RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.thejc.com/comment/comment/does-corbyn-know-who-wrote-this-about-jerusalem-1.470356

In the main annual (British) Labour Party conference hall in Liverpool on Wednesday it seemed there were more Palestinian flags being waved than at a Hamas rally in Gaza, or at the opening session of the Palestinian Parliament at Ramallah.

The vote by party members to debate Palestine was the fourth most popular after housing, schools, and justice for the Windrush generation. The subject of “Palestine” gained more votes (188,000) than the issues of Brexit, and the National Health Service.

The chanting by Labour activists included the Hamas and Islamic Jihad slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free” (i.e. from the river Jordan to the Mediterranean sea, including Tel Aviv, all of Israel should be destroyed).

One of the many lies told about Israel among left-wing Labour activists is that there were almost no Jews there before The Holocaust.

But I wonder how many of them (including Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn himself) know who wrote the following in 1854?

“The sedentary population of Jerusalem numbers about 15,500 souls, of whom 4,000 are Mussulmans [Muslims] and 8,000 Jews. The Mussulmans, forming about a fourth part of the whole, and consisting of Turks, Arabs and Moors, are, of course, the masters in every respect, as they are in no way affected with the weakness of their Government at Constantinople.

The TV pictures with the interview above don’t show the sea of Palestinian flags at the Labour party annual conference. You can see them here

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-45634379

At this week’s Labour conference, there were no mass flag wavings for the Kurds or Tibetans or Baluchis or Catalans or Abkhazians or South Ossetians or Western Saharans or Nagorno-Karabakh Azeris or Chechens or Papuans, or the more than 100 other independence movements throughout the world.

(In case the BBC forgot to report on it, over 500,000 Papuans have been killed, and thousands more have been raped, tortured and imprisoned by the Indonesian military in the last 50 years.)

There were no mention of Syria or Yemen, where millions of children are starving.

There were no British flags anywhere to be seen among delegates (below).

https://pjmedia.com/trending/netanyahu-drops-iran-bombshell-at-un/

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the UN General Assembly that there exists a secret Iranian nuclear facility in Tehran that proves the Iranians have not given up their ambition to build a nuclear weapon despite the agreement they signed in 2015 with western powers.

The previously undisclosed facility is a warehouse in Iran that Netanyahu says housed 33 pounds of nuclear material. The storage facility is close to an atomic archive that Netanyahu exposed last April after a daring raid by Israeli intelligence netted thousands of nuclear-related documents.

Reuters quotes Netanyahu in his speech saying,

“Since we raided the atomic archive, they’ve been busy cleaning out the atomic warehouse. Just last month they removed 15 kilograms of radioactive material. You know what they did with it?” he said. “They took it out and they spread it around Tehran in an effort to hide the evidence.”

“This site contained as much as 300 tonnes – 300 tonnes – of nuclear-related equipment and materiel,” he said.

The International Atomic Agency (IAEA) has repeatedly said Tehran was abiding by its commitments to the deal, formally called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), including in a document reviewed by Reuters on Aug. 30.

France, Britain, Germany, China and Russia have stayed in the pact, vowing to save it despite the restoration of U.S. sanctions and this week discussing a barter mechanism they hope may allow Iran to circumvent the U.S. measures.

https://pjmedia.com/homeland-security/known-wolf-westminster-terror-attacker-was-on-radar-of-uk-authorities-since-2004/

An ongoing inquiry into the March 22, 2017 terror attack near the Houses of Parliament in Westminster has revealed that the UK’s MI5 spy service knew about attacker Khalid Masood and his connections to terrorists since 2004. However, an investigation of him had been dropped.

UK authorities now defend their decision to stop the investigation as “appropriate” despite his continued association with a banned organization.

The terror attack killed five and injured nearly 50 more. Masood ran over pedestrians, and then stabbed a police officer to death guarding the gates to Parliament’s entrance. Masood was shot and killed by police at the scene.

Just moments prior to the attack, Masood sent out a document entitled “Jihad” on WhatsApp that featured a picture on the cover of him standing in front of the Kaaba in Mecca.

The Daily Mail reports:

Masood’s phone number appeared in the contact list of one of the central figures in Operation Crevice, a plot to blow up the Ministry of Sound nightclub and Bluewater shopping centre in Kent using half a ton of ammonium nitrate fertiliser, in April 2004.

He continued to pop up as a link to a man associated with the Crevice plotters before appearing in another investigation six years later, as a potential facilitator for extremists travelling to Pakistan through Saudi Arabia.

But an MI5 witness told the hearing, from behind a green curtain, that the security service had taken the correct decision in closing their investigation into him in 2010 and did so two years later.

