RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2021/05/27/central-and-eastern-europe-help-show-the-path-forward/

I’m writing from Warsaw, Poland, making for both my first time venturing behind the old Iron Curtain and my first trip back to Europe since the onset of COVID-19. Despite the overcast weather endemic to this part of the globe, the mood on the ground is unmistakably buoyant.

Poland, along with its fellow Visegrad Group member Central European nations of Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic—and perhaps also including nearby Austria—has emerged as a perhaps unlikely ground zero in the fight to save Western civilization from a debilitating and increasingly all-encompassing liberal decadence.

The sad history of the region continues to pervade daily life here. Locals routinely respond to questions about what sites tourists should visit in one of two ways: “The Nazis destroyed everything in the war” or “The Soviet occupation ruined everything.” Few regions in the world know totalitarian repression and occupation like this area of the blood-soaked European continent does. The Visegrad states, which have rarely tasted national independence over the vicissitudes of the past millennium, felt the full brunt of both Nazi fascism and Soviet Communism in all-too-recent memory.

The silver lining, and the reason this region is so interesting from a contemporary economic and geopolitical perspective, is that out of the joint tyrannical fires of Nazism and Communism were forged, in the decades following the fall of the Berlin Wall, a robust appreciation for the integrity of the independent nation-state and the importance of Judeo-Christian-inspired societal goals, such as family formation and fortified communitarian ties.

Put more simply, the four Visegrad states and Austria have emerged as veritable redoubts of traditional Western values and substantive political priorities, such as national borders, immigration properly limited to promote assimilation and intergenerational cultural stability, and the transcendental meaning and fulfillment that only religion can provide.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/05/its-getting-bad-for-the-jews/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=also-from-author&utm_term=first

Thoughts on the rising hostility in the United States and in Europe

 F or the past couple of years, there have been reports about an uptick in “random” assaults in New York. Men are just walking along a street in Brooklyn, and they get sucker-punched. Except it isn’t random. The victims are Orthodox Jews. This growing uptick in assaults has been punctuated by mass killings at Jewish synagogues in San Diego, Pittsburgh, and upstate New York. In recent weeks, as a conflict between Israel and Palestinians in Gaza has become the occasion for a coming-out party for a newly confident anti-Zionist wing in the American Left, we also see newly confident thugs assaulting Jews in Manhattan’s Diamond District while shouting slogans about Palestine.

This is a scandal beyond words. Secular and religious Jews are formed to be sensitive to these upsurges in hostility and violence because their history as a people in exile tells them that these spasms of violence do not just subside. They tend to grow and grow until Jews are finally forced to emigrate. Jewish life is dying out in Paris precisely because of a growing pattern of street harassment and assaults that are punctuated by terrorist attacks aimed at killing masses of Jews at synagogues and kosher supermarkets. Parisian Jews are leaving for Israel. There was a time they might have left for New York. I expect that for many Jews, the realization that New York could go the way of Paris would be the bitterest pill to swallow.

Speaking of the Europeans, what’s going on there is also a scandal. The news of rockets being fired from Gaza into Israel, and Israel launching attacks on the positions from which they are fired, set off major protests in European cities. Now, criticism would be one thing. The state of Israel, the Israel Defense Forces, and even the Israeli people are just that — people — and they are capable of folly, prejudice, and cruelty like any other. And the Palestinians are people too — many of them living in a situation that is abjectly miserable. Imagine both resenting Israel and having the foreign government of Iran pay for the thugs of Hamas to be your political leadership while you seek satisfaction and try to make a life for your family.

But these protests in European cities are not focused on legitimate criticisms of Israel. In North London, a group of Muslim men drove a kind of convoy through a Jewish neighborhood, shouting slogans such as, “F*** the Jews, rape their daughters.”

But crude as this was, there is something more scandalous about the protests in Europe. Muslims might at least feel like a party to the Israeli–Gaza conflict, in some way. What’s truly disturbing is the mass of secular Europeans who come from long lines of native residents in their countries joining in.

It brings up the question of why Israel’s actions bother Europeans so much. The oppression of the Kurds by Turkey occasions not a peep of protest. You’d think it might, given European connections to Turkey through NATO and other European Union–led deals about migration. Or the fact that the tyrant Recep Erdogan travels to European capitals and holds massive campaign rallies to capture the votes of Turkish men and women who live abroad. If the motor is a kind of anti-Americanism — American support for Israel is often brought up at these European protests — then why not protest the humanitarian disaster that has been Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen, which causes starvation and has exacerbated the worst cholera outbreak in modern history?

https://www.wsj.com/articles/france-suspects-russian-role-in-campaign-to-discredit-pfizer-vaccine-11621978289

PARIS—French counterintelligence authorities are investigating whether the Russian government was behind an attempt to pay high-profile health and science bloggers to sow public doubts about the safety of the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine, a French security official said.

