RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16332/iran-hezbollah-drug-smuggling

“Presumed to have been issued by Iranian religious leaders, the fatwa reportedly read: We are making drugs for Satan — America and the Jews. If we cannot kill them with guns, we will kill them with drugs.” — Matthew Levitt, Hezbollah: The Global Footprint of Lebanon’s Party of God, Hurst Publishers, 2013.

According to an FBI report, declassified in November 2008, “Hizbullah’s spiritual leader… has stated that narcotics trafficking is morally acceptable if the drugs are sold to Western infidels as part of the war against the enemies of Islam.”

The international community, the United Nations, and specifically its Office on Crimes and Drugs, remain totally silent on Hezbollah and Iran’s large-scale drug trafficking across the world.

When governments or organizations that operate under the legitimacy of a state engage in smuggling drugs, the negative consequences can be devastating for other nations. The Iranian regime and its proxy Hezbollah appear to be increasing their efforts to smuggle illicit drugs to other countries, particularly in the West.

A Lebanese man, Ghassan Diab, was recently extradited from Cyprus to the United States for charges linked to laundering drug money for the militant group Hezbollah. According to the US Department of Justice, Diab is alleged “to have conspired to engage in, and actually engaged, in the laundering of drug proceeds through the use of the black market peso exchange in support of Hezbollah’s global criminal-support network”.

Italian authorities announced on July 1, 2020 that they had seized 15.4 tons of counterfeit Captagon pills produced in Syria, a country reportedly the largest producer and exporter of the Captagon (fenethylline). The seized 15.4 tons of counterfeit Captagon pills are worth an estimated $1.3 billion. Captagon, a super-charged amphetamine, is banned in many countries due to its addictive nature. Reportedly, the seized drugs were so carefully hidden that the airport scanners did not detect them, according to Commander Domenico Napolitano of the Naples financial police. It was the interception of calls made by some criminals that assisted the local police in seizing the drugs.

Greek authorities, in July 2020, also seized a large haul of Captagon pills, also from Syria and worth more than half a billion dollars. The Greek financial crimes unit said:

“It is the largest quantity that has ever been seized globally, depriving organized crime of proceeds that would have exceeded $660 million (587.45 million euros).”

Why has Syria become the epicenter of producing illegal drugs and exporting them to other countries including the West? Possibly because Iran and Hezbollah exert significant influence in Syria and there is scarcely any credible international organization monitoring what is happening in Syria, a lapse that makes it difficult to these kinds of detect criminal activities.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/08/10/why-we-cant-afford-to-abandon-taiwan/

In the Munich Conference of September 1938, Great Britain and France threw Czechoslovakia to the wolves. In order to appease Adolf Hitler, the Western democracies forced the Czechs to give up the Sudetenland, a heavily fortified region on the border with Germany. This region contained millions of ethnic Germans which Hitler wanted to incorporate into his empire, and the German dictator claimed this would be his “last territorial demand.”

Of course, not long after his “last territorial demand” was satisfied, Hitler invaded and annexed the rest of the country (with the exception of a small Slovak rump state that became a German vassal), and then invaded Poland, starting the deadliest conflict in human history and resulting in at least 60 million deaths. The Western democracies easily could have stopped Hitler at Munich and prevented World War II—we now know that some of Hitler’s top generals were ready to arrest him if the negotiations failed—but instead, cowardice and appeasement won the day. 

In the next few years, it is likely that America will find itself in the position that France and Britain were in during the Munich Conference, and we would do well to learn from their mistakes. Only this time, the country facing the threat of annexation will be Taiwan.

Like Czechoslovakia, Taiwan is a small nation, a prosperous democracy, and a balancing force against an aggressive, totalitarian neighbor: Communist China. And as with Czechoslovakia’s fate at Munich, allowing Taiwan to be gobbled up would only embolden China, leading to more aggression, more territorial claims, and, eventually, the outbreak of war.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/08/lebanons-government-is-to-blame-for-the-beirut-explosion/

It was the country’s own government that brought Beirut to its knees.

The political and economic decline in Lebanon was eating away at the public’s confidence in its government. On Tuesday, however, any hope was dashed as physical destruction and death were added to a list of Lebanon’s troubles. Symbolic, in a way, the explosion in Beirut marked the end of Lebanon’s spiral. The once abundant, vibrant country is officially approaching rock bottom.

The Lebanese people have been protesting their government for months. The perfect storm of economic mismanagement, political corruption, and the mounting COVID crisis have empowered the Lebanese to join across sectarian lines to call for reform. Last Tuesday, any lingering hope in the government’s ability to uphold its most vital duty — safety and security — was blown up. The corruption and mismanagement of the Lebanese government allowed years of oversight in maintaining essential safety protocols.

