RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271718/nobel-peace-prize-shines-year-hugh-fitzgerald

Of all the Nobel Prizes, the one that gives rise to the most doubts is the Peace Prize. Nobels in the sciences and in economics are for achievements recognized by others in the field. The Peace Prize is political and wildly subjective, sometimes given for work that has nothing to do with “peace,” or used to promote the political side that the Norwegian judges favor. Yassir Arafat, before bin Laden the world’s foremost terrorist, shared a prize (with Rabin and Peres) for promoting peace by signing the Oslo Accords, which accords represented a stunning diplomatic victory for the “Palestinians.” The left-wing Norwegians were eager to forget all the terrorist attacks by Arafat’s men and to honor him in order that he might continue “on the path of peace.” Barack Obama won a Nobel Peace Prize for his “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples,” although his main diplomatic effort, that led to the Iran Nuclear Deal, also included, as is now known, all sorts of side deals favorable to Iran, that he made while keeping Congress largely in the dark.

There was Anwar Sadat, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for graciously agreeing to receive back the entire Sinai from Israel as part of a peace settlement. Sadat was later murdered by a Muslim fanatic who failed to realize what a diplomatic coup Sadat had pulled off as a veritable Prince of Peace. There was Shirin Ebadi, an Iranian female activist, who has worked for women’s rights in Iran, where Islamic misogyny is in full flower. Her Nobel hasn’t protected her; she now lives in London where, she now insists, she was wrong: she used to push for reform from within Iran, but has concluded that no reform is possible with the current regime, and women will continue to suffer in Iran until the regime is overthrown.

There was Malala Yousefzai, who worked for the right of girls in Pakistan to get an education, not something many Muslim males in that country favor, including the one who shot her through the head (she survived). There was a Nobel Peace Prize shared by Mohammed Yunus for his attempts to spread microloans, in order to help the poor start businesses. Mohammed el Baradei won for his efforts, as Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which shared the prize with him, “to prevent nuclear energy from being used for military purposes and to ensure that the Agency’s monitoring of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes in order to make sure it is used in the safest possible way.” Some American officials believed he was engaged in communications with the Iranians who were suspect. Of course, although he was dealing mostly with weapons programs in Iran and Iraq, two very aggressive states, El Baradei has accused Israel of being the biggest threat to the Middle East because of its nuclear weapons. Israel has repeatedly said it would not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons to any conflict, but that’s not good enough for El Baradei. He would like to force Israel to rid itself of nuclear weapons, but Israel, unsurprisingly, is not impressed with his suggestion and is not about to commit suicide to please the likes of Mohamed el Baradei.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13169/britain-grooming-gangs-part-3

This reformist activity in the migrant community needs to be encouraged and backed by government resources.

“On one level, most imams in the UK are simply using their puritanical sermons to promote the wearing of the hijab and even the burka among their female adherents. But the dire result can be the brutish misogyny we see in the Oxford sex ring.” — Taj Hargey, imam of the Oxford Islamic Congregation.

There are decent Muslims everywhere who work hard to counter all the anti-social and criminal activities in which so many of their co-religionists engage and the theological positions through which they try to justify what they do. But terrorist attacks, anti-Semitic hate speech, and sexual harassment of young white women are real crimes committed by a different kind of Muslim and must be addressed as such.

“Women in some communities are facing a double onslaught of gender inequality, combined with religious, cultural and social barriers preventing them from accessing even their basic rights as British residents. And violence against women remains all too prevalent….” — Dame Louise Casey, The Casey Review, 2016.

Not all Muslims remained silent about the grooming gang problem. We have already seen how the new Home Secretary, Sajid Javid, a Muslim of Pakistani origin, took rapid action to open an enquiry into the crimes. A number of Muslim organizations and individuals have spoken out against the gangs, and condemned them for bringing their faith into disrepute. The integrative Islamic Society of Britain (ISB), for one, has spoken out strongly about grooming culture.

