RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2019/09/25/must-get-brexit-done-break-free-suffocating-eu-global-stage/

Far away from the closeted world of Britain’s Supreme Court, important changes are taking place in the global landscape that are ultimately far more relevant to Britain’s future than legal arguments over Boris Johnson’s decision to prorogue parliament.

While the main focus of political debate in this country is the impact yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling will have on the Prime Minister’s ability to deliver Brexit, elsewhere the attention of the world’s major powers is occupied by much bigger concerns, such as the threat Iranian aggression poses to the world’s energy supplies.

Ever since US President Donald Trump announced his decision to withdraw from the Iranian nuclear deal last year, a dangerous split has emerged within the transatlantic alliance, one where the major European powers – Britain, France and Germany – seemed determined to resist Washington’s attempts to force Iran back to the negotiating table.

After the White House imposed a fresh set of punitive economic sanctions against Tehran, the Europeans sought to continue trading with the ayatollahs in defiance of Washington’s wishes.

Now all that has changed amid growing evidence of Iranian involvement in the devastating attacks carried out against Saudi Arabia’s oil production facilities earlier this month, the worst attack the kingdom has suffered since former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein fired a barrage of Scud missiles during the Gulf War in 1991. As senior Saudi officials have pointed out, this was not just an attack against the Saudi kingdom but on the global economy, as it cut their oil production by half and caused a spike in the global oil price.

The Iranians continue to deny their involvement, but the evidence assembled to date has been sufficient to persuade the Europeans to conclude that Tehran “bears responsibility” for carrying out the attacks. This conclusion is significant because it means European leaders are moving closer to the Trump administration’s position of seeking to renegotiate the flawed 2015 nuclear deal.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14912/hamas-leaders-corruption

“Frustrated Palestinian youths are committing suicide because of poverty, while the sons of the leaders are holding birthday parties!” — Hussein Qatoush, on Facebook.

The problem… is when your father is a senior terrorist leader who devotes himself to inciting against Israel and Jews and encouraging other young Palestinians to sacrifice their lives in the war against Israel. Hamad, like the rest of the Hamas leaders, would never send his own son to attack soldiers at the border with Israel.

It is time for the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip to revolt against the leaders who are keeping them chained in poverty and sending them to their deaths.

It is also time for the international community to wake up to the fact that it is wealthy Hamas leaders, and not Israel, who are responsible for the humanitarian and economic disaster that is known as the Gaza Strip.

The leaders of Hamas, the Palestinian terror group ruling the Gaza Strip since 2007, seem to have hearts of stone regarding the suffering of the people living under their regime.

These leaders have no problem sending Palestinians to risk their lives near the border with Israel, while they and their families enjoy a comfortable life. More than 250 Palestinians have been killed and thousands injured in clashes with the Israel Defense Forces since the beginning of the Hamas-sponsored weekly protests near the Gaza-Israel border in March 2018.

While the protests are continuing and more Palestinians continue to put their lives at risk at the behest of the Hamas leadership, the terror group’s senior officials are busy throwing lavish parties for their family members and upgrading their personal treasuries. It is as if the Hamas leaders were telling their people: Sacrifice yourself for the cause of destroying Israel and killing Jews so that we and our families can continue to live it up.

The latest example of this exploitation of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip surfaced in the form of a video of the birthday celebration of 20-year-old Mohammed, son of senior Hamas official Ghazi Hamad.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14913/uk-brexiteers-remainers

The [British Remainers] opposition camp, having already succeeded in obstructing Britain’s exit from the European Union for three years, have now won themselves extra time in which to block the path of democracy.

Anything and everything is apparently in the cards for the obstructionists, whose true agenda appears to be not to work out a Brexit deal at all — but to ignore the referendum result, and for the UK to remain in the untransparent, unaccountable and un-unelectable EU.

The latest twist in the UK’s ongoing battle to leave the European Union has — unsurprisingly — reached yet another impasse. The supreme court has ruled that British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s suspending of Parliament was unlawful because it “had the effect of frustrating parliament.” He was also accused of giving unlawful advice to the Queen in asking her for permission.

As is routine for a newly appointed PM, Johnson suspended Parliament in order to announce his domestic agenda with a Queen’s Speech. Furious Remainers claim that he shut it down to prevent Parliamentary scrutiny of his plans to leave Europe — with or without a deal. The suspension, which infuriated his foes, was the latest move in an ongoing battle to deliver Brexit — in spite of the opposition’s determined refusal to accept the will of the people.

