RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12660/iran-khuzestan-paradise

At the time no one could imagine that the dreams we all had for our beloved Khuzestan would become a nightmare. But it has, thanks to four decades of misrule, incompetence, corruption and sheer brutality by the Khomeinist regime.

When he seized power, Khomeini said in a notorious speech that the Shah had offered Iranians paradise in this world to deprive them of paradise in the next world, boasting that his Islamic Republic will provide both.

Naturally, we don’t know about the next world; but in this world the ayatollah turned a corner of paradise that was Khuzestan into a veritable hell.

In the late 1960s when the concept of “development” and “economic take-off” was all the rage in academic and media circles, many experts insisted that the so-called “developing nations” needed to showcase at least part of their territory as a model for progress and an inspiration for modernization.

Being one of those so-called “developing nations” Iran, under the Shah, chose its southwestern province Khuzestan as that showcase.

The choice wasn’t difficult. For, Khuzestan was a resource-rich province and already dotted with some of the modern infrastructures that other provinces had to wait a decade or more to acquire. Thanks to the oil industry, Khuzestan was the first province to have a modern electricity generating system and piped water in most of its cities, at least 20 years before the capital Tehran did. The province was also the hub of Iran’s sole railway network, the famous Trans-Iranian which connected it to the Caspian Sea via Tehran.

http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/2018/07/thank-you-best-wishes-michael-danby.html

Gregg Sheridan- Foreign Editor of The Australian- ” A Labor lion has decided to roar no more in Parliament.”

Danby’s words:

“My love of the Australian Jewish community emerges from having a similar background to many families in the community who endured the Holocaust…writes Michael Danby.

I think my obituary for the much-loved Rabbi of the holocaust survivors, Rabbi Chaim Gutnick (of blessed memory), reflects that https://bit.ly/2MQ4xSC. Even before the murder of the Jewish school children by a Jihadist at the Jewish school in Toulouse, I insisted that the Australian government see Jewish Students all over the country were protected. Security funding to fortify Jewish schools all over Australia has seen that every parent and grandparent can be assured that all our children can freely attend to their education in the best safety the Australian government can provide.

Before I was elected to Parliament in 1998, there hadn’t been a single MP visit Israel for more than a decade. Thanks to the support of philanthropists Sol Lew and David Goldberger, I took the first mission of Australian Labor MPs to Jerusalem (led by the then opposition leader Simon Crean). Since then, the atmosphere has totally improved in Parliament, with many Members and Senators having visited Israel, the Australia-Israel Parliamentary Friendship Group having one of the largest memberships in Parliament, we having regular speakers and functions thanks to the ECAJ, AIJAC and the Israeli Embassy. Words cannot speak highly enough of my regard for our long-standing Labor stalwart Senator Glenn Sterle. He works with love and passion to continue my work with the Australia-Israel Parliamentary Friendship Group. The same applies to my dear Liberal friend, the chairman of the Australia-Israel Parliamentary Friendship Group and the chairman of the Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade (which I used to chair), Senator David Fawcett. Israel visits have generally benefitted Australian national security. The visits to Israel have had an important transformative effect on our national politics. You don’t have to explain to MPs and Senators Iran, Jihadism, counter terrorism, the extremism of Erdogan, of Hezbollah and Hamas’ role as terrorist organisations and threat, once parliamentarians have visited there.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12661/egypt-christians-abuse

The violence, and incitement to violence, directed by Egyptian Muslims against the Copts — especially those organized sectarian campaigns by the Muslim Brotherhood and related groups — are crimes against humanity and should be treated as such by the international community.

We know that a few drops of lemon will curdle an entire bowl of milk. Egypt’s Muslims, as many Muslims elsewhere, have poured the entire Nile River — made toxic by their bigotry and violence — into their faith-tradition. We, Muslims, have degraded our culture by authoritarianism and the obstinate tendency to blame others for our own failings. We have thus perverted the very Islam that we believe is the final revelation.

Muslims in Egypt and elsewhere know from experience the extent to which Western powers have betrayed in practice what they pronounce in theory when it comes to support for people subjected to authoritarian regimes.

What is long overdue from the West is a robust policy to defend and secure human rights for everyone, especially minorities, in Muslim-majority countries… [as in] the Helsinki Agreement of 1975.

We have seen and recoiled from the horrific footage of Coptic Christians beheaded by ISIS in 2015 in Libya and the repeated bombings over the past two decades of Coptic churches in Egypt. We read about the Maspero massacre in 2011, when Egyptian military tanks, deployed to protect peaceful Christian demonstrators, instead rolled over them, crushing many to death. And we continue to receive reports of Coptic girls abducted, compelled to convert to Islam and forced into marriages with Muslims.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-social-justice-mob-takes-montreal-1530914174?cx_testId=16&cx_testVariant=cx&cx_artPos=3&cx_tag=collabctx&cx_navSource=newsReel#cxrecs_s

Betty Bonifassi has spent 18 years researching, reworking and performing slave songs. In “SLĀV,” the hit new play on the same topic, she is the lead singer—or was. The Montreal International Jazz Festival canceled “SLĀV” on Wednesday: “We would like to apologize to those who were hurt.” Why the pain? Because Ms. Bonifassi and director Robert Lepage are white. Two of the seven cast members were black, but they won’t be performing either.

