RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://dianebederman.com/the-canadian-trucker-convoy-all-over-the-world/

The Canadian Trucker Convoy woke people up from their slumber, and now they are on the march

It’s been difficult to be a proud Canadian under the tyranny of Liberal PM Justin Trudeau – the clown and his leftist wing-man Jagmeet Singh – the court jester.

What kind of leader asks if citizens who disagree with political decisions should be tolerated?  Hmmm, so reminiscent of the Nazis. Two years ago a group of freedom-loving Canadians banded together and formed a trucker convoy to Ottawa to protest against the oppression put upon us by our “leaders.” In response, our PM called out the police to go after peaceful protesters in Ottawa and enacted the Emergencies Act rather than speak to the citizens. And if that were not enough, he arranged to have bank accounts of the truckers frozen. Well, the PM has shared his love of China. “There’s a level of admiration I actually have for China. Their basic dictatorship is actually allowing them to turn their economy around on a dime.”

And that Convoy, that Convoy For Freedom, gave hope to other countries suffocating from the strict shut down caused by “Covid.” And they began to fly the Maple Leaf.  A shining symbol of hope and freedom. What a proud moment in time for those of us who believe that government bends the knee to “we the people” and not the other way around.

France waved the Canadian flag.

New Zealand  and Australia waved the  Canadian flag.

“It became a rallying call with so much of the protest movement that we see based on populism and nationalism and that flag can be resonant with them. It can be a social movement tool, so we can see them finding unity.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20358/china-ai-trap

[N]o, America should not want to enter into any AI agreement with the People’s Republic of China on “nuclear C2” — command and control — or any other matter.

An agreement requiring a human to make launch decisions would, as a practical matter, be unenforceable.

None of China, Russia, or the United States would allow others to pore over millions of lines of their computer code…..

America does not need another feel-good agreement with China. It already has them, especially the Biological Weapons Convention, which has no enforcement mechanisms.

The Chinese regime wants to talk about artificial intelligence largely because it is trailing the U.S. and thinks an agreement would help it catch up…. [and] pave the way for China to access the U.S. technology it does not already have.

“China has signaled interest in joining discussions on setting rules and norms for AI, and we should welcome that,” said Bonnie Glaser of the German Marshall Fund to the Breaking Defense site. “The White House is interested in engaging China on limiting the role of AI in command and control of nuclear weapons.”

“Nobody wants to see AI controlled nuclear weapons, right?” asked Joe Wang, a former State Department and NSC staffer now at the Arlington, Virginia-based Special Competitive Studies Project, which specializes in AI and emerging technologies. “Like, even the craziest dictator can probably agree.”

Call me crazy, but, no, America should not want to enter into any AI agreement with the People’s Republic of China on “nuclear C2” — command and control — or any other matter.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/australia/2024/01/when-and-how-a-nations-luck-runs-out/

EXCERPT:

“Freedom of speech, thought, movement, religion and association are the pillars of any free society. They cannot be allowed to exist in name alone, but must be protected and strengthened, never suppressed or curtailed. No government should ever have the right to coerce, obstruct, or illegally interfere with the life, liberty, and property of citizens. We are aware that this is a noble aspiration while also anxiously aware that the opposite often occurs in Australia. It is precisely this illiberal development that is addressed and documented in our book.

If this country wants to regain its luck, Australians should be very much involved in the culture wars, questioning the Left’s prevailing nostrums and ever-expanding edicts. The liberal tradition encourages individual entrepreneurship and small business as drivers of the economy and personal responsibility. This form of liberalism also acknowledges the importance of traditional Western principles, values, and culture in the development and preservation of democratic societies composed of free and responsible individuals.

