RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://standpointmag.co.uk/node/7222/full

Our cover picture for this summer double issue is inspired by a memorable image of the Quebec G7 summit, showing Angela Merkel confronting Donald Trump. This snapshot was actually a brilliant piece of propaganda from Berlin, taken by an official photographer and intended to depict a German chancellor dictating terms to the American president. Leni Riefenstahl could not have done better. But Mr Trump’s look of defiance is no less striking. In our version, by Michael Daley, he is flanked by his formidable National Security Advisor John Bolton, while Prime Minister Abe of Japan looks quizzically at Mrs Merkel. Sic transit gloria mundi.

At the time of writing it is she, rather than Mr Trump, whose authority is falling away. The insubordination of her Interior Minister Horst Seehofer is undisguised: “I cannot work with that woman,” he tells colleagues. Rubbing salt in the wounds inflicted by her own colleague, President Trump tweets that “the people of Germany are turning against their leadership as migration is rocking the already tenuous Berlin coalition”. Undiplomatic, certainly, but true.

Having bought herself time to seek concessions from her EU partners, Mrs Merkel may yet survive, as she has done so often before. But Mr Seehofer’s threat to close the borders to most asylum-seekers is very popular — and not only in his stronghold of Bavaria, the migrants’ first port of call. A tough line on migration represents the consensus among Germany’s southern and eastern neighbours. For them, the war is over. They are less afraid of Nazi aggression than of anti-Nazi Angst — because the latter implies an open border and demographic disorder.

From a British perspective, there is a certain Schadenfreude at the prospect of Mrs Merkel being hoist by her own petard. Years ago, when David Cameron repeatedly sent alarm signals to the Chancellery in Berlin about unsustainable levels of migration from Eastern Europe, they went unanswered. Freedom of movement was non-negotiable. She threw Cameron overboard, as the tidal wave of Brexit approached. As border anxiety began to grip Europe too, Mrs Merkel opened the floodgates, thereby undermining allies at home and abroad. Her counterparts in London, Paris, Rome, Vienna, Prague and Madrid have all fallen, mostly replaced by leaders who take a harder line on migration. Mrs Merkel is Europe’s last woman standing. She may survive, but only by demanding for Germany what she refused Cameron: a restoration of national sovereignty to allow an emergency brake on uncontrolled freedom of movement.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12647/tariq-ramadan-french-justice

Then, of course, comes the trump card: all the accusers are supposedly Islamophobes.

The next hearing has been set in July, in which Ramadan may well be slapped with that third indictment, for one, or several of, the nine rapes Ms Rabbouj accuses him of during 2013-2014. Ramadan denies the allegations.

Oborne’s rather spectacular pile of tendentious inaccuracies ends by referencing a petition supporting Ramadan. It was started by Ramadan’s usual Paris acolytes of the hard-left investigative website Médiapart and a handful of British academics who supported Ramadan’s elevation to a teaching post at Oxford, and may feel they need to protect their investment. They should cut their losses.

French-bashing is one of the few pleasures still allowed in Europe nowadays, and it seems a bit unkind to deprive you of it. Sadly, a recent piece, by Peter Oborne, accuses the entire French justice system of treating Tariq Ramadan, the sometime academic, stealth Islamist, serial liar and alleged rapist, like a latter-day hero from Les Misérables, supposedly “rotting” in a French jail as a victim of the complete “abandonment of due process”. Not quite.

Ramadan, the grandson of Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan Al-Banna, pretends to be “moderate”. Yet he has recently argued that FGM, for instance, is a cultural tradition of Muslims, or that corporal punishments including stoning of adulterous women in Islam ought to be the object of a “moratorium” to examine their implications (rather than banned). British Prime Minister Tony Blair apparently bought into the fiction that here was the kind of westernised Muslim he needed on an advisory board to his government; and Ramadan got a Qatar-financed chair of sorts at Oxford.

Early in 2018, Ramadan got caught in a #MeToo tsunami, with woman after woman coming forward to explain in strikingly similar terms how he used them for rough sex and threatened them afterwards should they dare to talk about it. (He denies the rough part; he has admitted to having sex with at least five of these women; and he has also admitted in judicial hearings that he has forked out €27,000 in hush money to his Belgian accuser.)

http://blog.nli.org.il/en/bullfight_poster/

THANKS TO:https://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/2018/07/republican-spains-bullfight-in-honor-of-maimonides/?utm_source=daily&utm_medium=

In 1935, the city of Cordoba held a bullfight “in commemoration of the eighth centenary of the great Cordoban philosopher Maimonides.” The towering talmudist, philosopher, and theologian was born in that city in 1135, although thirteen years later his family fled to Morocco and from there relocated to Egypt, where he lived for the rest of his life.

Read the story behind a poster advertising a bullfight in honor of the great Jewish philosopher, Maimonides.

Take a look at the rather unique poster below from the National Library of Israel’s European Ephemera Collection. What makes it extraordinary is not the illustration of a black bull hurtling towards the matador’s red cape, nor is it the elegance of his stance opposing the power of the bull’s massive body. It is one word above the names of the two bullfighters that makes this poster so extraordinary. That word, written in small font close to the bottom of the poster is Maimonides- the name of one of the greatest Jewish writers of the last two thousand years.