and Belarus. While serving as a reserve officer in the mid-1920s, he took over his family’s estate, and in 1931, he married elementary school teacher Maria Ostrowska. The couple had two children; Pilecki painted and wrote poetry in his free time.

But Hitler’s war machine shattered the family’s harmony. On September 1, 1939, the Nazis invaded Poland, and two weeks later, the Soviets attacked from the east. Pilecki mobilized a reserve unit of local men he’d trained over the summer, but most of them were “peasants who had never seen action or fired a gun in anger,” writes journalist Jack Fairweather in The Volunteer: One Man, an Underground Army and the Secret Mission to Destroy Auschwitz. In a little over a month, the Polish Army was defeated, and the country of Poland came under Nazi and Soviet occupation.

Pilecki, like thousands of other Polish soldiers and civilians, joined an underground opposition that battled the occupiers from forests, sewer systems and cellars, notes a permanent exhibition on Pilecki’s life at the Pilecki Institute in Berlin.

ISRAEL, MEDIA Comments turned off

A new low for the Pulitzer Prize How gross to give the commentary prize to a man who denigrated the Israeli hostages. Brendan O’Neill

Posted By on May 11th, 2025

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/05/09/a-new-low-for-the-pulitzer-prize/

Back in normal times, many moons ago, it was frowned upon to denigrate women who’d been kidnapped by violent men. It would have been seen as especially sick to disparage women who’d been seized by an army of anti-Semites during a bloody carnival of Jew-killing. Speaking ill of such victims would likely have earned you scorn in decent society. Not anymore. Now it wins you the Pulitzer Prize.

This year’s Pulitzer Prize for Commentary has gone to Mosab Abu Toha, a writer from Gaza who lives in the US. The prize is overseen by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. The judges praised Abu Toha’s essays in the New Yorker for showing the world ‘the physical and emotional carnage in Gaza’. They had rather less to say about his online hysterics, in which he called Israeli hostages ‘killers’ and denounced the BBC as ‘filthy people’ for daring to suggest the Bibas kids were murdered by Hamas.

The sleuths over at the Honest Reporting website have uncovered Abu Toha’s digital bitching. And it ain’t pretty. He flipped following the release of the British-Israeli hostage Emily Damari in January this year. ‘How on Earth is this girl called a hostage?’, he asked on Facebook. She’s a ‘soldier’, he said, who had been ‘detained’ by Hamas. And ‘this is the case [for] most of the “hostages”’.

Note those scare quotes. It’s amazing how hateful punctuation can be. The implication was as clear as it was vile: these aren’t real hostages. They’re not innocents. They’re occupiers who were taken as prisoners of war by Hamas. Here, Abu Toha both legitimised Hamas, treating it as a normal army doing normal army things, and denigrated the hostages, even going so far as to rob them of that title. ‘Soldiers’, ‘occupiers’ – ie, the fuckers had it coming.

EDUCATION, HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

INVESTIGATION: Uncovering Chinese Academic Espionage at Stanford

Posted By on May 11th, 2025

https://stanfordreview.org/investigation-uncovering-chinese-academic-espionage-at-stanford/

This summer, a CCP agent impersonated a Stanford student. Under the alias Charles Chen, he approached several students through social media. Anna*, a Stanford student conducting sensitive research on China, began receiving unexpected messages from Charles Chen. At first, Charles’s outreach seemed benign: he asked about networking opportunities. But soon, his messages took a strange turn.

Charles inquired whether Anna spoke Mandarin, then grew increasingly persistent and personal. He sent videos of Americans who had gained fame in China, encouraged Anna to visit Beijing, and offered to cover her travel expenses. He would send screenshots of a bank account balance to prove he could buy the plane tickets. Alarmingly, he referenced details about her that Anna had never disclosed to him.

