RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://pjmedia.com/homeland-security/a-trump-of-ones-own/

Here’s one reason to hold out some hope for 2019. On January 9 — while the British political class continued to bungle Brexit, French officials kept battling the gilets jaunes, and leaders across Europe persisted in waving the EU flag and waving in armies of Muslim immigrants — Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini went to Warsaw and, at a press conference with Polish Interior Minister Joachim Brudziński, envisioned Italy and Poland as ushering in a new “European spring” to challenge the primacy of the “Germany-France axis.”

The Guardian spelled out to readers just how they should feel about this “European spring.” Identifying Salvini — in the first two sentences of its article, mind you — as a “far-right interior minister” who seeks “far-right alliances” and leads “the far-right League” (later in the piece, Marine Le Pen, too, was labeled “far-right”), Guardian scribe Angela Giuffrida was quick to add that Salvini’s party and Brudziński’s “share similar anti-immigration, anti-Muslim and Eurosceptic views.”

It would be fairer, of course, to say “anti-Islam” here rather than “anti-Muslim,” and to describe Salvini and Brudziński not as “anti-immigration” but, rather, as opposed to suicidal immigration policies that have flooded much of Western Europe not with potential Nobel Prize winners but with likely rapists, Jew-beaters, gay-bashers, and lifelong welfare recipients, not to mention more than a few would-be jihadists and cheerleaders of terror.

Salvini further declared that if Europe follows along the path charted by himself and Brudziński, which involves “strengthening borders,” it might well experience a “renaissance of European values” and reverse the severe damage done to the continent by bureaucrats in Brussels and in the various national capitals. To any American, needless to say, this rhetoric will sound very familiar. And indeed, the fact is that while the Western European political class and its allies love to sneer at Donald Trump, millions of ordinary citizens across the continent wish dearly that they had a Trump of their own.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272521/beirut-paris-middle-east-joseph-puder

Lebanon has not had a functioning government since May of 2018. The reason? Squabbling among the various sectarian groups over ministerial posts. In the meantime, Lebanon’s national debt has soared to $84 billion or 155 percent of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP). The unemployment rate, too has risen to 36 percent.

Frustrated by the prolonged political bickering of the politicians, public-sector agencies and businesses throughout Lebanon staged a strike last week expressing their anger over the economic downturn, which has been crippled by the eight months absence of a functional government. Beirut’s port was closed along with state institutions such as the National Social Security Fund, the electricity company, and the Rafic Hariri International Airport experienced hour long stoppages. The strike was called by the General Confederation of Lebanese Workers, with the backing of the new cross-sectarian Sabaa Party.

Nabih Berri, Lebanon’s Parliament Speaker, called on (January 9, 2019) the Arab League economic summit scheduled to take place in Beirut at the end of the month, to be postponed due to Lebanon’s failure to agree on a new government. The Shiite-Muslim leader also asserted “the necessity of having Syria participate in such a summit.” The Arab League suspended Syria’s membership following the Assad regime crackdown and butchery of protesters against the Bashar al-Assad regime.

At the birth of modern Lebanon in 1943, the National Pact established a parliamentary allocation of seats based on a 1932 census, which gave Christians a 6-to-5 ratio. In 1990, the ratio changed to a 50/50 allocation of parliamentary seats. Nevertheless, according to the National Pact and established customs, the President of Lebanon is always a Christian Maronite, the Prime Minister is always a Sunni-Muslim, and the Speaker of the Parliament is always a Shiite-Muslim.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13561/palestinians-women-torture

This is the kind of story that the “State of Palestine” does not intend to raise during its chairmanship of the largest bloc of developing countries at the UN. It seems that, from the point of view of the Palestinian Authority leadership, Jbara’s ordeal does not fall within the category of human rights.

Jbara’s story has barely attracted the attention of the international mainstream media. As far as many foreign journalists covering the Middle East are concerned, a Palestinian woman complaining about torture in a Palestinian prison is not newsworthy. Had she been detained by Israel, Jbara would have most likely made it to the front pages of the world’s leading newspapers and magazines in a matter of minutes.

The PA regularly complains about human rights violations of Palestinians held in Israeli prison for security-related offenses. But when the PA’s own security forces detain and torture a mother of three, Palestinian leaders are found elsewhere — like at the helm of a UN bloc.

A Palestinian mother of three has accused the Palestinian Authority (PA) security forces of torturing her and threatening to rape her during the two months she was held in a PA prison in the West Bank.

The accusation by the woman, Suha Jbara, 31, came on the eve of PA President Mahmoud Abbas’s visit to New York, where he is scheduled to assume the chairmanship of the largest bloc of developing countries in the United Nations, known as the “Group of 77 and China.”

