RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://pjmedia.com/spengler/no-the-president-of-poland-didnt-say-that-jews-cause-anti-semitism/

In late June of 1941, my father’s first cousins Moshe and Dvora fled their house in the tiny town of Kameny Most, about halfway between Slonim and Baranavichy in what is now Belarus. Hitler had launched Operation Barbarossa days before, and their home stood almost on the German-Soviet line that had divided Poland in 1939. Now the Germans had marched into town. The boy and girl, then 15 and 16, reached the woods behind their house before the Germans arrived. Their parents and baby brother fled a minute later, but the Germans already were there. They couldn’t reach the woods and hid in the tall grass. A Polish neighbor pointed them out to the Germans, who shot them on the spot. Moshe and Dvora joined the partisan brigade led by the Bielski brothers, made famous in the film Defiance. Not long afterwards they returned at night, barricaded the neighbor in his house, set it afire and burned him alive. By the grace of God the teenagers survived the war and came to the new State of Israel and started large and flourishing families. I had the merit to arrive at Dvora’s deathbed in 2004 just in time to receive her blessing upon the American branch of her family.

I tell this story to make it clear that my family isn’t soft on Polish anti-Semitism.

Anti-Semitism is a matter of the most profound importance, and Polish anti-Semitism is something I take personally. That is why it is especially irresponsible to accuse Poles of anti-Semitism falsely, as the Jewish Insider website yesterday accused Polish President Andrzej Duda. According to the website, President Duda told a group of Jewish community leaders assembled at the Polish Consulate in New York that hostile remarks by an Israeli cabinet minister about Polish anti-Semitism “were a ‘humiliation’ and were the reason for an increase in antisemitic attacks against Jews in Poland.” It is wrong to cry wolf under any circumstances, and reckless to cry wolf where real wolves might turn up.

President Duda never said it. I know he never said it because I was at the meeting.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2019/09/29/often-centuries-europe-blowing/

Last week I wrote about political uncertainty as the new normal for the economy and financial markets. It seems that there is a growing body of opinion at the Bank of England that agrees.

In a speech, Michael Saunders, an external member of the Bank’s Monetary Policy Committee, said that UK interest rates may need to fall further regardless of what happens over Brexit, such is the likely seemingly never-ending uncertainty created by its political fallout.

This runs contrary to the official line, which is that even in the event of a no deal Brexit, interest rates may have to rise to deal with the inflationary consequences of any shock to output capacity.

Very few people believe this is actually what would happen in practice, and now along comes Mr Saunders to say, indeed; the economy is already slowing precipitously, so we may need to cut whatever happens over Brexit.

I’ve given up trying to figure out where we’ll end up on this journey. Almost any prediction is rendered redundant within a few hours by the unfathomable politics of the UK’s predicament.

Last week’s Supreme Court judgement seems to make the chances of a deal, already quite slim, vanishingly improbable.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14937/iran-europe-diplomacy

The reality of the delusional approach adopted by Mr Macron and other European leaders was, though, brutally exposed the moment Mr Rouhani arrived in New York. Instead of showing any sign of seeking to repair Tehran’s strained relationship with the West and its allies, he instead indulged in an orgy of self-justification in which he sought to portray his country as an innocent victim of Western aggression rather than accepting, as is really the case, that Iran was the primary instigator of the latest escalation in tensions.

“The security of our region shall be provided when American troops pull out.” — Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, UN General Assembly, September 25, 2019.

This will have made for uncomfortable listening for all those European leaders who still believe that the best way to resolve the global crisis with Iran is by trying to save the nuclear deal.

The reality is that, so long as Tehran remains committed to its hostile stance towards the West, there is little prospect of having a constructive relationship with Iran.

The utter futility of European attempts to keep faith with the flawed Iranian nuclear deal has been brutally exposed in the wake of the uncompromising approach adopted by Iranian President Hassan Rouhani during the United Nations General Assembly.

In the build-up to the UN’s annual jamboree of global networkers, there had been much speculation that, against a background of mounting tensions in the Gulf over Tehran’s aggressive conduct, the forum might provide an opportunity to re-establish a dialogue with the ayatollahs.

To this end French President Emmanuel Macron has, in particular, been actively trying to broker a diplomatic rapprochement between Tehran and Washington, to the extent it was even suggested that a bilateral meeting might be possible between US President Donald Trump and Mr Rouhani.

The reality of the delusional approach adopted by Mr Macron and other European leaders was, though, brutally exposed the moment Mr Rouhani arrived in New York. Instead of showing any sign of seeking to repair Tehran’s strained relationship with the West and its allies, he instead indulged in an orgy of self-justification in which he sought to portray his country as an innocent victim of Western aggression rather than accepting, as is really the case, that Iran was the primary instigator of the latest escalation in tensions.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14938/iran-we-did-we-didnt-game

For four decades, the mullahs have successfully practiced their “do-and-deny” tactic thanks to the indulgence, not to say cowardice, of Western leaders and the pathetic anti-Americanism of some Western pseudo-intellectuals.

Western anti-American intellectuals who become apologists for the mullahs are victims of their inability to conceive of a situation in which, while America may be bad, its adversary may be worse.

Then we had America versus the Third Reich. Later, America vs. the Soviet Empire, vs. the Vietcong and Khmer Rouge, vs. the Afghan Taliban, vs. Saddam Hussein. In every case, even if America was not the shining city on the hill, its adversary at the time was much worse.

Apologists for the Islamic Republic do not do it a service. By endorsing its illusions and shielding it against deserved criticism, they encourage its worst tendencies — tendencies that could cost Iran and the region more than they imagine.

How to take credit for a mischief you have committed but do not wish to own up to?

This is the dilemma Tehran apologists face when discussing the latest shenanigans in the region, including missile and drone attacks on Saudi oil installations.

On the one hand they want to take credit for the attacks and cast the Khomeinist regime as a mighty power capable of giving as good as it takes in a duel against the American “Great Satan.” They try to cast Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei as the little Tom Thumb taking on Donald Trump as the giant of the folk tale.

On the other hand, they try to cast Iran as an innocent victim, highlight the sufferings of babies supposedly left without powdered milk and old women running out of medication.

Wrapping up that theme is the claim that the Islamic Republic has done absolutely nothing that merits sanctions, and that the latest attacks were the work of Yemeni Houthis, Lebanon’s Hezbollah, Iraq’s PMF or even the army of djinns commanded by Zaafar al-Jinni from the 1001 Nights.