RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thefederalist.com/2020/02/03/now-that-brexit-is-complete-its-time-to-strengthen-the-anglosphere/

A new world order demands new geopolitical thinking and new leadership. An informal trade, research, and defense bloc that values national sovereignty would be a good start.

As the Big Ben gong struck 11 p.m. GMT on January 31, marking the moment the United Kingdom left the European Union, thousands of people started singing “Rule Britannia” in Parliament Square. Next to the statue of Winston Churchill was a British Army Parachute Regiment flag—apt, given that the EU is German-dominated—and a few large American flags.

Churchill was half American, and Americans in London clearly love a good independence party. A world where British people are free to vote and kick out their representatives might be hard in the days to come, but it is far, far better than one that was inexorably going towards a European empire. As one of the most striking placards read, “Britain isn’t supposed to be one of the many stars in someone else’s flag.” The period from 1973 to 2020 was a historical aberration.

Perhaps this is why Brexit vexes liberals so much. Brexit is important in ways more than the simple freedom and slavery dichotomy. It ruins a much vaunted and hitherto untouchable narrative. A recent IPSOS-MORI poll shows that Remainers, those who preferred to live in the EU, are less tolerant than Leavers of other people’s opinion. A earlier survey from 2016 found U.S. Democratic women block people on social media far more than do Republican women.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15510/europe-iran-hezbollah

“Hezbollah itself has publicly denied a distinction between its military and political wings. The group in its entirety is assessed to be concerned in terrorism…” — The British Treasury, January 17, 2020.

Britain joins the Netherlands, Canada, the United States, Israel, the 22-member Arab League, the six-member Gulf Cooperation Council as well as Argentina, Colombia, Guatemala, Honduras and Paraguay in making no distinction between Hezbollah’s military and civilian wings. In all, more than 30 countries have banned the group in its entirety.

In Germany, the EU’s largest member state, a foreign ministry official, Niels Annen, said that a complete ban of Hezbollah would be counterproductive because “we focus on dialogue.” His comment has been understood to mean that the German government does not want to burn bridges with Hezbollah’s main patron, the Islamic Republic of Iran, the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism.

In other EU member states, government officials appear worried that a total ban of Hezbollah could jeopardize the safety of European troops deployed to the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, or UNIFIL. EU member states contribute more than 3,650 troops to UNIFIL — mostly from France, Italy and Spain.

“Hezbollah is a single large organization, we have no wings that are separate from one another. What’s being said in Brussels doesn’t exist for us.” — Ibrahim Mussawi, Hezbollah spokesman, interview in Der Spiegel, July 22, 2013.

The British finance ministry has added the entirety of the Iran-backed Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah — Arabic for “The Party of Allah” — to its sanctions list and has ordered a freeze on any assets it may have in the United Kingdom.

The move, aimed at cracking down on Hezbollah’s fundraising activities in Britain, adds increased enforcement teeth to the British government’s February 2019 decision no longer to distinguish between Hezbollah’s military and political wings and to classify the entire organization as a terrorist group.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15511/russia-primacy-africa

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Moscow largely withdrew from the African continent, until Putin rekindled the flame about two years ago, in an attempt to restore Russia’s “glory days” and fill a vacuum wherever one is created by the West.

Between Russia’s expansionism in the region, and China’s as well, the United States would do well to remain as vigilant as ever.

While the United States and France have been helping the fragile governments of Africa’s Sahel region stave off Islamist terrorist attacks and takeovers, Russia has been busy trying to push NATO out of the area and augment its own influence there.

Moscow’s strategy rests on three pillars. The first is the cultivation of relationships with African leaders, particularly those attempting to remain in power in spite of constitutional limitations — such as, for instance, Sudan’s former dictator, Omar al-Bashir, who was recently ousted by oppositionists. The Kremlin dispatched several hundred paramilitary advisers in late 2018 to train the Sudanese military how to suppress protests.

Ultimately, Moscow’s mission to boost al-Bashir failed; he was overthrown in April 2019, a few months later.

The second pillar is the insertion of Russian agents into the inner circle of rising African leaders, such as the young, recently elected president of Madagascar, Andry Rajoelina. This pillar is also likely at work in the Kremlin’s penetration of Central African Republic (CAR) President Faustin Touadera’s staff by the Russian security adviser, Valery Zakharov.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/02/uks-dumbest-terrorist-tests-dumbest-justice-system-daniel-greenfield/

On a summer day in the UK, Mohiussunnath Chowdhury left his Luton home, took an anime sword that he had sharpened, typed “Windsor Castle” into his phone, and then followed the directions on the map.

