RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/the-left/2024/04/hate-zionists-apply-for-your-grant-today/

Clementine Ford, I’m sorry to report, has found a new way of making a pest of herself. Since Hamas’ pogrom of October 7, Ford has become one of Australia’s most prolific anti-Israel activists, a project she has undertaken with all the rigour and restraint we have come to expect from the feminist termagant.

This was all on display, for example, when Ford helped dox the names and details of about 600 Jewish artists and creators, an act that led, of course, to harassment and death threats. It was also around this time that Ford herself was outed as a devoted pal of Laura Allam, the Palestinian activist currently facing charges of stomping on the head of her kidnapped victim. “I love YOU”, gushed Ford to Allam on Instagram, which, to be fair, was a rare departure in her behaviour on that social media platform. More often, Ford is shouty and deranged, fond of directing her venom at Jewish women who object to Hamas’ psychopathic campaign of rape and murder. Ford has labelled these “Zionist women”, in politer moments, as pathetic crybabies.

None of this, I’m even sorrier to report, has disqualified Clementine Ford receiving government grants. To its discredit, Screen NSW has provided her with $30,000 to co-create a TV series called Smile Bitch, which, I predict, most viewers will find unwatchable.

As usual, it gets worse. Clementine Ford isn’t some weird outlier here. A penchant for anti-Israel fanaticism, I have come to suspect, is much more likely to assist prospective applicants in their quest to be awarded with taxpayer funds. For example, Elsa Tuet-Rosenberg recently introduced herself to the Australian public as one of Ford’s fellow doxxers. As The Australian reported, Ms Tuet-Rosenberg used the incident to show off her talent for organising and delegating, as she split up her various lists of Jews into categories like ‘Artists’, ‘Sports Zios’, and the like. She then exhorted her social media followers to “let these f***ing Zionists know no f***ing peace.” This seems to be about the extent of her vocabulary, though, as she has also posed for photos where she sports both a maniacal rictus and a t-shirt with profanity-laden imprecations against Zionists and Israel.

https://quillette.com/2024/04/11/queen-of-the-gender-crits/

EXCERPT

Indeed identity politics has become as central to the SNP’s creed, if not more so, than taking Scotland out of the UK. In a reversal of Whisky Galore-type stereotypes, in fact, the Scots have now taken on the role of witch-finders, sniffing out heretical thoughts under the cover of a supposedly liberal ideology. A vast amount of parliamentary time has been wasted on bad and unnecessary legislation advocated by trans activists, including a bill to remove all safeguards from the process that allows people to change their legal gender. The UK government salvaged the day by blocking the reckless Gender Recognition Reform Act last year, but the SNP had another trick up its sleeve.

The Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act came into effect on April 1—April Fools’ day, as critics were quick to point out. It’s been on the statute books since 2021, but implementation was delayed because no one could say with any certainty what it actually criminalised.

Officially described as an act “to make provision about the aggravation of offences by prejudice; to make provision about an offence of racially aggravated harassment; to make provision about offences relating to stirring up hatred against a group of persons” and various other “connected purposes,” the law extends existing protections against racial hatred to cover age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, transgender identity and variations in sex characteristics. Women are not explicitly protected. And so the female half of the population will have to wait for a separate piece of legislation that addresses misogyny at an unspecified time in the future.

At a moment when trans activists physically disrupt feminist events, and scour social media for posts they can present as transphobic, the scope for trivial and malicious complaints is endless. Opponents of the legislation warned that the Act would have a chilling effect on freedom of speech, not least because a new offence of “stirring up hatred” has no clear definition, yet attracts a sentence of up to seven years in prison. The Act has been denounced as a “clype’s charter” (clype being a Scots word meaning a sneak); and that is exactly what it has proved to be, prompting around 8,000 complaints to the police in the first week following the Act’s implementation. 

A new offence of ‘stirring up hatred’ has no clear definition, yet attracts a sentence of up to seven years in prison.

In a development that surprised no one, the Scottish First Minister, Humza Yousaf, who steered the bill through Parliament when he was Justice Secretary, has been accused of watering down protections for “gender-critical” women (which is to say, those who believe in a biologically-based definition of womanhood) to avoid upsetting trans activists. Susan Smith, director of the feminist organisation For Women Scotland, claimed on BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour that Yousaf and his fellow SNP politicians broke a promise that she and a colleague would be involved in drawing up training materials because he thought “it would upset the trans lobby if those examples were given in the guidance to the police.” And, as everyone predicted, one of the first targets when the legislation came into operation was another English novelist who has made Scotland her home.

