RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Iran nuclear deal (the Joint Comprehensive Program of Action, or JCPOA) reached an important milestone on October 18, a day designated by the agreement as “Adoption Day.” Under the JCPOA, this date was when all parties to the nuclear deal were to signify they are prepared to implement the agreement (including lifting most sanctions against Iran) on “Implementation Day” — a future date when the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) will certify Iran’s compliance with requirements to cut back its nuclear program. Iranian officials believe Implementation Day will occur by the end of the year. Obama officials have said it will be in about six months.

Although Adoption Day was intended to be an indication that the Iran deal is progressing, it has been overshadowed by growing signs that Iran intends to ignore important aspects of the deal and that the Obama administration is planning to look the other way.

President Obama refused to follow the Constitution and allow the Senate to ratify the JCPOA as a treaty. This was not the case for Iran’s parliament. Although the agreement only required the Iranian parliament (the Majlis) to ratify the Additional Protocol to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (an agreement that in theory will give IAEA inspectors greater access to Iranian nuclear sites), Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei gave parliament the opportunity to ratify the entire JCPOA. According to Obama officials and most press reports, the Iranian parliament passed a bill endorsing the nuclear deal on October 13.

The Syrian government sells passports and birth certificates at affordable prices. Many migrants have no passport, no ID, and refuse to give fingerprints.

Because Islam is the heart of the culture of people formerly colonized, Europeans rejected criticism of Islam, saying it would blend smoothly into a multicultural Europe. They did not demand the assimilation of the Muslims who came to live in Europe. Much of the time, Muslims are not assimilated — and often show signs of not wanting to assimilate.

Any criticism of Islam in Europe is treated as a form of racism, and “Islamophobia” is considered a crime or a sign of mental illness.

European people still have the right to vote, but are deprived of most of their power: all important political decisions in Europe are made behind closed doors by technocrats and professional politicians in Brussels or Strasbourg.

Europe has renounced force, so to many, it appears weak, vulnerable and easily able to be overpowered.

The sudden arrival of hundreds of thousands more Muslims most likely prompts Europeans to think that the nightmare will get worse; they see, powerlessly, that their leaders speak and act as if they have no awareness of what is happening.

Central European leaders and people, who have already lived under authoritarian rule, seem to be thinking that entering the European Union was a huge mistake. They came to what was then called the “free world.” They do not seem willing to be subjected again to coercive decisions made by outsiders.

Illegal Muslim migrants will live on social benefits until the bankruptcy of welfare states.

In all 28 countries of the European Union, birth rates are low and the population is aging. People under thirty account for only 16% of the population, or 80 million people. In the 22 Arab countries, plus Turkey and Iran, people under thirty account for 70% of the population, or 350 million people.

“What I’m going through can face all journalists out there. They can use laws to put you in prison just for mentioning the word ‘PKK’ in your news story. They take this as ‘praising the terrorist organization.'” — Ocak Isik Yurtcu, former editor of Ozgur Gudem. He was sentenced to 15 years in prison.

“We expose their war crimes; and they respond by blocking us.” — Ramazan Pekgoz, editor, Dicle News Agency.

Of the 580 issues of Ozgur Gundem, cases were opened in relation to 486 of them. Its editors-in-chief were sentenced to a total of 147 years in prison.

One cannot help asking: Why does Turkey try to destroy free speech that much? What is it that all those Turkish governments have been trying to hide?

“These bans take place because the state does not want the incidents in Kurdistan to be exposed.” — Eren Keskin, editor-in-chief and lawyer for Ozgur Gundem.

In 103 years in Turkey, 112 journalists and writers have been murdered, mostly Armenians and Kurds. — The Platform of Solidarity with Arrested Journalists (TGDP)

Western Europe’s long, slow suicide is too long and slow for Western European elites, apparently. You know, the self-loathing, Western-loathing progressive-minded sorts. Projections of Muslim supremacy in Europe by the latter part of the 21st Century means that Europe’s enlightened class won’t experience the pleasure of watching Muslims hoist guidons emblazoned with the shahada and the takbir over the Vatican. Quite a visual, won’t it be, compliments of Al Jazeera, having a muckety-muck imam emerge on the once papal balcony — a balcony festooned with a boldly oversized crescent moon and star flag — to bestow blessings on masses of believers shouting, “Allah Akbar,” as a global audience watches enthralled.

Thus the intent to hasten Europe’s demise — that is, whatever remains of degraded Christian Europe and Western Civilization there. Muslim ascendency has its satisfactions, but nothing beats witnessing the coup de grâce, the final scimitar coming down on the neck of once mighty Europe. That’s what open borders means — it’s a quickening of the suicide. It gives an outside chance for Western Europe’s elites to witness the dénouement of their crimes (perhaps they would prefer the kinder, gentler word, “designs”).

Spending billions of dollars on climate-related aid in countries that need help with tuberculosis, malaria and malnutrition.
In the run-up to the 2015 U.N. Climate Change Conference in Paris from Nov. 30 to Dec. 11, rich countries and development organizations are scrambling to join the fashionable ranks of “climate aid” donors. This effectively means telling the world’s worst-off people, suffering from tuberculosis, malaria or malnutrition, that what they really need isn’t medicine, mosquito nets or micronutrients, but a solar panel. It is terrible news.

