RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://standpointmag.co.uk/dispatches-november-2018-jeffrey-gedmin-chemnitz

Recently, I sat in my hotel a few steps away from the Gedächtniskirche — West Berlin’s iconic “church of remembrance,” left in ruin at the end of World War II to remind Germans of the horror of their aggression — preparing for a meeting with Reiner Haseloff, minister president of the east German state of Saxony-Anhalt. The 64-year-old Haseloff is a member of Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU). Like the Chancellor, Haseloff grew up on the country’s communist side, in the so-called German Democratic Republic. He, too, was trained as a scientist. Merkel holds a PhD in quantum chemistry; Haseloff’s doctorate is in physics.

I wanted to speak with Haseloff about the growing tensions between East and West Germans, three decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall; about the country’s shifting political landscape, about social cohesion and security, and Germany’s migration policies, the last being a subject where Haseloff and Merkel part ways. Haseloff has distanced himself from the Chancellor’s liberal migration policy; in 2015, Germany permitted some one million refugees from mostly Muslim majority countries to enter the country.

At the last minute my meeting with Haseloff was cancelled. The minister president was on his way to Köthen where a fight at a playground between two young Afghan men and a 22-year-old German man resulted in the German suffering a fatal heart attack. In Köthen, the mood was tense. Two weeks earlier, on August 26, violent protests had erupted in the east German city of Chemnitz where a 35-year-old German man was stabbed to death at a festival celebrating the city’s founding. A 22-year-old Iraqi and a 23-year-old Syrian were arrested for murder. If that were not enough, the same Sunday afternoon of the death in Köthen, September 9, a killing occurred in Neukölln, a Berlin neighbourhood where Turks and hipsters rub shoulder. In this case, a 36-year-old Lebanese-born man was shot to death, with five men fleeing the scene by car. Authorities suspect a clan dispute. Police estimate that 20 large families of foreign extraction in Berlin are involved in drug running, prostitution, and other organised crime. After Neukölln, Chemnitz, and Köthen a senior Berlin official said to me, with resignation, “People will have to accept some of this violence as the new normal.”

http://standpointmag.co.uk/features-november-2018-david-abulafia-antisemitism-labour-party-jeremy-corbyn

J’accuse . . . It may seem impudent to use Émile Zola’s famous opening to his defence of Alfred Dreyfus. And yet, as on that occasion, the issue of anti-Semitism has become intertwined with wider political questions, in this case a party leader who consorts with terrorists in Ireland and the Middle East and admires repressive regimes in Cuba and Venezuela, and a party whose members (including Members of Parliament) are being intimidated by extremists whose loathing for Israel has spilled over into contempt for Jews. This crisis has developed without much more than a murmur from the man at the top, although many, not just those on the Left, were willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, assuming that his blindness to anti-Semitism within the Labour Party was another example of the chaotic management of his party that characterised the first year of his reign. But more recent revelations have shown clearly that Jeremy Corbyn is very much part of the problem; he passionately believes what Ken Livingstone or indeed George Galloway believes: that the history of Zionism and of Israel proves his case, and he is happy to keep the company of the Iranians and others who propose to wipe Israel off the map.

His silence was not indolence, incompetence or stupidity, but the silence of one who is content to look the other way and cannily let things develop in the direction he has always wanted. Hence his own lack of fury at what are quite astonishing statements repeated again and again in the press and by public figures that he, the Leader of her Majesty’s Opposition, is an anti-Semite, statements that with any other senior politician would be countered by angry, vigorous, firm denial, a dose of righteous (or unrighteous) indignation, and maybe even recourse to the courts. He should also be aflame with rage at the extraordinary threats and slurs that those professing to be his supporters have flung into the ether by way of social media, some of the most revolting of which are now under investigation by the police for racist incitement. Indeed, it is now reported that the Labour Party itself is under police investigation for sitting on stomach-turning comments about the Holocaust and about exterminating Jews that were apparently supplied by its own members.

