RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13398/un-global-compact-withdrawal

The EU has been paying particularly North African governments for years to keep migrants away from the European continent. The effort seems to have yielded few results in terms of stopping migration to Europe.

The UN Global Compact stipulates that, “media outlets that systematically promote intolerance, xenophobia, racism and other forms of discrimination towards migrants” should not receive “public funding or material support.”

Already, it is clear what this stipulation means in practice. The UN recently banned the Canadian outlet Rebel Media from attending the Conference for the Adoption of the UN Global Migration Compact. When Rebel Media asked for an explanation, they were told that the UN, “reserves the right to deny or withdraw accreditation of journalists from media organizations whose activities run counter to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations, or who abuse the privileges so extended or put the accreditation to improper use or act in a way not consistent with the principles of the Organization. The decisions are final”.

This form of totalitarian behavior on the part of the UN should encourage more states that still value democracy, immediately to back out of the Compact.

The ongoing and bitter dispute between the EU and its Eastern European member states — countries such as Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic — that have refused to take in migrants as part of the EU’s quota system, might be approaching some sort of compromise. In an internal document circulated to EU interior ministers in Brussels in early December, Reuters reported, EU member states that refuse to host migrants in their countries could be exempted from doing so, if instead they show “alternative measures of solidarity.” According to diplomats, these “alternative measures” are apparently EU code for “paying into the EU budget or paying toward development projects in Africa”.

“The document,” Reuters noted, “said the European Union would need a proper mechanism to avoid a situation in which all EU governments opted to pay their way out of any hosting responsibilities and would set an eight-year period for any arrangements”.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13397/united-nations-chicanery

The Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration — which seeks to criminalize criticism of migration — is nothing more or less than a dangerous effort to weaken national borders, to normalize mass migration, to blur the line between legal and illegal immigration, and to bolster the idea that people claiming to be refugees enjoy a panoply of rights in countries where they have never before set foot.

One thing about the agreement, in any event, is irrefutable: almost nobody in the Western world has been clamoring for this. It is, quite simply, a project of the globalist elites. It is a UN power-grab.

It is something else, too: it is an effort to enhance the clout of the UN’s largest and most influential power bloc — namely, the Arab and Muslim states. Briefly put, whatever this deal is or is not, it is definitely not good news for the West, for freedom, or for national identity and security.

In Britain, the rage over Muslim rape gangs and Theresa May’s Brexit foul-up is spreading. In Germany, anger about Merkel’s recklessly transformative refugee policies is mounting. In France, the growing cost of immigrant freeloaders to taxpayers has sparked the most sensational public demonstrations since 1968. In Italy and Austria, opponents of the Islamization of Europe now hold the reins of power. Elsewhere in Western Europe, more and more citizens are standing up to their masters’ open-borders dhimmitude.

Yet much of this principled and patriotic resistance may turn out to be for naught, thanks to the so-called Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration, which is scheduled to be signed by representatives of the UN member states at a December 10-11 conference. Supporters of the compact are quick to reassure its critics that it is not a binding treaty and that it reaffirms the concept of national sovereignty. Nevertheless, when you come right down to it, it is nothing more or less than a dangerous effort to weaken national borders, to normalize mass migration, to blur the line between legal and illegal immigration, and to bolster the idea that people claiming to be refugees enjoy a panoply of rights in countries where they have never before set foot.

http://standpointmag.co.uk/features-december-2018-michael-pinto-duschinsky-munkacs-roman-vishniac-mukachevo

What was it really like to live in a traditional Jewish community in Eastern Europe before it was obliterated by the Nazis? The question is important because the physical destruction of six million Jews was also a cultural catastrophe. The danger is that our understanding will consist of noble caricatures. This essay was stimulated by the contrast between the highly influential scenes recorded in 1930s Munkacs by Roman Vishniac and family snapshots from the same period.

In the process of commissioning photographs which would help to raise funds for impoverished Jews in 1930s Europe, the New York based “Joint” — the American Joint Distribution Committee — produced images which were classic works of art as well as invaluable documents showing the predicament of Jewish communities already suffering from economic deprivation and increasingly severe anti-Semitism.

