RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/10/what_latin_americas_communist_travails_say_about_americas_future.html

During his 1961 inaugural address, President John F. Kennedy made it abundantly clear that he was concerned that the countries to the south of the United States not fall prey to communism.  He wrote:

To our sister republics south of our border, we offer a special pledge — to convert our good words into good deeds — in a new alliance for progress — to assist free men and free governments in casting off the chains of poverty.  But this peaceful revolution of hope cannot become the prey of hostile powers [emphasis mine].  Let all our neighbors know that we shall join with them to oppose aggression or subversion anywhere in the Americas.  And let every other power know that this Hemisphere intends to remain the master of its own house.

Yet not only have communist inroads been made south of the border, but jihadist attacks have increased.  Thus, “[d]uring the 2000s and early 2010s, Iran made notable inroads throughout Latin America.  Tehran capitalized on shifting power dynamics in an increasingly multipolar world and a tide of anti-US sentiments in Latin America in order to assert Iranian influence, most notably in countries where Left-leaning governments were in power.  Iran’s then-president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and other Iranian officials deepened Tehran’s relations with governments in Bolivia, Brazil, Cuba, Ecuador, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.”  In fact, South America has served as a “base for Hezbollah operatives who represent an extension of Iranian influence” into our southern neighbors’ countries.

In 2018, apologists for socialism cited Bolivia as a “seemingly successful” socialist regime.  They claimed that Bolivia had experienced a “3.8 percent growth rate” and that this was proof that socialism could work.  They contrasted Bolivia’s success with Venezuela’s total destruction under socialism and claimed that the latter was an “outlier” instead of a prime example of what occurs under socialist regimes.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/islamism-converges-with-cancel-culture-11603659312?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

Samuel Paty wanted to teach his students a lesson about free speech. He ended up paying with his life. Paty, 47, a middle-school teacher in a Paris suburb, announced to his civics class in early October that he would show some of the caricatures of the prophet Muhammad that the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo published in 2015 and that students were free to opt out of viewing the images.

The teacher was immediately denounced on social media. In a viral video, the Muslim father of one of Paty’s students related a series of fabrications. He falsely claimed that his daughter attended the class on free speech, that the teacher banned all Muslim students from the room and later showed the class a “photograph of a naked man” as if it were a portrait of “the Prophet of Islam,” and that his daughter had been excluded from the school in retaliation for her objections. 

On social media the father posted Paty’s name and the school’s address and encouraged all Muslims who shared his concerns to assist him in having the “rogue” instructor fired. The father and his entourage repeatedly described the affair as an act of racism and Islamophobia. 

An 18-year old Chechen refugee, Abdoullakh Anzorov, learned of the uproar from social media. He came to the middle school and bribed students to find out which teacher was Samuel Paty. Anzorov followed Paty as he left the school, then beat and stabbed him to death, decapitated him, and posted an image of the teacher’s severed head on Twitter. Later that day Anzorov was confronted by police; he attacked them with a knife and was shot and killed. 

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2020/10/25/france-recalls-ambassador-to-turkey-after-erdogan-says-macron-needs-mental-treatment-n1085581

France’s President Emmanuel Macron has declared war on radical Islam and Islamic separatism in France following the beheading of a history teacher who became a target after teaching about the Mohammed cartoons. This has angered Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose Islamist regime is at loggerheads with France and NATO over their spat with Greece over some islands.

Erdogan took Macron’s crackdown on radical Islam as an affront to Muslims and questioned Macron’s sanity for doing so.

CNN:

“What is Macron’s problem with Islam? What is his problem with Muslims?” Erdogan said, speaking at his Justice and Development Party meeting in Kayseri.

Erdogan added: “Macron needs some sort of mental treatment. What else is there to say about a head of state who doesn’t believe in the freedom of religion and behaves this way against the millions of people of different faiths living in his own country?”

Given that Erdogan’s own policies are an affront to freedom of religion, it’s so delicious that he’s oblivious to his own hypocrisy.

Naturally, the French government resented this insult and recalled its ambassador for “an evaluation.”

