RUTHFULLY YOURS

For many years, Palestinians hoped that one day they would enjoy public freedoms under the leadership of the Palestinian Authority (PA), like the freedoms their neighbors in Israel have. But more than two decades after the establishment of the PA, democracy and freedom of speech are still far from being introduced to Palestinian society.

A PA court sentenced Anas Saad Awwad to a year in prison for posting on Facebook a photoshopped picture of Abbas wearing a Real Madrid shirt.

“Come and invest in the Palestinian areas, but if you don’t bribe their corrupt officials, the Palestinian Authority will arrest you. This is a desperate political arrest by an undemocratic Palestinian Authority president who has no credibility amongst his people. ” — Khaled al-Sabawi, son of Palestinian-Canadian investor Mohamed al-Sabawi, who was jailed for recommending the removal of Mahmoud Abbas from power.

It is not easy for an Arab journalist to criticize his or her leaders. If there is one thing Arab dictators cannot tolerate, it is criticism, especially when it comes from an Arab journalist, columnist or political opponent.

For many years, Palestinians were hoping that one day they would enjoy freedom of expression under the leadership of the Palestinian Authority (PA). But more than two decades after the establishment of the PA, Palestinians have learned that democracy and freedom of speech are still far from being introduced to their society.

Since then, Palestinians have also learned that their leaders are “untouchable” and above criticism. Both Mahmoud Abbas and his predecessor, Yasser Arafat, have even taught Palestinians that “insulting” their president is a crime and an act of treason.

The momentous victory for the Brexit campaign signals a new era of freedom for the British people.

After more than four decades of being shackled to the European Union (previously the European Economic Community), Great Britain has declared its independence.

The vote for Brexit (52 percent of Britons cast ballots to leave the EU) is a vote for sovereignty and self-determination. Britain will no longer be subject to European legislation, with Britain’s Parliament retaking control. British judges will no longer be overruled by the European Court of Justice, and British businesses will be liberated from mountains of EU regulations, which have undermined economic liberty.

Indeed, Brexit will result in a bonfire of red tape, freeing the city of London and enterprises across the nation from European Union diktat. And at last, Britain is free again to negotiate its own free trade deals, a huge boost to the world’s fifth largest economy.

The United States should seize upon Brexit as a tremendous opportunity to sign an historic free trade agreement with the United Kingdom-a deal that would advance prosperity on both sides of the Atlantic. Brexit will also strengthen the Anglo-American special relationship, the most important bilateral partnership in the world.

Britain outside the EU will be a stronger ally for the United States, from confronting Russian aggression in Eastern Europe to defeating the Islamist terror threat.

Britain’s decision to leave the EU should be a cause for celebration here in America. Brexit embodies the very principles and ideals the American people hold dear to their hearts: self-determination, limited government, democratic accountability, and economic liberty. A truly free and powerful Great Britain is good for Europe and the United States.

As Margaret Thatcher famously declared after the liberation of the Falkland Islands by British forces in 1982: “Rejoice.” The Iron Lady believed firmly that Britain would be better off outside the European Union.

The British people can rejoice in their rediscovered freedom. It is a cause for celebration for America, too.

“Rule, Britannia!” hasn’t been relevant for a century, since Jutland in 1916. With sheer willpower, and clever leveraging of U.S. assets, by 1940 Winston Churchill could only evoke the first four lines of a stanza from James Thomson’s stirring, and endearing patriotic anthem:

‘Thee haughty tyrants ne’er shall tame:

All their attempts to bend thee down,

Will but arouse thy generous flame;

But work their woe, and thy renown.’

Britain’s vote Thursday to exit the EU is a hopeful reprise of Thomson’s chorus.

“Rule, Britannia! rule the waves:

“Britons never will be slaves.”

Presumably freed via an orderly decoupling from Brussels’ electronic bracelets, “Leavers” assert Britain should now set its own trade regimen, immigration rules, economic and environmental regulatory schemes, return to unmolested British jurisprudence, and void communitarian taxes.

In 1940 Churchill’s speech was about survival. “We shall defend our island, no matter what the cost may be…” By 1946, Churchill spoke of the need for a European Alliance, an economic coalition, vital for postwar recovery, but his sentiments preceded the U.S. Marshall Plan that largely supplanted Churchill’s Pan-Europe recovery sketch.

Churchill today would be horrified at how the EU has evolved into a virulent bureaucracy stifling economic growth, while frustrating Churchill’s foundational tenets — the supremacy of Western civilization, free trade outside the union, and political liberty.