After spending six years at the Beirut port, 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate ignited. It was unloaded in 2014, and then stored next to one of the most important sources of food and GDP for the import-dependent country. The ensuing blast has killed at least 163 people and left thousands injured. Property within a six-mile radius suffered damage, and the port and surrounding neighborhoods were decimated. From miles away, a relative of mine felt the blast as her bed moved across the room. A friend told me, “We felt the ground move . . . then we heard a huge explosion.” The explosion was so powerful that he thought it was nearby, only to realize he lives almost 20 kilometers (12.4 miles) away. The aftermath is shocking. My relative lamented: “I can’t even describe how painful the situation is . . . they’re still looking for the dead . . . mothers are crying in the streets.” Part of Beirut is “on the floor,” she told me.

How did this devastating explosion occur? The government, my friend told me: “They let this happen.”

https://pjmedia.com/claudiarosett/claudia-rosett/2020/02/28/jimmy-lais-warning-about-china-n378733

Surely China’s Communist Party henchmen have enough on their hands, as they hustle to disappear outspoken bloggers, kick out Wall Street Journal reporters, and repurpose parts of the CCP’s vast machinery of surveillance and coercion to police President Xi Jinping’s “People’s War” on the deadly new coronavirus — which achieved ruinous breakout in Wuhan early last month, while China’s authorities were busy detaining and silencing the honest local doctors who tried to sound a warning. But when it comes to ramping up repression, there’s always time for more. On Friday, China’s satrap administration in Hong Kong arrested one of the city’s longtime leading advocates of democracy, 71-year-old newspaper owner Jimmy Lai.

Let’s be clear: Jimmy Lai is one of the world’s most clarion voices for freedom. In Hong Kong these days, that takes tremendous courage. Born in China, he came to Hong Kong at the age of 12, made his fortune in the garment industry, and in 1995 founded a pro-democracy newspaper, Apple Daily. Under British colonial rule, and under China’s increasingly heavy boot since the 1997 handover, Lai has argued the case for democracy, in person and in print, and turned out, again and again, to take part in peaceful protests. Earlier this month, Jimmy Lai published a superb op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, under the headline “China’s Facade of Stability,” spelling out that “the spread of the coronavirus has revealed a truth that poses a much greater risk to Mr. Xi: There is no cure for Chinese communism except the collapse of the party.” Noting that “Deception is China’s true rule of law,” and citing the silencing at a critical moment of the Wuhan doctors who tried to warn of the virus, Lai spelled out, “This is the problem now before the world: the rise of a Goliath-like China no one trusts.”

https://pjmedia.com/vodkapundit/2020/08/10/hong-kong-crackdown-200-police-raid-newspaper-arrest-beijing-critic-jimmy-lai-n770499

Hong Kong Apple Daily publisher Jimmy Lai was taken from his paper’s offices in handcuffs Monday morning in a raid involving more than 200 police.

Police reportedly took box after box of “evidence,” although it’s unclear what crime Lai might have committed aside from being in favor of democracy and speaking out against the authoritarian Communist government in Beijing.

Reuters reports:

Apple Daily’s Editor-in-Chief Ryan Law, who was helping film and comment on the Facebook live feed, could be seen rushing about the building as he tried to report on events breaking in his own newsroom.

“This is, I believe, the first time in Hong Kong that police have initiated a mass search on a media outlet like this,” he said, panting, as he scaled a back staircase with a colleague to get around the mass of police officers.

And:

Staffers said they asked police what legal grounds they had for entering. But these questions were largely ignored as more than 200 police streamed in, according to a live feed of the unfolding drama.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/08/08/defending-new-europe-from-old-europes-woke/

All but ignored on this side of the Atlantic, Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orbán recently summed up one of the presidential campaign’s most critical and least-discussed issues—U.S. support for the frontline NATO states of Hungary and Poland against political assaults from their allies and ours in the European Union. Our national security is at stake in the outcome.

“American Democrats [and] the American Left, together with the elites of Western Europe,” Mr. Orbán observed, are working to impose their “world vision, choice of values and concepts—including . . . views on families . . . migration . . . work . . . unemployment—on countries that have a different thinking.” He meant Hungary and Poland. 

These countries, he continued, have been targets of the European Union’s “liberal [in the radical woke sense] imperialism,” that is, the EU’s hostility to what Americans would call socially conservative and economically populist governments that are, as Americans are, jealous of their sovereignty.

The strength of the NATO Alliance will turn on America’s choice on this question. Does the United States support the corrosive assault by what might be called “Big Europe” (Germany, France, and Eurocrats in Brussels) on “New Europe” (Hungary, Poland, and the continent’s other nation-state supporters)? Or should we help build up New Europe’s economic robustness and sovereign vitality, so these countries remain full and vibrant partners—for both the EU and us—in defending the still-challenged frontiers of freedom?

https://www.city-journal.org/confinement-in-covid-era-paris

During the many years that I worked as a prison doctor, never a day went by when I did not ask myself how I would react to imprisonment. “There but for the grace of God go I,” was a constant refrain in my mind, or, alternatively, Hamlet’s question to Polonius: “Use every man after his desert, and who should ’scape whipping?” Surely everyone has done something in his life that might justify imprisonment. I never dreamed, however, that 15 years after my retirement, I should experience a type of imprisonment, admittedly of a lenient kind, in Paris, not being allowed out of my small apartment for more than one hour a day—and then only with a permit, or laissez-passer. In just one respect was my imprisonment harder than the real kind: I was to have no visitors and no casual social contact.