“Excess and rudeness are not a method. We demand that Erdogan change the course of his policy because it is dangerous in every way. We do not enter into unnecessary polemics and do not accept insults,” a spokesperson at the Elysée Palace, home of the French presidency, told CNN.

The spokesperson added that France was recalling its ambassador to Ankara for an “evaluation of the ongoing situation,” which they described as a “rare move.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16686/nigeria-killing-christians

In just the first four months of 2020, Fulani herdsmen and other terrorists “hacked to death … no fewer than 620 defenseless Christians,” and engaged in the “wanton burning or destruction of their centers of worship and learning.”

How have formerly simple and unarmed Fulani herdsmen managed to kill, since 2015, nearly twice as many Christians as the “professional” terrorists of Boko Haram….?

“Since the government and its apologists are claiming the killings have no religious undertones, why are the terrorists and herdsmen targeting the predominantly Christian communities and Christian leaders?” — The Christian Association of Nigeria, International Centre for Investigative Reporting, January 21, 2020.

“Why are you killing Christians?” US President Donald J. Trump apparently shocked his Nigerian counterpart, Muhammadu Buhari, by asking this question the first time they met in the White House in April 2018. The Nigerian president admitted this, according to a September 8, 2020 report, toward the end of a recent talk with his cabinet members:

“[W]hen I was in his office, only myself and himself, with Allah as my witness, he looked at me in the face and said ‘why are you killing Christians?’ I wonder, if you were the person how you would react? I hope what I was feeling inside did not betray my emotion…”

He should not have been shocked. Several international observers characterize what Nigerian Christians experience not just as “persecution” but as a “pure genocide.”

Since 2009, “not less than 32,000 Christians have been butchered to death by the country’s main Jihadists,” according to a May 2020 report. Hundreds more have been killed since then. Earlier this year, Christian Solidarity International issued a “Genocide Warning for Christians in Nigeria” in response to the “rising tide of violence directed against Nigerian Christians and others classified as ‘infidels’ by Islamist militants….”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/beijings-covid-recovery-isnt-so-enviable-11603393097?mod=opinion_featst_pos2

Few myths are proving so durable in our pandemic age as the notion that China has somehow cracked the coronavirus code. It hasn’t.

The argument proceeds in two steps. The first is to assert that Beijing’s authoritarian approach to mass lockdowns, followed by intrusive testing and tracing, defeated the virus in a way almost no democratic government has managed. This might be true, but it is also meaningless. It does little good to argue in favor of Chinese methods to control a pandemic when a democratic society would by definition find that authoritarianism a cost not worth paying.

More interesting is the second prong of the Beijing-beats-the-world myth: the economy.

We’re supposed to believe that China’s success in suppressing the virus has facilitated a phenomenal economic recovery—and, by extension, that our economies would be growing again too if only we had batted down Covid-19 as efficiently. The claim was bolstered this week by more good news from Beijing’s statistics gnomes, who reported gross domestic product increased by 4.9% in the third quarter compared with the same quarter last year. China is set to be the only major economy that manages to grow this year.

This might even be true. Chinese economic data are notoriously, oh, what’s the word I’m looking for . . . fake. Headline GDP numbers tell you less about the real state of the economy and more about the Communist Party’s political preoccupations and goals. Still, there is substantial evidence that the Chinese economy is growing to some extent. Important and harder-to-fudge measures such as industrial production and retail sales have improved in recent months.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-arab-israeli-peace-cascade-11603494933?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

Middle East failures contributed to Republican defeats in 2008 and Democratic defeats in 2016. If Donald Trump loses in 2020, it will be for different reasons. The U.S.-brokered deals normalizing relations between Israel and Arab states are a highlight of his Presidency, and on Friday the White House announced Sudan would join the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain in ending its diplomatic boycott of the Jewish state.

These moves have been utterly confounding to Obama Administration alumni. They were certain that a pro-Israel foreign policy would inflame the Arab world, and that Mideast progress depended on accommodating the regime in Iran. In fact, Israel is the region’s chief source of stability and Iran its main source of terror and mayhem, and the Trump Administration treated them accordingly.

