RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12908/turkey-qatar

Ahmed Charai, in an article for The National Interest, has forcefully reminded the world that: “As Qatar faces international pressure to stop harboring senior [Muslim] Brotherhood figures, there are clear indications that it will facilitate their migration to Turkey. So among the urgent challenges for the U.S. allies to address is the question of how to weaken this budding alliance.”

Charai has a point. There is a “more-mature-than-emerging” anti-U.S. alliance among U.S.’s presumed Middle East allies

What should matter to Washington in this Turkish soap opera is the fact that Turkey is getting support, in its confrontation with the U.S., from “like-minded” countries: Russia, China and Qatar. It is clearly time for Washington to rethink its theoretical but fake alliance with Qatar, a tiny Gulf sheikhdom that is trying to neutralize U.S. efforts to sanction Turkey — another theoretical ally that is more like-minded with Russia than with the West.

In theory, the oil-rich sheikhdom of Qatar is an ally of the United States. The peninsula hosts more than 10,000 U.S. military personnel and approximately 72 F-15 fighter jets at its Al Udeid military base. In this turbulent part of the world, alliances, like enmities, can be treacherous. In March, the Foreign Affairs Committee of the US House of Representatives was already looking at four alternatives that could become the military headquarters when the Al Udeid contract with Qatar will expire in 2023. After “closely observing its [Qatar’s] financial and banking system due to fears of support for terrorist organisations and individuals associated with them,” Washington apparently decided it had to rethink Al Udeid and its Qatari “allies.”

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/08/23/australia-leadership-crisis-peter-dutton-cleared-remain-parliament/

Scott Morrison was on Friday picked as Australia’s new prime minister after a Liberal Party coup in a stunning upset against key challenger Peter Dutton.

An ally of deposed leader Malcolm Turnbull, Mr Morrison, Australia’s former Treasurer, won a party-room ballot 45-40, ending an internecine battle that has scarred the conservative government ahead of an election due by May 2019.

He will be Australia’s sixth prime minister in less than 10 years, after emerging victorious from a three-way race with Mr Dutton, the former home affairs minister, and foreign minister Julie Bishop.

“My course from here is to provide absolute loyalty to Scott Morrison,” Mr Dutton, who was accused by Mr Turnbull of bullying and intimidation, said in brief comments afterwards.

Mr Turnbull, who called the second leadership meeting in a week after losing the majority support of the party, opted not to contest the vote. The ballot on whether to spill the leadership (declare it vacant) had been narrower than expected, with the same numbers: 45 votes to 40.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2018/08/24/jeremy-corbyn-praised-nick-griffin-former-kkk-leaderafter-video/

Jeremy Corbyn has been praised by the ex-leader of the BNP and a former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan after a video emerged in which he claimed that British Zionists “don’t understand English irony”.

Nick Griffin and David Duke rallied behind the Labour leader on Friday morning amid a backlash over the remarks, which were made during a speech in 2013.

Mr Corbyn faced widespread condemnation when footage emerged of him appearing to suggest that Zionist-supporting Jews were not fully accustomed to English culture.

Speaking alongside Manuel Hassassian, the Palestinian Authority representative in Britain, Mr Corbyn referred to one of the envoy’s recent speeches, which he said had been “dutifully recorded by the thankfully silent Zionists who were in the audience”.

He continued: “[They] berated him afterwards for what he’d said. So clearly two problems. One is that they don’t want to study history and secondly, having lived in this country for a very long time, probably all their lives, they don’t understand English irony either.

“Manuel does understand English irony and uses it very, very effectively so I think they need two lessons which we can help them with.”

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/viktor-orban-isnt-the-illiberal-revolutionary-you-think-he-is/

A first-time visitor to Hungary could be excused for thinking he’d arrived at an intensely religious country. In Budapest, the spires of several churches are visible from either bank of the Danube, and the Hungarian double cross is proudly emblazoned across the nation’s ubiquitous coat of arms.

Hungarians are rightly proud of their religious heritage. But such sentiment should not be confused with genuine spiritual conviction. Few people regularly attend religious services, the country’s historic Roman Catholic and Calvinist Churches are shedding adherents, and Hungary’s public square is notably secular. Religious holidays have been absorbed into a broader celebration of Hungarian culture that retains the trappings of Christianity without much in the way of substance. Christmas markets, not Midnight Mass, are the order of the day.

Against this increasingly secularized backdrop, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has famously endorsed “illiberal democracy,” a vaguely defined political project that is partly aimed at shoring up Hungary’s Christian identity. Orbán’s ambitious political agenda has at least one thing in common with Hungary’s historic churches: both are impressive edifices that conceal a hollow core.

Orbán’s recent speech in Romania, supposedly the most concrete explanation yet of what “illiberal democracy” might look like, was just a banal restatement of principles that no center-right party in the United States or Western Europe could possibly object to. Orbán will almost certainly continue to be a hero to right-wing populists and immigration skeptics, but his latest address should put to rest the idea that he is fashioning a comprehensive ideological alternative to political liberalism.