RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16907/germany-un-security-council

A closer examination of Germany’s voting patterns at the UN over the past several years, however, reveals a troubling double standard on a range of issues, especially on human rights, which the German government claims to be “a cornerstone” of its foreign policy.

The record shows that during its stint on the UN Security Council, Germany voted for dozens of resolutions — many of which smack of anti-Semitism — that singled out Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East.

Moreover, Germany turned a blind eye as multiple serial human rights abusers, including China, Libya, Mauritania, Sudan and Venezuela, among others, were elected to the UN Human Rights Council, the UN’s highest human rights body.

In 2020, Germany voted 13 times to condemn Israel, but failed to introduce a single resolution on the human rights situation in Cuba, China, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Pakistan, Venezuela — or on 175 other countries, according to UN Watch, a Geneva-based, independent non-governmental watchdog group.

“While nearly all EU countries backed 13 out of 17 UNGA resolutions singling out Israel this year, they failed to introduce even one resolution for women’s right [sic] activists jailed and tortured in Saudi Arabia, dissident artists arrested in Cuba, journalists thrown behind bars in Turkey, religious minorities attacked in Pakistan, and opposition members persecuted in Venezuela, where more than five million people have fled government repression, hunger and economic collapse.” — UN Watch, December 16, 2020.

Germany pursued a similar policy of approving anti-Israel resolutions at the UN in 2018, 2017, and 2016, when Germany voted for an especially disgraceful UN resolution, co-sponsored by the Arab group of states and the Palestinian delegation, that singled out Israel as the world’s only violator of “mental, physical and environmental health.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16886/turkey-nazi-sympathizer

Sadly, Hüseyin Nihal Atsız still has many fans in Turkey.

“As the mud will not be iron even if it is put into an oven, the Jew cannot be Turkish no matter how hard he tries. Turkishness is a privilege, it is not granted to everyone, especially to those like Jews… If we get angry, we will not only exterminate Jews like the Germans did, we will go further….” — Hüseyin Nihal Atsız, in his National Revolution (Milli Inkılap) journal, 1934.

Today, behind many of Turkey’s continued aggressive policies such as its anti-Armenian, anti-Greek, anti-Cypriot, anti-Jewish, anti-Kurdish, anti-Western, and anti-Israeli activities lie the racist views of Atsız and the like. Millions of Turks have for decades been poisoned with Atsız’s Nazi-like views.

On December 16, the Istanbul metropolitan municipality, led by Turkey’s main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), named a park in Istanbul after Hüseyin Nihal Atsız, a racist anti-Semite and one of Turkey’s most prominent Nazi sympathizers. The request was made by members of another Turkish opposition party, “The Good Party” (Iyi). Atsız (1905-1975) was known for “measuring skulls” to determine people’s “amount of Turkishness.”

In March, a member of the Good Party presented a motion to the Istanbul municipal assembly, calling for a park in Istanbul’s Maltepe district to be named after Atsız. The motion stated that Atsız spent most of his life in the Köyiçi region of Maltepe, and the subject was put on the assembly’s agenda in November. After the motion was passed by the assembly, the park in the Yalı Neighborhood officially received Atsız’s name.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/europes-disgraceful-betrayal/

Really? This is from National Review, reflexively against Trump. Joe Biden and his foreign policy team will do exactly what the Euros are doing with China…..rsk

According to top EU officials, the new Comprehensive Agreement on Investment between Europe and China is a wonderful panacea of important measures that includes greater market access to European companies in China and pledges to implement the Paris climate agreement.

And, they say, “China has committed to effectively implement [International Labor Organization] Conventions it has ratified, and to work towards the ratification of the ILO fundamental Conventions, including on forced labour.”

No one believes that for a second.

European officials have rushed to cement the trade deal before the end of 2020, and before Joe Biden takes office. In the process, they’ve deliberately overlooked the Chinese Communist Party’s disdain for human rights and its widespread atrocities, including forced-labor practices, in Xinjiang. Although it once seemed that opposition to the deal spurred by concerns for China’s Uyghur minority might have scuttled the negotiations, the two sides completed their talks and signed the agreement earlier today.

Now it awaits approval by the European Parliament, which could vote the proposal down — and a number of the body’s members have already spoken out against the arrangement. Reinhard Butikofer, the Green Party member who runs the Parliament’s China delegation, tore into it on Twitter. The “language on ILO and forced labor is not worth the ink,” he wrote. In another tweet he compared the deal to putting lipstick on a pig. More than a few of his colleagues are expected to express their agreement with him.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/12/2020-year-european-islam-bruce-bawer/

This year the biggest story in Western Europe, as around the world, was the Chinese virus and lockdown. Yet the issue of Islam didn’t go away. More cars and churches went up in flames. Muslims continued to expand no-go zones, to engage in gang violence, to bash Jews and gays, to rape infidel women and “groom” infidel girls, to collect hefty welfare payments from supine governments, and to accrue political power that they use to push for Islamization in a range of cultural spheres. While Jews fled Europe to escape Muslim harassment, Muslims kept pouring in, and people smuggling was arguably more of a problem than ever.

