RUTHFULLY YOURS

Ali Mohammed Al-Nimr, arrested in Saudi Arabia at the age of seventeen, has been sentenced to beheading and crucifixion.

Last week, two Saudi human rights activists were sentenced to jail for illegally establishing a human rights organization, questioning the credibility and objectivity of the judiciary, interfering with the Saudi Human Rights Commission (one can imagine what that is like), and describing Saudi Arabia as a police state.

Karl Andree, a 74-year-old British grandfather and a UK citizen who has been imprisoned in Saudi Arabia for the last year, is due to receive 350 lashes for unpardonable crime of being caught with some homemade wine.

British Justice Minister Michael Gove has now reportedly insisted that the UK could not possibly enter into a contract to train Saudi prison guards.

The naïve Western leaders are those who expect our countries to carry on with “business as usual” with a regime that sentences our citizens to flogging, and that beheads and crucifies political dissidents.

The naïve politicians are those who think the publics of the West do not know what a human rights sewer Saudi Arabia is, or think that we will put up with it. If that were ever the case, that time is over.

Is international opinion on Saudi Arabia finally shifting? For years, one of the great embarrassments and contradictions of Western diplomacy has been the intimacy of the West’s relationship with the House of Saud. Of course, both Britain and America have some responsibility for installing and then maintaining the Saudi royal family in their position. Were it not for this circumstance, in addition to the world’s largest oil reserves, the people we now call the Saudi royal family would be neither richer nor any more famous than any other group of goat-herders in the region.

Kenya’s president told CNN over the weekend that the United States’ pressure on his country to ensure gay rights is not in sync with where his society is.

On his summertime visit to the country, President Obama spoke with Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta privately on the issue and publicly in a joint press conference.

“As an African-American in the United States, I am painfully aware of the history of what happens when people are treated differently under the law,” Obama said then. “I’m unequivocal on this.”

“I’ve been consistent all across Africa on this. I believe in the principle of treating people equally under the law. The state should not discriminate against people based on their sexual orientation.”

Kenyatta said in an interview aired Sunday that this pressure isn’t taking into account the wishes of Kenyan society.

“Let me make it clear to you, I’ll put it this way. All right? Think first and foremost we’re all saying that whatever society you come from, the principal aim is that you must give the people, you know, their right to choose. Now, where we are, and on the level of development that we are at, I am not saying that these people don’t have their rights. That’s not what I’m saying. I am just saying that the majority, the majority in our society do not wish to legalize this issue of gay rights,” Kenyatta said.

Mama Merkel’s Muslim ‘Migrants’

Everything which is now taking place before our eyes threatens to have explosive consequences for the whole of Europe. Europe’s response is madness. We must acknowledge that the European Union’s misguided immigration policy is responsible for this situation.

Irresponsibility is the mark of every European politician who holds out the promise of a better life to immigrants and encourages them to leave everything behind and risk their lives in setting out for Europe. If Europe does not return to the path of common sense, it will find itself laid low in a battle for its fate.

– Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban

The crowds are gone from the Keleti central train station, and few middle-eastern faces now appear on the streets of Budapest. But the recent tidal wave of humanity – whether deemed “migrants,” “refugees” or, more accurately, “unarmed invaders” – has left a new resolution implanted in Hungary and, indeed, this part of Europe that once labored under the Muslim yoke. And that impression is: this much and no more.

The death of Europe is in sight. Still hazy and not yet inevitable, but nevertheless visible and drawing nearer—like a distant planet in the lens of an approaching satellite. Europe is reaching its end not because of its sclerotic economy, or stagnant demography, or the dysfunctions of the superstate. Nor is the real cause the massive influx of Middle Eastern and African migrants. Those desperate people are just the latest stiff breeze against the timber of a desiccated civilization.

Europe is dying because it has become morally incompetent. It isn’t that Europe stands for nothing. It’s that it stands for shallow things, shallowly. Europeans believe in human rights, tolerance, openness, peace, progress, the environment, pleasure. These beliefs are all very nice, but they are also secondary.

What Europeans no longer believe in are the things from which their beliefs spring: Judaism and Christianity; liberalism and the Enlightenment; martial pride and capability; capitalism and wealth. Still less do they believe in fighting or sacrificing or paying or even arguing for these things. Having ignored and undermined their own foundations, they wonder why their house is coming apart.

What is Europe? It is Greece not Persia; Rome not Carthage; Christendom not the caliphate. These distinctions are fundamental. To say that Europe is a civilization apart is not to say it is better or worse. It is merely to say: This is us and that is you. Nor is it to say that Europe ought to be a closed civilization. It merely needs to be one that doesn’t dissolve on contact with the strangers it takes into its midst.

OTTAWA—Canada’s Conservative leader was ousted in a national vote Monday after almost a decade in power, as voter discontent and a souring economy helped the son of long-serving Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau sweep into the top office.

Justin Trudeau’s centrist Liberal Party was headed for a majority government, with his party leading in or elected in most districts across the country, after a hard-fought contest with incumbent Stephen Harper. Mr. Harper said last night that he would step down as party leader, after conceding to Mr. Trudeau.