“Tell everyone that I love them and that they should struggle against the enemies of Allah,” the aspiring Muslim terrorist had declared. “The Queen and her soldiers will all be in the hellfire.”

Instead of finding Queen Elizabeth II at the Windsor Castle, Mohiussunnath found that it was a pub offering “great real ales” and “fresh food”. The infidel phone had tried to divert the devout Muslim. Despite the Berkshire pub’s offerings of “grilled loin of pork” and Jägermeister, he didn’t attack it.

The Uber driver got back into his car, took along his anime sword, and this time made sure that the directions were pointing him to Buckingham Palace, not some sort of hellish booze palace. But the Queen wasn’t even there, the soldiers were on guard, and the police intercepted him outside the gates.

“It’s all a bit f____d up,” Mohiussunnath said, got out his anime sword, and shouted, “Allahu Akbar.”

The anime sword, unlike a real sword, had an enormous handle, which made it impractical to wield, and all too easy for the police to grab on to. The cops were able to wrestle it away from him even while he kept shouting, “Allahu Akbar”. Two cops suffered cuts before using tear gas to bring him to his knees.

Was it over? No, it was just getting started. The only thing more incompetent than Mohiussunnath was the British justice system which couldn’t convict a terrorist if he were attacking Buckingham Palace.

Literally.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/02/the_knife_attack_in_london_what_happens_in_israel_doesnt_stay_in_israel.html

In 2015, Israel once again came under terrorist attack from Palestinians desperate to erase Jews from the land they’ve inhabited continuously for 3,800 years. Unlike past terrorist attacks, which mostly relied on suicide bombs in restaurants and buses or on rocket attacks from afar, this was a more personal type of terrorism: Palestinians walking down the street or shopping in stores would suddenly pull out long knives and savagely stab anyone within reach. It was called “the knife intifada.”

But what happens in Israel doesn’t stay in Israel. In some ways, you can consider Israel a testing ground for terrorist tactics that Jihadists intend to use against others around the world – and it’s clear with Sunday’s “terrorist-related” knife attack in the Streatham neighborhood in London that the knife intifada has fully arrived in England.

The Palestinians haven’t been shy about using knives to wage war on Jews. Here’s a grim photograph from 1947 — before there was an Israel, before there were 1967 lines, and before the PLO had even formed — showing an Arab stabbing a Palestinian journalist, while the British soldiers took a photograph, but did not bother to help:

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/02/brexit-supporters-overcome-decades-establishment-opposition/#slide-1After decades of opposition from the establishment — from Obama to Blair to the BBC and the IMF — the Brexiteers won the day

William F. Buckley Jr. entitled one of his anthologies of conservative thought “Did You Ever See a Dream Walking?” In it, he expressed his hope that the ideas in it would become reality.

Last Friday, I attended a party in London where leading Brexit supporters celebrated their nation’s departure from the European Union. Several of them privately told me they never thought that such a day would ever arrive. But the left-wing Guardian newspaper paid the Brexit rebels their due in 2016. It noted that they’d “worked for little else, with no reward, and with no sign that they would ever prevail.” The paper compared the Brexit “sect” to medieval monks who copied their manuscripts “waiting for the Dark Ages to come to an end.”

Friday’s party, organized in part by Churchill biographer Andrew Roberts and held at a private club in Mayfair, was full of toasts and speeches reminding the world of the great odds that battlers for Brexit had overcome. Rising just before the clock struck 11 p.m., the point at which Britain formally left the EU, Roberts brought the house down by declaring:

We faced an establishment that hadn’t been so unanimous on any single issue since appeasement and Munich. It was the BBC, Barack Obama, Tony Blair, David Cameron, the powers of Oxford and Cambridge, the civil service, the Bank of England, the Confederation of British Industries, Goldman Sachs, and even the International Monetary Fund which warned Brexit would lead to a 10 percent decline in GNP — a decline greater than that during World War II.

But, Roberts continued: “The British people were conscious of their history, an extraordinary thing given they hadn’t been taught it in schools for the last half century. They instinctively understood the patriotic part of it. They were lions, they never were daunted, and the lions roared back in 2016.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/london-police-shoot-suspect-after-terrorism-related-knife-attack/

A man was shot dead by police in London Sunday after stabbing two people in what police are calling a “terrorism-related” incident.

Three people — two stab victims and one injured by broken glass — were taken to the hospital, with one man in critical condition. London’s Metropolitan police added that they believed the attack to be “Islamist-related.”

The attack occurred around 2 p.m. in Streatham, south London, and eyewitnesses said the man shot dead by police appeared to have a device strapped to his chest.