The social engineers who would remake the country impose and enforce anti-vilification laws but do so selectively. In only the past few days we have seen a slather of political leaders on both sides of the aisle demand prosecutions and stiff sentences for parading neo-Nazi clowns. Who among these political grandstanders has also demanded similar treatment for Islamic hate preachers and their equally intolerant congregations? The political castes’ silence speaks volumes. Government agencies have encouraged extreme leftist protests, supported the politicisation of sporting events, promoted cancel culture generally and condoned the teaching of critical race theory in schools. In light of these developments, Morrison’s assertion that Australia is a ‘liberal democracy’ can only be seen as vacuous and delusional.

Too often we have seen the right to religious freedom challenged by the right not to be discriminated against. In a true liberal society religious people should have the right to live according to their own ethos and belief. They should have freedom to create their own institutions without undue government interference. Most important, they should be able to transmit their religious and ethical values to their children.

Another challenge relates to political correctness, which is destroying our cultural heritage. This is one of the most disturbing developments of our time, and yet it is embraced and extolled by our political overlords and the so-called ‘progressive’ elites.

The uncontrolled growth of the welfare state is another challenge. Such growth is problematic because it must inevitably make recipients entirely dependent on the State. Yet more and more Australians look to the government as the solution to all their problems. As Adlai Stevenson, the failed Democratic presidential candidate, reminded us long ago, freedom can only exist in a society where it is entirely safe to be unpopular and citizens are free to think for themselves.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/ethnic-cleansing-and-crimes-against-humanity/

Not in Gaza, where there has been no ethnic cleansing and no crimes against humanity, though there were war crimes committed by Hamas on October 7 in the kibbutzim and at the Re’im Music Festival. Ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity have been committed, and are still being committed, in the Sudan, carried out on helpless black Africans by well-armed Arabs. Tens of thousands have been killed, and 7.5 million people have fled their homes. Half the population of 49 million now face famine. Half a million of these Africans have fled into Chad to escape the murderous Arab militias. More on this ethnic cleansing, and these crimes against humanity, that receive almost no attention in the world media, fixated as it is on Gaza, can be found here: “Ethnic killings in one Sudan city left up to 15,000 dead – UN report,” Reuters, January 20, 2024:

The war has left nearly half of Sudan’s 49 million people needing aid, while more than 7.5 million people have fled their homes – making Sudan the biggest displacement crisis globally.

Between 10,000 and 15,000 people were killed in one city in Sudan’s West Darfur region last year in ethnic violence by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and allied Arab militia, according to a United Nations report seen by Reuters on Friday [Jan. 19].

Within just a few days, in just one city, as many civilians were murdered in the Sudan as have died during more than three months of war in Gaza, where the IDF has estimated that of the 25,000 Gazans Hamas has so far declared dead, at least 10,000 were combatants, leaving 15,000 civilian deaths in Gaza, which is the upper estimate of the number of civilians killed in the Sudan.

In the report to the UN Security Council, independent UN sanctions monitors attributed the toll in El Geneina [Sudan] to intelligence sources and contrasted it with the UN estimate that about 12,000 people have been killed across Sudan since war erupted on April 15, 2023, between the Sudanese army and the RSF.

The monitors also described as “credible” accusations that the United Arab Emirates had provided military support to the RSF “several times per week” via Amdjarass in northern Chad. A top Sudanese general accused the UAE in November of backing the RSF war effort.

In a letter to the monitors, the UAE said 122 flights had delivered humanitarian aid to Amdjarass to help Sudanese fleeing the war. On Saturday, a UAE official told Reuters that it extended an invitation to the UN monitors to visit a field hospital in Amdjarass “to learn firsthand about the humanitarian efforts undertaken by the UAE to help alleviate the suffering caused by the current conflict.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/silencing-a-piano-man/

In London these days, if you’re lucky enough not to be hounded on the street by mobs of virulent pro-Hamas protesters, you just might find yourself assaulted by a gaggle of arrogant Chinese Communists. At least, that is, if you make your living by playing boogie-woogie on public pianos.