In May 2013, Julie Siddiqi, chief executive of the ISB, coordinated a Muslim-led coalition to campaign against offenders, known as The Community Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation, which, in turn, was launched in Bradford with the backing of the Bradford Council of Mosques. The following month, a Muslim group called Together Against Grooming (TAG) declared that a Friday prayer sermon (khutba) would be read out in around 500 mosques across the country to draw attention to the grooming issue. The sermon was written by Alyas Karmani, an imam who has a background in psychology and serves at several mosques around Bradford. Karmani specializes in sexual counselling from a non-fundamentalist perspective and has worked on a PhD entitled, “The Crises of Masculinity and Urban Male Violence”. His detailed understanding of the grooming gangs and their various motivations are perhaps the most sophisticated yet advanced by a Muslim expert and should be taken into account by any present or future investigation.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/zero-hour-for-the-islamic-republic-1540422152

Iran has long been a subject of intense discussion during the United Nations General Assembly. But in years past the world lacked the leadership and political will to confront Tehran over its nuclear ambitions and support for terrorism. This year is different. With the regime facing political unrest at home and escalating sanctions from abroad, the international community can block its expansionist and dangerous designs.

The Iranian leadership is beleaguered. It faces protests that directly challenge its legitimacy. Iranians are outraged that their leaders have funneled the billions of dollars their government received from the nuclear agreement to support terrorist proxies. Protesters are shouting “Death to Palestine”—repudiating the regime’s anti-Israel eliminationism—and “Leave Syria and think of us.”

Financial pressure from U.S. sanctions has compounded this domestic turmoil, as companies around the world end their commercial dealings with Iran. The value of the Iranian rial has plummeted, while Iran’s oil exports have fallen 25% since June. In November a second round of sanctions will target the backbone of Iran’s economy, its oil and gas sectors.

When the General Assembly convened in September, President Trump advised the international community to join the U.S. in isolating the regime. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu revealed the existence of a new nuclear site constructed in violation of the nuclear agreement. He invited the International Atomic Energy Agency, or anyone with a smartphone, to inspect the site: latitude 35.5022, longitude 51.2997.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/violence-against-gays-on-the-rise-in-europe/

On October 22, about three thousand people rallied in central Paris “to denounce assaults on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people and demand urgent action from the government.” Among the many recent incidents that had sparked the protest, noted Reuters, were “the beating of a gay couple by their cab driver” the previous week and the murder in August, in the Bois de Boulogne, of a “transgender sex worker.” Another report on the rally mentioned two additional, and particularly high-profile, incidents: in September, an actor named Arnaud Gagnoud was beaten up after giving his boyfriend a hug outside a theater in Paris’s 20th arrondissement; on October 16, Guillaume Mélanie, founder of the gay-rights group Urgence, was gay-bashed in a Paris street.

I looked at several news stories (in several languages) about these incidents – and about that October 22 rally. None of them included the words Muslim or Islam, even though the Religion of Peace is, to put it mildly, a major part of the problem – not just in Paris, of course, but all over Western Europe. Everybody knows this, even though virtually nobody feels comfortable talking about it. In most media reports of such incidents, indeed, the Islamic factor can only be discerned through exceeding careful reading.

Take a German paper’s report last May on a series of violent assaults on gays in Berlin’s Neukölln district. One of the victims reported that he’d been “singing and dancing” in a subway station late at night when “a group of young men aggressively confronted him, claiming they felt insulted by his extravagant behaviour.” Quick quiz: what’s the key word here? That’s right: “insulted.” Gay-bashers of Western origin don’t feel “insulted” by gay people’s behavior, and even if they do, they don’t bother prefacing a homophobic beat-down by saying so; they just start punching away. The “insult” thing is totally Islamic.

That German paper recounted several recent Berlin gay-bashings in detail, noting that while such attacks in that city are nothing new, they’ve undergone a notable increase in levels of brutality. But there was no explicit mention of Islam.

