RUTHFULLY YOURS

Jack Letts, dubbed ‘Jihadi Jack’ by British media, has been detained for about two years after a 2014 trip to Syria where he helped the Islamic State

OTTAWA — The United Kingdom is shirking its share of the international community’s duty to help keep the world safe from terrorism, the federal government suggested Sunday after the British Home Office revoked the citizenship of a dual citizen imprisoned in Syria.

Jack Letts, a British-Canadian man who has been behind bars in a Kurdish prison since 2017, has been stripped of his British citizenship, the office of Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale confirmed in a sternly worded statement.

“Canada is disappointed that the United Kingdom has taken this unilateral action to off-load their responsibilities,” the statement said. “Terrorism knows no borders, so countries need to work together to keep each other safe.”

Letts, who was dubbed “Jihadi Jack” by the British media, has been detained for about two years after he travelled to Syria in 2014 to support the Islamic State group.

A statement from the Home Office said revoking British citizenships is one way it counters terrorist threats. It said it does not comment on individual cases.

“Decisions on depriving a dual national of citizenship are based on substantial advice from officials, lawyers and the intelligence agencies and all available information,” the statement said.

Letts’ parents, John Letts and Sally Lane, were found guilty in June for funding terrorism when they tried to send him money. The couple, from Oxford, England, received suspended sentences of 12 months in prison.

John Letts wrote a letter to Canadian MPs last year that said his son is not a terrorist and deserves Canada’s protection. In his letter, Letts wrote that the money was to pay “people smugglers,”which he described as his son’s “only way out” of Syria.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14737/spain-jews-citizenship

The legislation’s main barriers to Spanish citizenship have been obligatory exams on Spanish language and socio-cultural history, the need to travel to Spain and exorbitant fees and costs — all without any guarantee of success.

“We want to express our disappointment because this law, which was supposed to restore justice, has become increasingly complicated. If we observe the procedures, the prerequisites, the number of documents to be submitted, the certified translations, the fees, the language and culture exams and the need to travel to Spain, we cannot but wonder about the reason for all of these hurdles.” — Jon Iñarritu García, a congressman representing the Basque Country.

Although official data on the number of Sephardic Jews who will have obtained Spanish citizenship under the 2015 law will not be available until all applications are processed… initial indications show that the law has failed to “right a wrong.”

A piece of much-heralded legislation to grant Spanish citizenship to up to 3.5 million descendants of Jews expelled from the country in 1492 is about to end in failure: fewer than 10,000 Jews have been awarded Spanish passports ahead of an October 1, 2019 deadline.

Spanish leaders promised that the law — which entered into force on October 1, 2015 for a period of three years and was extended for one additional year — would “right a historic wrong” and demonstrate that more than 500 years after the Inquisition began, Jews are once again welcome in Spain.

The legislation, however, introduced so many cumbersome bureaucratic hurdles to obtain Spanish citizenship that most prospective hopefuls appear to have been deterred from even initiating the application process.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14691/extinction-christians-middle-east

“I don’t believe in these two words [human rights], there are no human rights. But in Western countries, there are animal rights. In Australia they take care of frogs…. Look upon us as frogs, we’ll accept that — just protect us so we can stay in our land.” — Metropolitan Nicodemus, the Syriac Orthodox archbishop of Mosul, National Catholic Register.

“Those people are the same ones who came here many years ago. And we accepted them. We are the original people in this land. We accepted them, we opened the doors for them, and they push us to be minorities in our land, then refugees in our land. And this will be with you if you don’t wake up.” — Metropolitan Nicodemus.

“Threats to pandas cause more emotion” than threats to the extinction of the Christians in the Middle East. — Amin Maalouf, French-Lebanese author, Le Temps.

Convert, pay or die. Five years ago, that was the “choice” the Islamic State (ISIS) gave to Christians in Mosul, then Iraq’s third-largest city: either embrace Islam, submit to a religious tax or face the sword. ISIS then marked Christian houses with the Arabic letter ن (N), the first letter of the Arabic word “Nasrani” (“Nazarene,” or “Christian”) . Christians could often take no more than the clothes on their back and flee a city that had been home to Christians for 1,700 years.

Two years ago, ISIS was defeated in Mosul and its Caliphate crushed. The extremists, however, had succeeded in “cleansing” the Christians. Before the rise of ISIS, there were more than 15,000 Christians there. In July 2019, the Catholic charity, Aid to the Church in Need, disclosed that only about 40 Christians have come back. Not long ago, Mosul had “Christmas celebrations without Christians”.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/08/15/the-big-break-up/

Ever dated a crazy girl? Sorry. It is 2019. What I meant to ask is: Have you ever consensually courted a woman of alternative mental enthusiasm?

Well, it is marvelous. Narcotic and vibrating. Every fibrous sinew tensed and trilling. Sooner or later, however, that choppy high leavens into a faint despair. That vivifying alternative mien of hers? Nope. She’s just mental.

What follows is an anthropological study into the turbulent power of relationships. And how we over-brained monkeys may behave when something we depended upon is ripped from grasp.

