RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/05/ireland_is_on_the_verge_of_enacting_the_most_draconian_antispeech_law_in_the_west.html

Ireland, a country that long chafed under England’s repressive governance, is about to become very repressive itself. It’s about to put into effect a speech bill so repressive that anyone who even receives a text that runs afoul of the law could be arrested if he does not immediately delete and disavow the text. This is where the Western world, once the bastion of intellectual liberty, has ended.

The law, entitled “Criminal Justice (Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offences) Bill 2022,” passed through the legislature in February, with only 4 representatives out of 160 voting against it. Most in the public weren’t even aware of the bill and, if they’d thought about it, they probably would have congratulated themselves on being a nice country in which “hate” speech is barred.

It was only when an Irish conservative commentator, Keith Woods, who was reinstated on Twitter thanks to Elon Musk’s commitment to free speech, that word got out:

It’s a little hard to tell from that snippet exactly what’s going on, so let me fill in a few blanks. First, the bill has all sorts of sections and subsections for different speech offenses. They all revolve around silencing anything but positive speech about people with “protected characteristics.” Those characteristics are race, “colour,” nationalist, religion, national or ethnic origin, descent, gender, sex characteristics, sexual orientation, or disability.” “Gender,” the bill explains, includes the whole nonsensical panoply of gender identity.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19555/west-training-china-military

China is reportedly recruiting former air force pilots from the West to understand better how Western military aircraft and pilots operate. Up to 30 former UK military pilots are believed to have traveled to China since 2019 to work as instructors in the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).

“It’s taking Western pilots of great experience to help develop Chinese military air force tactics and capabilities. Money is a strong motivator.” — Unnamed Western official, BBC, October 28, 2022.

“It was very specific that it had to be frontline military aviators in current flying practice…. why send military pilots rather than teachers?” — Sky News, October 28, 2022.

Perhaps most incredibly, the US Army, as late as November 2020, conducted the Disaster Management Exchange (online, due to coronavirus) with China’s PLA…. Unbelievably, the November 2020 remote exercise took place just one month after President Donald Trump’s National Security Adviser, Robert O’Brien, had pronounced China to be the threat of the century….

China is reportedly recruiting former air force pilots from the West to understand better how Western military aircraft and pilots operate. Up to 30 former UK military pilots are believed to have traveled to China since 2019 to work as instructors in the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19605/ukraine-iron-harvest

The media prefer to talk of mansions and opulent yachts rather than the corporate assets which continue to generate profits for the oligarch class that includes men like Alexei Miller, Igor Sechin, Roman Abramovich, Boris Rotenberg, Vladimir Potanin, Viatcheslav ‘Moshe’ Kantor, and Igor Shuvalov as well as their sons and daughters who occupy key banking and business roles too. All of these have been sanctioned and some of their assets frozen.

Serious consideration should be given to finding a way to hold the beneficiaries of Putin’s largesse even more accountable, if possible, and direct their assets to rectifying the damage that their patron-in-chief has caused. It is likely that tens of billions of US dollars of Putin’s oligarchs’ assets have already been frozen under international sanctions. This means Russia cannot use them, but as things stand, they cannot be confiscated and put to work to help Ukraine re-build, much as there is the desire in the US, UK and EU to do so.

A series of bills has already been introduced in the US Congress towards this aim, but they would all appear to fall foul of domestic laws as well as international investment laws. What is now needed therefore is a coordinated legislative effort in Washington, London and like-minded capitals to permanently deprive Russia of these funds and use them to help offset the massive reconstruction bills that will otherwise fall entirely to US, British and European taxpayers.

The World Bank estimates an overall reconstruction bill for Ukraine at $349 billion, an eye-watering sum that is rising by the week. Ukrainian government sources put it at more like $700 billion. Somehow this has all got to be paid for, and it’s not going to come from Ukraine, whose economy is in tatters after months of fighting for its very survival. The chances of getting Russia to cough up are close to zero, whatever the talk of war crimes trials and reparations.

Meanwhile, sanctioned Russian oligarchs, who themselves bear considerable responsibility for Putin’s aggression, simply alter the ownership of their corporations to avoid penalties, often with their vast fortunes residing in Western banks and property empires. It is time for their wealth to come under greater scrutiny as the world figures out how to put Ukraine back together when the war eventually comes to an end.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19593/armenian-genocide-remembrance

The evidence is overwhelming.

“Each girl had been nailed alive upon her cross, spikes through her feet and hands…” — Aurora Mardiganian, Ravished Armenia.

Often overlooked… is that this was less a genocide of Armenians and more a genocide of Christians. Thus the opening sentence of U.S. House Resolution 296, which passed on the hundredth anniversary of the genocide (2019), correctly mentions “the campaign of genocide against Armenians, Greeks, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Syriacs, Arameans, Maronites, and other Christians.”

