RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.ruthfullyyours.com/?s=AUGUSTO+ZIMMERMAN October 18

This was posted last week-
Augusto Zimmermann : Brazil’s Crime

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/10/brazils-crime/

It is not the jaw-dropping murder rate or endemic corruption which marks every aspect of public life and office in the South America nation, for they are but symptoms of the greater affliction: decade upon decade of left-wing government. Reformer Jair Bolsonaro aims to change that.

I had the chance to meet Mr Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s leading presidential candidate, about two decades ago. He is now on the verge of a significant victory in a run-off to be held on October 28. Back in those days, Bolsonaro was a city councillor in Rio de Janeiro and I was starting my professional career as a legal academic. His wife, one of my law students, invited me to join them for lunch at the City Council. I spoke with Bolsonaro for about 30 minutes and my interaction with him was rather pleasant and insightful. He clearly demonstrated love for his family and for the country. The brief conversation was enough to convince me that he was a different politician — completely different from the usual Brazilian politician normally inclined to embrace a leftist view of the world.

Bolsonaro has always been labelled ‘far right’ by the Brazilian media. This is a label usually given to anyone who opposes such things as the radical feminist lobby and/or the LGBTQI agenda. Bolsonaro apparently is very ‘far right’ because he also sees a few positive aspects in the military regime that ruled over the country from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s. Above all, he is called a ‘fascist’ because he wishes to fight crime and to introduce policies that can somehow address the breakdown of law and order in Brazil. Above all, Bolsonaro is deeply hated by those who reject his correlation between the rampant levels of criminality and the disorder caused by the incapacity of successive let-wing governments to protect the people from dangerous criminals.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271776/after-pittsburgh-synagogue-massacre-anti-semites-ari-lieberman

Sabbath for me represents a day of rest and time to spend with my family. I do not access the internet, listen to radio or watch TV. For one day of the week, I take it upon myself to completely distance myself from the problems of the world. As a result, I did not hear of the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre until after sunset.

Aside from the horrific magnitude of the attack, two things immediately jumped out at me. The first was the advanced age of the victims, which included 97-year-old Rose Mallinger. This aspect of the dreadful slaughter reminded me of the Park Hotel Massacre when on the evening of March 27, 2002, during the start of the Jewish holiday of Passover, a Palestinian terrorist entered the dining area of the Park Hotel located in the resort city of Netanya, and detonated his shrapnel-laced bomb. The massive explosion killed thirty holiday-goers most of whom, like in Pittsburgh, were elderly.

The second thing that struck me was the sheer disingenuousness and hypocrisy of well-known anti-Semitic leaders and groups looking to score political points on the backs of dead Jewish victims. The Hamas terrorist organization, which has the blood of thousands of Jewish victims on its hands contemptibly said it was, “sorry to hear about the terror attack,” and then outrageously linked the attack to legitimate efforts undertaken by Israel to defend her citizenry.

Hamas’s enablers like Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan joined in on the action and issued faux condolences. Erdoğan is an anti-Semite to his core. He has dabbled with Holocaust revisionism, has compared Israel to Nazi Germany, claimed that Israel committed “genocide” against the Palestinians, alleged that Israel along with Jewish intellectual Bernard Henri Levy engineered the coup that saw the overthrow of Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood leader, Mohammed Morsi, and linked Jews to the fomenting of the 2013 Gezi Park riots.

Joining the chorus of fake expressions of sympathy was the Palestinian Authority, whose noxious octogenarian leader Mahmoud Abbas, is a confirmed Holocaust denier. On April 30, 2018 he publicly stated in a rambling televised address that the Holocaust was not the result of inherent German anti-Semitism but was rather brought upon by the Jews themselves due to their “social behavior” and alleged usurious conduct. Some other gems of his longwinded speech included the claim that Hitler was a Zionist sympathizer (a claim that has been regurgitated in British Labour Party circles), that Ashkenazi Jews are fake and descendants of the Khazars, and that Jews are not indigenous to Israel but are rather a foreign colonialist implant. In his 1982 dissertation Abbas alleged that gas chambers were never used to asphyxiate Jews and dismissed as a “fantastic lie” that six million Jews perished in the Holocaust. He claimed that the figure was less than 1,000,000.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271763/now-its-official-europeans-cant-criticize-islam-bruce-bawer

Founded in 1949 and headquartered in Strasbourg, the Council of Europe – which today counts every European state except Belarus and Vatican City as a member – is supposed to be a guardian of democracy and human rights. That’s its official raison d’être. It is separate from the European Union, and its court, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), whose judges are elected by the Council of Europe’s Parliamentary Assembly (a legislative body whose 324 members are drawn from Europe’s national parliaments), should not be confused with the EU’s European Court of Justice (ECJ). It began hearing cases and handing down verdicts in 1959.

