RUTHFULLY YOURS

Jeremy Corbyn — who could possibly become British prime minister at the next election – felt obliged to write something about the anniversary of 9/11 on Sunday. What he said is outrageous. At least it’s outrageous on a certain reading. The problem is, I don’t know how else to take it. Indeed many people have taken it in exactly the same way I’ve taken it.

Here’s Corbyn’s short tweet:

“My thoughts are with those whose lives were shattered on 9/11/2001 — and in the wars and terror unleashed across the globe in its aftermath.”

It’s crystal clear that Corbyn felt a strong need to politicise these commemorations. And he did so in a particular way.

Let’s be clear about that interpretation.

i) Corbyn states that his “thoughts are with those whose lives were shattered on 9/11/2001”.

ii) He then says: “and in the wars and terror unleashed across the globe in its aftermath”.

What connects the first clause with the second? They must have some kind of connection otherwise the whole sentence would be a non sequitur.

Why would a terrorist attack which was “the victims’ blow to the motherland” (as Chomsky once put it) — and after which tens of thousands of Muslims celebrated on the streets — have “unleashed war and terror across the globe”? After all, this was a successful act of terror for al-Qaeda and tens of millions of other Muslims.

That must mean that what followed 9/11 — not 9/11 itself! — “unleashed terror and war across the globe”. What followed 9/11? The intervention in Afghanistan in October 2001 and the Iraq War in 2003. Thus in a tweet seemingly to commemorate the victims of 9/11, Corbyn couldn’t stop himself from pointing the finger at Blair and Bush (plus another 23 states!) and indeed at all “Western capitalist powers”.

When the inquiry’s report was published on June 30, it turned out to be what most Jews and pro-Israel activists had suspected it would be from the beginning: a whitewash. It opens with the words: “The Labour Party is not overrun by anti-Semitism, Islamophobia or other forms of racism”. But nobody had ever suggested that it was.
The report is vague and waffly, 28 pages saying almost nothing about the subject under question, anti-Semitism, which is throughout subsumed under general issues of racism.
The working definitions of anti-Semitism for the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia and the US State Department, along with others, agree that exaggerated, mendacious, or malicious criticism of the Jewish state, or the setting of double standards for Israel that are used for no other nation, is anti-Semitic. It is precisely accusations of this kind that make up the bulk of the Labour Party’s anti-Semitic comments, including statements still being made by some party members, including Jeremy Corbyn himself.

Britain’s Labour Party, out of power since 2010, more or less cut its own throat when its members (plus fresh recruits who, instead of taking out membership, paid £3 to vote in the leadership election in 2015) chose Jeremy Corbyn, a formerly marginalized far left socialist, as the new head of the party. Ordinary Labour voters were horrified, knowing from day one that Corbyn could never lead the party to government and was not either remotely Prime Ministerial material. But vast numbers of young extreme left-wingers, flushed with victory and dedicated to an idealistic coming revolution and led by a new Corbyn-worshipping movement called Momentum, were determined to take traditional working- and middle-class voters in a direction that had little or no appeal to them at all.

From the outset, Labour was split almost down the centre. That divide proved dangerous for the political system in Britain, where government has been unevenly but broadly shared between the Tory and Labour parties in what was effectively a two-party arrangement. With the almost total collapse of the centrist Liberal Democrats, who had just been in an ill-judged coalition with the Tories in government from 2010 to 2014, Britain faced the possibility that the two-party system would founder after many decades, should Labour split and leave the country with three unbalanced parties and the real threat of a one-party state emerging, so long as neither Labour group remained unelectable.

That something has gone wrong within the Labour party is clear. After the referendum vote to leave the European Union, Corbyn came under severe pressure to resign as leader, and a battle ensued with loyal Corbynites both in and outside Momentum backing him to the hilt, but with the parliamentary Labour Party, made up of members of parliament, urging him to bow to the inevitable and go.

“[Britain wants] to be like Switzerland but they don’t know that Switzerland has to pay an enormous amount to the EU… They will have to accept the free movement of people and pay high fees and accept some laws which they would have no influence on.” — Daniel Pedroletti, president of the Swiss community group New Helvetic Society London.
Norway is the only country that has adopted all EU directives before their deadline. Norway, which is supposedly not a member of the EU, thus implements EU rules and regulations more obediently than do the founding members France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg.
Most of Norway’s laws are currently written by bureaucrats in Brussels, not by elected parliamentarians in Norway.
The citizens of Norway rejected membership in the EU, twice. Opinion polls today show that a very large majority of Norwegians are against membership in the EU. Despite this, the nation’s politicians have made the country more or less a member of the EU, only without any influence or voting rights — in opposition to the popular will, and possibly also in violation of the country’s Constitution.
The British should study the case of Norway closely. But mainly as a negative example of what to avoid.

On June 23, 2016, 51.9% of the voters in the United Kingdom voted for leaving the European Union (EU). The turnout was high, and the British referendum gained great international attention. Marine Le Pen, leader of France’s National Front, praised the result, calling Brexit “the most important moment since the fall of the Berlin Wall.” Le Pen said that if she wins France’s 2017 presidential election she would call a referendum on leaving the EU.

Nigel Farage stepped down as leader of the UK Independence Party (UKIP) shortly after winning the historic vote. Many death threats against him and his family from supporters of the EU reportedly affected his decision.

The complicated divorce process between the UK and the EU could take years of negotiations. Some people have looked to Switzerland and Norway, two of the wealthiest countries in Europe, as possible models to follow, yet both maintain a close cooperation with the EU. There are also concerns in Switzerland and Norway about how Brexit will impact their own relationship with the EU.

Days after Rodrigo Duterte called Barack Obama a “son of a whore,” the Philippine President announced he would expel U.S. counterterror forces from the southern Philippines, cease joint South China Sea patrols with the U.S. Navy and begin buying arms from Russia and China—a trifecta of policy shifts that will harm regional security.

“I do not like the Americans. It’s simply a matter of principle for me,” Mr. Duterte said Monday. His record backs him up.

Before winning election in May, Mr. Duterte was the longtime mayor of Davao in the restive southern province of Mindanao, where he railed against the presence of U.S. forces who were invited by previous national governments to fight al Qaeda-linked Abu Sayyaf terrorists. As mayor he kept U.S. drones out of Davao, refused to become Philippine Defense Minister for fear of working with Washington, and expressed “hatred” for the U.S. over a 2002 explosion in a Davao hotel for which he blames the FBI.

U.S. operations in Mindanao over the past two decades—counterterror raids, training of local forces, economic development—helped calm an insurgency that was killing Filipinos and foreigners by the hundreds, corrupting Philippine armed forces and bedeviling national leaders in Manila. But Mr. Duterte prefers to see the U.S. as an ex-colonial overlord trying to reimpose its will.

Many Filipinos assumed Mr. Duterte’s views would moderate once he became President. His predecessor, Benigno Aquino, initially courted China but then dramatically deepened security ties with the U.S. after Beijing escalated its assault on Philippine rights in the South China Sea. But three months into his tenure, and despite the landmark international-tribunal verdict against China’s maritime behavior in July, the new leader is increasingly spurning Washington for Beijing.