RUTHFULLY YOURS

The overall objective of President Macron’s plan is to ensure that French law takes precedence over Islamic law for Muslims living in the country.

The plan, as currently conceived, is vague and short on details, but appears to involve three broad pillars: determining who will represent Muslims in France; delineating how Islam in France will be financed; and defining how imams in France will be trained.

“It is time to bring in a new generation. We have seen fifteen years of debate to defend the interests of foreign states.” — Hakim el-Karoui, a French-Tunisian expert on Islam who is advising Macron on the reforms.

French President Emmanuel Macron, in a declared effort to “fight fundamentalism” and “preserve national cohesion,” has promised to “lay the groundwork for the entire reorganization of Islam in France.”

According to Macron, the plan, similar in ambition to Austria’s Islam Law, is aimed at seeking to “better integrate” Islam in France in order to “place it in a more peaceful relationship with the state.”

A key priority is to reduce outside interference by restricting foreign funding for mosques, imams and Muslim organizations in France. The plan’s overall objective is to ensure that French law takes precedence over Islamic law for Muslims living in the country.

In a February 11 interview with the Journal du Dimanche, Macron said that the plan, which is being coordinated by the Interior Ministry, will be announced within the next six months: “We are working on the structuring of Islam in France and also on how to explain it,” Macron said. “My goal is to rediscover what lies at the heart of secularism—the possibility of being able to believe as well as not to believe—in order to preserve national cohesion and the possibility of having free religious conscience.”

Since the failed coup in August 2016, the government says, it has purged more than 107,000 government employees for alleged links to the coup attempt. Worse, according to a Supreme Court justice, the Turkish government is investigating a total of 6.9 million citizens, or about 8.6% of all Turks.

Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu has warned international companies drilling for oil and gas off Cyprus that these hydrocarbons are within Turkey’s continental shelf. Cavusoglu said that Turkey “is prepared to take all necessary measures” to protect its rights, and those of the Turkish Cypriots, in the eastern Mediterranean.

On January 26, several thousand Turkish Cypriots marched against what they say is Turkey’s unwanted influence. Protesters braved pounding rain to voice their opposition to Turkey’s agitation of “fascist and extremist” segments of their society.

Erdogan’s Turkey apparently has an ideological incompatibility with the word “peace.” This outright bullying can target any nation at any time. Optimists who think it might fade away will be proven wrong once again.

In official language, Turkey is in a state of emergency ever since a failed putsch, allegedly masterminded by a self-exiled cleric, killed nearly 250 people on the evening of July 15, 2016. Since then, the government says, it has purged more than 107,000 government employees for alleged links to the coup attempt. Worse, according to a Supreme Court justice, the Turkish government is investigating a total of 6.9 million citizens, or about 8.6% of all Turks.

Even “not-warmongering” can be associated with being a terrorist. More than 300 activists were arrested for their opposition to Turkey’s military incursion into northern Syria. That number did not include the 11 doctors who are members of the Turkish Medical Association who were arrested for calling for a halt to the offensive. (They were later released but will stand trial). In addition, Turkey has asked Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to remove posts on the military offensive.

Fox News’ Tucker Carlson began his show Monday evening by slamming the U.S. media’s unseemly crush on North Korean official Kim Yo-jong, the younger sister of Kim Jong-un. The 30-year-old Jong is deputy director of the Propaganda and Agitation Department and a member of the North Korean politburo.

Media outlets over the weekend proclaimed that she “stole the show” at the Olympics and won the diplomatic gold medal. The Washington Post dubbed her “the Ivanka Trump of North Korea.”

Carlson argued that progressives have had a long history of supporting the world’s most repressive regimes and invited a member of the Communist Party in America to help him prove his point.

Deirdre Griswold, editor of the newspaper for the Workers World Party, came to the show armed with anti-war talking points, which is what she pushed no matter what Tucker asked her.

Griswold began by telling Carlson that she’s been to both North and South Korea and wanted to let the Foxe News viewers know that neither country wants war with the United States.

“We’re in the process of moving towards a nuclear war,” she declared. “The Korean people know very much what war is like and they’re not for it!”

Tucker tried to get the avowed communist to tell him which Korea she preferred, North or South, because she’d been to both countries.

“One is obviously the world’s last Stalinist regime,” Tucker noted. “It’s pretty rigidly Marxist — that’s North Korea. South Korea is floridly capitalist. It’s a market-based economy, which, of course, you reject. Which country would you rather live in personally?” he quizzed her.

But Griswold didn’t want to “debate” that issue because she had “really important” anti-war talking points that she needed to keep talking about.

When Carlson argued that North Korea is a closed country, she retorted that North Koreans know a lot more than Americans think, and cited their alleged 100 percent literacy rate as evidence.

Tucker pointed out that they “can’t read anything but the propaganda,” but Griswold was too busy reciting her anti-war, anti-American talking points to respond. She argued that the North Koreans were not “prisoners” in their own country. They just want to get out from under the threat of war imposed on them by the United States.

