RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13841/iran-executions-amputations-floggings

Europe ravenously throw sanctions on a country that has been home to Jews for more than three thousand years, yet tries to find ways to keep on doing business with a country such as Iran that is not only trying to establish its hegemony throughout the Middle East, but is also the serial violator of just about every human right imaginable. The only conclusion one can come to is that Europe would evidently still like to kill the Jews and is happy to support those wishing to kill them.

“In February [2018], Canadian Iranian academic and environmental activist Kavous Seyyed Emami died in Evin prison following his arbitrary arrest two weeks earlier. Authorities claimed he committed suicide and refused to release his body unless his family agreed to an immediate burial without an independent autopsy.” — Amnesty International.

The list of unspeakable human rights violations committed by Iran’s regime is lengthy; however, by far the most disturbing seems the cruelty enacted against children.

Now is the time for the EU to halt its appeasement policy with a regime that does not hesitate to flog people — publicly, as a message to others — torture any citizen they choose to target, enact cruel punishments such as amputation without a fair trial, and execute children just starting their lives. These are acts that should be condemned — not condoned through the pursuit of appeasement policies, moral depravity and raw greed.

According to a report published by Amnesty International on February 26, the human rights situation in Iran has “severely deteriorated”. Why then does the European Union continue to pursue appeasement policies with a regime that has an excruciating human rights record? Sadly, Europe — in spite its endless moral preening and self-righteousness — seems to have become the world most immoral player — if it was not already. The European Union, for instance, unjustly singles out for bullying the only liberal, democratic, human-rights-abiding country in the Middle East: Israel. Not Turkey for occupying Northern Cyprus, China for obliterating Tibet, or Pakistan for occupying Kashmir. Europe and the corrupt United Nations do not lay a glove on the real perpetrators of crimes against humanity such as China, Cuba, Russia, Turkey, North Korea, Nigeria or Sudan, to name just a few.

https://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/socialism-dies-in-the-darkness/

“A major power outage hit crisis-stricken Venezuela on Thursday, according to Reuters … a problem the government of President Nicolas Maduro quickly blamed on ‘sabotage’ at a hydroelectric dam that provides much of the country’s power.” National life ground to a standstill, telecommunications — including the Internet — stopped working, hospitals were plunged into darkness and cities of millions lay helpless without electricity.

As the outage continued into Friday spreading to every Venezuelan state, it became clear this was going to become the biggest of all blackouts yet and Maduro’s officials increasingly pointed a finger at the United States. But the national electric grid had also been teetering for a long time. “Crumbling infrastructure and lack of investments have hit Venezuela’s power supply for years.” Outages had become a way of life and there was no easy way of proving this wasn’t ‘sabotage’ but only more of the same dysfunction.

The government has blamed the outages on a variety of things — including pesky animals. In an Oct. 20 tweet, Energy Minister Luis Motta Dominguez named “rats, mice, snakes, cats, squirrels” as possible culprits in shorting out lines. He added: “In the list of animals mentioned above, of course iguanas are included.”

Critics, however, say insufficient investment by the government is the cause, following the 2007 nationalization of the electricity sector.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273085/bravest-man-africa-stephen-brown

There are few people who announce their candidacy for their country’s presidency only days after being released from prison. But anti-slavery activist and slave descendant Biram Dah Abeid is an exceptional man facing exceptional circumstances.

“I am from the servile community that makes up 50 per cent of the population (of Mauritania),” said Dah Obeid, a lawyer. “Twenty percent of the fifty percent have been born as property of other men. We were inherited by other people.”

Abeid, a prominent and fearless anti-slavery activist who has been jailed and tortured numerous times in his struggle to abolish slavery in the Islamic Republic of Mauritania, was released from prison last December 31, having been incarcerated on “an order from above.” Only days later, he again announced his candidacy, having also run for president in Mauritania’s 2014 federal election.

At that time, Dah Abeid, who heads the anti-slavery organization Initiative for the Resurgence of the Abolitionist Movement (IRA), presented Mauritanians with the extraordinary and ground-shaking sight of a slave descendant (his father was a freed slave while his mother and uncles remained slaves) under sentence of death of a sharia court and imprisoned numerous times standing for president. Nevertheless, he won eight per cent of the vote, coming in second. Abdel Aziz, a former army general, won with 81.94, not unusual for an African dictatorship.

“We are the only ones to have a different ideological position,” Dah Obeid told Le Courier de Sahel during that campaign. “We are fighting against slavery, against racism, against government waste and corruption.”

Jeremy Keenan, a professorial research associate at the School of Africa and Oriental Studies at the University of London stated the reason for Aziz’s overwhelming victory: “Mauritanian elections under President Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz are neither free, fair nor transparent.”

http://thefederalist.com/2019/03/07/labour-partys-response-anti-semitism-accusations-appears-confirm/

As reported here, almost a dozen people have recently left the United Kingdom’s Labour Party over what they have labeled its “culture of anti-Semitism.”