Some of the most striking pictures by Vishniac, the Moscow-born American photographer despatched by the Joint, were of pious, poverty-striken, long-bearded Hasidim in mud-laden Carpatho-Ruthenian villages and in towns such as Munkacs, which the Vishniac version implies was the essence of backwardness.

At the time Vishniac took his photographs in the late 1930s, Munkacs (Mukachevo in Slavic languages) was almost half Jewish. Following the Hungarian takeover of the town in 1938 and the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, the town’s Jewish refugees from Poland were driven into Soviet territory which the advancing Nazi forces soon overran. Most of the expellees were murdered within weeks in one of the first mass shootings of the Holocaust, carried out in Kamenets-Podolski by Hitler’s Einsatzgruppen. Apart from this tragedy, the fact that Hungary was an ally of Hitler at least protected Hungarian Jewry from the extreme suffering across the border in Slovakia and in Poland. Anti-Semitic economic measures and the conscription of Jewish males into labour battalions in lieu of military service functioned in Hungary as substitutes for mass murder.

As Germany neared defeat in 1944, supposedly-secret talks between the Allies and Hungarian officials to arrange for Hungary to switch sides were conducted so incompetently that Nazi agents were able to warn Hitler. He then sent the SS and Adolf Eichmann into Hungary with a mission to prevent Hungary’s desertion and to take the opportunity to deport its Jews to Auschwitz.

Nazi forces entered Hungary on March 19, 1944. Within weeks, Jews in most places, apart from Budapest, which was left to the last, were forced into makeshift ghettoes. The order to Jews in Munkacs to leave their homes for the few streets which were to form the ghetto came with a roll of drums on April 15, the last day of Passover. Jews from neighbouring villages were crowded separately into Jewish-owned brickyards on the outskirts of town. The Munkacs ghetto existed briefly. The first deportation train left on May 14, the last on May 24. According to notes left by my mother before she died last year, I was smuggled out of the Munkacs ghetto on May 5 at less than a year of age; she was smuggled out two weeks later. If the date she gives is correct, the deportations were already in full swing. Had the Christian woman recruited to visit the ghetto carrying false papers arrived a week later, it would have been too late to save her. Her mother was included in the final transport from the town, survived slave labour in Auschwitz and further camps but died a year and a half after her release. My mother never saw her again. Her father and grandfather were gassed on arrival in Auschwitz on May 26. We know that my mother’s uncle survived the selection that day since someone later reported meeting him in the camp. But he too died — where and when is unknown — as did a mass of other relatives.

http://standpointmag.co.uk/features-december-2018-george-schopflin-george-soros-central-european-university-fidesz-budapest

On October 25, the Rector of the Central European University (CEU), Michael Ignatieff, announced that unless the Hungarian government regularised the status of CEU by December 1, it would move to Vienna.

As so often with such stories — customarily presented in the Western media as a fight between good (the CEU) and evil (Orbán, Fidesz, the Hungarian government) — reality is infinitely more complex. There is indeed a contest between the CEU and the Hungarian government, but it’s far from being the simplified morality tale that is so widely propagated.

Matters began in 2005, when the CEU did a deal with the then left-wing government that it would be given a unique exception from the Hungarian education law and be able to grant both Hungarian and American diplomas. The American dimension of this arrangement was something free-floating, the CEU was registered in the US, but had no university presence there. But the new Hungarian education law of 2011 modernised the system and, inter alia, declared not unreasonably that all the 28 foreign institutions of higher education operating in Hungary would have to have a mother university in their country of origin. The CEU did not.

So when the Hungarian education office began its quinquennial review in 2016, it came upon the CEU’s anomalous status. Legally there were two CEUs. The CEU granted Hungarian diplomas (quite legally) and simultaneously American ones without the CEU having a US mother university. At this stage, the relationship between Hungary and the CEU was an administrative disagreement, which could certainly have been resolved at that level had there been the will to do so. The difficulty of there not being a US-based mother university could certainly have been circumvented. That’s what technocracies are for.

