RUTHFULLY YOURS

There is a cure for the hysteria gripping foreign capitals and diplomatic salons after a Trump win: soul-searching. For the explanation of why Americans demanded a fresh start can be found as much in the chambers of international diplomacy as it can in Washington corridors.

The United Nations provides a useful vantage point by which to understand the Trump phenomenon.

On September 5, 2016, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein claimed there were similarities between Donald Trump and ISIS. He labeled Trump a “populist” and opined “the propaganda of Da’esh uses tactics similar to those of the populists.” On October 12, 2016 al-Hussein directly weighed into the U.S. elections and told reporters, if elected, Donald Trump “would be dangerous from an international point of view.” Evidently, it never occurred to a Jordanian prince that most American listeners would wonder first about his qualifications to lecture them on freedom of speech, democracy and human rights.

If Americans had been looking for human rights guidance from the United Nations, however, they would have encountered other impediments.

In late October, the UN General Assembly elected Saudi Arabia to the UN’s top human rights body, the Human Rights Council. Iran is an elected member of the UN Commission on the Status of Women. Sudan supervises NGO applications for UN-accreditation and participatory rights from its berth as Vice-Chair of the UN’s Committee on NGO’s. Is a disconnect between multilateral authority figures and the chosen standard-bearer of American values really so difficult to figure out?

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon also made a steady stream of veiled swipes at the Republican candidate and his party’s platform over the course of the campaign. Speaking about climate change on May 18, 2016 at a US campus commencement address, he ordered students: “Don’t vote for politicians who deny the problem.” On September 20, 2016 he told the General Assembly: “I say to political leaders and candidates: do not engage in the cynical and dangerous political math that says you add votes by dividing people and multiplying fear. The world must stand up against lies and distortions of truth…”

But Americans know the facts intrude. UN peacekeepers who arrived in Haiti in 2010 gave the population cholera, killed ten thousand people and sickened hundreds of thousands more. Ban’s response has been to deny the problem: circle the wagons, claim diplomatic immunity, and deny scientifically-proven culpability and reparations. Moreover, throughout the Secretary-General’s tenure he has propagated the cynical fiction of zero tolerance of sexual abuse by UN peacekeepers, while presiding over a culture of impunity for repeated violations of the world’s most vulnerable women.

The liberal stranglehold on college textbooks and curricula clearly has at least some influence on the thinking of college students and graduates, and this influence shows itself in the attitudes younger Americans have toward important political issues. A typical college student in the United States spends four or more years listening to information and arguments that support a leftist agenda, while being sheltered from data and arguments that might militate in favor of more conservative positions. Since people quite naturally base their beliefs on the available information, a four year diet of information hand-picked by leftists will inevitably have some effect.

This liberal monopoly on the flow of information allows college faculties to promote all kinds of politically correct beliefs, including some that don’t stand up well to actual scrutiny. The gospel of man-made global warming is one such belief. The best way to convince students of the truth of the theory is to “protect” them from all the evidence that undermines it.

Similarly, positive attitudes toward the United Nations are best encouraged by the suppression of information. University professors, like most liberals, are eager to portray the UN as a force for Good; and the best way to do that is by concealing a lot of embarrassing data.

Critics of the UN point to its endemic corruption, its domination by totalitarian governments, and its lack of positive accomplishments. Admirers of the UN praise if for the utopian theories on which it was founded, and try to keep the critics from getting a chance to speak.

Fortunately for the UN, its admirers get to write most the mainstream college textbooks.

The View from the Ivory Tower

A typical freshman history textbook says that the Franklin Roosevelt administration “believed that the United States could lead the rest of the world to a future of international cooperation, expanding democracy, and ever-increasing living standards. New institutions like the United Nations and World Bank had been created to promote these goals.”1 In describing the constitution of the UN, the same book states “There would be a General Assembly…where each member enjoyed an equal voice – and a Security Council responsible for maintaining world peace.”2 Another textbook says “Roosevelt envisioned a strong international organization led by the world’s principle powers…The new organization would work to disband empires…The world after victory would be a world of nations, not of empires or blocs.”3

A Democracy of Dictators

The UN was constituted, right from its inception, to subordinate the interests of any one nation to the will of the majority of nations. In theory this constitution would promote equality and justice, but in actual practice an assembly where “each member enjoyed an equal voice,” as the textbook puts it, and where most of the member nations are totalitarian, forces the world’s democratic nations to accept minority status.