We get desperate. Act in the strangest of manners. Convince ourselves of a reality calibrated to our fragile comfort.

The current Brexit saga resembles a mass break-up. The jilted resorting to the most desperate and unedifying of endeavors; pursuits which will purple their cheeks in years to come.

As the common knowledge attests, the aggrieved must survive five stages of grief. First, they deny, then comes anger, and then they begin to bargain. At a loss, depression besets them. Eventually, they accept it. And scrub their social media accounts of those projective 3 a.m. statuses authored in their state of poison.

Remainers have broken the Kubler-Ross model of grief. Swirling between denial and anger, imbibing upon grief, springing back from depression, swimming into denial, never lapping at acceptance. It has been three years.

A Brexiteer before it was even remotely cool, Jeremy Corbyn—Labour Party leader, and intellectual Maris Piper, this week implored other party leaders, and Conservative “rebels” to install him as caretaker prime minister so he could stop a spectral no-deal Brexit.

A man elected for his promise to inject some honesty into our politics, Jeremy is happy to sell his decades of political soul for a few weeks in the prime minister’s office.

His fantasy entails: winning a no-confidence vote against Boris Johnson; becoming prime minister; delaying Brexit; calling a snap election and then campaigning for another referendum.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274592/when-britain-died-john-glynn

In April of this year, in an article titled “4 Reasons Why London is The Worst,” Maria Ebele had this to say: “London has the reputation of one of the greatest cities in the world. But I’ll let you in on a secret: if you ever want to make friends with a Brit who is not from London, casually drop in conversation that London isn’t your most favourite place in the world. Then sit back and watch. Most likely, you’ll see his or her eyes light up with glee at the opportunity to rip into the nation’s capital.”

The author has a point. Over the past couple of years, more than 340,000 people have moved away from London amid rising levels of knife crime, according to reports. Extortionate property prices and poor air quality are also cited as reasons for people choosing to leave the capital and set up a new life elsewhere in the UK. Obviously, people want a better quality of life; also, people would prefer not to get stabbed.

However, could there be another reason for the mass exodus?

I ask this because London is acquiring an increasingly Islamic face.

In the words of Maulana Syed Raza Rizvi, an eminent preacher in the city, “London is more Islamic than many Muslim countries put together.” Yes, that London, as in the home of red buses and posh accents. The “traditional” picture of London has been replaced with a more worrying one. According to Giulio Meotti, a researcher at the Gatestone Institute, by 2020, “estimates are that the number of Muslims attending prayers will reach at least 683,000, while the number of Christians attending weekly Mass will drop to 679,000.” Next year, Islam looks likely to be the dominant religion in the capital.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14412/conspiracy-theory

“To try to defeat an irrational supposition – especially when it is firmly held by its proponents – with a rational explanation is virtually impossible. Any information that does not correspond with the conspiracy theorists’ preferred social, political, or ethnic narrative is ipso facto false. Social scientists have described such theories as having a “self-sealing quality” that makes them “particularly immune to challenge.” — Deborah Lipstadt, Antisemitism Here and Now, 2019 pp 7-8.

The lies about the State of Israel are amplified in the West through the “mainstream media”, such as: The New York Times, The New Yorker, the BBC, The Guardian, MSNBC, and CNN. Churches join in, and of course the United Nations, as well as so-called human rights organizations where pretty well anything goes: The Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch.

This bias is well monitored by a number of websites that work to identify their inaccuracies and deliberate distortions about Israel, the IDF, or Palestinian terrorism. CAMERA, Honest Reporting, UK Media Watch, and BBC Watch all dissect bad reportage, and contact editors to request corrections.

How often have we seen commentary concerning the situation in Gaza, the West Bank and Israel, made with intensity even passion which purport to tell readers the “facts” about Israel? They often narrate falsehoods that might put to shame a string of fraudsters, conmen and conspiracy theorists.

It seems, at times, that there is no limit to anti-Semitic modern fantasies about the Jewish state of Israel that overwhelm the even older libels about Jews controlling world affairs, as in the totally fraudulent forgery of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Today, we are given to believe that it is Muslim Palestinian children who are slain by sneering Zionists and that the government of Israel works hand in hand with a global network of Christians and Jewish bankers, politicians, and media bosses.

It is not surprising to see ordinary folk taken in by anti-Semitic meanderings and anti-Israel fiction. A 2015 study by Chicago political scientists, J. Eric Oliver and Thomas J. Wood, provided evidence that belief in conspiracies and other falsehoods is widespread even in the United States:

Using four nationally representative surveys, sampled between 2006 and 2011, we find that half of the American public consistently endorses at least one conspiracy theory and that many popular conspiracy theories are differentiated along ideological and anomic dimensions. In contrast with many theoretical speculations, we do not find conspiracism to be a product of greater authoritarianism, ignorance, or political conservatism. Rather, the likelihood of supporting conspiracy theories is strongly predicted by a willingness to believe in other unseen, intentional forces and an attraction to Manichean narratives. These findings both demonstrate the widespread allure of conspiracy theories as political explanations and offer new perspectives on the forces that shape mass opinion and American political culture.