He advised her to enter China for only 24 to 144 hours, short enough, he said, to avoid visa scrutiny by authorities, and urged her to communicate exclusively via the Chinese version of WeChat, a platform heavily monitored by the CCP. When Charles commented on one of her social media posts, asking her to delete screenshots of their conversations, she knew this was serious. 

Under the guidance of experts familiar with espionage tactics, Anna contacted authorities. Their investigation revealed that Charles Chen had no affiliation with Stanford. Instead, he had posed as a Stanford student for years, slightly altering his name and persona online, targeting multiple students, nearly all of them women researching China-related topics. According to the experts on China who assisted Anna, Charles Chen was likely an agent of the Chinese Ministry of State Security (MSS), tasked with identifying sympathetic Stanford students and gathering intelligence.

POLITICS Comments turned off

After papal election, Liz Cheney demonstrates how Trump continues to live rent-free inside her head By Monica Showalter

Posted By on May 11th, 2025

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2025/05/after_papal_election_liz_cheney_demonstrates_how_trump_continues_to_live_rent_free_inside_her_head.html

With Pope Leo XIV’s election in the Vatican, politicians and world leaders of all kinds moved to deliver their congratulations, extending their best wishes.

But then there’s Liz Cheney, still dreaming of Donald Trump over anything else, even a papal election.

She actually tweeted this:

It’s always all about Trump with her, isn’t it?

Instead of congratulating the new pope, she tried to compare President Trump to him unfavorably, the one all full of ‘grace, humility, mercy, and faith’ and the other full of ‘depraved cruelty, corruption and shame,’ none of which is remotely true. The two might actually become friendly which would probably give Liz the vapors.

The whole post stinks because it’s focused on who’s the more famous one. Things like this are irrelevant to all but the most fevered swamp-dwellers, keeping score of whose status is more important.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Why Regime Change in Iran Is Becoming Inevitable Iran’s regime is crumbling under economic collapse, mass dissent, and regional isolation—making democratic transition less a question of if, and more of when. By Fariba Parsa

Posted By on May 11th, 2025

https://amgreatness.com/2025/05/10/why-regime-change-in-iran-is-becoming-inevitable/

he Islamic Republic of Iran is facing unprecedented pressure from both within and outside its borders. Internally, economic collapse, widespread political disillusionment, and mass rejection of religious authoritarianism have profoundly weakened the regime’s legitimacy. Externally, Iran’s regional influence is diminishing as its proxies suffer military defeats and diplomatic isolation. Although the precise timing is uncertain, the convergence of these pressures makes regime change in Iran increasingly likely. For Western policymakers, this is not the time for short-term crisis management—it is the time to prepare for a democratic transition.

Internal Fault Lines
Popular Rejection of the Regime

Forty-six years after the Islamic Revolution, Iranian public sentiment has turned sharply against the ruling elite. A 2022 survey by the Group for Analyzing and Measuring Attitudes in Iran GAMAAN found that nearly 90% of Iranians do not support the Islamic Republic as a system of governance. Additionally, 73% of respondents favor the separation of religion from politics—directly opposing the regime’s theocratic foundations. Calls for secular democracy and respect for human rights transcend ideological boundaries. Opposition comes from a wide range of constituencies—women’s rights activists, students, laborers, ethnic minorities, monarchists, secular republicans, and even traditional religious groups. The 2022–2023 “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests, sparked by the death of Mahsa Amini while in morality police custody, revealed a society no longer willing to endure repression. The Islamic regime is increasingly unable to enforce its compulsory hijab law, as millions of Iranian women openly defy it. At the same time, hardline factions within the regime are pressuring authorities to crack down and strictly implement the law. Yet the regime finds itself paralyzed—unable either to grant women the freedom to choose their clothing or to return to the mass arrests and repression of earlier years. The gulf between state and society has grown irreparably wide. Reform is no longer seen as a viable option. Today, the Iranian people themselves pose the greatest threat to the regime’s survival—more so than any external actor.