Sometimes the role of Islam is hinted at, but only obliquely. Consider a piece about gay-bashings in Berlin that appeared last June in the Irish Times. There was no mention of Muslims in the first several paragraphs, which, on the contrary, attributed gay-bashings in Berlin to a “backlash” against gay rights by “straight men who have problems with their own sexuality.” Only if you made it all the way to the end of the piece did you encounter a curiously phrased reference to – get this – “the threat to the gay community, real or perceived, from conservative Turkish and Arab men, and criminal gangs from Romania and Bulgaria.” Note the artful use of the words “perceived” and “conservative” (National Review subscribers, apparently) and the determined avoidance, again, of the words Islam or Muslim. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://amgreatness.com/2018/10/24/it-doesnt-matter-if

The operating assumption from many on both sides of the political aisle has been that Iran is a rational actor. Former President Barack Obama clearly adhered to this notion and it explains his signature on that terrible Iran deal. What few will tell you, however, is that operating behind Obama’s theory on Iran was the assumption that if Tehran was allowed to develop nuclear arms—and if the United States stepped back from the Mideast, leaving only Israel, the Sunni Arab states, and Iran—these powers would balance each other, creating relative peace.

As with so many of Obama’s ideas, this assumption was entirely theoretical and painfully naïve. Fact is, had the Obama Administration’s deal with Iran been continued, the Saudis inevitably would have bought nukes from Pakistan. While the Saudis may have reasons to be an ostensible ally of the United States, Saudi Arabia is home to some of the most ardent Sunni Islamist groups in the world.

What’s more, the ruling Saudi royal family maintains power through brutal autocratic practices. If the Saudi people were left to their own devices, it is more than likely that they would depose the Saudi royal family and replace them with a Sunni Muslim regime that mirrored Iran’s Shiite Muslim regime. And, if that Islamist Saudi regime had nuclear weapons—even if they remained nominally aligned with the United States against a nuclear-armed Iran—such a situation would hardly be peaceful.

In such a scenario, a nuclear-armed Israel, nuclear-armed Saudi Arabia, and nuclear-armed Iran would square off against each other. It would be a tripolar balance of power. Yet, tripolar orders are rarely stable; no grouping of three powers is likely to be evenly balanced against each other. Because of the inevitable imbalance of power, conflict becomes all but certain. In such a Mideast tripolar scenario, that conflict would be nuclear. Once started, a regional nuclear war, surely would expand into a world war, sucking in other powers, such as the United States, Russia, and China.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/10/23/british-metoo-scandal-cannot-revealed/

A leading businessman has been granted an injunction against The Telegraph to prevent this newspaper revealing alleged sexual harassment and racial abuse of staff.

The accusations against the businessman, who cannot be identified, would be sure to reignite the #MeToo movement against the mistreatment of women, minorities and others by powerful employers.

#MeToo became a worldwide social media campaign last year after revelations about Harvey Weinstein, the American movie mogul. Like Weinstein, the British businessman used controversial non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) to silence and pay off his alleged victims with “substantial sums”.

NDAs have been commonly used in business to protect matters of commercial confidentiality but there are concerns they are now being abused to cover up wrongdoing and deter victims of potential crimes from going to police.

Theresa May has already indicated that she plans to restrict the use of NDAs to prevent abuse, but Parliament has yet to consider changes to the law and campaigners are urging the Prime Minister to act now.

On Tuesday night, Maria Miller, who chairs the Commons Women and Equality committee, said it was “shocking” that NDAs were still being used to gag victims and should not be used “where there are accusations of sexual misconduct and wider bullying”.

Zelda Perkins, Weinstein’s former aide who broke a non-disclosure agreement from the late 1990s to allege sexual harassment, said it was “ridiculous” that The Telegraph had been prevented from reporting the allegations. She said: “NDAs have become weaponised.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13176/turkey-khashoggi-affair

Turkey, pursuing its own Islamist agenda and trying to rival Saudi influence in the Sunni world, is just too happy to have discredited the Wahhabi royals.

Turkey’s message to the Western world was: See the difference between our peaceful Islamism and rogue-state Islamism? Stop discrediting us for our democratic deficit — also, presumably, for “only” imprisoning more than 100 journalists there.

