RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13336/palestinians-trump-peace-plan

According to the reports, the White House “peace team,” led by senior adviser Jared Kushner and special envoy Jason Greenblatt, has been working on the plan for two years — and President Trump wants it published between December 2018 and February 2019.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and his representatives in Ramallah have radicalized their people against the Israeli government to a point where meeting or doing business with any Israeli official is tantamount to treason. This is why Abbas does not and cannot return to the negotiating table with Israel and also why Abbas cannot change his position toward the Trump administration.

Wasel Abu Yousef, a senior Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) official, said this week that the Palestinians were moving on three levels to thwart Trump’s upcoming plan: rallying worldwide support for the Palestinian position against the plan, uniting all Palestinians, and opposing attempts to normalize relations between the Arab countries and Israel.

Hardly a day passes without the leadership of the Palestinian Authority (PA) affirming its strong opposition to US President Donald Trump’s yet-to-be-announced Middle East peace plan, also referred to as the “deal of the century.” Palestinian leaders have convinced their people that Trump is the worst person on the face of the earth and that no one should be doing business with him.

The Palestinian Authority is not the only Palestinian party that continues to voice its opposition to the upcoming peace plan. No Palestinian group or individual has come out in favor the plan, although no one in the Middle East seems to have seen it or knows anything about its details. Trump has united the Palestinians in a way that no Palestinian or Arab has been able to do since the beginning of the Hamas-Fatah war 11 years ago.

The Palestinians are united in their opposition to the Trump administration and its policies, especially in the aftermath of the US president’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and relocate the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, as well as its decision to cut US funding to the Palestinian Authority for paying terrorists and to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA). The Palestinians have already determined that the US peace plan is “biased” in favor of Israel, and that is why, they say, they cannot accept it.

The Palestinian Authority and its rivals in Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and other Palestinian factions appear to disagree on everything except their hostility to Trump and his administration. They all refer to the “deal of the century” as a “conspiracy aimed at liquidating the Palestinian cause and rights.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13301/european-court-human-rights-islam

The ruling of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) is not only wrong for establishing a precedent for sharia-compliant adherence to Islamic blasphemy laws, but appears to be based on a number of false premises.

The real message the ECHR sent, as it succumbed to fears of “disturbing the religious peace,” is that if threats work, keep threatening! What sort of protection of human rights is that?

Just who is it, by the way, that gets to decide what is “incriminating”? Formerly, it was the Inquisition.

Islamic blasphemy laws have now been elevated to the law of the land in Europe.

The European Court of Human Rights ruled on October 25 that to state that the Islamic prophet Muhammad “liked to do it with children” and “… A 56-year-old and a six-year-old?… What do we call it, if it is not paedophilia?” goes “beyond the permissible limits of an objective debate,” and could be classified as “an abusive attack on the Prophet of Islam which could stir up prejudice and threaten religious peace.”

The Court’s judgment has a long history.

In 2011, free speech and anti-jihad activist, Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff, was convicted by an Austrian court of “denigrating religious symbols of a recognized religious group” after she gave a series of small seminars: “Introduction to the basics of Islam”, “The Islamization of Europe”, and “The impact of Islam”.[1]

No Muslims appear to have attended Sabaditsch-Wolff’s seminars. The court case against her came about only because a magazine, NEWS, filed a complaint against her after secretly planting a journalist at her seminars to record them.

Wolff was convicted of having said that Muhammad “liked to do it with children” and “… A 56-year-old and a six-year-old? … What do we call it, if it is not paedophilia?”

On February 15, 2011, the Vienna Regional Criminal Court — according to the summary in the judgment of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) — found that “these statements implied that Muhammad had had paedophilic tendencies”, and convicted Sabaditsch-Wolff “for disparaging religious doctrines” under §188 of the Austrian penal code, which states:

“Anyone publicly denigrating or mocking any person or thing that is the object of worship of a domestically existing church or religious society… among whom his conduct is liable to cause legitimate annoyance, is punishable by imprisonment of up to six months or a fine of up to 360 daily rates”.