It has paid off. The first peace announcement came in August between Israel and the UAE, which had been working together covertly to beat back Iranian influence in the Persian Gulf. Next came Bahrain, another Sunni Gulf monarchy threatened by Shiite Iran.

The agreement by Sudan, a North African country of more than 40 million, to normalize Israel ties shows that the peace cascade goes beyond the Persian Gulf and could extend across the Arab world. Sudan’s leadership has been moderating, and the Trump Administration recently negotiated a tentative agreement for Sudan to compensate victims of the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/10/beheaded-infidels-vs-fear-islamophobia-raymond-ibrahim/

An 18-year-old Muslim man beheaded a school teacher in France last Friday for showing cartoons of Islam’s prophet Muhammad to his students, in the context of discussing free speech and expression.

Some weeks earlier, another Muslim man killed an American citizen in Pakistan for also committing “blasphemy.”  The murdered man, Tahir Naseem, was actually being tried for blasphemy in a court room—which carries a maximum death penalty—when Faisal Khan, 15, walked in and opened fire on him.  While Khan “broke the law” by essentially jumping the gun, Pakistani law itself is sympathetic to the vigilante’s view that blasphemy is a crime, punishable by death.

In France, there is no blasphemy law and freedom of speech is or was once deemed an essential right of all citizens.  In this sense, then, the government of France, unlike the government of Pakistan, would obviously not hold Samuel Paty, the beheaded teacher, guilty of any blasphemy.

And yet the effective differences between France and Pakistan, within the context of these two crimes, seem to end there: while Pakistan and many other Muslim nations uphold Islam’s blasphemy laws, France and other Western nations pretend that Islam has no blasphemy laws.   After all, to acknowledge that Islam does indeed call for the punishment and death of blasphemers against Muhammad—to say nothing of any number of other “problematic” sharia stipulations, such as death for apostates—is to be “Islamophobic.”

In short, whereas Muslim nations like Pakistan actively affirm and uphold Islam’s blasphemy codes, Western nations like France passively acquiesce to them by pretending they don’t exist and therefore need no addressing.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/10/anti-semitism-todays-europe-joseph-puder/

The legacy of anti-Semitism in Europe is a long and painful one.  It had its culmination in the Holocaust.  Today, while Europe’s democratic governments profess their intentions to combat anti-Semitism, the influx of millions of Muslim migrants from throughout the Middle East has intensified the residual anti-Semitism embedded in the subconscious of many Europeans.  The European-born Muslims, along with the migrant newcomers, were honed on hatred of Jews thanks to the media and mosque indoctrination in their native lands. The Middle East Muslim migrants have additionally brought along with them a deep hatred for Israel.  In Europe today, anti-Semitism has been normalized on the streets if not in governmental bureaus. European governments are now worried that their native Jews might be fleeing the continent as a result of increased levels of anti-Semitism, especially when Covid-19 is plaguing Europe, and Jews have become ready scapegoats. The European Union (EU) governments in particular, are concerned that should Jewish life in Europe end, it will show that Europe has not learned the lessons of the Holocaust.  

An EU poll of European Jews from across Europe published in January 2019, showed that 89% of those surveyed said that anti-Semitism had significantly increased in the last five years.  The EU poll sampled 16,395 Jews in 12 EU countries. Yet, in a separate EU survey under the EU’s Fundamental Rights Agency, the conclusion arrived at was that Jews were “subjected to a sustained stream of abuse.”  38% of those surveyed said that they were thinking of emigrating out of Europe because the continent was no longer safe for Jews.  In the last decade, thousands of French and British Jews left for Israel.

The Jewish future in Europe is bleak.  A recent poll by the London-based Henry Jackson Society think tank found that 44% of British Muslims believe in anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. The poll also indicated that forty-seven percent of Muslims with a college degree back the “dual loyalty” canard against British Jews. Even more seriously, however, are the growing incidents of physical and verbal attacks on identifiable Jews by Muslims.  In fact, for each of the past three years, the U.K has reported the highest number of anti-Semitic incidents ever recorded.