RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/05/germany-constitutional-court-accelerates-euro-zones-slide-toward-crisis/

The existential questions that the European Project’s stakeholders have spent decades avoiding can’t be ignored much longer.

 O ne of the reasons that the euro zone has survived for as long as it has is the impressive ability of its leaders to postpone dealing with a series of questions that are as fundamental as they are inconvenient. Is it possible to sustain a monetary union without a fiscal union? (Probably not.) Is it possible to establish a fiscal union without genuine democratic consent? (We may yet find out.) And suddenly pressing: What is the relationship between the EU’s law and Germany’s?

For half a century the conflict hinted at by this last question could mostly be treated as theoretical. Then, last week, the German constitutional court (BVG) challenged the legality of the Public Sector Purchase Program (PSPP), the $2 trillion-and-counting quantitative-easing scheme first launched by the European Central Bank (the ECB) in 2015 to prop up the euro zone’s faltering economies, and restarted in 2019. The BVG’s ruling does not concern the ECB’s Pandemic Emergency Purchase Program (PEPP), a new, smaller quantitative-easing regimen under which the ECB will buy up to €750 billion in bonds to help stave off the effects of the mess that COVID-19 has left in its wake. But it may affect how the PEPP is run: Already widely considered inadequate for the task that lies ahead, the program may be hobbled by restrictions flowing from the BVG’s judgment, and that’s before another wave of German litigation tries to bring it down.

To the EU, the BVG’s intervention was both unwelcome and insolent. So far as the EU’s jurisprudence is concerned, EU law is supreme in every member state in a manner approximately analogous to the relationship between federal and state law in the U.S. In an English case from 1974, one of that country’s most distinguished — and quirkily eloquent — judges, Lord Denning, explained that the EEC Treaty (the EEC was a precursor of the EU) was “like an incoming tide. It flows into the estuaries and up the rivers. It cannot be held back.” The treaty, he wrote, was “equal in force to any statute,” and the European Court of Justice (the ECJ) was “the ultimate authority” when it came to interpreting EEC law; even England’s highest court had “to bow down to it.”

https://www.city-journal.org/wuhan-fuels-americas-fentanyl-epidemic?utm_source=Ci

The coronavirus has turned America upside-down. In less than three months, the virus has killed 70,000 Americans and destroyed more than 30 million jobs. According to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, “enormous evidence” shows that the virus emerged from a laboratory in Wuhan, China—not in that city’s infamous “wet markets.” But while few question that the virus originates in Wuhan, many don’t know that Wuhan is also the source of another deadly epidemic: America’s fentanyl overdoses.

Fentanyl, a form of synthetic opioid, has quickly become America’s most dangerous drug. In 2018, fentanyl killed 31,897 people in the United States—more than twice the number of any other narcotic. The chemical compound is so lethal, in fact, that just two milligrams—enough to cover Lincoln’s beard on a penny—can prove fatal. In the past five years, fentanyl has devastated hundreds of American communities, particularly in the Northeast and Midwest, where overdose death rates have skyrocketed.

“Most of the fentanyl and novel synthetic opioids in U.S. street markets—as well as their precursor chemicals—originate in China, where the regulatory system does not effectively police the country’s expansive pharmaceutical and chemical industries,” a recent RAND analysis concludes. Chinese manufacturers export the drug in two ways. First, they send shipments directly to American criminal organizations via the U.S. Postal Service, UPS, and FedEx, using the “dark web” to process orders. Second, they ship fentanyl and precursor chemicals to drug cartels in Mexico, which then smuggle the final product into American markets.

https://thehill.com/opinion/international/497497-saudi-tv-series-speaks-volumes-about-regional-dynamics

During the holy month of Ramadan, now underway, when TV viewership among Muslims traditionally skyrockets, Saudi Arabia’s MBC network is airing a series about Jewish families in a fictional Arab country in the late 1940s – a series that speaks volumes about what’s changing, and what isn’t, across the region.

In the series “Umm Haroun,” which means “mother of Aaron,” Jews, Christians, and Muslims live easily with one another. Jews, for instance, express “mazel tov” (congratulations in Hebrew) to a Muslim man upon his engagement, while families of all three religions cook together before the Jewish Sabbath. Viewers even witness the romantic relationship of a Jewish woman and Muslim man.

Nor is this the only positive depiction of Jews to air on MBC, the Arab world’s largest private broadcaster. Along with “Umm Haroun,” the network is airing “Exit 7,” a comedy in which, in one episode, two characters debate the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and one of them professes that he’d be happy to do business with the Jewish state.

Not surprisingly, “Umm Haroun” has stoked controversy across the region. That Saudi Arabia’s monarchy, to which MBC must be sensitive, is letting the series air reflects the potential for hugely consequential changes in Saudi-Israeli relations. That, at the same time, Palestinian officials are criticizing Riyadh in outraged terms reflects the futility of ongoing Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts.

https://www.jns.org/opinion/the-abduction-of-western-freedom/

How Silvia Romano, recently released from Al-Shabab captivity, is serving as a vehicle for importing jihadist ideology to Europe.

Silvia Romano, the Italian NGO volunteer who spent 18 months in captivity in Somalia, landed at Rome’s Ciampino airport on Sunday, dressed from head to toe in full Islamic garb. The fact that the 25-year-old woman—who was abducted in November 2018 by Al-Shabab terrorists in Kenya, where she was working on behalf of the Italian charity, Africa Milele, at a local orphanage—returned home in a hijab is cause for alarm, not an expression of freedom of religion.

The radical Islamist world in which the kidnapped Italian girl was indoctrinated during her captivity is antithetical to the Western values on which she was raised. Its mantra boils down to placing death on a higher plane than life, and in subjugating women, non-Muslims and “apostates.”

“I have converted to Islam of my own free will,” Romano said upon disembarking her plane from Mogadishu.