Sabaditsch-Wolff was ordered to pay a fine of 480 euros and the costs of the proceedings. The Vienna Court of Appeal upheld the decision in December 2011. Sabaditsch-Wolff then appealed the Austrian court decisions to the European Court of Human Rights. She stated that her right to freedom of expression, safeguarded in Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, had been violated.

On October 25, the ECHR reached the conclusion that there had been “no violation of Article 10 (freedom of expression) of the European Convention on Human Rights”.

In its ruling, the ECHR stated:

“The Court found in particular that the domestic courts comprehensively assessed the wider context of the applicant’s statements and carefully balanced her right to freedom of expression with the right of others to have their religious feelings protected, and served the legitimate aim of preserving religious peace in Austria. It held that by considering the impugned statements as going beyond the permissible limits of an objective debate, and by classifying them as an abusive attack on the Prophet of Islam which could stir up prejudice and threaten religious peace, the domestic courts put forward relevant and sufficient reasons.”

The ECHR’s ruling is not only wrong for establishing a precedent for sharia-compliant adherence to Islamic blasphemy laws, but appears to be based on a number of false premises.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13327/brexit-northern-ireland-protoco

lArticle 20 of the Protocol on Ireland/Northern Ireland should be supplemented by a sentence of the form: “If not earlier, this Protocol shall cease to apply [x] years after the end of the transition period unless both the European Union and the United Kingdom agree to extent its application in whole or in part.” Here “[x]” should be a number (of years) that is sufficiently large to convict the EU of bad faith if it refuses to countenance such a sentence, but sufficiently small not to be absurd. We think that “three” would be a suitable number of years, but even “five” would establish the principle that the United Kingdom must have a guaranteed prospect of liberty.

Theresa May presented her Brexit deal to her cabinet on November 14, 2018 and to the House of Commons the next day. It consists of two documents, the “Draft Agreement on the withdrawal of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland from the European Union and the European Atomic Energy Community” (585 pages) and the “Outline of the political declaration setting out the framework for the future relationship between the European Union and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland” (8 pages). The documents were released to the public only after the conclusion of that cabinet meeting.
The Problematic Protocol

The Members of Parliament hardly had time overnight to read the Draft Agreement in its entirety. Instead, they rushed to read the “Protocol on Ireland/Northern Ireland” because they knew that this had been the most controversial element in the negotiations between the United Kingdom and the European Union.

The Protocol recalls in its preamble that “the Withdrawal Agreement… does not aim at establishing a permanent future relationship between the Union and the United Kingdom” while noting that both parties recognize the need to maintain the “soft border” that exists between Northern Ireland, as an integral part of the United Kingdom, and the Irish Republic. Although it is hoped that that “permanent future relationship” will have been negotiated by the end of the “transition period” during which the United Kingdom completes its withdrawal from the EU, this may not happen. The aim of the Protocol, therefore, is to serve, if necessary, as a “backstop” arrangement to preserve the soft border even after the transition period while negotiations on the permanent future relationship are completed.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13333/interpol-president-election-russia

It is well-established that Russia has abused Interpol as a tool to persecute abroad the political opponents of the ruling Russian regime who have been forced to emigrate.

Such an influential organization as Interpol cannot be led by a representative and functionary of an unfree nation that violates the rights and freedoms of its own citizens, violates its international obligations, annexes the territories of other states, and is currently the protagonist of several wars of aggression.

Would Interpol target these people on Russian request? It is difficult to imagine otherwise should a Russian official becomes the head of Interpol. The candidate for the post of the head of Interpol also raises questions. Alexander Prokopchuk is a major general of the Russian police, an organization known for its corruption and persecution of representatives of the Russian opposition.

On November 21, the election of a new President of Interpol will take place. The leading candidate for this post is the representative of the Russian Federation, Major General of the Russian Police Alexander Prokopchuk. The Standing Committee of the Free Russia Forum expresses its categorical protest against the election of this candidate to the post of head of Interpol. Such an influential organization as Interpol cannot be led by a representative and functionary of an unfree nation that violates the rights and freedoms of its own citizens, violates its international obligations, annexes the territories of other states, and is currently the protagonist of several wars of aggression.