Several French bloggers said publicly they received emails in recent days from a person claiming to work for a marketing firm called Fazze. The emails, some of which were reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, offered to pay the bloggers to make videos on YouTube, Instagram and other platforms criticizing the vaccine developed by Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech SE, which has been the most widely used vaccine in France. One blogger told French TV he was offered €2,050 (about $2,500) for a video.

The security official said counterintelligence authorities suspect the Kremlin could be responsible for the emails. The official compared the emails to campaigns run by the Internet Research Agency, a Russian firm that U.S. authorities have identified as responsible for Moscow’s effort to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Western officials have said these operations are an attempt by the Kremlin to undermine public confidence in Western institutions.

The Kremlin didn’t respond to a request for comment. It has previously dismissed accusations that Russia was using disinformation campaigns against Western vaccines and has denied interfering in the U.S. election.

Fazze listed an address in London on its website, which was taken down Tuesday. Fazze isn’t registered as a U.K. company. A post on a Russian employment website describes it as a subsidiary of AdNow, a Moscow-based marketing agency. AdNow didn’t respond to a request for comment. The LinkedIn accounts of Fazze employees, now deleted, show many have been educated in Russian schools, such as Siberian Transport University.

https://www.city-journal.org/leftist-rage-at-uk-home-secretary-priti-patel

Some racism is less racist than other racism. Priti Patel, the British Home Secretary (in effect, the minister of the interior), is the daughter of Indian immigrants from Uganda. She is hated by the intelligentsia because she believes strongly in immigration control, though not an end to all immigration.

A crowd in Glasgow recently gathered to prevent two failed asylum-seekers from being deported by immigration officials. A prominent left-wing union official and member of the Labour Party, Howard Beckett, tweeted “Priti Patel should be deported, not refugees. She can go along with anyone else who supports institutional racism. She is disgusting.”

The Labour Party suspended Beckett (meaning, of course, that he will soon be back), and he issued an apology, though it will reassure neither Patel nor much of the British public. He said: “I certainly didn’t mean it to be taken literally. The idea that I would think that a Home Secretary would or should be deported, I’m against all forms of deportation.”

The two men to be deported had gone through a long legal process and had failed to prove that they were entitled to asylum status. This, and the fact that Beckett subsequently claimed to be against the deportation of anyone in any circumstances whatever—except, perhaps, those whom he disfavored politically—suggests that he would support a complete absence of control over immigration, no matter how large the influx such a policy would bring about.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17404/germany-political-islamism

The policy paper, “Preserving Free Society, Promoting Social Cohesion, Fighting Political Islamism,” which whole-heartedly commends law-abiding Muslims who respect Germany’s democratic order, argues that the debate about Islamism in Germany is often reduced to violence and terror, but that it is necessary to focus more on ideology. The proposals include improving research and analysis of political Islam in Europe and the methods by which it spreads; banning the foreign funding of mosques; and reducing the number of foreign imams active in Germany.

“Focusing only on the violent part of Islamism, Islamist terrorism, does not do justice to the overall problem…. This political Islamism, which ostensibly acts non-violently, but stirs up hatred, agitation and violence and strives for an Islamic order in which there is no equality, no freedom of opinion and religion and also no separation of religion and state, has spread far and wide in parts of our society.” — CDU/CSU policy paper.

“We owe the fight against political Islamism not only to our free-democratic ideals and values, but also to most of the Muslims in Germany who share these ideals with us and want to live with us on their basis. Because it is precisely liberal, secular Muslims who are victims of this illiberal, anti-democratic ideology. Those who publicly oppose political Islamism and its strategies are particularly at risk.” — CDU/CSU policy paper.

“These politically extremist, non-violent groups aim to establish an order according to their Islamist ideas by actively preventing integration, dividing Western societies into ‘believers’ and ‘unbelievers,’ rejecting equality and religious freedom…. They use democratic structures to undermine and ultimately abolish democracy.” — CDU/CSU policy paper.

“The present focus on groups prepared to use violence has led to disregarding the ideological justification of violence. These politically extremist, non-violent groups aim to establish an order based on their Islamist ideas by actively preventing integration, dividing Western societies into ‘believers’ and ‘unbelievers,’ rejecting equality and religious freedom, and alienating Muslim youth from Western societies. They use democratic structures to undermine and ultimately abolish democracy.” — CDU/CSU policy paper.

