RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13474/league-of-democracies

“Ours are not western values. They are the universal values of the human spirit. Anywhere and anytime, ordinary people when given the choice, the choice is the same: freedom not tyranny, democracy, not dictatorship, the rule of law, not the rule of the secret police.” — Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, 2003.

A League of Democracies might also serve as a vehicle to increase the numbers of democracies in the world: it could have as its overriding objective the expansion of democracy throughout the planet.

During a recent interview, Ambassador Ron Dermer, Israel’s Ambassador to the United States, suggested that a “League of Democracies” would help freedom-loving states survive the challenge to democratic values presented by authoritarian states and extremist ideologies.

According to Dermer, the league could be made up of a consortium of “Free World” nations unlimited by territorial region, race or culture. The alliance could be global in scope, not confined, as is NATO to a North Atlantic community of nation-states. Nor would the league be exclusively military in nature. Dermer proffered that it could include India, the world’s most populous democracy; Israel, the Middle East’s only democracy, and Japan, an Asian democracy.

Such a league might also serve as a vehicle to increase the numbers of democracies in the world: a League of Democracies could have as its overriding objective the expansion of democracy throughout the planet. This goal was previously suggested by Dermer and the former Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky in their book, The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror. In it, the authors underscore this sentiment by quoting from former British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s address to a Joint Session of the United States Congress in 2003:

“Ours are not western values. They are the universal values of the human spirit. Anywhere and anytime, ordinary people when given the choice, the choice is the same: freedom not tyranny, democracy, not dictatorship, the rule of law, not the rule of the secret police.”

https://www.jpost.com/Arab-Israeli-Conflict/Suspicious-Iranian-cargo-plane-left-Damascus-minutes-before-airstrike-575441
According to the site Flightradar24.com, the Boeing 747-281F left Damascus and flew due east towards Tehran, climbing to 30,000 feet and then crossing into Iraq after ten in the evening.

Two suspicious Iranian planes left Damascus on Tuesday night just prior to reports of airstrikes.

Details from flight monitoring sites show that a Fars Air Qeshm 747 cargo plane left Damascus International Airport at 9:28 in the evening, just half an hour before reports emerged of air strikes in Syria on Tuesday night.
According to the site Flightradar24.com, the Boeing 747-281F left Damascus and flew due east towards Tehran, climbing to 30,000 feet and then crossing into Iraq after ten in the evening.
By midnight it had entered Iranian airspace and began a beeline for Tehran. A second Tehran bound flight, Maham Air took off at 10:04 in the evening and flew precisely the same route. The Far Air Qeshm flight has been in the news in the past in relation to alleged smuggling of arms to Syria and also to Damascus. Al-Arabiya claimed that it transferred weapons to Hezbollah in early December. In October, FoxNews carried a similar report.

Similarly Mahan Air has been targeted by the US Treasury Department for links to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, making its departure right after the Fars Air Qeshm suspicions. Although the Fars Air Qeshm flight appears to have left before the airstrikes began, the Mahan Air flight seems to have left around the same time.

In the past reports have indicated that airstrikes targeted Damascus after suspicious flights landed and allegedly disembarked cargo for arms smuggling to Hezbollah factions.

This new Glazov Gang episode features Valerie Price‘s speech on The Dangers of the UN Global Compact — and she stresses: Love Canada! Act for Canada!https://jamieglazov.com/2018/12/25/glazov-gang-valerie-price-speech-on-the-un-global-compact/

Don’t miss it!

And make sure to watch Jamie’s recent appearance on America’s Voice with Kyle Olson & Tudor Dixon to discuss his new book, Jihadist Psychopath.

The book is now Amazon’s #1 New Release in the “Medical MentalIllness” and “Islam” categories and President Trump’s National Security Advisor, John Bolton, has praised the book.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13462/extremist-persecution-christians-october

Following the secession of South Sudan in 2011, Sudan President Omar al-Bashir vowed to adopt a stricter version of sharia (Islamic law) and recognize only Islamic culture and the Arabic language. Church leaders said Sudanese authorities have demolished or confiscated churches and limited Christian literature on the pretext that most Christians have left the country following South Sudan’s secession.” — Morning Star News, October 17, 2018.