It is well-established that Russia has abused Interpol as a tool to persecute abroad the political opponents of the ruling Russian regime who have been forced to emigrate. Critics and other targets of the Putin regime residing outside of Russia have repeatedly been victimized by Interpol mechanisms such as Red Notices and “diffusion” notices, as a result of which they were detained and put through lengthy legal procedures before they managed to convince Interpol of the political nature of their persecution — often requiring political intervention on their behalf.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13334/germany-domestic-intelligence

Sinan Selen, a 46-year-old Istanbul-born counter-terrorism expert, will be the first Muslim to fill a top leadership position within Germany’s intelligence community.

Throughout his government career, Selen has been resolute in confronting Islamic fundamentalists in Germany. He also led efforts at the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) to monitor the Turkish nationalist Milli Görüs, an influential Islamist movement strongly opposed to Muslim integration into European society.

The leadership changes at the BfV were spurred by a cellphone video that purportedly showed right-wing mobs attacking migrants over the murder of a German citizen in Chemnitz by two failed asylum seekers. According to the respected blog Tichys Einblick, the video actually documented migrants attacking Germans, not Germans “hunting” migrants.

Chancellor Angela Merkel has appointed a Turkish immigrant to fill the second-highest position in Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, BfV).

As the BfV’s new vice president, Sinan Selen, a 46-year-old Istanbul-born counter-terrorism expert, will be the first Muslim to fill a top leadership position within Germany’s intelligence community.

The appointment comes just weeks after Merkel fired BfV President Hans-Georg Maaßen for publicly defending the anti-mass-migration party Alternative for Germany (AfD) against attacks from Merkel and her junior coalition partner, the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD).

By choosing Selen, Merkel appears to be trying to achieve several objectives. First, she seems to be attempting to save her floundering government by placating the SPD, which has demanded that the domestic intelligence agency begin monitoring the AfD party, and which has called for more people with a “migration background” in leadership positions at federal agencies.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271992/asia-bibi-and-plight-pakistani-christians-jack-kerwick

Media talking heads and self-appointed monitors of “hate” have been waxing hysterical over what they claim is a rising tide of “hate crimes” nationwide, a phenomenon, they want for us to believe, provoked by the rhetoric of President Donald J. Trump.

This claim, of course, is nonsense. Yet there’s another point that I wish to make here.

While the Western world has been deluged with media coverage regarding the legions of Muslims that fled to Europe from the oppression that they allegedly suffered in their own homelands, as well as with stories (many of which have been revealed as hoaxes) of Christians victimizing religious minorities in the streets of America, media elites never make a sound concerning the oppression that Christians around the world really suffer at the hands of the non-Christian majorities with which they co-exist.

Take Asia Bibi as just one example of this endemic phenomenon. This young woman’s experience is illustrative of that endured by numerous Christians throughout Bibi’s home country of Pakistan and throughout the Islamic world. Hers is worth drawing attention to, however, for more people are increasingly becoming familiar with Bibi’s name.

Bibi is a Pakistani woman, a mother of five children, and a member of Pakistan’s Christian minority. In 2009, she was arrested. The following year, Bibi was found guilty of the blasphemy charges that had been brought against her and she was sentenced to…death.

Bibi had been charged by her co-workers with having made offensive remarks about Muhammad and the Quran. They had ordered her to fetch them some water. She did. But after Bibi drank from it, they refused to do so and mocked her for having “defiled” the drink. Bibi’s co-workers ordered her to convert to Islam. It was then that Bibi had responded that it is they, her harassers, who should convert, for while Jesus saved humanity from its sins, what had Muhammad ever done for humanity, Bibi asked.

http://standpointmag.co.uk/node/7301/full

The essence of the position of British prime minister is that at least in theory, and quite often in practice, he or she can be dismissed at a moment’s notice. In the midst of Downing Street, the prime minister is in death. It is very difficult to stay at the top for long. The average length of time that a PM has spent in office, not always in a single stint, is five and a half years. Nor has the Fixed-term Parliaments Act, passed in 2011 so the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats could carry on their coalition for a full five years without each party fearing the other might spring a general election on it, abolished this sudden-death tradition. Cameron felt obliged to declare at breakfast-time on the morning after the EU referendum that he would not be carrying on. He had encompassed his own downfall by a different but no less deadly method from the traditional overthrow either by voters in a general election (in recent decades, James Callaghan, John Major and Gordon Brown have gone in that way), or by rebels within the PM’s own party who reckon the leader has become an electoral liability (Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair).