But at that point, the CEU opted to see dispute not as technocratic, but as political. The CEU is a private foundation supported by George Soros, but Soros also finances a range of NGOs and think-tanks that have moved into the political vacuum left behind the collapse of the left-wing opposition to Fidesz. The CEU was and was seen as a part of this left-wing anti-Fidesz constellation. Thereby, with the coming into force of the new law, a political motive has been neatly attributed to the Hungarian government.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2018/12/08/must-defeat-theresa-mays-wretched-brexit-deal-go-world-hope/

This week’s meaningful vote on the Prime Minister’s Withdrawal Agreement marks a watershed moment in British politics. Parliament will decide on the UK’s future relationship with the European Union for a generation to come. That’s not hype. This is the decisive moment.

We are being asked to shackle ourselves to a deal which hands over £39 Billion without anything guaranteed in return, which allows the European Court of Justice to continue to interfere in British law and our daily lives, and which breaks the Conservative manifesto promise to leave the customs union. As Margaret Thatcher once said “No, No, No.”

There is an alternative. We can stop grappling and start grasping the global opportunities available to the UK. The real Brexit prize is the opportunity to go out into the world and agree free trade deals with old friends and new allies.

The UK’s biggest export market is the United States, worth over £110 billion a year. That is almost double our next biggest trading partner, Germany. Our trade with the United States, China and Australia far exceeds our trade with Germany, France and the Netherlands. When we traded primarily in bulky goods, such as coal or steel, our closest trading partners were often our biggest. This is no longer the case. Distance is dead.

The world is changing rapidly, and the UK must keep up. We have to look beyond Europe and seize the opportunities Brexit presents for us to be a truly Global Britain. Let’s not restrict ourselves to obsessive discussion of EU internal market or tie ourselves in knots as to how future trade will be conducted within the EU.

Aside from a global trade deal, Brexit brings a host of new opportunities. We have the opportunity to scrap the Common Agricultural Policy and the Common Fisheries Policy, allowing us to better support farmers, fishermen and consumers, and prioritise animal welfare.

We are a world leader in several emerging sectors including artificial intelligence, life sciences and information technology. These are the sectors of the future, and the UK is well poised to take advantage.

But if we remain tied to EU rules and within the EU’s orbit we will not remain a global leader for long. The EU will seek to reign in our competitive advantage with stifling regulations. Imagine being a global power in an emerging industry but having no power to set the rules.

We cannot allow ourselves to be bound by the EU’s stifling bureaucracy. Nobody is calling for a Wild West of deregulation. But we can have smarter, more sensible rules that create a fertile environment for our industries to thrive.

At least 700 were arrested in Paris as 5,000 demonstrators faced off against 8,000 police in another violent demonstration by “yellow vest” protesters.

Riots broke out all over France despite the supposed cause of the violence being eliminated earlier in the week by the government of President Emmanuel Macron. The government had been claiming that a fuel tax increase was to blame for the protests, but the government rescinded the increase on Wednesday.

Donald Trump believes it was Macron’s climate change policies:

But the protesters themselves were giving the real reason for the violence — if anyone in Macron’s government was listening.

Fox News:

“We are not here to destroy Paris, we are here to tell Macron we are f–king fed up,” said one protester before the clashes with the police began, adding that the people are protesting ever-increasing taxes on the working class.

[…]

Many protesters slammed the French media for portraying the protests as led by violent agitators and for siding with Macron’s government.

“We are not black bloc [black clad anarchists], we are ordinary people voicing our anger,” said a protester who did not want to be identified.

Meanwhile, the contagion has spread to neighboring Belgium and the Netherlands.

ABCNews:

Belgian police fired tear gas and water cannons at yellow-vested protesters calling for the resignation of Prime Minister Charles Michel after they tried to breach a riot barricade, as the movement that started in France made its mark Saturday in Belgium and the Netherlands.

Protesters in Brussels threw paving stones, road signs, fireworks, flares and other objects at police blocking their entry to an area where Michel’s offices, other government buildings and the parliament are located.

Brussels police spokeswoman Ilse Van de Keere said that around 400 protesters were gathered in the area.

About 100 were detained, many for carrying dangerous objects like fireworks or clothing that could be used as protection in clashes with police.

The reasons for the protests are not entirely clear. Neither Belgium nor the Netherlands has proposed a hike in fuel tax — the catalyst for the massive and destructive demonstrations in France in recent weeks.

Instead, protesters appeared to hail at least in part from a populist movement that is angry at government policy in general and what it sees as the widening gulf between mainstream politicians and the voters who put them in power. Some in Belgium appeared intent only on confronting police.