RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/an-exciting-finish-in-canadas-election-11571599515

As Canadians head to a federal election on Monday, polls have Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of the Liberal Party and Conservative Party leader Andrew Scheer in a dead heat.

Mr. Scheer has turned out to be a more serious contender than many, including many conservatives, expected. But Mr. Trudeau’s biggest headaches are on his left, where Jagmeet Singh, the personally engaging candidate of the New Democratic Party, and Bloc Quebecois candidate Yves-François Blanchet threaten to siphon off progressive votes from the Liberals. This has greatly increased Mr. Scheer’s chances of winning a minority government.

Voter surveys say the race is too close to call. As Darrell Bricker of the polling company Ipsos put on Oct. 15, the multiparty jockeying “points to an Election Night which could be full of surprises and close calls.”

Some meaningful number of Canadians appear ready to punish Mr. Trudeau for his performance since taking office in 2015. A carbon tax that wasn’t supposed to hurt a bit has harmed consumers in key provinces. Liberals promised fiscal discipline but Mr. Trudeau finishes four years with a C$20 billion deficit. The ruling party now counsels Canada not to expect a balanced budget until at least 2040.

The prime minister’s authenticity deficit is his bigger problem. The self-described champion of women and minorities took a hit when photos emerged last month showing that in years past, more than once, he darkened his face at costume parties.

Mr. Trudeau has apologized profusely and by most accounts Canadians don’t brand him a racist. For good measure he got President Obama to endorse him last week.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15028/sweden-church-hate

Although Good Shepherd’s Swedish School is marketed by the Swedish Jerusalem Society as a school that promotes peace, Tobias Petersson, Director of the think tank Perspective on Israel, has revealed that the textbooks used by Good Shepherd’s Swedish school have jihadi content that encourages holy war against the State of Israel. Also, in those textbooks, Jews are described as liars and corrupt.

Maps in the schoolbooks and on the walls of Good Shepherd’s Swedish School do not show the State of Israel; instead the outline of Israel had been displaced by the identical outline of the “State of Palestine”.

That such a large institution as the Church of Sweden gathers church collections throughout the country to support a school that spreads hatred and warmongering should doubtless be seen as enormously problematic.

The practice also shows that not only does Swedish aid go to organizations that spread hate, but also that large institutions in Sweden have opened back-channels to send millions of Swedish kronors every year to schools, such as Good Shepherd’s Swedish School, that also spread hate.

To understand how harmful this situation is, can you imagine what would happen if one of Israel’s — or another country’s — largest institutions were raising money to support a school that taught children to hate Sweden and celebrate terrorists who murdered Swedes? It would, of course, be a great scandal and totally unacceptable. But in Sweden, this is exactly what is happening now.

The Swedish Jerusalem Society, founded in 1900, has devoted its mission to charity work in Jerusalem and Bethlehem. For several decades, however, the Swedish Jerusalem Society has been hostile to the Jewish State of Israel. The association has three official goals in the Palestinian territories:

Strengthen the position of women
Contribute to peace and reconciliation
Strengthen the Christian minority

Despite these noble goals, the Swedish Jerusalem Society publishes a journal in which the content, although often about Israel, has a tone that is extremely hostile and biased. In the journal’s first issue of 2018, one can read an interview with a Palestinian school principal, in which she states:

“We have suffered for so many years, and may suffer for a few more years, but it is unfair to give our capital to anyone else. Why not share it?”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15043/turkey-kurdish-obsession

The end of First World War left the Kurds in an even worse situation than before. President Woodrow Wilson’s promise of “self-determination” was soon forgotten, leaving behind the dream of independence on the Kurdish side and the fear of Kurdish secession in the Ottoman camp as reconstituted as the Turkish Republic under Mustafa Kemal pasha (Ataturk).

In much of history, at least until recently, systems sustained by ultra-nationalist and/or nativist ideologies have always seen “otherness” as a threat rather than an opportunity of cultural and social enrichment.

In other words, one can commit genocide as long as one makes a speech in favor of Palestine and attends a Shi’ite chest-beating ceremony.

A classical dictum cited by Clausewitz, the father of war studies as an academic discipline, tells us that starting a war is often easy while ending it is always difficult. Does that dictum apply to the war that Turkey has started against the Kurds by invading Syria? Right now, the answer is that no one knows. What is certain, however, is that the best outcome that Turkey might expect, is to be extricated from that hornet’s nest with a minimum of damage.

While the war could be blamed on Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s autocratic style of decision-making, the deeper roots of the conflict must be sought in Turkey’s centuries-old Kurdish obsession.

That obsession was present, albeit in embryonic form, even during the Ottoman era, when the Sultan-Caliphs harbored suspicions about their Kurdish subjects on ethnic and religious grounds. Even when drawn into military service, Ottoman Kurds could not, or would not, be assimilated into the dominant Ottoman-Turkish identity. Subscribing to a variety of religious beliefs and traditions, including Alawism, Zoroastrianism, Yazidism and a panoply of Sufi orders stretching from the Balkans to Central Asia, the Kurds would not fit into the official Islamic identity of the empire.