RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/german-police-brace-for-more-protests-over-immigration-

BERLIN—The German city of Chemnitz saw renewed anti-immigration protests Thursday, five days after the violent death of a resident turned the city into a rallying point for far-right opponents of the government’s refugee policy.

The demonstrations, which turned violent at times, have shocked the country and are the latest manifestation of the divisions caused by the influx of close to two million asylum seekers since 2015.

Police are currently questioning two men—one from Syria and one from Iraq—over the fatal stabbing early Sunday morning of a local man identified by police only as Daniel H.

Within hours of the killing, protesters had taken to the streets shouting anti-immigration slogans. A video later posted on social media showed a group of white men chasing two foreign-looking youths as one man yelled “You aren’t welcome here.”

On Monday, a demonstration registered by a local anti-immigration group drew around 6,000 protesters—some performing the banned Nazi salute—around the city’s memorial to Karl Marx. About 20 people were wounded in clashes between rival groups of demonstrators and the police, according to regional authorities in Saxony, the eastern state where Chemnitz is located.

The state’s interior ministry had requested police reinforcements ahead of another protest planned during a visit to the city by Michael Kretschmer, the premier of Saxony, on Thursday. Björn Höcke, a right-wing leader of the Alternative for Germany, or AfD party, has urged supporters to conduct a “march of mourning” in Chemnitz on Saturday. Mr. Höcke has previously called for a reassessment of Adolf Hitler’s rule.

Thursday’s protest drew an estimated 900 participants according to the Saxony police, making it much smaller than Monday’s. It ended after two hours in the early evening without any incident.

The refugee crisis that peaked in the summer of 2015 rocked the sedate world of German politics and boosted support for the AfD. The party’s ratings went from low single digits to a 12.6% score at last year’s general election, making it the largest opposition party in parliament. Some of AfD’s best electoral results were in Saxony, where it came second only to Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats.

Earlier this summer, a dispute over whether to tighten immigration rules divided Ms. Merkel’s party and came close to toppling her government. The two sides eventually reached a compromise after Ms. Merkel pledged to negotiate agreements with other European countries allowing Berlin to turn back asylum seekers who have open applications elsewhere. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/08/kings-college-london-safe-spaces-thuggish-violence/

The crisis of free speech on campus is not limited to the U.S.

King’s College London’s student union has a “Safe Space Policy” enforced by marshals who are paid the equivalent of $16 an hour to restrict free speech on campus. Under the policy, a speaker or student can be forced to leave a room if they are accused of using speech that discriminates against someone on the basis of ideology, culture, gender, race, religion, or age, among other characteristics. These categories are so ill-defined that almost any speech could be deemed a violation of the policy. The rationale is that if students have the unequivocal right to shut down those who offend them, the university can create a “Safe Space” where everyone is emotionally protected at all times. The administration believes that this approach is key to keeping student satisfaction high and preventing unrest on campus. But declaring the majority of student events “Safe Spaces” has in reality only served to encourage recurring unsafeness, in the form of violence against visiting speakers.

In January 2016, the Safe Space policy was in place when a mob of anti-Israel students prevented former Israel Security Agency head Ami Ayalon from finishing his talk on the university’s main campus. After the protesters barricaded the room, screamed deafening chants, and set off fire alarms, attendees were forced to flee the event through underground tunnels. This March, an offshoot of Antifa stormed a debate organized by the Libertarian Society between Ayn Rand Institute president Yaron Brook and political YouTuber Carl Benjamin. A familiar scenario unfolded in which smoke bombs were set off, a security guard was seriously injured, and the entire event was ultimately shut down by the actions of masked vigilantes who were invited onto campus by students at the university. At both events, declaring a “Safe Space” failed to stop students from making it unsafe.

https://pjmedia.com/homeland-security/heres-what-happened-when-zimbabwe-seized-white-farmers-land/

Last week’s controversy over President Donald Trump’s call for his State Department to examine South Africa’s coming land reform policy — in which white farmers purportedly are to have their farmlands seized — recalled a similar tragic situation in neighboring Zimbabwe in the early 2000s.

Fox News host Tucker Carlson apparently started the ball rolling when he reported on South Africa’s plan to begin expropriating white farmers’ land. Carlson drew comparisons with a similar program in Zimbabwe 20 years ago that led to economic collapse and hunger there. The president apparently took his cue from Carlson; the talk show host called on the U.S. to take a human rights stand on the basis of how things turned out then in Zimbabwe for both blacks and whites. All of this has been portrayed elsewhere as “dog-whistling” to alt-right nationalists and white supremacists.

Even if the South Africa plan coincidentally excites some racists, Carlson is correct about naming Zimbabwe as the poster child for what can happen down this road. Zimbabwe was that bad — and the United States should put South Africa on notice that it and the whole world is watching if it chooses to follow Zimbabwe down this path.

I know a little about this. Some 17 years ago, while working as a reporter covering federal court systems for the Dallas Morning News, I’d had an interesting connection to the Zimbabwe situation referenced by Carlson. Back then, I heard through my source grapevine that a white family from Africa had arrived in Dallas and was pursuing a U.S. asylum claim. They, because they were white, claimed they had suffered racial persecution at the hands of a black-majority government.

This was classic man-bites-dog stuff, ironic beyond threshold as a news story to a broad general audience far wider than a few white supremacists. Naturally, I jumped all over it. Soon, I was interviewing Dave and Amber Penny and followed them in and out of the immigration courtroom.

A little background: Rebels supporting Mugabe and armed by the Soviet Union achieved independence in 1980 for the country once known as Rhodesia, about the size of Montana. Long before apartheid was dismantled in neighboring South Africa, Zimbabwe was seen as a model of how whites and blacks could live together after blacks replaced white minority rule, despite resentment that whites got to keep the nation’s land wealth. White farmers, who made up about 1 percent of the country’s population of 12 million but formed the backbone of its economy, were urged to stay as a minority class protected by law. The arrangement had been supported by the United States for decades, with appropriately little regard for whatever white supremacists in the U.S. might have had to say about it. CONTINUE AT SITE