On Oct. 9, World Bank President Jim Yong Kim pledged a one-third increase in the bank’s direct climate-related financing, bringing the bank’s annual total to an estimated $29 billion by 2020. In September, Chinese President Xi Jinping pledged to match President Obama’s promised $3 billion in aid to the U.N.’s Green Climate Fund. Meanwhile, the U.K is diverting $8.9 billion from its overseas aid budget to climate-related aid over the next five years, and France is promising $5.6 billion annually by 2020, up from $3.4 billion today. The African Development Bank is planning to triple its climate-related investments to more than $5 billion a year by 2020, representing 40% of its total portfolio.

The image of a “French republican idyll” masks a history of repeated anti-Jewish prejudice, and worse.

At the outset of his very interesting and provocative essay, Alain El-Mouchan quotes French Prime Minister Manuel Valls: “If 100,000 [French] Jews leave [for Israel], France will no longer be France. The French Republic will be judged a failure.”

Will France’s Jews depart en masse for Israel? Should they? If they do, will France still be France? These are disturbing questions to which I do not have the answers, and which may be unanswerable. But I would like to offer a number of thoughts and reactions, mainly of a historical nature, and some in the form of further questions.

Let us recall that in the first half of the 20th century, one-quarter of the Jews living in France were murdered in the Holocaust, with French connivance. Was France still France after that? If so, then it is hard for me to see how the departure of one-quarter of today’s Jewish population—not for Auschwitz but for Israel—would constitute the end of France.

But El-Mouchan, like Prime Minister Valls, has something more specific in mind. For both of them, that something, in El-Mouchan’s words, is “the French republican idyll, one of the most attractive and promising chapters in the history of mankind,” and one hallmark of this idyll was France’s “exceptionally open and welcoming” posture toward the Jews. That idyll, says El-Mouchan, has now “reached the beginning of the end.”

The meeting today between Pakistan Prime Minister Sharif and President Obama at the White House is a continuation of a dangerous charade engaged in for decades by the United States. By perceiving Pakistan, a failed Islamic terrorist state, as a valuable strategic ally when it, in fact, has a blatant history of actions and circumstances to the contrary, the United States is pursuing a delusional foreign policy that further endangers American national security.
The meeting with Pakistan occurs at a time when the ink is barely dry on the dubious Iran bomb deal. Now, President Obama stands poised to sign a second nuclear agreement that will threaten U.S. ally, India, and likely destabilize the region. The first agreement, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), was led by the United States and finalized in July.

Sunday, October 18, isn’t just a day of baseball playoffs and pro football games. It’s “Adoption Day,” when all parties to the Iran nuclear deal must begin preparing to implement its terms. And while the Obama administration takes another opportunity to pat itself on the back for its achievement, Iran has offered the international community a clear signal of what it thinks about its obligations under the deal, as well as its strategic intentions. Just a week before Adoption Day, Iran test-fired a new precision-guided ballistic missile capable of delivering a 1,600-pound warhead to Israel or even southeastern Europe and designed to evade missile defense systems.

Legally, this launch was an indisputable violation of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1929, passed in 2010, which dictates “Iran shall not undertake any activity related to ballistic missiles capable of delivering nuclear weapons, including launches using ballistic missile technology.”

European leaders talk about two things these days; preserving European values by taking in Muslim migrants and integrating Muslim migrants into Europe by getting them to adopt European values.

It does not occur to them that their plan to save European values depends on killing European values.

The same European values that require Sweden, a country of less than 10 million, to take in 180,000 Muslim migrants in one year also expects the new “Swedes” to celebrate tolerance, feminism and gay marriage. Instead European values have filled the cities of Europe with Shariah patrols, unemployed angry men waving ISIS flags and the occasional public act of terror.

European countries that refuse to invest money in border security instead find themselves forced to invest money into counterterrorism forces. And those are bad for European values too.

But, as Central European countries are discovering, European values don’t have much to do with the preservation of viable functioning European states. Instead they are about the sort of static Socialism that Bernie Sanders admires from abroad. But even a Socialist welfare state requires people to work for a living. Maine’s generous welfare policies began collapsing once Somali Muslims swarmed in to take advantage of them. Denmark and the Dutch, among other of Bernie Sanders’ role models, have been sounding more like Reagan and less like Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren.

Two years ago, the Dutch King declared that, “The classic welfare state of the second half of the 20th century in these areas in particular brought forth arrangements that are unsustainable in their current form.” That same year, the Danish Finance Minister called for the “modernization of the welfare state.”

For years, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper has served as a welcome counterpoint to Barack Obama, and the object of wistful musings about what a fine President of the United States he would have been, if only he had been born south of the border: generally realistic about the jihad threat, determined to do what was necessary to meet that threat, and a strong supporter of Israel.

But now Canada at last has its own Obama: Justin Trudeau. And that means that Canada, like the United States, faces deep trouble ahead.

The new Prime Minister of Canada, like Obama, has consistently downplayed the nature and magnitude of the jihad threat and ascribed it to other causes. Christine Williams, a Canadian journalist and a Federally appointed Director with the Canadian Race Relations Foundation, has noted that in the wake of the Boston Marathon jihad bombing, Trudeau issued a bizarre statement: “There is no question that this happened because of someone who feels completely excluded, someone who feels completely at war with innocence, at war with society.”