RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2018/11/16/the-menace-of-

“The enemies of Western civilization fear nationalism, and do their best to prop up soppy pathological altruists like Macron….”

There is an old joke that if you look up French military victories on Google, it says nothing can be found, and asks “Did you mean French military defeats?” Back when Google was an accurate search engine, the result would be imaginable. Given, however, that looking up “American inventors” on Google now produces a parade of nobodies apparently selected only on the basis of their skin color, one imagines Google probably has found a way to turn Hitler’s destruction of the Maginot Line into the French merely advancing in an alternative direction. Which is to say, the wrong direction.

That is as good a description of French President Emmanuel Macron’s recent speech at the World War I centennial, and of the tendency he exemplifies, as any I can think of in Western thought: advancing in the wrong direction.

The quote that everyone has seized on from Macron’s otherwise tedious and workmanlike speech has since been reproduced on Macron’s Twitter feed:

It is worth noting, as a matter of academic interest, that a literal translation of the original quote does not say that nationalism is merely a betrayal of patriotism: it says, instead, that “nationalisme en est la trahison,” i.e., “nationalism is treason.”

No doubt Bill Kristol will sue Macron for stealing his lines.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/11/17/the-bells

If I had one British pound for each time I was convinced of Prime Minister Theresa May’s end, I could purchase premium tickets to an Evening with Bill and Hillary Clinton. That abject cultural wreck dutifully has been cancelled. Though, the evening with Bill and Hillary stutters on.

Theresa May will go down as the most consequential prime minister in recent British history. For all the wrong reasons.

Yet, at the time of writing, May remains in office, not in power, as the once-ruthless Conservative party sharpens its pencils to the pitter-patter drip-feed of no-confidence letters. The slow death of Theresa May drips and drips and drips.

She is the Tinder date that just won’t leave. It was nice. Thanks for the Rioja. But I have work now. Please hail an Uber. I’ll pay.

But Theresa is in it for the wedding bells. After her Brexit secretary Dominic Raab resigned on Thursday morning, he was followed soon by another cabinet member, Esther McVey.

May didn’t take the brutal hint. Instead, just hours later, she told the nation she would resist any vote of confidence: “Am I going to see this through? Yes.”

This is despite arch-Euroskeptic Jacob Rees-Mogg, head of the influential European Research Group, handing in his own letter of no-confidence, and imploring his 80-plus lawmakers to do the same. So far, 20 Conservatives have publicly demanded she go.

Math doesn’t lie. May already relies on the minor Democratic Unionist Party to prop up her minority government. Without the ERG, her Brexit deal won’t get through parliament. May will be fortunate to get through the weekend.

Mogg’s letter to Sir Graham Brady, chairman of the 1922 Committee—a political murder squad—could force a leadership challenge, if the required 15 percent of the Parliamentary party—48 letters from lawmakers—hits the mat. A political death panel could convene next week.

Not only is she now opposed by most of her own party, but twice as many British people oppose her deal than support it. The Uber is beeping outside. Theresa just wants to chat. Theresa isn’t leaving.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/11/asia-bibi-blasphemy-laws-western-asylum/

Pakistan has released the purported blasphemer against Islam. Now what nation will have the courage to grant her asylum?

Asia Bibi, the Catholic mother imprisoned in Pakistan for nine years and condemned to hang for violating that country’s strict blasphemy law, has drawn broad sympathy throughout the West. Lacking credible evidence, and despite her denials, lower courts plainly yielded to Islamist pressure in making the illiterate field hand the first Pakistani woman to be given a death sentence for insulting Islam’s prophet, Mohammed. Then on October 31, Bibi finally received justice in an acquittal by Pakistan’s supreme court. But when she was released a week later, she found that mobs were baying for her blood throughout Pakistan — and, most surprisingly, that the West held out no firm offer of a safe haven.

Islamabad has given assurances that Bibi has been taken to a secret, secure location inside Pakistan, pending a permanent place of refuge. But her escape seems stalled. The West’s response so far of passive hand-wringing while Bibi faces mortal danger indicates more than poor planning; it shows a failure to fully comprehend the deeply radicalizing effects of the blasphemy taboo within the world’s second-largest Muslim nation — and the inroads it has made in the West.

