RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18548/lebanon-iran-double-whammy

[A]s official results came in, [Iran’s Supreme Guide Ali] Khamenei and [Major General Esmail Qaani, chief of the Quds Force who is supposed to rule the “Resistance Front” countries as a satrap]… realized that the Lebanese electorate, or at least the 49% who went to the polls, had denied Tehran the “crushing victory” it had hoped for.

That meant a double whammy in two of the four Arab capitals that Ayatollah Ali Yunesi boasts are now under Tehran’s control; the others being Sanaa and Damascus.

What is certain is that a majority of politically active Lebanese seek a new departure for the country.

Numerous direct and indirect messages from Shiites inside Lebanon indicate a growing weariness with a scheme that sees the country, in the words of Tehran’s Kayhan daily, as nothing but a “shield for Islamic Republic” of Iran. Large chunks of the Shiite community have seen the prosperity they had secured since the 1980s melt away as a result of the economic crisis that has plunged 70% of the Lebanese into poverty.

Granting Lebanon urgent relief from its current pains would send a positive message that even a slight distancing of Hezbollah from full control could bear fruits for the average Lebanese. That, in turn, would strengthen the message that Lebanon could do better without a politico-military Trojan Horse in its midst.

There is no doubt that Hezbollah is an illness and the key cause of Lebanon’s sorry state today…. The latest election could signal the start of that process which is bound to be accelerated by positive developments in Iraq and, eventually, in Iran itself.

It was only a couple of weeks ago that the general election in Lebanon made the headlines in Tehran’s official media. “Supreme Guide” Ali Khamenei had labeled the election as “a referendum on the Resistance Front”, a coalition of Iran-controlled groups that have struck roots in Iraq, Syria, north Yemen, Gaza and Lebanon. He had also publicly donated an extra $25 million to the Lebanese branch of Hezbollah to ensure its victory.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18547/persecution-of-christians-april-2022

On Good Friday, Fulani [Muslim tribe] kidnapped eight Christians. Four were released after paying a hefty ransom. One of the women released said that she was “raped several times by two leaders of the Fulani Militants.” A “militant told us, after receiving the ransom money, that they got money to kill more Christians.” — International Christian Concern, April 18, 2022, Nigeria

“It is not the first time that we ourselves have been attacked in Italy because we are Christians… It makes me angry to think that this discrimination also exists here.” — Daughter of a Coptic Christian man who was attacked for smoking during Ramadan, medforth.biz, April 23, 2022, Turin, Italy.

“They want to apply Sharia law because they consider us inferior and want to rule us.” — Coptic Christian man who was attacked for smoking during Ramadan, medforth.biz, April 23, 2022, Turin, Italy.

“They destroyed almost everything in the house, shot holes in the new truck and tried to burn it. The house itself is OK, but its contents are “They seized Sister Suellen from her bed in her nightclothes, with “no glasses, shoes, phone, medicine, etc.” She has not been heard from since. — Marianite Sister Ann Lacour, congregational leader, Clarion Herald, April 5, 2022, Burkina Faso.

“Inside the police station, I was surprised by attempts and pressure to conciliate. The perpetrator’s lawyer steered the writing of the report [in a manner] that contradicted reality, and they forced me to sign the report which contained statements from the pharmacist’s lawyer without taking my statements. …. We were especially shocked to see the report said that ‘the pharmacist is a friend of the family, who was just bantering and joking around with Mrs. Nevin, because he is close to the family.'” — Christian woman who was violently slapped by a pharmacist for entering his store without a head covering during Ramadan; Coptic Solidarity, April 27, 2022, Egypt.

The following are among the abuses Muslims inflicted on Christians throughout the month of April, 2022:

The Muslim Slaughter of Christians

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18546/iran-foreign-hostages

“[T]here are extensive, vague and arbitrary grounds in Iran for imposing the death sentence, which quickly can turn this punishment into a political tool…. In addition, the structural flaws of the justice system are so deep and at odds with the notion of rule of law that one can barely speak of a justice system. The entrenched flaws in law and in the administration of the death penalty in Iran mean that most, if not all, executions are an arbitrary deprivation of life.” — Javaid Rehman, UN special rapporteur on human rights in the Islamic Republic of Iran, October 25, 2021.