The MI5 officer, known only as Witness L, told the inquest that a person ‘subsequently identified’ as Khalid Masood had appeared in the contacts list for Waheed Mahmood, the man considered the spiritual leader of the fertiliser bombers…

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13022/europeanize-america

Europe did not invent racism and religious bigotry, but it surely perfected them.
Europeans lived for centuries under kings and emperors. They came to believe that power flowed from the top down. The “elite” decide what is best for the “common people” — the “masses” — and then cram it down their throats.
The “elite” send their children to the best schools and universities, and relegate the children of the “common people” to lousy schools, where they get lousy educations, which prepare them for lousy jobs, which pay lousy salaries, which leave them dependent on the government for a lifetime of “assistance.” But they expect the “common people” to be grateful for the “universal education” — and for the “assistance.”
The American idea of individuals being responsible and taking responsibility is utterly foreign to the “elite,” who seem much more comfortable with the European idea of infantilizing subjects to make them dependent on a parentified government to protect them, care for them, dole out money to them, and in general control their lives. If people cannot even choose their own light bulbs, toilets, or dishwasher detergent, in what sense are they free?

If Europeanize were not a word, we would have to invent it, because that is what many are doing to America. Remember when candidate Obama was asked if he believed America is exceptional? He answered yes, but only in the sense that Britain, Greece, and other nations are exceptional.

As Gilbert and Sullivan said, “When everyone is somebody, then no one is anybody.”

If every nation is exceptional, none is.

It is not that Obama and his friends really think America is unexceptional. They may well believe it is exceptional, but that it should not be. So they do everything they can to end its exceptional nature, and to make it resemble other nations. They are Europeanizing America.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/laugh-at-the-u-n-not-with-it-1538002997

Oh, how they laughed.

When President Trump told the United Nations General Assembly Tuesday that “in less than two years, my administration has accomplished more than almost any administration in the history of our country,” the delegates of the world couldn’t contain themselves. “I didn’t expect that reaction,” Mr. Trump responded to the laughter ringing through the hall, “but that’s OK.”

Mr. Trump’s boast merited an eye roll, but I’d laugh right back at the U.N. It deserves it.

Who but the U.N. would elect some of the world’s leading human-rights abusers—Saudi Arabia, China, Venezuela, Pakistan and others—to run a Human Rights Council and lecture the rest of us? In 2016 many of these members even tried to silence Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch, in midsentence as he exposed their hypocrisy.

Who but the U.N. would elect the Islamic Republic of Iran to the executive board of its agency “dedicated to gender equality and the empowerment of women”? The World Economic Forum ranks Iran 140th out of 144 nations in parity between the sexes for a reason. Its regime arrests and beats women who peacefully protest for their rights. It imprisons and tortures women for removing their headscarves. Discrimination is written into every area of Iran’s civil code, from marriage and divorce to employment.

http://quadrant.org.au/opinion/bennelong-papers/2018/09/three-false-waves-australian-history/

The divisive myth that modern Australia is the result of three sequential ‘nations’ — Aboriginal, European and post-war immigrant — has seduced many, most recently Paul Kelly, who believes it ‘true and inclusive’. There has been only one nation, brought into being at Federation.

Morrison should reference the best recent formulation of Australian identity and history, courtesy of Noel Pearson, who argues the nation embodies three traditions: the first Australians, who roamed this continent for 65,000 years, long before the ages of Babylon, Athens and Rome; the British inheritance dating from the voyages of James Cook, the initial colony at Sydney Cove, the rise of British-derived laws, values and institutions; and the immigrant tradition, the arrival of people from many nations that so enriched the culture and led to a multicultural nation. Pearson’s concept is true and it is inclusive. It should appeal to the entire nation, from conservative to progressive.
—Paul Kelly in The Australian, September 26, 2018, on Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s call to retain Australia Day on January 26 but also observe a new public holiday to commemorate indigenous people.

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There are a number of problems with this proposal from journalist Paul Kelly. For a start, it is wrong to say the concept originated with Noel Pearson; second, it provides a seriously mistaken view of the formation of the Australian nation; and third, it is not hard to show the notion fosters division not inclusion.

Nonetheless, Kelly is right to say the idea should appeal to both conservatives and progressives, since it has already done so for almost twenty years now. John Howard used the same terminology in 1999 when he sought to include in the preamble of the Constitution the words ‘honouring Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders, the nation’s first people’. I have heard both John Howard and Tony Abbott repeat this terminology several times since then, providing the same ‘Three Waves’ version of what they call the ‘national story’, though without knowing its real origins.