This is part of our understanding of liberty. We are a free country because we can at any moment get rid of whoever is in charge. Throughout her 11 years and 209 days in power, Margaret Thatcher could have been chucked overboard, and she knew it. At the start of the 1980s, when unemployment rose to three million and great swathes of British industry collapsed, the general view was that unless, like Edward Heath, she did a U-turn, she was finished. The Falklands War, the miners’ strike, the Brighton bomb and the Westland affair could all have precipitated her downfall long before the poll tax and disagreements about Europe brought about her defeat by her own MPs. Many of her colleagues detested her, she managed to fall out even with ministers such as Nigel Lawson and Geoffrey Howe who agreed with most of what she was doing, and the longer her leadership went on, the more unbearable it seemed to her rivals that she was allowing none of them a turn at being prime minister. In retrospect, it is surprising, not that she was thrown overboard at the end of 1990, but that she lasted so long.

We need a crisis, or a series of crises, in part because these can be turned into opportunities to turn out the prime minister, and sometimes the whole government. Commentators tend to deplore whatever difficulties we happen to be passing through, lamenting that these are the worst since the Second World War, or at least since Suez, and conveniently overlooking all the troubles which have occurred since then, which seemed bad enough at the time. They write on the unspoken assumption, welcome to whoever is in power at the time, that security is the highest political good. A degree of security is of course desirable, indeed necessary, but too much is dangerous to liberty. Parliamentary politics would perish, or atrophy, if we had nothing serious to argue about. The prime minister ought almost always to be in danger, at risk of being eclipsed by figures within his or her own party as well as by the leader of the opposition.

Conservative backwoodsmen ended up treating one of their most remarkable leaders, Robert Peel, as a renegade, despite the formative role he had played in the creation of their party. Labour MPs came to regard Ramsay MacDonald, who had done so much to create and lead their parliamentary party, as the worst traitor of all. The role of prime minister is essentially a sacrificial one.

Not that those who compete against each other for it are inclined to see it in this light. They believe they will be powerful, and they assure us they have the solutions we seek, however disappointing their predecessors may have proved. And it is true that most of them have a honeymoon period during which we allow ourselves to share in their optimism, for as voters we are torn between conflicting impulses. We long to believe we have found a saviour, but are determined to overthrow whoever fails to save us. We allow the stage to be dominated for a time by a successful prime minister, but then restore equality, for which all democracies have a deep desire, by dragging that individual back down to our own level, often with brutal abruptness.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/11/emmanuel-macron-pan-european-army-crackpot-idea/

His idea of a pan-European army is as crackpot as it is ungracious.

Almost everything French president Emmanuel Macron has said recently on the topic of foreign affairs, the United States, and nationalism and patriotism is silly. He implicitly rebukes Donald Trump for praising the idea of nationalism as a creed in which citizens of sovereign nations expect their leaders to put the interests of their fellow citizens first and those of other nations second. And while critiquing nationalism, Macron nonetheless talks and acts as though he is an insecure French chauvinist of the first order.

The French president suffers from the usual dreams of some sort of European “empire” — Caesar, Napoleon, Hitler . . . Brussels? He probably envisions a new Rome steered by French cultural elites whose wisdom, style, and sophistication would substitute for polluting tanks and bombers, and who would play Greece’s robed philosophers to Europe’s Roman legions: “It’s about Europe having to become a kind of empire, as China is. And how the U.S. is.”

But aside from the fact that the immigration-wary eastern and financially strapped southern Europeans are increasingly skeptical of northern European imperial ecumenicalism, can Macron cite any “empire” in the past — Persian, Roman, Ottoman, British — that was not first and foremost “nationalist”?

