RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19025/turkey-erdogan-aggression

Turkey’s Islamist President, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has been militarily threatening a fellow NATO ally, Greece, using increasingly threatening language. He also proudly announced that Russian President Vladimir Putin has promised him to make Turkey an international natural gas hub, therefore selling his gas via Turkey, avoiding Western sanctions.

What does Erdoğan get in return? Huge American (and other Western) pats on the back.

Erdoğan, while explicitly threatening a NATO ally, has a plan to seriously undermine Western sanctions on Russia…. The project will enable Turkey to store Russian gas in Thrace and sell it to willing European buyers. This will effectively kill Western sanctions on Russia. Turkey will earn transit fees from every cubic meter of Russian gas sold to European buyers. A win-win for two autocrats.

What was the U.S. administration’s response to all that? Approval for fighter jet sales!… An earlier version of the bill had linked the sale to the condition that Turkey would not use the aircraft against Greece.

Erdoğan is now hopeful that Congress should give the green light to the F-16 deal before the end of the year.

What other insane, anti-Western moves should Erdoğan make before U.S. President Joe Biden understands that Turkey’s Islamist autocrat is a Putin pawn inside the NATO alliance?

Or is Biden a Putin pawn as well?

Turkey’s Islamist President, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has been militarily threatening a fellow NATO ally, Greece, using increasingly threatening language. He also proudly announced that Russian President Vladimir Putin has promised him to make Turkey an international natural gas hub, therefore selling his gas via Turkey, avoiding Western sanctions. What does Erdoğan get in return? Huge American (and other Western) pats on the back.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/10/22/the-revenge-of-the-technocrats/

Watching prime minister Liz Truss’s short resignation speech yesterday, I couldn’t help feeling that she was selling herself short. She managed to summon up just two achievements to boast about from her 44 days in office: the energy price guarantee and the cut to national insurance contributions. But we all know she’s achieved much more than that. She’s tanked her party in spectacular fashion, for a start. Right now, the only thing in Westminster more unpopular than the Tory Party (a poll today put it at 14 per cent) is Truss herself – she is only slightly more popular than Vladimir Putin among the UK population.

Her history-making achievements don’t stop there. Her premiership was the mother of all political cock-ups, in an era in which they have hardly been in short supply. She may even have succeeded in partially rehabilitating her predecessor, Boris Johnson, who has emerged as a strangely plausible candidate to replace her. (At least he has a democratic mandate.) And beyond the party and personality politics, what makes the end of Truss so tragic is that, ideologically speaking, her premiership has managed to achieve the precise opposite of its goals. Whatever Trussonomics was – the underlying logic was never entirely clear – it is now utterly discredited. Indeed, Truss was only able to limp on for a few more days as PM by getting Jeremy Hunt to rip up her mini-budget in the Commons, while she looked on with a kind of lobotomised zen.

More positively, Truss set out to challenge ‘the orthodoxy’, ‘the Treasury view’, ‘the consensus’ preached by various unelected and unaccountable institutions. She even had the gall to suggest that maybe the Bank of England – whose galaxy-brained governor said in August last year that inflation would be ‘temporary’ – wasn’t working as it should. Her chancellor’s first act in office was to sack Treasury permanent secretary Tom Scholar, a man no one had ever heard of but whose expertise was apparently all that stood between us and barbarism, in an act that our hysterical media seemed to equate with regicide. Her refusal of a forecast from the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) – another apparently unassailable institution, despite its stellar record of getting things wrong – was seen as another awful heresy.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19010/persecuted-christians-radical-muslims

Although the U.S. government had acknowledged that ISIS was committing genocide against Christians in Syria due solely to their religious identity, it took in only those who by definition were not in any way being targeted by ISIS — Sunni Muslims, with whom ISIS, a Sunni organization, identifies and does not attack.