That’s what happened the other day to British piano man Brendan Kavanagh, whose YouTube channel has 2.4 million subscribers. Until this dustup occurred, I was unfamiliar with him. He comes off as a totally easygoing type, a middle-aged bloke who enjoys his music, loves sharing it online, and doesn’t take himself too seriously. In brief, a free spirit.

Alas, there are people moving among us in the Western world who, far from being free spirits, are agents of the planet’s largest terror regime. The other day Kavanagh was livestreaming while tickling the ivories at St. Pancras Station in London – on a Yamaha upright donated to the station, as it happens, by Elton John – when a half-dozen or so of them approached him. They were all wearing identical red scarves and carrying small Chinese flags.

At first it appeared as if one of them wanted to play the piano. But no: she said something in broken English about a “disclosure form” and about recording for Chinese TV. Then one of her male comrades told Kavanagh to turn off his camera, insisting that it was the group’s “right” not to have their images recorded. Kavanagh replied, firmly but pleasantly, that “we’re in a free country…..We’re not in Communist China.” To which the young man shot back: “Sorry, this is racist now!” And when Kavanagh’s hand grazed against one young woman’s flag, the Chinese guy exploded: “Don’t touch her!”

Suddenly he’d become a totalitarian commissar, giving orders and expecting to be obeyed. Kavanagh, to his credit, refused to back down, and even dared to say: “Are you in the Communist Party?…You’ve got a Communist flag in your hand.” In reply to which the commissar accused him of “discriminating a different country,” told him to “educate yourself,” and again hurled the word “racist.”

Summoned by the Chinese group, two cops turned up. One of them, a middle-aged woman named Kerry, told Kavanagh to turn off his camera. He refused, as was his right.

https://asiatimes.com/2024/01/when-genosuicide-feels-like-genocide/

An American coalition consisting mainly of Iraqi forces destroyed the city of Mosul in northern Iraq in 2017, with civilian casualties estimated at somewhere between 2,500 and 40,000. The Associated Press count was 11,000 civilians dead but it might have been much higher. ISIS fighters prevented civilians from leaving as the US and its allies bombarded the town, and no one knows to this day how many are buried under the rubble.

No one called this genocide because it didn’t feel like genocide. Muslims killing Muslims is a tragedy but Jews killing Muslims feels like genocide in the mind of the Muslim world and some who sympathize with it. Humiliation equals death in traditional society, and it is not the death count in Gaza but the humiliation of Hamas that elicits the charge of genocide.

When Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh said, “We love death like our enemies love life! We love martyrdom, the way in which [Hamas] leaders died,” the world should have taken him at his word. Hamas leaders might experience martyrdom vicariously from hotel suites in Qatar but they are sincere about martyrdom and do not care how many martyrs they make among non-combatants. This is not genocide but rather genosuicide.

The purging of ISIS from Mosul parallels Israel’s efforts to root Hamas out of Gaza after the October 7 massacre of 1,200 Israelis accompanied by unspeakable sexual and other atrocities, and the abduction of another 240 Israeli hostages. 25,000 Gazans are alleged by the Hamas-controlled health ministry to have died, of which almost 10,000 are Hamas fighters by Israel’s count.

The civilian death toll is about the same as Mosul’s. With 2 million residents in 2014, Mosul had roughly the same population as Gaza so the per capita death rate of civilians is roughly the same—assuming that the unverified figures circulated by Hamas and echoed by the United Nations are accurate.

An Internet search for items posted before 2020 shows that the term “genocide” appeared frequently in connection with Mosul but only and exclusively in association with ISIS, which perpetrated genocide against the Yazidi religious minority, according to a UN commission. There is barely a single instance in which the term “genocide” was used to characterize the destruction of Mosul itself, apart perhaps from the heading of a 2017 Arab Center Washington DC think tank report.