Western leaders have consistently expressed concern for Bibi during her nearly decade-long ordeal. Human-rights advocates, such as the indefatigable Lord David Alton, who just last month met personally in Pakistan with the chief justice, have vigorously championed Bibi in the British parliament. Yet when the moment of truth arrived, London quickly decided it would not give her asylum owing to security concerns. The U.K. has its own radical Islamist leaders within its million-strong Pakistani community to worry about, including Anjem Choudary, paroled last month following a terror-law conviction. Lord Alton called the British decision “craven.”

In Paris, the city hall had an enlarged photo of Bibi by its front entrance when I last visited several years ago, and France has long been discussed as a place of asylum for her. But deadly Islamist attacks against Charlie Hebdo’s editors for blasphemy, and most recently against French Jews, make asylum there unthinkable. Last week Italy and Canada revealed their engagement in “sensitive” multilateral talks on Bibi’s case, but so far neither has offered an actual legal grant of asylum. Also last week, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau apologized for Canada’s turning away the MS St. Louis and its 907 desperate Jewish passengers seeking refuge from German Nazis 79 years ago. Hopefully, he will apply the St. Louis lesson to throw a lifeline to Bibi.

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/middle-east-watch/world-should-back-trumps-strategy-iran-36002

The JCPOA has not engendered a more moderate stance on the part of the Islamic regime, which has become more aggressive in the pursuit of its regional aspirations across the Middle East.

The round of sanctions slapped on Iran in early November—targeting the oil and energy sectors, banks and shipping companies—are the latest step in the pressure campaign that the Trump administration has been mounting on Iran since it came into office in early 2017, and with greater impetus since it left the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), known as the Iran nuclear deal, in May 2018.

The goal of the Trump administration is primarily to leverage the pressure of these sanctions to compel the Iranian regime to negotiate a much improved nuclear deal. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has noted that reimposing the sanctions that were lifted as part of the 2015 nuclear deal is also designed to ensure that the regime has fewer resources with which to continue to support terror and its other aggressive activities throughout the region, in line with its declared hegemonic aspirations.

Cutting off resources is a rather straightforward aim that has a good chance of achieving the desired result. With regard to the expected effectiveness of sanctions as a means of bringing Iran back to the table to renegotiate the nuclear deal, the situation is more complicated. It depends on the regime’s assessment as to whether it can withstand the pressure—at least until a new president is elected in 2020; one that might adopt a more favorable approach toward Iran—or whether it concludes that it cannot do so, and is compelled to make additional nuclear concessions in order to ease the pressure.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/11/bolsonaro_is_right_about_the_cuban_doctors.html

For years, Cuba has sent doctors to Brazil. It started in 2013 under an agreement between the Castro regime and Brazil’s leftist government. The doctors were sent to poor areas. In reality, it was just another source of hard currency for the Cuban government.

Brazil’s President-elect Bolsonaro wants to change the arrangement and Cuba does not like it.

This is his tweet.

This is the news report from The Guardian:

Mr Bolsonaro said Brazil would offer asylum to Cuban doctors who wished to stay in Brazil.

“This is slave labour,” he said. “I couldn’t be an accomplice of that.”

https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/2018/December/43/12/magazine/article/10845837/

Jair Bolsonaro won the presidential election in Brazil on October 28 with 55 percent of the vote. The former army captain triumphed over Fernando Haddad of the leftist Workers’ Party pledging to fight crime and corruption, to end affirmative action for “disadvantaged minorities,” and to shatter the straitjacketed discourse on race and sexuality. The leader of the fourth-largest democracy has vowed to uphold traditional family, patriotism, Christian faith, and law and order.

From the standpoint of the Western elite, Bolsonaro’s views are beyond the pale.

“I will not fight nor discriminate,” he said in 2002, “but if I see two men kissing in the street, I’ll hit them.”

