RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270826/iran-flirts-disaster-joseph-puder

The Islamic Republic of Iran is playing with fire. To distract from its maneuvers in Syria, where along with its proxies – including the Lebanese Shiite Hezbollah terrorist group, as well as Iraqi, Afghan and Yemeni Shiite militias it controls – Iran in gunning for the Israeli border in the Quneitra province of southwestern Syria. Tehran is directing Hamas, the Islamic terror group who they fund and arm, to provoke Israel by attacking the Israeli communities around Gaza. In recent weeks, Hamas launched incendiary kites across the Gaza border that scorched a whopping 8,000 acres of farms and nature reserves causing an “ecological disaster” in Israel. In addition, over 200 rockets have been fired by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) terrorists into southern Israel in order to kill Israelis.

Last week, Hamas and PIJ agreed to an Egyptian-brokered ceasefire with Israel. These terror groups, however, continued to hammer away at Israeli civilians with more death-kites and rockets. This violation of a ceasefire undermined the understanding reached between Israel and Hamas following the “Operation Protective Edge” in 2014. Israel’s response to these provocations has been rather mild hitherto, mainly firing on the location where the incendiary kites and rockets are being launched. Israel is limiting its application of force to, perhaps, prevent a humanitarian crisis in Gaza — one entirely of Hamas’ own making. The real victims in this latest batch of attacks are the Israeli residents of southern Israel, who have endured three and a half months of terror and severe economic damages.

Visiting a kindergarten in Sderot (close to the Gaza border) last Monday (July 16, 2018), Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, “There is no such thing as a cease-fire that does not include the flaming kites and balloons.” He added, “I have ordered the military to stop the terror of incendiary kites and balloons.”

Last year, the new leader of Hamas Yahya Sinwar, told reporters that, “Relations with Iran are excellent, and admitted that, “Iran is the largest supporter of the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades with money and arms.” Sinwar also revealed this about the Iran-Hamas relationship: “The relationship today is developing and returning to what it was in the old days…this will be reflected in the assistance against Israel, and in the Hamas agenda to achieve the liberation.” In 2012, the Sunni radical Islamist Hamas broke with radical Islamist Shiite Iran over the butchery of hundreds of thousands of Sunni-Muslims by the Bashar Assad Alawite (breakaway Shiite sect) dictatorships and its Iranian allies, including the Shiite Hezbollah (Iran’s proxy).

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/07/danish_prosecutors_charge_imam_for_calling_for_the_killing_of_jews.html

Denmark passed a law making it a crime to incite or welcome the killing of people that took effect last year, and yesterday brought charges under it for the first time, against Imam Mundhir Abdallah. One small wrinkle: he was reading to his congregation from holy scripture. The Times of Israel reports:

Imam Mundhir Abdallah, who preaches in the Copenhagen neighborhood of Norrebro at the Masjid Al-Faruq mosque, which media have linked to radical Islam, is accused of citing a hadith or koranic narrative calling for Muslims to rise up against Jews.

“Judgement Day will not come until the Muslims fight the Jews and kill them,” Abdallah said in a Facebook and YouTube video post in March, according to a translation of the original Arabic provided by the US organization the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI).

It championed an idea at grave risk today: that those of us lucky enough to live in open societies should fight for the freedom of those born into closed ones.

Fifty years ago this paper devoted three broadsheet pages to an essay that had been circulating secretly in the Soviet Union for weeks. The manifesto, written by Andrei Sakharov, championed an essential idea at grave risk today: that those of us lucky enough to live in open societies should fight for the freedom of those born into closed ones. This radical argument changed the course of history.

Sakharov’s essay carried a mild title — “Thoughts on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom” — but it was explosive. “Freedom of thought is the only guarantee against an infection of mankind by mass myths, which, in the hands of treacherous hypocrites and demagogues, can be transformed into bloody dictatorships,” he wrote. Suddenly the Soviet Union’s most decorated physicist became its most prominent dissident.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/20/opinion/andrei-sakharov-essay-soviet

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2018/07/experimenting-children-gender-dysphoria/

Paediatricians with a total of 931 years’ experience reported only 12 cases of gender confusion, meaning just one genuine case might be expected every 76 years. Now, each year in Australia, hundreds are presenting for treatment which the ascendant orthodoxy decrees must be provided.