Why then accuse Israel of genocide in Gaza for collateral damage among civilians in a similar campaign to extirpate a terrorist army? The charges brought against Israel at the International Court of Justice are absurd on the face of it.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/iran-backed-terrorists-kills-3-american-soldiers-injure-30/

Drone and rocket attacks by Iran and its Jihadist militias across the region have killed and injured American soldiers, but not this many, and this attack took place not in Iraq, but in Jordan, which is supposed to be safe territory and not a war zone.

The current reports are that three American soldiers were killed and over 30 wounded in an attack on a position known as Tower 22. This was a position that the United States was using to coordinate attacks on ISIS in Syria. (Jordan, with the typical fidelity we can expect of allies in the Muslim world, already declared that it considers the area to be Syria and has nothing to do with it.)

The drone was reportedly launched from an Iranian-backed Jihadist militia in Syria. There’s plenty of those since the Syrian government is effectively non-functional and a puppet of Iran and Russia which bailed it out during the civil war. Hezbollah and every bunch of Shiite Jihadists in the region have a presence in Syria.

The actual attack was labeled as coming from the Islamic Resistance in Iraq which is a name for an umbrella group of Shiite Jihadists which have been used by Iran to attack American targets providing some plausible deniability for the PMUs and Shiite militias linked to the Shiite regime in Baghdad which are actually behind it. But while the militias and Jihadists have previously aimed attacks at Israel, this is the first attack in Jordan. American forces were clearly not expecting an attack in Jordan.

https://www.jns.org/a-hollow-holocaust-remembrance-day/?_se=

Those who support a ceasefire to allow a genocidal antisemitic movement like Hamas to commit more slaughters of Jews shouldn’t pretend to mourn the Six Million.

It’s an important date on the international community’s calendar. Every year, the United Nations and many other institutions and organizations hold ceremonies on Jan. 27 commemorating the Holocaust. It’s long been clear that much of the world did so without actually thinking seriously about what allowed the Nazis’ campaign of extermination of European Jewry to succeed as well as it did. Nor do most of those going through the motions of mourning the systematic murder of 6 million Jews or making empty promises about “never again” think much about how a supposedly civilized people like the Germans, with the help of various collaborators from other nations, convinced themselves that it was not only acceptable to kill that many people but justified to do so.

But this year, perhaps they shouldn’t bother to pretend to care about the subject. After the Hamas atrocities on Oct. 7 and, even more importantly, the reaction of much of the civilized world to what happened, the meaninglessness of most of what passes for the commemoration of the Shoah by the international community and the West has become painfully obvious.

It goes beyond hypocrisy

To describe those who are indifferent to the mass slaughter of Jews today but still prepared to mouth words of indignation about those killed by the Nazis in the 1930s and ’40s as merely hypocritical is insufficient.

The willingness of the world, including many of the educated elites in the West to dismiss the importance of the crimes perpetrated in southern Israel three months ago, to be effectively neutral about the murders, rapes, torture and kidnapping committed by Hamas and the Palestinians—or actually to take the side of the murderers, rapists, torturers and kidnappers—isn’t just shocking. It’s a seminal moment in modern history that not only illustrates the moral bankruptcy of a significant segment of contemporary opinion but also provides an explanation for how the Holocaust happened. As hard as it may be for us to accept, this demonstrates that Holocaust commemorations or even education programs about the destruction of European Jewry in the mid-20th century either don’t make people less likely to support more Holocausts; even worse, all this might be counterproductive.

The surge in antisemitism throughout the West in the aftermath of Oct. 7—with mobs marching in the streets of major cities and on college campuses proclaiming their support for the destruction of the one Jewish state on the planet (“from the river to the sea”) and for terrorism against Jews in Israel and everywhere else (“globalize the intifada”)—and the support such positions have received in much of the corporate media was surprising to those Jews who thought such sentiments were only held by marginal extremists. Nor can they be explained as an understandable reaction to a supposedly disproportionate Israeli response to terrorism or as sympathy for Palestinians caught up in a war that Hamas started.