RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.”