RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/yellow-vest-leader-arrested-signaling-crackdown-on-protests-11546523102

French authorities arrested a key “yellow vest” protester for organizing an unauthorized demonstration, signaling a crackdown on a movement that has upended the agenda of President Emmanuel Macron.

Police held Eric Drouet on Wednesday evening near the Champs-Élysées, the glitzy avenue that has become a magnet for protests by the yellow vests—or gilets jaunes—over the past two months. He was leading a commemoration of yellow vests who have died since the movement began, mainly hit by cars inadvertently as they protested at roundabouts around the country.

A truck driver from the Parisian suburbs, Mr. Drouet had created a Facebook page that sparked the antigovernment protests in November.

“The arrest and detention of Mr. Drouet is completely unjustified and arbitrary,” Mr. Drouet’s lawyer said in a statement Thursday.
The ‘yellow vest’ protests have become a national movement against President Emmanuel Macron and his government.

The coming weeks will test whether Mr. Macron’s government can stop the protests, which have slowed the French economy and are undermining his plans for a free-market overhaul of the country. Participation waned during the holiday season, but yellow vests are organizing new demonstrations this Saturday in Paris and elsewhere that appear set to attract thousands of people.

Hundreds of protesters continue to camp out at roundabouts across the countryside.

The first protest on Nov. 17 drew more than 250,000 people. While participation has fallen steadily since—dipping below 100,000 on recent weekends—the intensity of the demonstrations escalated sharply in early December. Rioting and clashes with police left some of the most upscale neighborhoods of Paris dotted with burning cars and shattered storefronts. Police have arrested thousands of protesters, straining the French justice system.

The government has struggled to contain the grass-roots movement, which has no organized leadership and has refused to declare demonstrations to the authorities as required by French law.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2019/01/03/iranians-willing-risk-lives-fleeing-france-britain/

Given the reaction in some quarters, over the past few weeks it’s at times felt as if no democracy has faced such a Persian threat since ancient Athens fought the battle of Marathon. Obviously the situation on the Channel is serious and we shouldn’t be complacent about border security. But the number of illegal migrants, purportedly Iranians, attempting to sail across to the UK has been small – and far lower than the huge numbers of legal migrants that arrive from the EU each year over which we have no control.

There has been another reaction, however: incredulity. To a certain type of Remainer, it is unimaginable that anyone would seek to cross the Channel to make their way to Britain. And yet here they are, hundreds of people trying to escape from France.

Migration was such a big issue in the referendum because our society’s flexibility and our economy’s strength have made us a magnet. Macron talks about getting France “on the move”, but its brutal level of youth unemployment is a reflection of the bureaucratic blocks to enterprise and job creation that have long hindered growth.

An entrepreneurial Iranian – or Frenchman – has a better chance of making it here than in any other European country. Our language is an attraction, too. Migrants, if they don’t speak it already, regard learning English as more useful than picking up Italian or Greek.

It’s a separate question whether we want them to come, but it is interesting that so many of these migrants claim to be Iranian. Accounts of what is wrong in Iran tend to focus on the intolerance of the Islamic Republic towards Christians and other minorities, its restrictive policies towards women, and its authoritarian clerical regime.

However, what really threatens the Ayatollahs is their failure to kickstart an economy stifled by cronyism. President Rouhani was presented as a fresh face who would reinvigorate the economy. Now he looks more like an Iranian Macron, responsible for a makeover without substance.

https://jamieglazov.com/2019/01/03/glazov-gang-when-islamophobe

This new edition of The Glazov Gang features Dr. Charles Jacobs,
President of Americans for Peace and Tolerance.

Dr. Jacobs sheds light on When “Islamophobes” Free Muslim Slaves, and also on the curious phenomenon of “racists” freeing black slaves.

Don’t miss it!

Also make sure to watch Dr. Jacobs and Ilya Feoktistov, Executive Director of Americans for Peace and Tolerance, focus on Newton’s Anti-Semitism Problem, where they tackle the question: Why exactly are American children being given a Saudi education about the Middle East? (The clip above is taken from this entire episode below).

