RUTHFULLY YOURS

To visit Greenwich is to grasp in an afternoon’s stroll the Britain that was once and is now no more. General Wolfe, whose addition of Canada to the Empire is celebrated here, was brought down by a French musket ball. Today, prostration before the EU is Theresa May’s instinctive first position.

Stepping back and forth between the world’s two longitudinal hemispheres is fun in a quirky sort of way. Of course it requires you to be positioned right above the Prime Meridian. And that, in turn, means you must have decided to spend a London afternoon over in Greenwich, a few miles down-river along a now much cleaned-up Thames and more or less across from Canary Wharf. If you’d somehow been asleep for a quarter of a millennium, and were wholly unaware of Britain’s Empire years, you’d soon be set straight when you visited Greenwich. It’s magnificent!

My wife and I spent a day this past weekend re-acquainting ourselves with this London borough where you’ll find the National Maritime Museum (magnificent!), the Old Naval College (which in its original incarnation had been a retirement home for Royal Navy sailors and is partly a Christopher Wren creation with a splendid chapel), the seventeenth-century Queen’s House, a Greenwich Market first established over three centuries ago and, of course, the Royal Observatory. It’s at the last of those listed attractions where one can hop between hemispheres.

Remember, the east-west division of the world is wholly arbitrary in a way that the north-south split is not. The equator is a fact imposed on the world. Where to draw the up-down line to split the world’s west from its east is a function of nothing more than who happened to be drawing the line and what they prefered. At the height of the British Empire, the world’s largest-ever, the people doing the preferring were in London. And so the Prime Meridian runs right through the Royal Observatory at Greenwich. That is why, before political correctness infected everything from banning temporal reference to the shorthand of ‘Before Christ’ to toilets and ‘renewable energy is cheaper if you just ignore the $3 billion in subsidies it gets each year’, we used to talk in terms of Greenwich Mean Time. Everything was based on that, and the arbitrary line drawn there to separate east from west.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/high-ranking-venezuela-air-force-general-rejects-maduro-supports-guaido/

The first defection of a high ranking military officer from the Venezuelan armed forces said in a video that he “doesn’t recognize the dictatorial authority of Nicolás Maduro,” and added “The people have suffered enough.”

General Francisco Yanez of the Venezuelan air force endorsed opposition leader Juan Guaidó, who declared himself president two weeks ago.

NPR:

“To order the armed forces to keep repressing the people is to continue killing more people from hunger, diseases and god willing combat between ourselves,” he said. “The people have suffered enough.”

Then Yanez invited the citizens to peacefully defend Guaidó in the streets. “To my armed fellow men,” he pleaded, “I ask you not to turn your back on the people of Venezuela.”

He is the first of the nation’s military brass to voice strong support for Guaidó, who declared himself interim president in January after denouncing the integrity of Venezuela’s presidential elections.

Yanez told the Associated Press that he would not issue other statements until he was authorized by “the commander-in-chief of the legal armed force,” Guaidó.

General Yanez is currently alone. The Venezuelan military, carefully courted and nurtured by both former President Chavez and current President Maduro, are not likely to switch loyalties in great numbers any time soon.

Several factions of Venezuela, including its Military Aviation and the Academy of Aviation, used Twitter to denounce the general. They tweeted a photo of Yanez in his uniform with the word “TRAITOR” scrawled across. The Air Force Command also accused him of switching sides because his father is facing an investigation into corruption.

Although hundreds of generals serve in the Venezuelan military, the announcement represents a victory for Guaidó, NPR’s Philip Reeves reports. The young leader has asked armed forces to still their guns, and hopes to weaken their loyalty to Maduro.

Guaidó passed an amnesty measure for them in the National Assembly. Supporters in the streets have handed out copies of the law to soldiers and police, though analysts say Maduro receives loyalty from top-ranking officers by giving them big paychecks and control of lucrative assets. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13582/pope-silence-persecution-christians

Unfortunately, Pope Francis’s stance on Islam seems to be coming from a fantasy world.

