RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.jns.org/opinion/irans-proxy-war-is-the-real-problem/

Sunday night’s landing of a Katyusha rocket less than half a mile from the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad was not merely the latest provocation on the part of Tehran in its battle of wills with Washington. More importantly, it verified Israeli intelligence revealing stockpiles of Iranian ballistic missiles in Iraq, poised to strike American targets. It also vindicated the dispatch of U.S. warships and fighter jets to the Persian Gulf, and the State Department’s order that all non-essential diplomatic personnel evacuate Iraq immediately.

The rocket attack, then, did not come as a total shock. Still, it came two weeks after U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo suddenly canceled a trip to Germany and headed to Baghdad to warn Iraqi leaders about Iran’s growing influence on their soil and threat to their sovereignty.

On Sunday, U.S. President Donald Trump made two statements that illustrate his administration’s dilemma about when or whether to engage in actual battle with the Islamic Republic.

In the afternoon, he tweeted: “If Iran wants to fight, that will be the official end of Iran. Never threaten the United States again!”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14250/afghan-war-peace

President Trump should be lauded for working toward a withdrawal from Afghanistan, where 14,000 U.S. troops still remain. But he should not expect to leave behind a peaceful situation in the failed state, which is made up of a complex web of tribal divisions and hostilities.

Yet another factor militating against national unity is that Pashtun clans appear not to view Afghanistan’s non-Pashtun ethnic minorities as equal partners in a future Afghanistan.

These Persian, Mongol and Turkic peoples, based upon their past armed resistance to Pashtun attempts to control the whole of Afghanistan, will most likely fight to maintain their autonomy. This historical reality alone should be sufficient cause for U.S. policy-makers to abandon the seemingly impossible task of building a unified, democratic, pro-Western Afghanistan.

Sadly, no amount of blood, money or time spent in Afghanistan has been, or possibly will be, able to fashion it into a peaceful, united and democratic country.

In his State of the Union address on February 5, U.S. President Donald Trump said that his administration was “holding constructive talks with a number of Afghan groups, including the Taliban… [in order] to be able to reduce our troop presence and focus on counter-terrorism.”Trump continued, “We do not know whether we will achieve an agreement — but we do know that after two decades of war, the hour has come to at least try for peace.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/australias-election-did-not-involve-a-populist-wave/

The term is merely a way to put scare-quotes around any electoral victory for a conservative.

Regular readers will know that I am not a fan of the term ‘populism’. As I mentioned here in January, over the last three years the term has been turned into one more way to insult the decisions made by the general public in country after country.

In Britain, the “Brexit” vote was derided as a “populist” vote. The U.S. election of 2016 have repeatedly been described as a victory for “populism.” And in Europe, every time anybody on the political right looks set to achieve any electoral success, this is whipped up as being yet another victory for this amorphous, ill-defined but unarguably dark force.
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This has rarely been made clearer than in the New York Times coverage of the results of last week’s Australian elections. This was not a contest between Matteo Salvini and the Left. It was not even a debate about sovereignty. It was merely an election — of the kind Australia tends to have — between a party to the left of center, and one slightly to the right. But the New York Times managed to write it up as follows: “Scott Morrison, Australia’s conservative prime minister, scored a surprise victory in federal elections on Saturday, propelled by a populist wave.”

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/0/oppressed-enslaved-brutalised-women-trafficked-north-korea-chinas/

Thousands of North Korean women and girls are being subjected to forced marriage, prostitution and sadistic abuse by trafficking gangs running a multi-million dollar illicit sex industry in China.

A report by the Korea Future Initiative (KFI), which will be presented in the House of Commons on Monday, forensically details how vulnerable women and girls as young as 12 are being tricked into escaping North Korea only to be sold as sex slaves in China.

The women ensnared by the gangs face the sickening choice of becoming sex slaves or being repatriated to the oppressive state where they face torture in bleak prison camps or possible execution.

The report – Sex Slaves: The Prostitution, Cybersex and Forced Marriage of North Korean Women and Girls in China – has been compiled by researchers who interviewed 45 women in China and South Korea over two years and will make difficult reading for MPs.

It reveals a widespread Chinese trade which plumbs the depths of human depravity.

One survivor reveals in stomach-churning detail how a girl forced into prostitution had been so brutalised that she could not stand.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14249/spain-migrant-crime

“We have tasers, but they are stored in a closet because of political cowardice.” — Spokesperson, Municipal Police of Bilbao.

In Madrid, an elderly couple returning home from vacation discovered that their apartment had been “occupied” by African migrants. When a camera crew from the Madrid television channel Telecinco went to investigate, the migrants destroyed the camera…. Spain’s notoriously lethargic justice system now rules on who is the apartment’s rightful owner.

The Madrid city council, run by Mayor Manuela Carmena, in a case study of political correctness run amok, ordered police to keep out of the neighborhood of Lavapiés. The result is that illegal immigrants, far from facing the threat of deportation, are now secure in the knowledge that their violent actions have empowered them effectively to take control of an entire neighborhood of a major European capital.

Six African migrants gang-raped a 12-year-old girl in small town near Madrid, but Spanish authorities kept information about the crime hidden from the public for more than a year, apparently to avoid fueling anti-immigration sentiments.

On March 15, 2018, the 12-year-old girl was playing in a park in Azuqueca de Henares with several other girls when, at around one o’clock in the afternoon, six migrants — five Moroccans and one Nigerian — approached the playground. They carried two of the girls off to a nearby abandoned building, but then let one of them go after discovering that she was a Muslim. The migrants, aged between 15 and 20, grabbed the 12-year-old by her arms and legs and took turns raping her, first anally and then vaginally, for nearly an hour.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14246/richard-pipes-daniel-pipes

“My main contribution was revealing the flaws in the détente policy and urging a policy designed to reform the Soviet Union through a strategy of economic denial.” In other words, the USSR could be changed from within by raising the costs of its aggression. — Richard Pipes.