How many Europeans are even aware of the Council of Europe’s existence – or, if they are, could explain what it does? How many know the difference between the ECHR and the ECJ? Relatively few, I suspect. But this is par for the course in Europe, where the elected governments, in the decades since World War II, have built up a network of international bodies that wield considerable power while operating in the shadows with little or no accountability to the people. Guardian of democracy, indeed.

All of this dry information is by way of prefacing news of a sensational and sobering verdict that was handed down by the ECHR last week. Although the full name of the petitioner is not mentioned – she is identified only as an Austrian woman with the initials “E.S.” – the case, as Robert Spencer has noted, is obviously that of Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff, who in 2011 was convicted in her native country of “disparaging religious doctrines” for having stated, in seminars entitled “Basic Information on Islam” that she held in October and November 2009, that Muhammed, the prophet of Islam, was a pedophile. Of course, any minimally knowledgeable student of that religion knows that, according to the canonical records of Muhammed’s life that are known as hadith, he wed his wife Aisha when she was a child of six and (perfect male role model that he was) waited until she was nine to consummate the marriage.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13204/european-court-human-rights-sharia

The European Court of Human Rights — which has jurisdiction over 47 European countries, and whose rulings are legally binding on all 28 member states of the European Union — has effectively legitimized an Islamic blasphemy code in the interests of “preserving religious peace” in Europe.

The ruling effectively establishes a dangerous legal precedent, one that authorizes European states to curtail the right to free speech if such speech is deemed to be offensive to Muslims and thus pose a threat to religious peace.

“In other words, my right to speak freely is less important than protecting the religious feelings of others.” – Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff.

The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has ruled that criticism of Mohammed, the founder of Islam, constitutes incitement to hatred and therefore is not protected free speech.

With its unprecedented decision, the Strasbourg-based court — which has jurisdiction over 47 European countries, and whose rulings are legally binding on all 28 member states of the European Union — has effectively legitimized an Islamic blasphemy code in the interests of “preserving religious peace” in Europe.

The case involves Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff, an Austrian woman who in 2011 was convicted of “denigrating religious beliefs” after giving a series of lectures about the dangers of fundamentalist Islam.

Sabaditsch-Wolff’s legal problems began in November 2009, when she presented a three-part seminar about Islam to the Freedom Education Institute, a political academy linked to the Austrian Freedom Party — which today forms part of the Austrian government. A left-leaning weekly magazine, News, planted a journalist in the audience to secretly record the lectures. Lawyers for the publication then handed the transcripts over to the Viennese public prosecutor’s office as evidence of hate speech against Islam, according to Section 283 of the Austrian Criminal Code (Strafgesetzbuch, StGB).

The offending speech was an offhand comment by Sabaditsch-Wolff that Mohammed was a pedophile because he married his wife Aisha when she was just six or seven years old. Sabaditsch-Wolff’s actual words were, “A 56-year-old and a six-year-old? What do we call it, if it is not pedophilia?”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/bolsonaro-takes-brazil-1540768718

Sunday’s runoff presidential election in Brazil pitted Jair Bolsonaro, a former army captain who has spent 27 years in Brazil’s Congress, against Fernando Haddad, a former one-term mayor of the city of São Paulo. On Sunday evening with 97% of the vote in, Mr. Bolsonaro was handily beating Mr. Haddad, 55.4% to 44.6%.

Much was made during the campaign of Mr. Bolsonaro’s history of rude comments about women and minorities and about his pledge to use an iron fist to fight crime in poor neighborhoods.

He was labeled a racist, a misogynist, a homophobe, a fascist, an advocate of torture and an aspiring dictator. His opponents gathered in the streets to denounce him and wrote withering diatribes against him in the press. The proudly “progressive” international media joined the fray, declaring him a threat to the environment and democracy.

It ought to have been enough to sink the Bolsonaro candidacy. Yet he prevailed, and it isn’t hard to see why: Brazilians are in the midst of a national awakening in which socialism—the alternative to a Bolsonaro presidency—has been put on trial. The resounding victory of Novo Party’s classical-liberal gubernatorial candidate Romeu Zema in the large state of Minas Gerais confirms that theory.

