RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18855/arabs-iran-deal-war

“A few days ago, US officials announced that it was Iran, not America, that had given up core demands. They lie. Iran has not given up on anything essential. On the contrary, Iran has obtained the essential demands it wants.” — Sayed Zahra, deputy editor of Bahrain’s Akhbar Al-Khaleej, August 31, 2022.

“[T]he most dangerous concession made by the US was to waive the inclusion of Iran’s expansionist terrorist role in the region, its threats to the security and stability of Arab countries, the terrorist subversive role that Iran’s proxy militias play in the Arab countries, and the issue of the Iranian missile program.” — Sayed Zahra, Akhbar Al-Khaleej, August 31, 2022.

“He [Obama] did not hide his hatred of Arabs and his admiration for Iran. What Biden is doing today is following the same path, with full conviction on his part.” — Sayed Zahra, Akhbar Al-Khaleej, August 31, 2022.

“Syria has been taken hostage by a regime that is affiliated with the Iranians and Russians…. The Iranian regime…does not differ from the Taliban regime or from Islamic State (ISIS). Terrorism, destabilization, and domination of people are almost the only goals of such regimes.” — Ibrahim Allush, Syrian author, Enabbaladi, August 28, 2022.

“Washington has been very late in holding Iran accountable, or at least trying to hold it accountable for the systematic sabotage that it has practiced and is practicing in Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Gaza. This is the largest international sabotage operation that the Security Council has not been able to consider. None of the Security Council resolutions related to the region’s crises mentions Iran, even though its role is essential in tampering with the four countries and destroying their institutions.” — Abdul Wahab Badrakhan, Lebanese journalist, Al-Watan, August 28, 2022.

“President Biden’s administration is trying to create an image in the eyes of the Americans that Iran’s return to the nuclear agreement will bring it under control. Washington appears to be in a weak and precarious position, especially in light of the absence of an armed option.” — Emil Amin, Egyptian author, Asharq Al-Awsat, August 27, 2022.

“[I]f these billions flow into the coffers of the Revolutionary Guard Corps and the Quds Force, how will Washington guarantee the security of these countries [Gulf states, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen] ?” — Mashar Al-Thaydi, Saudi commentator, Asharq Al-Awsat, August 26, 2022.

The Arabs… appear convinced that that pouring billions of dollars on the mullahs will eventually bring terrorism and violence to the US and the other Western powers involved in the new deal, if not a major war.

The talk about an imminent revival of the nuclear deal between Iran and the Biden administration and other Western countries has raised serious concerns among many Arabs. They state that they are especially worried about the billions of dollars that Iran’s mullahs will receive once the deal is done. The Arabs say they have no doubt that the money would be used by the mullahs to promote more terrorism and violence and expand Tehran’s terrorist proxies in the Middle East, including Hezbollah, the Houthis, Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and various militias in Iraq.

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/britain-new-prime-minister-jeremy-corbyn-liz-truss/

Many years ago, when the earth was young and leaving the European Union was a position espoused only by those trying to stay on the right side of Bill Cash at a drinks party, former British MP Ken Clarke stood for the Tory leadership against Iain Duncan Smith. He said one memorable thing while making his doomed bid for the captaincy — which was that the Tories needed to decide whether they were going to be a political party or a debating society.

What I understand him to have meant by that was that ideological purity buttered no parsnips in politics. For most of its history, its friends and its enemies alike would agree that Britain’s Conservative party has been a magnificent machine for winning and retaining power. While the Left frittered its energy denouncing ideological deviationists, reciting parrot-like dogmas about collective ownership, and purging its own ranks, the Tories were pragmatists. They believed something firmly until it became a vote-loser; and then they found a way of believing something else. I don’t say that as a sneer but as a sincere compliment. Toryism has tended to recognize that there’s no point in having a brilliant scheme for government if you can’t get into government in the first place. Tony Blair struck gold when he had the humility to copy that page of his rivals’ homework.

Liz Truss, who on Monday was selected by Conservatives to be their next party leader and Britain’s newest prime minister, has been doing the same thing on the face of it. She can’t invent and promulgate Trussism until she has her bottom planted on Boris Johnson’s old chair in No. 10. And she can’t plant her bottom thither without the support of the 160,000-odd paid-up members of the Conservative party who select the party’s leaders.

