RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://bit.ly/39WtPz5
”Many observers wonder how Iran, while in a difficult economic situation, can afford to finance a massive campaign to destabilize the region, as well as an extensive network of agents in the West. They should pay attention to the involvement of Iranian special services in the global drug trafficking [and mega-billion-dollar money laundering]….”

“A commercial jetliner from Venezuela’s state-run Conviasa Airline flew from Caracas to Tehran via Damascus, Syria, every week with a cargo-hold full of drugs and cash, nicknamed “Aeroterror,” because the return flight often carried weapons and was packed with Hezbollah and Iranian operatives whom the Venezuelan government would provide with fake identities and travel documents on their arrival…. From there, the operatives spread throughout the subcontinent….”

Shiite clerics in Iran and Lebanon have determined that narco-trafficking is morally acceptable when drugs are sold to Western “infidels,” and especially to “The Great American Satan.” They have concluded that drugs may be more effective a weapon than guns.

Iran’s Ayatollahs bite the hand that feeds them

*In 1979, President Carter assumed that Iran’s Ayatollahs were amenable to peaceful coexistence. Therefore, he turned against the Shah of Iran – who was “America’s Policeman in the Persian Gulf” – and provided a tailwind to their rise to power, since “they would be preoccupied with tractors, not with tanks.”  However, as expected, upon toppling the Shah of Iran, the Ayatollahs regime bit the hand that fed them, and leveraged the critical US support to transforming Iran into the lead epicenter of anti-US terrorism and drug trafficking, highlighting rogue operations in Latin America, the US’ soft underbelly.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18541/erdogan-nato-blackmail

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, is trying to turn what appears to be the most strategic move in NATO’s history into carpet-trading at Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar.

“The Russian-Kurdish nexus has been a recurring feature of Middle Eastern geopolitics for more than two hundred years, since Catherine the Great commissioned the publication of a Kurdish grammar in 1787.” — Michael A. Reynolds, The National Interest, March 1, 2016.

None of the many examples of Russian appeasement of Turkey’s “Kurdish terrorists” is secret. Russia has been doing all it could for its Kurdish friends overtly, with Erdoğan completely silent. Now the same Erdoğan is by trying to blackmail NATO by vetoing membership for two Western European countries on the grounds that these countries, threatened by Russia, are supporting Kurdish terrorists.

The Western military alliance should be strong enough to tell Erdoğan what he needs to hear.

Once again, Turkey is the odd one out in the NATO alliance. The country’s Islamist strongman, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, is trying to turn what appears to be the most strategic move in NATO’s history into carpet-trading at Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2022/05/30/on-the-baltic-frontier/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=top-of-nav&utm_content=hero-module

Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania keep a wary eye on Russia

Estonia and Latvia

Toomas Hendrik Ilves, Estonia’s president between 2006 and 2016, is not known for mincing his words about Russia. Nevertheless, as we drove towards a restaurant amid the refurbished industrial buildings and new waterfront apartments in a neighborhood that is a monument of sorts to Estonia’s astonishingly successful tech sector, it was evident that, had circumstances allowed, he would rather have been talking about the future that this small, determined nation is making for itself than about the latest poisonous eruption from the past.

As Ilves and I finished dinner, one of Estonia’s high-tech entrepreneurs wandered over. What had brought me to the country? “The neighbors, I’m afraid.” “Ah yes.” The neighbors are, by definition, not going away. Nor are they likely to change for the better. Russia’s ruling class seems disinclined to abandon political, imperial, and military principles that, despite brief interludes, have remained fundamentally unchanged for centuries. In discussions in Latvia and Estonia (sadly, there was no time to visit Lithuania), it was emphasized to me more than once that the war in Ukraine was Russia’s war, not just Putin’s. To the extent it can be believed (somewhat), polling in Russia appears to support that thesis, at least up to now. But this is not inconsistent with the argument made by James Sherr, an analyst at Estonia’s respected International Centre for Defence and Security, that “Putin’s views about Ukraine are widely shared, but without him there might have been no war.” Something similar, I suppose, might be said about Germany and Hitler.

