RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19756/hamas-in-sweden

The European Palestinians Conference, held in Malmö, Sweden on May 27, had clear and strong connections with Hamas….

When the Swedish media wrote about the connection between the European Palestinians Conference and Hamas, however, MPs, one by one, began withdrawing from the conference — although, notably, without distancing themselves from Hamas.

As Hamas is classified as a terrorist organization within the European Union and therefore also within Sweden, it would of course be embarrassing for these gentlemen to admit that they were prepared to participate in a conference with connections to Hamas, and that they only refrained because of negative media attention.

The MP who did not withdraw… was Social Democratic Party MP Jamal El-Haj, who represents Malmö in parliament. El-Haj, who has Palestinian roots, has sat in parliament since 2016, and has a history of repulsive statements and activism concerning the Israel-Palestine issue.

El-Haj, who has Palestinian roots, has sat in Sweden’s parliament since 2016, and has a history of repulsive statements and activism concerning the Israel-Palestine issue. In 2018, El-Haj said in an interview, totally incorrectly, that Israel is an apartheid state that engages in ethnic cleansing. Despite this statement, the Social Democrats placed him on the parliament’s foreign affairs committee….

El-Haj has not made the situation easier for his party after this scandal. He actually defended his participation. In a social media post, he wrote: “This conference is about my mother’s right to return to her home in Palestine. There is nothing in the world that can make me give up such a dream”.

What was left out, of course, is that the Arabs who stayed in Israel in 1948, and now number nearly two million, are still in their homes, with Israeli citizenship and equal rights. What took place was that five Arab armies attacked Israel on the day of its birth — and lost. The Arabs who fled during the conflict were perceived by the people in Israel who had not fled as disloyal fifth columnists, who had declined to stay and protect the country alongside them. Therefore, after the war, those Arabs were not allowed back. These are now known as Palestinians.

Even after El-Haj’s participation in the Hamas conference, he has been allowed to remain on the foreign affairs committee, which shows just how high the Social Democrats’ tolerance level for extremists is.

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2023/06/russia-no-one-knows-anything.php

Screenwriter William Goldman’s famous line about Hollywood—”No one knows anything”—applies fully to the confusing scene in Russia right now. And let’s not go further without also bringing up for the millionth time Churchill’s description of Russia as “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.”

There’s a sentence in one of the Wall Street Journal‘s many articles about the matter today that reminds of this: “The full story behind why Prigozhin launched—then stunningly halted—his revolt isn’t yet known.” One reason for this is the scarcity of western European or American reporters inside Russia who have developed good sources and understand the country. In this regard one must wonder whether it is a mere coincidence that the American reporter most fluent in Russian and with intimate knowledge of the country—Evan Gershkovich—was arrested and jailed several weeks ago. (If you have a long Cold War memory, re-run the Nick Danilov arrest in Moscow in 1986, just weeks before the climactic Reagan-Gorbachev summit in Iceland.) Joe Biden has been strangely quiet about the matter, and while there is one obvious explanation for that, it is also possible that our intelligence agencies didn’t have any hint it was going to happen, or did know it, and Biden’s team didn’t know just what, if anything, to do or say about it.

Lots of aspects of this “coup” or “insurrection” don’t make a lot of sense, unless . . . it was an exercise from the old Communist playbook going back to the Stalinist purges of the 1930s of setting up a “controlled opposition” as a means of smoking out dissidents and disloyal party members so they could be eliminated before a threat grew. And even legitimate protest groups, like Solidarity in Poland in the early 1980s or Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia, were always quickly infiltrated (kind of like the FBI and the Proud Boys, Weather Underground, etc), and divided, disrupted, or rolled up.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/india/2023/06/an-indian-idol-well-worth-junking/

“Postcolonial history is chock-full of Third World dictators revered as great reformers: Ho Chi Minh, Kwame Nkrumah, Fidel Castro — and in India there is Jawaharlal Nehru. The first and longest-serving prime minister, he was an enemy of free speech, a persecutor of political opponents and, in regard to legislative legerdemain, a masterclass practitioner. Yet knowing all this, India’s intellectual class continues to approach his memory on bended knee.”

The First Amendment to the United States Constitution famously guarantees Americans near-absolute freedom of speech. It was foisted on an unwilling political class by anti-federalists who were wary of despotic rule by the newly-created national government.

The First Amendment to the Indian Constitution, by contrast, limited Indians’ freedom of speech by explicitly granting the government the authority to impose “reasonable restrictions … in the interests of the security of the State, friendly relations with foreign States, public order, decency or morality, or in relation to contempt of court, defamation or incitement to an offence”.

It was foisted on a mostly-illiterate population in 1951 by a political class that was wary of the growing power of the people in India’s newly-independent democracy.

Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first and longest-serving prime minister, was the chief architect of the first amendment, and he did not hesitate to say why he wanted it. In the formal statement of objectives for amendment, he personally wrote that “certain difficulties have been brought to light by judicial decisions and pronouncements specially in regard to the chapter on fundamental rights”.

What were those difficulties? The Supreme Court had ordered the release of political opponents who had been indefinitely detained by the government and invalidated the censorship of publications that had been critical of the government. In other words, Nehru did an end-run around the judiciary by changing the Constitution to suit his political needs.