RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14409/iran-terrorism-europe

One of the more disturbing discoveries regarding Iran’s ever-expanding terrorism horizons has emerged in London where it was revealed by the Daily Telegraph earlier this month that a terrorist cell with links to Iran had been caught stockpiling tonnes of explosive materials on the outskirts of London at a secret bomb factory.

British intelligence officials have now concluded the stockpile was part of an international Hizbollah plot to lay the foundations for future terror attacks in Europe.

One positive outcome from Iran’s increased terrorist activity has been to persuade the British government finally to designate the entire Hizbollah organisation as a terrorist organisation.

Now, with Iran being held responsible for the latest escalation in tensions in the Gulf, Britain and other European powers should demonstrate their resolve to oppose Iran’s well-documented sponsorship of terrorism by backing the Trump administration in its latest confrontation with the ayatollahs.

Iran is intensifying its efforts to build a global terror network as the ayatollahs come under increasing economic and political pressure resulting from US sanctions.

While US officials continue to investigate Iran’s involvement in the recent series of attacks on a number of oil tankers operating in the Gulf, counter-terrorism experts have uncovered evidence that Iran is also working hard to develop its terrorist infrastructure well beyond the confines of the Middle East.

Intelligence officials are particularly concerned about Iran’s activities in Europe where they have identified a recent upsurge in Iranian-sponsored terrorist activity.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14406/suicide-of-france

“Frenchness” is disappearing and being replaced by a kind balkanization of enclaves not communicating with one another…. this is not a good recipe.

The more the French élites with their disposable incomes and cultural leisure cloister themselves in their enclaves, the less likely it is that they will understand the everyday impact of failed mass immigration and multiculturalism.

The globalized, “bobo-ized [bourgeois Bohemian] upper classes” are filling the “new citadels” — as in Medieval France — and are voting en masse for Macron. They have developed “a single way of talking and thinking… that allows the dominant classes to substitute for the reality of a nation subject to severe stress and strain the fable of a kind and welcoming society.” — Christophe Guilluy, Twilight of the Elites, Yale University Press, 2019.

“Regarding France in 2019, it can no longer be denied that a momentous and hazardous transformation, a ‘Great Switch’, is in the making”, observed the founder and president of the Jean-Jacques Rousseau Institute, Michel Gurfinkiel. He was mourning “the passing of France as a distinct country, or at least as the Western, Judeo-Christian nation it had hitherto been presumed to be”. A recent cover story in the weekly Le Point called it “the great upheaval”.

Switch or upheaval, the days of France as we knew it are numbered: the society has lost its cultural center of gravity: the old way of life is fading and close to “extinction”. “Frenchness” is disappearing and being replaced by a kind balkanization of enclaves not communicating with one another. For the country most affected by Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism, this is not a good recipe.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14415/britain-education-clash

While Britons are striving to promote British values, those increasingly appear not to be the values everyone here wants.

The No Outsiders curriculum… teaches acceptance of people different from oneself, which is what brings pupils into contact with mutual respect for Christians, Muslims and Jews, the disabled, gays and everyone who might be considered “other”. “It should make absolutely clear that no group should be left out….”

There seems to be a broader agenda at work here: that is, to find ways in which to maintain British values when faced with people who in many instances seem to oppose them. One example might be a lesson summed up in the Anderton Park expressions about British values…: “Jewish people are equal to Sikhs, Muslims, Christians and people with no religion.” Many might not agree to that sentiment, whether in primary or secondary education, and possibly many Muslim parents would wish their children not to be taught it….

The importance of teaching children about respect for other people cannot be exaggerated. In the light of this, can there be any question that the lessons at Anderton Park school are vital for the West?

What started as a small protest in the UK has taken on wider dimensions that are already spreading to other cities. For more than two months now, a primary school in Birmingham in the UK has been at the centre of a standoff between modern Western values and the concerns of a large group of Muslim parents. As early as April, reports said, leafleters were targeting schools in Birmingham, Manchester, Oldham, London, Blackburn and Bradford.