Ilves anticipated “a hard road ahead,” as did Sherr, who warned that “there is no safe path through this.” A defense official in Tallinn forecast mounting escalation and saw little chance of a return to peaceful conditions. But, for all that, neither Tallinn nor the Latvian capital, Riga, felt like a city on a precipice. There were no troops in the streets. Restaurants looked to be doing good business; shops were busy and well stocked.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18533/lebanese-election

To win that referendum, Tehran last month wrote a $25 million cheque in “extra help” for Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.

More money was raised through a number of concerts in Iran, where mullahs also invited “the believers” to dig into their pockets to help Hezbollah and its allies in all Lebanese communities secure “a glaring victory” (fath al-mobin). Nasrallah was portrayed as a caricature of Khamenei, who is himself a caricature of the late Khomeini.

In contrast, Najib Mikati, Lebanon’s ephemeral Prime Minister, hopes that the election will persuade the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to sign its promised cheque of $5 billion in “emergency aid”.

Pie-in-the-sky projects such as reviving the Beirut port, building a railway hub, and removing Bank of Lebanon from the life-support machine may never go beyond after-dinner talks.

Lebanon’s problem is fundamentally geopolitical in the sense that those who hold the reins of power regard the country either as a bunker or a glacis where the interest of outside powers trump those of the nation-state.

Worse still, those who exercise power have proved their utter incompetence, not to mention their corruption, for almost two decades.

[R]eal decision-making is centralized in Khamenei’s office in Tehran.

Regardless of the results, likely to be “arranged”, Sunday’s election may yet turn out to be a referendum on resistance: the resistance of the Lebanese people against forces that try to de-Lebanize their country.

A general election in Lebanon is bound to be news if only because it is years overdue.

But what is it for?

Is it a step towards the exit from the maze of misery and terror that the Lebanese have endured for years or a step deeper into it?

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18531/eu-biden-iran-mullahs

The European Union is basically admitting that it views the nuclear deal with Iran’s ruling clerics from the perspective of economic opportunity. That should not be the objective of the nuclear talks. Instead, European leaders ought to be seeking a strong deal that will prevent the Iranian regime from acquiring nuclear weapons, especially — as they should have learned from Russia by now — because those nukes may soon be aimed at their countries.

By revealing its desperation to buy oil, the EU is empowering Iran’s ruling clerics to gain the upper hand in the nuclear talks and obtain even more concessions to revive the nuclear deal. Desperation, to the Iranian regime, means weakness.

To appease Iran’s mullahs, the EU and the Biden administration are also turning a blind eye to China’s violating the sanctions on Iran… Reportedly, the Iranian regime is exporting more than 1.5 million bpd. The ruling mullahs of Iran are exporting approximately 80% of the oil they used to export before the sanctions. Iran’s revenues heavily rely on oil exports; the sale of oil accounts for more than 50% of the regime’s export revenues.

The EU, moreover, has yet to join the US in imposing sanctions on the Iranian regime. In fact, European countries are still trading with Tehran in spite of the US sanctions. Tehran Times reported: “The value of trade between Iran and the European Union reached €4.863 billion in 2021, registering a nine-percent growth compared to the previous year….”

It seems clear that the nuclear deal was never about stopping the predatory regime of Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. For the EU, the nuclear deal is about trade, making money and buying oil from the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism; for the Biden administration, it is about a “diplomatic win”. In return, the ruling mullahs will have a legal path to blackmail the world, using nuclear weapons and missiles, into sending Iran’s regime billions for their terror and militia groups to torment everyone.

The Biden administration and the European Union are trying hard to appease the Iranian regime in order to revive a nuclear deal that will provide the ruling mullahs of Iran with additional billions of dollars of revenue, enhance the regime’s legitimacy on the global stage, and actually open the path for Iran to have a nuclear arsenal.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/tens-of-thousands-of-xinjiang-detainees-killed-by-organ-harvesting-expert-says/

A researcher who last month published a paper detailing the Chinese Communist Party’s forced organ-harvesting techniques told a congressional panel yesterday that his research proves that Chinese organ-harvesting doctors killed their patients. Another expert presented analysis indicating that 25,000 to 50,000 Xinjiang prison-camp detainees are subjected to organ harvesting, then cremated, each year.

