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2016

Who Will Be Britain’s Next Prime Minister? The most likely options, out of several possibilities: Safe-pair-of-hands Theresa May or the charismatic Boris Johnson. By Toby Young

It would have been understandable if Boris Johnson had allowed himself a celebratory fist-pump when he appeared before the press in London on Friday morning. After all, the former London mayor was the de facto leader of the Out campaign, which against all odds had just won the U.K.’s referendum on the European Union.

Yet he looked shocked and ashen-faced. Not because he was now regretting his decision to campaign for Brexit, but because a short time earlier David Cameron had announced that by October he would step down as Britain’s prime minister. Plenty of people thought his resignation was inevitable, given how vigorously Mr. Cameron had fought to stay in the EU. But not Boris. He was one of 84 Conservative members of Parliament who had written a letter to Mr. Cameron on the eve of the referendum saying he had a “mandate and duty” to stay in post whatever the result.

But Mr. Cameron didn’t relish the prospect of being in charge during what will be a dangerous passage in the history of the British Isles. There is a mighty prize to be had—a new settlement with the EU that preserves access to the world’s largest single market and restores sovereignty to the British Parliament—but the risks are formidable, including the breakup of the U.K. England and Wales voted to Leave, but Northern Ireland and Scotland voted to Remain, and separatists in both are already using the skewed result as a pretext to agitate for independence. It will take Disraeli-like political guile, as well as Stakhanovite hard work, to guide the U.K. safely through this period.

For the 52-year-old Mr. Johnson, the crown he has been reaching for all his life is finally within his grasp, but the contest he will have to win has come sooner than he would have liked.

Britain’s Labour Coup Brexit’s first benefit: A rebellion against Jeremy Corbyn.

One happy result of Britain’s historic vote to leave the European Union is some belated signs of seriousness from grown-ups in the Labour Party. Witness this weekend’s rebellion against the party’s far-left leader, Jeremy Corbyn, in a move for new leadership in a turbulent time.

The putsch against Mr. Corbyn started on Friday when two Labour members of parliament formally sought a no-confidence vote against their leader. It gained momentum Saturday evening when Mr. Corbyn fired Hilary Benn, the party’s spokesman for foreign affairs, for disloyalty. Mr. Benn’s sacking led 11 (as of this writing) of Labour’s leading members of parliament on Sunday to resign their posts in the shadow cabinet in hopes of forcing a leadership election—an astonishing scale of rebellion in British politics.

Their complaint is that Mr. Corbyn didn’t campaign hard enough for Remain ahead of last week’s referendum. Remain was the party’s official position, held by many of its leading politicians, its financial backers among trade unions, and a large majority of the party’s young, educated and cosmopolitan supporters.

Instead, Mr. Corbyn followed his own pro-Brexit instincts, widely shared on the radical left, that the European Union is a free-trade, pro-deregulation vehicle for imposing “neoliberalism,” whatever that is, on Europe’s working class. He stumped for EU membership half-heartedly at best, and he refused to appear alongside Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron in the campaign’s last days to make a united case.

A New American Deal for Europe The next President can revive the commitment Obama abandoned.

Britain’s decision to leave the European Union opens an era of political disruption, but along with it comes opportunity. The U.S. can seize this moment of uncertainty to reassert its leadership of a Western alliance of free nations.

Britain and Europe are masters of their own fate, but the Continent has always benefited when a confident America points in the right direction. The Obama era has been marked by U.S. indifference and de facto default to the EU, the kind of supranational body President Obama thinks should rule the world.

But the EU has proved unequal to the urgent tasks of reviving economic growth and resisting security threats on its eastern and southern borders. It’s time for the U.S. to get back in the game because America needs a confident, prosperous Europe as a partner to defend the West against the rise of authoritarian regimes and global disorder.

An important first signal would be for the U.S. to invite the U.K. to begin bilateral free-trade talks that run alongside current talks with the EU. Mr. Obama may not be able to rise above his pre-Brexit taunt that Britain will move to “the back of the queue” on trade. But this would not be his first strategic mistake.

A trade deal with the world’s fifth-largest economy—and one of Europe’s healthiest—is in America’s interests for its own sake. A two-track trade negotiation would also help the British in their negotiation over new terms of trade with the European Union by giving Britain the leverage of a U.S. alternative. U.S.-British talks could also prod Brussels to move faster and rebuff the French protectionism that is infecting the EU-U.S. talks.

Whether or not Mr. Obama leads, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump should. Republicans in particular have a great opportunity to shore up a crucial alliance. Mr. Trump and House Speaker Paul Ryan can take the advice of our friends at the New York Sun and hold a joint press conference saying they’d welcome British trade talks. This would show statesmanship by Mr. Trump, allay some of the concerns about his protectionism, and offer a welcome opportunity for the two men to agree about something.