Johnson’s detractors, inevitably, have leapt upon the decision, passed by a panel of eleven judges, to void his decision to prorogue — or suspend — Parliament. The Labour Party, led by Jeremy Corbyn, have called for Johnson’s resignation, and demanded a new election. Mr Johnson — who is currently in New York on his first UN summit — has steadfastly refused to stand down.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/09/castros-torture-american-pows-vietnam-jamie-glazov/

Editors’ note: Last Friday, Sept. 20, 2019, our nation, led by solemnly marked National POW/MIA Recognition Day, during which we honored all American prisoners of war and expressed our deep gratitude and respect for what they endured and — as empirical evidence suggests — in some cases may very well be continuing to endure. Indeed, we pay tribute to those who never returned — and, of course, also to their suffering families. In honor of this sacred day, Frontpage has deemed it important to run Jamie Glazov’s article, Castro’s Torture of American POWs in Vietnam from Breitbart’s Dec. 8, 2016 issue. We hope that our leadership and citizens will take serious action on this issue. We will always remember and we will never forget.

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Castro’s Torture of American POWs in Vietnam.
By Jamie Glazov

The death of communist tyrant Fidel Castro has yielded much-deserved coverage of the monstrous nature of his tyrannical rule.

What has gone virtually unreported, however, is the direct and instrumental role Castro played in the torture and murder of American POWs in Vietnam during the Vietnam War. The story of Castro’s atrocities against American soldiers in this conflict is rarely ever told, least of all by our mainstream media.

During the Vietnam War, Castro sent a gang of his henchmen to run the “Cuban Program” at the Cu Loc POW camp in Hanoi, which became known as “the Zoo.” As Stuart Rochester and Frederick Kiley have documented in their book Honor Bound in a chapter entitled “The Zoo, 1967–1969: The Cuban Program and Other Atrocities,” one of the primary objectives of this “program” was to determine how much physical and psychological agony a human being could withstand.

Castro selected American POWs as his guinea pigs. A Cuban nicknamed “Fidel,” the main torturer at the Zoo, initiated his own personal reign of terror. He was described in documents based on POW debriefings as “a professional who was trained in psychology and prison control in Russia or Europe.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/09/europes_coming_trade_storm.html

“With America insisting on actual fair trade and tightening access to her markets, China and Europe will be like two scorpions in a bottle. ”

The European Union has consistently enjoyed hefty trade surpluses with the United States. According to the United States Census Bureau for, the past four years, those surpluses were $168, $151, $147, and $156 billion respectively. For the first six months of 2019, the EU ran a near $100 billion surplus. And this is before the European Central Bank’s devaluation of the euro via negative interest rates and more quantitative easing.

In a world where the U.S. economic establishment proclaims ‘free trade’ as the cause of American prosperity, this is an anomaly. If anything, under ‘free trade,’ it is the U.S. that should run multi-billion-dollar surpluses with Europe. That’s because America is the source of innovations and the development of cutting-edge technologies, not Europe. Add to that the fact that European industries are grossly inefficient by U.S. standards due to the EU’s extensive welfare-state laws, which are essentially pseudo-socialistic.

This anomaly exists only because past U.S. leadership has allowed it. Far too often, our ruling class has shown a greater affinity for the European elite than for their fellow citizens. They found it easier to sell out the American middle class than to inconvenience their friends in Europe.

Fortunately Donald Trump is a different breed of cat. And although the president’s main focus right now is on China, he will get around to the trade inequity with Europe in due time.  When this happens, it will be a tremendous blow to the Europeans. It will especially hurt Germany, Europe’s industrial powerhouse. This is because almost 50% of the German GDP is due to exports. A drop here and the affect ripples through the Germany and on to the rest of the Continent. 

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14907/france-saudis-critics

“Mohammed Al-Issa, who heads the World Islamic League, is credited for more than 500 executions when he was Minister of Justice of Saudi Arabia from 2009 to 2015, and countless orders of torture including the conviction of the famous Raif Badawi with 1.000 lashes.” — Michel Taube, Le Figaro, September 16, 2019.

Raif Badawi has just launched a hunger strike over mistreatment by the Saudi prison officials. “As part of their cruel crackdown, they’ve just confiscated his books & crucial medication.” — Irwin Cotler, former Canadian Justice Minister and head of the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights, in a tweet.

How can France, the country of the “liberty, equality, fraternity,” welcome the former Saudi minister who was in charge of Badawi’s torture and imprisonment… who condemns apostates to death and inflicts public flagellation on dissidents such as Badawi?

Right after the extremist massacre at the weekly Charlie Hebdo, then-French President François Hollande invited the Saudis to join the march of solidarity in Paris. When the Saudis returned home, they started flogging Badawi.

Among the French Muslims, political Islam is rapidly increasing. Instead of embracing the West where they were born, the youngest generations are rejecting it.

Éric Zemmour, apparently, was found “guilty” by a French court of saying that Muslims should be given “the choice between Islam and France” and that “in innumerable French suburbs there is a struggle to Islamize territory”. Freedom of expression… [is] under threat in France.

