RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2020/07/after-turning-hagia-sophia-mosque-turkeys-islamist-daniel-greenfield/

The outcome was inevitable.

The fake Reichstag coup that so many western nations fell for closed the door on any kind of independent authority in Turkey. All that remains is Erdogan, its insane Islamist tyrant, and his fantasies of rebuilding the Ottoman Empire. 

The reconquest of the Hagia Sophia was a crucial step in that direction. 

The process was meaningless because Erdogan now wholly controls the courts. Judicial decisions are Erdogan’s decisions. And Erdogan made it clear that the hijacking of the historic church is just one step in a larger plan for Islamist expansionism targeting other Islamic “holy” sites that had once been under Ottoman control.

Like Jerusalem.

“The revival of Hagia Sophia is the harbinger of freedom of Al-Aqsa and the footsteps of Muslims emerging from the era of interregnum,” the Turkish president said late Friday, referring to the mosque in Jerusalem that many Muslims consider under occupation.

Al-Aqsa is the Islamic occupation mosque in Jerusalem that had been planted as a symbol of the Islamic conquest over the holiest site in Judaism. The similarity to what Erdogan had just done was obvious.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/07/turkeys-new-mosque-monument-western-decline-bruce-thornton/

Last week Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan announced that on July 24 Hagia Sophia, for a thousand years one of Christendom’s most storied and significant churches, will once again become a mosque. So far, the remnant of established Christianity has been silent. But this affront to the faith that is one of the pillars upon which the West was founded reveals how damaging has been the historical amnesia and appeasing double-standards that have compromised our response to the challenge of Islamic jihadism.

Until recently Turkey had been a poster-boy for the dubious globalist consensus that liberal democracy and free-market capitalism are the destiny of all humanity, including Muslims. In 1923 founder Kemal Atatürk created Turkey to be a modern Western nation-state, with religion separated from the secular government. He abolished the caliphate, closed Islamic courts, gave women equal rights in divorce and inheritance, allowed them to vote, restricted sharia to religion, and secularized education for females as well as males. In 1934 Hagia Sophia was turned into a museum, part of Atatürk’s program to recognize Turkey’s pre-Muslim history and strengthen Turkey’s modern global identity and prestige.

But over the years it took the military to maintain this modernizing, secular program in the face of the more traditional and conservative Muslim masses and their discontent. Starting as mayor of Istanbul in 1994, Erdoğan became their champion, and as president has abandoned Atatürk’s democratic, secular program: He has jailed more journalists than any other country, and built 17,000 new mosques. Nearly a century of efforts to reconcile Islam with liberal democracy are failing under Erdoğan’s incremental Islamization. Turning Hagia Sophia back into a mosque is an important sign of his success, and a gesture of defiance of the “rules-based international order.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16223/good-riddance-who

China was malicious, and there is plenty of evidence of planning.

“Whether WHO can reform effectively is directly tied to the accountability issue,” wrote Dr. Xiaoxu Sean Lin, former lab director of the viral disease branch of the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, to Gatestone. The structure of the organization defeats accountability he argues, because its leaders report to many member states and therefore to no one. As a result, unacceptable conduct goes unpunished.

To make matters worse, the WHO is a UN body, and the UN is composed of some of the world’s most malign actors. Accountability in such an organization is extremely unlikely as long as China, for instance, is considered a legitimate participant in issues of global concern, such as public health.

America should have forced a review of the WHO years ago, but the religion of multilateralism dies hard. We can be sure that the forces of “one worldism” will be working with Director-General Tedros to keep the U.S. in his organization.

No, President Trump, abandoning a dangerous organization, is giving the world a chance to succeed and save lives.

A tearful Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus on Thursday pleaded for international cooperation in the fight against the coronavirus. “The COVID-19 pandemic is a test of global solidarity and global leadership,” said the director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO). “The virus thrives on division, but is thwarted when we unite.”

At the same time, Tedros publicly thanked Helen Clark, former prime minister of New Zealand, and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, former president Liberia, for agreeing to serve as co-chairs of the Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response.

It is no surprise the embattled Tedros has been active in recent days. He has, after all, begun what is a long-term campaign to keep his organization going. The Trump administration gave formal notice to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Monday that the United States was withdrawing from the WHO. The withdrawal is scheduled to take effect July 6, 2021.

The withdrawal may never happen, however: Tedros is not the only party mobilizing to prevent the WHO’s biggest contributor from leaving. Joe Biden, sitting on a long lead in the polls, tweeted he will reverse the withdrawal “on my first day as President.”

Nonetheless, President Donald J. Trump’s decisive action was justified, furthering the interests of both America and the global community.

Why? The WHO was complicit with China in the spread of the coronavirus around the world and is not capable of meaningful reform.

https://www.foxnews.com/world/iran-ukrainian-jetliner-shootdown-miscommunication-alignment

A report released Saturday by Iran’s Civil Aviation Organization blames the shootdown of a Ukrainian jetliner on a misaligned missile battery and miscommunication between troops and their commanders.

The report comes months after the Jan. 8 crash near Tehran that killed all 176 people on board. Authorities had initially denied responsibility but changed course days later after Western nations presented extensive evidence that Iran had shot down the plane.

The report signals a new phase in the investigation into the crash, as the aircraft’s black box flight recorder is due to be sent to Paris, where international investigators will finally be able to examine it. It also comes as public opinion remains low over Iran’s government as it faces both crushing U.S. sanctions and vast domestic economic problems.

The shootdown happened the same night Iran launched a ballistic missile attack targeting U.S. soldiers in Iraq, its response to the American drone strike that killed Revolutionary Guard Gen. Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad on Jan. 3.