Economic Collapse and Systemic Corruption

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Roadblocks prevent Trump from deporting millions of illegal immigrants Local judges and officials aren’t the only obstacle to Trump’s immigration enforcement Charles Lipson

Posted By on May 11th, 2025

https://thespectator.com/topic/roadblocks-prevent-trump-from-deporting-millions-of-illegal-immigrants/

“You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.” So goes the bartenders’ refrain to customers at closing time. The Trump administration is issuing that same call to millions of illegal immigrants, beginning with the most violent (and those caught staying with them). You can’t stay here.

It’s a wildly popular stance, but it is running into predictable problems.

The first is that rounding up the millions here illegally is costly, time-consuming and sometimes dangerous. That problem was vastly increased by Joe Biden’s deliberate decision to open the southern border, allow millions of people to cross it illegally and then lie to the public and Congress about what his administration was doing.

President Biden, Vice President Harris and Secretary of Homeland Security Mayorkas repeatedly said the border was “closed and secure” when they knew it was not. Mayorkas said it in sworn testimony to Congress. These weren’t just lies; they were stupid lies because voters could see the increasing problems and the obvious deceit.

Second, while Biden ignored the laws protecting our borders and did so with legal impunity, the immigrants gained rights of due process once they arrived on American soil. Again, the Biden administration failed in its basic responsibilities, with considerable support from the entire Democratic Party. The Biden administration could have detained these illegal immigrants at the border, which would have facilitated swift, legally appropriate deportation. They chose not to. Instead, they released almost all the illegal arrivals into the country’s interior. Some were given instructions to return in several years for court hearings. Some were simply released with no instructions or documentation.

Those policies swamped states and localities with new, illegal residents and vast expenditures for schools, housing, healthcare, crime prevention and more. The “sanctuary” policies of many blue cities and states invite them to come and stay. One unanticipated result has been a deepening cleavage within the Democratic Party, pitting progressives (who favor the influx without ever saying the word “illegal”) and minority voters who rely on jobs and government services that are under greater pressure.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Tragic Story of Ivan Morales Corrales Allan Wall

Posted By on May 11th, 2025

https://mexiconewsreport.com/index.php/2025/05/10/the-tragic-story-of-ivan-morales-corrales/

The tragic story of recently-murdered Ivan Morales Corrales displays the power and ruthlessness of a Mexican drug cartel.

Ivan Morales Corrales was a Mexican federal agent.

On May 1st, 2015, Morales was part of a secret mission in Jalisco state to capture Nemesio Ruben “El Mencho” Oseguera Cervantes, leader of the Cártel Jalisco Nueva Generación (CJNG).

There were five helicopters on the mission. The one Morales Corrales was in was hit by RPGs and crashed and burned. Of the 18 persons on board the aircraft 9 survived.

Morales survived but was horribly burned, with second and third degree burns over 70% of his body, after which he underwent 15 reconstructive surgeries.

In December of 2015, Morelos received the Police Medal of Merit from then-President Enrique Pena Nieto.

2015 – President Pena Nieto and Ivan Morales Corrales. Source: Univisión

In September of 2024, Morelos was in the U.S. where he testified in the trial of
Ruben Oseguera González  “El Menchito”, the son of “El Mencho”.

El Menchito had actually given the order to attack the helicopter and was later arrested in Mexico and extradited to the United States.

On March 7th, 2025, El Menchito was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment for international drug trafficking.

On April 30th, 2025, nearly 10 years after the attack on the helicopter, Morales and his wife were ambushed and shot to death in Temixco, state of Morelos.

So the CJNG got its revenge on a brave Mexican who had already suffered greatly in the Cartel War.

ISRAEL, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

John Fetterman: Sluggish Schizophrenic? Once praised, John Fetterman now faces Soviet-style smears from the left, deemed mentally unfit for defying party orthodoxy and supporting Israel. By Stephen Soukup

Posted By on May 11th, 2025

https://amgreatness.com/2025/05/10/john-fetterman-sluggish-schizophrenic/

Readers of a certain age or a certain educational predisposition will undoubtedly recall the name Andrei Sakharov—for good reason. Sakharov was a hero, a dissident, and a brilliant man who paid an enormous price for his convictions. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975. The European Parliament honored him for his bravery and sacrifice by naming its coveted human rights award after him. He was, in short, an extremely impressive person.