“I was crossing the road when I saw a man with a machete and silver canisters on his chest being chased by what I assume was an undercover police officer,” a man told the PA news agency.

An off-duty security officer who lives in the Streatham area told CNN that the body had “something that looked like a device strapped to him.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/02/wuhan_revisited.html

For a number of years in the 20-aughts, I worked in Wuhan, Hubei Province, People’s Republic of China.

China being China, and Wuhan being a provincial outpost of old China, an amalgamation of three towns incorporated under the one name, observations of life there then might be of interest now, given the tumult over the mushrooming conflagration of the coronavirus.

Because I lived on the outskirts of town, near a squealing pig farm, many buffalo in the fields, goats occasioning the streets, wild dogs inoffensively wandering about most of the open-air eateries not presumptuous enough to call themselves restaurants — a few plastic chairs and unwashed PVC tables scattered near a rough kitchen, basically — I was faced daily with the critical choice: Shall I risk whatever microbes or bacteria or whatever we might ‘catch’ or go along with the locals, who ate whatever was on offer without much of a tremor or fret.

Most of the time, frankly, I was hungry, and my colleagues and I trusted to Providence to keep us out of what the local Wuhanites called the doctor’s office, or the uncontemporary places they called hospitals, where  if you were unlucky enough to be in one of the stalls, your relatives brought you food, bed linens, and whatever else you needed that was outside the pill regimen or ‘treatment’ you were being accorded.

At night, because my brand- new apartment had been completed with a living room, a bedroom and a marble-floored Western bathroom, a major prize considering everyone else having a squat toilet, even at work, but no kitchen at all, I would  do my work, try to fight off the plagues of mosquitoes that bedeviled me every single night. Despite my burning Citronella candles as an encircling talismanic circle around my work-desk in a vain attempt to discourage the fierce buggers, every morning I’d have a field of itching bites up and down any exposed flesh.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15507/christians-persecution-global-catastrophe

Dictatorial paranoia continues to make North Korea (#1) the worst nation. “If North Korean Christians are discovered, they are deported to labor camps as political criminals or even killed on the spot.” — World Watch List 2020, Open Doors.

Otherwise, as has been the case in all statistics and reports on the global persecution of Christians, not only does “Islamic oppression” remain the chief “source of persecution” faced by Christians in seven of the absolute ten worst nations, but 38 of the 50 nations composing the list are either Muslim majority or have a sizeable Muslim population.

The targeting of Christians around the world has become more widespread than ever. Part of this is because “persecution against Christians has taken a technological turn.” ….in India (#10) — where “Hindu radicals often attack Christians with little to no consequences” — “the government plans to introduce a national facial recognition system. Similarly, China (#23)….” — World Watch List 2020, Open Doors.

Perhaps the most disturbing trend is that the number of persecuted Christians continues to grow year after year….

Will this trend ever stop and reverse, or will it continue to get worse — and possibly even spill into those nations that, for now, enjoy religious freedom and equality?

The global persecution of Christians has reached unprecedented levels: “260 million Christians experience high levels of persecution” around the world, notes the recently published Open Doors World Watch List 2020, an annual report that ranks the top 50 countries where Christians are most persecuted for their faith.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15508/iran-chinese-dream

The Chinese found out that producing and exporting goods that people wanted across the globe was easier and more profitable than trying to export a revolution that no one, perhaps apart from a few students in London and Paris, thirsted for.

The Shah had promised that he would turn Iran into “a second Japan”. Rafsanjani promised a “second China.”

Some of Rafsanjani’s close associates now tell me that he was “a bit of a coward” and lost his opportunity to do a Deng Xiaoping by being sucked into corrupt business deals. According to them, Rafsanjani didn’t realize that one starts making money for himself, his family and his entourage after one has done a Deng Xiaoping, and not before.

Today, the Tehran “deciders” constitute a small, increasingly isolated minority caught in an imagined past and fearful of the future. Worse still, many “deciders” have already put part of their money abroad, having sent their children to Europe and America. Going through a who-is-who of these “deciders” one is amazed by how many are behaving as carpetbaggers, treating Iran as a land to plunder, sending the proceeds to the West. They cannot produce an Iranian “Deng” because they don’t want to create a productive economy; all they are interested in is to get the money and run.

Could General Qassem Soleimani’s dramatic demise provide the shock therapy to persuade those who wield real power in Tehran to admit the failure of a strategy that has led Iran into an impasse? This was the question discussed in a zoom conference with a number of academics from one of Iran’s leading universities.