“You have this absurd situation where the scheme is set up to help Syrian refugees and the people most in need, Christians who have been ‘genocided,’ they can’t even get into the U.N. camps to get the food. If you enter and say I am a Christian or convert, the Muslim U.N. guards will block you [from] getting in and laugh at you and mock you and even threaten you…. [saying] ‘You shouldn’t have converted. You’re an idiot for converting. You get what you get,’ words to that effect.” — Paul Diamond, British human rights lawyer, CBN News, December 4, 2019.

[The UK Home Office] ridiculed an Iranian female asylum seeker in her rejection letter by writing, “You affirmed in your AIR [Asylum Interview Record] that Jesus is your saviour, but then claimed that he would not be able to save you from the Iranian regime. It is therefore considered that you have no conviction in your faith and your belief in Jesus is half-hearted.”

She later said… her Home Office interviewer, “was either chuckling or maybe just kind of mocking when he was talking to me…. [H]e asked me why Jesus didn’t help you from the Iranian regime or Iranian authorities.”

Meanwhile, as the few Christians who seek asylum are highly scrutinized and presented with obstacles, millions of Muslim asylum seekers are taken into the West without any difficulties, and most without even being vetted.

Once Pakistanis in Britain learned that the UK was going to offer asylum to Asia Bibi, they rioted en masse. As a result, then-Prime Minister Theresa May personally blocked Bibi’s asylum application, “despite UK playing host to [Muslim] hijackers, extremists and rapists,” to quote from one headline.

Meanwhile, as usual, the Home Office allowed a Pakistani cleric who celebrated the slaughter of a politician because he had defended Bibi — a cleric deemed so extreme as to be banned from his native Pakistan — to enter and lecture in British mosques.

“It’s unbelievable that these persecuted Christians who come from the cradle of Christianity are being told there is no room at the inn, when the UK is offering a welcome to Islamists who persecute Christians.” — Dr. Martin Parsons, human rights activist, The Express, December 4, 2016.

Western authorities appear committed to discriminating against Christian asylum seekers, while welcoming Muslims ones.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2022-10-20-it-is-remarkable-how-badly-putin-has-screwed-up-in-russia

Sometimes I look at the U.S. government under President Biden, and I think that it couldn’t be possible to be more incompetent than this. But take a look at any of the U.S.’s main geopolitical adversaries — besides Russia there’s China, and Iran, and perhaps you might throw in a Venezuela or a North Korea — and you quickly realize that all of them have far, far more incompetent government policy than the U.S. on its very worst day.

For today I’m going to focus on Russia. As recently as five or ten years ago, I was willing to grudgingly concede to Vladimir Putin some decent successes, particularly on the international stage. Starting with a relatively bad hand, I thought he was playing it cleverly in world affairs. But by 2018 I had come to the view that no amount of foreign policy cleverness could overcome Russia’s growing weaknesses, from a stagnant crony-capitalist economy to declining population. In a piece on March 4, 2018 titled “How Are Things Going In Russia?” I went through a litany of negative indicators, from a 40% decline in GDP since 2014 (mostly due to then-declining energy prices), to declining population, to military spending badly constrained by the small economy.

And now comes the invasion of Ukraine. It would be fair to say that the invasion and its consequences have taken Russia from a major player on the world stage to a much less important player. Here are some of the many indicators:

Loss of the fear factor. The biggest benefit of a large army is not actually being able to win a war, but rather being able to intimidate your adversaries into doing your bidding without having to resort to hostilities. When the invasion began in February, everybody assumed that the Russian tanks would roll through Ukraine in a matter of days if not hours. Now, eight months later, Russia is steadily losing back to Ukrainian counter-offenses significant parts of the small amounts of territory it had captured. If little Ukraine can stand up to the Russians so handily, it gives spirit to every one of Putin’s neighbors.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18972/isis-terrorists-turkey

In Ankara’s Sincan district, a 24-year-old enslaved Yazidi woman was rescued after her relatives in Australia (who themselves are asylum-seekers) purchased her freedom on the dark web. The woman was held captive in a house in Sincan for 10 months and systematically raped. Signs of torture in the form of cigarette burns and razor cuts were found on her body.