Christianity is what all of those otherwise diverse peoples had in common, and therefore it — not nationality, ethnicity, territory, or grievances — was the ultimate determining factor concerning who the Turks would and would not “purge.”

“Christians were considered infidels (kafir). The call to Jihad… was part of the plan.” — Joseph Yacoub, author of Year of the Sword: The Assyrian Christian Genocide

An eyewitness recalled that… “outrages” [were] committed against “even children”….

“The opportunity [World War I] presented itself for clearing Turkish soil of a Christian race.” — Winston Churchill.

“Turkey is taking advantage of the war in order to thoroughly liquidate its internal foes, i.e., the indigenous Christians, without being thereby disturbed by foreign intervention…. The question is settled. There are no more Armenians.” — Talaat Pasha, the de facto leader of the Ottoman Empire during the genocide, June 1915.

Turkey, in 2020, sent sharia-enforcing “jihadist groups,” from Syria and Libya…. These Muslim groups committed numerous atrocities. These included raping an Armenian female soldier and mother of three, before hacking off all four of her limbs, gouging her eyes, and sticking one of her severed fingers inside her private parts. — Greek City Times, September 25, 2020.

Not only has it gone unpunished; NATO ally Turkey has resumed the genocide against the very descendants of those whom the Turks nearly exterminated over a century ago — namely Armenians and Assyrians.

More recently, in late 2022, Turkey launched thousands of attacks — air, mortar, drone, artillery, etc.—several miles deep into Syria’s northern border. This is, of course, where most of the religious minorities live — Christians, Yazidis, and Kurds, who a few years earlier experienced a genocide at the hands of the Islamic State (“ISIS”).

“These military attacks by Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s regime are part of a wider Turkish policy of annihilation of the Kurdish and Assyrian [Christian] people in northern Syria and Iraq. Turkey has committed war crimes and crimes against humanity, including bombing, shelling, abduction, torture, and extrajudicial killings. The attacks are part of Turkey’s genocidal policies towards Kurds, Christians, and Ezidis.” — Genocide Watch, December 7, 2022.

“This genocide is a pattern we see, and it’s certainly nothing new…. For those who say ‘Not on our watch!’ or ‘Never again!’— here it is, happening again!” — Charmaine Hedding, president of the US-based Shai Fund, webinar on Turkey’s genocidal assault on Christians in Syria, rumble.com, December 15, 2022.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19592/pakistan-school-blasphemy

They had both been asked to clean a store room. During the cleaning they gathered all the rubbish (Paper etc) and later burnt them.

Since they are both illiterate therefore they didn’t know what kind of paper they were burning, and there were some Qurans page in that rubbish.

After taking a statement from the witnesses, the police have registered a case under section 295- B of blasphemy law against Musarrat Bibi and Mohammad Sarmad and taken them into custody at Police Station Sadar Arifwala Park Pandan [Punjab].

Nasir Saeed, Director CLAAS-UK thar, [said] it is very sad that two illiterate people are charged with blasphemy. They are completely innocent as both didn’t know what they were doing, they were just doing the work they were asked….

“The case against Bibi and Sarmad should be dismissed and those people who asked them to clean the store and didn’t supervise them should be investigated and should be punished for their carelessness…. This is completely unfair and unjust. Such people who don’t how to read and write are given such a job and then they are charged with blasphemy. It is misuse of the blasphemy law and it has to be stopped.” — Nasir Saeed, Director CLAAS-UK, April 22, 2023.

On 15 April, 2023, a First Information Report (FIR) was registered against two people working in Government girls’ higher secondary school, EB 66, Arifwala, Punjab.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19182/issues-of-concern

Hamas is an enemy [of Israel], but it is a much weaker enemy than Iran, which is determined to go ahead and develop nuclear weapons with the sole objective of destroying Israel… Hamas is extreme in its ideology, which is radical Islam. They have absolutely no desire to resolve this conflict with Israel in the ways that Western leaders hope and expect — which is settling the conflict by accepting what we have been calling a two‑part state for a very long time. That is not the objective of Hamas. The objective of Hamas is to destroy the State of Israel.

The Palestinians are unfortunate to have, on the one hand, a leader who is corrupt and really does not care very much about average Palestinians and may even want the conflict to continue so that he can continue to cash in on international handouts from the EU, America and others; then on the other hand, there is Hamas. This terrorist deadly group, also does not care about Palestinian lives. That is where the problem lies…. Both Hamas and the PA are deeply cynical: if they wished to increase the well-being of the average Palestinian, they would pursue peace…. One has to ask if peace with Israel is in their interest….

Hamas is an enemy, but it is a much weaker enemy than Iran, which is determined to go ahead and develop a nuclear weapon with the sole objective of destroying Israel.