The Iranian regime most likely believes that detaining Western nationals will put pressure on the EU and the US to accept its demands and seal the nuclear deal as soon as possible.

The Biden administration and the EU should not remain silent in the face of the Iranian regime taking more foreign hostages. The only language that all rogue and predatory regimes, including that of the mullahs, understand is the language of pressure. Why not try using it?

The European Union appear excited that the nuclear talks have reopened again to revive the nuclear deal that will bring nuclear weapons to the “world largest state sponsor of terrorism,” Iran, and additional billions of dollars to the treasury of the country’s ruling mullahs and to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) to practice more terrorism. In the meantime, the Biden administration and the EU have remained silent in the face of the Iranian regime taking more hostages.

Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence recently detained two French citizens. The Iranian authorities claimed that they arrested the two because they were planning to cause “chaos, social disorder, and instability”. Iran’s judiciary spokesperson, Zabihollah Khodaian, also stated that a Swedish-Iranian national, Ahmadreza Djalali, has received a death sentence and he will be executed by May 21, 2022. He was arrested in 2016 on the trumped-up charge of spying for a country that the Iranian regime wants to annihilate: Israel.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/05/a-christian-stoned-to-death-for-blasphemy-in-nigeria-when-will-it-end/?utm_source=

Last week in Sokoto, Nigeria, a young Christian university student was stoned, beaten, and burnt to death by a mob over allegations of “blasphemy.”  The mob accused her, Deborah Samuel Yakubu, of insulting the Prophet Mohammed in a WhatsApp classroom discussion group. Some of her classmates were outraged after Yakubu thanked Jesus for helping her in an exam. To the mob, the accusation of blasphemy justified murdering her.

Videos of the attack immediately began circulating on social media in Nigeria and worldwide. Against the background of an upcoming and contentious election in 2023 and of widespread kidnappings and terrorist and militant attacks in Northern Nigeria, the horrific murder of Yakubu is generating national uproar.

Unfortunately, some in Nigeria continue to defend the attacks. Violent protesters in Sokoto vandalized and set fire to Catholic churches on Saturday while calling for the release of Yakubu’s suspected attackers. In Maiduguri, another young Christian woman is facing calls for vigilante mob violence after being accused of posting blasphemy on social media.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18545/sri-lanka-crisis-china

Sri Lanka is only the world’s opening act.

Events in Sri Lanka also highlight how China is going about dominating the world. Beijing is corrupting national leaders, drowning them in debt, and ultimately destabilizing their governments. Beijing, it appears, is particularly targeting democracies.

China is the world’s predatory lender, something evident from its Belt and Road Initiative, also known as BRI. Beijing’s grand infrastructure project specializes in roads, ports, and railroads that have, like the Sri Lankan projects, little or no commercial justification. So far, 146 countries have signed BRI memo agreements with Beijing.

The Chinese have established a pattern. “China extends debt on onerous terms, backs up authoritarian governments when there are financial collapses or civil disobedience, and then takes everything it can find,” Cleo Paskal of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies told Gatestone.

In December 2017, Beijing took control of the Hambantota port…. Now there are concerns that Hambantota will eventually become a Chinese naval base. China’s admirals have long eyed Sri Lanka…

A base in Sri Lanka would allow Chinese aircraft and surface combatants as well as submarines to cut sea lanes in the Indian Ocean and force next-door India to divert military assets to a threatening presence.

Sri Lanka is now looking for a bailout from the International Monetary Fund, but that is not necessarily a good idea. The international community should not be helping a voracious China gobble up small, vulnerable societies.

If the IMF bails out Sri Lanka without ensuring that it is no longer aligned with Beijing, it will have subsidized Chinese investment and politically reinforced a country that becomes a Chinese proxy.” – Cleo Paskal, Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, to Gatestone, May, 2022.

On May 12, India confirmed that it would provide a desperate Sri Lankan government 65,000 metric tons of urea, pursuant to an existing $1 billion credit line. The sale, which overrides New Delhi’s ban on the exports of the commodity, relieves severe pressure on the government of Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa.