And tune in to our 5-Part Series with Dr. Charles Jacobs where he covers:

[1] Saudi Curriculum in American High Schools,
[2] Confronting Islamic Indoctrination in American High Schools, [3] Leftist Rabbis Endanger Jewish Community,
[4] Racist Arabs’ Black Slaves in Sudan and Mauritania
and
[5] Farrakhan’s Shameful Stance on Slavery.

See all 5 episodes below!

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13497/china-sovereign-state

The trend of Chinese ruler Xi Jinping’s recent comments warns us that his China does not want to live within the current Westphalian system of nation states or even to adjust it. From every indication, Xi is thinking of overthrowing it altogether.

Beijing now thinks it can, with impunity, injure Americans. In the first week of May, the Pentagon said that China, from its base in Djibouti, lasered a C-130 military cargo plane, causing eye injuries to two American pilots.

The laser attack in the Horn of Africa, far from any Chinese boundaries, highlights Beijing’s unstated position that the U.S. military has no right to operate anywhere and that China is free to do whatever it wants anyplace it chooses. And let us understand the severity of the Chinese act: an attempt to blind pilots is akin to an attempt to bring down their planes, and an attempt to bring down planes is an assertion China has the right to kill.

“I hear prominent Americans, disappointed that China has not become a democracy, claiming that China poses a threat to the American way of life,” Jimmy Carter wrote on the last day of 2018 in a Washington Post op-ed. That claim, Carter tells us, is a “dangerous notion.”

There is nothing more dangerous than a notion from the 39th president, even on China. China, despite what he said, threatens not only America’s way of life but also the existence of the American republic. Chinese ruler Xi Jinping has, in recent years, been making the extraordinary case that the U.S. is not a sovereign state.

The breathtaking position puts China’s aggressive actions into a far more ominous context.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/syrian-christians-plead-for-no-fly-zone-to-protect-only-hope-for-our-long-term-survival/

A coalition of Syrian Christian political and military groups issued an appeal today to Christians around the world to back their call for a quickly established no-fly zone over northeast Syria to protect the region’s religious minorities from Turkish invasion.

The plea was signed by the Syriac Military Council, the Syriac National Council of Syria, European Syriac Union, American Syriac Union, and Syriac Union Party of Syria, and comes on the heels of the SMC — the Christian unit within the multi-ethnic, multi-sectarian Syrian Democratic Forces that has cleared regional territory of ISIS — warning that Christians in Syria are “at risk of extinction” at the hands of Turks after U.S. withdrawal.

The Chaldean-Syriac-Assyrian Christian coalition of groups represented in today’s request said they “urgently need protection from Turkey’s threats to invade and ‘cleanse’ our territory from Christianity, religious freedom, and democracy.”

“U.S. President Donald Trump’s sudden decision to withdraw U.S. troops leaves us powerless and open to be destroyed by either Turkey or other regimes scrambling to see our demise in the vacuum this will create,” they said. “Turkey is threatening us daily in the local media to invade and kill us. They are calling us ‘infidels.’ When Turkey was allowed to enter Afrin by the West, Turkey committed war crimes and ethnic cleansing against the religious minorities. All the Christians had to flee the area as Turkey’s jihadi troops conducted door to door searches to hunt the Christians down to kill them and destroyed all of Afrin’s churches. They had to flee with nothing, and take refuge in the area that Turkey is now threatening to invade: north and east Syria.”

The Christian coalition added that “when President Trump gave Turkey’s Recep Erdogan the permission to replace the U.S. forces this means Turkey will crush the multi-religious democracy that is happening in north and east Syria.”

“It alone is an island of religious freedom, decentralized and representative government, and is the only hope for our long-term survival as Middle Eastern Christians.”

The SDF alliance of Kurdish, Arab, Assyrian/Syriac Christians, and other ethnic minorities was founded in October 2015 and is about 70,000 strong. Equality is a core value of the SDF: the successful battle to rout ISIS from their declared capital, Raqqa, was commanded by Rojda Felat, a Kurdish woman, and the SDF spokesman, Kino Gabriel, is a Christian with the Syriac Military Council.

The Syriac Christian alliance stressed that they “know what it means to live under the Ottoman Empire’s Caliphate,” with a “collective memory of the Ottoman’s ‘special treatment’ of Christians” including laws that made them second-class citizens, the jizya “extortion taxes,” oppression, “persecution, ethnic cleansing, and genocide.” CONTINUE AT SITE