Four studies recently published in Pediatrics, the prestigious journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics, confirm the experimental basis of the “Dutch Protocol” of medical intervention for childhood gender dysphoria now practised throughout the Western world, including special clinics in Australian children’s hospitals. They reveal the tunnel vision of appraisal of the nature of associated mental and social disorder, when viewed through the lens of the ideology of gender fluidity. That ideology maintains there is no such binary entity as a girl and a boy: our gender exists on a variable locus on the “rainbow”. It perceives associated mental disorder to result from parental and societal frustration of fulfilment of a chosen gender distinct from chromosomal reality. This frustration is the root of the problem, and gender dysphoria is but one symptom of an underlying, innate mental disorder. The ideology of gender fluidity would lead to the conclusion that confused children should have their desired gender affirmed by the medical profession, practised by society and enforced by the law.

Known as the Dutch Protocol because it was developed in the Netherlands, the medical pathway may result in massive intervention into the mind and body of a child despite the lack of scientific basis. The newly released “Australian Standards of Care and Treatment Guidelines for Trans and Gender Diverse Children and Adolescents” publicly declare they are not based on the usual standards that justify Western medical therapy, including biological plausibility, proof of effect and absence of complications in bench studies, animal experiments and human trials. Rather, they are based on “clinical consensus … and a limited number of non-randomised clinical guidelines and observational studies”: in other words, on the “expert” opinion of the doctors running the clinics.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12731/sweden-election-year

Disaffection with immigration has affected the two largest establishment parties.

“What you read about Sweden on alternative news platforms is true. We are facing problems more severe than ever before in our history, where Swedes face a situation of being a minority within 20 years if nothing is done to stop the replacement of our people…What makes the situation even more difficult is, of course, the extreme political correctness that has haunted Sweden for decades, but which is now finally breaking up.” — Gustav Kasselstrand, co-founder and Chairman of the Alternative for Sweden party.

Kasselstrand and the Alternative for Sweden argue that the policies of the Sweden Democrats are no longer sufficient to deal with Sweden’s problems with violent crime and public gang shootings.

Sweden’s general election on September 9 looks set to become the most interesting the country has had in years. Concerns over mass immigration and rampant crime are redefining the political landscape. For the first time in more than a hundred years, the Social Democrats may be dethroned as the country’s largest political party. By Swedish standards, this constitutes a political earthquake.

Concerns in Europe over crime and mass immigration have been changing the political atmosphere, from Italy to Germany. Now, these developments may finally have caught up with Sweden as well.

The Social Democrats in Sweden are not just any political party. They have shaped Swedish political and cultural life for generations. At the peak of their power, they dominated Swedish society to such an extent that the country almost resembled a one-party state. They have been the largest party in all national elections for more than a century. From the 1930s until the early 1990s, they received more than 40% of the vote. Several times during this period, they got more than 50% of the votes and held an overall majority of the seats in the Swedish Parliament (Riksdag). They received 45.2 % of the votes as late as in 1994, and 39.9 % in 2002.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270787/genocidal-assault-nigerias-christians-jack-kerwick

With the election of President Trump and the reported rise of nationalist parties across the Western world, leftists in America and beyond are having a blast self-styling as “resistors” to “fascism.”

They are outraged explicitly over the so-called “Islamophobia” of the President’s “travel ban.”

Yet the perpetually indignant, unsurprisingly, are utterly silent regarding the massive slaughter and persecution by Muslims of Christians throughout Africa, the Middle East, and Asia.

For example, how many people know that just last month, over a span of four days, militant Islamic Fulani herdsmen embarked on a killing spree that reduced a dozen Nigerian villages to dust and claimed the lives of at least 200 Christian men, women, and children?