The Labour Party’s latest attempts at quelling accusations of anti-Semitism have done little to put the allegations to rest. If anything, Labour Party’s response this past week to the party’s recent exodus of members of Parliament (MPs), as well as leaked material from the past year, suggest the party’s leadership has little genuine desire to address the issue and that, more darkly, the accusations are likely true. Neither situation bodes well for the party.

A recording leaked from a recent grassroots meeting reveals the depth of the party’s depravity, and the challenges it will likely face as it attempts to correct course. In response to the defections, Chris Williamson, an MP for Derby North, delivered a speech where he celebrated the defection of MP Joan Ryan, who left the Labour Party due to the party’s growing anti-Semitism problem. In explaining her departure, Ryan had reiterated, “The Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn has become infected with the scourge of anti-Jewish racism. The problem simply did not exist in the party before his election as leader.”

But what sparked even greater ire were Williamson’s comments regarding the party’s anti-Semitism problem, about which he felt the party had been “too apologetic”: “I have got to say I think our party’s response has been partly responsible for that because in my opinion… we have backed off on too much, we have given too much ground, we have been too apologetic.” Williamson also claimed that anti-Semitism was being “weaponized,” decrying that it was “like 1984.”

http://swtotd.blogspot.com/

A series of emotions were exposed as this essay emerged from a blank piece of paper: thankfulness for being born where and when I was; concern as to whether we truly understand the meaning of service and sacrifice; and scorn for our current attitude of trivializing victimhood, which now include those who hear words they find hurtful. Sydney Williams

“Six million of our people live on in our hearts. We are their eyes that remember.We are their voice that cries out. The dreadful scenes flow from their dead eyes to our open ones. And those scenes will be remembered exactly as they happen. Shimon Peres (1923-2016) Former Prime Minister and President of Israel                                               

The American Transcendentalist Theodore Parker (1810-1860) was an abolitionist and reforming minister of the Unitarian Church. He is, perhaps, best remembered for a quote, since borrowed by others, most notably Martin Luther King and Barack Obama. The quote came from a sermon delivered in 1853, when the scourge of slavery still blemished the character of the American Republic. His words would have been wistful, even fatuous, to the more than three million Americans still then enslaved: “Look at the facts of the world. You see a continual and progressive triumph of the right. I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends toward justice.” Grand words – and perhaps true given enough time – but little solace for those who suffer the evil of man’s cruelty to man.

There are places we visit where we express gratitude for the sacrifices made by a few for the many: Arlington National Cemetery, the Thiepval Memorial to the Missing at the Somme, the American Cemetery at Normandy, the USS Arizona Memorial in Pearl Harbor and the Florence American Cemetery, where 326 GIs from the 10th Mountain Division lie, including Juan Barrientos from my father’s squad whose grave I have visited. There are other memorials dedicated to the deliberate, pre-planned evil that man has inflicted on man, like the memorial to the victims of 9/11. These tend to be less grand, but more poignant, like Memorial Hall in Nanking, dedicated to the victims of the Japanese massacre in 1937, the memorial to the Holodomor victims in Ukraine, the Wall of Grief in Moscow that memorializes those killed in Stalin’s Gulags, the Choeung Ek Memorial in Cambodia to victims of the Khmer Rouge and the Kigali Genocide Memorial in Rwanda. Sadly, there are other examples of man’s inhumanity to man for which there are no memorials, such as the estimated thirty million Chinese who died during Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward.

In Europe, there are places of remembrance for the more than six million Jews killed during Hitler’s reign of terror. More than two dozen concentration camps in Germany, Poland, Ukraine, Latvia, Holland and Austria are open to visitors. They sit as reminders of what man is capable. In Berlin, there is the spacious Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe and in Vienna a small memorial; but both seem inadequate to the horrors Nazis inflicted. But the one in Prague is different.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13842/palestinians-arrest-torture-journalists

The Palestinian Journalists Syndicate, a body dominated by Fatah loyalists, condemned the arrest of Hazem Nasser and called for his immediate release. The syndicate pointed out that Nasser had been summoned for interrogation by the Palestinian Authority (PA) security forces several times in the past few weeks despite the fact that he did not commit any crime.

In the world of the PA and Hamas, the only “good” journalists are those who report negatively about Israel. Independent journalists therefore find themselves forced to seek work in non-Palestinian media organizations, including some in Israel. Even then, these journalists, especially those who live under the PA and Hamas, engage in massive self-censorship.

What is hard to understand are the continued closed mouths of the international community and media towards this ongoing assault on the freedom of the media in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Had Nasser and Abu Arafeh been arrested by the Israeli authorities, their “plight” would have been splashed over headlines across the globe.

The Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank is continuing its unremitting security crackdown on Palestinian journalists, particularly on those who are not affiliated with Mahmoud Abbas’s ruling Fatah faction. Scores of journalists have been arrested or summoned by the PA in the West Bank on a regular basis in the past few years. In the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip, Palestinian journalists are facing a similar campaign of intimidation and harassment.

