RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/02/canada_a_totalitarian_stateinprogress.html

To describe Canada as a totalitarian state-in-progress sounds like a gross and indeed absurd exaggeration. Yet many premonitory signs are present. In the words of political philosopher William Gairdner, author of The Book of Absolutes, The Great Divide and The Trouble with Canada, Canada “has just crossed the red line between soft-socialism and soft-totalitarianism.”

Gairdner has assembled a virtual mountain of evidence for his claim: Bill C-25 seeking to impose “diversity” on all corporations; financial penalties against organizations that do not comply with government programs; a teeming brigade of government surveillance “Inspectors,” that is, spies — wage spies, speech spies, feminist spies, pay-equity spies, Human Rights spies; paralegal bodies known as Human Rights Tribunals with the power to levy crippling fines, bankrupt families and shut down businesses, to impose prison time for contempt of court, and to compel conformity via “re-education.”

The list goes on. Bill C-16 prohibits discrimination on the basis of gender identity and gender expression, which sounds unexceptionable except for the obvious fact that “discrimination” is in the eye of the offended beholder and the government enforcer. The bill effectively mandates that citizens must address others by their preferred pronouns and transgender fantasies — or else! It’s “zir,” “ze,” “zem” or “zeir” or you’re done for. It’s Emily, not Brian, or your job’s in peril. The Ontario Human Rights Code stipulates that “refusing to refer to a trans person by their chosen name and a personal pronoun that matches their gender identity… will likely be discrimination” in social areas like employment, housing, education and so on. As Queen’s University law professor Bruce Pardy writes, “human rights have become a weapon to normalize social justice values and delegitimize competing beliefs.” There are other laws on the books, bills such as C-59,  C-75 and C-76 that reduce and even criminalize freedom of expression, infringe on privacy rights, compromise due process and render government transparency a thing of the past.

https://www.algemeiner.com/2020/02/16/eu-must-develop-appetite-for-power-top-diplomat-says/

European Union governments need to be willing to intervene in international crises or risk prolonging paralysis in their foreign policy, the EU’s top diplomat said on Sunday.

The EU is the world’s largest trading bloc but it often fails to speak with one voice on foreign policy because its policy-making requires consensus among members. EU governments are divided on issues from Libya to Venezuela.

“Europe has to develop an appetite for power,” the EU’s foreign policy chief Josep Borrell told the Munich Security Conference, stressing that did not only mean military power.

“We should be able to act … not everyday making comments, expressing concern,” he told leaders, lawmakers, and diplomats.

With its economic power, the bloc has been able to boast of a “soft power,” but its influence in the world has waned, partly because US President Donald Trump’s “America First”‘ policies have undermined European priorities.

Trump’s decision to pull out of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, as well as the Paris climate accord, his recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital before a final peace settlement, and his criticism of NATO are at odds with European positions.

https://www.city-journal.org/france-anti-semitism

The most dangerous place to be a Jew in Europe today is France—that’s the conclusion of an as-yet unpublished, two-year report on anti-Semitism in 11 European countries, conducted by former NYPD commissioner Raymond W. Kelly for Ronald S. Lauder, the former U.S. Ambassador to Austria.

Lauder, president of the World Jewish Congress, has donated heavily to efforts combatting anti-Semitism in Europe and the United States. He asked Kelly, New York’s longest-serving police commissioner, to assess the growth of the anti-Semitism sweeping Europe and suggest practical ways to strengthen the security of Jewish communities and institutions.

Though the resurgence of anti-Semitism in Europe has been widely noted and condemned, Kelly’s report concludes that the threat to France’s 450,000 Jews—the world’s third-largest community, after Israel and the U.S.—is the most “acute.” Attacks and threats against French Jews surged 74 percent from 2017 to 2018, the report finds, and preliminary data for the first half of 2019 indicate “further intensification,” with another 75 percent increase last year. Moreover, the official estimates of some 500 attacks and anti-Semitic acts per year are “notoriously under reported,” according to the study, which contends that “no responsible individuals or even government representatives place much credence in these numbers.”