Ruth Dudley Edwards is an Irish historian, crime novelist and broadcaster.

Close to 10,000 have been killed in Ireland in the last century because of political violence, tens of thousands have been injured and many more bereaved or traumatised. Irish nationalists still honour their “patriot dead”, but the legacy is no longer sacrosanct. The country is growing up.
Whatever else the centenary of 1916 has done for Ireland, it’s been a bonanza for booksellers. Whole shop windows are devoted to books about every aspect of what was commemorated this year on Easter Sunday, even though that wasn’t actually the anniversary of the rising, insurrection, rebellion or whatever you like to call an event which involved—in a democracy—a seven-man clique within an oath-bound secret society leading around 1600 people to occupy buildings in Dublin and shoot soldiers and unarmed policemen. For some of them, like the front man, Patrick Pearse, chosen by the seven to be President of the Provisional Government, it was a form of suicide by cop.

The actual anniversary is April 24, which fell in 1916 on Easter Monday, but because it became popularly known as the Easter Rising, and because of the success of Pearse, its chief propagandist, in tying it into Catholicism, there is a tendency to mark the religious festival, rather than the actual anniversary.

A measure of home rule had been passed by the Westminster Parliament, but had been suspended for the duration of the First World War—not least because there was armed opposition to it among the (mainly Protestant) unionists in the northern part of the island. The government of the United Kingdom feared civil war. In 1916, the immediate result of the rebels’ actions was almost 500 deaths, innumerable injuries and the destruction by British artillery of important chunks of Dublin. Owing to the execution of sixteen of the rebel leaders (who included a few poets) tapping into the Irish appetite for tragic, romantic, eloquent heroes, the insurrection would go on to receive retrospective nationalist legitimisation in an election in 1918. It would help people of violence to groom generations to follow the example of the “martyred dead”.

In the north of the island, the main effect was the hardening of opposition to any form of independence. With the exacerbation of tribal hatred on the island, it would be left with two confessional and mutually hostile bourgeois states with unhappy minorities, hundreds of thousands of refugees, isolationism, poverty, bigotry and philistinism.
These days the political establishment of the Republic of Ireland mostly retrospectively endorses political violence until 1921—the end of the so-called war of independence, which was begun by another small handful of unelected revolutionaries. A distinguished exception is the ex-Taoiseach (prime minister), John Bruton, from Fine Gael, traditionally the law-and-order party, who contends forcefully that Ireland would have been a happier place had independence been gained gradually through the peaceful route of democratic reform. For Fianna Fail (whose antecedents were on the losing side of a civil war begun in opposition to an Anglo-Irish treaty endorsed by the Irish electorate) the magic date after which violence became unacceptable was the surrender in 1923.

The longer the process is dragged out, the more the plebiscite’s result will be re-cast in whatever nuanced perspective best suits the political elite. ‘Leave’ is going to mean whatever they succeed in making it mean. Those who led the campaign have most of the work still to do.
I don’t want to be a party-pooper but the celebrations have to be kept short. What does this mean? It means that the Brexit vote, far from necessarily being “seismic” in its implications (the favoured description, so far as I can tell) could, potentially, become a damp squib. The political elite have already started to backslide. My fear is that a formula will be found which will pay only lip service to the Leave campaign victory.

The likes of UKIP’s Nigel Farage will not call the tune. The likes of longstanding Euro-sceptic Daniel Hannan will. He already has the exit process elongated. He conceives of an agreement which will preserve the common market for goods allied with free movement of labour. By the latter he means the free movement of people who can show they have jobs waiting; but, if that is your opening gambit, it doesn’t take much imagination to see where negotiations will end up. Listening to him, when frequently interviewed on the BBC, brought the Stockholm syndrome to fresh life in my mind.

One conservative chap, with a polished accent, whose name escapes me, said that he thought a general election should be called and that it would be perfectly proper if a party sought a mandate to stay in the EC. When you think you have heard it all, listen to an English public school old boy and no longer wonder why working people in Burnley, Bolton and Bradford feel betrayed.

The problem is not just that a large majority of parliamentarians favour staying in; it is that the popular vote was close. The 52% of those who voted to leave was far short of the two-thirds who voted for staying in the EU in 1975. The mandate for resolute action is far thinner and boon for those who believe they know better than do common folk. A further complication is the strong vote in Scotland (62%) to stay and in Northern Ireland (56%). And more complicated still is the gulf between younger and older voters. According to the BBC, 73% of those aged from 18 to 25 voted to stay.

