RUTHFULLY YOURS

WASHINGTON — U.S. Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley lashed out at the UN Security Council during a Tuesday briefing on the humanitarian crisis in Syria for not being “responsible” and acting against the Assad regime and his allies Russia and Iran as they ignored a UN ceasefire.

“Siege. Starve. And surrender. This is the awful, unceasing rhythm of the Syrian war. As we meet here today, the third step – surrender – is taking place in eastern Ghouta. After years of enduring siege and starvation, residents are surrendering eastern Ghouta. The terrible irony of this moment must be stated and acknowledged: in the 30 days since the Security Council demanded a ceasefire, the bombardment of the people of eastern Ghouta has only increased. And now, at the end of the so-called ceasefire, eastern Ghouta has nearly fallen,” Haley said.

“History will not be kind when it judges the effectiveness of this Council in relieving the suffering of the Syrian people. Seventeen hundred Syrian civilians were killed in just the last month alone. Hospitals and ambulances are deliberately targeted with bombs and artillery. Schools are hit, like the school in eastern Ghouta that was bombed just last week, killing 15 children. Siege. Starve. And surrender,” she added.

About 1,700 civilians have been killed in the city over the past month; about 500 of the dead were women and children.

“I would ask my Security Council colleagues to consider whether we are wrong when we point to Russian and Iranian forces working alongside Assad as being responsible for this slaughter,” Haley said. “Russia voted for the so-called ‘ceasefire’ in Syria last month. More than that, Russia took its time painstakingly negotiating the resolution demanding the ceasefire.”

Haley noted that during those negotiations “we could see our Russian friends constantly leaving the room to confer with their Syrian counterparts.”

“The possibilities for what was going on are only two – either Russia was informing their Syrian colleagues about the content of the negotiations, or Russia was taking directions from the Syrian colleagues about the content of the negotiations. Either way, Russia cynically negotiated a ceasefire it instantly defied,” she said.

Saying they’re bombing “terrorists” as they target civilian neighborhoods is a “transparent excuse for the Russians and Assad to maintain their assault,” the ambassador added.

“…Their blatantly false narratives will not keep us from telling the world about Russia’s central role in bombing the Syrian people into submission.”

Haley told the council “we should all be ashamed” for the fact that, with the ceasefire ignored, Assad and his allies now control 80 percent of Ghouta. CONTINUE AT SITE

The 85-year-old child Holocaust survivor murdered in her Paris apartment who I wrote about yesterday morning, has now been named as Mireille Knoll. Besides being repeatedly stabbed and burned, police sources say she had her throat slit, and that anti-Semitism was the prime motive for her murder. Two suspects have been arrested.

As a nine-year-old girl, she was one of the survivors of the notorious Vel d’hiv round-up of Paris’s Jews by French police acting for the Nazis in 1942 — events depicted in the 2010 film Sarah’s Key, starring Kristin Scott Thomas, which I recommended in this dispatch.

Knoll is the 11th person murdered in an act of anti-Semitism in France in the past 12 years, and many others, including children, have been badly injured.

A “silent march” outside her home in Paris, initiated by a French friend of mine and subscriber to this email list, is planned for tomorrow in her memory. It is expected to draw thousands of people. Unlike the march yesterday in London, in which only a handful of non-Jews joined British Jews in protesting anti-Semitism, significant numbers of French non-Jews are expected to join tomorrow’s vigil.

FRONT PAGE NEWS

Below are a selection of today’s British newspaper covers. Only the Guardian, in denial about the ugly nature of the British far left as ever, talks of ‘perceived’ anti-Semitism.

“MORE REMARKABLE IS THAT IT IS HAPPENING IN BRITAIN”

As the left-wing Israeli paper Haaretz writes:

The rally by Jews outside parliament in London was “unprecedented. The Jewish community in a modern Western democracy is accusing one of the country’s largest mainstream political parties and its leader, who may well be the country’s next prime minister, of tolerating and enabling anti-Semitism. More remarkable is that it is happening in Britain, where the leaders of the Jewish establishment are notoriously timid and routinely shy away from any hint of controversy. And to the Labour Party, which historically fought against any racism or discrimination against minorities…”

“There will be no happy end to this sorry saga. At 68, and after nearly half a century of political activism, Corbyn is too old and dogmatic to change. His attitudes can’t shift. In the some way he is incapable of acknowledging that Russia was almost certainly behind last month’s poisoning of a former double agent in Salisbury, even though his beloved Soviet Union was long ago replaced in Moscow by Vladimir Putin’s kleptocracy, he is incapable of grasping that many of his fellow-travelers on the radical left are judeophobic. And many of those who now cling to Corbyn as their savior are equally incapable of hearing any ill spoken of him.”

