RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2020/02/15/europes-retrenchment-in-the-wake-of-brexit/

The cynic will often overestimate the forces of inevitability, immobility, and kinetic power. In so doing he will be exposed for his eternal pessimism, while the optimist runs his victory lap. Yet even as the cynic is little more than an idealist who has been burned by reality too many times, he too gets to savor the taste of slaying that which was once thought unbeatable.

The class James Burnham called the “Managers,” those definers and keepers of “norms,” have taken quite the beating these past few years. Today, in February 2020, President Donald J. Trump has not only emerged triumphant from his bare-knuckle brawls with the deep state but is now consolidating power and poised to defeat whichever candidate the Democrats put up to challenge him in the November presidential election. The constellation of forces arrayed against him, ranging from media giants to state security agencies, and including some within his own party, surely should have resulted in his removal from office. 

Yet those of us who watched this soap opera for the past three years couldn’t help but notice mistake after mistake from Burnham’s vaunted Managers. Did we overestimate them? I think it’s safe to say that we did. The rotting edifice of “Trump-Russia collusion” finally collapsed with Robert Mueller’s uninspiring testimony on Capitol Hill, and “Trump-Ukraine quid pro quo” only saw a fatigued and bored nation ignore the Democrats crying “wolf” yet again.

Across the pond, Brexit gave us the same show in parallel to the American drama. 

Former Prime Minister David Cameron called a referendum on Brexit in 2016 to once and for all shut up an anti-EU wing inside of his own party. Instead, it resulted in his removal from power and the exit of the UK from the European Union, dealing a blow to the decades-long juggernaut of globalism. 

There, too, we witnessed a street fight that lasted years, and that pitted all of the elites and their vast array of instruments on one side, against people who according to the elite “shouldn’t matter” and “are probably racist anyway” on the other.

Overconfidence and hubris on the part of ruling elites, insulated from various crises of liberal democracy ranging from the 2008 financial crisis to Merkel’s invitation to the Third World to settle in Europe, has not only halted globalist projects but, in both Germany and Britain, has set them back. Beyond that, they have raised questions pertaining to the legitimacy of these regimes. Brexit in particular questions the legitimacy of the European Union project as a whole.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/02/islamic_reform_top_muslim_university_says_no.html

Largely unknown to and unreported in the West, a large, two-day conference was recently hosted (Jan. 27–28) by Al Azhar University in Egypt and attended by the leading clerics and politicians from 46 nations.  Titled “Renewal in Islamic Thought,” it is currently the most significant response to Egyptian president Sisi’s calls for reform, which he forcibly made on January 1, 2015.

The conference focused on the most pressing topics affecting the Islamic — and in some cases non-Islamic — world, including women’s rights, government and society, and the question of “radicalization” and the emergence of jihadi terror groups such as the Islamic State.

I’ve watched many of the panels with great interest, and in the coming weeks, I hope to remark on some of these, but for now I wish to discuss what can be learned from the closing remarks of the grand imam of Al Azhar (and Pope Francis’s good friend), Sheikh Ahmed al-Tayeb. 

First, he — in agreement with the other clerics present — closed the door on the possibility for reform on a great number of issues: “Renewal,” he announced, “is in no way possible concerning those texts which are irrefutable in their certainty and stability; as for those texts that are not entirely credible, they are subject to ijtihad [reinterpretation, especially based on changing circumstances].”

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/02/angela_merkel_and_the_destruction_of_german_democracy.html

These thoughts reflect the writer’s concern about the worsening political and social conditions in Germany, a nation whose importance — for America, Europe, and the world — should require no laboring to a readership of politically sophisticated Americans.

What’s happening today in Germany is deeply disturbing.

And it’s not for the reason casual American observers, including many conservatives, might think based on information derived from the mainstream English-language media.  Contrary to these purveyors of globalist, multi-cultural propaganda, the reason for growing unease about Germany is not the presence in the German parliament (Bundestag), and persistent electoral strength, of “Die Alternative für Deutschland” (“The alternative for Germany,” or AFD) — invariably, counterfactually, and ludicrously styled by the Western corporate media as the far-right AFD — as they style all western European political parties committed to preserving national cultures. 

Deep concern about Germany arises because of two different but related phenomena.

First, Angela Merkel’s destruction of the center-right Christian Democrats/Christian Social Union (the Christlich Demokratische Union Deutschlands, or CDU, and the Christlich Soziale Union in Bayern, or CSU, respectively), and her radical transformation of those allied parties, which together formed most of the post war governments that led Germany out of the physical and moral ruins of World War II.  Through Merkel’s policies, the CDU/CSU have been shorn of their conservative principles and become nearly indistinguishable from Germany’s extremist Die Grünen (“the Greens”) and its dying Sozial Demokratische Partei Deutschlands (the old socialists, or “SPD”).