RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/01/theresa-may-brexit-deal-defeat/After two years of political dysfunction, the British prime minister’s future is as unclear as her country’s.

The only meaningful unity that the United Kingdom has seen in the past two years has been opposition to the Brexit deal Prime Minister Theresa May negotiated with the European Union. That agreement, as predicted, suffered a crushing blow in the House of Commons today, voted down by a 432-to-202 margin in what was instantly the worst parliamentary defeat in history.

The defeat, as predicted, has prompted Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn to propose a vote, expected to be held on Wednesday, of no confidence in the government. When future historians consider Brexit, they will surely marvel at May’s obstinate capacity for survival in the face of unending political humiliation. Though her authority is all but nil at this point, if she hangs on tomorrow, her leadership will be further cemented. What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger, though it still doesn’t bring me Brexit . . .

May’s final plea before the defeat was that “a vote against this deal is a vote for nothing more than uncertainty, division, and the very real risk of no deal,” or worse, “no Brexit at all.” Which is true. Labour is just as split as the Tories on the question of how to proceed. Corbyn now faces enormous pressure from his own back-benchers to back a second referendum, and has shown no sign at any point of having an alternative to May’s deal in mind.

That is because there were only ever two alternatives to May’s deal, as the EU saw it: no-deal Brexit (which they deem disastrous) or no Brexit at all (which they’d quite like). For the British people, the choice was simpler still — faith in Brexit or no faith in Brexit. Now it seems that Britain faces two distinct but inexorably linked crises: a crisis of government and a crisis of legitimacy. Should both crises collide, it is hard to imagine the havoc that would ensue.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13540/europe-peaceful-takeover

The concept of the clash of civilizations assumes that there is a conflict between religions. This view often appears to be true where Islam is concerned; the religious aspect of Islamism appears to be a powerful motivator. That desire illustrates how deeply flawed were the sociological and political theories of modernization, according to which the entire world eventually would undergo a process of enlightenment, similar to Europe’s.
Whereas traditional Marxists believed that a dictatorship of the proletariat would result in a classless society, the neo-Marxists apparently believe that a dictatorship for the benefit of minorities will result in a society of absolute freedom for all.
To this end, they seem to think, it is necessary to build an anti-discrimination bureaucracy to break the domination of the majority over the minority and force the majority to demand an end to its own privileged position. It is not enough for the majority to tolerate otherness; it must embrace and love it.

The vast majority of Western politicians and members of the media today appear to be guided by the idea that it is better to be wrong about Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History than to be right about Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations. This seems simply an abbreviated expression of a widespread unwillingness, or inability, to call things by their real names. Let us examine the reality that is so hard for many members of liberal societies to acknowledge, and which explains why Huntington’s diagnosis of the current era is far more fitting than Fukuyama’s.

Huntington’s working hypothesis for analyzing current events basically follows German sociologist Max Weber’s “sociology of civilizations.” Yet the term “shock of civilizations” was coined in 1957 by the historian Bernard Lewis, in the aftermath of the Suez crisis.

The clash of civilizations should not be understood, however, in a purely military context. The clash of civilizations in which we find ourselves today is less direct in three main ways:

The two “civilizations” are not on distinct opposite sides. Not all Muslims are Islamists; not all Europeans want to defend European civilization.
Two religions do not stand against each other. Europe has religiously disarmed and in its place has put a totally irrational dogma in the form of multiculturalism.
The clash is not taking place with arms. Although terrorist attacks are severe, the attempt by one civilization to subjugate the other is occurring on a broader ideological and religious plane.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13521/denmark-immigration-transformation

The decision to send the criminal inhabitants of the asylum center to the uninhabited island of Lindholm caused great relief in Bording — an element the international press appears to have missed. Clearly, the right of law-abiding citizens to live in peace does not count for much on the scale of international moral outrage.

Significantly, the outraged international press did not offer any answers to the legitimate question of what governments are supposed to do with hardened criminal asylum seekers, who pose a genuine threat to their surroundings and have been sentenced to deportation, but cannot be deported from the country because of international human rights obligations.

The problem is far from a uniquely Danish one: virtually all European countries have signed international human rights conventions that leave them with the same dilemma.

The country did not just “change”. Danish politicians, with their policies, changed it.

Denmark made international headlines in late November 2018, when the Danish government announced a plan to send certain asylum seekers to the small, uninhabited island of Lindholm. The international outrage was intensified when it came to light that the island currently houses a research center for contagious animal diseases; that the ferry which the asylum seekers will be able to take to the mainland during the day (it does not operate in the evening) is named “Virus”; and that the asylum center will be accompanied by a constant police presence on the island.

The group of asylum seekers meant to live in Lindholm consists of criminals of various sorts, including those who have been sentenced to be deported from Denmark, those who are considered a security threat to Denmark, and so-called “foreign warriors”.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/parliament-rejects-mays-brexit-deal/

The Brexit deal painstakingly negotiated by British prime minister Theresa May over the past two years was rejected overwhelmingly by Parliament on Tuesday.

The deal, which fell in a 432–202 vote in the House of Commons, represented the only established path forward to prevent a so-called “no-deal” British exit from the European Union, which is set to take place in March and would likely result in massive political and economic upheaval.

In response to the historic defeat, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn tabled a vote of no confidence, which, if passed, would oust May and give Corbyn a chance to form a new government. If Corbyn’s bid to become prime minister then failed to gain the support of a majority of MPs within 14 days, Parliament would dissolve and a new general election would be held.

May, in advocating on behalf of the deal she has negotiated over the past two years, cast it as the only viable option that accorded with the will of the British people, who voted in June 2016 to leave the European Union.

“This is the most significant vote that any of us will ever be part of in our political careers,” May said as the five-day Commons debate concluded. “The time has now come for all of is in this House to make a decision . . . a decision that each of us will have to justify and live with for many years to come.”

https://pjmedia.com/homeland-security/a-trump-of-ones-own/

Here’s one reason to hold out some hope for 2019. On January 9 — while the British political class continued to bungle Brexit, French officials kept battling the gilets jaunes, and leaders across Europe persisted in waving the EU flag and waving in armies of Muslim immigrants — Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini went to Warsaw and, at a press conference with Polish Interior Minister Joachim Brudziński, envisioned Italy and Poland as ushering in a new “European spring” to challenge the primacy of the “Germany-France axis.”

The Guardian spelled out to readers just how they should feel about this “European spring.” Identifying Salvini — in the first two sentences of its article, mind you — as a “far-right interior minister” who seeks “far-right alliances” and leads “the far-right League” (later in the piece, Marine Le Pen, too, was labeled “far-right”), Guardian scribe Angela Giuffrida was quick to add that Salvini’s party and Brudziński’s “share similar anti-immigration, anti-Muslim and Eurosceptic views.”

It would be fairer, of course, to say “anti-Islam” here rather than “anti-Muslim,” and to describe Salvini and Brudziński not as “anti-immigration” but, rather, as opposed to suicidal immigration policies that have flooded much of Western Europe not with potential Nobel Prize winners but with likely rapists, Jew-beaters, gay-bashers, and lifelong welfare recipients, not to mention more than a few would-be jihadists and cheerleaders of terror.

Salvini further declared that if Europe follows along the path charted by himself and Brudziński, which involves “strengthening borders,” it might well experience a “renaissance of European values” and reverse the severe damage done to the continent by bureaucrats in Brussels and in the various national capitals. To any American, needless to say, this rhetoric will sound very familiar. And indeed, the fact is that while the Western European political class and its allies love to sneer at Donald Trump, millions of ordinary citizens across the continent wish dearly that they had a Trump of their own.