RUTHFULLY YOURS

If the opinion polls are correct, in under two weeks Labour’s Sadiq Khan will be elected Mayor of London. This is extremely troubling. Despite his noisy denunciations of terrorism and the Jew-hatred infecting his party, questions about his attitude to extremism continue to mount.

In 2003, he spoke at a London conference where he criticised anti-terror legislation for targeting Muslim groups. He spoke alongside Yasser al Siri, charged in 2002 and convicted in 2005 for assisting the man behind the 1993 World Trade Centre bombing in New York, and Sajeel abu Ibrahim, who ran a terrorist camp which trained the ringleader of the 2005 London bomb attacks.

Khan’s people say he was only doing what was required as a human rights lawyer and, at the time, chairman of the human rights group Liberty. He spoke out for these men because it was “quite literally his job”.

This is absurd. The extremists he has spoken alongside or associated with were not always his clients. His support for them far exceeds any professional relationship or MP’s duty to his constituents.

Atma Singh, who was Asian affairs adviser to the former London Mayor Ken Livingstone, has accused him of being “far too willing to turn a blind eye to terrorism”.

For a decade, said Singh, Khan campaigned for terrorists Babar Ahmad and Talha Ahsan.Ahmad, convicted of conspiracy and providing material to support terrorism, was a key radicaliser in London. Yet before his trial, Khan declared his childhood friend Ahmad to be “innocent”.

Khan has said he’s “embarrassed and sorrowful” about antisemitism in the Labour party and wants Jeremy Corbyn to “take a tougher stance”.Yet he has chosen to sanitise Islamist Jew-haters, as well as officiate in an organisation with ideological roots in Jew-bashing radical Islam.

Former Democratic senator Bob Graham upped pressure on the White House to make public 28 pages of a congressional investigation into the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks that specifically focuses on the alleged role of Saudi Arabia in the plot.

The Obama administration has said it will decide by June whether or not to declassify these documents. But, in private, senior U.S. officials have indicated the White House will move ahead with making the documents public.

Mr. Graham, a former head of the Senate Intelligence Committee who co-chaired the bipartisan congressional investigation into the attacks, has been a major critic of Saudi Arabia since the 2001 al Qaeda attacks on New York and Washington.

The three-term Florida senator appeared on NBC’s “Meet the Press” Sunday and again claimed the 28 documents would show high-level Saudi support for the al Qaeda operation.

“The most important unanswered question of 9/11 is, did these 19 people conduct this very sophisticated plot alone, or were they supported?” Mr. Graham said. “So who was the most likely entity to have provided them that support? And I think all the evidence points to Saudi Arabia.”

Mr. Graham again said he believed the highest levels of the Saudi government knew of the plot, a charge repeatedly denied by the Saudi monarchy. “I think it covers a broad range, from the highest ranks of the kingdom through these, what would be private entities,” Mr. Graham said.

The debate over the release of the documents is coming at a particularly delicate time in U.S.-Saudi relations.
President Barack Obama, in an interview with The Atlantic released last month, suggested Saudi governments were “free riders” for their dependence on the U.S. military for their security.

Relations between Washington and Riyadh have also been strained by the nuclear agreement reached last year between the U.S. and Iran, Saudi Arabia’s principal rival in the Middle East. The deal slowed Iran’s nuclear program but removed most international sanctions on Tehran. CONTINUE AT SITE

On April 22, a unique chapter in the history of the international bond market drew to a close when the Republic of Argentina settled with the largest remaining holders of the bonds unresolved from its 2001 default on more than $80 billion. Elliott Management, the firm I founded and manage, was one of these holders, having purchased bonds both before and after the default.

The 15-year saga has generated reams of articles about what lessons should be drawn to improve the sovereign-debt restructuring process. Now that the Argentina story is winding down, we would like to add our perspective to the debate.

When we first invested in these bonds in 2001, we believed that a negotiated restructuring could help Argentina avoid default. We also believed that if we participated in a negotiation, we could help achieve a good deal for all of the country’s bondholders.

As it turned out, Argentina chose to default, and its leaders refused to negotiate. Normally, sovereign restructurings are completed quickly—a 2013 study by the Moody’s rating agency put the average at around 10 months. But it was nearly three years before Argentina’s leaders even put an offer on the table.

When they finally did, bondholders—including many individual Argentines—were given a take-it-or-leave-it offer of new bonds worth just 30 cents for every dollar owed on the old bonds. Argentina’s leaders even took the extraordinary step of passing a law prohibiting payment to any bondholder that rejected the offer.

Despite these coercive tactics, more than half of Argentina’s foreign bondholders rejected Argentina’s unilateral terms. Five years later, in 2010, Argentina repeated the 30-cent offer. Many participants in this second exchange were bondholders who were worn down by the financial crisis or just tired of waiting.

At that point, Argentina’s leaders could have easily negotiated a settlement with the remaining bondholders and put the 2001 default behind them. We tried again, as we had in the past, to initiate a settlement discussion with Argentina.

Our entreaties were again refused. Instead, Argentina’s leaders chose to use us as scapegoats for the country’s mounting economic problems, insisting that bondholders like us would never be paid a single peso. CONTINUE AT SITE

Britons now know how Americans feel. The most politically polarizing U.S. President in modern history decided on Friday to inject himself into the British debate over the June referendum to leave the European Union, as ever leading with a dubious political threat.

President Obama spoke at a joint press conference with Prime Minister David Cameron, who is leading the Stay in the EU campaign. Mr. Obama began, as he often does, by saying that he wasn’t going to do what he then proceeded to do.