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The suicide note left by Fidel Castro’s eldest son has rocked the Cuban nation this week, with the most astonishing revelation being the claim that Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was his half-brother and the son of the late Fidel Castro.

The handwritten note left by Fidel Castro Diaz-Balart, 68, the eldest of Fidel Castro’s children, appears to confirm the longstanding rumor in Cuba that Fidel Castro fathered Justin Trudeau after a public tryst with Margaret Trudeau in 1970.

“Castro Diaz-Balart, who had been attended by a group of doctors for several months due to a state of profound depression, committed suicide this morning,” Cubadebate website reported.

The death of the high-profile government nuclear scientist, also known as “Fidelito”, or Little Fidel, because of how much he looked like his father, stunned the nation, however it is his “explosive” suicide note that has set tongues wagging in Havana.

Amid a wide-ranging barrage of complaints, the note suggests Fidelito was angry with his late father, the revolutionary Cuban dictator. Fidelito wrote that his father, Fidel Castro, was “always comparing me unfavorably with Justin” and “dismissing my achievements in comparison to his success in Canada.“

“But what was I to do? I am Cuban. My brother is Canadian. If he was born and raised in Cuba, he would have lived in our father’s shadow forever just like me.”

While Justin Trudeau is famously known as the son of Canada’s liberal former Prime Minister, Pierre Trudeau, comparison images of Pierre, Justin and Fidel suggest there may be something to the Cuban claims.

Strong physical resemblance aside, the Cuban rumors are also backed up by historical fact.

While Justin Trudeau’s birthplace of Ottawa, Canada may be a long way from Havana, his mother Margaret Trudeau visited Cuba nine months before Justin was born, and there are photographs of her socializing with Fidel Castro.

The evolving U.S.-Kurdish partnership has alarmed Turkey. Ankara fears that establishing a Kurdish-led entity on its southern borders would empower its restive Kurdish population, particularly PKK fighters.

Washington needs to ensure that its Kurdish partners on the ground are protected and not distracted from the main mission, which is defeating terror in Syria.

Turkey’s offensive against Syrian Kurds will serve only to aggravate the multi-layered conflict in Syria, making it even harder for international interlocutors to bring an end to the seven-year civil war and secure a much-needed political settlement for the country.

A Turkish assault against Kurdish forces in Syria, such as the ongoing one, was expected by everyone, including the U.S.

Now, three weeks into its controversial offensive against a Kurdish enclave in northern Syria, Turkey’s military is facing fierce resistance from the U.S.-backed Kurdish fighters in the city of Afrin.

Observing the daily operations since they began on January 20, it is noticeable that the Turkish military and its allied Syrian rebels, backed by Turkish air support, have made little progress in taking control of Kurdish-held territory — the main objective behind Ankara’s decision to launch the offensive in Syria.

So far, Turkey’s advances have not gone beyond seizing a number of villages along its border with Syria, according to local sources.

Since mid-2012, the Afrin region in northwestern Syria has been controlled by the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG). That occurred after the withdrawal of Syrian regime troops, which then began to focus on fighting rebel forces elsewhere in the country.

The irony, of course, is that so many people, have adopted a way of interpreting human rights and liberal values in a manner that often undermines them.

It is time for some home truths. Islam has been at war with the West for some 1,384 years, with very little respite. When Muslim Arab armies invaded Syria in 634, went on to destroy all but a rump of the Christian Byzantine empire (which it finally defeated when the Ottoman Turks conquered Constantinople in 1453), took control of Spain, Portugal, Sicily and other lands on the north Mediterranean coast, it was the start of endless jihad wars.

Most importantly, we seem unable to understand that Islam is, above all else, a totalitarian project covering all aspects of human life from the spiritual to the material, from law to government to clothing to food to sex to taxation and more. This totalitarianism rejects democracy in the most basic way, as having come from mere humans rather than divinely, from Allah.

Unfortunately, concluding that modern terrorism “has nothing to do with Islam” or that “Islam is a religion of peace” visibly contradicts the historical record.

Much of the weakness we have identified in so many modern European states comes, ironically, from many of our strengths. We have much to be proud of. However imperfectly at times, we have replaced tyranny with democracy, guaranteed freedom of speech and the press, ensured rights for all citizens, provided legal and political foundations for the growing empowerment of women, struggled against racist and religious bigotry, brought homosexual men and women out of the closet, given protections to the environment and wildlife, extended healthcare provision to most people, abolished the death sentence in all European countries (and Israel), and instituted regulations to block and punish crimes such as people trafficking, slavery, and drug smuggling.

The best example of what this means is to be found in the state of Israel. It is precisely because Israel and a majority of Israelis have, from the beginning, combined Jewish ethical values with Western Enlightenment beliefs, that makes it stand out so sharply against all its neighbours. Human rights abuses in Iran, the Arab states, Turkey, and beyond guarantee that Israel, however much abused by international bodies and media, and however flawed, is, in fact, a bastion of democracy, human rights, equality under the law and the positive values that go with them.