In the past few days, another two journalists, Hazem Nasser and Amer Abu Arafeh, were arrested by the PA security forces — and not for the first time. Nasser, who is from the city of Tulkarem, and Abu Arafeh, who is from Hebron, have, in fact, become “frequent visitors” of PA detention centers and interrogation rooms.

The incarceration of Nasser and Abu Arafeh brings to 16 the number of Palestinian journalists who have been arrested or summoned for interrogation by the PA security forces in the West Bank and Hamas in the Gaza Strip just since the beginning of this year.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/03/06/must

Britain, in recent days, has had a rare distraction from its seemingly endless Brexit debate. The distraction, however, has not been an altogether welcome one. It involves the case of Shamima Begum, one of a number of girls who left their school in Bethnal Green in London in 2015 to go and join ISIS.

Back then, in 2015, the story of the Bethnal Green schoolgirls was headline news. Many British people were genuinely shocked that anyone—let alone young women at the start of their lives—would find ISIS’s promise of a Caliphate so alluring that they would leave the comforts of their friends, family, and country in the UK to go to join the group. There was much national debate about this. Various people, including some of the girls’ family members, blamed the British police and security services for not stopping the girls from leaving the UK. Ironically, the people who blamed the police—including the lawyer representing the girls’ families—were often precisely the same people as those who had spent previous years urging Muslims in Britain not to cooperate with the British police. How exactly the British police were either to blame, or to find any way to “win” in such a situation, was never explained. It was just one of many paradoxes thrown up in these circumstances.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13840/north-korea-discussion

It may be the North Korean leadership wants only to survive, keep its nuclear weapons, and work to secure sufficient funds to take care of its ruling elite — and wait for the day that US forces leave the peninsula.

What if North Korea regarded its nuclear program as the very leverage necessary to bargain concessions from the US and South Korea? What if the goal were to secure an extremely important concession — the removal of US military forces from the Korean peninsula, a goal long-sought, put on the table before North Korea even acquired nuclear weapons?

The Trump administration took office after eight years of “strategic patience,” which led only to more North Korean missiles, nuclear bombs and weapons shipments to terror states. The proponents of these policies — having failed miserably — now lecture the Trump administration about what America’s North Korean policy should be. They seem, however, unwilling to see that the very nature of the discussion has now been changed — to a necessary focus on North Korea’s nuclear capability and not on the US military presence or ostensible US “hostile policy” in the region.

The rationale for the summits between US President Donald Trump and North Korea’s Chairman Kim Jong-Un may well be misunderstood by the critics of the American administration. By meeting with the North Korean leader, the administration is seeking to change the “accepted” narrative about the Korean peninsula and Western Pacific, just as it has with respect to the Middle East.

Whether the administration can be successful is an open question, but changes already secured in the Middle East give support to the administration’s strategy and goals.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13838/aid-organizations-jihadists-syria

It appears that many radical Islamists in Turkey have established an international network to sustain the jihadist terrorists in Syria.

Because this network operates under the guise of “charity,” European governments are having difficulty monitoring its activities — particularly in jihadist-controlled territory — and holding the perpetrators to account.

“We get most of our donations from abroad through the bank accounts we share on social media,” Fukara-Der’s president Hasan Süslü said in a 2014 interview. “And most of the donations are from the Netherlands, Germany and Belgium.”

Turkish police recently raided the homes of, and detained, more than a dozen nationals suspected of “joining conflicts in Syria, providing logistics and money, and recruiting for [terrorist] organizations.”

Four days after the raids, which were carried out on January 13, all thirteen detainees were released — eleven of them pending trial and the other two on judicial control. The Turkish government-run Anadolu Agency, which reported on the detentions, later removed the story from its website and social media pages.

Among the detainees was Hasan Süslü, president of the NGO Fukara-Der (Aid and Solidarity Association for the Poor), suspected of aiding Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) — a coalition of al Qaeda-affiliated groups, formerly known as the al Nusra Front, and currently the dominant jihadist force in Idlib in northern Syria.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/sincerely-emmanuel-11551831254

As political campaign tactics go, we’ve seen better than the open letter that French President Emmanuel Macron sent this week laying out a pan-Europe agenda ahead of May’s European Parliament elections. He manages to combine bad ideas with off-putting self-promotion.

Mr. Macron is trying to rally voters around a centrist, “pro-European” message amid fears that euroskeptic parties could win a third or more of the seats in the next parliament. Violent protests against a fuel-tax hike at home have thwarted Mr. Macron’s effort to build a pan-European political movement, so he’s making do with the letter published in newspapers across the Continent in 22 languages. His platform is “freedom, protection and progress.”

Some ideas are merely impractical. European voters increasingly demand more effective border enforcement, especially after 2015’s migration crisis. Mr. Macron’s call for more stringent border controls around the passport-free European Schengen zone may resonate. But his demand for more burden-sharing in processing asylum claimants will flop. Voters in Poland don’t want to be obliged to house migrants that countries such as Germany or Italy have welcomed or proven powerless to stop.