“In plain language, the papers appear to show that the donors, who were prisoners, were alive at the time of surgery, and were killed by the transplant surgeons in the process of heart extraction,” said Matthew Robertson, the co-author of a groundbreaking article in the American Journal of Transplantation.

His paper, published in April, looked at a number of cases up through 2015, in which surgeons effectively admitted to execution by organ harvesting. The analysis looked at 124,000 Chinese-language medical papers, finding at least 71 papers outright describing that practice.

“These findings show a uniquely close and long-running collaboration between the PRC’s medical establishment and its public security system,” he said. “This would make PRC surgeons, many of whom were trained in the West, involved in medicalized extrajudicial killing.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18529/britain-illegal-immigration

The plan to outsource the processing of asylum applications overseas — if it survives legal challenges that are certain to come from human rights groups and the European Court of Human Rights — could become a model for other European countries seeking to crack down on illegal immigration.

The legal basis for the plan is enshrined in a new Nationality and Borders Act 2022 approved by Parliament on April 28. The new law, which integrates changes to British immigration law, includes offshoring asylum — processing claims at overseas facilities — and making it a criminal offense to knowingly arrive in the UK illegally.

“Access to the UK’s asylum system should be based on need, not on the ability to pay people smugglers…. If you illegally enter the UK via a safe country in which you could have claimed asylum, you are not seeking refuge from imminent peril — as is the intended purpose of the asylum system — but are picking the UK as a preferred destination over others.” — New Plan for Immigration, UK Home Office.

“We cannot sustain a parallel illegal system…. We can’t ask the British taxpayer to write a blank cheque to cover the costs of anyone who might want to come and live here…. Nor is it fair on those who are seeking to come here legally, if others can just bypass the system. It’s a striking fact that around seven out of ten of those arriving in small boats last year were men under 40, paying people smugglers to queue jump and taking up our capacity to help genuine women and child refugees.” — British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, April 14, 2022.

“We can no longer accept the status quo. People are dying and the global migration crisis requires new ways to find new partnerships and to find new solutions.” — British Home Secretary Priti Patel, April 14, 2022.

The British government has announced a new plan to fight illegal immigration by giving some migrants seeking asylum in the United Kingdom a one-way ticket to Rwanda to have their applications processed in the East African country.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/05/another-year-another-un-scandal-bruce-bawer/

It doesn’t happen too often anymore, but every now and then we’re reminded that that wretched left-wing propaganda sheet, the New York Times, is still capable of publishing objective works of investigative journalism. Witness its bombshell May 7 report on corruption at the United Nations. Yes, the reporters bylined on the story are David A. Fahrenthold, who won a Pulitzer for smearing Donald Trump,  and Farnaz Fassihi, who’s been accused of shilling for Iran. But this time around their work looks legit.

Over the decades, of course, there’s been a lot of shameless, bald-faced corruption at the U.N. But the story served up by Fahrenthold and Fassihi is particularly ludicrous. It involves an obscure U.N. agency called the Office for Project Services (UNOPS), which, until May 8, was headed by Grete Faremo, formerly Norway’s Minister of Defense. The agency, as the Times reporters noted, serves as “a kind of general contractor,” hired by other U.N. agencies “to build schools and roads, deliver medical equipment or perform other logistical tasks.”

In short, UNOPS is low-profile and unsexy. But Faremo, after taking over in 2014, sought to change that. UNOPS “had stockpiled tens of millions of dollars in excess fees paid to it by other U.N. agencies,” and Faremo’s idea was “to lend out the money, like a bank, to fund profit-making projects in the developing world,” thereby converting UNOPS into “a revolutionary in-house investment firm.”