RUTHFULLY YOURS

Philippe Verdier, the weather chief at France’s state broadcaster France Televisions, has reportedly been sent on “forced holiday” for writing a book accusing top climatologists of “taking the world hostage.”

Every night, France’s chief weatherman has told the nation how much wind, sun or rain they can expect the following day.
Now Philippe Verdier, a household name for his nightly forecasts on France 2, has been taken off air after a more controversial announcement – criticising the world’s top climate change experts.
Mr Verdier claims in the book Climat Investigation (Climate Investigation) that leading climatologists and political leaders have “taken the world hostage” with misleading data.
In a promotional video, Mr Verdier said: “Every night I address five million French people to talk to you about the wind, the clouds and the sun. And yet there is something important, very important that I haven’t been able to tell you, because it’s neither the time nor the place to do so.”
He added: “We are hostage to a planetary scandal over climate change – a war machine whose aim is to keep us in fear.”

If the wave of migrants keeps coming, in 10-15 years, Swedes will be a minority in their own country. That there is, in fact, an exchange of populations going on, should be clear in any sober assessment.

The final consequence of… Sweden’s immigration policy is that the economy will collapse — because who is going to pay for it all? And economic breakdowns, once they happen, always happen very fast.” — Lars Hedegaard.

In the last two weeks, more than 1,000 “unaccompanied refugee children” have arrived from Germany via ferry; more than half of them have now vanished and are listed as missing.

For the last few weeks, the central train station in Sweden’s third largest city, Malmö, has been overrun with migrants; the volunteers that for the first few days showed up with food, water and clothes now seem to have lost interest.

It will not be long until the Swedes realize that the state will not look after them. The country that just 20 years ago was considered one of the safest and most affluent in the world, is now in danger of becoming a failed state.

Sweden is fast approaching a complete collapse. More and more municipalities are raising the alarm that if the migrants keep coming at this pace, the government can no longer guarantee normal service to its citizens. In addition, ominous statements from government officials have left Swedes in fear of what tomorrow may bring. If the migrant wave keeps coming, in 10-15 years, Swedes will be a minority in their own country.

Secretary Kerry’s comments will encourage the continuation of violence and lead to further deaths of both Israelis and Palestinians. His explanation for the widespread knifings, suicide bombings, shootings, arson, firebombings, vehicle attacks and lethal rock-throwing is either naive or mendacious; perhaps both.

Kerry asserts that the frustrations of Israeli settlement activity are responsible for the Palestinians’ murderous behaviour. The reality is that this new wave of killings is a continuation of the aggression against Jews that has been going on in the territory of Palestine for many decades — since long before 1948 and pre-dating the first Israeli settlements in the West Bank that Kerry falsely brands as illegal.

The violence is motivated by the same racist and sectarian zeal that drives the Islamic State and numerous Arab governments and jihadist groups that have sought to eradicate the presence of “infidels,” whether Jews, Christians or Yazidis, from land that they consider the exclusive preserve of Muslims.

Palestinian children are taught that Jews are descended from apes and pigs and must be killed before their “filthy feet” desecrate the holy places of Islam — in the words of President Abbas.

Secretary Kerry, the UN, and the EU should be discouraging further violence by condemnation and by meaningful threats of sanction against the Palestinian Authority leadership. The international community has encouraged Hamas’s illegal use of human shields and berated Israel for defending itself and for inflicting civilian casualties, which were in reality the unavoidable consequence of Hamas’s unprovoked aggression and its way of fighting from within private houses, schools, hospitals and mosques.

Welcome to an only-in-France controversy.

Marine Le Pen is, without a doubt, the most interesting figure on the French political stage today. Amid France’s persistent economic and cultural malaise and the unpopularity of Socialist president François Hollande, the rise of her National Front seems unstoppable.

This rise is based in part on Ms. Le Pen’s charisma and political skill, but also on a strategic realignment of the National Front. In part, this involves an embrace of populist economic policies to go with her populist social stances. And in part, this involves a repudiation of her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder and leader of the National Front, who built a ceiling of support for his movement thanks to a history of racist and anti-Semitic outbursts, a repudiation that has gone as far as her ousting her father from the party he founded.

While still calling for shutting down the borders, Ms. Le Pen has officially repudiated racism and has expelled, in addition to her father, any party official or activist caught making racist, or racist-sounding, remarks, whether in the media or on their Facebook pages. Her hostility to many forms of Muslim immigration, she insists, is driven by France’s secular value of laïcité, officially embraced by all French elites, rather than by any belief in any clash of civilizations.

For every chapter in the history of Palestinian violence against Israelis, there has been an emblematic image. For the 1972 massacre of Israeli Olympians in Munich, the masked gunman on the balcony. In the first intifada of the late 1980s, the boys hurling rocks. In the second intifada of the early 2000s, the suicide bomber.

It’s too soon to say whether the current wave of Palestinian attacks amounts to a third intifada, or uprising. But the defining picture has already been set: the terrorist brandishing a knife. In the past two weeks Palestinian assailants have attacked more than 50 Jews, killing eight. Among the wounded: a 2-year-old toddler, a 13-year-old boy riding his bike, a 70-year-old woman boarding a bus.

This is terrorism in its most exact and repulsive form, a potential danger for anyone who steps out the front door. It also poses extraordinary challenges for the Israeli government, which must deploy thousands of security personnel, each on hair-trigger alert, while trying to minimize mistakes, prevent Israeli vigilantism and not resort to collective forms of punishment. If Israel’s perennial critics in the West think they could do better under similar circumstances, they ought to explain how.

A recent special operation in Grozny against suspected militants of the so-called Islamic State (IS) took Chechnya’s residents and analysts who follow the situation in the republic by surprise. Readers of Chechen ruler Ramzan Kadyrov’s Instagram postings were the first to learn about the incident. For several years now, Kadyrov has used Instagram to communicate with the public. An Instagram posting he published on October 8 said that “the forces of the Interior Ministry, the Federal Security Service (FSB) and the Terek special police unit have neutralized three terrorists at the edge of Staropromyslovsky district of Grozny. We had determined that three militants who had been trained in the camps of the ‘Iblis State’ arrived in the republic” (Ramzan Kadyrov calls the IS the “Devil State”) (Instagram.com, October 8).

The U.S. and China are headed for a showdown at sea. U.S. officials say that within days the U.S. military will conduct “freedom of navigation” patrols to challenge Beijing’s territorial claims in the South China Sea’s strategic Spratly archipelago. That area lies more than 700 miles off China’s coast, between Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam, but China’s government has warned that it is “seriously concerned” about U.S. action and “will absolutely not permit any country to infringe on China’s territorial waters.”

Now’s a good time, then, to clarify what’s going on. The U.S. and its Asian partners are trying to curb a Chinese campaign to conquer one of the world’s most vital international waterways. The South China Sea is home to rich natural resources and half of all global shipborne trade: some $5 trillion a year in oil, food, iPhones and more. By asserting “indisputable sovereignty” over its nearly 1.35 million square miles, including vast swaths of sea belonging to its neighbors, Beijing threatens to hold hostage—and to wage war over—the economic heart of East Asia.