It’s a sad fact that only about a third of the world’s nations can be properly described as politically “free.” By giving equal voting power to every nation, the UN effectively becomes a democracy of dictators. And since the totalitarian nations tend to be Socialistic in their economic structures, hence desperately poor, the UN is frequently a tool that poverty-stricken totalitarian regimes can use to extract financial aid from freer and more prosperous nations.

Given American policymakers’ ignorance of Islam, “I am just worried about people like me running around with big theories trying to set foreign policy,” stated famed intellectual historian Francis Fukuyama in Washington, D.C. His confession occurred at “Democracy in the Arab World: The Obama Legacy and Beyond,” a recent conference that did little to alleviate the knowledge deficit among hackneyed Islamism apologists.

Fukuyama’s luncheon address at the downtown JW Marriot luxury hotel focused on the cultural factors that aided the development of modern societies. While China benefited from the appearance 2,300 years ago of the “first modern, relatively impersonal state,” Fukuyama said, the “Arab world [is] where I think the fundamental problem is” for human progress today. Although he worried that the U.S. had not made an effort to understand Muslim societies comparable to its Cold War study of Russia, Fukuyama’s own knowledge of Islam was spotty. He described an often repressive and all-encompassing sharia law as a mere “balance to political power.”

Referencing the late scholar Ernest Gellner, Fukuyama maintained that “contemporary Islamism is basically just a different version of European nationalism in the nineteenth century.” Just as Europeans transitioning from intimate rural communities to urban anonymity during industrialization sought a new identity, Islamists invoke a “universal umma that extends all the way from Morocco to Jakarta.” Similarly, this Islamism appeals to alienated second-generation European Muslim immigrants. Left unexamined was whether the cosmic worldview of a faith like Islam has considerably more ideological content, and can incite far more zeal, than nationalist allegiances, particularly in an increasingly globalized world.

At least Fukuyama didn’t minimize jihadist terrorism, unlike the preceding panelist, anti-Israel commentator Peter Beinart. He decried the “rise of ISIS and a massive increase fueled by cable news [coverage] of the threat of terror that emerged in 2014” and reflected upon President Barack Obama’s shared view that the “threat of terrorism had been exaggerated.” Obama rejected former President George W. Bush’s “war on terrorism” as the “new Cold War, the new World War II; there was fascism and communism, and now there was jihadism.”

According to New Europe, in Leeuwarden, “about twenty opponents of the plans [to establish asylum centers] in the region received police visits at home.” In other words, the Netherlands are engaging in state censorship, thereby raising the question: Is the Netherlands now a police state?

In the town of Sliedrecht, police came to Mark Jongeneel’s office and told him that he tweeted “too much” and that he should “watch his tone”: his tweets “may seem seditious”. His offense? One tweet said: “The College of #Sliedrecht comes up with a proposal to take 250 refugees over the next two years. What a bad idea!”

In September 2015, Die Welt reported that people who air “xenophobic” views on social media, risk losing the right to see their own children.

While ordinary European citizens risk arrest and prosecution for “xenophobic” remarks, a German EU Commissioner, Günther Oettinger, called a visiting Chinese delegation of ministers “slant eyes” (“Schlitzaugen”). European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker has promoted Oettinger to be in charge of the EU budget.

Clearly, the law is not equal. EU Commissioners can make “xenophobic” remarks and get a promotion; European citizens, for exercising their right to free speech, are arrested and prosecuted.

In Europe, is the enemy now the governments? Evidence is mounting that expressing even a mild opinion that runs counter to official government policy can land you in prison, or at least ensure a visit from your friendly local Kafkaesque police. Has Europe effectively become a police state?

Several European governments are making it clear to their citizens that criticizing migrants or European migrant policies is criminally off limits. People who go “too far,” according to the authorities, are being arrested, prosecuted and at times convicted.

In the Netherlands, the police visited people who naïvely made critical comments about asylum centers on Twitter in October 2015. In the town of Sliedrecht, police came to Mark Jongeneel’s office and told him that he tweeted “too much” and that he should “watch his tone”: his tweets “may seem seditious”. His offense? The town had held a citizens meeting about a refugee center in the region, and Jongeneel had posted a few tweets. One said: “The College of #Sliedrecht comes up with a proposal to take 250 refugees over the next two years. What a bad idea!” Earlier he had also tweeted: “Should we let this happen?!”

He was not the only one. In Leeuwarden, according to New Europe:

“…about twenty opponents of the plans [to establish asylum centers] in the region received police visits at home. It also happened in Enschede, and in some places in the Brabant, where, according to the Dutch media, people who had been critical of the arrival of refugees and ran a page on social media on the topic were told to stop”.

