RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13532/eu-full-orwell

The problem is that this professedly noble initiative comes from an organization that has already for several years been censoring free speech in Europe.

The handbook guidelines state that journalists should “Take care not to further stigmatize terms such as ‘Muslim’ or ‘Islam’ by associating them with particular acts… Don’t allow extremists’ claims about acting ‘in the name of Islam’ to stand unchallenged. Highlight… the diversity of Muslim communities… where it is necessary and newsworthy to report hateful comments against Muslims, mediate the information.” In other words, the guidelines ask journalists to disinform the public.

This is the same European Commission that most recently expressed its disapproval of the withdrawal of Austria from the UN’s “Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration.” The Compact stipulates that media outlets that do not support the UN’s migration agenda will not be eligible for public funding. How is that for “fully respecting Europe’s fundamental principles of freedom of expression, a free press and pluralism”?

The EU has launched a comprehensive Action Plan against Disinformation. Its purpose, according to a recent press release from the European Commission, is apparently to “protect its democratic systems and public debates and in view of the 2019 European elections as well as a number of national and local elections that will be held in Member States by 2020”.

In June 2018, leaders of EU member states had met in the European Council and invited the European Commission “to present… an action plan by December 2018 with specific proposals for a coordinated EU response to the challenge of disinformation…” It is this action plan that the Commission presented to the public on December 5.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13658/philippines-christians-slaughtered

The new terrorism in the Philippines is not merely inspired by political or territorial grievances, real or imagined, but rather is imbued with intrinsic hate for the “other” — for the “infidel.”

In May 2017, in the city of Marawi, a civilian bus was stopped by jihadis; when 9 passengers were discovered to be Christian — apparently because they were not able to quote the Koran — they were tied together and shot dead, execution style. The jihadis who took over Marawi during the uprising forced women into sex-slavery and ordered Christian men embrace Islam or be used as human shields against the Philippine Army.

January’s deadly church-bombing, which claimed 20 lives and wounded more than 100, is the latest reminder that, as with other nations that have a sizeable Muslim minority, the Philippines is embroiled in the jihad. While the ostensible reason behind it may be political or territorial, the sadistic hate that accompanies attacks on Christians and their churches suggests that ideology is the ultimate cause.

On Sunday, January 27, extremist Muslims bombed a Catholic cathedral during Mass in the Philippines. At least 20 people were killed and 111 wounded.

At 8:45 am, two explosives were detonated about a minute apart in or near the Cathedral of Our Lady of Mount Carmel in Jolo. According to the Associated Press:

“The initial explosion scattered the wooden pews inside the main hall and blasted window glass panels, and the second bomb hurled human remains and debris across a town square fronting the Cathedral of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, witnesses said.”

Photographs on social media showed human bodies and remains strewn on the street just outside the cathedral. Last heard, the officiating priest, Fr. Ricky Bacolcol, “was still in shock and could not speak about what happened,” said a colleague.

After the first bomb detonated, army troops and police posted outside the cathedral rushed in, at which point the second bomb went off. Fifteen of the slain were civilians, five were military men; 90 of the wounded were civilians.

The cathedral, located in a Muslim-majority area, was heavily guarded; it had been hit before. In 1997, Catholic Bishop, Benjamin de Jesus, was gunned down just outside the cathedral; in 2010, grenades were hurled at it twice, damaging the building.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-growing-anti-maduro-alliance/

The administration of our “America First” president is leading an international and multilateral effort to restore popular sovereignty and human rights in what was once the richest country in South America. This is an historical irony worth welcoming. Today, after a weekend of protests in Caracas, the United Kingdom, Germany, Spain, Denmark, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Poland, among others, joined the growing number of countries recognizing 35-year-old Juan Guaidò as president of Venezuela.

It’s a trend that Donald Trump started. Last month the opposition-controlled National Assembly designated Guaidò president after the disputed inauguration of socialist autocrat Nicolás Maduro. On January 23, Trump validated the assembly’s decision and mobilized the U.S. government behind Guaidò’s democratic revolution.