As chairman of the group, which represents 134 nations, Abbas and the “State of Palestine” will negotiate and co-sponsor proposals and amendments on various developmental, humanitarian and legal issues that are on the agenda of the UN.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13541/turkey-erdogan-syria-withdrawal

In May 2015, the secular daily newspaper Cumhuriyet published on its front page a video and photographic evidence of arms deliveries by the Turkish intelligence services to Islamist groups in Syria. A month later, President Erdoğan himself filed a criminal complaint against Cumhuriyet’s editor-in-chief and said, “He who ran this story will pay heavily for it.”

Clearly, Erdoğan’s “militarily speaking, the so-called Islamic State has been defeated in Syria. Yet we are deeply concerned that some outside powers may use the organization’s remnants as an excuse to meddle in Syria’s internal affairs” means “outside powers should not meddle in Syria but Turkey should.”

Erdoğan’s plan is merely about substituting jihadists hostile to him with ones friendly to him.

Shortly after President Donald Trump’s controversial decision to pull out U.S. troops from Syria, a move that exorbitantly pleased Turkey, Russia and Iran, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, in a charm offensive, wrote an op-ed piece for the New York Times, entitled, “Trump Is Right on Syria. Turkey Can Get the Job Done.”

Turkey, Erdoğan claims, is the only country with the power and commitment to perform that task of protecting the interests of the United States, the international community and the Syrian people.

This claim is grossly wrong. Despite some convergences, Turkey’s interests in the Syrian theater are widely different than those of the Western bloc of countries. Turkey’s ambitions over the future of Syria are largely sectarian (pro-Sunni) and, therefore, a good recipe for further violence in civil war-torn Syria and the potential slaughter of the Kurds, a job Turkey can get done.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272545/rahafs-saudi-family-will-never-ever-stop-coming-phyllis-chesler

Reprinted from Israel National News

Rahaf Mohammed Alqunun, a Saudi teenager, has just tried to save her own life—and in so doing, has risked death for shaming her family and her country.

Rahaf fled her family vacation in Kuwait, took a plane to Bangkok, barricaded herself in her hotel room at the airport and began posting about her plight on social media. She demanded political asylum.

Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition. In this case, the ammunition is digital and governmental.

Via her smartphone, Rahaf claimed that she had renounced Islam and that her family would surely kill her if she was returned to them. Rahaf obtained 90,000 followers on Twitter. The media began to cover her plight.

The Thai government had been about to deport her back to the family which Rahaf claimed had beaten and imprisoned her for up to six months at a time for minor, alleged offenses. And then, it changed its mind and allowed Rahaf to meet with an official from the UN’s refugee agency (U.N.H.C.R.).

Rahaf wanted asylum in either Australia or Canada and both countries considered her request even as she was being vetted for “refugee” status.

But make no mistake. She remains in real and terrible danger. She has shut down her Twitter account due to death threats. Her family will never, ever stop coming after her.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/01/china_dystopia_in_power.html

This debate has become even more heated, given some disturbing changes in China of late and the emergence of an American president seemingly willing to challenge Beijing’s accustomed rapacious way of doing business with the West. What has happened in China, in short, is a remarkable strengthening of the state-owned sector and therefore communist party rule under Xi Jinping, who came to power in 2012. According to The State Strikes Back: The End of Economic Reform in China? by Nicholas Lardy of the Peterson Institute, while in 2013, 57% of bank loans went to private companies and 35% to state-owned firms, under Xi, in 2016, these percentages were dramatically reversed to 83% for state firms and only 11% for private companies, despite the fact that most state-owned companies were loss-making and inefficient compared to private ones. Finally, in perhaps the best example of the new ascendancy of the Communist Party yet, the party changed its succession rules in 2018 to allow Xi to become president for life – a clean break with Deng’s admonition not to allow another disastrous cult of personality of the party chairman like that of Mao.

Very little of this has seen the light in America’s mainstream media, which have been happy to project yet another Trump defeat in his “trade war” with China. In this, the media are uncannily similar to Walter Duranty of the New York Times and assorted leftist “political pilgrims” who could see nothing wrong with “Uncle Joe” Stalin and his murderous regime while they starved and murdered millions. Fortunately, history cannot be falsified forever, even by the Times, and eventually, books like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago and Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror and The Harvest of Sorrow appeared to provide a measure of historical justice to the victims.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13560/italy-anti-eu-axis

“Today begins a journey that will continue in the coming months for a different Europe, for a change of the European Commission, of European policies, which puts at the center the right to life, work, health, safety, all that the European elites, financed by [billionaire Hungarian philanthropist George] Soros and represented by Macron, deny….” — Matteo Salvini, Italian Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of the Interior.