[A] secrecy order was placed on the indictment against those ISIS members who had kidnapped a seven-year-old Yazidi child to Turkey and listed her for sale. These are allegedly high-ranking IS members. They are currently living in Ankara and remain free.

[I]t is difficult to obtain data on the detained ISIS members from state authorities. When we ask questions to authorities, it is not possible to get an answer from them. — Hale Gonultas, Turkish journalist, interview with Gatestone Institute, October 2022.

“After I reported on Yazidi women’s sales on the dark web, Ankara Anti-Terrorism teams came to my house. They emphasized that the buying and selling of foreign nationals within the borders of the Republic of Turkey is a ‘human trafficking crime’ and they claimed that I supported human trafficking through the press by publishing such news.” — Hale Gonultas, interview with Gatestone Institute, October 2022.

” [V]ery little is being done…. I do not believe ISIS members should be able to settle anywhere, and police authorities should actively search for them in every country. At the same time, the rescue of innocent Yezidi captives should be an associated priority. This is for security and safety but also for humanitarian and human rights reasons. These missing Yezidis have suffered enormously, and their rights must not be ignored.” — Pari Ibrahim, executive director of Free Yezidi Foundation, to Gatestone Institute, October 2022.

ISIS terrorists are living and operating in Turkey, some with Yazidis abducted from Syria or Iraq. For years, these Yazidi children and women have been enslaved, raped and sold. Most are survivors of the 2014 genocide by ISIS in the Sinjar region of Iraq. Even though it has been more than three years since ISIS was ousted from the last of the territory it seized in Syria and Iraq, these crimes are still taking place now.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/a-globalist-coup-in-westminster/

Given what’s happened since her death on September 8, it would’ve been fitting for Queen Elizabeth II, in her final days, to have said, in an echo of Louis XV, “Après moi, le déluge.” Because it’s taken no time at all, since her passing, for the British ship of state to run aground.

In her last official act, on September 6, the Queen invited Liz Truss to succeed Boris Johnson as PM. Johnson – whose Spectator columns I’d read with enthusiasm for years – had been swept into power in a 2019 election in which the Tories won an 80-seat majority. The mandate: to get Brexit done. Boris got it done – sort of – but otherwise, in many ways, he spectacularly betrayed basic Conservative principles.

Backed by many voters who hoped he’d be a British Trump, Boris did little or nothing to tackle his country’s version of the swamp. On his watch, English police ignored Muslim rape gangs and arrested law-abiding citizens for criticizing Islam online. Boris championed strict COVID lockdown rules and mandatory vaccination, but broke the lockdown himself and then lied about it – a move that was used as an excuse to give him the heave-ho.

For me, the big lesson of Boris’s downfall was that a terrific political journalist doesn’t necessarily make a decent prime minister. As it happens, during the last months of his premiership I was fitfully making my way through Charles Moore’s magnificent three-volume biography of Margaret Thatcher. What a woman! The more I read, the more I admire her. It really can feel as if she was born to be prime minister. She had what it took – unshakable core beliefs, strong self-discipline, excellent management skills, etc. – to rescue Britain from socialism and help bring down the USSR. Why wasn’t Boris able to do something similar for the UK – and the world – at a time when globalism was threatening liberal democracy? Could it be he just wasn’t wired for the job? Alas, some writers aren’t good for anything other than writing.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-tory-warning-to-u-s-republicans-11666305620?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

For the shortest-tenured Prime Minister in British history, Liz Truss sure has a lot of ignominy loaded on her shoulders. She’s apparently responsible for the fall of the pound, a looming recession, and the political demise of the Conservative Party. All accomplished in a mere 44 days.