Kelly and two additional investigators, David Cohen and Mitchell D. Silber, both former senior NYPD counterterrorism officials, blame the French government for failing to respond to the almost-constant violence against and harassment of French Jews. Government funds to the Jewish community total just $3.7 million a year—“about one-fifth of what British Jews receive from their government, though France’s Jewish population is roughly double that of Britain.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15599/ouyar-hassan

For four decades, Ouyar Hassan has put up with an ochlocracy disguised as a theocracy. Wearing an Anatolian smile, he has seen Iran become the only country in the world, perhaps with the exception of Zimbabwe, poorer than it was 40 years ago. He has seen Iran top the list of infamy in the word for the number of political prisoners and executions. He has witnessed the establishment of widespread corruption not as an aberration but as a way of life. For four decades, Ouyar Hassan has turned up at polling stations to cast his vote in fake elections for an ersatz parliament and an actor playing President of the Republic.

For the first time since the mullahs seized power, almost all political groups associated with them from the beginning… have publicly called for a boycott of the polls. Even some of the so-called “moderate-reformists”, better known for their sheer opportunism than their moral courage, are calling for a boycott of the fake elections.

As usual, the authorities could try to manipulate the results in a number of ways such as refusing to register many would-be voters, pre-filling polling boxes and inflating the number of ballots cast in the provinces. Nevertheless, a massive boycott would be hard to camouflage. Such a massive refusal to play extras in a sinister masquerade would show that Ouyar Hassan is no longer prepared to let “those better than us” walk all over him.

Since the 19th century, caricature has been used to highlight in a humorous mode the key features of famous persons or even a whole nation. In the latter case, some well-known examples include Uncle Sam, with his top-hat and carefully trimmed Van Dyke, representing the United States. England is represented by John Bull with his bowler hat, belly and rosy cheeks. French are made fun of with Gaston Dupont, wearing a beret, and with a baguette under his arm and a Gauloise in his mouth, who doesn’t know whether his name should end with a D or a T neither of which are pronounced in any case. For its part, Iran is represented by Ouyar Hassan wearing a felt cap, long shirt and baggy trousers.

Ouyar Hassan, who first appeared in satirical magazines in the 1900s when 80 percent of Iranians lived in rural areas, is a peasant. He is constantly boasting about his glorious past but is terrified of his uncertain future. As for his present, his chief, not to say sole, concern is to survive on a day-to-day hand-to-mouth basis. To survive, Ouyar Hassan depends on his instincts, which dictate that he should have no opinions on anything, no expectations from anyone and, more importantly, not to antagonize the city where “those better than us” live and rule the world.

Since his first appearance, Ouyar Hassan has lived through two revolutions, two World Wars, two changes of ruling dynasty, and an eightfold increase in his nation’s population. In the meantime, Iran has been transformed into a highly urbanized country where people like Ouyar Hassan account for no more than 20 percent of the population.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15598/persecution-of-christians-november

“He was a 15-year-old adolescent. He was so deeply asleep in his bed that he didn’t hear any of the noise around him. They thrust the blade of the axe so deeply into his skull, to the point we had to use a hammer to get it out of his head.” Many Christians have been displaced by these ongoing attacks and live in “extreme misery,” added another local: “This is beyond persecution. It is a dramatic situation, plunging thousands of families into a deplorable humanitarian crisis.” — Rebecca, a witness, Barnabas Fund, November 15, 2019, Cameroon.

A group of Muslims beat, robbed, and threatened to kill a Christian evangelist if he did not convert to Islam…. [T]he Muslims indicated that they had physical pains and injuries. Fløttum offered to pray for them, they accepted, and he complied. They said they felt better and urged him to go with them and pray for another of their friends who was also suffering from a foot injury…. “They were very nice and I couldn’t believe they would deceive me,” he later said. They took him to a backyard, pushed him down a cellar staircase, and began to beat and kick him in the face….”While they kept me there, they threatened me and said they would kill me if I did not convert to Islam….I was scared and actually thought they were going to kill me because they said they had a knife and didn’t want witnesses.” — Idag.no, November 28, 2019, Norway.

“…although the Egyptian government has made some modest progress toward legalizing informal churches around the country and improving public discourse about Coptic rights, it has taken few steps toward systematically improving religious freedom conditions for vulnerable Christian populations, particularly in rural areas.” — United States Commission on Interreligious Freedom (USCIRF), Annual Report 2019, Egypt.