In this case he announced that he wasn’t trying to influence any British votes, and he wasn’t issuing a “threat.” But he went on to attack the argument of the Leave campaigners who say that, if the Leave vote prevails, the U.K. could strike trade deals that have similar benefits without the EU’s bureaucratic barnacles.

“And on that matter,” Mr. Obama said to British voters, “I think it’s fair to say that maybe some point down the line, there might be a U.K.-U.S. trade agreement, but it’s not going to happen anytime soon, because our focus is in negotiating with a big bloc, the European Union, to get a trade agreement done, and the U.K. is going to be in the back of the queue—not because we don’t have a special relationship, but because, given the heavy lift on any trade agreement, us having access to a big market with a lot of countries—rather than trying to do piecemeal trade agreements is hugely inefficient.”

The problem—apart from the blunt political threat to a stalwart ally—is that Mr. Obama is stating his policy choice, not what is inevitable. The U.S. is negotiating a trade deal with the EU, but the talks haven’t been going well in part because of the demands of the EU’s multiple special interests and French economic nationalism. The talks might extend into the next U.S. Administration, and they could fail. CONTINUE AT SITE

Would veterans of the Waffen SS be welcomed as marchers on Anzac Day? The very idea is appalling, yet every year we hear only of the bravery of the Turks — nothing of the genocidal massacres of Armenians and others which, long after Germans accepted their guilt, the leaders continue aggressively to deny.

A century ago, in a misconceived encounter on the history-soaked precipices of Asia Minor, the sons of ANZAC received their initiation in battle against the German-trained soldiers of the Ottoman Empire. The Turkish forces, well prepared behind excellent defences, used their tactics to good effect, ably led by a professional officer who would go on to bigger things, Kemal Ataturk.

Now is celebrated, in an annual event that grows in mythology and status in proportion to the passing of the years, the shared combat ordeal of Gallant Johnny Turk and the Bronzed Anzac. Pause for a moment to this: What if, say, instead of Gallipolli, the ANZACs forces went into combat against an SS Battalion somewhere in Poland during World War 11? Would we then, decades later, be joining with our former enemies to celebrate what both sides had gone through, all enmities long forgotten? Could one with clear conscience commemorate battle experiences shared with representatives of enemy forces acting as the military arm of a state carrying out a terrible genocide at the same time?

For it was the night before the landing at Gallipolli on April 25 in the capital of the Ottoman Empire (then called Constantinople) when occurred the arrest, detention and subsequent liquidation of 625 intellectuals, priests and leading Armenians. This event is widely held to signal the onset of the first major genocide of the twentieth century, the most bloodthirsty period in human history.

What followed was the mass murder of an entirely innocent group of citizens by means still horrifying to contemplate. By the time Turkey sued for peace in 1918, up to 1.5 million Armenians had been slaughtered, decimating the population of a group whose ancestors had lived in the Fertile Crescent since the dawn of human settlement. It did not stop there. The Assyrian people lost at least 75,000, three-quarters of their population; the numbers have not been made up to this day. Later, the Greeks in Asia Minor, in some of the bloodiest scenes of city-sacking since the fall of Nineveh and Tyre, were driven out of ancient homelands, never to return. And, largely lost in the high tide of bloodletting at the time, there were pogroms of Jewish settlements in Anatolia.

The South Korean military says that North Korea fired a submarine-launched ballistic missile off its eastern coast on Saturday. The missile flew about 30 miles before crashing in the ocean.

Reuters:

North Korea will hold a congress of its ruling Workers’ Party in early May for the first time in 36 years, at which its leader Kim Jong Un is expected to say the country is a strong military power and a nuclear state.

The missile flew for about 30 km (18 miles), a South Korean Defence Ministry official said by telephone, adding its military was trying to determine whether the launch may have been a failure for unspecified reasons.

South Korea’s Yonhap news agency said the missile flew “for a few minutes”, citing a government source.

The U.S. State Department in Washington said it was aware of reports the North had launched what appeared to be a ballistic missile.

“Launches using ballistic missile technology are a clear violation of multiple U.N. Security Council resolutions,” said State Department spokesman John Kirby.

The North first attempted a launch of the submarine-based missile last year and was seen to be in the early stages of developing such a weapons system, which could pose a new threat to its neighbours and the United States if it is perfected.

However, follow-up test launches were believed to have fallen short of the North’s expectations as its state media footage appeared to have been edited to fake success, according experts who have seen the visuals.

President Obama stuck his nose in the Brexit question in Great Britain, provoking outrage and scorn when he threatened the Brits by warning that if they left the EU, the UK would be “at the back of the queue” on any trade deal.

Obama claimed that his threat wasn’t a threat but rather he was trying to “enhance the debate.”

At a press conference with Prime Minister Cameron, a BBC reporter asked the president if it was any of his business whether the UK remained in the EU.

“Thank you, Mr. President. You’ve made your views very plain on the fact that British voters should choose to stay in the E.U. But in the interest of good friends always being honest, are you also saying that our decades-old special relationship, that’s been through so much, would be fundamentally damaged and changed by our exit? If so, how? And are you also, do you have any sympathy with people who think this is none of your business?” the reporter asked.

“And Prime Minister, to you, if I may, some of your colleagues believe it’s utterly wrong that you have dragged our closest ally in the E.U. referendum campaign, what do you say to them?” the reporter asked. “And is it appropriate for the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, to have brought up President Obama’s Kenyan ancestry in the context of this debate?”

Obama’s lecture to the Brits included references to World War II and the creation of NATO as examples of how America and Great Britain have cooperated in the past. But the president had people shaking their heads in disbelief because the U.S. had nothing to do with the creation of the EU.

The U.S. president said he feels it’s his prerogative to clarify the U.S. position rather than have it defined by British politicians.