RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/trumps-america-first-trade-vision-comes-into-focus-on-three-fronts-11576436055

President Trump claimed a multi-front victory last week in his bid to reshape U.S. trade policy, extracting fresh commercial concessions from Mexico and China while stripping the World Trade Organization of its powers to restrain the tactics he used to secure them.

Combined, the efforts show an approach toward U.S. trading partners and multinationals that is focused more on pressuring companies to produce domestically and sell American-made goods abroad than on helping them expand their global manufacturing footprint.

On Tuesday, the White House announced the rewrite of the country’s largest trade deal, the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement, winning approval not only from the compact’s Mexican and Canadian partners but from longtime Nafta opponents among congressional Democrats and organized labor. On Friday, the administration brokered a truce with Beijing in its year-and-a-half-long trade war, putting further tariffs on hold and securing an unusual Chinese pledge to boost imports of U.S. goods by a specified dollar amount while trade talks between the two sides continue.

In between those two announcements, the U.S. on Wednesday effectively crippled the Geneva-based WTO trade court that was launched in 1995 to prevent the kinds of trade tactics Mr. Trump has deployed to coerce America’s trading partners to the bargaining table. Over the past two years, the administration has blocked the appointment of judges to the court and, after two remaining members’ terms expired, the panel as of last week no longer had enough members to issue decisions and enforce WTO rules. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15289/austria-bds-antisemitism

The initiative is being spearheaded by Sebastian Kurz, a former (and most likely the next) chancellor of Austria who also leads the center-right Austrian People’s Party (Österreichische Volkspartei, ÖVP).

“For Austria, Israel’s right to exist is non-negotiable, and any form of anti-Semitism, including Israel-related anti-Semitism, is unacceptable and must be severely condemned. Of course, factual criticism of individual measures by the government of Israel must be allowed.” — Austrian Parliamentary Resolution condemning the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement as anti-Semitic.

“This [BDS] movement calls for a boycott of… Israeli artists, scientists and athletes. It demonizes and measures Israel by double standards, makes Austrian Jews jointly responsible for Israeli politics, and by calling for the right of return for Palestinian refugees and all their descendants, it questions the right of existence of the Jewish state.” — Austrian Parliamentary Resolution condemning the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement as anti-Semitic.

The BDS campaign “undermines the possibility for a negotiated solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by demanding concessions of one party alone and encouraging the Palestinians to reject negotiations in favor of international pressure.” — U.S. House of Representatives Resolution 246.

All of the major parties represented in the Austrian Parliament have agreed to support a resolution condemning the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement as anti-Semitic.

The measure calls on Austria’s federal government to fight anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, and to withhold any form of financial and other state support from anti-Semitic organizations and advocates of BDS principles.

The resolution will be submitted to the lower house of Parliament, the National Council, in January 2020. It is expected to be passed with an overwhelming majority. While anti-BDS laws have been passed in Vienna and Graz, the largest and second-largest cities in Austria, this would be the first time that such a measure is enacted at the federal level.

On December 11, legislators from all five major parties — including the left-leaning Greens and the right-leaning Freedom Party (Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs, FPÖ) — formally agreed to co-sponsor the resolution, which is being spearheaded by Sebastian Kurz, a former (and most likely the next) chancellor of Austria who also leads the center-right Austrian People’s Party (Österreichische Volkspartei, ÖVP). The resolution states:

“Anti-Semitism has existed since antiquity, although the term itself was not used until the 19th century. The core, however, was always the same: it was — and is — the fomenting of prejudices and hatred in word and deed against Jews. Throughout history they have been victims of violence and exclusion, which reached a devastating climax in the murderous cruelty of National Socialism and the declared goal of the systematic destruction of Jewry by the Nazi regime.

“In total, more than six million Jews, many of them children, fell victim to the Shoah. They were murdered in the extermination camps by poison gas or otherwise. But even this unimaginably cruel genocide and the memory of it has not caused many people to rethink, and so Jews, even in the present, are exposed, once again, to hate and prejudices, which in the worst cases culminate in violence.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/12/hopkins-boris-win-seismic-moment-our-history-katie-hopkins/

There are still times this little island I live on manages to surprise me. Right now, I could kiss it’s rolling hills and green and pleasant lands.

Boris Johnson’s stunning win in the British General Election 2019 is simply electrifying. It gives him a clear majority in the House of Commons and an equally clear mandate to Get Brexit Done by 31 January.

The reaction of decent Brits and law-abiding patriots could not be more thrilling. Boris re-imagined a clip from Love, Actually in his campaign and right now it really does feel as if there is ‘joy all around’.

It is not just that Boris won. Nor the size of his majority at 78. Nor the fact that his power is nearing Thatcher’s.

It is the affirmation that the heart and soul of this country is still intact. That the British spirit is alive and kicking and that some kind of fight-back for our Judeo-Christian culture is on.

