RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://pjmedia.com/trending/u-s-envoy-urges-eu-to-ban-hezbollah/

A U.S. civilian contractor was killed in a rocket attack on an Iraqi military base near the city of Kirkuk on Friday. The attack occurred in an area controlled by Kataib Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed Shiite militia.

U.S. Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell used the attack to urge the entire EU to ban Hezbollah.

Richard Grenell

Richard Grenell Retweeted Jason Brodsky

Now would be a good time for our European allies to follow the lead of the German parliament and move to designate Hezbollah a terrorist organization. #diplomacy

The German parliament recently passed a non-binding resolution urging the government to ban Hezbollah’s “political organization.” The motion urged Chancellor Angela Merkel’s administration, as well as the EU, to adopt a total ban of Hezbollah.

There are more than a thousand Hezbollah representatives in Germany alone.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15229/iran-christians-persecution

Three of the Islamist judges known to preside over the trials of Christians are Mashallah Ahmadzadeh, Mohammed Moghiseh, and Ahmad Zargar. The international community needs to consider imposing sanctions on them.
Converts to Christianity from Islam, according the Iran’s Islamic law, can face the death penalty. The Iranian Islamist judges generally resort to verses from the Quran and Hadith (Muhammad’s sayings and acts) to justify their verdicts.
Iran systematically violates the U.S. International Religious Freedom Act and this is why, since 1999, the U.S. has designated the Islamic Republic as a “Country of Concern.”
Under international law, the Iranian government has an obligation to respect freedom of religion. Yet, while Christians are being increasingly persecuted and their rights are violated in Iran at an unprecedented level, the international community still remains silent.

The Islamic Republic of Iran is unleashing a sweeping crackdown on Christians, particularly those who have dared to convert from Islam to Christianity.

Most recently, nine Christians in Iran, possibly converts, have been convicted by the Islamic court, and each sentenced to five years in prison. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) arrested them for attending church services at a private house. According to a report by Article 18, an Iranian NGO which promotes religious freedom:

“The arresting officers introduced themselves as agents from the Ministry of Intelligence (MOIS).

“They stormed the Christians’ homes in a coordinated operation at around 9am, confiscating Bibles, Christian literature, wooden crosses and pictures carrying Christian symbols, along with laptops, phones, all forms of identity cards, bank cards and other personal belongings.

“Arresting agents also searched the work offices of at least two Christians and confiscated computer hard drives and security-camera recordings.”

Christian families are generally dehumanized and humiliated in the community during the agent’s raids. As the Article 18 report explained, “The officers are reported to have treated the Christians harshly, even though small children were present during the arrests.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15349/interesting-year

International organizations, starting with the United Nations itself, appear less relevant than ever.

Classical media have also lost much of their power and relevance….

In the United States, female presidential wannabes dominated the Democrat Party’s list of candidates. This feminization shifts the emphasis away from the traditional goals of the nation-state that highlighted prestige, glory, economic growth, and hard power to social goals such as welfare, education, health, and help for real or imagined “victims of society.”

Iran is also heading for a transition as a regime of geriatrics that has lost much of its legitimacy finds it more and more difficult to frustrate the ambitions of a mostly young, creative, and determined nation.

As 2019 ends, the phrase that comes to mind is “what an interesting year!” And, the word “interesting” in this context should be taken in its traditional Chinese meaning, which is full of risks and dangers.

The year now ending confirmed a trend that started earlier in the decade, marking a slow, but undeniable, retreat from globalization which, at the start of the new century, was believed to be the panacea for all our ills. The new trend, taking shape in many countries, is that of nationalism highlighted by a return to the nation-state as the most effective model of political organization.

https://leonupsidedown.blogspot.com/
Here is some news that none of the mainstream media (MSM) feels worthy of news coverage but I certainly feel that it does. Let me know after you read this if you agree or not.

While our national state sponsored broadcaster in Canada, the left winged CBC, has decided that it was of the utmost importance to cut a 10 second cameo appearance of President Trump out of the movie Home Alone 2 (yes folks, that’s why we pay them the big bucks), they failed to report on a high school in Nova Scotia that has for a long time now, posted pictures of some of their heroes (certainly not mine and hopefully not yours): Karl Marx and Che Guevara! 

Thanks to my colleague Jeremy Valentine, who lives out east, we are all now privy to what passes as history in our Canadian schools where opinion replaces fact and feelings trump everything. 

Despite Jeremy’s numerous attempts to notify the school, the department of education and the mayor of the city of Truro where this school (Cobequid Educational Center) is located, of this terrible ‘mistake’, he’s received no replies to my knowledge.  Worse still, the pictures remain prominently displayed so that children can be brainwashed to think that these men are heroes. I urge you all to contact the school (notice I embedded the link to it above) and let them know what you think of this dreadful practice. 

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15041/germany-insecurity

Fifty-seven percent of Germans say that “increasingly being told what to say and how to behave” is getting on their nerves. — Survey on self-censorship in Germany, (conducted by Institut für Demoskopie Allensbach for the newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung), May 2019.

“We have seen the consequences of this decision [unrestricted migration] in terms of German public opinion and internal security – we experience problems every day. We have criminals, terrorist suspects and people who use multiple identities… While things are tighter today, we still have 300,000 people in Germany of whose identities we cannot be sure. That’s a massive security risk.” — August Hanning, former president of Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service.

“Evidently, many people nowadays view Islam more as a political ideology and less as a religion and therefore not deserving of religious tolerance.” — Yasemin El-Menouar, Bertelsmann Stiftung’s expert on religion, July 19, 2019.