The head of the United Nations agency that oversees the Iranian nuclear deal warned Tehran on Thursday to stick to the accord after it was found for the second time to have breached one of its terms.

The International Atomic Energy Agency said last week that Iran had stockpiled slightly more than the allowable 130 metric tons of heavy water. Spent fuel can be taken from the heavy water to produce plutonium for a nuclear weapon.

Details of the violation emerged the day after Donald Trump’s election as U.S. president. During the campaign, Mr. Trump talked about tearing up the July 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and the U.S. and five other world powers. Since election day, he hasn’t commented publicly on the agreement.

Yukiya Amano, head of the IAEA, told the agency’s board Thursday that it was the second time Iran’s inventory of heavy water had exceeded 130 metric tons. He confirmed that Iran had pledged to transfer its excess heavy water out of the country under the agency’s supervision.

“It is important that such situations should be avoided in future in order to maintain international confidence in the implementation of the JCPOA, which represents a clear gain for nuclear verification in Iran,” Mr. Amano said, referring to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the nuclear accord’s formal name.

In a press conference Monday afternoon from the IAEA’s Vienna headquarters, Mr. Amano said Iran “is preparing to transfer a quantity of heavy water to other countries” and the agency is monitoring this.

However, he said the agency doesn’t yet know when that transfer will take place or how much heavy water will be exported. Mr. Amano said he would update the IAEA Board when there is more information.

Asked if his decision to express his concerns was connected to Mr. Trump’s recent election win, Mr. Amano said “by no means.”

“The reason why I expressed this concern is the fact that the inventory of heavy water surpassed 130 tonnes for the second time,” he said.

Besides the issue of excess heavy water, Iran is meeting its other commitments under the nuclear deal, the IAEA has repeatedly said. Those include a commitment not to separate plutonium or reprocess spent fuel for 15 years. Iran has also pledged to redesign and rebuild its Arak nuclear reactor in coming years so it doesn’t produce weapons-grade plutonium.

When the second violation of the deal’s provision on heavy water surfaced last week, U.S. officials played down it down, stressing that Tehran had made no effort to hide the excess material from the agency and had pledged to correct the situation.

Under the agreement, Iran is permitted to continue producing heavy water at its Arak production plant as long as any amount in excess of 130 tons is transferred out of the country. Officials familiar with the deal say Iran has struggled to find buyers for heavy water on the international market.

David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security, estimates Iran is producing heavy water at a rate of around 25 tonnes a year.

“Thus, under current arrangements, Iran is likely to continue pushing up against this cap,” he said in a report published Tuesday.

Earlier this year, the Obama administration bought heavy water from Iran for nearly $10 million to help it meet the 130-metric-ton limit.

For its part, Iran claims the U.S. hasn’t upheld the spirit of the nuclear deal. It has failed, Tehran says, to do more to encourage European and other international banks to resume business with Iranian firms following the suspension of most economic and financial sanctions in January. Many U.S. sanctions remain in place. CONTINUE AT SITE

Zvi Mazel, a former Israeli ambassador to Egypt, reports that Egypt is in trouble.

On the one hand, President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi is pursuing ambitious economic reforms. He’s doubled the size of the Suez Canal, bringing a major spike in revenue. He’s building a new capital south of Cairo, aimed at relieving congestion and pollution in Cairo and making it a commercial and tourist hub.

Sisi has also launched processes of building about two thousand miles of new highways, cleaning and rehabilitating wheat silos where wheat—the main Egyptian staple—rots because of negligence, and developing oil and natural gas resources.

That oil and gas development, Mazel notes, “could be greatly accelerated if the West decided at long last to help Egypt. It has not happened so far.”

Indeed it’s well known that since Sisi—then the defense minister—overthrew the Muslim Brotherhood regime of Mohamed Morsi in July 2013, the Obama administration and other Western governments have turned Egypt a cold shoulder.

They have done so even though that overthrow was backed by the most massive popular protests in history, with 14 million Egyptians taking to the streets.

They were protesting a regime that was radical, incompetent, and—in office for a year—already taking steps to abrogate Egypt’s constitution and strangle the country in sharia legislation.

Yet “Western countries led by US President Barack Obama,” Mazel notes,

still see in president Sisi a military dictator who grabbed power from a “democratically elected president.” They do not want to admit that Morsi was toppled by a popular uprising—admittedly with the help of the army—just in time to prevent him from creating an Islamic dictatorship.

Jilted by the West, Sisi has had to turn elsewhere. China is underwriting his building of a new capital. More problematically, Egypt has already signed major arms deals with Russia, and Russia has pledged $25 billion toward the building of a nuclear power plant in northern Egypt.