Despite the fact our supporters are silenced in the media, unrepresented by broadcasters and unheard in life, we are still here, ready to shout and to act when we are called upon – or, indeed, finally allowed to.

This is a very British revolution. No battles waged in the street, as in France with the Gilets Jaunes still out there week on week. No stones thrown, or windows broken, as on the streets of Hong Kong. No streak of flames across the night sky as a Molotov cocktail is tossed in anger.

Just the dignified silence of the ballot box on a cold December day in the wind and rain, reminding those who should know better that when we voted on 23 June 2016 we meant what we said. And we still mean it today.

The British people voted for Brexit. They have waited stoically for it to be delivered. And now it will be done.

All this coming from a place where things do feel truly broken. London is just picking itself back up from another terror attack on London Bridge, only recently washed down from the last blood that was spilled there.

A Muslim mayor presides over the highest murder rates in modern history, with Chicago-level numbers of black-on-black stabbings, the slaughter of children as young as 14, and feuding drug gangs settling scores with knives.

https://www.steynonline.com/9913/boffo-boris

Whatever one feels about Boris Johnson (and almost any one who’s had any truck with the man has, if he’s honest, highly mixed views) today’s election is a spectacular triumph for him. On the day Andrew Scheer, the Canadian Tory leader, announced he would be stepping down, the UK Tory leader led his party to their biggest share of the vote in half-a-century and swiped seats held by Labour since 1935 – from Blythe Valley to Bishop Auckland. Both Scheer and Johnson are unprincipled opportunists, but the latter is a fighter who knows how to return the ball and swat it down the opposition’s gullet.

He was fortunate, of course, in finding himself up against Jeremy Corbyn rather than Justin Trudeau. Whether this was a referendum on Corbynism or on Brexit I leave for the exit pollsters, but either way Labour looks set to be reduced to fewer than 200 seats for the first time in eighty-four years. As I write, there appears to have been, in pure psephological terms, a swing away from Labour of about ten per cent. Six per cent of that went to the Brexit Party, not that it was enough to win them any seats, with the rest being split between Tories and the Liberal Democrats. So, put crudely, historically Labour working-class constituencies in northern England that voted Leave and were then screwed over by the subversives of a Remainer Parliament abandoned century-old tribal loyalties to Labour and shifted to pro-Brexit parties.

On the other hand, in leafier southern territory middle-class Remainers weary of Corbyn’s equivocation on the subject shifted in smaller numbers to the LibDems, as the party most upfront about its willingness to subvert the result of the referendum (“Bollocks to Brexit”). As a result, Labour has been reduced to a pantomime horse of urban redoubts – immigrant enclaves in the North and Midlands and upscale champagne-socialist quartiers of London, either indifferent or rather partial to Jeremy Corbyn’s particular baggage.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15285/viktor-orban-persecuted-christians

“Those we are helping now can give us the greatest help in saving Europe. We are giving persecuted Christians what they need: homes, hospitals, and schools, and we receive in return what Europe needs most: a Christian faith, love and perseverance”. — Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, Daily News Hungary, November 28, 2019.

“Our estimation is that more than 90 percent of Christian have already left Iraq and almost 50 percent of Christians in Syria have left the country”. — Ignatius Aphrem II, Patriarch of the Syrian Orthodox Church.

European leaders, rather than being embarrassed, should make the condition of Christians under Islam the starting point of their conversations with Muslims.

“The fate of Eastern Christians and other minorities is the prelude to our own fate.” — Former French Prime Minister François Fillon, Valeurs Actuelles, December 12, 2019.

“There is an ongoing persecution of Christians. For months, we bishops have been denouncing what is happening in Burkina Faso” Bishop Kjustin Kientega recently said, “but nobody is listening to us.” “Evidently”, he concluded, “the West is more concerned with protecting its own interests”.

In a recent series of a transnational tragedies, 14 Christians were murdered in an attack on a church in Burkina Faso, 11 Christians were murdered in an attack on a bus in Kenya and seven Christians were murdered by Boko Haram in Cameroon. These three deadly attacks by Islamists in the same week give an idea of the intensity and frequency of global anti-Christian persecution.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15288/genocide-christians-burkina-faso

While a total of 12 Islamic terror attacks in Burkina Faso were registered in 2016, nearly 160 were reported in just the first five months of 2019.

The situation has reached the point where… the mainstream media habitually downplay the religious element whenever Muslims attack Christians, by referring to it as “sectarian strife….

[T]he militants told everyone to lie down and proceeded to look for Christians by asking for first names or looking for anyone wearing Christian insignia (like crosses). The deadly search yielded four men…. [W]hen they saw crosses, the assailants singled them out. All four were taken aside and executed.” – June 27, 2019.

“There is no Christian anymore in this town [Arbinda],” said a local contact; “… they [terrorists] were looking for Christians. Families who hide Christians are [also] killed. Arbinda had now lost in total no less than 100 people within six months.”