“Religious extremism doesn’t come out of nowhere. On the contrary, it thrives in isolated parallel worlds that have nothing in common with our values. We urgently need to shed light on this and not only wake up when violence erupts.” — Bundestag Member Nina Warken, Integration Commissioner, CDU/CSU parliamentary group.

The German-Moroccan author Sineb El Masrar, in an interview with the public radio station Deutschlandfunk Kultur, said that the policy paper is clearly directed against “reactionary, Islamist organizations” and “that it is not aimed at all Muslims, but at those with a radical agenda.”

“Islamists are not interested in democracy. On the contrary. They reject democracy because they only consider politics to be legitimate if it follows regulations that adhere to the politics of Mohammed in the 7th century. — Susanne Schröter, Islam scholar, Die Tagespost.

“The decisive question is to what extent imams are willing and able to explain that these warlike verses and suras are only to be considered in their historical context and that they no longer have any meaning today, i.e. in principle could be deleted…. It should be added that the implementation of the strategy is only possible if, for example, mosque communities or Muslims as a whole are willing to actively contribute, because they understandably know the segregation efforts of many association representatives much better and more closely than most German observers.” — Bundestag Member Hans-Jürgen Irmer, member of the Interior Committee, CDU/CSU parliamentary group.

The largest parliamentary group in the German Bundestag, the faction of the ruling Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU), has approved a wide-ranging strategy to contain the spread of political Islam in Germany.

The plan, outlined in a new policy paper, “Preserving Free Society, Promoting Social Cohesion, Fighting Political Islamism,” warns that a growing number of areas in Germany, where German law is overruled by Sharia law, are in danger of becoming “parallel societies.”

The document also warns that many mosques and Islamic associations in Germany are controlled by foreign governments and that they are producing a generation of German jihadists who extol martyrdom and threaten Germany’s liberal democratic order.

The authors of the report argue that a recent wave of jihadist attacks in Germany and elsewhere in Europe — including the beheading of a schoolteacher in Paris, a crime celebrated by many Muslim pupils in Berlin — requires urgent measures to stop the “poison” of extremist ideology from gaining further ground on the continent.

The policy paper, which whole-heartedly commends law-abiding Muslims who respect Germany’s democratic order, argues that the debate about Islamism in Germany is often reduced to violence and terror, but that it is necessary to focus more on ideology. The proposals include improving research and analysis of political Islam in Europe and the methods by which it spreads; banning the foreign funding of mosques; and reducing the number of foreign imams active in Germany.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17400/iran-will-pursue-nukes

It is important to expect that whatever the deal, the Iranian regime will continue to pursue its nuclear ambitions and clandestine nuclear activities: there are historical precedents for it.

Tehran claimed that the “secret atomic warehouse,” located in a village of Turquz Abad in the suburbs of Tehran, was a place where carpets were cleaned.

The IAEA at first ignored the reports. This should not come as a surprise: the IAEA has a long history of misreporting the Islamic Republic’s compliance with the deal and declining to follow up on credible reports about Iran’s illicit nuclear activities.

The mullahs of Iran will not honor any deal with the international community. While the mullahs will gladly reap the profits of any nuclear deal and its lifting of the sanctions, their regime will continue pursuing its covert attempts to obtain nuclear weapons and overt attempts — with China — to take over the Middle East.

Just recently, we have seen Iran’s entrenchments in Syria and Iraq; its takeover of Lebanon by its proxy Hezbollah; its stepped-up aggression against Saudi Arabia by its proxy, the Houthis, and its 4,000-rocket war this month on the tiny country of Israel by yet another proxy, Hamas.

Whatever “deal” is struck in Vienna, Iran is not interested in “stabilizing” the Middle East. As the Biden administration has correctly pointed out, Iran’s leaders, with China, seem interested only in destabilizing, then dominating it.

The argument that negotiating and reaching a nuclear deal with the mullahs of Iran will curb their nuclear ambitions and prevent the Iranian regime from obtaining nuclear weapons is, sadly, a dangerous fantasy.

The nuclear deal has sunset clauses that soon remove restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program after the deal expires. In short, the nuclear deal, rather than preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, as it was falsely touted to do, in fact paves the way for Tehran to become a legitimized nuclear state after it concludes.

Even before that, however, it is important to expect that whatever the deal, the Iranian regime will continue to pursue its nuclear ambitions and clandestine nuclear activities: there are historical precedents for it.

It was not one year into the 2015 nuclear deal that two credible intelligence reports revealed that Iran had no intention of honoring the terms of the deal it had just reached with the Obama-Biden administration. Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, revealed in its annual report in 2016 that the Iranian government had been pursuing a “clandestine” path to obtain illicit nuclear technology and equipment from German companies “at what is, even by international standards, a quantitatively high level.”