Mr. Haddad was the candidate of Brazil’s gigantic left-wing populist Workers’ Party, known as PT. He was also the handpicked successor to former two-term President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who is in jail on a bribery conviction but remains popular with his supporters. Against Mr. Bolsonaro’s small Social Liberal Party, Mr. Haddad should have won walking away.

How Mr. Bolsonaro triumphed is worth examining because it suggests that something changed in this election. It can always change back, and it probably will. But for now the momentum is on the side of reform, and policy makers have a unique opportunity to advance liberty and prosperity in South America’s largest economy. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://pjmedia.com/trending/report-iran-was-closer-to-nuclear-weapons-than-we-thought/

A document published by the Institute for Science and International Security says Iran was much closer to constructing a working nuclear weapon than was previously realized.

The paper, authored by Institute director David Albright and International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) former deputy director General Olli Heinonen, concluded that “the information highlights dual-use, controlled equipment used at the site, such as a flash x-ray system utilizing a Marx generator and a variety of neutron measurement equipment, with electronics, designed to monitor high speed, explosively driven tests of a neutron source commonly used in a nuclear weapon.”

“The site” is Parchin military base, where the vital neutron measurement tests were being conducted. These tests were necessary to determine if Iran had a workable bomb or not. Too many neutrons bombarding the nuclear mass would cause a fizzle. Too few, a dud.

If Iran was at this stage of nuclear bomb development, the game was over.

Express:

The report, written by watchdog director David Albright, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) former Deputy Director General Olli Heinonen and other top experts, concluded the findings “shows that the Parchin site did house high explosive chambers capable for use in nuclear weapons research and development.”

The news follows a chilling warning by Iranian General Hossein Salami, second-in-command of Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards force, who vowed to destroy Israel in a furious attack that raised fears of a major outbreak of conflict in the volatile Middle East. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13193/iraq-christians-annihilation

“I’m proud to be an Iraqi, I love my country. But my country is not proud that I’m part of it. What is happening to my people [Christians] is nothing other than genocide… Wake up!” — Father Douglas al-Bazi, Iraqi Catholic parish priest, Erbil.

“Contacting the authorities forces us to identify ourselves [as Christians], and we aren’t certain that some of the people threatening us aren’t the people in the government offices that are supposed to be protecting us.” — Iraqi Christian man, explaining why Christians in Iraq do not turn to government authorities for protection.

Government-sponsored school curricula present indigenous Christians as unwanted “foreigners,” although Iraq was Christian for centuries before it was conquered by Muslims in the seventh century.

“Another wave of persecution will be the end of Christianity after 2,000 years” in Iraq, an Iraqi Christian leader recently said. In an interview earlier this month, Chaldean Archbishop Habib Nafali of Basra discussed how more than a decade of violent persecution has virtually annihilated Iraq’s Christian minority. Since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, the Christian population has dropped from 1.5 million to about 250,000 — a reduction of 85%. During those 15 years, Christians have been abducted, enslaved, raped and slaughtered, sometimes by crucifixion; a church or monastery has been destroyed about every 40 days on average, said the archbishop.

Europeans are free to say only what the courts let them.

When he was 50, the prophet of Islam took as his wife Aisha, who was then six or seven. The marriage was consummated when Aisha was nine.

This is not a smear. It is an accurate account of authoritative Islamic scripture. (See, e.g., Sahih-Bukhari, Vol. 5, Book 58, Nos. 234–236.) Yet it can no longer safely be discussed in Europe, thanks to the extortionate threat of violence and intimidation — specifically, of jihadist terrorism and the Islamist grievance industry that slipstreams behind it. Under a ruling by the so-called European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), free speech has been supplanted by sharia blasphemy standards.

The case involves an Austrian woman (identified as “Mrs. S.” in court filings and believed to be Elisabeth Sabaditsch Wolff) who, in 2009, conducted two seminars entitled “Basic Information on Islam.” She included the account of Mohammed’s marriage to Aisha. Though this account is scripturally accurate, Mrs. S. was prosecuted on the rationale that her statements implied pedophilic tendencies on the part of the prophet. A fine (about $547) was imposed for disparaging religion.

Mrs. S. appealed, relying on Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights. That provision purports to safeguard “freedom of expression,” though it works about the same way the warranty on your used car does — it sounds like you’re covered, but the fine print eviscerates your protection.