The Slaughter of Christians

Syria: On November 11, Islamic gunmen opened fire on a vehicle known to be carrying Christian leaders. Two Armenian priests, Father Abrahim Petoyan and Father Hovsep Petoyan, a father and son, were killed and a deacon was seriously wounded. ISIS claimed responsibility. The Armenians had been going to inspect repairs on an Armenian Catholic church that had earlier been damaged in Deir ez-Zor. “We continue to feel the presence of ISIS,” responded the Armenian Catholic Archbishop Boutros Marayati of Aleppo, adding that Deir ez-Zor “is a very important town for us, because it is there that many of our martyrs were killed as they fled the Turkish genocide of 1915. Today there are no Armenian Catholics left there. Undoubtedly, the Turks don’t want us to return, because our presence would be a reminder of the Armenian genocide.”

https://amgreatness.com/2020/02/15/europes-retrenchment-in-the-wake-of-brexit/

The cynic will often overestimate the forces of inevitability, immobility, and kinetic power. In so doing he will be exposed for his eternal pessimism, while the optimist runs his victory lap. Yet even as the cynic is little more than an idealist who has been burned by reality too many times, he too gets to savor the taste of slaying that which was once thought unbeatable.

The class James Burnham called the “Managers,” those definers and keepers of “norms,” have taken quite the beating these past few years. Today, in February 2020, President Donald J. Trump has not only emerged triumphant from his bare-knuckle brawls with the deep state but is now consolidating power and poised to defeat whichever candidate the Democrats put up to challenge him in the November presidential election. The constellation of forces arrayed against him, ranging from media giants to state security agencies, and including some within his own party, surely should have resulted in his removal from office. 

Yet those of us who watched this soap opera for the past three years couldn’t help but notice mistake after mistake from Burnham’s vaunted Managers. Did we overestimate them? I think it’s safe to say that we did. The rotting edifice of “Trump-Russia collusion” finally collapsed with Robert Mueller’s uninspiring testimony on Capitol Hill, and “Trump-Ukraine quid pro quo” only saw a fatigued and bored nation ignore the Democrats crying “wolf” yet again.

Across the pond, Brexit gave us the same show in parallel to the American drama. 

Former Prime Minister David Cameron called a referendum on Brexit in 2016 to once and for all shut up an anti-EU wing inside of his own party. Instead, it resulted in his removal from power and the exit of the UK from the European Union, dealing a blow to the decades-long juggernaut of globalism. 

There, too, we witnessed a street fight that lasted years, and that pitted all of the elites and their vast array of instruments on one side, against people who according to the elite “shouldn’t matter” and “are probably racist anyway” on the other.

Overconfidence and hubris on the part of ruling elites, insulated from various crises of liberal democracy ranging from the 2008 financial crisis to Merkel’s invitation to the Third World to settle in Europe, has not only halted globalist projects but, in both Germany and Britain, has set them back. Beyond that, they have raised questions pertaining to the legitimacy of these regimes. Brexit in particular questions the legitimacy of the European Union project as a whole.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/02/islamic_reform_top_muslim_university_says_no.html

Largely unknown to and unreported in the West, a large, two-day conference was recently hosted (Jan. 27–28) by Al Azhar University in Egypt and attended by the leading clerics and politicians from 46 nations.  Titled “Renewal in Islamic Thought,” it is currently the most significant response to Egyptian president Sisi’s calls for reform, which he forcibly made on January 1, 2015.

The conference focused on the most pressing topics affecting the Islamic — and in some cases non-Islamic — world, including women’s rights, government and society, and the question of “radicalization” and the emergence of jihadi terror groups such as the Islamic State.

I’ve watched many of the panels with great interest, and in the coming weeks, I hope to remark on some of these, but for now I wish to discuss what can be learned from the closing remarks of the grand imam of Al Azhar (and Pope Francis’s good friend), Sheikh Ahmed al-Tayeb. 

First, he — in agreement with the other clerics present — closed the door on the possibility for reform on a great number of issues: “Renewal,” he announced, “is in no way possible concerning those texts which are irrefutable in their certainty and stability; as for those texts that are not entirely credible, they are subject to ijtihad [reinterpretation, especially based on changing circumstances].”

