RUTHFULLY YOURS

Spending billions of dollars on climate-related aid in countries that need help with tuberculosis, malaria and malnutrition.
In the run-up to the 2015 U.N. Climate Change Conference in Paris from Nov. 30 to Dec. 11, rich countries and development organizations are scrambling to join the fashionable ranks of “climate aid” donors. This effectively means telling the world’s worst-off people, suffering from tuberculosis, malaria or malnutrition, that what they really need isn’t medicine, mosquito nets or micronutrients, but a solar panel. It is terrible news.

On Oct. 9, World Bank President Jim Yong Kim pledged a one-third increase in the bank’s direct climate-related financing, bringing the bank’s annual total to an estimated $29 billion by 2020. In September, Chinese President Xi Jinping pledged to match President Obama’s promised $3 billion in aid to the U.N.’s Green Climate Fund. Meanwhile, the U.K is diverting $8.9 billion from its overseas aid budget to climate-related aid over the next five years, and France is promising $5.6 billion annually by 2020, up from $3.4 billion today. The African Development Bank is planning to triple its climate-related investments to more than $5 billion a year by 2020, representing 40% of its total portfolio.

The image of a “French republican idyll” masks a history of repeated anti-Jewish prejudice, and worse.

At the outset of his very interesting and provocative essay, Alain El-Mouchan quotes French Prime Minister Manuel Valls: “If 100,000 [French] Jews leave [for Israel], France will no longer be France. The French Republic will be judged a failure.”

Will France’s Jews depart en masse for Israel? Should they? If they do, will France still be France? These are disturbing questions to which I do not have the answers, and which may be unanswerable. But I would like to offer a number of thoughts and reactions, mainly of a historical nature, and some in the form of further questions.

Let us recall that in the first half of the 20th century, one-quarter of the Jews living in France were murdered in the Holocaust, with French connivance. Was France still France after that? If so, then it is hard for me to see how the departure of one-quarter of today’s Jewish population—not for Auschwitz but for Israel—would constitute the end of France.

But El-Mouchan, like Prime Minister Valls, has something more specific in mind. For both of them, that something, in El-Mouchan’s words, is “the French republican idyll, one of the most attractive and promising chapters in the history of mankind,” and one hallmark of this idyll was France’s “exceptionally open and welcoming” posture toward the Jews. That idyll, says El-Mouchan, has now “reached the beginning of the end.”

The meeting today between Pakistan Prime Minister Sharif and President Obama at the White House is a continuation of a dangerous charade engaged in for decades by the United States. By perceiving Pakistan, a failed Islamic terrorist state, as a valuable strategic ally when it, in fact, has a blatant history of actions and circumstances to the contrary, the United States is pursuing a delusional foreign policy that further endangers American national security.
The meeting with Pakistan occurs at a time when the ink is barely dry on the dubious Iran bomb deal. Now, President Obama stands poised to sign a second nuclear agreement that will threaten U.S. ally, India, and likely destabilize the region. The first agreement, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), was led by the United States and finalized in July.

Sunday, October 18, isn’t just a day of baseball playoffs and pro football games. It’s “Adoption Day,” when all parties to the Iran nuclear deal must begin preparing to implement its terms. And while the Obama administration takes another opportunity to pat itself on the back for its achievement, Iran has offered the international community a clear signal of what it thinks about its obligations under the deal, as well as its strategic intentions. Just a week before Adoption Day, Iran test-fired a new precision-guided ballistic missile capable of delivering a 1,600-pound warhead to Israel or even southeastern Europe and designed to evade missile defense systems.

Legally, this launch was an indisputable violation of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1929, passed in 2010, which dictates “Iran shall not undertake any activity related to ballistic missiles capable of delivering nuclear weapons, including launches using ballistic missile technology.”

European leaders talk about two things these days; preserving European values by taking in Muslim migrants and integrating Muslim migrants into Europe by getting them to adopt European values.

It does not occur to them that their plan to save European values depends on killing European values.

The same European values that require Sweden, a country of less than 10 million, to take in 180,000 Muslim migrants in one year also expects the new “Swedes” to celebrate tolerance, feminism and gay marriage. Instead European values have filled the cities of Europe with Shariah patrols, unemployed angry men waving ISIS flags and the occasional public act of terror.

European countries that refuse to invest money in border security instead find themselves forced to invest money into counterterrorism forces. And those are bad for European values too.

But, as Central European countries are discovering, European values don’t have much to do with the preservation of viable functioning European states. Instead they are about the sort of static Socialism that Bernie Sanders admires from abroad. But even a Socialist welfare state requires people to work for a living. Maine’s generous welfare policies began collapsing once Somali Muslims swarmed in to take advantage of them. Denmark and the Dutch, among other of Bernie Sanders’ role models, have been sounding more like Reagan and less like Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren.

Two years ago, the Dutch King declared that, “The classic welfare state of the second half of the 20th century in these areas in particular brought forth arrangements that are unsustainable in their current form.” That same year, the Danish Finance Minister called for the “modernization of the welfare state.”

For years, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper has served as a welcome counterpoint to Barack Obama, and the object of wistful musings about what a fine President of the United States he would have been, if only he had been born south of the border: generally realistic about the jihad threat, determined to do what was necessary to meet that threat, and a strong supporter of Israel.