The president of the Organization of American States, as well as the governments of Brazil, Colombia, Argentina, Canada, Chile, and Australia, followed Trump’s lead. Israel recognized Guaidò a few days later. Now the Europeans have joined the bandwagon.
2

Two decades of socialism have impoverished and corrupted Venezuela. The United States and Canada say they will send humanitarian aid, putting the generals who continue to support Maduro on defense. “To the Venezuelan military high command, now is the time to stand on the side of the Venezuelan people,” John Bolton Tweeted on February 2. The military is all that stands between Maduro and the abyss. His Cuban puppeteers, and his Russian, Chinese, and Iranian allies, will be dealt a major setback if the armed forces abandon Maduro and new elections are held.

The situation is fluid and dangerous. But the number of Guaidò’s friends is rising as Maduro grows ever more isolated. And given the ruin Maduro has brought to Venezuela, Guaidò needs all the friends he can muster.

https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/a-not-so-innocent-abroad-pope-francis-in-arabia-i

Pope Francis arrived in the United Arab Emirates yesterday, February 3. Tonight he will address the “Muslim Council of Elders,” a body based in the UAE which supposedly “seeks to counter religious fanaticism by promoting a moderate brand of Islam.” We’ll reserve our judgment until we see the text of his speech (cf. Part II tomorrow); but on current form nothing good should be expected from the occasion.

The “Council of Elders” is the brainchild of Sheikh Ahmed el-Tayeb, the grand imam of Cairo’s Al-Azhar mosque and university. Today’s meeting between Francis and el-Tayeb (fifth in three years) is light years away from Al-Azhar’s angry freezing of relations with the Holy See which followed Pope Benedict XVI’s September 2006 lecture at the University of Regensburg on Islam and violence, and his subsequent demand for greater protection for Christians in Egypt.

The Legacy of Pope Benedict—The ongoing improvement in relations was predicated on a clear volte-face on the Roman side, an implicit albeit not openly stated admission that Pope Benedict’s analysis is not accepted by his successor. As if to confirm the hint, in 2016 Pope Francis claimed that his meeting with el-Tayeb at the Vatican—ended with an embrace—was proof that “they [Muslims] seek peace, encounter.” On the other side, however, throughout the past decade Sheikh el-Tayeb himself has remained unyielding on his condemnation of Benedict’s alleged Islamophobia and insulting intolerance.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/02/clock_ticking_quickly_for_maduro.html

Down in Venezuela, the people are in the streets and Sr. Maduro got some very bad news. He lost a key military man, as we see in this report:

An active Venezuelan general called on the armed forces to rebel against President Nicolas Maduro and to recognize the opposition leader Juan Guaido as interim chief as pressure at home and abroad grows on the head of state to step down.

In a video circulating on Twitter on Saturday, General Francisco Yanez of the air force’s high command, said most of the armed forces already disavowed Maduro, who claims he is victim of a coup directed by the United States.

“People of Venezuela, 90 percent of the armed forces of Venezuela are not with the dictator, they are with the people of Venezuela,” Yanez said in the video.

“Given the happenings of the last few hours, already the transition to democracy is imminent.”

The high command’s web page lists Yanez, along with a photo, as the air force’s head of strategic planning.

Wonder what other general is next?

There are three possible scenarios for Maduro:

First, the Batista exit, filling up a plane with your belongings and leave in the middle of the night. I should add that my parents did not support Fulgencio Batista but he did leave a very prosperous nation behind. You can’t say that about Maduro.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13667/multiculturalism-britain-january

More than 5,000 people signed a petition to boycott Marks and Spencer toilet paper: they alleged it was embossed with the Arabic word for God. Marks and Spencer, in a statement on Twitter, denied the claims: “The motif on the aloe vera toilet tissue, which we have been selling for over five years, is categorically of an aloe vera leaf and we have investigated and confirmed this with our suppliers.”

The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe urged Britain to make it a legal requirement for Muslim couples to register their marriages civilly before or at the same time as their religious ceremony, because Sharia marriages alone “clearly discriminate against women in divorce and inheritance cases.”