In terms of foreign policy, it is important to realize that the threat of radical Islam, it may have faded away from the desks of policy‑makers in the United States…but it has not gone away…. If anybody is paying attention, Islamists remain a force to be reckoned with in Africa: think of Somalia, the Sahel (Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger), the Lake Chad Basin (Nigeria, Cameroon, Chad, Niger), Mozambique, and Egypt.

The Muslim Brotherhood and sympathetic groups are very much active on American soil, in the UK, and in many other Western countries. Their front organizations pretend to be humanitarian, charitable, educational or religious organizations. In its world view…the Brotherhood is not that different from that of violent groups such as Al‑Qaeda or ISIS. Where they differ is on the tactics to get there. Their activities are just coated in a language that is appealing to the leadership… and especially appealing to Westerners, often including support for “democracy”. It is time that we expose the Muslim Brotherhood for what it is.

[A]ny human being who is suffering, regardless of their color, regardless of their geographical location, whatever language they speak, awakens your compassion, your empathy, and your sympathy. I hope that we can do that — so an African, or an Arab, or anyone from any part of the world will feel empathy with a white person who is suffering and the other way around. That is where the message of common humanity is powerful. That is the only way to defeat these ideologues who are trying to divide us.

What we are seeing happen to women in Islamic communities in Western countries, as well as in majority-Muslim countries, is what has been happening for decades. Everyone has been looking away. There are a number of Muslim women, individuals, who were able to escape their families. The oppression really comes for these women… from their own families, from brothers, fathers, husbands, cousins, nephews…. It’s just that there is this constant struggle within the West of trying to undermine the values that are the tools of emancipation and dismissing them as white supremacy, or colonialist, or ethnocentric.

Now, there are women who really want no trouble at all, they just want to emancipate themselves from this straight jacket. They want to go to school. They want to work. They want to pursue a profession of their choosing. They want to live like the average European woman or American woman — fend for themselves and control their own destiny. Those are the women that are often regarded as abnormal by those around them. their immediate environment…. We can help them by empowering the women who want to emancipate themselves… their right to autonomy in their life.

What if you have hundreds of thousands of young men who come from a society with the opposite norms, and they come into various parts of Europe…? They just come, they are shocked, and then they act — and people react. It is a huge problem. There have been lots of journalists, commentators, scholars who have been warning European leaders for decades about this collision of values….They have all been ignored or demonized as racists and xenophobes.

Parts of Paris, parts of Marseille are now completely locked in with this confrontation between what they call Islamist separatism, which for decades they pretended did not exist. Many French intellectuals were trying to sound the alarm for decades and were demonized. They continue to be demonized. If you look at some of the entrenched Islamist groups in France, the ideology is hostile towards the civil Republic just as the ideology of Hamas is hostile to co-existence with Israel. They reject the French Republic as much as Hamas rejects the Israeli government. They call it a parallel society. It is like having an alien state within the state…. [T]he objective of the leadership of that infrastructure is to create these parallel states.

With the Internet now, there are opportunities for women that we did not have before. Where we can connect like‑minded people with like‑minded people. It is just that there is this constant struggle within the West of trying to undermine the values that are the tools of human emancipation and dismissing them as based on white supremacy, or as colonialist or ethnocentric.

The problems we have been seeing in Europe is that the punishment and the legal frameworks — prosecuting, sending people to prison, fines, and other corrections they have in place — for whatever reason, do not seem to make an impression on some of the perpetrators. When I talk to men who have come to Europe, they say that what would make an impression on them is to be sent back to the country they came from. One of the reasons why, is that the families have invested so much in these young men to send them to Europe. For them to be sent back, the families are going to be met with shame and embarrassment that their child was sent back.

Also, a number of the men who are coming from Syria, Iraq, even as far as Bangladesh and Pakistan, or Somalia and Eritrea have entrenched prejudices against European women that reflect their societies of origin. They look at white women, and they see them from Hollywood, they see them in pornographic movies, and they think when they go to Europe, that is what they are going to encounter. They have an inaccurate picture. Women, they think, are going to have sex with them readily. Then the reality hits, and they see that this is not the case, then they use force and act in groups, and do not understand why they are being punished when the women are out and about. The women are in the parks. Women are going to work, they are dressed as they please. The men are very confused by that.

Now, if we take in hundreds of thousands of Arabs and Muslims, do we sit back and say, well, you can continue to treat women as you like, it is your prerogative, it is none of our business — even though you now want to build a future within our societies?

Do we say, there are red lines that you cannot cross, and we are going to uphold our norms and values, and particularly, our laws? For me, integration or assimilation means that you uphold those laws, and values, and norms, and that you tie credible consequences to those who refuse to abide by the laws.

Where I grew up, I was raised to believe that unless you had almost your entire body covered, you were regarded as naked. When I first encountered women in parts of Germany and the Netherlands who were in tank tops, and shorts, and mini-skirts, and out and about during the day and all hours of the night I thought this was crazy. It was a revolution; it was shocking…..