“I’m homophobic, yes,” he reiterated some years later, “and very proud of it if it is to defend children in schools.”

“I’d rather have my son die in an accident,” he declared in 2010, “than show up with some mustachioed guy!”

“Brazil is a Christian country,” Bolsonaro insists. “God above everyone! It is not this story, this little story of secular state. It is a Christian state, and if a minority is against it, then move!”

What would he do if his son fell in love with a black woman? The question was put to Bolsonaro in 2011. “I do not run that risk as my children were very well raised,” he replied. In 2017, he promised to end all indigenous and slave-descended quota programs. “Has anyone ever seen a Japanese begging for charity?” he asked. Of course not, “because it’s a race that has shame. It’s not like this race that’s down here, or like a minority ruminating here on the side.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13300/iran-sanctions-palestinians

What the Hamas official is actually saying is that thanks to Iran’s backing, Hamas continues to hold hostage the two million residents of the Gaza Strip, whose lives have been literally destroyed by the Hamas leaders’ policies.

The message that Hamas and PIJ are sounding is: How dare the US administration impose sanctions on Iran, the only country that is helping us in our effort to continue our terrorist attacks against Israel?

The renewed US sanctions on Iran are good news, however, for many Arabs and Muslims who feel threatened by Tehran’s actions and rhetoric. Iran has long been systematically working towards undermining moderate Arabs and Muslims in the region.

The Palestinian Authority and Abbas are actually attacking a US administration that is seeking to undermine the enemies of Abbas: Hamas and Iran. The Palestinian Authority is, thus, aligning itself with its own enemies.

If the United States is worried about imposing harsher sanctions on Iran, it should not give those concerns a second thought. Being unpopular with people who do not wish you well is probably the price of true leadership.

Those who are worried, and should be worried, are Iran and its Palestinian allies and friends.

The US administration has decided to reinstate the sanctions against Tehran that were removed under the 2015 “nuclear deal.” These sanctions are part of Washington’s effort to curb Iran’s missile and nuclear programs and diminish its influence in the Middle East.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13299/erdogan-charm-offensive

“Turkey remains the world’s worst jailer for the second consecutive year, with 73 journalists behind bars, compared with 81 last year. Dozens more still face trial, and fresh arrests take place regularly.” — The Committee to Protect Journalists, December 2017.

For Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, apparently, as for the Saudis, there are “good journalists” and “bad journalists.” He often refers to the latter group as “terrorists” and “traitors.”

Erdoğan has tried so hard to use the murder of the Saudi journalist, Khashoggi, for a charm offensive mission to polish his badly tarnished image in the Western world. He is still trying hard to play the game. Sorry, Mr. President: It just does not work.

For weeks after the October 2 disappearance of a Saudi journalist, Jamal Khashoggi, after he entered the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has behaved like the leader of a Western democracy: He feared there might have been a murder of the Saudi journalist, which Saudi officials later admitted; speaking loud and louder, he asked the Saudi authorities to bring the journalist’s killers to justice; he offered them a trial in Turkey, and asked for their extradition; he urged the House of Saud to find and hand over to justice those who may have ordered the murder. He also shared audio evidence of the murder with Western leaders. Yet Erdoğan’s public image in the more civilized parts of the world looks closer to that of the Saudi royals than to any Western leader. For that, he has can only himself to blame.

“Erdoğan championing the basic human rights of a journalist” sounds grossly oxymoronic. In its annual report in December, the Committee to Protect Journalists wrote:

“Turkey remains the world’s worst jailer for the second consecutive year, with 73 journalists behind bars, compared with 81 last year. Dozens more still face trial, and fresh arrests take place regularly”.

In Turkey, during the two-year state of emergency after a failed coup against Erdoğan’s government in July 2016, more than 100,000 people have been imprisoned, including academics, lawyers, journalists and opposition politicians. More than 50,000 people remain in prison, according to Amnesty International, and 100,000 have been purged from government service. The Vienna-based International Press Institute tweeted on Oct. 25: “Gruesome nature of #Khashoggi murder should not distract from #Turkey’s own persecution of journalists”.