The almost daily protests outside the schools, although on a more muted scale, are the biggest since those against Salman Rushdie and his book, The Satanic Verses back in 1988 — events that for some radicalized a generation. According to the author Kenan Malik, those early protests sowed the seeds of rifts that have since become wider. Some form of clash between these two sets of values is taking place again.

Anderton Park Primary School is an outstanding place of education for children between the ages of five and eleven. Most of the children are Muslims, but that does not restrict the efforts to introduce them to being fully educated citizens in the country where most were born.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14365/china-totalitarian-technology

In China, censorship, now largely automated, has reached “unprecedented levels of accuracy, aided by machine learning and voice and image recognition.” — Cate Cadell, Reuters, May 26, 2019.

As in other Communist regimes, such as that of the former Soviet Union, the Communist ideology does not tolerate any competing narratives. “Religion is a source of authority, and an object of fidelity, that is greater than the state… This characteristic of religion has always been anathema to history’s totalitarian despots…” — Thomas F. Farr, President of the Religious Freedom Institute, in testimony before the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, November 28, 2018.

In 2018, China had an estimated 200 million surveillance cameras, with plans for 626 million surveillance cameras by 2020. China’s aim is apparently an “Integrated Joint Operations Platform” which will integrate and coordinate data from surveillance cameras with facial recognition technology, citizen ID card numbers, biometric data, license plate numbers and information about vehicle ownership, health, family planning, banking, and legal records, “unusual activity”, and any other relevant data that can be gathered about citizens, such as religious practice, travels abroad, and so on, according to reports of local officials and police.

At the moment, China is in the process of fulfilling what Stalin, Hitler and Mao could only dream about: The flawless totalitarian state, powered by digital technology, where the individual has nowhere to flee from the all-seeing eye of the Communist state.

The 30th anniversary on June 4 of the Chinese regime’s 1989 massacre of pro-democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square served to highlight the extreme censorship in China under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and President Xi Jinping.

The Tiananmen anniversary is referred to euphemistically in mainland China, as ‘the June Fourth Incident’. The regime there evidently fears that any talk, let alone public commemoration, of that historical event will stir up anti-regime unrest, which could endanger the Chinese Communist Party’s absolute power.

The internet in China is under control of the Chinese Communist Party, especially through the rigorous censorship practiced by the party’s top internet censor, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), established in 2014. In May 2017, according to a Reuters report, the CAC introduced strict guidelines requiring all internet platforms that produce or distribute news “to be managed by party-sanctioned editorial staff” who have been “approved by the national or local government internet and information offices, while their workers must get training and reporting credentials from the central government”.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14407/venezuela-mafia-state

To make matters worse, many of Maduro’s 2,000 generals are also heavily involved in the drug trade, aiding the very networks they are supposed to be battling…. Meanwhile, much of the country is also controlled by “pranes,” crime lords who run gangs from within the country’s prisons.

“Illicit narco trafficking through Venezuela is up some 40 percent.” — Navy Admiral Craig Faller, head of U.S. Southern Command, The Hill, May 23, 2019.

“The administration’s strategy seeks to force the estimated 15,000 Cuban military and security personnel out of Venezuela. ‘[O]nce the rocks start rolling downhill, the regime itself is unsustainable,’ Bolton said.” — U.S. National Security Adviser John R. Bolton, as reported by Bill Gertz in the Washington Free Beacon, June 17, 2019.

In an op-ed in the New York Times on June 11, Abraham F. Lowenthal and David Smilde propose a humanistic vision for the current Oslo negotiations between representatives of the regime of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and the democratic opposition, led by Juan Guaidó — recognized by more than 50 countries as Venezuela’s interim president.

According to Lowenthal and Smilde, “The divisions within Maduro’s coalition laid bare during the failed April 30 uprising, coupled with Juan Guaidó’s unsuccessful call for the support of the armed forces, may have finally persuaded key people on both sides that the only viable way forward is a negotiated transition.”