Would an envisioned non-nationalist “European empire” put the interests of the United States or China on an equal plane with its own? Would it follow U.N. dictates? Does Macron object to nationalism only because other nationalists are more powerful than he is, with his own brand of nationalism (whether defined as French or Europe Unionist)? And does he therefore seek competitive clout through a nationalist, imperial European project?

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13328/turkey-us-conflict-contained

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said that Turkey will not abide by the renewed U.S. sanctions on Iran’s oil and shipping industries, claiming that they are “steps aimed at unbalancing the world.”

U.S. President Donald Trump, in the same speech in which he hailed Erdoğan as a “friend and a tough, smart man,” ruled out the possibility of Gülen’s extradition.

The future actually looks potentially gloomier as the future of Syria shapes up and Erdoğan might well switch back to more radical anti-Western rhetoric ahead of critical local elections in March.

Only three months ago Turkey and its NATO ally the United States had too many issues about which to disagree: They had major divergences over Syria; they had different views on Turkey’s plans to deploy the Russian-made S-400 air defense system on NATO soil; they had mutual sanctions on top government officials due to Turkey’s refusal to free Andrew Brunson, an American evangelical Christian pastor living in Turkey who faced bogus charges of terrorism and espionage; they had a potential U.S. decision to block delivery to Turkey of arms systems, including the F-35 stealth fighter; they had potential U.S. sanctions on a Turkish public bank; the U.S. had doubled tariffs on Turkish steel and aluminium; a Turkish boycott on U.S. electronics; major differences over Syrian Kurds; and Turkey’s persistent demands for the extradition of Fethullah Gülen, a Muslim cleric who is Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s political nemesis, living in self-exile in Pennsylvania.

Three months later, there is not much left of the anti-American euphoria in Turkey. Erdoğan has already stopped accusing the U.S. of waging economic warfare against Turkey. For his part, President Donald Trump has said, “We’re having a very good moment with Turkey … He [Erdoğan] is a friend of mine. He’s a strong man, he’s tough man, and he’s a smart man.”

What has changed so radically in three months to lift up the relationship from its worst tensions in decades to such warmth? Not much.

Under U.S. pressure, Turkey released Pastor Andrew Brunson; Turkey’s currency, the lira, has since steadied, and there is no more Turkish talk of an American “economic warfare.” Yet Ankara and Washington still have a rich menu of problems to be resolved. Washington has not had an ambassador in Ankara for more than a year now, a first in the modern history of U.S.-Turkish relations. But there is more.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13262/eu-confidence-game

The first problem of the European Court of Human Rights decision against Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff is that it means that, at least in cases of blasphemy, truth is not a defence.

Such a judgement hands over the decision on what is or is not allowed to be said not to a European or national court, but to whoever can claim, plausibly or otherwise, that another individual has risked “the peace.”

There have been similar mobster tricks tried for some years now. They all run on the old claim, “I’m not mad with you myself; I’m just holding my friend back here.”

At the start of this decade, a minor story occurred that set the scene for the years that have followed. In 2010, a Saudi lawyer named Faisal Yamani wrote to the Danish newspapers that had published cartoons of Islam’s prophet, Mohammed. Claiming to act on behalf of 95,000 descendants of Mohammed, the Saudi lawyer said that the cartoons were defamatory and that legal proceedings would thereby begin.

However, everything about the supposed legal claim reeked. How had Mr Yamani located all these descendants? How had he come up with exactly 95,000 of them? And how could you claim that a statement about somebody who died 1,400 years ago was “defamatory”? Legally, one cannot “defame” the dead.

Everything about the claim was laughable Yet it had its desired effect. At least one Danish paper — Politiken — swiftly issued an apology for republishing the cartoons. So Mr Yamani got what he wanted. He had (one might suggest) conjured up a set of alleged victims and cobbled together an alleged offence, but no matter, because he also got a European newspaper to fold in no seconds flat. It was an interesting probe of the European system of justice — and a good example of submission. And a fine scene-setting precedent for the decade that has followed.

Now, eight years later, an even greater act of submission has come along. This one not imposed from some dodgy Saudi lawyer, but from the highest court in Europe.