The Guardian reported that hundreds, and possibly thousands, of young girls in Britain are being subjected to so-called breast-ironing, an African practice whereby mothers or grandmothers use a hot stone to massage across the breast repeatedly in order to “break the tissue” and slow its growth. The objective is to stop unwanted male attention.

January 1. A 25-year-old Somali man stabbed three people — including a police officer — at Victoria Station in Manchester. BBC producer Sam Clack, who was waiting for a tram when the attack took place, reported: “The guy, his exact words were, he said: ‘As long as you keep bombing other countries, this sort of sh*t is going to keep happening.’ The suspect also screamed “Allahu Akbar!” (“Allah is the greatest!”) as he was bundled into a police van. Assistant Chief Constable Russ Jackson nevertheless said that officers were “retaining an open mind in relation to the motivation for this attack.” The suspect was eventually detained under the Mental Health Act.

To visit Greenwich is to grasp in an afternoon’s stroll the Britain that was once and is now no more. General Wolfe, whose addition of Canada to the Empire is celebrated here, was brought down by a French musket ball. Today, prostration before the EU is Theresa May’s instinctive first position.

Stepping back and forth between the world’s two longitudinal hemispheres is fun in a quirky sort of way. Of course it requires you to be positioned right above the Prime Meridian. And that, in turn, means you must have decided to spend a London afternoon over in Greenwich, a few miles down-river along a now much cleaned-up Thames and more or less across from Canary Wharf. If you’d somehow been asleep for a quarter of a millennium, and were wholly unaware of Britain’s Empire years, you’d soon be set straight when you visited Greenwich. It’s magnificent!

My wife and I spent a day this past weekend re-acquainting ourselves with this London borough where you’ll find the National Maritime Museum (magnificent!), the Old Naval College (which in its original incarnation had been a retirement home for Royal Navy sailors and is partly a Christopher Wren creation with a splendid chapel), the seventeenth-century Queen’s House, a Greenwich Market first established over three centuries ago and, of course, the Royal Observatory. It’s at the last of those listed attractions where one can hop between hemispheres.

Remember, the east-west division of the world is wholly arbitrary in a way that the north-south split is not. The equator is a fact imposed on the world. Where to draw the up-down line to split the world’s west from its east is a function of nothing more than who happened to be drawing the line and what they prefered. At the height of the British Empire, the world’s largest-ever, the people doing the preferring were in London. And so the Prime Meridian runs right through the Royal Observatory at Greenwich. That is why, before political correctness infected everything from banning temporal reference to the shorthand of ‘Before Christ’ to toilets and ‘renewable energy is cheaper if you just ignore the $3 billion in subsidies it gets each year’, we used to talk in terms of Greenwich Mean Time. Everything was based on that, and the arbitrary line drawn there to separate east from west.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/high-ranking-venezuela-air-force-general-rejects-maduro-supports-guaido/

The first defection of a high ranking military officer from the Venezuelan armed forces said in a video that he “doesn’t recognize the dictatorial authority of Nicolás Maduro,” and added “The people have suffered enough.”

General Francisco Yanez of the Venezuelan air force endorsed opposition leader Juan Guaidó, who declared himself president two weeks ago.

NPR:

“To order the armed forces to keep repressing the people is to continue killing more people from hunger, diseases and god willing combat between ourselves,” he said. “The people have suffered enough.”

Then Yanez invited the citizens to peacefully defend Guaidó in the streets. “To my armed fellow men,” he pleaded, “I ask you not to turn your back on the people of Venezuela.”

He is the first of the nation’s military brass to voice strong support for Guaidó, who declared himself interim president in January after denouncing the integrity of Venezuela’s presidential elections.

Yanez told the Associated Press that he would not issue other statements until he was authorized by “the commander-in-chief of the legal armed force,” Guaidó.

General Yanez is currently alone. The Venezuelan military, carefully courted and nurtured by both former President Chavez and current President Maduro, are not likely to switch loyalties in great numbers any time soon.

