RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17512/end-china-trade

The real problem for Beijing is that consumption, the only sustainable part of the Chinese economy, looks far softer than officially reported, something evident from the widely followed China Beige Book survey. Spending will not fully recover until the coronavirus pandemic passes, and that is unlikely to happen soon due to China’s barely effective vaccines.

In any event, Washington must begin enforcing laws, especially those banning the importation of products made with forced or slave labor.

Japan’s Uniqlo is not the only brand that has been implicated. Nike and Apple have, through subcontractors, apparently used such labor. Enforcement has been hampered by, among other things, lack of personnel and a failure of political will.

The larger goal has to be an ending of trade relations with China. “Because the threat posed by China to the United States results from its hostile system and includes economic, technological, and military dimensions, only systemic, not piecemeal, responses can possibly protect critical U.S. interests,” Washington, D.C.-based trade expert Alan Tonelson tells Gatestone. “Sanctions against individuals or companies will inevitably produce only pinprick effects, and even these are easily nullified with shell game corporate renamings and personnel changes.”

“I want to be clear on this, our goal is not to hold China back,” said U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken in a June 25 interview with Anne Claire Coudray of TF1. “It is not to establish a policy against China.”

Really? The Chinese regime spread a disease that has at last count killed 604,000 Americans; last year it urged the violent overthrow of the American government; it is killing tens of thousands of Americans annually with fentanyl and related opioids; and it steals half a trillion dollars of American intellectual property every 12 months. It has even declared a “people’s war” on America.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/06/false-claim-muslims-are-being-lynched-india-ashlyn-davis/

We received an interesting reply to one of our articles yesterday. When we reported about the Muslim preacher Mohammad Umar Gautam, who has been arrested by the Uttar Pradesh Anti-Terror Squad for running a religious conversion outlet, one Twitter user claimed, “They are already lynching Muslims on streets with impunity, don’t make their situation worse.” 

We found it incongruous that in a country where a Muslim preacher, supported by politicians and industrialists, openly holds congregations to convert non-Muslims to Islam, Muslims are being lynched on the streets, and that, too, with impunity. But we believe in giving a fair chance to all claims and so did some research, and this is what we found.

In 2017, a Muslim man, Pehlu Khan, was attacked under the suspicion of cow theft, and succumbed to his injuries. The incident got immediate judicial attention; the accused were detained by the police and then-Home Minister Rajnath Singh assured justice. Crimes cannot be obliterated from a country of over 1.3 billion. But to contend that the crime against the Muslim was committed with impunity is a shameless stretch of the truth in order to claim eternal victimhood.

This is the dear and treasured victimhood status that many Muslims have been unremittingly exploiting throughout Narendra Modi’s tenure as Prime Minister. Nurturing their deep-seated hatred for Hindus, they have now prefixed their favorite hyperbolic claim, “lynched for being a Muslim” with “forced to chant Jai Shree Ram,” in order to satiate their occasional cravings for affronting Hindu sentiments.

We have previously detailed how, earlier this month, the Muslim intelligentsia, comprising Muslim media personalities, politicians and political influencers, distorted the Muslim-on-Muslim violence in Uttar Pradesh’s Ghaziabad into an assault on a Muslim by Hindu extremists. This venomous cabal has mastered the art of coming up with false and deceptive claims of “hate crimes” every time a Muslim is victimized, regardless of the faith of his offender or the cause of the attack. Hinduphobic media houses and assorted websites have repeatedly latched onto such stories, ensuring they reach every corner of the world, but have done nothing to negate the impact of the misinformation after investigations revealed these to be warped narratives and that no hate crime was involved.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/06/pro-palestinian-anti-semitism-europe-joseph-puder/

Violent anti-Semitic eruptions in Europe following the outburst of hostilities between the Gaza-based Hamas terrorists and Israel have become common and repeated occurrences. The European governments have done little to prevent the largely Muslim and some local anti-Semites from initiating violence against European Jews. It is particularly true of the German government and its leader, Angela Merkel. Chancellor Merkel invited over a million migrants into Germany, mostly Muslims from the Middle East and Africa. Their inculcated hatred for Israel and Jews has resulted in the desecration of Jewish cemeteries, Holocaust memorials, and attacks on synagogues. To assuage Jewish concerns, Merkel and the German government pay lip-service to the unacceptability of anti-Semitism in Germany due to Germany’s role in perpetrating the Holocaust in which Six Million Jews were murdered by Nazi Germany. In reality, few of the perpetrators are punished, and certainly not with long prison terms or deportation. 