The idea that Aborigines are the nation’s first people is a version of Australian history devised not by Noel Pearson but the left-wing economist Herbert Cole ‘Nugget’ Coombs in 1982. As president of the Aboriginal Treaty Committee, he addressed the National Press Club on Australia Day that year, giving a speech titled ‘The Three Waves and Australian Identity’. Coombs said Australian history was defined by three distinct human migrations: the Aborigines who arrived some 40,000 years ago; the Anglo-Celtic migrants from the British Isles who came in 1788 and thereafter; and the third wave, the more ethnically mixed migrants of the period after the 1939-45 world war.

Coombs did not go to the National Press Club to lecture his audience about Australian demography. His aim was to score moral and political points, and he laid down a narrative that many people have found compelling ever since.

On the one hand, he described the continent when Aborigines dominated it as a paradise where people were in harmony both with nature and one another.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/09/china-naval-power-growing-new-doctrines-new-missions/

Over time, the expanded navy will push China to new doctrines and new missions.

With the launch of its second aircraft carrier, China has enhanced its position in the front ranks of military powers and prompted questions as to the ultimate purpose of its navy. The Chinese navy, formally known as the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN), is expanding and will be doing so for years — decades — to come. Some of this is the natural consequence of being the navy of a country in economic ascendancy. Some of this is bureaucratic politics; the PLA is represented on the Communist Party Central Committee, and the PLA answers to the Chinese Communist Party, not the Chinese government. But some of this, the interesting part, is what’s left after one accounts for normal economic growth and institutional self-interest. We might not just be seeing an updated navy or a more potent navy; we might be seeing a different navy, with a different mission.

The axiom here is that in the short run, doctrine determines capabilities, but in the long run, capabilities determine doctrine.

So in the short run, the PLAN will acquire the navy it needs to do its job, already expanding to resupply and safeguard the growing Chinese base structure in the South China Sea. And with one eye on the United States, the PLAN will advocate internally for more ships, bigger ships, better ships, along a new generation of ballistic missiles, all with enhanced range, speed, and lethality. The U.S. military terms the Chinese strategy A2/AD, for “anti-access/area denial.” In other words, China need not match the U.S. ship-for-ship or weapon-for-weapon; it can still throw quite a punch. None of this should surprise military analysts. As countries grow, they seek to project power.

But in the long run, this new navy will itself push the PLAN to new doctrines and new missions. No longer just territorial defense. No longer just Sea Lines of Communication, those maritime arteries that facilitate commerce and military access. No longer just to intimidate or defeat countries in its near abroad, the “first island chain” in PLAN lexicon. Over the next few decades, China will increasingly discover that it has a broader mission.

President Trump’s speech at the United Nations on Tuesday is one of the greatest political speeches ever delivered in peacetime.

Maybe you are like those members of the audience seated in the General Assembly who tittered when the president began his speech noting that, “In less than two years, my administration has accomplished more than almost any administration in the history of our country.”

The bureaucrats shifting upon their glutei maximi upon the plush receptacles provided by the custodians of the United Nations may have found the president’s frank statement risible. But their hilarity detracts not one iota from the truth of his observation.

What President Trump said was not braggadocio. It was the unvarnished truth.

What Were They Laughing About Again?
In less than two years, the United States has added some $10 trillion in wealth to its economy. Four million new jobs have been created, and unemployment has plummeted to historic lows. Consumer confidence has soared, while tax reform has put more money in the pockets of average Americans and turbocharged American businesses.

Meanwhile, the President’s attention to the United States military has reversed the decay orchestrated by the Obama Administration, upping military spending to $700 billion this year, $716 billion next year. In short, “the United States is stronger, safer, and a richer country than it was when I assumed office less than two years ago.”

Giggle away, ye bureaucrats, giggle away.

So it is with the president’s speech. Barack Obama is reputed to be an impressive orator. But he never gave a speech that, in substance, could hold a candle to President Trump’s speeches at Warsaw, at Riyadh, before the joint session of Congress last year, or indeed his “rocket man” speech at the United Nations. And this topped them all for forcefulness, clarity, and wisdom.

The forcefulness and clarity, I believe, are acknowledged by everyone, even the president’s opponents. Emblematic passages include his description of ISIS “bloodthirsty killers,” his characterization of Iran as a “brutal regime,” the “world’s leading sponsor of terrorism,” whose leaders “sow chaos, death, and destruction” and “plunder the nation’s resources to enrich themselves and to spread mayhem across the Middle East and far beyond.” All this is patently true, but one is not supposed to utter such things on the floor of the General Assembly.

This is not the usual language of diplomacy. It is the frank argot of truth: a tongue rarely heard in the echo-chambers of the United Nations with its squadrons of translators who translate clichés from one language into another swiftly, accurately, and inconsequentially. How refreshing—though admittedly, how startling it must have been to hear someone deliver an entire speech without lying.