Mr. Trump says he’s not against trade, only against bad trade deals. Here is a moment to show he means it. He could also say he will meet with the new British Prime Minister as soon as possible if he is elected, and that America’s relationship with the U.K. is as important as any in the world.

Brexit also creates an opening to reinvigorate NATO. The transatlantic defense alliance has always been broader and sturdier than the European Union in providing European security, and now it will be the main vehicle for British influence in Europe. This can be a healthy development, especially if it frees Europe from a distracting and generally quixotic attempt to create an EU security structure that overlaps with NATO.CONTINUE AT SITE

HIS SAY: PAUL SCHNEE RESPONDING TO THE #TRUMP DUMPSTERS

A response from an e-pal:

During the last 12 months nobody has won any money betting against Donald Trump. As I understand it the gravamen of Mr. Suissa’s argument is that some method should be found to deny the will of the primary voters either before or at the Republican convention in July. This suggestion would have been more beneficially applied to Obama’s candidacy in 2008. Had it been successful the likelihood of a populist Trump candidacy, which seems to horrify Mr. Suissa even more than the 8 mirthless, poisonous and treacherous years of Obama’s presidency, would have been remote. Denying the will of the people is a conceit of the political elite as Prime Minister Cameron just discovered on Thursday.

Those conservatives and Republicans who will not support Donald Trump because they imagine themselves to be too politically pure, too morally superior, too well educated and too sophisticated because they consider Trump to be an unprincipled quasi-liberal vulgarian are committing a costly form of sanctimony which will hand over America and the Supreme Court to a political party which has abandoned Israel, supports the hate-group Black Lives Matter and whose members have moved so far to the left they would be unable to see the center if they were standing on top of a ladder looking through a pair of binoculars.

Yours sincerely,

Paul Schnee

West Hollywood

My Say:’This Is Not My Party’: George Will Goes from GOP to Unaffiliated By Nicholas Ballasy (And who really cares?) see note please

The Geiger counter is flat….there was no hail and firestorm….as the long winded sesquepidalian in media made his gratuitous announcement…..rsk

WASHINGTON – Conservative columnist George Will told PJM he has officially left the Republican Party and urged conservatives not to support presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump even if it leads to a Democratic victory in the 2016 presidential election.

Will, who writes for the Washington Post, acknowledged it is a “little too late” for the Republican Party to find a replacement for Trump but had a message for Republican voters.

“Make sure he loses. Grit their teeth for four years and win the White House,” Will said during an interview after his speech at a Federalist Society luncheon.

Will said he changed his voter registration this month from Republican to “unaffiliated” in the state of Maryland.

“This is not my party,” Will said during his speech at the event.

He mentioned House Speaker Paul Ryan’s (R-Wis.) endorsement of Trump as one of the factors that led him to leave the party.

Will, a Fox News contributor, said a “President Trump” with “no opposition” from a Republican-led Congress would be worse than a Hillary Clinton presidency with a Republican-led Congress.

Farage: Brits Voted ‘Leave’ Because Obama Told Them Not To By Rick Moran

“Obama certainly has that reverse Midas touch. Recall his efforts to secure the Olympics for Chicago that ended in embarrassing failure. After nearly eight years in the White House, President Obama can’t understand that the influence he has as president is a precious resource not to be wasted unless he is sure that he can make a difference. That includes efforts to influence domestic as well as foreign policy.”

UKIP leader Nigel Farage gave a backhanded compliment to President Obama when he said that many voters supported leaving the EU because Obama told them not to.

The Hill:

Threatening people too much insults their intelligence,” the United Kingdom Independence Party head said.

“A lot of people in Britain said, ‘How dare the American president come here and tell us what to do?’ ” Farage continued on Sirius XM’s “Breitbart News Daily,” citing Obama’s U.K. trip in April.

“It backfired. We got an Obama-Brexit bounce, because people do not want foreign leaders telling them how to think and vote.”

Britain on Thursday voted to leave the EU in a move experts predict will lead to worldwide financial uncertainty.

British Prime Minister David Cameron promptlyresigned Friday morning.

Obama warned Britain against leaving the EU during a visit in April, saying it could hurt potential trade deals with the U.S.

“The U.K. is going to be in the back of the queue,” he said during an appearance alongside Cameron.

“Not because we don’t have a special relationship but because given the heavy lift of 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.”

Donald Trump on Friday mocked Obama for being on the losing side in the Brexit vote.

“The world doesn’t listen to him,” the presumptive GOP presidential nominee said during a press conference in Turnberry, Scotland.

Trump said he wholeheartedly backed Britain’s decision to leave the EU and once again forge its own path.

“You just have to embrace it,” he said. “It’s the will of the people. What happened should have happened, and they’ll be stronger for it.”

