RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.afpc.org/publications/articles/the-view-from-kyiv

The recent U.S. and German decision to send tanks to Ukraine, thereby opening the floodgates for contributions by other governments that reportedly will bring total Western tank contributions to more than 300, brought a palpable sigh of relief from political, military, and private sector leaders in Kyiv.

That decision came in the middle of an American Foreign Policy Council delegation’s nine-day swing through Kyiv and Odessa (bookended by stops in Warsaw and Chisinau), so one could see its impact on morale in Ukraine.

The earlier U.S. and German refusal to provide tanks had been met with exasperation, and with a sense that the West didn’t recognize the following realities. First, that Ukraine can’t win a war of attrition against a far more populous Russia. Second, that existing sanctions aren’t nearly strong enough to force Moscow’s retreat. Third, and most of all, that Ukraine must prevail so that Moscow isn’t emboldened to sic its military next on other nations that were once part of the Soviet empire – and Beijing, Tehran, and other Western adversaries aren’t emboldened to move against U.S. interests in their respective regions.

The subsequent U.S. and German decision to reverse course and send the tanks renewed Ukrainian confidence in Western resolve, and it empowered an appreciative Kyiv to set its sights next on securing longer-range missiles and fighter jets from the West to better combat Moscow’s air campaign.

The tense days of decision-making over the tanks, however, highlight differences between Kyiv and Washington about the war – and those differences could become more consequential if Ukraine withstands Russia’s coming spring offensive, retakes land in the east, and set its sights on Crimea.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19374/iran-selling-family-jewels

What does an autocrat do when his support base is shaken by popular protests?

The standard answer is: he tries to reassure supporters by increasing their privileges, thus giving them a bigger stake in the preservation of the status quo.

Transfer of public assets to chosen supporters has a routine pattern.

The supporter, usually a senior IRGC officer or a senior mullah, secures a low-interest loan from a state-owned bank to buy a state-owned asset at rock-bottom price. Almost always this is just a formality. Once the asset is acquired, the new owner forms a company and sells parts of its shares to others, making a huge profit. Those who acquire prime real estate make especially big killings.

One problem remains: will retired or cashiered generals feel confident enough about the regime’s future to embark on the recycling scheme offered?

What does an autocrat do when his support base is shaken by popular protests?

The standard answer is: he tries to reassure supporters by increasing their privileges, thus giving them a bigger stake in the preservation of the status quo.

This is what Islamic Republic’s “Supreme Guide” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is trying to do with an edict for the largest privatization scheme in Iran’s history.

Unveiled last week, the scheme is the seventh of its kind since the first was launched 23 years ago.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/02/a_pregnant_iranian_woman_is_about_to_be_executed.html

Not only will Iran also execute the innocent life within her, but you won’t believe what led to this dual death sentence.

Increasingly, indoctrinated American college students agree that life would be better without the First Amendment. After all, that pesky First Amendment means that they are routinely exposed to ideas that frighten them or with which they disagree. What they fail to understand is that, once the government has the power to dictate what is acceptable speech and what is not, you discover yourself in a world like Iran, where the government plans to execute a pregnant woman for daring to burn a picture of the Ayatollah Khomenei.

This appalling report originated with IranWire:

Iranian judicial officials have sentenced a pregnant woman in her early-20s to death, and her execution is imminent, IranWire understands.

Shahla Abdi, an ethic Kurd from the northwestern province of West Azerbaijan, was arrested in Urmia in mid-October at the peak of nationwide protests triggered by the September death of Mahsa Amini in the custody of morality police.

Abdi is said to have received capital punishment for setting fire to a portrait of Ruhollah Khomeini, the founding father of the Islamic Republic.

A fellow woman inmate told IranWire that Abdi was held in Urmia Central Prison for about a month. Some prisoners say the young woman was transferred to Tabriz Prison about three weeks ago; according to others, she was taken to the detention center of the Ministry of Intelligence.

“When I saw this woman, she looked very young but weak and abused, and I realized that she was four months pregnant,” the inmate said. 

Another inmate said that Abdi is 21 or 22 years old.

This story is so surreal that I double-checked to see whether it’s been confirmed anywhere else. Daily Tribune/News of Bahrain, a regional outlet in the Middle East, has relied on IranWire to report the same story. Likewise, The National, a Canadian Broadcast Corporation outlet published in the UAE, has the same report. In other words, those geographically closest to the story believe it’s true.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19367/erdogan-turkey-nato-trojan-horse

In its Freedom in the World 2022 report, Freedom House, a U.S. government funded organization in Washington, D.C., put Turkey in its “not free” category of countries, along with Afghanistan, Angola, Belarus, Cambodia, China, Cuba, Ethiopia, Haiti, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Nicaragua, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and several other third world rogue regimes. Could one, by the criteria of democracy, imagine any of those countries as a NATO member state? But Turkey is.

