RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15599/ouyar-hassan

For four decades, Ouyar Hassan has put up with an ochlocracy disguised as a theocracy. Wearing an Anatolian smile, he has seen Iran become the only country in the world, perhaps with the exception of Zimbabwe, poorer than it was 40 years ago. He has seen Iran top the list of infamy in the word for the number of political prisoners and executions. He has witnessed the establishment of widespread corruption not as an aberration but as a way of life. For four decades, Ouyar Hassan has turned up at polling stations to cast his vote in fake elections for an ersatz parliament and an actor playing President of the Republic.

For the first time since the mullahs seized power, almost all political groups associated with them from the beginning… have publicly called for a boycott of the polls. Even some of the so-called “moderate-reformists”, better known for their sheer opportunism than their moral courage, are calling for a boycott of the fake elections.

As usual, the authorities could try to manipulate the results in a number of ways such as refusing to register many would-be voters, pre-filling polling boxes and inflating the number of ballots cast in the provinces. Nevertheless, a massive boycott would be hard to camouflage. Such a massive refusal to play extras in a sinister masquerade would show that Ouyar Hassan is no longer prepared to let “those better than us” walk all over him.

Since the 19th century, caricature has been used to highlight in a humorous mode the key features of famous persons or even a whole nation. In the latter case, some well-known examples include Uncle Sam, with his top-hat and carefully trimmed Van Dyke, representing the United States. England is represented by John Bull with his bowler hat, belly and rosy cheeks. French are made fun of with Gaston Dupont, wearing a beret, and with a baguette under his arm and a Gauloise in his mouth, who doesn’t know whether his name should end with a D or a T neither of which are pronounced in any case. For its part, Iran is represented by Ouyar Hassan wearing a felt cap, long shirt and baggy trousers.

Ouyar Hassan, who first appeared in satirical magazines in the 1900s when 80 percent of Iranians lived in rural areas, is a peasant. He is constantly boasting about his glorious past but is terrified of his uncertain future. As for his present, his chief, not to say sole, concern is to survive on a day-to-day hand-to-mouth basis. To survive, Ouyar Hassan depends on his instincts, which dictate that he should have no opinions on anything, no expectations from anyone and, more importantly, not to antagonize the city where “those better than us” live and rule the world.

Since his first appearance, Ouyar Hassan has lived through two revolutions, two World Wars, two changes of ruling dynasty, and an eightfold increase in his nation’s population. In the meantime, Iran has been transformed into a highly urbanized country where people like Ouyar Hassan account for no more than 20 percent of the population.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15598/persecution-of-christians-november

“He was a 15-year-old adolescent. He was so deeply asleep in his bed that he didn’t hear any of the noise around him. They thrust the blade of the axe so deeply into his skull, to the point we had to use a hammer to get it out of his head.” Many Christians have been displaced by these ongoing attacks and live in “extreme misery,” added another local: “This is beyond persecution. It is a dramatic situation, plunging thousands of families into a deplorable humanitarian crisis.” — Rebecca, a witness, Barnabas Fund, November 15, 2019, Cameroon.

A group of Muslims beat, robbed, and threatened to kill a Christian evangelist if he did not convert to Islam…. [T]he Muslims indicated that they had physical pains and injuries. Fløttum offered to pray for them, they accepted, and he complied. They said they felt better and urged him to go with them and pray for another of their friends who was also suffering from a foot injury…. “They were very nice and I couldn’t believe they would deceive me,” he later said. They took him to a backyard, pushed him down a cellar staircase, and began to beat and kick him in the face….”While they kept me there, they threatened me and said they would kill me if I did not convert to Islam….I was scared and actually thought they were going to kill me because they said they had a knife and didn’t want witnesses.” — Idag.no, November 28, 2019, Norway.

“…although the Egyptian government has made some modest progress toward legalizing informal churches around the country and improving public discourse about Coptic rights, it has taken few steps toward systematically improving religious freedom conditions for vulnerable Christian populations, particularly in rural areas.” — United States Commission on Interreligious Freedom (USCIRF), Annual Report 2019, Egypt.

The Slaughter of Christians

Syria: On November 11, Islamic gunmen opened fire on a vehicle known to be carrying Christian leaders. Two Armenian priests, Father Abrahim Petoyan and Father Hovsep Petoyan, a father and son, were killed and a deacon was seriously wounded. ISIS claimed responsibility. The Armenians had been going to inspect repairs on an Armenian Catholic church that had earlier been damaged in Deir ez-Zor. “We continue to feel the presence of ISIS,” responded the Armenian Catholic Archbishop Boutros Marayati of Aleppo, adding that Deir ez-Zor “is a very important town for us, because it is there that many of our martyrs were killed as they fled the Turkish genocide of 1915. Today there are no Armenian Catholics left there. Undoubtedly, the Turks don’t want us to return, because our presence would be a reminder of the Armenian genocide.”

https://amgreatness.com/2020/02/15/europes-retrenchment-in-the-wake-of-brexit/

The cynic will often overestimate the forces of inevitability, immobility, and kinetic power. In so doing he will be exposed for his eternal pessimism, while the optimist runs his victory lap. Yet even as the cynic is little more than an idealist who has been burned by reality too many times, he too gets to savor the taste of slaying that which was once thought unbeatable.