Before he became a brilliant human rights and peace activist, Sakharov was a brilliant physicist, one of the most brilliant of the twentieth century. He was the youngest person ever elected to the Soviet Academy of Sciences, at the tender age of 32. For his work on developing the Soviet Union’s hydrogen bomb, Sakharov was named a “Hero of Socialist Labor” three times—in 1953, 1956, and 1962. He was a member of the Soviet Atomic Energy Commission and is credited as being a key contributor to the advancement of the Soviet thermonuclear weapons program.

Near the end of the 1960s, however, Sakharov’s concern about the (literal) fallout from nuclear testing morphed into concern about nuclear weapons in general and then into peace activism and advocacy for civil liberties. His manifesto, “Reflections on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom,” was smuggled out of the Soviet Union in 1968, was published by the New York Times, and turned Sakharov into an international icon, a respected and admired dissident.

Just over a decade later, Sakharov openly criticized the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, prompting the Brezhnev regime to take drastic action against him. In the conventional telling of the story the dissident and his wife (fellow physicist and activist Yelena Bonner) were arrested and exiled to the closed city of Gorky. In truth, what happened to Sakharov was much more nefarious. He wasn’t just exiled or “banished.” And he was never officially “arrested.” Rather, he was removed from the proximity to power for what the Brezhnev regime called “his own good.” On December 9, 1983, The New York Times explained precisely what that meant:

A prominent Soviet official implied at a news conference today that Andrei D. Sakharov, the physicist and human rights campaigner, was mentally disturbed. The official, Vitaly P. Ruben, who is chairman of one of the two houses of the Supreme Soviet, the nominal Parliament, called Dr. Sakharov “a talented but sick man” and said an article the physicist published in the West earlier this year had invited an American nuclear strike on the Soviet Union.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Iranian Regime’s Trojan Horse “Civilian Use” Lie on Nuclear Weapons by Majid Rafizadeh

Posted By on May 10th, 2025

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21607/iran-lies-nuclear-weapons

Any deal that permits Iran to keep centrifuges spinning, continue uranium enrichment, or store nuclear material is a deal that guarantees a future nuclear-armed Iran. We cannot afford a disastrous “JCPOA, the Sequel.”

Now, after President Trump’s return, the world is watching to see whether the United States really has the backbone to compel Iran completely to dismantle its nuclear weapons infrastructure – or actually to deliver the alternative.

The Iranian regime is not to be trusted. Its so-called “civilian” nuclear program is a Trojan horse, a fraud designed to keep the West paralyzed. There have to be no more talks, no more half-measures, no more inspectors playing cat and mouse with a regime that lies to their faces with impunity. The only acceptable outcome is either full dismantlement — no centrifuges and enriched uranium for “civilian use”, no secret sites — or unfortunately, the less pretty “Plan B,” if Trump and his administration are to have any credibility.

For more than two decades, the Iranian regime has played a dangerous and calculated game of deception with the West by skillfully masking its nuclear ambitions under the pretense of “civilian use.” This is not a new tactic — it’s a time-tested playbook used by rogue regimes to buy time, mislead international watchdogs, and continue marching in the shadows toward nuclear weapons and the missiles to them.

Tehran has manipulated global diplomacy by leveraging Western naivety and its obsession with appeasement and the search for “peace” to keep all the core elements of its nuclear program intact.

While negotiations and deals were struck in the name of “peace,” Iran preserved and advanced the infrastructure necessary to build nuclear bombs. Preserving its nuclear programs by proliferating secret sites under the deceitful banner of civilian energy has allowed the regime to reap the benefits of economic deals while continuing to lie and manipulate.