Erdoğan needs NATO… He is tying NATO’s planned Nordic expansion, to include Sweden and Finland, to his election campaign.

“If you can come up with a security problem, then people rally behind the strong leader.” — Özer Sencar, chairman of the Turkish polling company, Metropoll.

Any unwisely public Turkish-Western confrontation in the few months before Turkey’s elections will add to votes for Erdoğan. Most Turks still believe what they were taught at primary school: A Turk’s only friend is another Turk. They are still living in a xenophobic unreal world where every other nation is an enemy of their land and is plotting against Turkey. That childish feeling, in a matter of collective psychology, coerces them to unite behind the leader. Trouble with the West, and Erdoğan wins again.

NATO is essentially a security alliance. Its preamble, however, states that the organization is founded on the principles of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law. The grossly autocratic one-man show in Turkey, a NATO member, features none of that. According to the 2021 Democracy Index prepared by Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), Turkey ranks 103rd among 167 countries. The index evaluation was based on five criteria: electoral processes and pluralism, functioning of government, political participation, democratic political culture and civil liberties.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19365/christians-persecuted

Overall, the global persecution of Christians remains higher than ever, with 360 million believers suffering high levels of discrimination and violence.

These are among some of the findings of the World Watch List 2023, recently published by the international humanitarian organization, Open Doors.

The worst nations and their rankings are: 1) North Korea, 2) Somalia, 3) Yemen, 4) Eritrea, 5) Libya, 6) Nigeria, 7) Pakistan, 8) Iran, 9) Afghanistan, 10) Sudan, 11) India.

” [A]pproximately 80% of the worst persecution around the globe takes place in the name of Islam…

Although the persecution in North Korea is worse, there is at least hope for the Christians there: their ill treatment is entirely connected to the regime of Kim Jong-un. Once he is gone, North Korea may well become like South Korea, where Christianity is flourishing. Conversely, the Muslim persecution of Christians is perennial, existential, and far transcends this or that regime or ruler. It is part of the history, doctrines and socio-political makeup of Islam — hence its tenacity and ubiquity.

In Somalia, “Christians from Muslim backgrounds are regarded as high-value targets and may be killed on the spot if discovered.”

In most Muslim nations on the list, all three sectors of society — Muslim authorities, Muslim mobs and Muslim terrorists — persecute Christians to varying degrees.

In Afghanistan, “More than a year after the Taliban’s takeover, any promises they made about recognising freedoms have proved to be false. Following Jesus remains a death sentence, if discovered.”

In Pakistan, “roughly a quarter of all blasphemy accusations target Christians, who only make up 1.8% of the population.”

In Egypt, “President al-Sisi regularly speaks positively about Egypt’s Christian community. However, the lack of serious law enforcement and the unwillingness of local authorities to protect Christians leave them vulnerable to all kinds of attacks….”

In the worst of these Sub-Saharan nations, Nigeria, “Christians are experiencing a genocide.”

“China’s model of oppression is spreading…. The apparent success of China, especially in economic terms, is appealing to many leaders around the world. The promise of growth and prosperity, while being able to control all groups and individuals perceived as deviant, has triggered the interest of leaders from all over the world, no matter their ideological background.”

Perhaps the most disturbing trend is that, since 1993, the persecution of Christians has nearly doubled… and has already increased by nearly 70% over the last six years, with no signs of abating.

How long before this seemingly irreversible trend metastasizes into even those nations currently celebrated for their religious freedom?

In 2022, 5,621 Christian around the world were “killed for faith related reasons.” Another 4,542 Christians were illegally detained or arrested, and 2,110 churches were attacked, many destroyed. Overall, the global persecution of Christians remains higher than ever, with 360 million believers suffering high levels of discrimination and violence.

https://besacenter.org/controlling-the-narrative-of-the-protest-movement-in-iran/?swcfpc=1

When popular protests began in Iran in mid-September 2022, the regime of the Islamic Republic initially tried to portray them as sporadic disturbances by misguided individuals who were supported and encouraged by the United States, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and a few European countries. As the protests intensified and began to spread throughout the country, the regime subtly yet systematically shifted the blame onto two non-Persian, predominantly Sunni regions of the country: Kurdistan in the northwest and Sistan and Baluchistan in the southeast. While the protests have lost some of their intensity, the regime’s object is to taint the message of popular protest movements and muddy their message by linking them to separatist aspirations in those regions and foreign meddling.