The head teacher of the Government Boys Primary School… assaulted Sharjeel Masih, a 12-year-old Christian student, after he touched a water tap in her presence. “I was just trying to turn off a running tap when the teacher grabbed me… and asked why I had touched the tap and made it filthy…” The boy was then suspended from school. — Pakistan.

Since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, Christians in Iraq have been abducted, enslaved, raped and slaughtered, sometimes by crucifixion. “Another wave of persecution will be the end of Christianity [in Iraq] after 2,000 years,” according to Chaldean Archbishop Habib Nafali of Basra.

The Slaughter of Christians

Nigeria: As many as 55 Christians were murdered and a church was torched during an attack by Muslims on a crowded market in Kaduna state on October 18. A local source explained:

“A Muslim raised a false alarm about a thief in the market, which caused stampede, and then other Muslims started chanting ‘Allahu Akbar [the jihadist slogan, God is Greater],’ attacking Christians, burning houses and shops belonging to Christians in the town.”

“When people heard ‘Thief! Thief!’ they were confused and started running,” the reverend James Moore elaborated. “Unknown to the people, it was a strategy by the Muslim youth to attack the people. They went into killings, looting and burning.” After visiting the site, Kaduna governor Nasir El-Rufai reported that so far “55 corpses have been recovered; some burned beyond recognition.” He added that such Islamist attacks “cannot continue…. This country belongs to all of us; this state belongs to all of us. No one is going to chase anyone away. So, you must learn to live with everyone in peace and justice.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13464/free-speech-west

The Organisation of Islamic Cooperation’s “Media Strategy in Countering Islamophobia and its Implementation Mechanisms” describes one part of its strategy as: “To call media professionals to develop, articulate and implement voluntary codes of conduct to counter Islamophobia. The OIC and its Member States should be vocal in calling media professionals to use the power they have with responsibly through accurate reporting.” What, however, if those two requirements — accurate reporting and countering Islamophobia — conflict with each other?

“Free expression is the base of human rights, the root of human nature and the mother of truth. To kill free speech is to insult human rights, to stifle human nature and to suppress truth.” — Liu Xiaobo, Chinese dissident and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, author of Charter 08.

“Man… does not have to accept a lie.” — Václav Havel, in his 1978 essay, “The Power of the Powerless”.

“… if you lived, as I did, several years under Nazi totalitarianism, and then 20 years in communist totalitarianism, you would certainly realize how precious freedom is, and how easy it is to lose your freedom.” — Miloš Forman, Czech-American film director.

The freedom to express oneself without fear and the tolerance for opposing viewpoints are what binds otherwise diverse, democratic societies. In the United States, this freedom is protected by the Constitution, with only very specific limits, the key one of which was imposed in 1969, following a landmark Supreme Court ruling in the case of Brandenburg v. Ohio. According to that ruling, inflammatory speech cannot be penalized unless it is “directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.”

https://spectator.us/terror-changed-europes-christmas-markets/

The traditional Christmas market is one of the great sights in any European capital at this time of year. But as with all traditions it evolves over time. A few evenings ago, I went to visit the Duomo in Milan and walked through the beautiful Christmas market in the square surrounding it. It was all there: the Christmas lights, the chalet-like huts selling warm food and drink, the fake snow. And, of course, the crash barriers. For since December 2016, when Anis Amri hijacked a truck in Berlin, shot the driver and then plowed the vehicle into the local Christmas market (killing 11 more people) crash barriers have become a necessary feature of any European Christmas market.

I was in Milan two days after Cherif Chekatt shouted ‘Allahu Akbar’ and started shooting at people enjoying the Christmas market in the city of Strasbourg. And so Milan’s Christmas market, like every other in similar cities, was on high alert. Which furthers yet another new tradition at Europe’s Christmas markets, which is the presence of army vehicles and police and military standing around with heavy duty weapons at the ready.