“Both President Macron and Mrs. Merkel have expressed frustration at the rise of populism and nationalism, and at Europe’s dithering in the face of problems such as climate change and mass migration….” — The Times.

“The only certainty I have of the European elections is that the socialists and the communists will always be less in Brussels — they have already done enough damage….” — Matteo Salvini.

Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini is leading an effort to create a pan-European populist alliance to challenge the pro-European establishment over the future of the European Union. The aim is to reclaim sovereignty from unelected bureaucrats in Brussels and transfer key EU powers back to national capitals.

Germany and France, the self-appointed guardians of European integration, are responding to the challenge with an ambitious counterplan to make the European Union a “more decisive power on the world stage.”

The showdown, which threatens to split the European Union down the middle between Eurosceptic nationalists and Europhile globalists, will heat up in coming weeks and months, ahead of elections for the European Parliament in late May 2019.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272463/checking-sweden-bruce-bawer

I’ve told this one before. Back in 2005, Mona Sahlin, who from 2002 to 2004 had served as Sweden’s minister of integration, told an audience at a Swedish mosque that many native Swedes envied them, because, she said, immigrants have real cultures and histories while Swedes have only “silliness” such as the commemoration of Midsummer Night. Later that year, at a debate on integration policy, the Norwegian activist Hege Storhaug asked Lise Bergh, who had succeeded to the post of Swedish minister of integration, whether Swedish culture was worth preserving. Blithely, Bergh replied: “Well, what is Swedish culture? And by saying that, I think I’ve answered the question.”

Those two appalling comments reflect a mentality – one that is shared, unfortunately, by a great many Swedes – that goes a long way toward explaining the breathtakingly self-destructive policies that, over the last few decades, have sent Sweden barreling down the road toward cultural self-annihilation. Of course, other Western European countries are headed down the same road, but they aren’t moving quite so quickly and eagerly, and with such a fatuous, pathetic air of self-satisfaction, toward their grim fate. The difference lies entirely in that Swedish mentality. Even more than most other Western Europeans, Swedes, especially the self-consciously sophisticated urban elites, are possessed of a degree of self-abnegation that is nothing short of pathological.

Consider this. In the U.S., we have “Native Americans.” Canada has the “First Nations.” Australia has its “aborigines.” What all these peoples have in common is that they were there first. In Sweden, the native peoples, the ur-folk, are, needless to say, the Swedes themselves. There are ten million of them, and they’ve been there for millennia. But when establishment journalists and politicians in Sweden refer to their country’s “indigenous people,” they’re not talking about themselves. No, they’re talking about the 20,000 Sami (also known as Lapps or Laplanders) who live way up in the far northern reaches of Sweden, tending reindeer and wearing funny red outfits.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/01/free_speech_is_dead_in_canada_the_persecution_of_christian_activist_bill_whatcott.html

In the past year, I witnessed two frightening assaults on free speech by a kangaroo “justice” system. This wasn’t in some banana republic, North Korea, or China; it was in Canada. These were gut-wrenching experiences for me.

These stories from Canada are potent warnings to the U.S.

If Congress and more states pass anti-discrimination “equality” laws giving special protection to LGBTQ identities, “hate speech” prosecutions and compelled speech will surely follow.

There can be no doubt of that, given the LGBT-driven lawsuits we have already seen against florists, bakers, and wedding photographers. The Civil Rights Commission of Colorado has tried to compel speech from Jack Phillips of Masterpiece Cakeshop. We’re seeing numerous battles over bathroom use and forced use of silly pronouns in our media, colleges, and public schools. The EEOC already interprets Title VII (employment) to protect employees from “sexual orientation” discrimination.

So, we’re already on that totalitarian road; Canada is just farther along.

An Enemy of the Canadian State

The victim of Canada’s repressive “injustice” system is Bill Whatcott, a pro-family born-again Christian activist. He is about to have his life ruined by the courts in Canada (with fines, possible jail time, ruined employment prospects, social ostracism). But he will not bend to tyranny and is standing for free speech.

Whatcott’s two ongoing cases are discussed below.

December 2018: His “hate speech” hearing before the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal (with further court action pending). Hundreds of thousands in fines may be assessed.
2019: His ongoing $104-million lawsuit in Toronto for a “hate crime” (preceded by his June 2018 arrest on a national criminal warrant).

What terrible “hate crimes” did Whatcott commit? The Orwellian tyrants in Canada deem it criminal to speak the truth about transgender ideology and the health hazards of homosexuality. Furthermore, he speaks from the unwanted Christian viewpoint. Then he adds a dash of humor. And so he has become an Enemy of the State in Canada.