The New York Times reported (May 19, 2021) that rocks were thrown at doors of a Synagogue in Bonn. Israeli flags were burned outside a synagogue in Munster. Pro-Palestinian rallies took place in Berlin, Cologne, Dusseldorf, Hamburg, and Leipzig. “In Germany, where historical memory runs especially deep because of the Holocaust, pro-Palestinian rallies have been held in cities across the west of the country and in the capital, Berlin. Several have descended into violence, including anti-Semitic chants, calls for violence against Israel, desecration of memorials to Holocaust victims, and attacks on at least two synagogues.”

The German Interior Minister Horst Seehoffer threatened to crackdown on anti-Semitism at pro-Palestinian protests. He stated, “We will not tolerate the burning of Israeli flags on German soil and attacks on Jewish facilities.” He added, “Anyone who spreads anti-Semitic hatred will feel the full force of the law.” We have heard these immaterialized threats before, but then, political correctness appears to cause German officials to fold rather than deal forcibly with violent Muslims, many of them new migrants. European White Guilt, particularly toward Third World people, accompanied by the loss of national pride, and the will to defend its own traditional values, is allowing a violent minority to perpetuate anti-Semitic violence.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2021/06/somali-refugee-stabbed-8-women-germany-while-daniel-greenfield/

Obviously, the authorities are blaming “psychiatric” problems.

Three women were killed and five others were seriously injured after a 24-year-old man who is also a Somali immigrant attacked the women in Wuerzburg. 

The attack began in a store when the attacker asked where the business kept its knives, regional police president Gerhard Kallert said.

He then stabbed and killed the saleswoman and two other people in the store before running out on the street and stabbing five more women as well as a child.

Regional Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann said authorities are investigating an Islamic motive for the attack as witnesses claim the attacker yelled “Allahu akbar” before the rampage.

The suspect, allegedly named Abdirahamn J, was another refugee whose application was denied, but never left Germany. German media sources suggest that there was ISIS material in the homeless shelter where he was staying.

 Abdirahamn, who came to Germany from Mogadishu, began stabbing women at a Woolworth store, as part of his Jihad.

The “Bild” newspaper reported, with reference to an internal notice from the authorities, that the accused had said when he was arrested that he had carried out his “jihad” with the attack. Investigators at the press conference confirmed that the word “jihad” had been used. 

That’s what happens when countries enable Jihad migration.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/06/in-the-west-incorrect-speech-is-increasingly-treated-as-blasphemy/

Europe’s ‘hate-speech laws’ have taken the core principles of ‘blasphemy laws’ and dressed them up in a watered-down Western packaging.

Freedom of speech is one of the most fundamental American values. This value was brought all the more sharply into focus recently when my fellow expat, Prince Harry, quite royally offended his host nation by calling the First Amendment “bonkers” on the California-based Armchair Experts podcast. Even as a Brit, I could still detect the irony of the blood descendent of King George III complaining about constitutional rights in the land of the free.

But Prince Harry’s ability to speak freely about his beliefs might not have fared so well in other countries that were formerly under the Crown. Take Pakistan. Last week, advocates supported by human-rights group ADF International celebrated a victory for free speech at the High Court in Lahore, Pakistan. A couple was accused of sending an offensive message about the Prophet Mohammed and the Qur’an in English in 2014. Never mind that they don’t speak English. Never mind that the wife’s phone had been missing for a full month before the inflammatory text was sent. Shafqat Emmanuel and Shagufta Kausar are Catholic, illiterate, and entirely innocent. The couple, parents of four, were sentenced to death in 2014. In a landmark ruling, the High Court has now thrown out the case. The SIM card from the phone in question had not been sent for a forensic test, and therefore was deemed inadmissible as evidence, undermining the case of the prosecution.

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/when-a-free-society-becomes-a-police?token=

By my lights, the most important news event of this past week was not the New York mayoral primary (my condolences to Andrew Yang). It wasn’t Bitcoin dropping below $30,000. And it certainly wasn’t the new bipartisan infrastructure deal announced by President Biden.

It was the forced closure of Apple Daily, a pro-democracy newspaper in Hong Kong.

You may not have heard of Apple Daily. I knew of it, but only vaguely. It is — or rather, it was — Hong Kong’s version of the New York Post combined with William Lloyd Garrison’s The Liberator. A tabloid, yes. But also: a voice for freedom. 

Ever since it began publishing in 1995, Apple Daily has been a thorn in the side of the Chinese Communist Party. Its commitment to democracy and freedom had everything to do with its founder, Jimmy Lai.