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/02/angela_merkel_and_the_destruction_of_german_democracy.html

These thoughts reflect the writer’s concern about the worsening political and social conditions in Germany, a nation whose importance — for America, Europe, and the world — should require no laboring to a readership of politically sophisticated Americans.

What’s happening today in Germany is deeply disturbing.

And it’s not for the reason casual American observers, including many conservatives, might think based on information derived from the mainstream English-language media.  Contrary to these purveyors of globalist, multi-cultural propaganda, the reason for growing unease about Germany is not the presence in the German parliament (Bundestag), and persistent electoral strength, of “Die Alternative für Deutschland” (“The alternative for Germany,” or AFD) — invariably, counterfactually, and ludicrously styled by the Western corporate media as the far-right AFD — as they style all western European political parties committed to preserving national cultures. 

Deep concern about Germany arises because of two different but related phenomena.

First, Angela Merkel’s destruction of the center-right Christian Democrats/Christian Social Union (the Christlich Demokratische Union Deutschlands, or CDU, and the Christlich Soziale Union in Bayern, or CSU, respectively), and her radical transformation of those allied parties, which together formed most of the post war governments that led Germany out of the physical and moral ruins of World War II.  Through Merkel’s policies, the CDU/CSU have been shorn of their conservative principles and become nearly indistinguishable from Germany’s extremist Die Grünen (“the Greens”) and its dying Sozial Demokratische Partei Deutschlands (the old socialists, or “SPD”).  

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/02/the_crumbling_of_cubas_grand_socialist_experiment.html

John Alpert is an American photojournalist whose work is featured in the Netflix documentary Cuba and the Cameraman.  He first went to the island nation in 1972, a little more than a decade after the Cuban Revolution.  Over the next 45 years, Alpert returned to Cuba, each time taking pictures of its towns and cities and people.  The images he took are a timeline that chronicle how Castro’s socialist revolution played out for the Cuban people in the years that lay ahead.

A disarmingly polite young photojournalist at the time, Alpert was one of the few Americans granted face-to-face meetings with Castro.  With the U.S. media curious about the grand socialist experiment unfolding in Cuba, Alpert was invited to appear on TV programming to discuss his conversations with Cuba’s communist dictator.  Alpert was quite impressed when Castro said he was taking concrete measures to make life better for the Cuban people, citing as evidence a free health care system, free schools, free higher education, and shiny new and rent-free housing projects. When Alpert first visited Cuba, the shelves of grocery stores and other retail establishments were filled with consumer goods of every description.

To a young photojournalist who was idealistic and somewhat naïve at the time, socialism seemed to portend a bright future for Cuba.  With its people happy and well taken care of by a paternalistic government, things were going well.  But as time moved one, Cuba’s house-of-cards communist system fell apart.  The free goods and services given to the Cuban people were funded not by the country’s top-down collectivist economy, but by a massive infusion of hard cash, gasoline, food, and other provisions from the Soviet Union.  When the Soviets eventually pulled the plug as their own socialist economy was crumbling, the day-to-day lives of the Cuban people fell on hard times, a rude reminder of Margaret Thatcher’s observation the problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.

https://thehill.com/opinion/international/483213-maduro-acknowledges-his-socialist-delusions

Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro’s quiet move to restore elements of free enterprise to his nation’s economy should serve as a cautionary tale for anyone listening to Sen. Bernie Sanders’ siren song of socialism in the Democratic primaries or who is still tempted by promises of socialist bliss.

Maduro’s move represents a desperate attempt to dampen public outrage, and thus maintain his grip on power, in the midst of an astonishing economic collapse that economists view as the world’s worst in decades in the absence of war.

Venezuela’s tale is hardly a unique one. In recent decades, socialist nations across the world have scrapped their doctrinaire visions and incorporated elements of free enterprise to rescue their ailing economies. Perhaps most striking, a post-Mao China opted for a more market-based economy as Deng Xiaoping conceded that his nation could not otherwise compete with the United States.

Maduro’s bow to reality is particularly instructive. It comes a decade after the Great Recession and financial collapse of 2008 and 2009 shook confidence in capitalism and emboldened the proponents of socialism and other alternative models. With that crisis long over, however, capitalism has again proved its mettle by nourishing more prosperity and higher living standards while Venezuela’s economy continues shrinking at an alarming rate.