Open Doors, an organization dedicated to serving persecuted Christians throughout the world, describes these targeted villages as Nigeria’s Plateau State, and describes the region as “the epicenter of Christianity in northern Nigeria’s Middle Belt.” The organization is still trying to piece together the events surrounding the genocidal attack of Nigerian Christians on June 25th,

According to reports, 120 villagers were hunted down and hacked to death by machete-wielding Muslims while traveling home from the funeral of an elderly villager in In the Nigerian ward of Gidin Akwati.

Also slaughtered that day was a Christian pastor, the Reverend Musa Choji – murdered by these savages along with his wife and son.

These terrorists scorched the entire community of Gidin Akwatito the ground. Reports claim that some of those forced to flee their homes are now hiding in the Bush – remaining ever vulnerable to future attacks.

In a neighboring community of Gidin Akwati , another Christian pastor reported “more than 50 heavily armed Fulani herdsmen” laid waste to his whole village via fire and murdered 100 of his neighbors. Predictably, these Islamic militants destroyed that town’s Christian churches while also laying waste to all the homes in the community. Remarkably few people managed to save themselves that day.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270832/attacking-toddler-worcester-bruce-bawer

On Saturday afternoon, a three-year-old boy was sitting in a stroller at a Home Bargains store in Worcester, England, when some kind of corrosive liquid – later described as a “pungent pink chemical” with “an astringent kind of smell” – was “thrown or sprayed” at him, causing serious burns on his face and arms. The boy was with his mother; news reports make no mention of a father. One suspect, a 38-year-old man, was apprehended on the spot and is in police custody; three others were arrested in London on Monday morning. One shopper said she had heard that the first man to be picked up was “a skinny white guy”; the others, seen in CCTV footage, look rather swarthy. This assault, as it happens, took place on the same day as an English Defence League rally in Worcester against the construction of a new £3 million mosque in that city and of counter-protests by an array of Muslims, students, trade unionists, and Antifa types.

At first rumors were rife that the assailants were EDL members, but this seemed unlikely: genuinely racist though the EDL is – Tommy Robinson quite admirably quit the group on that account – and despite its record of violence, causing grave harm to small tots isn’t part of its usual M.O. Still, savagery begets savagery. Not until Monday did the police rule out any EDL or gang involvement and, while withholding the names of the suspects, say that the child had been “deliberately attacked” and describe the assault as part of a “dispute in communities.” This sounded, of course, very much like one of those awkward euphemisms the British authorities insist on using whenever the subject is Muslims. (If the culprits were ordinary English guys, the cops would likely have said something like “neighborhood dispute.”)

https://www.wsj.com/articles/satellite-images-indicate-north-korea-has-started-dismantling-primary-nuclear-test-site-1532390574?cx_testId=16&cx_testVariant=cx&cx_artPos=1&cx_tag=collabctx&cx_navSource=newsReel#cxrecs_s

Satellite imagery shows North Korea has begun taking down its main satellite launch facility, an apparent confidence-building measure by Pyongyang amid concerns about the slow pace of progress on dismantling the country’s nuclear weapons programs.

North Korea has begun to raze its rocket engine test stand and a related building at the Sohae Satellite Launching Station, the country’s primary launch site for rockets since 2012, according to new imagery published Monday by North Korea-focused website 38 North.

The move, which hasn’t yet been announced by North Korea’s state media, is an apparent follow-through on a promise that President Donald Trump said was made to him during his June 12 summit meeting in Singapore with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

In the six weeks since that handshake, concerns have grown about North Korea’s sincerity in fulfilling its pledges as part of the detente—particularly following apparent delays by North Korea in returning the remains of U.S. soldiers killed in the Korean War, the most immediate of the four points agreed to in the Singapore statement.

The moves to dismantle facilities at Sohae, on the country’s northwest coast, in contrast, “represent a significant confidence-building measure on the part of North Korea,” said Joseph Bermudez, an analyst for 38 North.

Mr. Bermudez, relying on commercial satellite imagery from July 20 and 22, said that given the progress of the activity, the dismantling had likely begun in the past two weeks.