It’s not possible to do Lai’s whole story justice in a column — someone should make a blockbuster — but here is the cliffsnotes version: Lai fled mainland China at 12 years old as a stowaway on a fishing boat. He found a job in a Hong Kong sweatshop and eventually worked his way up in the garment trade (or, as we in the Jewish community call it, the shmata business.)

Along the way, he encountered fellow garment workers in New York who introduced him to free-market theorists like Frederick Hayek, Karl Popper and Milton Friedman, with whom he later developed a close relationship. “This is a guy who didn’t have any formal schooling past the age of maybe eight,” Mark Simon, who has been Lai’s right hand for the past two decades, told me in an interview this week. “Those books started his real political awakening.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17504/persecution-of-christians-may

The boy eventually met up with his mother, and they went searching for Pastor Thomas. According to the wife, “As we continued doing the search, we found my husband in a pool of blood, beheaded and his tongue removed.” His tongue was likely cut out as punishment for “speaking against Islam.”

Although Azerbaijan claims to be repairing the damage it caused the cathedral, subsequent pictures and video footage suggest that they are defacing it more…. In the same area of Shushi where the cathedral is being profaned, Azerbaijan is preparing to build a “victory” mosque…. Finally, Azerbaijan is using gravestones from Armenian Christian cemeteries as building material.

Muslim men raped a Christian child and molested another. On May 2, Muhammad Awais, “beat, raped, and left for dead” Anum Bibi, an 8-year-old Christian girl, after he caught her trying to retrieve water with her 9-year-old brother. — Pakistan.

A group of Muslims attacked a Christian family and destroyed their home in an effort to seize their farmstead. “Muslims destroyed our mud house,” the mother explained. “They stole our tin roof, took the rice, food, everything of value. They also beat me and my husband with a stick, even my children.”… As a result, police failed to respond or make any arrests and instead asked for money from the victims. — Bangladesh.

The following are among the abuses inflicted on Christians by Muslims throughout the month of May 2021:

The Slaughter of Christians

Uganda: On May 3, hours after Pastor Thomas Chikooma engaged in a public debate about Islam and Christianity, Muslims severed his tongue and beheaded him. The well-known pastor, father of 11, had planted 50 churches in eastern Uganda. During the open-air event, to which Muslims had invited him, he used the Bible and Koran to make his points. He won over several people — including six Muslims, who went on to convert to Christianity — prompting angry Muslims in the crowd to cry “Allahu Akbar,” prompted the pastor and his young son to rush away from the event.

“Two motorcycles carrying two Muslims each and dressed in Islamic attire speedily bypassed us,” his son, a minor, later explained. “When we were 200 meters to reach our house, the two motorcycles stopped at the junction opposite Nalufenya primary school and the road near our house.” The pastor told his son to wait while he went to confront the four men. “Immediately some commotion began as the men started talking about the open-air debate, and soon one of them slapped my father,” said his son. “I got scared and fled … and arrived at home.” The boy eventually met up with his mother, and they went searching for Pastor Thomas.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17503/iran-ebrahim-raisi-black-turban

[T]o see Raisi as a cleric heading a clerical regime would be a mistake. He is as much of a cleric as Saddam Hussein was a Field Marshal. It would also be a mistake to see him, as some American “liberals” have done, as more “open to the world” because he claims a PhD.
However, to see Raisi as a mere puppet playing Judge Blood could also be misleading. Raisi has been created by a network of Mafia-like interests linked to the military-security apparatus that has embraced the Iranian-nation, sucking its vial energies, as a poison ivy that could kill a towering oak with a tight embrace.
Raisi’s victory is the victory of a coterie that cares neither for Iran nor for revolution as long as it can advance its position of power and protect its ill-gained assets. Khamenei is the apprentice wizard that helped create this monster….
Paradoxically, the concentration of power in the hands of the faction of which Khamenei is the face could mean that Tehran may be more likely to bend now than it ever was. If things go wrong domestically, as they are bound to if current policies remain in place, the clique won’t be able to blame it on the “New York Boys”.

Now what? This is the question Iranians ask these days as they try to absorb the shock of the latest elections which has propelled another turban into the presidency of the Islamic Republic.

Leaving aside the first two whose ephemeral career was too short to merit attention, the Islamic Republic has had five presidents.

Of these, only one, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, did not pretend to be a man of the cloth. Of the remaining four two, Hashemi Rafsanjani and Hassan Rouhani, wore white turbans that designated them as “common folk” (aam in Arabic) while two others, Ali Khamenei and Muhammad Khatami, donned black turbans and the title of “sayyed” which in Persian designates the descendants of the Prophet through his daughter Fatimah az-Zahra, thus regarded as “special”.