I was surprised, working in prison, to discover that the type of person who one might imagine would find prison particularly awful was able to endure it with comparative ease, if not with pleasure, exactly. I mean people like me: doctors, professionals, and academics, who occasionally (and to my great embarrassment) ended up incarcerated. Surely, prison would be an insupportable torture to them, humiliated by their loss of status; forced into social promiscuity with people with whom they would not normally associate; experiencing constant noise that made concentration impossible; deprived of the sense of agency that, until then, they took for granted; and with little choice now as to what to eat, read, or do, and subject to the favor of men much less educated than themselves. Yet they settled in without special difficulty. They were not, as so many first-time prisoners were, subject to suicidal thoughts. In the cant phrase used by old lags to advise younger convicts, they “got their head down and did their bird.” In other words, they did not make themselves conspicuous to the authorities, complained little, and did not stand on their dignity.

Why were they able to adapt so well? Whatever the advantages—as well as sometimes the disadvantages—that education and intelligence might confer outside prison, on the “in” (as prisoners call it), they permitted the prisoner to distance himself from his own situation and to take an interest in the foreign country around him: for like the past, prison is a foreign country; they do things differently there, and difference has an interest in itself, even when it represents a worsening.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16328/algeria-france-history

Keeping alive the narrative of victimhood, successive Algerian leaders have tried to divert attention from their own shortcomings, not to say misdeeds.

Covering the 1990s troubles in Algeria, I was often told by Algerian politicians of all colors that all of their country’s troubles, including terrorism in the name of religion and police brutality, were due to French colonial rule. After a while… I suggested to Algerian interlocutors to fix a certain date up to which everything was the fault of the French but after that regard Algerians as responsible for their own troubles.

Should the writing of history be treated as a governmental project? French President Emmanuel Macron and his Algerian counterpart Abdul-Majid Tebboune seem to think so. They have ordered the creation of a joint commission to write the history of relations between the two countries since the French annexed that strand of North Africa in 1832.

Macron and Tebboune are not the first rulers to seek an officially vetted and approved narrative of our human story. However, their case is unique because other rulers just wanted to tell their side of the story while Macron and Tebboune demand a two-voices, presumably parallel, narrative.

There is one more difference between the old official histories and what we are likely to see this time. Old official histories were often presented with the modesty they merited as chronologies. And because they carried a heavy load of hagiography, they never pretended to be scientific. Macron and Tebboune, of course are not looking for props to build a cult of personality with. However, they may be seeking something even less dignified: the presentation of history in the colors of current, and necessarily transient, fads of political correctness.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16327/france-colonization

Asking the police not to give the name of killers is an attempt to hide the truth and prevent the public from knowing exactly who in France is committing these acts. Hiding the name shows a desire to appease the killers: when a killer has a Christian name, it is immediately printed on the front page.

“We only love what hates us, anything that destroys us is seen as great. There is a desire to destroy truth, history… We no longer teach the history of France and we no longer say what our civilization has accomplished. We only talk about our civilization to disparage it.” — Michel Onfray, Le Salon Beige, July 30, 2020 and YouTube, July 17, 2020.

“France is undergoing reverse colonization. Populations coming mainly from countries formerly colonized by France have settled in France without any intention of integrating. Most of them live in neighborhoods where the laws of Islam now reign and where imams spread hatred of France…. And in a gesture of submission, the French authorities say that hatred does not emanate from those who kill, but from those who want to react and say that we must put an end to assaults and murders. It is a suicidal attitude.” — Éric Zemmour, YouTube, November 22, 2016.

Lyon, the third largest city in France, July 20, 3 a.m. A middle-class neighborhood. A young woman walks her dog on a quiet street. A car arrives at high speed and crushes her dog. The driver stops, backs up, runs over the young woman and crushes her too. He goes forward again, at full speed, and drags her dead body half a mile. People awakened by the noise write down the license number of the car. The police officers who come to the scene are horrified. The young woman’s body was dismembered. A leg was found on one side of the street; the rest of her body was shredded. One arm was close to the body of her dog. The other was still holding onto the dog’s leash. Her name was Axelle Dorier. She was a nurse, only 23.

The French Department of Justice asked the police not to release the name of the killer. An anonymous policeman released it anyway on a social network site. The killer’s name is Youssef T. He was driving under the influence, without a license. The prosecutor charged him with “reckless murder”. He is in jail awaiting trial. He risks a maximum sentence of ten years. Residents of Lyon wanted to organize a peaceful march to pay tribute to the young nurse. They asked the government to get tough on crime. The young woman’s parents objected: they said they have “have no hatred” for the killer.