RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2020/12/17/the-new-middle-east/

From Israel to the Gulf States to Iran, the troubled region is changing

‘Normalization” is the rather cumbersome jargon for what seems to be happening in the Middle East. For the time being, it’s to do with expectations. Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates have signed peace treaties with Israel. At the signing ceremony in the White House, the Arab foreign ministers looked like officials going about their business. The expression on the face of Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, was beatific.

For the Arabs, it is taboo to normalize anything with Israel. The sole exceptions are Egypt and Jordan, which signed peace treaties to mitigate their wartime losses. When Islamist soldiers then assassinated the Egyptian president, Anwar Sadat, the Egyptian treaty pretty much fell by the wayside. More to the point, the peace process known as the “Oslo Accords” had been negotiated in secret, and in 1993 a party was held on the White House lawn to mark that at last the Palestinians were coming to terms with Israel. Yasser Arafat signed for the Palestinians, but the ink was hardly dry on the page before he gave orders for an intifada, which translated into violent civil disobedience and cost hundreds of Israelis their lives. That’s not going to be repeated; times have changed, the look on Netanyahu’s face plainly signified. Bahrain and the UAE are too insignificant to be independent actors and too marginal to be harmed if normalization goes wrong. They are testing the waters. A grand reversal of alliances is getting under way.

It has long been common knowledge that Saudi Arabia and Israel are holding confidential talks. That is extraordinary enough. The Saudi Arabian public has a perception that Jews are as pernicious a people as any in the wide world. Learned imams appear on Saudi television to recite the age-old anti-Semitic fantasies, Hitler’s Mein Kampf is in the bookshops, and Jews are not allowed to enter the country. The supposition is that participants in these confidential talks are considering the conditions that might oblige Israel to intervene in a strictly Muslim struggle for supremacy between Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Iran. Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan has taken the Islamist position against the infidel Christians and the Jews. Iran de­vised the anti-American war cry “Death to the Great Satan” and the corresponding anti-Israeli war-cry “Death to the Little Satan.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16797/erdogan-bogus-democratic-reforms

Erdoğan’s new reform pledge came at a time when a former leader of a pro-Kurdish party, along with dozens of others, remains in jail for the past years. Almost all the elected Kurdish mayors have been replaced by government-appointed administrators. Hundreds of journalists, politicians and intellectuals spend jail time on absurdly flimsy charges.

Pro-government judges announce rulings in defiance of rulings from superior Turkish courts, including the Constitutional Court, and from the European Court of Human Rights. Those judges who dare make “undesirable verdicts” are probed and often get disciplinary punishments.

Erdoğan’s new charm offensive is deeply problematic. It is not genuine. It is too little too late. Just a few days after he launched his reform campaign, he refused calls for the release of a jailed Kurdish politician and a civil rights activist. “Erdoğan’s reform program survived only nine days,” said Bekir Ağırdır, a prominent political analyst and director of the research company KONDA.

Erdoğan has a serious predicament: He wants his country to keep suffering as a third world democracy while he hopes to lure foreign investment at the same amounts and terms as a Western democracy. That will not happen.

It is his favorite cycle: President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan recklessly widens Turkey’s democratic deficit, weakens institutions, refuses to acknowledge democratic checks and balances. He isolates Turkey mostly from its Western alliances and follows an irredentist foreign policy of trying to reclaim supposedly “lost” land. Turkey is at odds with both the United States and Europe.

Inevitably, political isolation causes economic isolation. The economy is on a downfall. Investors flee the country. Voters start to complain about the double-digit inflation and interest rates; the lira falls and falls; unemployment rises sharply. Erdogan rediscovers his reformist self and promises to democratize — presumably hoping, in vain, that he can reverse the economic downfall.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16817/eu-mourns-iranian-scientist

“There is no gloating about death, but the Iranian scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh…. was not the scientist who discovered the anti-coronavirus vaccine, but the scientist called the father of the Iranian nuclear bomb…” — Tareq Al-Hameed, Saudi author, Okaz, November 30, 2020.