To support this argument, the authors provide examples of previous “negotiated transitions” — such as Chile in 1988 and Poland in 1989. Neither case can be applied to Maduro’s Venezuela, however, which is neither a military dictatorship, like that of Augusto Pinochet, nor a classical Communist regime.

Venezuela — as described in an interview with The Hill in May by Navy Admiral Craig Faller, head of U.S. Southern Command — is “a mafia… an illicit business that [Maduro is] running with his 2,000 corrupt generals. It’s ruining the country. And the effects of that are compounding every other security problem in our neighborhood. Every security problem is made worse by Venezuela.”

In his interview, Faller pointed to Venezuela’s gold and drug trades, which are helping to fund the remnants of Colombia’s FARC communist guerrillas. “The data and statistics show that their numbers have increased because of what they can gain in terms of freedom of maneuver and the economic opportunity that they get from illicit trafficking and partnering with the Maduro regime,” Faller said. “Illicit narco trafficking through Venezuela is up some 40 percent.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/iran-to-increase-uranium-enrichment-in-violation-of-2015-nuclear-treaty/

Iranian officials announced on Monday that they will begin to increase uranium enrichment in violation of the 2015 international nuclear treaty from which the U.S. already has withdrawn.

Behrouz Kamalvandi, a spokesman for the Atomic Energy Agency, said the country’s stockpile of low-enriched uranium will surpass the limit established under the treaty within ten days, according to the Iranian news agency Tasnim.

The announcement by Iran’s Atomic Energy Agency comes weeks after Tehran threatened to violate the 2015 nuclear treaty if the pact’s remaining European signatories failed to shield the country from the effects of U.S. sanctions within 60 days.

Kamalvandi left open the possibility of returning to compliance with the treaty if the European parties help to relieve some of the burden of U.S. sanctions by establishing alternative trade arrangements.

“As long as they comply by their commitments, these will go back,” Kamalvandi said during a televised press conference at the country’s Arak nuclear plant.

Tensions between the U.S. and Iran continued to escalate last week after Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that Iran was responsible for an attack on two oil tankers that occurred in the Strait of Hormuz on Thursday morning.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orTAUMMWd-A

https://www.wsj.com/articles/europes-italian-stranglehold-11560716406

Italian Deputy Premier Matteo Salvini is favored to become the country’s next Prime Minister, and European Union mandarins are improving the euroskeptic’s chances. See how Brussels is handling its latest fiscal dispute with Rome.

The European Commission is on course to impose a fine of up to €3.5 billion on Rome to punish it for breaking EU budget rules. Governments are supposed to keep their fiscal deficit below 3% of gross domestic product and total debt under 60% of GDP. Many EU members violate these strictures, but Rome is unusually bad. Italian debt is expected to reach more than 135% in 2020, and the Commission frets about Rome’s deficit, which ran 2.1% in 2018.

This triggered a fiscal showdown last year, which ended when Rome agreed to make minor changes to its budget and Brussels pretended the numbers would add up. But now the EU complains that Italy’s motley left-right coalition government isn’t abiding by that deal and is teeing up another fiscal battle. A June 5 Commission report recommends opening up an “excess deficit procedure,” though it would take weeks and several bureaucratic hurdles before a fine is imposed.

The EU seems alarmed by Mr. Salvini’s tax-reform plan, which goes to show that Brussels doesn’t understand incentives for growth. Mr. Salvini wants to capitalize on the political boost from a recent European Parliament election win to push for a flat tax on personal and small-business incomes up to €50,000. He hasn’t divulged many details, but this is the best idea anyone in Rome has had in years to simplify Italy’s tax code and maybe cut down on evasion.

EU mandarins see only what they view as “lost revenue” from this proposal, but Italy’s fiscal crisis is building despite high taxes. Some 42% of GDP goes to the government. Rome wastes too much of that on misdirected social spending. What’s missing is economic growth to expand the tax base.