After the Earthquake By Roger Kimball

A cartoon on the front page of The Telegraph this morning sums up the stunned mood in London. “Good evening,” a newsreader says. “Aliens didn’t land on earth and Elvis wasn’t found alive, but everything else happened.” The triumph of Brexit sent shock waves through the edifice of polite opinion. As several commentators noted, it was a Pauline Kael moment: no one who was anyone knew anyone who had voted for Brexit and yet, just as Pauline Kael (apocryphally) was flabbergasted at the victory of Richard Nixon because she knew no one who had voted for him, so all the best sort of people woke yesterday to the impossible news that the angry, unwashed, lumpen folk who live in the wrong postal districts had won! How could it be?

The reaction on the street ripened from near catatonic incredulity to spluttering anger. Like Denmark after the death of the elder Hamlet, all polite society, on the continent and in America as well as in Britain, was contracted in one brow of woe. Yet by the end of the day reality began to reassert itself. The markets had a bad day, and doubtless will have a few more, but the pound, after plunging to a 30-year low, rebounded. David Cameron, who had hitched his wagon to the shooting star of the Remainders, gave what was perhaps the best speech of his career, ending with the announcement of his resignation. But the real news, tomorrow’s bulletin, came from Boris Johnson who, along with Michael Gove, Dan Hannan, and Nigel Farage, was the public face of Brexit. In a speech that was at once mollifying and candid, Boris noted the obvious.

“We cannot turn our backs on Europe,” he said in a speech yesterday. “We are part of Europe. Our children and grandchildren will continue to have a wonderful future as Europeans, traveling to the continent, understanding the language and culture that make up our common European civilization.”“Our common European civilization.” It is one of the ironies of the spirit of the European Union that it has turned its back on the essentials of that civilization, beginning with its hostility to the Christian roots of that civilization and proceeding on to its attack on the essentially European values of democracy and individual liberty. Reflecting on the referendum, Boris pointed out that voters decided that it was time “to take back control from a European Union that has become too remote, too opaque and not accountable to the people it is meant to serve.” This is the fundamental message of Thursday’s referendum. CONTINUE AT SITE

Western Universities: The Best Indoctrination Money Can Buy by Denis MacEoin

The tendency of modern liberals to wring apologies out of governments for the actions of their ancestors, from the slave trade to Orientalist depictions of the peoples of Islam, is a pointless attempt to re-write history. There are, of course, no calls for Muslim governments to apologize for anything from their slave trade to the early Arab conquests.

“The ethics of establishing a campus in an authoritarian country are murky, especially when it inhibits free expression.” — Professor Stephen F. Eisenman, Northwestern University (which has a branch in Qatar)

Oxford and Cambridge, have accepted more than 233.5 million pounds sterling from Saudi and Muslim sources since 1995 — the largest source of external funding to UK universities.

“Several agreements made between the MEC [Oxford’s Middle East Centre] and donors appear to indicate that funders have sought to influence the centre’s output and activities.” — Robin Simcox, A Degree of Influence, 2009, p.35

One of those “dilemmas” is the influence by teachers across the United States on impressionable students who organize Israel Apartheid Weeks. They join with assorted anti-Semitic demonstrators, condemn Israel for every sin under the sun, and use intimidation against Jewish and Zionist colleagues, but are never told any historical, legal, or political facts by their equally biased faculties.

Fundamentalist Islam, backed by vast monetary power, is corrupting our dearest Enlightenment values.

In asking why Western civilization has been the greatest in history, many point to European and, later, American military power, the strength of the British, French, Spanish and Portuguese empires, their command of the oceans, or the progress brought about through the Industrial Revolution. Today, of course, there is a general trend to picture Western achievements in a uniformly negative light, often for valid reasons, including our use of slavery or the mistreatment of so many native Americans. This negativity is, however, highly selective. Why, for example, are Western Christian empires considered a blight on mankind while the great many Muslim empires of the past — which lasted over a much longer period, engaged in the largest and longest-lasting slave trade in history, sought to impose one religion over all others, and placed enormous barriers on rational thought from about the 10th century — regarded as a blessing?

The greatness of the modern West owes much to those discoverers, conquerors, and traders and to the worldwide enterprises they built — just as the Islamic empires had their explorers, traders, and international networks (as in the great Sufi orders). Important civilizations were created in both realms: great urban developments, great architecture, the first universities, great poetry, great art, great philosophy, a flurry of scientific and mathematical activity in the Muslim middle ages, and then in the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution in Europe. The tendency of modern liberals to wring apologies out of governments for the actions of their ancestors, from the slave trade to Orientalist depictions of the peoples of Islam, is a pointless attempt to re-write history. There are, of course, no calls for Muslim governments to apologize for anything from their slave trade to the early Arab conquests.

