RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.jns.org/the-russian-dictators-double-terrorism-standards/

Following Friday’s massacre at the Crocus City Hall concert venue in the outskirts of Moscow, Russian President Vladimir Putin delivered a video address to his nation. The slaying of “dozens of peaceful, innocent people … including children, teenagers and women,” he said, was a “bloody, barbaric, terrorist act.”

After praising security services, firefighters, medical teams and “ordinary citizens” who aided in rescuing the victims, he declared that “it is already obvious that we are faced not just with a carefully, cynically planned terrorist attack, but with a prepared and organized mass murder of peaceful, defenseless people.”

Yes, he added, “The criminals calmly and purposefully set out to kill, to shoot at point-blank range our citizens, our children. Just like the Nazis once carried out massacres in the occupied territories, they decided to stage a show execution, a bloody act of intimidation.”

He proceeded to vow: “All perpetrators, organizers and customers of this crime will suffer fair and inevitable punishment—whoever they are, whoever guides them. I repeat, we will identify and punish everyone who stands behind the terrorists, who prepared this atrocity, this attack on Russia, on our people.”

Not much detective work proved necessary, though, since Islamic State Khorasan (ISIS-K) promptly and proudly took credit for the heinous assault in a statement published on the Telegram channel of the group’s affiliate news agency, Amaq. This didn’t prevent Putin from a subsequent attempt to pin the event on Ukraine, despite zero evidence of Kiyiv involvement.

ttps://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20494/ukraine-unintended-consequences

Though Putin remains personally popular to a degree that would make any Western leader green with envy, the war is clearly losing popular backing. Latest polls, some sanctioned by Kremlin-controlled organs, show that the war enjoys no more than 30 to 40 percent approval among Russians. More interestingly, between 50 and 60 percent of Russians oppose a second wave of military call-up, something that the Kremlin’s military planners regard as imperative if Russia means to stay in the game.

Instead, NATO has found two new members, and not just anyone, because Finland and Sweden built part of their national identity on neutrality. Even worse for Putin, the US-led alliance is seeding up membership procedures for at least four other countries, notably Albania…

Being forced to sell its oil at a juicy discount to China is the last thing that Russia might have wanted, had it not been forced to do so because of Western sanctions.

What is amazing is that all those involved in this tragedy seem to be unable to read the runes even when plainly explained to them, notably that a war fought half-heartedly, almost as a weekend hobby, could go on without producing a winner and a loser, something without which no war can ever end.

Though Russian President Vladimir Putin remains personally popular to a degree that would make any Western leader green with envy, the war against Ukraine is clearly losing popular backing. Latest polls, some sanctioned by Kremlin-controlled organs, show that the war enjoys no more than 30 to 40 percent approval among Russians.

Even a year ago, some Russia-watchers believed that President Vladimir Putin might end his war on Ukraine with something like a victory in time before what could be his last re-election campaign.

However, now as Russians go to the polls, no victory is even remotely in sight.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/03/13/tyranny-in-drag/

Would you vote for a party that promised to let men parade around bollock-naked in women’s changing rooms? Or a party that was alarmingly blasé about gay kids being ‘corrected’ with drugs and surgery? Or a party that threatened to clamp down on thoughtcriminals who refer to people with penises and testicles – you know, men – as men? If not, then don’t vote Labour in the upcoming General Election. Because it’s possible it will pursue all of these petty tyrannical policies.

Of course, it isn’t using these actual words. It isn’t saying, ‘We will fight for the right of men to show their knobs to women at the gym’. Even Labour knows that would be a vote-loser. Instead, its authoritarianism will arrive wrapped in euphemism. Its regressive agenda will be smuggled in under progressive-sounding slogans. Rather than saying, ‘Men should be allowed to piss in any bathroom they bloody well choose’, Labour says: ‘We will modernise gender-recognition processes.’ It amounts to the same thing, though: if we get into government we will make it easier for men to masquerade as women.

It really is time we dismantled the scaffolding of deceptive rhetoric that surrounds the tyranny of woke. Angela Eagle, a Labour MP who served in the governments of both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, recently gave voice to the illiberal aspirations of the government-in-waiting. Her choice of words was impeccably politically correct. Labour, she said last week, will ‘legislate for a trans-inclusive conversion therapy ban, make anti-LGBT+ hate crime an aggravated offence [and] modernise gender-recognition processes’. What a lovely collection of buzzwords. Who could object? Well, me.