J.K. Rowling has lived in Edinburgh since 1993, before she published her first Harry Potter novel. Her increasingly stellar fame was initially seen as an ornament to the city and she became one of Scotland’s foremost philanthropists, setting up a charity in 2006 that supports children in orphanages in Eastern Europe, Africa, and Latin America. More recently, after Edinburgh’s rape crisis centre appointed a trans-identified male as its CEO, Rowling set up and funded Beira’s Place, a women-only service for victims of sexual violence. In any sane world, such generous acts would have won plaudits from government ministers. Not in Scotland, however, where the SNP is convinced that even the mildest resistance to the intemperate demands of gender warriors is tantamount to heresy.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20561/defining-jihadism

There is no need, therefore, to abandon the terms jihadism and jihadist out of political correctness or fear of offending Muslims. When appropriately defined, those terms are helpful in grasping the terrorist and insurgent threats and challenges posed by al-Qa’ida, the Islamic State and similar groups — far more so than khawarij, a term that does not have immediately clear meaning for wider audiences, is historically inaccurate, and sounds like a sneaky effort to cloud a very real threat.

Recently, the Daily Wire revealed that an internal newsletter from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence featured an article arguing for “changing terminology related to counterterrorism,” because “certain phrases to identify international terrorism… are hurtful to Muslim-Americans.” One of the supposedly “problematic phrases” is the term “jihadist.” An alternative suggestion given in the newsletter to denote jihadists is the word khawarij.[1]

If one wanted to find stereotypical “woke” discourse and political correctness, one would be hard pressed to find a better example than this. Unfortunately, the suggested change in terminology only creates more obstacles to an accurate understanding of contemporary terrorism and insurgent activity associated with the Islamic State (ISIS) and al-Qa’ida.

For a start, the term khawarij (which can be translated in the broadest sense as “outsiders”) is not immediately understandable to broader audiences or those without knowledge of historical and present-day usage of the term in Arabic-language and Islamic discourse. In this regard, the use of the term recalls the British government’s official adoption of the derisive Arabic acronym “Da’esh'”(standing for “the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham”) to refer to the Islamic State — an acronym that is by now familiar to Arabic-speakers but is meaningless to most English-speakers.

Within Islamic discourse today, the term khawarij is often thrown at those who are deemed too extreme in their beliefs. It may be as an insult, for example, against the Islamic State by al-Qa’ida, or from other Sunni Muslims against the Islamic State and al-Qa’ida. Even the Islamic State uses the term khawarij to describe groups it deems too extreme: most notably, the faction dubbed Jama’at Ahl al-Sunna lil-Da’wa wa al-Jihad, which broke off from the Islamic State in the West Africa region and continues to fight against the Islamic State.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/meet-the-new-taliban-same-as-the-old-taliban-middle-east-terrorism-pakistan-afghanistan-d8b8483b?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

Nearly three years after the Taliban retook Kabul, they plan to resume the brutal practice of stoning women for adultery. “You say it’s a violation of women’s rights when we stone them to death,” Taliban supreme leader Hibatullah Akhundzada said in a March audio message aired on state television, apparently directed at Western critics. “But we will soon implement the punishment for adultery. . . . We both say we defend human rights—we do it as God’s representative and you as the devil’s.”

The return of barbarism to Afghanistan shouldn’t surprise anyone familiar with the Taliban’s strict interpretation of Shariah. Since returning to power, the Taliban have brought back public executions, banned girls from attending school beyond sixth grade, and carried out hundreds of public floggings. Nonetheless, the Taliban 2.0—like the Taliban 1.0, which ruled Afghanistan between 1996 and 2001—offer lessons to the West.

First, their actions expose the naiveté of Western analysts who argued that the Taliban would be more moderate the second time around. Except for reluctantly accepting television and the internet as unavoidable aspects of 21st-century life, they appear as committed as ever to instituting its archaic and bleak vision of Allah’s law on earth.

In a phone interview from London, Tamim Asey, a former Afghan deputy defense minister who now heads the Afghanistan-focused Institute of War and Peace Studies, says the Taliban are “involved in a state-building exercise, the likes of which you have never seen in the Islamic world. They say they are going to establish the purest Islamic system. They view all other Islamic countries as under the influence of infidels.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20551/jordan-hamas-muslim-brotherhood

The Jordanian authorities have accused the Muslim Brotherhood and its offshoot, Hamas, of seeking to destabilize security inside the kingdom.

Behind both Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, of course, is the terrorist-sponsoring emirate, Qatar, and its propagandizing television bullhorn, Al-Jazeera.

Jordan’s leaders are doing exactly what many other Arab regimes and heads of state have long been doing: radicalizing their people and inciting them to violence against Israel as a means of distracting them from problems at home.

The Arab leaders want their people to be busy hating Israel. Otherwise, the people might demand democracy, transparency and accountability from the corrupt Arab rulers.

Their Jordanian majesties apparently seem to have forgotten that if Israel were not protecting them, their own Palestinian population would have overthrown them or assassinated them long ago, as they did to the king’s grandfather, King Abdullah I.

[Queen Rania] has also apparently forgotten is that it is Hamas that is using its own citizens as human shields and stealing and hoarding the humanitarian aid in the hope that the blame will be assigned to Israel – as it all too often unfortunately is.