Results from polls in the country’s most-populated regions, Quebec and Ontario, and from Canada’s Eastern Seaboard and the Pacific Coast city of Vancouver, showed a wave of Liberal red, marking an impressive victory in Mr. Trudeau’s first campaign as leader. The win represents the first Liberal majority in 15 years. The Conservatives maintained their bedrock support in the resource-rich western provinces, as well as in the bulk of rural Canada.

Voting to reauthorize the Export-Import Bank could allow floods of U.S. taxpayer money to reach Iran’s terrorist government.

On October 9, 218 House lawmakers, including 42 Republicans, signed a discharge petition to bring the Ex-Im Bank reauthorization back from the dead. The petition, which Republicans initiated, has resulted in a scheduled October 26 vote to reauthorize the Export-Import Bank, that 80-year-old relic from the days of the New Deal.

Conservative Republicans in both the House and Senate have opposed reauthorizing the Ex-Im Bank, accusing it of crony capitalism, ongoing corruption, conflicts of interest, and accounting methods that hide the actual market risk of its loans (the risk that the loans won’t be paid back).

Here’s another reason to question reauthorizing the Ex-Im Bank: specific language in the Obama administration’s Iran deal that ends prohibitions on Ex-Im bank financing for sales to Iran, including sales to businesses the Iranian government owns.

Stephen Harper has been the most pro Israel leader in the world. ….RSK

Is it possible that Israel has friends like Canadian PM, Stephen Harper, left in the world? His honesty and strong pro-Israel stand is so uncommon that it inspires admiration. And he knows it.

“There are, after all, a lot more votes—a lot more—in being anti-Israeli than in taking a stand. But as long as I am prime minister, whether it is at the United Nations, the Francophonie or anywhere else, Canada will take that stand, whatever the cost.”

Harper has little to gain from his strong pro-Israel speech as only 1 percent of the Canadian population is Jewish. But, as he says so well in his speech on Parliment Hill at a conference on anti-semitism at the start of Holocaust Education Week, “Not just because it is the right thing to do, but because history shows us, and the ideology of the anti-Israel mob tell us all too well, that those who threaten the existence of the Jewish people are in the longer term a threat to all of us”.

We all have much to learn from this honest and courageous man who takes a stand on what’s right, because it’s right with no consideration of personal gain.

In an emergency congress convened on Saturday, Taiwan’s ruling Nationalist Party (Kuomintang, or KMT) ousted Hung Hsiu-chu from its presidential ticket and formally endorsed Party Chairman Eric Chu for January’s presidential election.

Ms. Hung, vice president of the legislature, suffered from low opinion polls and an ever-widening gap with the opposition candidate Tsai Ing-wen of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), who was ahead by nearly 30 percentage points in September. Ms. Hung’s strongly China-leaning policy turned off voters and risked undermining the KMT effort to retain control of the legislature, which the party has held for more than a decade.

Mr. Chu, a popular centrist figure, should improve the fortunes of the KMT’s legislative candidates. At 54 he is relatively young, with a reputation for clean government and focusing on economic development. He is currently the mayor of New Taipei City, which he was re-elected to last year in a tight race.

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s management style seems to have alienated a lot of people on his own side of the aisle during his nine-and-a-half years at the helm of the Conservative government. Now, as he faces an election on Monday, his reputation as a not-very-likable fellow could cost him and his party—and also cost Canadians their future prosperity.

None of Canada’s top three national parties is expected to come away from the election with a majority government. For most of the campaign the Conservatives were given a reasonable chance of winning a plurality of seats in Parliament. If that happens, Mr. Harper would have to govern by looking for allies on a vote-by-vote basis until he is forced to call another election.

But in recent days internal polling began to suggest that the center-left Liberal Party led by Justin Trudeau—the eldest son of former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau—could finish first past the post with enough seats for a minority government. This is partly the result of a late-stage slump by the further-left New Democratic Party (NDP). A Liberal majority is unlikely but not impossible. The contest is now said to be down to suburban Vancouver and Toronto electoral districts.

P.M. Stephen Harper has been Israel’s staunchest ally during his entire tenure. Justin Trudeau his liberal opposition, is the son of the late P.M. Pierre Trudeau and has been, like his father, warm to Israel but not with the commitment of Harper….stay tuned….rsk

Economic slump and voter fatigue with ruling Conservatives help Liberals make gains ahead of Monday vote

LONDON, Ontario—Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, after nearly a decade in power, heads into Monday’s federal election caught in a tight race for his political survival.

One of the West’s longest serving leaders, Mr. Harper is seeking to win a fourth term. But voter fatigue with his ruling Conservative party and a slump driven by a collapse in oil and metal prices have helped the opposition Liberals—led by Justin Trudeau, son of the former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau—edge ahead in polls in the last weeks of the race.

Issues beyond Canada’s slumping economy have also dogged Mr. Harper’s campaign, including a scandal over lawmakers’ expense accounts and controversies over his government’s recent decision not to take in more Syrian refugees and to push for a ban on the right of women to wear the face-covering niqab while taking citizenship oaths. In a survey of 1,000 Canadians by Ottawa pollster Nanos Research last week, 71% said it was time for a change in government.