Forced marriages and honor killings persisted. In a year when a record number of non-Muslim women across the Western world woke up and decided that they weren’t women after all, and perhaps weren’t even men either, but belonged rather to one of scores of newly minted gender categories, countless Muslim women in Western European sharia enclaves, who enjoyed no such flexibility, remained under the heel of the same rigid system of patriarchal oppression that had characterized Islam for centuries, and received no support whatsoever from the media darlings on the gender barricades.

Criticism of Islam, already verboten in newspapers, plays, you name it, became even more radioactive, with a UK publisher canceling a book – itself not about Islam – simply because its author had tweeted an inconvenient truth about the prophet Muhammed. In January, a previously unknown French teenager, Mila O., slammed Islam on Instagram and joined the ever-growing club of the instantly notorious whose members are forced underground and obliged to live with bodyguards 24/7 (even as cowardly politicians and commentators malign them).

While the year saw no acts of jihadist terror in Europe on the scale of the 2017 Barcelona and Manchester Arena attacks, there were a few somewhat smaller incidents, such as stabbings in Nice on October 29 and a mass shooting in Vienna on November 2 – all of which the media spun with the usual sleight of hand, turning Muslims from perpetrators into victims. On November 13, for example, a contributor to the Guardian named Shada Islam lamented that such acts “put…Muslims back in the spotlight” – as if this were the worst thing about them.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16884/paris-coronavirus

One remembers lazy afternoons spent discussing the fate of mankind and providing answers to non-existent existential questions, and warm evenings visiting exhibitions of structuralist paintings with no structure, rounding up all that at sunrise with a generous bowl of onion soup in the fruit and vegetable market in Les Halles.

Having nowhere to go and nothing interesting to do, being in Paris these days feels like being in Moscow in the 1960s when the only excitement was provided by rumors about the arrival of new supplies of potatoes or a one-day availability of hot chocolate in Cafe Pushkin.

The roots of this unbelievable population control, something even Lenin could not dream of, may be found in the culture of dirgisme (overall control) that assumes the governments know best even when they admit they don’t.

“You are lucky to be in Paris at this time,” says a friend phoning from New York. “Here, we are like rats in a box, going round and round.”

In the past few weeks I have heard similar lamentations from friends in London and Berlin, not to mention Beirut and Tehran.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16882/persecution-of-christians-november-2020

“They tried to force some of our Christians to convert to Islam. They also tried to force my wife and our four children to convert to Islam, but when they refused to convert, they shot my wife in the head while our four children were cut into pieces with a Somali sword. — Morningstar News, Democratic Republic of Congo.

“Islamic militants turned a village soccer field in northern Mozambique into an execution ground when they beheaded more than 50 people during three days of savage violence…. More than 2,000 people have been killed and about 430,000 left homeless in the region since 2017.” — Barnabas Aid, Mozambique.

For two months after kidnapping a deaf and mute Christian teenage girl her, five Muslim men repeatedly gang-raped and tortured her. All this time, police ignored the parents’ pleas to intervene. It was only when a local authority took up the case, and only after months of court meetings, that the girl was located and returned to her parents. One of the kidnappers insisted the girl had willingly converted to Islam and married him. — British Pakistani Christian Association, Pakistan.

The following are among the abuses inflicted on Christians by Muslims throughout the month of November 2020:

The Slaughter of Christians

Indonesia: On Nov. 27, Islamic terrorists beheaded a Christian priest and killed three other Christians by slitting their throats in Lembantongoa village. During the raid, a Salvation Army church and six Christian homes were also torched. While acknowledging that an Islamic militant group was responsible, authorities claimed that the attack was not “religiously motivated.” One human rights researcher said that this “latest strike was a ‘clear escalation’ of violence against Christians.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16861/turkey-europe-tensions-sanctions

Erdoğan also said that he sees Turkey’s future in Europe — the same Europe he just had accused of being “Nazi remnants and fascists.”

The heart of the matter was how tough the EU would go in sanctions at a time when Turkey’s national economy was in free-fall. What Brussels decided, it turned out, was: Not so tough

Legally speaking, the man Erdoğan referred to as a “terrorist” is only a suspect without a court verdict. This, however, is Erdoğan’s sick understanding of constitutional rights: He is the elected leader, so he believes he can take the liberty to declare suspects guilty or not guilty while their court cases are in progress.

If Turkey’s Islamist strongman, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, spent more sleepless nights the first week of December than he had over his concerns for U.S. sanctions, it was because of the more imminent and potentially punishing European Union sanctions that would take shape at a summit on December 10-11. He must have had a relatively peaceful sleep when the summit was over. He might have thought that he had managed to get away from a huge European sanctions bomb, at least until March. It may, however, be a bit premature for him to sigh with relief.

After the EU leaders gave Turkey an unambiguous warning in October, Erdoğan chose to escalate tensions, bringing what otherwise would have been mere diplomatic issues to the level of a mini-clash of civilizations. Erdoğan calculated that he could play the tough Ottoman sultan until the last moment and that the EU would never dare burn their bridges with Turkey. He was right and wrong. He bought time, the EU did not burn their bridges, the sanctions at the December summit were not powerful enough to change Turkey’s course. Nevertheless, Erdoğan now has another deadline by which he must choose between a further clash of civilizations and sustainable de-escalation.