The modern world of the West is a product of a period that created the greatest advances in human history: the Enlightenment. From that era we can date the beginnings of the most important strengths of our modern world. It is these strengths, in spite of the many blessings they have bestowed and their role as buttresses for cohesive societies, that are derided and often attacked from the Islamic sphere as well as by forces within the West. It is not hard to remember what those strengths are: liberal democracy, human rights, religious tolerance, international instruments for the managing of conflict, women’s rights, minority rights of all kinds, legislation out of political debate, an abhorrence of tyranny, freedom of thought, belief, and speech, critical inquiry, freedom of the press and other media, secularization that permits freedom of religious worship, and safety for the authors of opinions that dissent.

Egypt: New Attacks on Christians by Raymond Ibrahim

After appearing, the police stood back and allowed the mob to continue destroying the house and setting more Christian homes and vehicles on fire.

Last month in Egypt, a 70 year old Christian woman was stripped naked, beaten, and paraded in the streets of her village by a mob of 300 Muslim men.

“How long will these acts continue with impunity — will they never stop?” — Dr. Mona Roman, host of the Arabic-language news show, Behind the Scenes.

In a chronically familiar scene, angry, rioting Muslims in Egypt burned down around 80 Christian homes on June 17. In the words of one of the victims, Moses Zarif,

“On Friday afternoon, after noon prayers, a large number of Muslims gathered in the front of the new house of my cousin because a rumor had spread in the village that it would be turned into a church. They were chanting slogans against us: ‘By no means will there be a church here’ and ‘Egypt will remain Islamic!'”

According to the report, rioting Muslims beat the two cousins, attacked the building, destroyed all construction materials, and threw rocks at any Christian trying to intervene. Then they “turned their wrath on the Christian homes adjacent to the building, hurled rocks, looted houses and set fire to any Christian property in their wake.”

When the local priest heard what was happening, he rushed to the scene — only to be attacked while in his car; the Muslims climbed on it, stomped on it, and damaged it.

Furtive Outcasts of the Arab World ‘What’s the point of risking your life to remove a mask only to have to wear a different one?’ By Sam Sacks

Early in Saleem Haddad’s “Guapa” (Other Press, 358 pages, $16.95), the novel’s narrator, Rasa, accompanies an American journalist to an interview with an opposition leader, acting as her interpreter. The setting is an unnamed Middle Eastern nation that could stand in for any of the countries convulsed during the Arab Spring. Rasa has taken part in the protests, but when he meets the opposition leader, a religious populist who wants to usher in a strict Islamic state, he’s flooded with doubts. For as well as being American-educated and reform-minded, Rasa is gay. “I joined the protests so that I would no longer have to wear a mask. What’s the point of risking your life to remove a mask only to have to wear a different one?”

“Guapa”—the title refers to a clandestine gay bar Rasa frequents—is about the furtive, outcast status of gay men in the Arab world. Mr. Haddad, who was born in Kuwait and lives in London, threads the book’s conflicts through both political and personal spheres. Just as Rasa is squeezed between Islamism and authoritarianism, his place in the household is thrown into doubt when his grandmother catches him sharing a bed with his lover. His fear of government reprisal is matched by his ingrained horror of violating the codes of eib, a word that loosely translates to “shame” and refers to Arabic societies’ strict rules of social conduct that deem homosexuality a perversion.

“Infidels” (Seven Stories, 143 pages, $23.95), the third of his books to be translated into English, centers on Jallal, the teenaged son of a Moroccan prostitute whose own sexual initiation comes at the hands of men in bathhouses. This world is described in a succession of raw, polemical monologues spoken by Jallal and his relatives (all in a rough-and-ready translation from French by Alison Strayer). Jallal’s grandmother, who initiated the family trade, rages at the hypocrisy of being “damned, and so very much in demand.” The angriest voice is the boy’s: “For the tens of thousands of people around us, we deserve our pariah status, our grim fate, because we do nothing to change it, break out of it. Maman, one day you’ll be stoned to death by the very same people who creep to the house each night to ask for your forgiveness and a bit of pleasure.”

An outsider’s fury fuels Jallal’s coming of age, which takes him in exile to Egypt and then Belgium. There he meets and falls for Mahmoud, another disenchanted expat who introduces him to a mystical form of Islam based on ecstatic love and liberation. The planned endpoint of their febrile religious conversion? A suicide bombing in Casablanca.

Mr. Taïa unblinkingly recounts this folie à deux as it moves toward a “sublime explosion” designed “to make people see love. Through death. Through an extreme act.” Jallal’s testimony boils with resentment, self-loathing, vindictiveness and a flailing desire for personal salvation. “I understood that a huge sacrifice had to be made in order for the world to change,” he says, “for my heart to open and let in the light.” In view of the deadly attack in Orlando, Mr. Taïa’s unnerving portrait of self-radicalization feels all the more relevant.