Ms. Truss resigned as PM Thursday after a fiasco of a premiership, but the fault is far from hers alone. She is being made the scapegoat for the economic policy blunders that the ruling Conservatives have made over 12 years in power, and especially since 2019 under previous Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

Ms. Truss’s tax cuts lasted two weeks as a mere proposal and never even came to a vote in Parliament. She had told the Tory rank-and-file about her tax plans when she ran to succeed Mr. Johnson. The only surprise she offered in office was a cut in the top marginal income tax rate to 40% from 45%—about £2 billion in lost revenue in a year. Yet this supposedly was the nail that lost the shoe, that lost the horse, that lost the economy.

Ms. Truss certainly mismanaged her policy rollout. She didn’t prepare the country or her party to sell tax cuts after a decade of Tory tax-and-spend politics. She lacked an electoral mandate of her own and only narrowly beat former Chancellor Rishi Sunak in the PM contest. When markets fell after exotic pension fund schemes broke down amid rising interest rates, she lost her nerve. She sacked her first Chancellor and threw over her program. The Tory sharks then went for the kill.

But Ms. Truss didn’t create Britain’s 10.1% inflation rate (blame the Bank of England), didn’t produce energy shortages and price spikes (blame the last two Prime Ministers), and didn’t fail to supervise pensions so they wouldn’t gamble to get higher returns. All of that was in motion before she took office.

Rough political justice would now give the premiership to Mr. Sunak, whose policies contributed to this economic mess. Whoever gets the PM job may be volunteering for a suicide mission, as an election must be held by January 2025. Even the Labour Party could beat this pack of panicked Tories.

The dumbest argument is that Ms. Truss’s fall is a warning to U.S. Republicans not to cut taxes. Ms. Truss wanted pro-growth policies to counter the economic failures of the Boris Johnson Tories, who pursued the policies lauded by America’s big government conservatives: more welfare and healthcare entitlements, green energy subsidies, higher taxes on business, and easy money.

If Republicans want to end up like the Tories, they’ll follow the Boris Johnson-Rishi Sunak tax-and-spend model.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19007/biden-iran-nuclear-obsession

If US President Joe Biden really is “gravely concerned” about the plight of Iranian schoolgirls being attacked and killed by Iran’s authoritarian regime, then the best way to help them would be to abandon his ill-considered attempt to broker a new nuclear deal with Tehran.
The death toll is now said to have passed the 200 mark, with many of the fatalities reported to be children as young as 11 years old.
Consequently, Mr Biden’s response is being seen as little more than a token gesture….
Rather than holding the Iranian regime to account for its atrocious conduct, Mr Biden’s priority remains to secure another flawed nuclear deal with Tehran, one that would result in enabling Iran to have nuclear weapons with no prohibition on the missiles to deliver them, as well as the lifting of punitive economic sanctions and up to a trillion dollars in additional revenues to “export the revolution.”
If, as now seems increasingly likely, the White House commits to a new nuclear deal once next month’s midterm elections are out of the way, the US Congress will be in Christmas recess and therefore unable to block it.
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), designated by the US as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, together with all the other instruments of state-sponsored oppression in Iran, would receive extra funding dollars once the sanctions are lifted that will enable them to further develop their hostile activities.
Iran has already destroyed four Arab countries in addition to its own: Lebanon, Yemen, Syria and Iraq.
The Biden administration’s intransigence on the Iran issue also helps to explain the recent decision by Saudi Arabia to reach an agreement to reduce oil production….
The Saudis remain frustrated by Mr Biden’s obsession with trying to revive the Iran nuclear deal, which to the kingdom is a mortal threat…. How could Biden have expected them to help him?
Biden seems to be threatening “consequences” for the Saudis because they are trying try to prevent Iran from annihilating them?
Iran is also now supplying Russia with hundreds of “kamikaze” drones and lethal missiles which Russia is using to target civilians and destroy Ukraine — all while Biden has been relying on Russia to negotiate the Iran nuclear deal on America’s behalf: US negotiators are even not allowed in the room.
Consequently, rather than making the world a safer place, Mr Biden’s pro-Iran stance is merely fanning the flames of even greater global instability.