“Authentic Islam and the proper reading of the Koran are opposed to every form of violence”, the Pope claimed, not quite accurately. It is as if all of the Pope’s efforts have been directed to exonerating Islam from any of its responsibilities. He seems to have been doing this even more than observant Muslims — such as Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, American author and physician M. Zuhdi Jasser, former Kuwaiti Information Minister Sami Abdullatif Al-Nesf, French-Algerian author Razika Adnani, Paris-based Tunisian philosopher Youssef Seddik, Jordanian journalist Yosef Alawnah, and Moroccan author Rachid Aylal, among many others — have been doing.

“Pope Francis could in no way be ignorant of the heavy problems caused by the expansion… at the very heart of the Christian domain… Let us note this again… the last religion that arrived in Europe has an intrinsic impediment to integrating into the European framework that is fundamentally Judeo-Christian…” – Boualem Sansal, Algerian author, in his best-selling book “2084.”

Pope Francis now faces the potential risk of a Christian world physically swallowed by the Muslim crescent — as on the Vatican logo chosen for the Pope’s upcoming trip to Morocco. It is time the appeasement is replaced.

4,305 Christians were killed simply because their Christian faith in 2018. This is the dramatic number contained in the new “World Watch List 2019” just compiled by the non-governmental organization Open Doors. It reveals that in 2018, there were 1,000 more Christian victims — 25% more — than the year before, when there were 3,066.

These days, 245 million Christians in the world are apparently persecuted simply for their faith. Last November, The organization Aid to the Church in Need released its “Religious Freedom Report” for 2018 and reached the a similar conclusion: 300 million Christians were subjected to violence. Christianity, despite stiff competition, has been called “the most persecuted religion in the world”.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13630/persecution-converts-christianity

“[F]or millions of Christians — particularly those who grew up Muslim or were born into Muslim families — openly following Jesus can have painful consequences. They can be treated as second-class citizens, discriminated against for jobs or even violently attacked.” — Open Doors, World Watch List 2019.

“The root of the problem is that the existence and functions of Protestants and other non-Muslim groups are seen as a threat by the government institutions. And therefore, it is believed that all their activities should be banned.” — 2008 Report: “The Question of Places of Worship for the Protestant Community of Turkey,” prepared by the Legal Committee of the Alliance of Protestant Churches of Turkey.

Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan are all secular on paper. Yet, “the police, secret service and local authorities strictly monitor religious activities, with state authorities regularly raiding non-registered churches. In general, the Islamic culture makes life for Christian converts particularly difficult, but indigenous Christians with a Muslim background bear the brunt of persecution from the state and family, friends and community.” — Open Doors, World Watch List 2019.

“While Christians are indeed experiencing a ‘life of hell’ in North Korea, overthrowing Kim Jong-un’s regime could not only lead to a quick halt to this persecution but also to a rise of Christianity — as has happened recently in Russia… Unlike the persecution of Christians in Communist nations, persecution of Christians is perennial, existential, and… far transcends any ruler or regime. It unfortunately seems part and parcel of the history, doctrines, and socio-political makeup of Islam — hence its tenacity and ubiquity. It is a ‘tradition.'” — Raymond Ibrahim.

According to the human rights organization Open Doors, the number of Christians in the world subjected to persecution — 245 million — is 14% higher than it was a year ago.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13668/iran-pink-lines

Europeans, including British Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt, delude themselves in believing that by “working with Iran” they could prevent the Islamic Republic from “crossing the red lines.”

The problem is that the Islamic Republic does not cross those real or imaginary “red lines”. Like the now-defunct Soviet Union in its time, the Islamic Republic’s strategy is to cross only “pink lines”. The Islamic Republic has no troops in Yemen but manages to keep that tragedy going by helping Houthi rebels hang on to the patch of territory they hold.

In the EU countries, Tehran is careful not to cross “red lines”. But, it crosses “pink lines” when it can through mosques, hussainiyahs, religious endowments and fake charities. In Britain alone, the Islamic Republic controls at least a dozen tax-exempt “charities”, often used for financing violent groups across the globe or simply for money laundering.

Talk to any senior European Union official and you are sure to hear the Islamic Republic in Iran designated as “a threat to regional stability.” German Chancellor Angela Merkel endorses Israeli Premier Benjamin Netanyahu’s assessment of Iranian behavior as “unacceptable.”

French President Emmanuel Macron insists that Iran should carry out UN resolutions by closing its ballistic missile project. And, yet, EU’s Iran policy, assuming such a thing exists, is plagued by contradictions.