It looked like a first-class spy thriller: A prominent writer enters the Saudi consulate in Istanbul but never leaves the building. Saudi officials said he left the building but could not offer footage from security cameras. When they did, the image was of a dark-haired body-double dressed in the writer’s clothes.

Turkish police and intelligence start leaking evidence of the man’s murder, drop by drop. The day before the Saudi journalist’s disappearance, two private Saudi jets had arrived in Istanbul, with 15 passengers aboard belonging to security agencies in Riyadh. Both jets left for Saudi Arabia shortly after the consulate incident. Unnamed Turkish officials fed (mostly foreign) media stories of how the man had been killed, how his body was dismembered and disposed of after the murder — all by the Saudi death squad. As the Saudi consul-general rushed to Riyadh, Turkish police searched the consulate. More unnamed Turkish officials tell the press that they found forensic evidence for the murder. Unsure if the Turkish police really have evidence, the House of Saud decides to admit that the man had been killed “in a brawl” at the consulate but Saudi officials claim to have no idea where his body was — not convincing anyone in the world’s more democratic parts.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/europes-growth-problem-in-italian-1540336936

There’s little new in the budget battle roiling Rome—but when did that ever stop the European Commission? The mandarins of Brussels on Tuesday issued an unprecedented demand that Italy rewrite its bad budget in line with Brussels’ bad fiscal principles. The tangle contributed to a selloff in global equities.

The Commission wants Rome to deliver a budget deficit equal to no more than 0.8% of GDP next year, a commitment made by the previous Italian government. In theory that discipline should matter to an Italian government whose debt is more than 130% of GDP. But elections have consequences, and one result of the winning coalition of the right-wing League and vaguely left-wing 5-Star Movement is a new budget with a deficit of 2.4% of GDP annually for the next few years.

Other European governments and their taxpayers—and investors—have cause to be wary about parts of the Italian plan. Tens of billions of euros in new spending are slated for welfare handouts and public works that Italy can’t deliver without waste and corruption. None of this will boost economic growth, potentially leaving other eurozone countries to bail out an insolvent Italian state down the road.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13167/palestinians-saudi-arabia

As Mahmoud Abbas was busy praising the Saudis for their “fairness, values and principles,” the London-based Action Group for Palestinians of Syria issued a statement in which it accused the Saudi authorities of preventing Palestinian refugees from entering the kingdom.

Many Arabs and Muslims can hardly afford to alienate a country as rich as Saudi Arabia. This is a good example of “money talks.” However, this does not mean that the Saudi money will ever change the hearts and minds of Palestinians, especially regarding a peace agreement with Israel.

The mistreatment of Palestinians at the hands of their Arab brethren has never been of concern to Abbas and his leadership. They are silent when Palestinians are killed and expelled from their homes in Syria. They are silent when Palestinians face discrimination and apartheid laws in Lebanon.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas did not wait for Saudi Arabia to admit that Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi was killed in its consulate in Turkey. Days before the Saudi announcement, Abbas decided that he and the Palestinians have “absolute confidence” in King Salman bin Abdel Aziz and this son, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

As Abbas was busy praising the Saudis for their “justice, values and principles,” the London-based Action Group for Palestinians of Syria issued a statement in which it accused the Saudi authorities of preventing Palestinian refugees from entering the kingdom.

“Palestinian refugees fleeing war-ravaged Syria have been denied access into Saudi territories,” the group said. It pointed out that the Saudi ban excluded Palestinians heading to the kingdom to perform the Islamic hajj, or pilgrimage. The group also pointed out that Palestinians who fled Syria to Saudi Arabia “have been shorn of their right to visas, education, and health care, among other vital services.” Saudi Arabia, the group added, “continues to opt for a closed-door immigration policy regarding Palestinian refugees seeking asylum in its territories.”

This is only one example of Saudi discrimination against the Palestinians. The group’s announcement was published on the same day that Abbas was heaping praise on the Saudi leaders.