“At least since the events at the Cologne cathedral square on New Year’s Eve in 2015 people apparently feel more and more unsafe,” said Oliver Malchow, the chairman of one of Germany’s two largest police unions. He was referring to the mass sexual assaults committed mainly by Arab and North African men at the Cologne cathedral square on New Year’s Eve more than four years ago. Malchow was also referring to new statistics, which show that approximately 640,000 Germans now have licenses for gas pistols — a large increase since 2014, when around 260,000 people had such a license. A gas pistol fires loud blanks or tear gas cartridges and is only potentially lethal at extremely close range.

The new statistics, according to Malchow, showed a “latent sense of insecurity” in the population. The number of real firearms owned privately also reportedly increased in 2018 — by 27,000 over the previous year. In Germany now, 5.4 million firearms are privately owned, most of them rifles.

A recent annual poll, conducted in September, confirms Malchow’s estimate: Every year since 1992, R+V, Germany’s largest insurance firm, has been asking Germans what they fear most. “This year, for the first time,” according to a report in Deutsche Welle, “a majority said they were most afraid that the country would be unable to deal with the aftermath of the migrant influx of 2015”. Fifty-six percent of those polled said they were scared that the country would not be able to deal with the number of migrants. This September marked exactly four years since Chancellor Angela Merkel opened Germany’s borders and allowed in almost a million migrants. However, Ulrich Wagner, professor of social psychology at the University of Marburg told Deutsche Welle:

“It’s really got more to do with the fact that politicians and media discuss this issue a great deal — which triggers fear… For example, in the latest study, fear of terrorism has clearly gone down. We simply don’t discuss this issue as much as we used to, and that means that people feel safer.”

What the professor appears to imply is that you can solve a crucial societal issue, not by debating its ramifications and publicly seeking to find solutions to it, but by not talking about it, thereby lulling the public into a false sense of security by pretending that the problem does not exist.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15348/libya-instability-turkey

Turkey, which signed a military and economic accord with the Libyan government in November, could deprive Greece and the Greek Cypriots of large swaths of their oil and gas exploration areas and force Egypt and Israel to negotiate with Turkey over the construction of natural gas pipelines to Europe.

The threat posed by extremists in Libya and Tunisia is not one that Europeans can ignore, as evidenced by the attack on British tourists in Sousse and the more recent attack by Tunisian Anis Amri in Berlin.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan opened the way on December 26 for direct military intervention in Libya: he announced a parliamentary vote in early January on sending troops to support the UN-backed Tripoli government against General Khalifa Haftar. Instructors, equipment and Turkish special forces are already operating in Libya alongside pro-government militias. Erdogan said that Turkey would also be willing to send aerial and naval assistance if circumstances require it.

Sending Turkish troops will complicate the situation in an already fragile country, torn by internal dissent since the ouster and killing of the dictator Muammar Gaddafi in 2011.

The map of foreign intervention in Libya is important: In the east of the country, forces from Saudi Arabia and Egypt support Gen. Haftar, the separatist who heads the Libyan National Army — not the country’s national army. Arrayed against them are Turkey and Qatar, supporting the recognized government headed by Fayez al-Sarraj, but his government is not supported by the legislature. Then there is Russia. It has dispatched militia forces known as the Wagner Group, which have already carried out operations in Syria, are also operating in several African countries — supporting and assisting Haftar’s forces. France has joined the group of countries that support the rebel general, while Italy backs Sarraj’s recognized government.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/12/academics-ignore-iranian-colonialism/

Behavior they decry when done by Europeans is overlooked when practiced by the Islamic Republic.

Academics today are obsessed with colonization, empire, and cultural hegemony, along with postcolonialism, ethnic studies, and intersectionality. Scholarship in many fields has come to be dominated by hegemony-fighting, indigenous-supporting anti-imperialists who attack anyone who disagrees with them. When a journal called Third World Quarterly published an article in 2017 about the benefits of colonialism, the uproar from the social-justice professors led to the article’s being withdrawn and 15 members of the editorial board resigning amid threats.

So if the profession is so adamant about the evils of colonialism, why is it ignoring Iran?

When strong countries exert their (unfair) advantages over weaker ones, imposing their values and cultures and manipulating indigenous economies, academics are among the loudest and most creative critics. Even the most benign influence of a powerful country over a weaker one is excoriated — hence the long obsession with something called “cocacolonization.” Legions of scholar-activists are busy enlisting history to shed light on the present, drawing parallels between a benighted European era of colonization and an ongoing American or Israeli one, looking under rocks for signs of Western, American, and Trumpian oppression and proclaiming a new American empire. Fair enough — but why ignore the Iranian attempts to do exactly to others what they accuse others of having done to Iran?

Journalists and analysts, such as Jonathan Spyer and Seth Frantzman, have been documenting Iran’s colonial expansion for many years. But most academics have been reluctant to turn their skills on Iran. Many prefer softer targets, such as Israel and the U.S. Earlier this month, the United Nations’ Decolonization Committee pushed eight anti-Israel measures through the General Assembly, showing where its priorities lie.

Even without its violations of other countries’ sovereignty, Iran itself is an empire, with ethnic Persians dominating the Arabs, Kurds, Balochis, Azeris, Turkmen, Lur, Gilakis, and Mazandaranis. Only a few, notably Daniel Pipes, Ilan Berman, and Shoshana Bryen, are interested in this fact.