I have discussed elsewhere why the current protests in Iran have an objective that, if sustained and coordinated, could begin to resemble the protests of 1978-79 that ended the monarchical system in Iran. Here I will focus on the centrality of the protests’ narrative to their success.

The Message of the Protest Movement

Mass public protests in Iran are nothing new. At various times, the Islamic Republic has tried to present different faces of the regime to the public, occasionally offering a semblance of more openness or public participation. However, the protests that began in September 2022 are not calling for cosmetic changes. They are calling for the end of the regime, which has lost legitimacy in the eyes of the majority of the Iranian people — particularly those of the post-revolution generations.

The authorities in Tehran are of course well aware of the protesters’ goal. In response, they have targeted — using both rhetorical weapons and intensified brutality — two predominantly non-Shia and non-Persian regions of the country in an attempt to link the protests to the Kurdish and Baluchi insurrections and separatist movements. Their intention is to break the protest movement’s momentum and muddy its anti-regime message.

The current protests were triggered by the death of a young woman, Mahsa Amini, in police custody. The popular uprisings have much deeper roots, however, than concern over the violation of women’s rights or other civil liberties.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19296/afghanistan-islamic-state-china

Despite ideological differences, China and Afghanistan are in the process of forming a transactional relationship based on interests. China most likely is waiting for the Taliban to grant it access to Afghanistan’s huge deposits of rare earth materials that America left behind.

It remains to be seen if China decides that, at least for now, a trillion dollars’ worth of Afghan mineral deposits might not be worth the risk of being in the midst of terrorist civil war between the Taliban and the Islamic State.

When two Hellfire missiles last July smashed into the Kabul safehouse that Afghanistan’s regime had been providing to Al-Qaeda leader Ayman Zawahiri, thereby killing him, the incident simply underscored the continued strong bonds between the Taliban and Al-Qaeda.

This terrorist alliance, originally forged in the 1990s by the now-deceased leaders of Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, Osama bin Ladin and Mullah Omar, has resisted intense US pressure to break it up. With the departure of NATO and US forces from Afghanistan, jihadists from the Islamic State in Khorasan Province (ISIS-K) have been intensifying their attacks on the Taliban.

Despite ideological differences, China and Afghanistan are in the process of forming a transactional relationship based on interests. China most likely is waiting for the Taliban to grant it access to Afghanistan’s huge deposits of rare earth materials that America left behind.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19336/pakistan-blasphemy-accusers

“Pakistan was to review its harsh blasphemy laws. It has made them even harsher…The National Assembly has unanimously passed an amendment to the laws that widens the net and makes punishment more stringent under these laws…. The blasphemy laws are often misused in Pakistan to settle personal scores. It is also used to persecute its small minorities.” [Emphasis in the original] – Daily O, January 18, 2023.

Those who make false accusations do not care that innocent Christians may end up dead or in miserable prison conditions for years on end or be forced into hiding with their entire family, not knowing what will become of them, all the while in fear for their lives.

Worse, some are prepared to kill under the cover of religion and become — a hero.

Again and again, we see the victims being treated as criminals by those in positions of authority while the perpetrators are let off scot-free and even hailed as heroes. All the while, politicians who actually have the power to change this state of affairs refuse even to discuss the matter in Parliament. When people such as M. P. Bhandara and Sherry Rehman dare to speak up, they receive the inevitable death threats. For Punjab Governor Salman Taseer, Christian Federal Minister Shahbaz Bhatti and human rights lawyer Rashid Rehman, these death threats were carried out.

[H]ere we still are with nothing done to change what truly is the shame of Pakistan. The law still is as it is: innocent people continue to be accused of blasphemy and killed.

Christians need to be grateful for the way in which [Samina Mushtaq] courageously brought the truth about blasphemy to the forefront and stirred up a national debate. We need much more of it. Lawmakers need to change the laws before more unjust killings.

“Pakistan was to review its harsh blasphemy laws. It has made them even harsher,” according to a report from this month. “The National Assembly has unanimously passed an amendment to the laws that widens the net and makes punishment more stringent under these laws… The blasphemy laws are often misused in Pakistan to settle personal scores. It is also used to persecute its small minorities.” [Emphasis in the original]