“[H]ow can they condemn the killing of a man who devoted his life to making a sinister bomb for an evil regime, but they do not condemn Iran’s killing of innocent people in the region. Iran kills Syrians, Iraqis, and Lebanese, and destroys Yemen, and sponsors all terrorist groups…” — Al-Hameed, Saudi author Okaz, November 30, 2020.

“[D]isrupting the Iranian regime’s access to nuclear weapons is a long-term service to humanity.” Iran… sees nuclear weapons as a tool “that enables it to occupy the rest of the world….” — Mohammed Al-Saaed, Saudi political analyst, Okaz, November 30, 2020.

“We are talking about a gang that hijacked Iran, and its defeated people became its captive. It seeks to hijack the entire region, fueled by intense hatred for the Arab. Is it acceptable to allow it to produce nuclear weapons and use them to kill millions of people?” — Mohammed Al-Saaed, Saudi political analyst, Okaz, November 30, 2020.

While the European Union has condemned the killing of Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, widely regarded as the father of Iran’s modern nuclear program, many Arabs and Muslims expressed relief over the assassination.

By condemning the killing of Fakhrizadeh, the EU has found itself on the side of Palestinian terror groups such as the Iran-backed Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. These factions, together with Lebanon’s Hezbollah terror group, another Iran proxy, and the Muslim Brotherhood, have also voiced outrage over the killing of the scientist.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/macron-seeks-an-enlightened-islam-11607037298?mod=opinion_lead_pos10

Emmanuel Macron has resolved to be the president who finally eases tensions over France’s young and growing Muslim population. Every president since Valéry Giscard d’Estaing in the 1970s has resolved to do that. None succeeded, and the stakes have risen with each failure.

On Oct. 16, a Chechen-born 18-year-old living west of Paris decapitated the schoolteacher Samuel Paty, who had lately shown cartoons mocking the Prophet Muhammad to junior-high-age kids in a civics class on free speech. On Oct. 29, a 20-year-old Tunisian, who had been refused asylum in Italy after arriving by boat the month before, showed up in the south of France. He stabbed to death two worshipers and a sacristan in the Notre Dame Basilica in Nice.

Even before the incidents Mr. Macron had made a major speech about Islamist “separatism.” He aims to limit the sponsoring of imams by foreign governments. He has dissolved organizations allegedly sympathetic to Islamic radicalism, such as the charity BarakaCity and the “antiracist” Collective against Islamophobia. He plans to ban home schooling, popular among religious Muslims.

Mr. Macron is putting almost all his eggs in the basket of laïcité, the 115-year-old French system for regulating religion. (The word means “secularism.”) At a meeting with the French Council of the Muslim Faith (CFCM), an official Islamic umbrella group created almost two decades ago by then Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, Mr. Macron added more detail. The CFCM would create a “national council of imams.” Preachers would be accredited, or licensed, like doctors and lawyers. By next week the CFCM is expected to create a “Charter of Republican Values” to which the organizations that make it up will adhere. “Some will sign and some will not,” the president reportedly said at the meeting. “We will be watching. Either you are with the Republic or you are not.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/12/what-hell-happened-boris-johnson-katie-hopkins/

It’s what many of you ask me the most, and the question I feel most ashamed to answer.

Partly because I don’t have proof of what I am about to tell you. But also because I was once the one banging on about how blooming marvelous he was and why he was lined up to be my fourth husband (or was it fifth?).

Not only did I announce this publicly, but the last time I saw him in person I actually reminded him personally that he was destined to be Mr Hopkins. (No, that was not fear in his eyes; he had indigestion. Probably.)

If you are reading this, Boris Johnson, please know that the offer of my hand in marriage has been rescinded. You have been nothing but a huge disappointment and, as populist leaders go, are about as much use as a potato in a wig.

I did try to answer the “What the hell happened?” question six months ago, though looking back on my answer I fear I was being too easy on the man, blaming his failings on his inability to work the COVID problem, rather than on Boris himself. Six months on I realize it is the weakness of Johnson, not the strength of the COVID conspiracy, that is the issue.