Sri Lanka since the end of March has been wracked by violent protests. “Shoot-on-sight” orders have for the most part restored order, but the unrest has led to the replacement of Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa, once the country’s dominate political figure. His brother, the president, is unlikely to survive the tumult. The ongoing economic and financial crisis is Sri Lanka’s worst since independence from Britain in 1948.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/05/genocide-yezidis-has-been-forgotten-zidan-ismail/

In the summer of 2014, the Islamic State (ISIS) committed genocide of the Yezidis in their largest city in Iraq and the world, Sinjar.

The Yezidis are a religious minority in the Middle East; their main center is Iraq. At the time that the genocide began, their number was no more than 550,000 people, according to the United Nations when it was evaluating the crimes committed by ISIS against the Yezidis, which were classified as genocide and crimes against humanity.

It seems clear that what happened at the time had a goal, namely to wipe out the presence of the Yezidis. While it appeared initially that the world had grasped the significance of these crimes, now the Yezidi cause is largely being neglected amid the many crises and regional wars around the world.

Iraq historically has been an area of great religious diversity; the genocide of the Yezidis was one aspect of the Islamic State’s efforts to destroy that. The captivity and rape of Yezidi women, using them as commodities and even opening slave markets in the twenty-first century, was not just mass exploitation and sexual assault; this type of attack was used as a means of ethnic cleansing.

One of those who observed these events, “Salloum,” an iraqi researcher and writer living in Baghdad and working at a Baghdad university, explains: “It was the commitment of women in war with the aim of intimidating and humiliating a religious minority and taking away their dignity, and also with the aim of influencing the ethnic composition of this religious minority, and therefore this act is part of the efforts (genocide) that tried to change the Yezidis and their beliefs and to influence the ethnic and religious composition of the region.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18543/iran-us-demands

Iraqi writer Farouk Yousef pointed out that after the US gave Iran $90 billion following the signing of the nuclear agreement with the Obama administration in 2015… the bulk of the money… was spent on terrorist groups run by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) in Iraq, Yemen, Lebanon, and Syria, as well as terrorist groups run covertly in other Arab countries.

[Iran is] trying to delay the signing of the nuclear agreement so that the mullahs succeed in forcing the Biden administration to accept all their demands, especially the removal of the IRGC from the list of foreign terrorist organizations.

“Biden was not ignorant of the wrong way he started [dealing with Iran]. All the countries in the region were telling him that the resumption of talks with Iran must include Iran’s missile program and its destabilizing activities in the region, including the activities of its militias that threaten stability in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen. Biden chose not to listen….” — Ali Al-Sarraf, Iraqi writer, Al-Ain, May 10, 2022.

“Biden could have told the mullahs that a return to the nuclear agreement would take place on the basis of three conditions: abandoning violations of the commitments in that agreement, curbing the missile program… and stopping the actions of militias that threaten the security and stability of the countries of the region…. The Revolutionary Guard is directly involved in the civil war and violence in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen…. Iran’s own actions will prove to him that he took the wrong path.” — Ali Al-Sarraf, Al-Ain, May 10, 2022.

Like many Arabs, Al-Sarraf asked why the Biden administration was not defending the interests of America’s allies.

“[T]here is no sane person in the region willing to take seriously any reassuring words issued by [US Special Envoy for Iran] Robert Malley and other officials in the US administration concerned with the Iranian file. Every child now knows that these American officials have nothing but flattery for Iran, especially in light of the cold American reaction to the attacks it carried out against the Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates….If anything has changed, it is for the worse.” — Kheirallah Kheirallah, Lebanese journalist, Elaph, March 30, 2022.

“How can a US administration gain the trust of its allies despite its refusal to take note that northern Yemen has become a base for Iranian missiles and drones? These missiles and drones are directed at the Arab Gulf states and are now threatening navigation in the Red Sea as well.” — Kheirallah Kheirallah, Elaph, March 30, 2022.

[T]he removal of the IRGC from the list of terrorist organizations would cause massive damage to the interests of the US. It will lose all its Arab friends, who will stop working with the Americans in a number of fields, including the war on terrorism.

It now remains to be seen whether the Biden administration will continue with its benighted policy of appeasing the mullahs or heed the insistent wake-up calls of America’s real allies.

As the European Union is trying to revive the stalled talks on restoring Iran’s nuclear deal with world powers, many Arabs are again warning the Biden administration against rushing to strike a deal with the mullahs, saying this could jeopardize Washington’s relations with its Arab allies in the Middle East.

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.