Daniel Pipes argues that, ironically, the Palestinians would actually fare far better if they were defeated: they could end their fantasies of genocide and, like post-WWII Germany, finally start to build a constructive and flourishing civil society.

“The hardest thing for Westerners to understand is… the nature of the enemy’s ultimate goal… to apply the Islamic law (Sharia) globally. In U.S. terms, it intends to replace the Constitution with the Qur’an…. Now, it has become widely accepted that, in Bernard Lewis’s words, “Europe will be Islamic by the end of the century.” — Daniel Pipes, “The Islamic States of America?”, FrontPageMagazine.com, September 23, 2004.

“Although the moderate Muslims appear — and in fact are — weak, they have a crucial role to play, for they alone can reconcile Islam with modernity…” — Daniel Pipes, Introduction, Militant Islam Reaches America.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/05/australian-election-voters-reject-leftist-ideas/

A stunning conservative win has lessons for the U.S.

Hell hath no fury greater than left-wingers who lose an election in a surprise upset. Think Brexit in 2016. Think Trump’s victory the same year. Now add Australia.

Conservative prime minister Scott Morrison shocked pollsters and pundits alike with his victory on Saturday, and the reaction has been brutal from supporters of the opposition Labor party. They can’t seem to decide whether Australia’s electorate is stupid, evil, or both.

Cathy Wilcox, a newspaper cartoonist, tweeted: “It seems unfair that the morons outnumber the thinking people at election time.” Broadcaster Meshel Laurie concluded that “Australians are dumb, mean-spirited, and greedy. Accept it.” Some were ready to write off the whole country. Brigid Delaney, a columnist for the Guardian, wrote, “It’s the country that’s rotten.” She reported from the Labor party’s Election Night event. People there had to face “the fact that their vision for Australia’s future was not affirmed,” she wrote. That “made them feel estranged and alienated from their own country.”

By contrast, Zareh Ghazarian, a political-science lecturer at Monash University in Melbourne, was snobbishly restrained: “We have completely expected an opposite thing for two years,’ he told the Washington Post. “Voters rejected the big picture.”

By that, he meant that voters have rejected a sweeping Labor-party platform that urged Australia to move in a dramatically leftward direction on everything from higher taxes on retirement income to greater benefits for indigenous people to an ambitious program to reduce carbon emissions by 45 percent from 2005 levels over the next decade. Labor was heavily promoting renewable energy and electric vehicles; many Australians called the plan Labor’s version of the Green New Deal in the U.S.

The sweeping nature of these ideas gave Prime Minister Morrison the opening to paint his Labor challenger, former union head Bill Shorten, as a risky, job-killing opponent of traditional Australian values. Morrison “ran a targeted, presidential-style campaign with a tight message focusing on tax increases under Labor,” lamented Osmond Chiu, editor of the Australian left-wing magazine Challenge. “He often appeared as if he himself was not in government but rather the insurgent.”

http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/2019/05/fickle-fannys-down-under.html

The Iranians hang gays from cranes, and the hard men of Hamas have a habit of throwing gays off the roofs of buildings, but when the Eurovision Song Contest is held in Tel Aviv, a singularly misplaced hatred for Israel prods gay activists into turning their backs on the event.

Not all gays, of course.  Even the pompous “occasional Jew” (as somebody deliciously termed him) and gay icon Stephen Fry, who invokes his halachic Jewish status on occasions when to do so suits him (such as signing as-a-Jew statements inveighing against Israel) joined such staunch pro-Israel figures as Tracy Ann Oberman and Gene Simmons in signing a statement issued by the so-called Creative Community for Peace condemning calls for a boycott of this year’s Israel-based event:

“We, the undersigned, believe that music is our shared language, one that transcends boundaries and brings people together under a common bond.We believe that unifying events, such as singing competitions, are crucial to help bridge our cultural divides and bring people of all backgrounds together through their shared love of music.The annual Eurovision Song Contest embodies this unifying power. Every year, millions of people across Europe, and around the world, join together in a massive display of cultural exchange and celebration of music.Unfortunately, this year, the spirit of togetherness is under attack by those calling to boycott Eurovision 2019 because it is being held in Israel, subverting the spirit of the contest and turning it from a tool of unity into a weapon of division.We believe the cultural boycott movement is an affront to both Palestinians and Israelis who are working to advance peace through compromise, exchange, and mutual recognition.While we all may have differing opinions on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the best path to peace, we all agree that a cultural boycott is not the answer.”

https://www.israelhayom.com/2019/05/19/bomb-hits-tourist-bus-near-egypts-giza-pyramids-at-least-16-wounded/

Blast detonates near new museum being built nearby Egypt’s famed pyramids, most of the wounded are foreign nationals, sources report.

A roadside bomb hit a tourist bus on Sunday near the Giza Pyramids, wounding at least 17 people including tourists, Egyptian officials said.

The officials said the bus was travelling on a road close to the under-construction Grand Egyptian Museum, which is located adjacent to the Giza Pyramids but is not yet open to tourists.

The bus was carrying at least 25 people, mostly from South Africa, officials added.

The attack comes as Egypt’s vital tourism industry is showing signs of recovery after years in the doldrums because of the political turmoil and violence that followed a 2011 uprising that toppled former leader Hosni Mubarak.

The officials said security forces cordoned off the site of the explosion and the wounded were taken to a nearby hospital.