The French Institute of Muslim Civilization opened in Lyon on September 19, in the presence of the French Minister of the Interior, Christophe Castaner. He welcomed the project for an “open Islam” dedicated to the “fight against prejudice”. The building, of five stories and 2,700 square meters, which now adjoins the Grand Mosque, will offer courses in Muslim civilization and languages, along with symposia, conferences and debates. The project is co-funded by the World Islamic League, the diplomatic and religious arm of Saudi Arabia, which has “ties” with the Federation of French Muslims.

A few years ago, in 2016, the president of the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region, Laurent Wauquiez, sparked a heated debate by refusing to finance the project; he said he feared interference by Islamist countries. He was right.

This month, Mohammed Al-Issa, general secretary of the World Islamic League, was in Lyon at the inauguration of the institute. “As everyone knows, the World Islamic League is a Saudi organization based in Mecca”, wrote the scholar Razika Adnani in the weekly Marianne.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14905/latin-america-hezbollah

“Transnational terrorism poses an immediate threat to us here in the Western Hemisphere. Although the perceived center of gravity seems far away, groups like ISIS, al-Qa’ida, and Lebanese Hizballah operate where they can find recruits, raise support, operate unchecked, and pursue their terrorist agendas.” — U.S. Deputy Secretary of State John J. Sullivan; ministerial conference on counterterrorism, December 11, 2018.

[W]hen the Department of Justice (DOJ), on October 15, 2018, designated Hezbollah as one of the world’s top five transnational criminal organizations, many Latin American governments turned their attention to Hezbollah’s illicit networks.

Argentine President [Mauricio] Macri’s leadership and political will have succeeded in establishing tremendous momentum for other Latin American governments to think critically about Hezbollah, as evidenced in President Abdo’s recognition of the Lebanese terror group in Paraguay last month.

At this moment, President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, and President Ivan Duque of Colombia, are working potentially to designate Hezbollah as a foreign terrorist organization.

Recent Hezbollah-related cases in Peru and Paraguay show that [Hezbollah’s] crime-terror actions in Latin America are far from over.

The counterterrorism conversation in Latin America is changing. On July 16, the Macri government of Argentina made history by becoming the first country in Latin America to officially designate Hezbollah a terrorist organization. Less than one month later, on August 9, the Paraguayan government followed suit and also officially recognized Hezbollah as a terror organization. Now, at least two other countries in the region are seriously considering issuing the same counterterrorism designation in the near future.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14910/iran-nuclear-deal-violations

The IAEA first ignored the reports about Iran’s undeclared clandestine nuclear facilities. This should not come as a surprise: the IAEA has a long history of misreporting the Islamic Republic’s compliance with the deal and declining to follow up on credible reports about Iran’s illicit nuclear activities.

New evidence shows that Iran’s theocratic establishment was most likely violating the nuclear agreement since the day that Obama’s administration and Tehran struck the deal in 2015.

The international community would truly do itself a great service to recognize that the nuclear deal was nothing more than a pro-mullah agreement which provided Iran’s ruling clerics with billions of dollars to pursue their anti-American, anti-Semitic, anti-Iranian people and pro-terror activities, while simultaneously providing cover for Iran to pursue its nuclear ambitions.

The Iranian government is advancing its nuclear program at a faster pace. Recently, the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) declared that Tehran took the third step in increasing its nuclear activities by activating advanced centrifuges: 20 IR-4 and 20 IR-6 centrifuges.

https://www.israelhayom.com/2019/09/22/trumps-peace-deal-anything-in-it-for-jordan/

Jordan presents itself to the world as a constitutional monarchy – a state supporting a multiparty political system, an elected parliament, and a prime minister who is the head of government.

Constitutional experts beg to differ. Most maintain that Jordan is an autocracy in which authoritarian power is exercised by the king through legal manipulation, described by the Journal of Democracy as “selective economic reforms, new civil society regulations, and hollow pluralism initiatives.” In fact, the king is the country’s ultimate authority in respect of all three branches of government – executive, legislative, and judicial. He appoints the prime minister and chooses the cabinet. The judges are appointed and dismissed by royal decree. Political parties were legalized in 1992 provided they acknowledge the legitimacy of the monarchy.

These democratically dubious constitutional arrangements do not, however, affect the popularity of the monarchy, and there is no demand within Jordan for constitutional change. However, the usual consequences of autocratic rule – corruption, unemployment, poverty, high taxes, rising food prices, and poor government services – regularly result in outbursts of popular protest. Over the course of 2019, the scale and depth of Jordan’s economic problems have been unprecedented, and massive public demonstrations have been the result.

In May and June, the public took to the streets in great numbers to protest increased taxes and soaring prices. The rebellion was nationwide, uniting all sectors of Jordanian society. In response, King Abdullah dismissed the government, froze prices, and appointed a new prime minister, Omar al-Razzaz, whom he ordered to produce reforms.