It might all be less troubling if Egypt were mainly suffering from economic problems.

But, in addition, it remains under assault by radical anti-Western terrorist forces.

“The Muslim Brotherhood,” Mazel reports, “is still carrying out low-grade warfare against local infrastructure in the country.” And a branch of Islamic State in the Sinai Peninsula has kept up a string of deadly attacks. The most devastating was its downing one year ago of a Russian plane, which, says Mazel, “has brought tourism to a near standstill.”

And as the economy keeps struggling and Sisi institutes reforms—some of them, like a VAT increase, widely resented—the potential for popular insurrection, driven by or at least exploited by the Islamist forces, remains.

Or as Mazel puts it, “It is now show time for [Sisi]. The next few months will be critical.”

Israel, for its part, is helping Egypt both in the security and economic spheres, but the assistance it can give is limited by ongoing popular hostility to Israel and Jews in Egypt.

Another development in the next few months, however, offers the best hope of keeping Sisi’s government on its moderate, constructive course and keeping the jihadists at bay.

An AP analysis notes that U.S. president-elect Donald Trump has already praised the “good chemistry” between him and Sisi when they met at the UN in September, suggesting a possibility of “closer ties after the chill between al-Sissi and Obama.”

Indeed Egypt’s media cheered Trump’s victory, reflecting widespread resentment at Obama’s support for the short-lived but hated Morsi regime.

It is not that Egypt is an exemplary country or a Western democracy. As mentioned, hatred in the Israeli and Jewish direction is still pervasive decades after the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty. Vigilante attacks on Christians continue. Sisi’s crackdown on Muslim Brotherhood and other radical forces hardly meets Western judicial standards.

But in the real world, the Sisi government—which wants to align with the West, is nonbelligerent toward Israel, and at least aspires to curb Islamic extremism—is vastly preferable to the alternatives.

Supporting Sisi would mean a shift to a sane policy.

Ahead of spiked’s conference in central London next Wednesday – ‘Enemies of the State: Religious Freedom and the New Repression’ – Paul Coleman asks if Britain outside of the EU will be any more respectful of freedom of thought and speech.

It has been argued that Brexit will make us freer. Not just in an economic or political sense, but also in terms of individual civil liberties. spiked’s Mick Hume wrote that ‘the referendum result is a triumph for free speech and a smack in the eye for the culture of You Can’t Say That’. And it is.

Post-Brexit Britain will no longer be bound by an EU Code of Conduct that seeks to police the online speech of over 500million citizens and ban ‘illegal online hate speech’. Or an EU law that encourages the criminalisation of ‘insult’. Or a proposed EU law that undermines fundamental freedoms by purging Europe of every last shred of supposed ‘discrimination’.

We can distinguish ourselves from our European neighbours that are intent on pursuing more and more censorship. Just over the summer it was reported that prosecutors in Spain initiated criminal proceedings against the Archbishop of Valencia for preaching a homily alleged to have been ‘sexist’ and ‘homophobic’. In the Netherlands, a man was sentenced to 30 days in prison for ‘intentionally insulting’ the king on Facebook. And in Germany a prosecution was launched against a comedian who made jokes against Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

These kinds of cases have become normal on the continent. So much so that they barely generate news. And they are often willingly cheered on by the EU and other European institutions. Britain can tread a different path.

There is just one, small problem: when it comes to censorship and the quashing of civil liberties, the UK doesn’t need any encouragement from the EU, or anybody else.

Take the issue of free speech. In Britain there are countless attacks on this fundamental freedom that have little or no connection to EU law. Evangelical street preachers are routinely arrested for public preaching; peaceful campaigners have been prosecuted for holding allegedly insulting signs; and the police have started labelling wolf-whistling a ‘hate crime’. None of this was EU-mandated. CONTINUE AT SITE

It is astonishing how little news Britain gets from the Continent. Lest this be thought to be a post-Brexit thing, it is worth noting that this has been the case for years. In a spirit of reconciliation, could all of us agree — leavers and remainers alike — that a positive result of Brexit would be an upsurge in serious media coverage from the Continent?

***During visits to Paris, Berlin and Stockholm in the last month the way in which our media has let us down has struck me more than ever. The British print and broadcast media are happy to lead on news about celebrities and even their relatives. But regular news even from a capital city such as Berlin is almost wholly absent. Consider a single day’s news while I was there.