I heard one younger commentator say that she thought that older people had been selfish. This prompted historian David Starkey to ask whether she thought there should be an upper age limit on voter eligibility. My own view is that people younger than 25, whose brains are still developing, should be excluded from voting. But this is regarded as an eccentric view by most so I better keep quiet about it.

Obama, Cameron and the Day of the ‘Remains’The president’s entry into the ‘Brexit’ debate included adding to the economic scaremongering.ByToby Young

The debate about whether Britain should remain in the European Union or leave (“Brexit”) took a dramatic turn Friday when President Obama broke off from wishing Queen Elizabeth II a happy 90th birthday to lecture the British people about how to vote in the EU referendum on June 23.

In a joint news conference with Prime Minister David Cameron, who has staked his political future on Britain’s voting “Remain” rather than “Leave,” Mr. Obama was full of surprises.

For one thing, he admitted that it had been his call to remove the bust of Winston Churchill from the Oval Office when he first became president. That was a jaw-dropper, because until now the White House has maintained that the decision was taken before Mr. Obama took up residence and was no reflection on the president’s attitude toward Britain or its “special relationship” with the United States. Only a month ago, Ted Cruz was accused of “lying” when he repeated this story. So it was good of the president to clear that up, although unlikely to endear him to his British audience.

The biggest shock, though, was his affirmation of something the pro-EU camp has been claiming and which is usually dismissed as typical of “Project Fear”—the disparaging name the Leave side has given to the Remain campaign. Earlier this week, George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and Mr. Cameron’s closest ally, claimed that Brexit would cost each British family £4,300 ($6,200), a figure written off by his opponents as scaremongering.

But Mr. Obama seemed to confirm Mr. Osborne’s pessimistic analysis when he said Britain, if it leaves the EU, would be at the “back of the queue” if it had to negotiate a separate trade deal with the U.S. That sent shock waves through the Brexit camp, which has long maintained that America’s exports to the U.K.—$56.35 billion in 2015—are so valuable that a new trade agreement would be quickly negotiated. CONTINUE AT SITE

What indignation we had from London liberals when the result of Britain’s referendum on the European Union became clear early on Friday. By a majority of 52% in a high turnout, voters had opted to leave the Brussels-based union of 28 European countries.

“Catastrophic!” spluttered Keith Vaz, chairman of the parliamentary select committee on home affairs. Tony Blair suggested the public—the ill-educated dimwits—did not understand what it had just done. A former national political party leader, Lord Ashdown, was so aghast at the result that he lamented: “God help our country.”

The name of the party Mr. Ashdown once led? The Liberal Democrats. Yet here he was complaining after 17.4 million voters gave a clear democratic order to quit the EU, a federalizing union that was unpopular chiefly because, ahem, it was so undemocratic.

Events moved fast. Prime Minister David Cameron, choking back tears, announced his resignation. Mr. Cameron paid the price for leading a rancorous campaign to keep his country in the EU.

Sterling plummeted and the London stock market had an attack of the vapors. The opposition Labour Party announced moves to unseat its own leader, Jeremy Corbyn, who had also campaigned for standing by Brussels. With British politics suffering a bout of the collywobbles, we needed a statesman to bring some stability to proceedings. Enter Donald Trump, who arrived in Scotland on a visit and made a speech in the middle of his Turnberry golf course. Turnberry being prey to notorious breezes, Mr. Trump wore one of his trademark baseball caps.
Not since 1975 had the British electorate been consulted on its membership in the European club. That was before the EU as we now know it existed. Back then it had been the European Economic Community. British politicians assured voters four decades ago that if the U.K. stayed in, there would be no threat to democratic accountability. They did so with the air of parents assuring children that they will like the taste of green beans. Honestly, honey, you really will, once you get used to them.

In 1993 the EEC morphed into the European Union, a far more political undertaking. The EU not only had its own flag and anthem but also a hunger for fiscal, diplomatic and legislative powers. Then came its own currency, the euro. This has caused economic ruin in much of Europe (though not, happily, in Britain, which never gave up the pound).

Now the British electorate has said “enough!” Voters have declared that they want Westminster’s elected House of Commons, not the EU’s commissioners in Brussels, to set British policy—particularly on immigration. Other European nations might look at Brexit with envy. There could well be a domino effect. CONTINUE AT SITE