Of course, his way of thinking should have been obvious from the moment that he installed Shami Chakrabarti and her colleagues on his commission to examine the presence of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party. The most significant feature of their conclusions was the way references to anti-Semitism were wrapped up alongside other forms of racism — in other words, it was always being relativised, shown to be inherently implausible because it was inconceivable that a party committed to anti-racism and the fight against Islamophobia would be hostile to Jews. Far from generating action, the report was seen as an opportunity to declare that action had been taken.

https://www.steynonline.com/8895/the-majority-as-identity-group

The sold-out Mark Steyn Club Cruise departed Quebec City just as a wild tsunami of an election result crashed on the Plains of Abraham and washed away the National Assembly. On Monday François Legault’s brand new party, the CAQ (Coalition Avenir Québec), won 74 out of 125 seats and became the first government in half-a-century to be neither Liberal nor separatist. The CAQ is described as “center-right”, but that term doesn’t really cover it: Like many of the emerging parties in the new Europe – from Sweden to Italy, France to Hungary – M Legault concluded that the sweet spot on the spectrum lay in being both fiscally protective and socially protective. That’s to say, these new parties are not “center-right” in terms of Milton Friedman economics – they do not seriously challenge expectations of the big welfare state – but they are nationally assertive on the cultural front.

And so it was that Quebec’s new premier, in his first press conference, pledged to cut immigration by twenty per cent and to use the Notwithstanding clause to uphold the government’s ban on the niqab in the public service. Once again we see a clear difference between the English world (America, Britain, anglo-Canada) and the rest of the west (continental Europe, Quebec) when it comes to the rights of the majority versus the provocations of Islam. Here’s what I had to say on the subject in Maclean’s in 2010 :

The other day, a reader wrote to say that, while en vacances au Québec, he had espied me in a restaurant. With a couple of obvious francophones. And, from the snatches of conversation he caught, I appeared to be speaking French. “Appeared” is right, if you’ve ever heard my French. Nevertheless: “You’re a fraud, Steyn!” he thundered. The cut of his jib was that I was merely pretending to be a pro-Yank right-wing bastard while in reality living la vie en rose lounging on chaises longues snorting poutine with louche Frenchie socialists all day long.

I haven’t felt such a hypocrite since I was caught singing The Man That Got Away in a San Francisco bathhouse two days after my column opposing gay marriage. But yes, you’re right. I cannot tell a lie. I have a soft spot for Quebec. Not because of its risible separatist movement, for which the only rational explanation is that it was never anything but one almighty bluff for shakedown purposes. Yet, putting that aside, I’m not unsympathetic to the province’s broader cultural disposition. I regard neither Trudeaupian Canada nor Quietly Revolutionary Quebec as good long-term bets, or even medium-term bets. But, if I had to pick, I’d give marginally better odds to the latter. And the reasons why can be found in the coverage of Ms. Naema Ahmed and her “illegal” niqab, the head-to-toe Islamic covering that only has eyes for you.

The facts—or, at any rate, fact—of the case is well-known: a niqab-garbed immigrant from Egypt has been twice expelled from her French-language classes at the Saint-Laurent CEGEP and the Centre d’appui aux communautés immigrantes by order of the Quebec government. That much is agreed. Thereafter, the English and French press diverge significantly. The ROC reacted reflexively, deploring this assault on Canada’s cherished “values” of “multiculturalism.” In the Calgary Herald, Naomi Lakritz compared Quebec’s government to the Taliban. So did the Globe and Mail, in an editorial titled “Intolerant Intrusion.” In La Presse, Patrick Lagacé responded with a column called “The Globe, Reporting From Mars!”

The headline was in English, and on the whole M. Lagacé’s English is better than the Globe’s French. He began by noting their unbelievably stupid editorial on O Canada, in which they endeavoured to balance their charge of sexism in the English lyrics (“in all thy sons command”) by uncovering sexism in the French—”terre de nos aïeux” or “land of our forefathers.” Where, fretted the Globe for a couple hundred words, are the foremothers? This is what happens when your claims to be Canada’s national newspaper rest on the translation services of Babel Fish. As M. Lagacé pointed out, “aïeux, en français, englobe hommes et femmes.” Englobe maybe, but not in Globe.