“SLĀV” sold out its first five shows and was booked for 11 more at Montreal’s Théâtre du Nouveau Monde. It also received glowing reviews in the Quebecois press. One critic wrote that the show reminds him of the “need to overcome” and makes him feel “ashamed” of his own “insane non-activism.” A writer at Le Journal de Montréal credits it with “demonstrating the absurdity of racism.”

Ms. Bonifassi, whose mother is Serbian and who sings the play’s first slave songs in Bulgarian, has said that because of her own heritage, she feels “touched by slavery.” “SLĀV” makes its way from the Balkans through Ireland and Quebec before reaching the U.S., where it not only confronts slavery but depicts a present-day black American jogger arrested for no reason.

https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2018/07/the-real-modern-anti-semitism

Brezhnev-era joke asked whether it was a crime to say that the party chairman was an idiot. The answer was yes, because it’s a state secret. For those who miss Soviet-era humor, French President Emmanuel Macron has provided some consolation, by firing the French ambassador to Budapest for observing in a private memorandum that the president of Hungary is not an anti-Semite. Evidently that is a state secret in France.

In a June 18 dispatch, Eric Fournier, the French ambassador to Hungary, reported that the alleged anti-Semitism of Hungarian President Viktor Orban was “a fantasy of the foreign press.” He added that the allegation diverted attention from the “real modern anti-Semitism,” whose source is “Muslims in France and Germany.” The private memorandum was leaked by the left-wing website Mediapart and reported widely in the French press. Hungary’s “management of illegal immigration” might be a model for France, Fournier added.

The French president denounced the memo as “contrary to the French official position,” saying that if it were shown that Fournier’s views had been made in public, he would be removed. The memo was private, but Macron fired him anyway. Fournier’s memo had struck a raw nerve. On April 18, 250 French notables, including former president Nicolas Sarkozy, had denounced the “new anti-Semitism” arising from “Islamic radicalization,” declaring: “We demand that the fight against this democratic failure that is anti-Semitism becomes a national cause before it’s too late. Before France is no longer France.” Nearly a tenth of France’s half-million Jews have emigrated in the past decade in response to Muslim violence against Jews.

https://www.jns.org/british-government-plans-inquiry-into-incitement-in-palestinian-textbooks/

“It is grotesque that U.K. taxpayers’ money is helping to support the teaching of a curriculum which incites violence and terrorism and spreads anti-Semitism,” said Parliament member Joan Ryan.

The British government is set to review the Palestinian Authority’s educational curriculum over growing concerns that British taxpayers are paying for the Palestinians to teach children incitement and anti-Semitism.

In a letter to Labour Friends of Israel (LFI), Parliament members Joan Ryan and Ian Austin, and Middle East Minister Alistair Burt “brought forward a planned assessment of the Palestinian curriculum, which will involve a rigorous and independent review of the pilot PA textbook,” the U.K. Jewish News reported.

The United Kingdom pays more than £20million ($26 million) per year for Palestinian schools. LFI has been pushing for a review of P.A. curriculum for several months.

http://standpointmag.co.uk/node/7222/full

Our cover picture for this summer double issue is inspired by a memorable image of the Quebec G7 summit, showing Angela Merkel confronting Donald Trump. This snapshot was actually a brilliant piece of propaganda from Berlin, taken by an official photographer and intended to depict a German chancellor dictating terms to the American president. Leni Riefenstahl could not have done better. But Mr Trump’s look of defiance is no less striking. In our version, by Michael Daley, he is flanked by his formidable National Security Advisor John Bolton, while Prime Minister Abe of Japan looks quizzically at Mrs Merkel. Sic transit gloria mundi.

At the time of writing it is she, rather than Mr Trump, whose authority is falling away. The insubordination of her Interior Minister Horst Seehofer is undisguised: “I cannot work with that woman,” he tells colleagues. Rubbing salt in the wounds inflicted by her own colleague, President Trump tweets that “the people of Germany are turning against their leadership as migration is rocking the already tenuous Berlin coalition”. Undiplomatic, certainly, but true.

Having bought herself time to seek concessions from her EU partners, Mrs Merkel may yet survive, as she has done so often before. But Mr Seehofer’s threat to close the borders to most asylum-seekers is very popular — and not only in his stronghold of Bavaria, the migrants’ first port of call. A tough line on migration represents the consensus among Germany’s southern and eastern neighbours. For them, the war is over. They are less afraid of Nazi aggression than of anti-Nazi Angst — because the latter implies an open border and demographic disorder.

