RUTHFULLY YOURS

“Do not listen to what the Communists promise, just watch their actions…Search the truth by talking to victims of Communism,” recently warned Truc Brown, a refugee from Vietnamese Communism. Available for public appearances in the Anticommunism Action Team’s (ACAT) Speakers Bureau, she and other individuals now provide powerful testimony of their personal experiences with Communism’s horrors from around the world.

Brown addressed the April 30 Washington, DC-area conference “Down the Memory Hole of Socialism,” cosponsored by the Alexandria Tea Party and the Botev Academy. She joined other ACAT speakers such as Boyko Antonov and Lilia Slavova from Bulgaria, Anna Urman (Belarus/Lithuania), and Klara Sever. Sever, who is Jewish, hid from Nazi genocide in her occupied Czechoslovakian homeland during World War II thanks to heroic neighbors, but then had to endure Czechoslovakia’s postwar Communist tyranny. Like Brown, Sever warned that Communism “is a very poor copy of utopia, which has nothing to do with real life, but it is a very good tool because utopia is based on promises, and promises, as we well know, are very cheap.”

In a personal essay, Server recalls how she spent “half of my adult life standing in line” for all manner of basic necessities and consumer goods while living in her native Bratislava. Accordingly, she always carried a shopping bag for use whenever she chanced upon scarce commodities in any store, such as when she stopped to buy onions and potatoes while rushing to a theater performance with her husband. “We made it to the theater in the nick of time,” she recalled, the “lady behind the counter, without batting an eye, hanged the bag next to my nice coat.”

Sever’s essay elaborates upon her online biography’s description of being “blacklisted” in the 1950s due to her “enemy of the state” husband. Given that her father was an initial supporter of Communism, she had encountered no difficulty in studying at a university, but there her marriage to a man from a bourgeois background changed everything. Authorities answered her application for further study “with a proviso that I need to go to work as a manual worker for 5 years. I did and was moved into a working class cadre.” “Your position depended on your family background,” she recalled; “if you came from a working class, the doors were opened to you to all positions without qualifications.”

As at the 2013 Survivors of Communism Summit of the Alexandria, Virginia, Tea Party, Sever has often discussed life under totalitarian surveillance. “One could never be too cautious. You trusted only very few friends, that meant your little circle was small and sometimes getting smaller and smaller, depending upon who was disappearing.” People meeting in the street would often first ask about a recent soccer game in order to be able to pretend to any inquisitive police who might appear that the street conservation had nothing to do with sensitive topics like politics.

Drawing upon his extensive writings, Jaroslaw Martyniuk has joined Sever at both conferences in 2013 and 2017 to analyze Communism on the basis of his experience as the son of a family that fled Ukraine in World War II’s aftermath. He often focuses on the Holodomor, the Soviet Union’s genocidal forced famine of the Ukraine in the 1930s, and thereby emphasizes the importance of a citizenry’s right to bear arms that is often disputed in the United States. While World War I and Russia’s subsequent Civil War had littered Ukraine with weapons, Soviet authorities confiscated them in 1925. As a result 25,000 Soviet authorities could later subdue 25 million Ukrainians even as 25,000 died a day at the Holodomor’s height in 1933, a “magic 25/25/25” formula.

The implication is that Muslims too love Jesus — an approach that is bound to attract Christian passers-by (including priests and nuns) if only out of curiosity. But the Jesus of the Qur’an is not the Jesus of the New Testament. For Muslims, he is not the Son of God, not one third of the Trinity, did not die on the cross, was not resurrected after death, and is not God incarnate. He is simply one of a long line of prophets, important — yet inferior to Muhammad.

“We call them stinking kafir [non-Muslims], dirty. But, of course, akhi [brother], if that’s going to run them away from al-Islam, we don’t say that to them in front of their face.” — Abu Usamah, an imam at the Green Lane Mosque in Birmingham.

No one loves the kuffaar. No one loves the kuffaar! [unbelievers] … Whether these kuffaar are from the UK, or from the US … We love the people of Islam and we hate the people of the kufr. We hate the kuffaar. Whoever changes his religion from al-Islam to anything else kill him in the Islamic state. — Abu Usamah al-Thahabi, Channel 4 documentary, 2007.

