RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/an-antiterror-opportunity-in-sudan-11601333982?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

The fact that Sudan’s leaders are openly discussing the normalization of relations with Israel shows how much the northeast African nation has changed since the downfall of dictator Omar al-Bashir. The Trump Administration’s diplomacy is pulling Khartoum closer to the West, but it needs help from Congress.

Sudanese Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok took office last year after widespread protests brought about the old regime’s end. He shares power with unsavory figures but has managed to repeal draconian Islamic laws and give civil society some breathing room. The government has promised elections in 2022, and Mr. Hamdok wants to improve ties with the U.S. before his term ends.

The prime minister’s position is fragile. Many Islamists want him gone—he survived an assassination attempt this year—and the generals who toppled Mr. Bashir aren’t excited about democracy in Khartoum. But Congress can improve Mr. Hamdok’s standing, and give the country’s struggling economy a boost, by removing Sudan from the state sponsor of terrorism list.

The U.S. made the designation in 1993. Mr. Bashir hosted al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden at the time and gave them a free hand to plot mayhem around the region. After decades of isolation, the country has turned around and already qualifies for removal. Washington has tied the change to a $335 million compensation package for victims of the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania.

https://www.israelhayom.com/2020/09/27/uae-irans-aggressive-policies-made-arabs-look-at-israel/

“The more strategic the Israelis look at these relationships, the more doors will open to them,” says UAE Foreign Minister Anwar Gargash. Normalizing ties with Israel “was strategically good for the UAE, will make it have more of a global presence.”

The United Arab Emirates didn’t need peace with Israel to counter Iran, a top UAE official said Friday, but he said Iran’s aggressive policies over three decades alarmed many Arab countries and made them look at their relationship with Israel “with fresh eyes.”

UAE Foreign Minister Anwar Gargash acknowledged at a virtual briefing on the sidelines of the equally virtual UN General Assembly’s annual meeting of world leaders that this may not have been Iran’s intention. But its actions had an impact in the region, he said, though he wouldn’t speculate on whether other Arab countries would follow the UAE and Bahrain in establishing relations with Israel.

“The only thing I want to say is the more strategic the Israelis look at these relationships, the more doors will open to them,” Gargash said. “If they look at it very `transactionally’, I think that it is not going to send a very good omen for normalizing relations with many of the Arab countries.”

Gargash said the UAE’s message to Israel is to “look at these opportunities and build strategically, and think long term rather than short term” – and prove wrong the countries who say that because of the Israeli political system its decision-makers think only tactically.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16550/france-terrorism-silence

This brand of extremism has also managed to transform many European citizens into prisoners, people hiding in their own countries, sentenced to death and forced to live in houses unknown even to their friends and families. And we got used to it!

“[T]his lack of courage to follow in Charlie’s footsteps comes at a price, we are losing freedom of speech and an insidious form of self-censorship is gaining ground.” — Flemming Rose, Le Point, September 2, 2020.

“To put it simply, freedom of speech is in bad shape around the world. Including in Denmark, France and throughout the West. These are troubled times; people prefer order and security to freedom.” — Flemming Rose, Le Point, August 15, 2020.

On September 25, in Paris, two people were stabbed and seriously wounded outside the former offices of Charlie Hebdo, where 12 of the satirical magazine’s editors and cartoonists were murdered by extremist Muslims in 2015. The suspect, in police custody, is being investigated for terrorism.

The accused murderers in the 2015 attacks are currently on trial in Paris.

Shortly before the knifing attack, on September 22, Charlie Hebdo’s director of human resources, Marika Bret, did not come home. In fact, she no longer has a home. She was evicted after serious and concrete death threats from extremist Muslims. She decided to make her “exfiltration” public for French intelligence to alert the public to the threat of extremism in France.

“I have lived under police protection for almost five years”, she told the weekly Le Point.

“My security agents received specific and detailed threats. I had ten minutes to pack and leave the house. Ten minutes to give up a part of one’s life is a bit short and it was very violent. I will not go home. I am losing my home to outbursts of hatred, the hatred that always begins with the threat of instilling fear. We know how it can end”.

Bret also claimed that the French Left abandoned the “battle for secularism”.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16552/egypt-christians-abduction-rape

“One of the strategies they used to gain the girls’ trust was for the kidnapper, a Muslim man, to tell the Christian girl he loved her and wanted to convert to Christianity for her. They would start a romantic relationship until, one day, they would decide to ‘escape’ together. What the girls do not know is that they are actually being kidnapped.” — Former Egyptian human trafficker, World Watch Monitor, October 5, 2017.

