RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/women-s-rights-trial-casts-light-on-hardline-approach-in-saudi-arabia-a-1258460.html

Three Saudi women are currently on trial in Riyadh, charged with espionage and conspiracy. The truth is that the women merely advocated for women’s rights. They have reportedly been tortured in a case that has cast light on the kingdom’s new hardline approach.

Eman al-Nafjan must have guessed they were coming for her. A few weeks before her arrest by Saudi authorities, the women’s-rights activist changed her profile picture on WhatsApp. Instead of her face and soft, brown hair, it showed a reptile with its mouth open. Deep in the animal’s throat was a frog, petrified by fear, at the moment of death.

It was a harbinger of doom. Nafjan, 38 years old and a well-organized mother of four children, had been committed to fighting for human rights in her country, especially women’s rights for over a decade. At the time, her youngest daughter was just 2.

Sometime between May 15 and 18, Nafjan was arrested. Around the same time, Saudi secret police rounded up other female activists from their homes. For years, the women have been fighting together for the right to drive and the abolition of Saudi Arabia’s so-called guardianship law, which gives men in the kingdom extensive control over their female relatives. Men can be notified via a government app when their wives or daughters want to cross the border.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14018/turkey-erdogan-hagia-sophia-mosque

“When Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks in 1453, virtually all of the city’s surviving cathedrals and churches were — after being desecrated and thoroughly plundered — forcibly seized and turned over to the Turks’ religious establishment to be converted to mosques and used as Muslim properties.” — Dr. Alexandros K. Kyrou, professor of history, Salem State University.

Nine other former Hagia Sophia churches are either being used as mosques already or are in the process of being renovated for this purpose. The youngest of these, in Trabzon, was converted into a mosque in 2013. — Ersoy Soydan, assistant professor of communications at Kastamonu University and author of Churches and Monasteries in Turkey

Sadly, Turkey’s Greek community as a whole, let alone that of Istanbul by itself, is not sizeable enough to oppose or protest infringements on their historic cathedral. The 1914-1923 genocide of Greek Christians in Anatolia, and subsequent atrocities against the survivors — such as the 1955 anti-Greek pogroms in Istanbul — have almost completely wiped out the region’s Greek populace.

Addressing a rally ahead of the March 31 municipal elections in Turkey, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced plans to convert the Hagia Sophia museum, originally a Byzantine cathedral, into a mosque.

Erdogan repeated this statement the following day during a televised interview. “Hagia Sophia will no longer be called a museum,” he declared. “Its status will change. We will call it a mosque.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14026/iran-floods-mullahs

The natural disaster has also revealed some of the fundamental weaknesses of a dysfunctional system that, having devoted its principal resources and much of its energies to promoting a weird ideology, seems to be incapable of coping with basic tasks of a normal nation-state.

President Hassan Rouhani, spending a week-long holiday in the island resort of Qishm, appeared beyond reach. “Supreme Guide” Ali Khamenei, too busy with a poetry gathering, was unavailable for days and found it unnecessary even to comment.

Iranians watched in amazement as special units of the regular army moved to save lives, prevent floods from spreading further, reopen roads and even start repairing some of the damage. Buoyed by the presence of regular army units, thousands of volunteers also poured in to help deal with the disaster. Contacts across Iran describe the solidarity shown by average citizens as “exemplary”, implying that Iran deserves a better government.

It may take weeks if not months before the full facts of the current nationwide floods in Iran are established. But we already know that the floods represent one of the biggest natural disasters Iran has suffered in half a century.

According to provisional data from the Islamic Red Crescent, the floods struck in over 300 towns and cities in 22 of Iran’s 31 provinces, affecting 18.5 million people, almost a quarter of the nation’s total population. Some 1.2 million people have been made homeless, at least temporarily.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/brexit-debate-british-independence/

Charles Moore today ends his weekly Telegraph column, which has become required reading for both supporters and opponents of Brexit, with a gloomy forecast that the only way of saving Brexit from its betrayal by a Tory prime minister and government is her replacement by a new leader who then reforms the Tory party along lines that would allow local Tory associations to deselect Remain MPs and replace them with Leavers. His final paragraph reads:

It does not sound very likely, does it? The only reason to think that it might happen is the prospect of the alternative, which is annihilation.

Does “annihilation” sound a trifle over-dramatic? Well, I suspect Moore intends that it should have a shock effect on his readers — a metaphorical shaking of the shoulders to make them realize what’s at stake. What is at stake is not the physical annihilation of the Brits but the absorption of their self-governing democracy into an undemocratic European empire called the European Union. And that prospect justifies the gloomiest of forecasts.