According to a local, “The assailants asked the Christians to convert to Islam, but the pastor and the others refused.” So “they called them, one after the other, behind the church building where they shot them dead.”

One can only hope that the response of the media and international community will be stronger than their usual one: ignoring the massacres. This slaughter has been already been characterized as a “genocide of Christians.” When, then, will the media and the so-called human rights groups finally confront — or at the very least condemn or even report on — these religiously fueled massacres plaguing West Africa?

On Sunday, December 1, 2019, Islamic terrorists raided a Protestant Christian church in Burkina Faso during the service and massacred 14 worshippers. The pastor and several children were among those killed.

This is but the latest of many lethal attacks on the Christian minority of the small nation located in West Africa, a region better known for the persecution of Christians in Nigeria.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15287/despots-square-kilometer-empires

The “Supreme Guide” is supposed to be excellent in everything. He has written on Islamic cuisine, the methodology of successful marriage, the destruction of Israel, the reform of human sciences, a new Islamic civilization to replace the old one that has decayed, and, as an afterthought, radical re-ordering of the global order.

Today, Syrian regime head Bashar Assad is confined to his square-kilometer close to Damascus with no chance of ever roaming in other parts of the war-torn country. General Qassem Soleimani, the Iranian master of PR, claims he prevented Assad from fleeing because Khamenei ordered him to stay put which, in practice, means the Syrian became a prisoner like Khamenei.

In autobiographical notes, Khamenei waxes lyrical about the joys of visiting Shiite “holy” shrines in Iraq. Today, he dares not set foot in an Iraq shaken by uprisings against his ideology. Worse still, fearful of visiting even Mash’had, Iran’s own “holy” city, he has to be content with a hussainiyah he built near a “villa” confiscated by the revolution.

In a recent speech in Tehran, Ayatollah Golpayegani, Chief of Staff of “Supreme Guide” Ali Khamenei, claimed that his boss had reached a position from which he not only led the Muslim world but also dictated to infidel powers, now in retreat.

https://www.city-journal.org/boris-johnson-victory

All elections matter, but some matter more than others. Yesterday’s British general election will be remembered as one of the most consequential in decades. The immediate effects are beyond doubt. Boris Johnson’s 80-seat victory—the biggest Conservative win since Margaret Thatcher—means that Brexit will happen next month. Britain will leave the European Union by the end of January. The emphatic defeat for Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn—the worst defeat for the party since the 1930s—means that, for the foreseeable future, socialism in Britain remains something to be debated in the abstract, rather than tested on the country.

Finishing Brexit and finishing off Corbyn are huge achievements. But they are only part of a bigger shift. Last night, British politics didn’t just escape a three-and-a-half-year doom loop of squabbling over the 2016 referendum; it changed in fundamental ways. As the results trickled in, it soon became clear that the realignment many had forecast ahead of polling day was really happening, and on a remarkable scale. Voters in Brexit-supporting seats in the North and Midlands that have always returned a Labour MP to Parliament abandoned the party in droves. While the Conservatives demolished Labour’s red wall, it was a different story in London and the South East, where things trended in the other direction, even if the Conservatives held onto all but a few of the seats they were defending in and around the capital.

The upshot is that Britain’s two major parties now answer to very different sets of voters than before. The Conservative base has become more working-class, older, and whiter. The Labour Party’s constituency is getting wealthier, younger, more metropolitan, and more ethnically diverse.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/12/post-wwii-order-ending-and-nothing-has-replaced-it/

The post-WWII order is ending — and nothing has replaced it.

Economists at the World Bank and International Monetary Fund must feel pretty lucky these days. They work for just about the only institutions set up in the aftermath of World War II that aren’t in the middle of an identity crisis. From Turtle Bay to Brussels, from Washington to Vienna, the decay of the economic and security infrastructure of the postwar world has accelerated in recent weeks. The bad news: As the legacy of the 20th century recedes into the past, the only 21st-century alternatives are offered from an authoritarian surveillance state.

The pressure is both external and internal. Revisionist powers such as China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea undermine the foundations of global governance and hijack institutions to the detriment of the liberal international order. The institutions themselves lack the self-confidence necessary to further the cause of human freedom. Meanwhile, the most powerful nation in the world has turned inward. Its foreign policy is haphazard and improvisational, contradictory and equivocal. The confusion and zigzagging contribute to the erosion of legitimacy. It delays the emergence of new forms of international organization.

The breakdown was visible at last week’s NATO summit in London. Remarkably, the source of the immediate ruckus wasn’t President Trump. It was French president Emmanuel Macron, who doubled down on his criticism of the Atlantic alliance that he’d expressed in a recent interview with The Economist. Trump disagreed with Macron’s description of NATO as “brain dead.” He and other allies didn’t back Macron’s call for rapprochement with Russia and China and renewed focus on terrorism.