The class James Burnham called the “Managers,” those definers and keepers of “norms,” have taken quite the beating these past few years. Today, in February 2020, President Donald J. Trump has not only emerged triumphant from his bare-knuckle brawls with the deep state but is now consolidating power and poised to defeat whichever candidate the Democrats put up to challenge him in the November presidential election. The constellation of forces arrayed against him, ranging from media giants to state security agencies, and including some within his own party, surely should have resulted in his removal from office. 

Yet those of us who watched this soap opera for the past three years couldn’t help but notice mistake after mistake from Burnham’s vaunted Managers. Did we overestimate them? I think it’s safe to say that we did. The rotting edifice of “Trump-Russia collusion” finally collapsed with Robert Mueller’s uninspiring testimony on Capitol Hill, and “Trump-Ukraine quid pro quo” only saw a fatigued and bored nation ignore the Democrats crying “wolf” yet again.

Across the pond, Brexit gave us the same show in parallel to the American drama. 

Former Prime Minister David Cameron called a referendum on Brexit in 2016 to once and for all shut up an anti-EU wing inside of his own party. Instead, it resulted in his removal from power and the exit of the UK from the European Union, dealing a blow to the decades-long juggernaut of globalism. 

There, too, we witnessed a street fight that lasted years, and that pitted all of the elites and their vast array of instruments on one side, against people who according to the elite “shouldn’t matter” and “are probably racist anyway” on the other.

Overconfidence and hubris on the part of ruling elites, insulated from various crises of liberal democracy ranging from the 2008 financial crisis to Merkel’s invitation to the Third World to settle in Europe, has not only halted globalist projects but, in both Germany and Britain, has set them back. Beyond that, they have raised questions pertaining to the legitimacy of these regimes. Brexit in particular questions the legitimacy of the European Union project as a whole.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/02/islamic_reform_top_muslim_university_says_no.html

Largely unknown to and unreported in the West, a large, two-day conference was recently hosted (Jan. 27–28) by Al Azhar University in Egypt and attended by the leading clerics and politicians from 46 nations.  Titled “Renewal in Islamic Thought,” it is currently the most significant response to Egyptian president Sisi’s calls for reform, which he forcibly made on January 1, 2015.

The conference focused on the most pressing topics affecting the Islamic — and in some cases non-Islamic — world, including women’s rights, government and society, and the question of “radicalization” and the emergence of jihadi terror groups such as the Islamic State.

I’ve watched many of the panels with great interest, and in the coming weeks, I hope to remark on some of these, but for now I wish to discuss what can be learned from the closing remarks of the grand imam of Al Azhar (and Pope Francis’s good friend), Sheikh Ahmed al-Tayeb. 

First, he — in agreement with the other clerics present — closed the door on the possibility for reform on a great number of issues: “Renewal,” he announced, “is in no way possible concerning those texts which are irrefutable in their certainty and stability; as for those texts that are not entirely credible, they are subject to ijtihad [reinterpretation, especially based on changing circumstances].”

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/02/angela_merkel_and_the_destruction_of_german_democracy.html

These thoughts reflect the writer’s concern about the worsening political and social conditions in Germany, a nation whose importance — for America, Europe, and the world — should require no laboring to a readership of politically sophisticated Americans.

What’s happening today in Germany is deeply disturbing.

And it’s not for the reason casual American observers, including many conservatives, might think based on information derived from the mainstream English-language media.  Contrary to these purveyors of globalist, multi-cultural propaganda, the reason for growing unease about Germany is not the presence in the German parliament (Bundestag), and persistent electoral strength, of “Die Alternative für Deutschland” (“The alternative for Germany,” or AFD) — invariably, counterfactually, and ludicrously styled by the Western corporate media as the far-right AFD — as they style all western European political parties committed to preserving national cultures. 

Deep concern about Germany arises because of two different but related phenomena.

First, Angela Merkel’s destruction of the center-right Christian Democrats/Christian Social Union (the Christlich Demokratische Union Deutschlands, or CDU, and the Christlich Soziale Union in Bayern, or CSU, respectively), and her radical transformation of those allied parties, which together formed most of the post war governments that led Germany out of the physical and moral ruins of World War II.  Through Merkel’s policies, the CDU/CSU have been shorn of their conservative principles and become nearly indistinguishable from Germany’s extremist Die Grünen (“the Greens”) and its dying Sozial Demokratische Partei Deutschlands (the old socialists, or “SPD”).