One minute he was crashing along like a sexually profligate rhino looking for a Brexit mate, full of Get Brexit Done, and doing splendid things like proroguing (suspending) Parliament and firing treacherous MPs who were working AGAINST the will of the people.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16816/mozambique-terrorism-islamists

Radical Muslims from Kenya and Tanzania are transforming what was initially a low-intensity ethnic rebellion, into a full-fledged Islamic jihad against Mozambique’s central government.

Ansar al-Sunna, estimated to consist of about 20 cells operating throughout northeast Mozambique, is responsible for the murders of about 2,000 people, mostly civilians.

The terrorist group has driven approximately 200,000 people from their homes and burdened the majority Christian country’s central government.

The Islamic State’s Central African Province may have bigger plans for Mozambique’s Ansar al-Sunna. If the terrorists are able to establish an Emirate under Sharia in Cabo Delgado Province, it could serve as a jihadi model, threatening the stability of other states in southern Africa. Malawi, Zimbabwe, South Africa, as well as Africa’s Indian Ocean states of the Comoros and Madagascar, could be targeted.

Jihadists in northern Mozambique have intensified their military operations this year in an apparent attempt to establish an Islamic Emirate in the province of Cabo Delgado. The Islamist insurgency, which began in October 2017, remained below the radar until recently. The escalating violence, however, has become a security concern for Mozambique’s regional neighbors, including South Africa, Uganda, Tanzania, Kenya and Somalia. Radical Muslims from Kenya and Tanzania are transforming what was initially a low-intensity ethnic rebellion, into a full-fledged Islamic jihad against Mozambique’s central government.

Ansar al-Sunna (Supporters of Sunni Tradition), aka Ahlu wa Jamo, is affiliated with the Islamic State’s Central African Province and is inspired, in part, by Somalia’s leading terrorist organization, Al-Shabaab. Ansar al-Sunna, estimated to consist of about 20 cells operating throughout northeast Mozambique, is responsible for the murders of about 2,000 people, mostly civilians. These martyred innocents are largely from the same ethnic Kimwani tribe as their murderers, who reside in villages in Cabo Delgado Province. The terrorist group has driven approximately 200,000 people from their homes and burdened the majority Christian country’s central government.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16812/iran-mullahs-want-nuclear-deal

Iran’s mullahs love the nuclear deal because of its fundamental flaws, especially the sunset clauses that remove restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program after the deal expires soon. The nuclear deal, rather than preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, as it was falsely touted to do, in fact paves the way for Tehran to become a legitimized nuclear state.

With the nuclear deal, the regime would gain global legitimacy, making it even more difficult to hold Iran’s leaders accountable for any malign behavior or terror activity across the world.

Finally, Iran’s ruling clerics want immediately to rejoin the nuclear deal because it would again alienate other governments in the Middle East and inevitably lead to a worsening of relations between the US and its traditional allies, especially Israel, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states.

This flawed deal, in favor of Iran, failed to recognize the rightful concerns of other countries in the region about Iran’s potential nuclear capability, missile proliferation or funding of violent proxies — both within and next door to their territories.

Iran’s ruling mullahs, who are celebrating presumptive President-Elect Joe Biden’s possible presidency in 2021, are already calling on him to rejoin the 2015 nuclear deal, which, incidentally, Iran never signed.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani — already urging the next US administration, which he hopes is the Biden administration — also pointed out, according to the state-run IRNA agency:

“Now, an opportunity has come up for the next U.S. administration to compensate for past mistakes and return to the path of complying with international agreements through respect of international norms.”

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammed Javad Zarif also advised Biden on Twitter to abandon President Trump’s Iran policy of maximum pressure and rejoin the nuclear deal.

The Trump administration, after pulling out of the nuclear deal, imposed significant pressure politically and economically on the Iranian regime and re-imposed sanctions on the mullahs.