Article 10 starts out benignly enough: Europeans are free “to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers.” But then comes the legalese: One’s exercise of the right to impart information, you see, “carries with it duties and responsibilities.” Consequently, what is called “freedom” is actually “subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties” that the authorities decide “are necessary in a democratic society,” including for “public safety” and for “the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others.”

http://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2018/10/febrile-summer-divided-capital/

Even if you ignore the rancorous Brexit debate and Remainers’ predictions that put the seven plagues of Egypt to shame, there have been plenty of entirely unrelated developments to make a Briton think seriously of buying a one-way ticket to the Antipodes or Americas.

The crowds sunbathing in the parks and strolling the shopping streets in their shorts and T-shirts seem so happy and carefree that if you didn’t read or watch the news you might have little sense that Britain may be finally, genuinely going down the tubes. Indeed, their calm and good cheer make you almost wonder if the panic, anger and bitterness so prevalent among the political and media classes might be misguided or at least excessive.

It was different last summer. In June, during the humid, febrile days after the terrible Grenfell fire, which came on the heels of Theresa May’s election debacle and assembly of a shaky coalition government, the capital felt as if it was on the verge of revolution. But then things calmed down and there was nothing like the run of headlines that over the past few months have prompted pundits to wonder if the UK as we know it is falling apart.
This dispatch appears in October’s Quadrant.
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Some of the more frightening ones may well be (consciously or unconsciously) part of the continuing campaign to stop or reverse the dismayingly chaotic Brexit process. These include the reports from both inside and outside the government that warn of catastrophic shortages of food, antibiotics and other vital goods come March 2019.

The UK may well face some difficult times after next spring, but it does seem a little unlikely that the country will be devastated by the equivalent of Napoleon’s naval blockade. It is not obvious that the hostility of M Barnier’s European Commission is shared by all the EU member governments, and surely one thing that has been made clear by various efforts to enforce sanctions on rogue regimes during the last decades is that there is no pariah state so despised and hateful that France, Germany and others won’t fight to trade with it. (As for the dark talk of civil unrest when or if Britain ceases to be a member of the EU, such an outcome seems more probable if the predominantly “Remainer” political class tries to overturn or reverse the referendum.)

However, there have been plenty of developments completely unrelated to Brexit or the EU that might make a Briton think a bit more seriously about buying a one-way ticket to the Antipodes or Americas.

This week, for instance, there was the report that a Birmingham prison whose management had been outsourced to a well-connected private company was actually being run by prison gangs, and was therefore even more chaotic and drug-ridden than the state-run penitentiaries. This was soon followed by an announcement by the Justice Secretary (a slow-witted fellow even by the undemanding standard that the Prime Minister prefers for her cabinet colleagues) that instead of enforcing the prison ban on mobile phones he would hand one to every prisoner. As is widely known (at least outside the Ministry of Justice), convicts use mobile phones not just to run their criminal enterprises from inside but to arrange the intimidation of witnesses and to put pressure on prison guards by targeting their families.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13158/turkey-education-islamization

After the minimum age for Quran studies in Turkey was abolished in 2011, a project named “Pre-school religious education through Koran classes” was piloted in ten cities across the country in 2013. The project teaches “basic Islamic information” to children between the ages of four and six. Since then, the number of “pre-school Koran classes” has continued to rise.

The number of religious “imam hatip schools” has climbed from 450 in 2002 to 4,112 in 2017. Meanwhile, there are only 302 specialized science high schools in the country.

“There are religious organizations… [that] pump their own ideologies on children through classes in ‘values education’ … We know that they use one-sided language that demonizes those who are different. We observe that the students who are exposed to such curricula consider those who think differently to be their ‘enemies.’… When one looks at countries such as Afghanistan, where similar steps were taken, one can see where this process leads to.” — İlknur Bahadır Kaya, chairman of the Parents’ Association.

Turkey’s Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet) is set to receive an additional two billion liras (around $350 million), boosting its budget from last year’s 8.3 billion liras ($1.5 billion) to 10.4 billion ($1.8 billion) liras for 2019, according to the newspaper Cumhuriyet. This increase in budget surpasses that of 29 other major state institutions, including the ministries of the interior and foreign affairs.

The Diyanet, the state body regulating the role of Islam in Turkey, apparently has, as one of its main missions, transforming the country’s education system. It is now fully engaged in shaping school curricula.

After the minimum age for Quran studies in Turkey was abolished in 2011, a project named “Pre-school religious education through Quran classes,” implemented by the Diyanet, was piloted in ten cities across the country in 2013. The project teaches the Quran and “basic Islamic information” to children between the ages of four and six. In 2015, the Diyanet decided to expand to program to “all places where physical conditions are suitable.” Since then, the number of “pre-school Koran classes” has continued to rise. It has increased to 150,000 students in five years.