Some people grumble that her policy platforms have been a bit vague, and what specifics we have had — such as her hastily revised scheme to cut public sector pay — are getting pushback from the supposed experts. One police chief has called her policing policy “meaningless.” Economists have been skeptical about her confidence that all it will take is a few tax cuts to put a tiger back in the national tank. She has pledged to help those about to be clobbered by rocketing energy bills, though she’s done so by promising what you might describe as “an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is.”

A defense can be made there — and has been — that Truss is doing what politicians always do: she is campaigning in poetry that she might govern in prose. You come up with a series of resonant slogans that don’t tie you down to a specific policy position — “Build Back Better,” “I’m Backing Britain,” “For the Many, Not the Few,” or what have you — wave a few flags and hope for the best. Once you’ve promised your core supporters the moon, you set about gently revising their expectations after you’re safely ensconced in the reality-based world of actual government.

I don’t, by the way, presume here to editorialize on why a Truss premiership will be a Bad Thing, still less to describe the horrible face I made as I read the list of her rumored cabinet appointments. Obviously Liz Truss isn’t specially interested in appealing to soaking wet liberal centrist dads like me — and fair enough. That’s not the game she’s in. She might throw the likes of us a bone come a general election, but we’re a way off that yet. If people like me are complaining that she wants to cut taxes so people can keep more of their own money, rather than spend other people’s money on handouts to the needy, that’s probably a sign she’s doing something right by her natural constituency.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/09/04/the-tyranny-of-pride/

Imagine there was a political movement so powerful and so intolerant that you might be visited by the cops for making fun of it. A movement so dominant that desecrating its symbols came to be treated as a kind of blasphemy. A movement so fawned over by the elites that any town or village that refused to bow down to it – to wave its flag and shout its slogans – risked being written off as unsafe, and essentially as unclean. A movement so embedded in the ruling class that every wing of the establishment, from the political set to the military to the financial elite, was duty bound to display its insignia.

Well, such a movement exists, right here in 21st-century Britain. And it isn’t Toryism or ‘Brexshit’ or any of the other ideologies the liberal elite is constantly telling us to fear. It’s Pride.

We’re living under a tyranny of Pride. Its eyesore rainbow flag dominates every major highway during Pride month. Back in June London looked like a city under occupation, with vast boulevards like Regent Street festooned in this ugly new standard. Scores of them fluttered as far as the eye could see, in perfect and sinister militaristic formation. The capitalist class drapes itself in the Pride flag, too. Banks splash it across their windows, Morgan Stanley staff march behind it in the street. Even the armed wing of the state now comes in Pride colours. Cop cars have been repainted in the hues of this ideological rainbow. Top officers wear Pride-themed insignias and lanyards. The Ministry of Defence’s vast headquarters in London have been illuminated in the Pride colours. The Royal Air Force even did a flyover of the Pride march in London last year, with 10 fighter jets pumping out rainbow-coloured contrails to the whooping and cheering of the crowd below. How long before they start dropping Pride-painted bombs on their missions overseas?

And woe betide anyone who refuses to wave the Pride flag or – sin of sins – violates it in some fashion. Ockbrook and Borrowash Parish Council in Derbyshire was branded a sinful backwater when it refused to fly the flag last year. ‘Anger as Pride Month flag snubbed by Derbyshire council…’, reported a horrified BBC. As for profaning Pride and its sacred symbols – that is so serious it can become a police matter. A few weeks ago a man in Hampshire was visited by cops, and put in handcuffs, for the blasphemy of retweeting a meme showing four Pride flags arranged to look like a swastika. The literal speech police who knocked on his door accused him of ‘causing anxiety’.

Defiling Pride is to the 21st century what desecrating an image of Christ was to the 14th. Modern-day liberals puff themselves up as superior to little religious people, and yet they are far more rashly hostile to acts of iconoclasm. Most Christians let out a weary sigh when their beliefs or their book are mocked by the woke (who would never, of course, say an untoward word about Islam). It is the secular right-on who kick off when their holy symbols are befouled.