When long-standing Palestinian Authority (PA) president Mahmoud Abbas met US President Donald Trump on May 7, he came out with what we British call a whopper, a huge lie. Here is what Abbas said with a straight face:

“Mr. President, I affirm to you that we are raising our youth, our children, our grandchildren on a culture of peace. And we are endeavoring to bring about security, freedom and peace for our children to live like the other children in the world, along with the Israeli children, in peace, freedom and security.”

We expect politicians to lie out of all sides of their mouths, to use doublespeak in order to seduce citizens to vote for them. Whether they be government officials or opposition hopefuls, a certain amount of economy with the truth is par for the course. Political analysts and well-informed journalists know this, of course, and work hard to untangle these webs. Facts matter. Sources make a difference. And in democratic countries that value free speech and the freedom of the press, politicians are held to account. Not many falsehoods get off Scot-free, and serial liars are regularly brought to book.

Politicians and their spokespeople know this, however, and do their best to keep their lies within reasonable bounds, even when making promises they have no real desire to fulfil. Abbas’s lies, however, are so gargantuan as to be in a league of their own. There, the exact opposite is true, and thousands of videos, texts, and recorded radio broadcasts show that the PA, the PLO, Fatah and Abbas himself have, over the years done their utmost to teach Palestinian children to hate and prepare themselves for violence against Jews.

There is a reason for this subterfuge. Muslims in general, especially those promoting extreme ideas, are growing more and more conscious of how they appear in the forum of public opinion. Even the terrorist group Hamas has issued a new Charter from which they have removed the explicit anti-Semitic passages of its 1988 version, in order to make it look better in Western eyes. In fact, Hamas has not changed its ways, and is still planning to use violence to eliminate Israel and replace it with an Islamic Palestinian state.

An incredible video has emerged online of Australian conservative commentator Andrew Bolt being attacked by Antifa goons in Melbourne, Australia, and fighting back hard.

The masked thugs attacked Bolt with a “glitter-bomb” (consisting of glitter, dye, and shaving cream) outside a Melbourne cafe on Tuesday, after a woman asked him for a selfie.

The video shows Bolt immediately responding with a haymaker, being pushed into a pole and falling over chairs and tables outside the restaurant. But he recovered quickly and charged his assailants, kicking and punching one of them in the face and groin before they scurried away.

Bolt explained his reason for punching back:

We must intimidate and humiliate the enemies of free speech, and not let them intimidate and humiliate us.

The video was taken by a photographer at the scene “who claims he wasn’t part of the ambush.” But Bolt says he “has trouble believing him”:

How come he was so well placed?

Why did he run away when the attackers did?

Why didn’t he offer help or tell me he had the vision?

He said on Thursday morning that he would pursue a monetary settlement from his attackers, as well as a donation to a charity of his choice, if and when police nab them.

Via the Australian:

“I’m not a brawler,” he said. “I had one bruised knuckle and I don’t care a stuff about it. I had a suit ruined and I want every cent of that paid back. And I want a hefty donation to a charity of my choice.”

Melbourne Antifa, a loose collection of left-wing activists united behind “anti-fascist action”, appeared to claim a role in the incident, posting on Facebook that “some of our family in solidarity were attacked by Andrew Bolt while they were protesting today”.

The group argued Bolt should be imprisoned for his “violent, horrendous language”.

Bolt told Fairfax Media the attack was the latest in a long line of threats to the safety of himself, his family and other conservatives in his home city.

“I am sick of people trying to intimidate me, trying to threaten me,” he said. “I’m sick of the threats on my life and my reputation. I’m sick of being sued and bullied and I’m not going to take it. I’m just not going to take it.

“We should be free to have a debate and to walk down the street without fear of being attacked.

“The right to free speech has to be better protected — everywhere but particularly in Melbourne. It is ridiculous how dangerous it is for conservatives in this town to speak out.

“If you don’t like what I say just prove me wrong. Don’t threaten me, don’t threaten my house, don’t threaten my family, don’t abuse me — just argue with me.

“It must be a question of the principle and not the side.”

“The Great Mosque of Cordoba.” That’s what Unesco—the cultural arm of the United Nations—calls the 24,000-square-foot 10th-century structure visited by 1.5 million tourists a year. It was declared a World Heritage site in 1984, and rightfully so: The building’s interior is a stunning example of Moorish architecture.