Unsurprisingly, Michelle Obama’s “hashtag” campaign from four years back failed abysmally to prevail upon the violent jihadist group Boko Haram to return the hundreds of Nigerian school girls who it abducted.

And while the American media gave audiences the impression that this attack by militant Muslims against young Christian girls was a one-off, the truth is that Boko Haram has been conducting a reign of terror upon Nigeria’s Christian inhabitants for years. When men are included, the total number of victims of Boko Haram is estimated to be at 20,000.

Some, like 17 year-old Esther, have managed to return home.

On a day that started like any other in October of 2015, Esther’s life would forever change. Esther’s mother had already passed away. She lived with her sick father, for whom she cared when she wasn’t in school. But the day that Boko Haram besieged her town would be the last day that she would ever see him alive.

Esther and her father heard the first gunshots. They tried to escape, but the terrorists already had their home surrounded. Open Doors shares what happened next:

“The rebel militants struck down her [Esther’s] father and left him in a heap on the ground. Esther became a Boko Haram captive. As rebel fighters carried off her and several other young women in their town to their hideout in the Sambisa Forest (where Boko Haram drove thousands of those they kidnapped), she continued to look back, her eyes fixed on her father.”

At Brooklands College in July 2017, Ahmed Hassan was awarded a prize as “student of the year”. He used the £20 Amazon voucher he received to purchase the first of the ingredients he needed to build his bomb.

Mr Justice Haddon-Cave seems almost to suggest that “violating” the law of the Quran and Islam is an offense in itself — one worth noting alongside the crime of putting a bomb on a packed commuter train.

That the judge’s pronouncement was superfluous is obvious. That it is incorrect is at least equally so. But worst is that it will further erode the belief of the citizenry in their lawmakers.

Last week, Ahmed Hassan was sentenced to a minimum term of 34 years in prison. The previous September, he had stepped onto the District line of the London Underground and left a homemade bomb on the train. At Parson’s Green tube station, the device detonated. Fortunately for the commuters, which included many children on their way to school, only the detonator of the bomb went off. On its own, it created a fireball which ran along the roof of the carriage, singeing the hair of many passengers and causing an immediate stampede away from the blast and a number of injuries. The main explosive material the of bomb, however, which was packed with shrapnel, including bolts, nails and knives, failed to detonate. Had it done so, the United Kingdom would have seen — for the fourth time in a few months — dozens more dead victims, including school children, carried out in body bags.

All this happened because of a young man of Iraqi origin, who should never have been in the UK in the first place. Hassan moved into Europe among the migrant flows of 2015. He ended up at the “Jungle” migrant camp in Calais — a place to which celebrities in the UK consistently go in order to implore the British people to take in the people who are living there. A particular cry of these celebrities (figures such as the actress Juliet Stevenson) is that the “child migrants” in particular should be taken in by the UK. The call is flawed, not least, in that it suggests that anybody who breaks the existing asylum procedures of the European Union and simply pushes their way to the front of the queue is somebody who will be rewarded for this act.

Two days after the Turkish military and allied jihadist forces took control of the Kurdish city of Afrin in northwestern Syria, Islamic State (ISIS) terrorists launched a major attack on Syrian regime forces in the eastern province of Deir Ezzor. The ISIS terrorists killed at least 25 soldiers and seized a large oil field.

Around the same time, ISIS militants captured a strategic district in the suburb of Syria’s capital, Damascus, where they killed more than 60 government troops.

In the Palestinian refugee camp of Yarmouk in southern Damascus, ISIS enjoys a rising popularity among local residents. The group also maintains a significant presence near the Israeli border, where it has at least one dangerous affiliate, the Khalid bin al-Walid Army.

Two days after the Turkish military and allied jihadist forces took control of the Kurdish city of Afrin in northwestern Syria, Islamic State (ISIS) terrorists launched a major attack on Syrian regime forces in the eastern province of Deir Ezzor. The ISIS terrorists killed at least 25 soldiers and seized a large oil field. Around the same time, ISIS militants captured a strategic district in the suburb of Syria’s capital, Damascus, where they killed more than 60 government troops.