Let’s take her platitudinous promises one at a time. What does it mean to ‘legislate for a trans-inclusive conversion therapy ban’? To some, this will sound nice. Conversion therapy, if we take it to mean some religious hothead exorcising the demon of homosexuality from a 15-year-old gay lad, is a bad thing, so surely banning it is right? Not so fast.

In the trans context, ‘conversion therapy’ doesn’t only refer to the caricature vision of a Bible-thumping redneck making his kid ‘pray away the gay’. It refers to pretty much any attempt to dissuade a young person from undergoing dramatic and oftentimes irreversible procedures to ‘change their sex’.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20484/tiktok-china-war

If you have TikTok on a device, you are getting what the Communist Party of China (CCP) wants you to see. The Chinese regime has used its algorithm to disseminate pro-Hamas disinformation, Russian narratives about the Ukraine war, and other pro-CCP propaganda. The Party also uses the app to try to destroy America’s young, by flooding them with messages promoting illegal drug use, self-harm, and even suicide.

The TikTok bill… does not violate the First Amendment…. Congress is not trying to regulate what appears on the app…. it does not regulate the content of what is posted.

China’s Communist Party this month mobilized TikTok’s American users, with deceptive messages, to contact their elected representatives to block the House legislation. Users did so in droves. Imagine if TikTok, in different circumstances, were to push China’s other political messages, such as urging the abandonment of, say, Taiwan.

China has even weaponized TikTok, turning it into an instrument of war. The CCP wages what it calls “unrestricted warfare” against America.

The Communist Party of China has no constitutional right to attack America.

Yesterday, March 13, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the “Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act” by a vote of 352 to 65, with one member voting present.

It was a victory for the United States.

The bill, H.R. 7521, requires the “qualified divestiture” — as determined by the president — of any company controlled by a foreign adversary, within 180 days. The proposed act specifically mentions TikTok, a wildly popular video-sharing app, and its Chinese parent ByteDance Ltd. as such companies.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20485/nato-welfare-states

The NATO alliance today, however, more closely resembles an international welfare program than a true alliance, with most countries failing to meet their defense commitments and instead relying on the generosity of the United States.

As the eminent journalist Amir Taheri put it: “others… treat the US as a ‘room service’ reachable by pressing a button…”

All of America’s leaders also need to embrace the reality that if our allies are unwilling to do more to keep the world safe and secure, we may need to reassess the relationship we have with them, and cease being “room service.” Alliances are only alliances when the costs and benefits run both ways. Anything less, especially from the richest countries in Europe, is not only disrespectful, but an unacceptable breach of contract.

Last month, NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg conceded what former US President Donald Trump has been warning about for nearly a decade: America’s allies are not paying their fair share — as they had agreed — for national defense. After four years in which Trump held our NATO allies accountable for funding their share of NATO’s collective defense, US President Joe Biden has once again allowed many of them to pass significant burdens of NATO spending on to American taxpayers – threatening the security of the NATO alliance in the process.

The very nature of alliances is that they are a two-way street. Americans should rightly expect to realize benefits from U.S. participation in NATO, just as the citizens of other NATO nations can expect to benefit from their country’s relationship with the United States.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/islam-iniceland/

I’ve been writing about Islam in Europe for a quarter century, but I’ve never written a word about Islam in Iceland, and at one point I was naive enough to believe that I would never have to. Pretty much everywhere else you go in Western Europe these days, there’s at least a hint of an Islamic presence and hence, to at least some degree, a sense of being in the presence of a hostile and alien threat. It was never like that in Iceland. In no other Western European urban center have I ever felt as safe as I have in Reykjavik. It’s a clean, charming city of 120,000 in a remote island country of 370,000, and until recently virtually everybody there was Icelandic. It’s like one big family – except it’s not really that big. When I walked the streets, at any time of day or night, the sense of security was palpable; indeed, it was less like wandering around a city than like wandering through the comfortable (if chilly) rooms of a well-secured home. There are high-trust societies and there are low-trust societies; Iceland was as high-trust as you can imagine. And a big part of the reason for that was the extremely low level of immigration – especially Muslim immigration.