But now Canada at last has its own Obama: Justin Trudeau. And that means that Canada, like the United States, faces deep trouble ahead.

The new Prime Minister of Canada, like Obama, has consistently downplayed the nature and magnitude of the jihad threat and ascribed it to other causes. Christine Williams, a Canadian journalist and a Federally appointed Director with the Canadian Race Relations Foundation, has noted that in the wake of the Boston Marathon jihad bombing, Trudeau issued a bizarre statement: “There is no question that this happened because of someone who feels completely excluded, someone who feels completely at war with innocence, at war with society.”

“Refugees” plundered a train’s dining car and threatened the staff. Railroad employees had assured all “refugees from Syria” that they would not be thrown off any train if they lacked valid tickets. This led to thousands of people claiming to be from Syria in order to get a free ride.

The police have about 17,000 deportation cases piled up. Despite the government’s request for a clampdown on people staying in Sweden despite having received deportation notices, more and more people are staying in the country illegally. 54,00 people have refused to leave the country after being denied asylum since 2011.

Per Gudmundson of the daily Svenska Dagbladet questions the repatriation of ISIS combatants to Sweden: “Who is in charge of the security aspect? Anyone can pretend to be a defector.”

On September 3, a 37-year-old man with a serious criminal record was shot dead in a car in the Stockholm suburb of Hässelby Gård. His two small children were sitting in the back seat at the time, but were physically unharmed. A witness told the police that the youngest child screamed: “Help, help, they’ve killed my daddy!” A 23-year-old man, suspected of the murder, is now in custody, but vehemently denies the charges. Concern about safety is now growing in Hässelby Gård, which was the scene of another shooting in June, when two girls crossing the town square were wounded in crossfire.

The victory of Canada’s Liberal Party under Justin Trudeau in Monday’s election was only surprising to those who were keen to present the election as a close horse race. Writing a few days ago, I foresaw a Liberal near majority, while I feared what proved to be the actual outcome: a solid Liberal majority.

On the adage that governments defeat themselves, after almost ten years of Conservative government, 2015 was likely to be a Liberal year. This was only obscured by the anomalous result of the 2011 election, which saw the left-wing New Democratic Party installed as the official opposition and the Liberals as a third-place rump.

The election marks a return to form for Canada’s politics. A dominant Liberal Party, a strong Conservative opposition, and the New Democrats permanently in third place. The parties shifted places almost exactly from 2011. In popular vote in 2011, it was roughly Conservatives 40 percent, New Democrats 30 percent, and Liberals 20 percent. In 2015, Liberals won 40 percent, Conservatives 30 percent, and New Democrats 20 percent. The 2011 outcome was almost entirely due to the volatile Quebec electorate; this time they gave Liberals a majority of the province’s seats, but again showed their eccentricity by giving the Conservatives twelve seats, up from five in 2011. The Conservatives lost seats in every other province and were wiped out in four.

“Convert or Die” — Graffiti on a restaurant, Gothenburg, Sweden.

“Very religious Muslims are spreading the following idea throughout the refugee centers: Sharia law rules wherever we are.” – Gottfried Martens, pastor of a south Berlin church.

“You have a cross on — then you are also a Christian f***ing whore. Do you know what we do to people like you? … You get stoned [to death].” — Muslim threats against Christians in Denmark, documented by TV2.

A British Christian family that was attacked says both police and the Anglican Church have failed to provide any meaningful support and are “reluctant to treat the problem as a religious hate crime.”

Christian residents of Europe continue to be persecuted, often by Muslims allowed into Europe on the grounds that they are being “persecuted.”

As Muslims grow in numbers, so do their demands — assimilation in Europe is falling by the wayside.

“Before we put on a show of unity with Muslims, let’s have them begin by respecting our civilization and our culture.” — Giuseppe Berlin, Municipal Councillor of Cinisello Balsamo, Italy.

Last April, police in Sicily reported that Muslim migrants hurled as many as 53 Christians overboard during a recent boat crossing from Libya. The motive was that the victims “professed the Christian faith while the aggressors were Muslim.” Another report cited a boy seen praying to the Judeo-Christian God. Muslims commanded him to stop, saying “Here, we pray only to Allah.” Eventually the Muslims “went mad,” in the words of a witness, started screaming “Allahu Akbar!” [“Allah is Greater!”] and began hurling Christians into the sea.

Every ruling party in a democracy eventually wears out its welcome, and on Monday Canadians tossed out the Conservative Party after nine years in power under Prime Minister Stephen Harper. They’re now taking a gamble that the winning Liberals, led by 43-year-old Justin Trudeau, won’t return to the anticompetitive economic policies of the past.

Mr. Harper resigned as Conservative leader and said in a gracious concession speech that “the people are never wrong.” They’d clearly had enough of Mr. Harper, who governed sensibly but in his later years had grown increasingly insular and autocratic in stifling party debate. The Conservatives also suffered from the global commodity bust, which has sent Canada into a mild recession after years of outperforming most of the developed world.

The popular desire for change vaulted the Liberals to a surprisingly large victory with 184 seats in Parliament. They were also helped by the collapse of the hard-left New Democratic Party, which won only 44 seats compared to 103 in the 2011 election. The Conservatives will settle for 99.