From a British perspective, there is a certain Schadenfreude at the prospect of Mrs Merkel being hoist by her own petard. Years ago, when David Cameron repeatedly sent alarm signals to the Chancellery in Berlin about unsustainable levels of migration from Eastern Europe, they went unanswered. Freedom of movement was non-negotiable. She threw Cameron overboard, as the tidal wave of Brexit approached. As border anxiety began to grip Europe too, Mrs Merkel opened the floodgates, thereby undermining allies at home and abroad. Her counterparts in London, Paris, Rome, Vienna, Prague and Madrid have all fallen, mostly replaced by leaders who take a harder line on migration. Mrs Merkel is Europe’s last woman standing. She may survive, but only by demanding for Germany what she refused Cameron: a restoration of national sovereignty to allow an emergency brake on uncontrolled freedom of movement.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12647/tariq-ramadan-french-justice

Then, of course, comes the trump card: all the accusers are supposedly Islamophobes.

The next hearing has been set in July, in which Ramadan may well be slapped with that third indictment, for one, or several of, the nine rapes Ms Rabbouj accuses him of during 2013-2014. Ramadan denies the allegations.

Oborne’s rather spectacular pile of tendentious inaccuracies ends by referencing a petition supporting Ramadan. It was started by Ramadan’s usual Paris acolytes of the hard-left investigative website Médiapart and a handful of British academics who supported Ramadan’s elevation to a teaching post at Oxford, and may feel they need to protect their investment. They should cut their losses.

French-bashing is one of the few pleasures still allowed in Europe nowadays, and it seems a bit unkind to deprive you of it. Sadly, a recent piece, by Peter Oborne, accuses the entire French justice system of treating Tariq Ramadan, the sometime academic, stealth Islamist, serial liar and alleged rapist, like a latter-day hero from Les Misérables, supposedly “rotting” in a French jail as a victim of the complete “abandonment of due process”. Not quite.

Ramadan, the grandson of Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan Al-Banna, pretends to be “moderate”. Yet he has recently argued that FGM, for instance, is a cultural tradition of Muslims, or that corporal punishments including stoning of adulterous women in Islam ought to be the object of a “moratorium” to examine their implications (rather than banned). British Prime Minister Tony Blair apparently bought into the fiction that here was the kind of westernised Muslim he needed on an advisory board to his government; and Ramadan got a Qatar-financed chair of sorts at Oxford.

Early in 2018, Ramadan got caught in a #MeToo tsunami, with woman after woman coming forward to explain in strikingly similar terms how he used them for rough sex and threatened them afterwards should they dare to talk about it. (He denies the rough part; he has admitted to having sex with at least five of these women; and he has also admitted in judicial hearings that he has forked out €27,000 in hush money to his Belgian accuser.)

http://blog.nli.org.il/en/bullfight_poster/

THANKS TO:https://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/2018/07/republican-spains-bullfight-in-honor-of-maimonides/?utm_source=daily&utm_medium=

In 1935, the city of Cordoba held a bullfight “in commemoration of the eighth centenary of the great Cordoban philosopher Maimonides.” The towering talmudist, philosopher, and theologian was born in that city in 1135, although thirteen years later his family fled to Morocco and from there relocated to Egypt, where he lived for the rest of his life.

Read the story behind a poster advertising a bullfight in honor of the great Jewish philosopher, Maimonides.

Take a look at the rather unique poster below from the National Library of Israel’s European Ephemera Collection. What makes it extraordinary is not the illustration of a black bull hurtling towards the matador’s red cape, nor is it the elegance of his stance opposing the power of the bull’s massive body. It is one word above the names of the two bullfighters that makes this poster so extraordinary. That word, written in small font close to the bottom of the poster is Maimonides- the name of one of the greatest Jewish writers of the last two thousand years.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/jul/5/sanctions-can-ruin-the-economy-but-wont-free-iran-

To the surprise of no sentient person, North Korea is dissembling instead of disassembling its nuclear weapons. It is making no move toward denuclearization and instead is finishing the expansion of a key missile manufacturing facility. President Trump’s summit with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un served only to demonstrate Mr. Kim’s intractability.

Mr. Trump is having much more success with Iran, North Korea’s partner in developing nuclear weapons and missiles. After the president exited the 2015 Obama-Iran deal in May he has taken a hard line by re-imposing economic sanctions on Tehran which are proving effective in weakening Iran’s economy and the ayatollahs’ regime.

Most importantly, for the first time since 2009, large violent protests against the regime are occurring in many of Iran’s big cities, including Tehran.

Unemployment is up, inflation is soaring and the Iranian currency has lost half its value this year. In 2017, the Iranian rial traded at about 43,000:1 against the dollar. It began to weaken leading up to Mr. Trump’s action in May and the rial is now trading at about 75,000:1 against the dollar.

The currency crash is clearly driven by Iranian panic buying of dollars in response to Mr. Trump’s actions. Unlike North Korea, Iran doesn’t have China acting as a sugar daddy to prop up its economy and its regime. The Obama-Iran agreement served to do that by undoing the economic sanctions against Iran and freeing Iran to sell its oil.

Because Iran’s economy is supported primarily by oil sales to South Korea, India, China, Japan and Turkey, the president wants to cut those sales. He plans to slap sanctions on any nation that doesn’t cut off Iranian oil imports by Nov. 4. Mr. Trump reportedly wants to give buyers of Iranian crude time to reduce their imports (which accounts for the delay until November) and may grant temporary waivers of sanctions to nations that make a significant effort to reduce them by that date.