“The kidnappers receive large amounts of money. Police can help them in different ways, and when they do, they might also receive a part of the financial reward the kidnappers are paid…. In some cases, police provide the kidnappers with drugs they seize.” — Former Egyptian trafficker, World Watch Monitor, October 5, 2017

“If all goes to plan, the girls are also forced into marriage with a strict Muslim. Their husbands don’t love them, they just marry her to make her a Muslim. She will be hit and humiliated. And if she tries to escape, or convert back to her original religion, she will be killed.” — Former Egyptian trafficker, World Watch Monitor, October 5, 2017.

“There are countless families who report that police have either been complicit in the kidnapping or at the very least bribed into silence. If there is any hope for Coptic women in Egypt to have a merely ‘primitive’ level of equality, these incidents of trafficking must cease, and the perpetrators must be held accountable by the judiciary.” — From “‘Jihad of the Womb’: Trafficking of Coptic Women & Girls in Egypt,” a report by Coptic Solidarity.

The kidnapping, sexual abuse and forced conversion of Christian women and girls in Egypt — a “particularly vulnerable group to exploitation” that is quietly living an “unimaginable nightmare” — is rampant, with no signs of easing up. This is the finding of a report published on September 10, 2020 by Coptic Solidarity, an international organization based in Washington D.C., that works to promote equal citizenship rights for Egypt’s Christian minority.

In its 15-page report, “‘Jihad of the Womb’: Trafficking of Coptic Women & Girls in Egypt,” Coptic Solidarity documents “the widespread practice of abduction and trafficking” and estimates that there have been “about 500 cases within the last decade, where elements of coercion were used that amount to trafficking,” according to the UN’s own definitions, particularly per its “Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons Especially Women and Children.”

According to Coptic Solidarity:

“The capture and disappearance of Coptic women and minor girls is a bane of the Coptic community in Egypt, yet little has been done to address this scourge by the Egyptian or foreign governments, NGOs, or international bodies. According to a priest in the Minya Governorate, at least 15 girls go missing every year in his area alone. His own daughter was nearly kidnapped had he not been able to intervene in time.”

The report offers 13 separate case studies. Victims range from teenage girls, to newlywed and pregnant young women, to married women with children. Most of the victims disappeared in one of two ways: either they were publicly kidnapped, often by being forced into a car while traveling to school, church, or work; or — especially true for teenage girls — they were lured into relationships with young Muslim men who promised them the world, until, that is, they realized they had been duped. According to a former Egyptian human trafficker:

“[O]ne of the strategies they used to gain the girls’ trust was for the kidnapper, a Muslim man, to tell the Christian girl he loved her and wanted to convert to Christianity for her. They would start a romantic relationship until, one day, they would decide to ‘escape’ together. What the girls do not know is that they are actually being kidnapped. Most of the time they will not marry their kidnapper, but someone else.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16551/cfr-javad-zarif

The tweet contains interesting indicators to how [the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, Richard] Haas tries to dodge the issue. He presents Afkari’s killing as a judicial “execution”, enabling Zarif to say “well, you have executions in some states of the US as well.”

In November 1938, a few days after Kristallnacht, the French ambassador to Berlin Robert Coulondre reported the event to Paris, describing the savagery in the heart of Europe, concluding that “nevertheless [néanmoins in French] one should understand German grievances against the Jews.”

[I]n his expose at the CFR meeting, Zarif repeated the same claims, not to say lies, that he has been dishing out to the illustrious audience for years. And it seems that they gobbled it up with the same appetite as before. To hoodwink his audience, Zarif never used the term “Islamic Republic” and pretended that “Supreme Guide” Ali Khamenei doesn’t exist. Nor did he talk of Islam and Tehran’s strategy to “export the Islamic Revolution” to the whole world, including New York where the CFR is located.

Portrayed by Zarif, the Khomeinist regime is a peace-and-love enterprise where the judiciary is independent, all freedoms are respected, and the strategic aim is to establish peace and harmony across the globe. There are no political prisoners in Iran. Tehran’s support for Hezbollah and Hamas is cultural and the Iranian presence in Syria is only advisory, at the invitation of the Syrian government. There are, of course, no American and other foreign hostages in Iran. If there is trouble in the Middle East it is the fault of the United States. OK, not of good Americans like John Kerry and Barack Obama but of people like Donald Trump and Mike Pompeo.

For the past few years, hosting the Islamic Republic’s Foreign Minister, Mohammed Javad Zarif, has developed into an annual ritual of the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). This year, however, CFR’s invitation to Zarif raised a storm of protest beyond the bubble in which American foreign policy junkies play games, indulge in fantasies, and address their principal task, which is fund-raising.