On the front pages was news of the fire-bombing of a mosque in Dresden — a fairly common event, though no one was injured, and the building was not badly damaged. The inside pages included the sort of stories that now wash across every day in Germany though fail to make news elsewhere. A story of a violent clash in a small village between a gang of German bikers and a gang of refugees. And another story relaying events at an asylum centre the day before. A migrant phoned the police because he had seen a young girl being assaulted in a bush by another migrant. Three policemen arrived and caught a Pakistani man in his late twenties raping a six-year-old girl from Iraq. One of the policemen took the girl away while the other two handcuffed the Pakistani migrant.

As they were putting him into the back of the police car the father of the girl, who had obviously heard about what had happened to his daughter, came running out of the centre wielding a knife, clearly intent on attacking the perpetrator. At which point the two policemen shot him dead. Just one of a thousand stories every day in Merkel’s Germany.

First, the liberal opposition Democratic Alliance (DA) last month won Johannesburg, Pretoria, Port Elizabeth and Cape Town in the local elections, a huge blow to the ruling African National Congress (ANC). Second, the country is waiting on tenterhooks for the credit rating agencies to re-rate the country’s creditworthiness in November: most fear relegation to junk status. Third, President Jacob Zuma, a crony capitalist par excellence, is trying to hand as many favours as possible to his allies, the Gupta family. This is being resisted by his finance minister, Pravin Gordhan, and a showdown between Zuma and Gordhan cannot be long averted. Finally, there is the question of the presidential succession, to be decided by an ANC conference in 2017. Rumours fly that Zuma has already accepted $200 million from Vladimir Putin to commission a string of Russian nuclear power stations; that fearing jail, he is planning to retire offshore; and that he will push his ex-wife, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, into the presidency to succeed him. And so on.

One could write: “Apart from that, normal politics goes on.” In one sense that is true — we have rioting students burning down university buildings, affirmative action causing a flight of white cricketers and rugby players — but mainly it’s not true simply because the ANC, which has ruled the country since 1994, is disassembling before one’s eyes. There is an almost complete absence of leadership. Zuma remains largely passive when in-country, and he’s often out. The police, doubtless on his instructions, endlessly harass and threaten the finance minister, Pravin Gordhan. Not only do individual cabinet ministers squabble in public and make unilateral decisions without any semblance of cabinet co-ordination but even subordinate state agencies sometimes make large policy announcements, apparently chancing their arm to see what they can get away with. Many of the ministers are clearly buffoons, while ANC deputy secretary-general Jessie Duarte has made announcements that suggest complete economic illiteracy. But then the president himself has said he doesn’t really believe in markets and relies on Marx’s labour theory of value, which even Marxist economists stopped using in the 1950s.

As the local elections approached, propaganda from the ANC and the South African Communist Party (the parties are allies and all but indistinguishable) became increasingly frenzied. Opinion polls showing the ANC behind were denounced as having “a regime change agenda” and the SACP demanded that their publication be stopped. There were furious demands to “defend the capital”, and posters went up widely enjoining us all to “defend the revolution”. Zuma, for his part, threatened his audiences that if the opposition won cities like Port Elizabeth “the ancestors will never forgive you”. This led to considerable doubts as to whether the ANC would actually accept an adverse result. In Port Elizabeth the (theoretically) Independent Electoral Commission displayed great reluctance to declare an opposition victory but in the end the verdict of the polls was respected.

However, this was quickly followed by the ANC threatening to make the cities they had lost “ungovernable” and by initial council meetings where the ANC caucus tried to prevent the new administration from being sworn in. In Pretoria this was followed by a series of ANC-led illegal land invasions in which squatters grabbed public land and put up shacks, forcing the municipality to evict them and thus incur the ignominy of being portrayed as apartheid lookalikes. But this is all part of the rather muscular style of South African politics. The really important thing is that the ANC seems habituated to the rules of electoral democracy and this gives one some — not complete, but some — confidence that it may one day accept the loss of national power in good part.

The second issue — the possible downrating of South Africa to junk bond status — is still moot though most market sentiment is that it will happen, causing a stockmarket and currency downgrade of some severity. The result will, of course, be higher interest rates on all forms of government debt, increasingly tight constraints on government spending and, ultimately, an increased possibility that the country will be forced towards an IMF bail-out. All this is some way off and the ANC still lives in a dreamworld where the Brics banks will lend them lots of money at no interest and without conditions. Reality is likely to be a lot less comfortable and the crunch will be felt first in South Africa’s host of loss-making state-owned industries. South African Airways, for example, is run by one of Zuma’s girlfriends, Dudu Myeni, who is therefore unsackable despite her complete lack of business or aviation experience and the huge losses SAA has incurred under her care. It is doubtful if any commercial airline would employ Ms Myeni even as a receptionist.