I have colleagues, professors who are terrified of publishing papers, of giving lectures, of sharing their views, for fear of being fired, canceled, shamed. It is really horrific. Many of them are just speaking the truth.

Hamas is extreme in its ideology, which is radical Islamist. They have absolutely no desire to resolve their conflict with Israel in the ways that Western leaders hope and expect — which is settling the conflict by accepting what we have been calling a two‑part state for a very long time. That is not the objective of Hamas. The objective of Hamas is to destroy the State of Israel. Keeping the conflict going is, in a way, beneficial to them as a group even if it hurts normal people.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19550/turkey-iraqi-syrian-christian-refugees

Iraqi and Syrian Christian asylum seekers, stuck in Turkey for years, suffer from countless problems such as their children’s lack of education, severe poverty, lack of religious liberty, lack of work permits, restricted freedom of movement, the hostility of some Muslims against their faith, and rejections of their asylum applications by Western governments.

“Although the European Union says the full amount has been allocated and more than 4 billion euros have been disbursed, the Turkish government has taken issue with the pace and manner of the payments, which have gone to refugee-serving organizations rather than government accounts.” — Migration Policy Institute, April 8, 2021.

Even though Syrian and Iraqi Christian asylum seekers in Turkey face harassment, poverty and discrimination, the asylum applications of many Iraqi and Syrian Christians are rejected by Australia, Canada, the US and other Western countries. Why?

Around 22,000 Iraqi and Syrian Christian asylum seekers currently live in Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey. They have been exposed to genocide, terrorism, war crimes and crimes against humanity in their home countries. Where are the Western governments?

So, what has happened to the 6 billion euros given by the EU to Turkey so that Turkey would help refugees more? If such a huge amount of money has been granted to Turkey to provide more for refugees, why are so many refugees and asylum seekers still suffering under horrible conditions in the country? And who are these organizations referred to as “refugee-serving”? Have they taken the money, embezzled it, spent it, and it wasn’t enough? The international community, including the EU, urgently needs more transparency regarding how the money has been spent and how many refugees and asylum seekers have benefited from it.

Why not issue non-refugee visas? Especially as, according to figures reportedly released by the Biden Administration, 5.5 million illegal migrants have crossed the Mexican border into the US as well as “more than 414 million lethal doses” of fentanyl just in 2022.

Currently, asylum seekers need humanitarian visas to be resettled in the West. But many Christian asylum seekers are educated or have skills, so they would be qualified to receive work permits to reside in Western countries. They hope to safely migrate for work, using their skills to provide for their families and live dignified lives.

Where are the UN, international women’s organizations, the International Rescue Committee and children’s rights organizations? These asylum seekers are facing extinction in their homelands, suffering in places such as Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan, and hoping someday to find safety in the West.

The Christians of Iraq and Syria have for decades suffered from persecution and instability caused by oppression by the Ba’ath regimes, the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq, the outbreak of Sunni-Shiite fighting in 2006, al-Qaeda terrorism, the 2014 genocide by ISIS, ongoing Turkish airstrikes on Iraq and Syria, and in many cases, pressures and harassment at the hands of their Muslim neighbors. All this persecution has forced many of them to leave their home countries and seek asylum elsewhere.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/irans-mullahs-use-ramadan-to-crush-dissent/

With international condemnation at their brutal crackdown on protesters during the nationwide uprising that has now continued for seven months, it might have been imagined that Iran’s mullahs would have learned some lessons in moderation. The killing last September, of the young Kurdish girl, Mahsa Amini, by the morality police, for not wearing her hijab properly, was an outrage that has led to a denunciation by Amnesty International and other human rights organizations. The shoot-to-kill strategy that has killed more than 750 protesters, and the arrest of over 30,000, has triggered an unprecedented outcry from the civilized world. But, deaf to all demonstrations, the theocratic regime has continued on its repressive path.

Now, during the Nowruz (Persian New Year) holidays and the holy month of Ramadan, the police are demanding even greater powers to crush dissent. Hassan Karami, the commander of the regime’s Law Enforcement Forces (LEF) Special Units, has called for the number of security police to be doubled to confront the ongoing nationwide insurrection. Karami was sanctioned by the EU in April 2021 for his role in the savage response to mass protests that took place in November 2019, when more than 1,500, mostly young protesters, were killed. He has coordinated the use of lethal force for crowd control and the suppression of protests during the current uprising. His LEF Special Units have also been responsible for serious human rights abuse against prisoners detained during the disturbances. Karamihas boasted that confronting the protests would be part of the agenda of his LEF Special Units during the Nowruz holidays and Ramadan. He described the uprising as “extreme sedition” and told the state-run Mehr news agency that his units were covering the unrest and possible movement of enemies in at least 400 cities and regions and that this required a doubling of police numbers.