Yet this “mosque” is actually the cathedral of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Córdoba. In 1236, King Ferdinand III of Castile captured Córdoba from the Almohad Caliphate. He then had the building consecrated for Christian use. Or reconsecrated, rather, since underneath the mosque lay the demolished remains of a sixth-century church built by Spain’s Visigothic rulers before the Muslim invasion in 711. Today, Mass and confession are celebrated inside. The cathedral has been a Christian house of worship for centuries longer than it was an Islamic one.

The discordance greeting tourists is the result of more than 200 years of antagonism toward the Catholic Church by left-leaning Spanish intellectuals. They have used the cathedral’s unique architecture essentially to de-Christianize it in the name of restoring its historical Islamic roots. This secularist campaign began in the early 19th century but has gained new force in the past 20 years. Recent Islamic immigration to Spain has given the anticlerical leftists new allies—Muslims demanding to worship in their “Great Mosque.”

But that would require taking the building out of the Catholic Church’s hands. In 2013 an organization called the Platform for the Mosque-Cathedral of Córdoba gathered more than 350,000 signatures on a petition calling for a public takeover. A year later, the Socialist-led coalition government of Spain’s Andalusia region, which includes Córdoba, accused the diocese of “hiding” the building’s history. In March the city council issued a report arguing that the diocese does not legally own the cathedral. “Religious consecration is not the way to acquire property,” it said. The site’s true owners “are each and every citizen of the world from whatever epoch and regardless of people, nation, culture or race.”

The diocese worries that the leftists may be about to get their way. To shore up support among American Catholics, the bishop of Córdoba, Demetrio Fernández González, spoke Wednesday at a meeting sponsored by the Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom. Outright expropriation by the local government “would be impossible,” Bishop Fernández told me before his speech. But, as a European Union report on the mosque controversy pointed out, Andalusian law would permit expropriation if a court determined the diocese had failed properly to maintain and conserve the property. The bishop added that he already has obtained the pope’s support should a legal battle arise over ownership. CONTINUE AT SITE

Mr. Cooper was the U.S. ambassador to the Defense and Space Talks during the Reagan administration and director of the Strategic Defense Initiative during the George H.W. Bush administration.

Conventional wisdom holds that it will be years before North Korea can credibly threaten the United States with a nuclear attack. Kim Jong Un’s scientists are still testing only low-yield nuclear weapons, the thinking goes, and have yet to place them on ballistic missiles capable of reaching America’s West Coast.

While its technological shortcomings have been well documented, North Korea’s desire to provoke a nuclear conflict with the U.S. should not be minimized or ignored. Pyongyang is surely close to getting it right.

For South Korea the danger is more immediate. According to physicist David Albright, the founder and president of the Institute for Science and International Security, the North Koreans have between 13 and 30 nuclear weapons and can build as many as five more every year. If Mr. Kim were to detonate one of these bombs in the atmosphere 40 miles above Seoul, it could inflict catastrophic damage on South Korea’s electric power grid, leading to a prolonged blackout that could have deadly consequences.

The United States has 28,500 soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines in South Korea stationed below the 38th parallel—and more at sea nearby. An electromagnetic pulse attack on South Korea could play havoc with America’s ability to mount an effective response to North Korean aggression. One hopes the troops manning the two already-deployed batteries of the Thaad ballistic-missile defense system are prepared for such a scenario (in a concession to China, the newly elected South Korean government suspended this week the deployment of four additional launchers).

In 2001 Congress established a commission to study the danger of an electromagnetic pulse generated by the detonation of a high-altitude nuclear weapon. It concluded that while there would be no blast effects on the ground, critical electricity-dependent infrastructure could be rendered inoperable. The commission’s chairman, William R. Graham, has noted that several Russian generals told the commissioners in 2004 that the designs for a “super EMP nuclear weapon” had been transferred to North Korea.

Pyongyang, the Russian generals reported, was probably only a few years away from developing super EMP capability. According to Peter Vincent Pry, staff director of the congressional EMP commission, a recent North Korean medium-range missile test that was widely reported to have exploded midflight could in fact have been deliberately detonated at an altitude of 40 miles. CONTINUE AT SITE