RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14409/iran-terrorism-europe

One of the more disturbing discoveries regarding Iran’s ever-expanding terrorism horizons has emerged in London where it was revealed by the Daily Telegraph earlier this month that a terrorist cell with links to Iran had been caught stockpiling tonnes of explosive materials on the outskirts of London at a secret bomb factory.

British intelligence officials have now concluded the stockpile was part of an international Hizbollah plot to lay the foundations for future terror attacks in Europe.

One positive outcome from Iran’s increased terrorist activity has been to persuade the British government finally to designate the entire Hizbollah organisation as a terrorist organisation.

Now, with Iran being held responsible for the latest escalation in tensions in the Gulf, Britain and other European powers should demonstrate their resolve to oppose Iran’s well-documented sponsorship of terrorism by backing the Trump administration in its latest confrontation with the ayatollahs.

Iran is intensifying its efforts to build a global terror network as the ayatollahs come under increasing economic and political pressure resulting from US sanctions.

While US officials continue to investigate Iran’s involvement in the recent series of attacks on a number of oil tankers operating in the Gulf, counter-terrorism experts have uncovered evidence that Iran is also working hard to develop its terrorist infrastructure well beyond the confines of the Middle East.

Intelligence officials are particularly concerned about Iran’s activities in Europe where they have identified a recent upsurge in Iranian-sponsored terrorist activity.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14406/suicide-of-france

“Frenchness” is disappearing and being replaced by a kind balkanization of enclaves not communicating with one another…. this is not a good recipe.

The more the French élites with their disposable incomes and cultural leisure cloister themselves in their enclaves, the less likely it is that they will understand the everyday impact of failed mass immigration and multiculturalism.

The globalized, “bobo-ized [bourgeois Bohemian] upper classes” are filling the “new citadels” — as in Medieval France — and are voting en masse for Macron. They have developed “a single way of talking and thinking… that allows the dominant classes to substitute for the reality of a nation subject to severe stress and strain the fable of a kind and welcoming society.” — Christophe Guilluy, Twilight of the Elites, Yale University Press, 2019.

“Regarding France in 2019, it can no longer be denied that a momentous and hazardous transformation, a ‘Great Switch’, is in the making”, observed the founder and president of the Jean-Jacques Rousseau Institute, Michel Gurfinkiel. He was mourning “the passing of France as a distinct country, or at least as the Western, Judeo-Christian nation it had hitherto been presumed to be”. A recent cover story in the weekly Le Point called it “the great upheaval”.

Switch or upheaval, the days of France as we knew it are numbered: the society has lost its cultural center of gravity: the old way of life is fading and close to “extinction”. “Frenchness” is disappearing and being replaced by a kind balkanization of enclaves not communicating with one another. For the country most affected by Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism, this is not a good recipe.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14415/britain-education-clash

While Britons are striving to promote British values, those increasingly appear not to be the values everyone here wants.

The No Outsiders curriculum… teaches acceptance of people different from oneself, which is what brings pupils into contact with mutual respect for Christians, Muslims and Jews, the disabled, gays and everyone who might be considered “other”. “It should make absolutely clear that no group should be left out….”

There seems to be a broader agenda at work here: that is, to find ways in which to maintain British values when faced with people who in many instances seem to oppose them. One example might be a lesson summed up in the Anderton Park expressions about British values…: “Jewish people are equal to Sikhs, Muslims, Christians and people with no religion.” Many might not agree to that sentiment, whether in primary or secondary education, and possibly many Muslim parents would wish their children not to be taught it….

The importance of teaching children about respect for other people cannot be exaggerated. In the light of this, can there be any question that the lessons at Anderton Park school are vital for the West?

What started as a small protest in the UK has taken on wider dimensions that are already spreading to other cities. For more than two months now, a primary school in Birmingham in the UK has been at the centre of a standoff between modern Western values and the concerns of a large group of Muslim parents. As early as April, reports said, leafleters were targeting schools in Birmingham, Manchester, Oldham, London, Blackburn and Bradford.

The almost daily protests outside the schools, although on a more muted scale, are the biggest since those against Salman Rushdie and his book, The Satanic Verses back in 1988 — events that for some radicalized a generation. According to the author Kenan Malik, those early protests sowed the seeds of rifts that have since become wider. Some form of clash between these two sets of values is taking place again.

Anderton Park Primary School is an outstanding place of education for children between the ages of five and eleven. Most of the children are Muslims, but that does not restrict the efforts to introduce them to being fully educated citizens in the country where most were born.