RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/guatemala-gives-the-u-n-the-boot-11547411965?cx_testId=16&cx_testVariant=cx&cx_artPos=0&cx_tag=collabctx&cx_navSource=newsReel#cxrecs_s

While President Trump has been tangling with Congress over security solutions along the U.S. southern border, the United Nations has provoked a political crisis in Guatemala. The U.S. is unlikely to make progress on the former without paying attention to the latter.

The U.N.’s Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala, or CICIG, began work in 2007 with a mandate to investigate illicit security forces and clandestine organizations and to support the Guatemalan attorney general in prosecuting organized crime. Yet in 11 years, CICIG has secured precious few successful prosecutions and none among high-level politicians.

Meanwhile it has undermined confidence in the Guatemalan justice system, and CICIG Commissioner Iván Velásquez has become a lightning rod for controversy. Last Monday Guatemalan President Jimmy Morales gave the commission 24 hours to leave the country. CICIG complied—for now.

According to people familiar with the matter, the Morales government had brought credible complaints to U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres about CICIG witness tampering, illegal negotiations with convicted criminals, and prolonged, illegal preventive detention as a form of psychological torture. It complained that a CICIG official publicly stated that the commission is above the Guatemalan Constitution.

Stéphane Dujarric, the U.N. secretary-general’s spokesman, told me by email on Thursday that the U.N. doesn’t believe CICIG is above the constitution. But he said “the management and running of the commission are the responsibility of the Commissioner. Questions relating to personnel should be addressed to the Commission itself.” In the U.N.’s eyes, Mr. Velásquez answers to no higher power.

Mr. Morales wanted Mr. Velásquez replaced. One person familiar with the matter told me that the secretary-general gave his word to Mr. Morales in September that within two weeks the U.N. would provide names of three candidates to take over the job.

According to Mr. Dujarric, the secretary-general “had proposed the appointment of a CICIG Deputy Commissioner. The President of Guatemala had expressed his agreement with such a plan, as had Commissioner Velásquez.”

The U.N. version of events may well be true. But by last week, Mr. Velásquez still had not been replaced. On Jan. 5, a CICIG employee who had been expelled by the Guatemalan government for security reasons forced his way back into the country. Two days later the foreign minister announced CICIG had to leave.

CICIG supporters claim the commission was close to exposing rampant corruption by Mr. Morales. But he has been in office since January 2016, and CICIG has launched only two formal investigations that might affect him. Neither involves a serious crime.

In the first case, the president’s brother and son were found to have made false invoices for 564 Christmas gift baskets sold to the National Property Registry Office in 2013. Multiple invoices seem to have been drafted at the request of the government office to hide the aggregate value of the purchase (roughly $30,000) because it would have triggered the need for a bidding process.

This is an administrative violation, hardly the heist of the century. Even so, CICIG locked up the president’s relatives for 35 days in January 2017. The case still hasn’t been resolved.

A second case concerns the hiring, by Morales backers, of poll watchers for his National Convergence Front party during the 2015 presidential election. The party didn’t record this “in kind” donation worth roughly $1 million.

This was probably also an administrative violation. Regardless, Congress has already said that there is insufficient evidence against Mr. Morales in the case to warrant the removal of his immunity. There is another alleged campaign-finance violation, but there has been no formal accusation. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://worldisraelnews.com/watch-venezuela-exposed-as-hotbed-for-hezbollah-terr

Venezuela is not only plagued by economic hardship and political strife, is has also been infiltrated major terror groups like Hezbollah, which use the unstable Latin American dictatorship as a staging ground for training and narcotics trafficking according to an exclusive interview granted by an underground fighter to the Israel media.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/paris-police-use-water-cannon-to-battle-growing-yellow-vest-protests/

Another weekend, another massive series of protests across France by demonstrators wearing yellow vests, as Paris police were forced to use tear gas and water cannons to keep demonstrators away from the Arc de Triomphe monument.

The government says the protests were larger than last week’s and hundreds of people were arrested.

Reuters:

Thousands of protesters in Paris marched noisily but mostly peacefully through the Grands Boulevards shopping area in northern Paris, close to where a massive gas explosion in a bakery killed two firefighters and a Spanish tourist and injured nearly 50 people early on Saturday.

But small groups of demonstrators broke away from the designated route and threw bottles and other projectiles at the police.

Around the 19th-century Arc de Triomphe at the top of the Champs Elysees boulevard, riot police fired water cannon and tear gas at militant protesters after being pelted with stones and paint, witnesses said.

Groups of protesters also gathered on and around the Champs Elysees, the scene of disturbances in recent weeks, many of them calling loudly for Macron to resign.

“Macron, we are going to tear down your place!” one banner read.

The Interior Ministry estimated that there were a maximum of about 84,000 demonstrators nationwide on Saturday – more than the 50,000 counted last week but well below the record 282,000 estimated on Nov. 17, the first day of the protests.

In Paris, the ministry counted 8,000 demonstrators, more than in the past two weekends, when authorities tallied just 3,500 people on Jan. 5 and only 800 on Dec. 29.

The government has been toughening its rhetoric against the demonstrators in recent weeks and has deployed 80,00 police to contain them.

Bourges authorities said nearly 5,000 yellow vests stuck to the designated demonstration area. The historical city center was off-limits for demonstrators, but some 500 protesters made their way to the center where they scuffled with police and set garbage bins on fire.

Many businesses in Bourges had boarded themselves up to avoid damage and authorities had removed street furniture and building site materials that could be used for barricades.

In Strasbourg, up to 2,000 demonstrators gathered in front of the European Parliament building and later marched to the center of the city on the Rhine river border with Germany. No serious violence or looting was reported there.

More than 80,000 police were on duty for the protests nationwide, including 5,000 in Paris.