“It is no longer a secret that there are two parties that have interests in creating tension in the region and moving to a new front: the Muslim Brotherhood and Iran. They share the same agenda: destabilizing the Arab states. Since the beginning of the Gaza war, we have seen that the Hamas leadership is trying to mobilize the Jordanian street and is trying to drag the Jordanians into the war by any means.” — Munif Al-Harbi, Saudi political analyst, aawsat.com, April 1, 2024.

If Jordan’s King Abdullah and his wife want to avoid chaos in their kingdom, and a rather unpleasant outcome for themselves, they would do well to stop playing into the hands of the radical Islamists by inciting the Jordanian people to violence against Israel.

However, behind the incitement to violence that is empowering the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas — and destabilizing the area — lies the silky hand of Qatar.

Jordan’s leaders are doing exactly what many other Arab regimes and heads of state have long been doing: radicalizing their people and inciting them to violence against Israel as a means of distracting them from problems at home.

The Jordanian authorities have accused the Muslim Brotherhood and its offshoot, Hamas, of seeking to destabilize security inside the kingdom. The accusation came in the aftermath of recent demonstrations in the capital Amman and other parts of Jordan in support of Hamas and in condemnation of Israel. The demonstrators are demanding that Jordan shut down the Israeli embassy and cut all ties with Israel.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20549/rwanda-30-years-after-genocide

Many of them had taken refuge in the local church, and others in a plot of land opposite the communal house, where there were several thousand frightened people, thinking that the authorities were going to protect them. Instead, the authorities conveniently decided to kill them on the spot. The soldiers and police, armed with rifles and grenades, and the militiamen with machetes and spiked clubs, surrounded the refugees and began firing into the crowd, throwing grenades and machetes.

What is certain is that he killed every day for a month… and that he never ran out of ammunition. How did he feel? “At first it was fear,” he tells us, “but then the fear disappeared, there was no joy either, it became a habit to kill. It was a job ordered by the authorities and we did our duty.” He took orders and obeyed, like Adolf Eichmann and the other Nazi executioners of the Final Solution.

Brainwashing

In 1994, Jean-Claude, a Hutu policeman later turned “Tutsi hunter,” was 26 years old and one of 14 police officers in the commune of Nyamata, an hour outside Kigali, one of the areas worst affected by the genocide.

Four years earlier, the Rwandan Patriotic Front had attacked Rwanda from Uganda. The movement was made up of mainly Tutsis, living in exile since 1959, whom the Rwandan regime had not wanted to let return to the country.

In 1990, after that attack, Jean-Claude and his colleagues, on the orders of the authorities, began harassing the Tutsis in the commune, arresting them for no reason and beating them up. In 1992, dozens were killed and their homes burnt down…. Until 1994, during meetings, the authorities had kept repeating that the Tutsis were “snakes” and “cockroaches,” and that the Rwandan Patriotic Front would, according to their truncated vision of history, “bring back serfdom” (of the Hutus by the Tutsis), a powerful theme in the imagination of the regime.

The Rwandans were fed the message that the Tutsis, all the Tutsis, who had been second-class citizens since 1959, were allies of the exiled group that had attacked them. When Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana’s plane was shot down on the evening of April 6, the authorities were quick to spread an accusatory discourse: “Here is the proof that what we told you was true, they killed our President.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20548/iran-israel-denial-game

Soleimani would do everything to avoid a direct clash with either Israel or the US forces in the region.

If he [“Supreme Guide” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei] does nothing, he could anger his core supporters. If he orders attacks on Israeli and/or Jewish targets, he won’t be able to cite plausible deniability. And that, as the Iranian state TV analyst suggests, could give Israel an excuse for attacks on big targets in Tehran itself.

“Will this time be different?” This is the question that haunts Tehran political circles as more body bags are flown in from Damascus.

The body bags contain the mortal remains of 13 Iranian diplomatic and military officers, including two senior commanders of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), General Muhammad-Reza Zahedi (alias Abu Mahdi) and Gen. Muhammad-Hadi Haj-Rahimi, killed in an Israeli airstrike on what was presented as an Iranian consular building in the Syrian capital.

To be sure, this is not the first time that Israelis have taken out IRGC officers, and Lebanese, Iraqi, Syrian, Pakistani, and Afghan mercenaries in Syria.

The take-out operation started in 2015 and reached a peak in 2020. The last time an Iranian official organ provided figures was in 2018, when the Foundation for Martyrs and Self-Sacrificers put Iran’s losses at around 5,000. The figures didn’t show how many were Iranian officers or foreign mercenaries.

In the first three years of this deadly cycle, Tehran used the transfer of body bags from Damascus as a propaganda ploy and organized mass rallies on the burial day of its “heroes of Islam.” Later, when Tehran’s losses grew the propaganda aspect was forgotten, the “heroes of Islam” were quietly buried in their native hometowns and villages.

Over time, partly thanks to the influence of late Gen. Qassem Soleimani, Tehran decided to swallow the bitter pill and brag about “taking revenge,” but not retaliate.