Several factions of Venezuela, including its Military Aviation and the Academy of Aviation, used Twitter to denounce the general. They tweeted a photo of Yanez in his uniform with the word “TRAITOR” scrawled across. The Air Force Command also accused him of switching sides because his father is facing an investigation into corruption.

Although hundreds of generals serve in the Venezuelan military, the announcement represents a victory for Guaidó, NPR’s Philip Reeves reports. The young leader has asked armed forces to still their guns, and hopes to weaken their loyalty to Maduro.

Guaidó passed an amnesty measure for them in the National Assembly. Supporters in the streets have handed out copies of the law to soldiers and police, though analysts say Maduro receives loyalty from top-ranking officers by giving them big paychecks and control of lucrative assets. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13582/pope-silence-persecution-christians

Unfortunately, Pope Francis’s stance on Islam seems to be coming from a fantasy world.

“Authentic Islam and the proper reading of the Koran are opposed to every form of violence”, the Pope claimed, not quite accurately. It is as if all of the Pope’s efforts have been directed to exonerating Islam from any of its responsibilities. He seems to have been doing this even more than observant Muslims — such as Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, American author and physician M. Zuhdi Jasser, former Kuwaiti Information Minister Sami Abdullatif Al-Nesf, French-Algerian author Razika Adnani, Paris-based Tunisian philosopher Youssef Seddik, Jordanian journalist Yosef Alawnah, and Moroccan author Rachid Aylal, among many others — have been doing.

“Pope Francis could in no way be ignorant of the heavy problems caused by the expansion… at the very heart of the Christian domain… Let us note this again… the last religion that arrived in Europe has an intrinsic impediment to integrating into the European framework that is fundamentally Judeo-Christian…” – Boualem Sansal, Algerian author, in his best-selling book “2084.”

Pope Francis now faces the potential risk of a Christian world physically swallowed by the Muslim crescent — as on the Vatican logo chosen for the Pope’s upcoming trip to Morocco. It is time the appeasement is replaced.

4,305 Christians were killed simply because their Christian faith in 2018. This is the dramatic number contained in the new “World Watch List 2019” just compiled by the non-governmental organization Open Doors. It reveals that in 2018, there were 1,000 more Christian victims — 25% more — than the year before, when there were 3,066.

These days, 245 million Christians in the world are apparently persecuted simply for their faith. Last November, The organization Aid to the Church in Need released its “Religious Freedom Report” for 2018 and reached the a similar conclusion: 300 million Christians were subjected to violence. Christianity, despite stiff competition, has been called “the most persecuted religion in the world”.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13630/persecution-converts-christianity

“[F]or millions of Christians — particularly those who grew up Muslim or were born into Muslim families — openly following Jesus can have painful consequences. They can be treated as second-class citizens, discriminated against for jobs or even violently attacked.” — Open Doors, World Watch List 2019.

“The root of the problem is that the existence and functions of Protestants and other non-Muslim groups are seen as a threat by the government institutions. And therefore, it is believed that all their activities should be banned.” — 2008 Report: “The Question of Places of Worship for the Protestant Community of Turkey,” prepared by the Legal Committee of the Alliance of Protestant Churches of Turkey.

Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan are all secular on paper. Yet, “the police, secret service and local authorities strictly monitor religious activities, with state authorities regularly raiding non-registered churches. In general, the Islamic culture makes life for Christian converts particularly difficult, but indigenous Christians with a Muslim background bear the brunt of persecution from the state and family, friends and community.” — Open Doors, World Watch List 2019.

“While Christians are indeed experiencing a ‘life of hell’ in North Korea, overthrowing Kim Jong-un’s regime could not only lead to a quick halt to this persecution but also to a rise of Christianity — as has happened recently in Russia… Unlike the persecution of Christians in Communist nations, persecution of Christians is perennial, existential, and… far transcends any ruler or regime. It unfortunately seems part and parcel of the history, doctrines, and socio-political makeup of Islam — hence its tenacity and ubiquity. It is a ‘tradition.'” — Raymond Ibrahim.

According to the human rights organization Open Doors, the number of Christians in the world subjected to persecution — 245 million — is 14% higher than it was a year ago.