Well, that’s over. No, that feeling of security hasn’t disappeared overnight; but it’s definitely taken a hit. On March 7, a session of the Allting – Iceland’s parliament – was interrupted by three foreign men in the visitors’ gallery who have apparently settled illegally in the country and who, in a language that was clearly not Icelandic, shouted out demands that the government provide them with homes, residency permits, and a right to be joined in Iceland by their families. (If they’re this arrogant when there are so few of them, what would it be like if their relatives – and their relatives, and their relatives – came and joined them?) One of the three, who was barechested – not a common sight in Iceland, except, of course, at one of the country’s highly popular geothermal spas – climbed up onto a railing and seemed to be preparing to leap down onto the floor of the chamber, or perhaps, alarmingly, onto one of the legislators.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20480/china-russia-moon-base

“Chinese control of the moon would confer control of Cis-Lunar space, the portion of space between the Earth and the moon. Control of Cis-Lunar space would give a country the ability to shoot down or otherwise disable deep-space satellites, which are essential for, among other things, the early warning of ballistic missile attacks.” — Richard Fisher of the International Assessment and Strategy Center, to the author, March 2014.

The free world should view Chinese and Russian progress with alarm. China’s regime, for instance, has made it clear it intends to annex space.

Ye Peijian made it clear that Beijing intends to exclude others from the moon, among other places, if it is in a position to do so.

The American-led Artemis program also contemplates a base at the south pole. NASA, unfortunately, has been pushing back Artemis timetables.

Article II of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty prohibits “national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means,” but when has a treaty obligation ever stopped the People’s Republic from doing whatever it wants?

China, with Russia’s help, wants to build a base on the moon.

If the Chinese regime succeeds in building the first facility there, it will try to deny to others the ability to land on the lunar surface. The People’s Republic of China in fact intends to annex the near parts of the solar system.

As Richard Fisher of the International Assessment and Strategy Center pointed out to this author, Chinese control of the moon would confer control of Cis-Lunar space, the portion of space between the Earth and the moon. Control of Cis-Lunar space would give a country the ability to shoot down or otherwise disable deep-space satellites, which are essential for, among other things, the early warning of ballistic missile attacks.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/03/11/why-the-elites-are-terrified-of-talking-about-radical-islam/

So now we know. If you’re from a working-class background in a Red Wall constituency and you think Islamism is a big problem, the Tories are not the party for you. That’s the takeaway, surely, from Lee Anderson’s flight from the Tories into the welcoming arms of Reform UK following the confected media stink over his brash comments about Sadiq Khan being too cosy with Islamists. The optics of this are awful. A former miner turned Tory MP pipes up about radical Islam and the eye-wateringly wealthy Rishi Sunak effectively kicks him out? Yikes.

This is the news that Anderson, the MP for Ashfield, has defected to Reform UK, the upstart right-wing party led by Richard Tice. It follows his suspension from the Conservative Party last month after he said Islamists have ‘got control’ of London and its mayor, Sadiq Khan. ‘Islamophobe!’, hollered the liberal media. Centrist arseholes and tedious podcasters obsessed over his ‘racist’ comments for days. That Anderson also said Keir Starmer is in the pocket of Islamist loons didn’t help his cause: he was branded a Muslim-basher whose very mention of the word ‘Islamist’ was likely to inflame the bovine bigotries of his fellow Red Wall meatheads.

You didn’t have to agree with Anderson’s comments to find the response to them chilling. My view is that it’s just wrong to say Sadiq is a marionette of religious hotheads. London’s preening, pint-sized overlord is a woke despot, not an Islamist one. He smuggles his intolerance under the Pride flag, not the Shahada flag, and damns as blasphemers less those who query the Koran than those who think men can’t become women or who don’t fancy stumping up £12 a day to drive their car in London. But it wasn’t the inaccuracy of Anderson’s ‘Islamist’ jibe that earned him the week-long wrath of media hysterics – it was the fact he said the word ‘Islamist’ at all.

‘Islamism’ is the great unutterable in 21st-century Britain. Representatives of the state have even flirted with erasing the i-word from public discourse – remember when counter-terrorist police considered ditching phrases like ‘Islamist terrorism’ and ‘jihadis’ and replacing them with ‘faith-claimed terrorism’ and ‘terrorists abusing religious motivations’? In the end, such brazen Orwellian meddling in everyday speech wasn’t necessary. Instead, as Anderson found out, an informal moratorium on open chatter about Islamism has been enforced by our fretful cultural elite, who wield the charge of ‘Islamophobe’ against anyone who asks too many questions or feels too many feelings about the scourge of radical Islam.