These two recent advances signal a possible return by the extremist group that only months ago was thought to be largely defeated.

Since Turkey, a NATO ally, launched its Afrin offensive against the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) — a main U.S. ally in the fight against ISIS — U.S. officials have been warning that the fighting between two U.S. allies is distracting from the main mission, which is defeating ISIS.

“We are very concerned about the effect fighting there has had on our defeat ISIS efforts and would like to see an end to the hostilities before ISIS has the opportunity to regroup in eastern Syria,” said Pentagon spokesman U.S. Army Colonel Rob Manning, referring to the Turkish offensive against Kurds in Afrin.

The U.S. State Department is already convinced that the terror group has been rebuilding itself in some places in Syria.

A rejection of social democrats is reconfiguring the continent’s politics

Everyone has noticed the collapse of Europe’s social-democratic parties, largely because it is unmissable. Take, first, the three big parties in the EU. France’s Socialist party went from a governing majority in the presidency and the National Assembly to 7 percent of the total vote in last year’s presidential election and virtual disappearance from parliament. Germany’s Social Democratic party (SPD) fell to 20 percent in the recent elections (and it’s fallen further during the negotiations over forming the new German government). Italy’s Democratic party managed a little better, winning 23 percent of the votes for both the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies. All three had started 2017 as parties serving in government — two as the dominant partners in coalitions.

This implosive trend started earlier and went further in Central Europe. Poland’s socialists lost power in 2005 when Polish politics became a contest between the urban, liberal Civic Platform and the rural, conservative Law and Justice party. They haven’t really come back since. Hungary’s Social Democrats lost office in 2010 and have since splintered into several parties; a five-party Left coalition won a quarter of the total vote in 2014 and splintered again; at present they are debating whether to form a new coalition for the forthcoming election on April 8. The Czech Social Democrats went from government into a polling debacle of 7 percent à la française last December. And Spain, Holland, Scotland, and other once reliably progressive places have seen similar collapses.

It’s not difficult to list the reasons for this cull, because so many agonized social democrats have already done so. The primary cause is generally agreed to be that the parties have either lost or abandoned their founding base in the mass working-class electorate. That happened because social democrats, who were increasingly composed of progressive middle-class intellectuals, usually working in the public sector, lost interest in blue-collar issues and were actively hostile to the conservative social values (patriotism, hard work, church) that appealed to workers as much as to the bourgeoisie. Eventually the workers noticed and began to drift off to other parties.

Pierre Manent, the classical-liberal French political scientist, has noticed that “Europe” played an important role in this tendency in the French and other parties because it replaced the proletariat as the proper focus of progressive loyalty. Environmentalism, feminism, immigration, and gay rights were other issues that replaced socialism and the welfare state in the social-democratic hierarchy of values. The disappearance of the Soviet Union disillusioned a small but passionate set of activists. And, finally, David Goodhart, a veteran journalist and former leftist, discerned a growing division in Britain and other advanced societies between the “Somewheres” (locally rooted people with modest ambitions) and the “Anywheres” (globally rootless professionals). A different kind of class war was overtaking the Left-vs.-Right conflict between the working and middle classes within a society — and producing a new politics.

When the South African parliament passed a motion, by 241 votes to 83, to change the nation’s constitution to allow white-owned land to be expropriated without compensation, the Guardian, Britain’s equivalent of the Washington Post, was coy about reporting it. Even now, it has not mentioned the measure on its website, except indirectly.

The reasons for this coyness can only be surmised, but one might have supposed that, given the newspaper’s long history of interest in South African affairs, a development with such potentially catastrophic long-term, and even short-term, effects would be considered of some importance. The proposal, if ever fully acted upon, would produce a crisis to dwarf Zimbabwe’s, with starvation and famine avertable only if 10 million or 15 million South Africans succeeded in finding somewhere to migrate to.

The motion in parliament was proposed by Julius Malema, a former radical member of the ruling African National Congress, now leader of a splinter party called the Economic Freedom Fighters, which received 6 per cent of the vote and has the same proportion of seats in the parliament. They dress entirely in red and call for radical redistribution of wealth, as if an economy were a stew or soup to be ladled out in portions. Malema, who, if the large financial scandals connected with his person are anything to go by, excludes himself from his own economic egalitarianism, said in 2016 that he was not calling for the slaughter of whites—at least, not yet.