It all brought to mind a point that Mark Steyn has made a number of times in recent years, which is the phenomenon one might call the ‘bollard-ization’ of public life. Earlier this year in Norway I noticed that even Oslo has a strange set of massive steel devices on both sides of the street on the popular thoroughfare of cafes, restaurants and hotels that leads up to the country’s Parliament. They began to sprout one day and after a dose of negative public comment the local authorities decided to plant flowers on the devices, making them probably the world’s most ungainly flower-pots. What could have made these huge flower-carrying vessels so necessary? Who is to say.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2018/12/31/swedens-parallel-society/

I don’t go to those places without security,” a Swedish journalist tells me when I ask whether she would accompany me to some of her country’s “especially vulnerable” areas. The label is given by police to neighborhoods where crime is rampant and parallel social structures compete for authority with the state. To the politically incorrect, these are also known as “immigrant ghettos.”

While much attention was focused on Germany during the 2015 refugee crisis, in which more than a million migrants from the Middle East and Africa entered the continent at the behest of Angela Merkel, the country that admitted the most migrants per capita was Sweden. In one year alone, the northern European nation of 10 million added nearly 2 percent to its population. Most of those arrivals were young men. Tens of thousands more have continued to arrive since then.

It is too early to see the long-term impact of the 2015 migrant crisis, but if the past is any indication of Sweden’s future, the answer may be found in its “vulnerable” neighborhoods. In recent years, the Nordic state known for scoring among the highest among all nations in quality-of-life indexes has also gained a reputation for gang shootings, grenade attacks, and sexual crimes.

Days before I was due to arrive in Sweden last summer, the country was rocked by mass car burnings across its west coast. Authorities faulted “youth gangs” for the fires, a euphemism for criminal young men of migrant backgrounds. My first visit was to Rosengård, Seved, and Nydala, immigrant neighborhoods in the southern city of Malmö and among the 23 “especially vulnerable” areas across Sweden. At times, ambulances and fire trucks will enter only with police protection. Desperate police have appealed to imams and clan leaders for help when they cannot contain the violence.

From Malmö’s central train station, I began walking alone to Rosengård, an area rocked by some of the country’s most violent riots in 2008 after a mosque was denied a new lease. Halfway through my journey, I stopped outside the Malmö Synagogue. I was greeted by a metal security fence and closed-circuit cameras. In 2010, the synagogue was attacked with explosives. And in December 2017, hundreds of protesters in the city chanted for an intifada and promised to “shoot the Jews” after President Trump announced the recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. One of the consequences of mass migration to Europe that no one had predicted was the importation of a different strain of anti-Semitism.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272332/murder-morocco-bruce-bawer

It was only last July 29 that Jay Austin and Lauren Geoghegan, a young American couple who had spent the previous year bicycling across much of Africa, Europe, and southern Asia, were murdered by ISIS members in Tajikistan. The story made international headlines. What added to the widespread interest in their fate was the fact that they had kept a blog of their journey, complete with photos and philosophical reflections. Repeatedly they denied the reality of evil and expressed the view that people are basically good. Reader comments on a New York Times article about the couple that appeared after their deaths celebrated them as “heroic,” “authentic,” “idealistic,” “inspiring,” “a Beautiful example of Purity and Light,” and so on. I disagreed. “Their naivete,” I noted in a piece I wrote about them, “is nothing less than breathtaking.”

Now comes the story of Maren Ueland and Louisa Vesterager Jespersen, which captured the interest of people in Norway and Denmark all last week. Ueland (28) was Norwegian; Jespersen (24) was Danish. They were students together at the campus of the University of South-Eastern Norway in Bø, a small Telemark mountain town (pop. 6,000) that happens to be in my own neck of the woods. Both Ueland and Jespersen were majoring in something called friluftsliv og kultur- og naturveiledning, a combination of words that defines precise translation; suffice it to say that the subject is designed for students who want to work in the outdoors, to lead guided tours in the woods, and to point out items of cultural interest to hikers – that sort of thing.

No field of study could be more archetypically Norwegian. Until recently, the official state religion of Norway was Lutheranism, but the country’s real religion is nature – specifically, going for a walk in the mountains: fresh air, quiet, serenity, a sense of being in touch with the eternal and divine. This activity even has its own standard set of rituals, among them the practice of taking along a couple of oranges, a Kvikk Lunsj (that’s a brand name) chocolate bar, a Thermos of hot chocolate and another Thermos containing boiled hot dogs. A common expression here is “Ut på tur, aldri sur” – take a walk in the wood and you’ll always feel good!