The conflict between Israel and Iran may be heating up after a half-decade simmer. On Friday night Iran dispatched a drone from Syria that penetrated Israeli airspace in the Golan Heights. Israel destroyed it with an Apache helicopter. Then on Saturday Israel sent eight F-16s across the border to strike the airfield in the Homs governorate, called the T-4 base, where the drone originated, as well as a handful of other Iranian targets. Although the mission was a success, one F-16 was shot down by Syrian antiaircraft fire—though the pilot made it back to Israel, where he and his navigator ejected successfully.

This was the most significant clash to date between Israel and the so-called Axis of Resistance—Iran, Syria’s Assad regime and Hezbollah—since Iran began deploying soldiers and proxies to Syria six years ago. Israel insists its response was limited and its intent is to contain this conflagration. Its critics worry that the skirmish could explode into one of the worst wars the Middle East has ever seen.

The Iranians have been exploiting the chaos of the Syrian civil war to build up military assets there that target Israel, all the while sending advanced weaponry to Lebanon by way of Damascus, also under the fog of war. The Israelis have been vigilant; they have destroyed some of this hardware in Syria with one-off strikes. In December they struck an Iranian base southwest of Damascus, some 30 miles from the Golan Heights. But they had never entered Syria with the kind of overwhelming force seen on Saturday morning.

What prompted this level of response is still unclear. Israeli military officials won’t say whether the Iranian unmanned aerial vehicle was armed. It would be a surprise, though, if Israel’s reprisal was prompted by an unarmed UAV. Indeed, this was not the first drone incursion into the Golan Heights. Last year, Israel’s missile defenses intercepted several Iranian-built drones, operated by Hezbollah, attempting to enter Israeli airspace from Syria.

The Israel Defense Forces had warned that the T-4 base was crawling with fighters from Iran’s Qods Force, an arm of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had paid multiple visits to Moscow hoping to convince President Vladimir Putin to curb the threatening activities of Iran and its proxies. Mr. Putin has established a formidable presence in Syria since 2015, when his forces entered the country ostensibly to combat Islamic State.

The Israelis took a significant risk Saturday of rankling the Russians, especially since they reportedly did not warn Moscow of the attack in advance. Russian personnel sometimes embed with Syrian air-defense units and are sometimes present at the T-4 base. Thus the strike might have been intended as a message to the Russians as much as to the Iranian axis.

Whether Russia had advance knowledge of the Iranian drone operation isn’t clear. Nor do we know whether Russia was involved in unleashing the Syrian surface-to-air missiles that downed the Israeli F-16. What we do know is that after many Israeli airstrikes in Syria over many months, this was the first time Syrian antiaircraft weapons managed to hit a target. That points toward Russian involvement. CONTINUE AT SITE

When Swedish authorities representing a Swedish left-wing government and media announce a project to prevent “fake news” from “decisively influencing” the 2018 elections, this ought to set off loud alarm bells among Swedes. Who determines what constitutes “fake news” anyway? Is it not the very essence of “fake news” when a media outlet refuses to report mass sexual assaults, because the perpetrators happen to be foreigners from third world countries?

A British Cabinet Office spokesperson told Sky News: “The Government is committed to tackling false information and the Government Communications Service plays a crucial role in this”. Perhaps their “rapid response fake news unit” should begin with Theresa May herself, who falsely and against all factual evidence continues to claim that Islam is a religion of peace and that ISIS is not Islamic.

Meanwhile, European citizens continue to face costly legal prosecution for refusing to accept the fake news about Islam propagated by people such as Theresa May.

“I also thought that Islam was just a normal religion, but then I read the Koran and became shocked by the hatred that exists there, the misogyny… The more Islam takes over, the more we compromise. Islam is a totalitarian ideology, which means dictatorship. So, I believe that our democratic system is in danger… I hate no people. What I hate is ideology, Islam. One can criticize fascism or Nazism, but why not Islam? Why should Islam have any protection status?” — Denny, on trial in Sweden for “incitement to hatred” for calling Islam “a fascist ideology” on Facebook. If found guilty, he faces up to two years in prison.

The Swedish government’s innovation agency, Vinnova, is financing a project led by the combined forces of Swedish mainstream media to, in the words of Vinnova, “prevent fake news and unfounded statements from spreading and playing a decisive role in the Swedish elections in 2018”. The next elections, which take place every four years, are scheduled to take place on September 9, 2018. The Swedish media giants involved in the project consist of Swedish State Television, Swedish State Radio, Bonnier, Schibsted Sverige, and NTM. Together, these media companies effectively own Swedish mainstream media in the form of newspapers, online news outlets, and state and private television and radio. The Swedish state is financing the technical aspects of the project with 1.9 million Swedish kroner ($240,000), while the Swedish mainstream media is financing the remaining project costs themselves. The “fake news” project was originally launched in October 2017.