RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20485/nato-welfare-states

The NATO alliance today, however, more closely resembles an international welfare program than a true alliance, with most countries failing to meet their defense commitments and instead relying on the generosity of the United States.

As the eminent journalist Amir Taheri put it: “others… treat the US as a ‘room service’ reachable by pressing a button…”

All of America’s leaders also need to embrace the reality that if our allies are unwilling to do more to keep the world safe and secure, we may need to reassess the relationship we have with them, and cease being “room service.” Alliances are only alliances when the costs and benefits run both ways. Anything less, especially from the richest countries in Europe, is not only disrespectful, but an unacceptable breach of contract.

Last month, NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg conceded what former US President Donald Trump has been warning about for nearly a decade: America’s allies are not paying their fair share — as they had agreed — for national defense. After four years in which Trump held our NATO allies accountable for funding their share of NATO’s collective defense, US President Joe Biden has once again allowed many of them to pass significant burdens of NATO spending on to American taxpayers – threatening the security of the NATO alliance in the process.

The very nature of alliances is that they are a two-way street. Americans should rightly expect to realize benefits from U.S. participation in NATO, just as the citizens of other NATO nations can expect to benefit from their country’s relationship with the United States.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/islam-iniceland/

I’ve been writing about Islam in Europe for a quarter century, but I’ve never written a word about Islam in Iceland, and at one point I was naive enough to believe that I would never have to. Pretty much everywhere else you go in Western Europe these days, there’s at least a hint of an Islamic presence and hence, to at least some degree, a sense of being in the presence of a hostile and alien threat. It was never like that in Iceland. In no other Western European urban center have I ever felt as safe as I have in Reykjavik. It’s a clean, charming city of 120,000 in a remote island country of 370,000, and until recently virtually everybody there was Icelandic. It’s like one big family – except it’s not really that big. When I walked the streets, at any time of day or night, the sense of security was palpable; indeed, it was less like wandering around a city than like wandering through the comfortable (if chilly) rooms of a well-secured home. There are high-trust societies and there are low-trust societies; Iceland was as high-trust as you can imagine. And a big part of the reason for that was the extremely low level of immigration – especially Muslim immigration.

Well, that’s over. No, that feeling of security hasn’t disappeared overnight; but it’s definitely taken a hit. On March 7, a session of the Allting – Iceland’s parliament – was interrupted by three foreign men in the visitors’ gallery who have apparently settled illegally in the country and who, in a language that was clearly not Icelandic, shouted out demands that the government provide them with homes, residency permits, and a right to be joined in Iceland by their families. (If they’re this arrogant when there are so few of them, what would it be like if their relatives – and their relatives, and their relatives – came and joined them?) One of the three, who was barechested – not a common sight in Iceland, except, of course, at one of the country’s highly popular geothermal spas – climbed up onto a railing and seemed to be preparing to leap down onto the floor of the chamber, or perhaps, alarmingly, onto one of the legislators.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20480/china-russia-moon-base

“Chinese control of the moon would confer control of Cis-Lunar space, the portion of space between the Earth and the moon. Control of Cis-Lunar space would give a country the ability to shoot down or otherwise disable deep-space satellites, which are essential for, among other things, the early warning of ballistic missile attacks.” — Richard Fisher of the International Assessment and Strategy Center, to the author, March 2014.

The free world should view Chinese and Russian progress with alarm. China’s regime, for instance, has made it clear it intends to annex space.

Ye Peijian made it clear that Beijing intends to exclude others from the moon, among other places, if it is in a position to do so.

The American-led Artemis program also contemplates a base at the south pole. NASA, unfortunately, has been pushing back Artemis timetables.

Article II of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty prohibits “national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means,” but when has a treaty obligation ever stopped the People’s Republic from doing whatever it wants?

China, with Russia’s help, wants to build a base on the moon.

If the Chinese regime succeeds in building the first facility there, it will try to deny to others the ability to land on the lunar surface. The People’s Republic of China in fact intends to annex the near parts of the solar system.

As Richard Fisher of the International Assessment and Strategy Center pointed out to this author, Chinese control of the moon would confer control of Cis-Lunar space, the portion of space between the Earth and the moon. Control of Cis-Lunar space would give a country the ability to shoot down or otherwise disable deep-space satellites, which are essential for, among other things, the early warning of ballistic missile attacks.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/03/11/why-the-elites-are-terrified-of-talking-about-radical-islam/

So now we know. If you’re from a working-class background in a Red Wall constituency and you think Islamism is a big problem, the Tories are not the party for you. That’s the takeaway, surely, from Lee Anderson’s flight from the Tories into the welcoming arms of Reform UK following the confected media stink over his brash comments about Sadiq Khan being too cosy with Islamists. The optics of this are awful. A former miner turned Tory MP pipes up about radical Islam and the eye-wateringly wealthy Rishi Sunak effectively kicks him out? Yikes.

This is the news that Anderson, the MP for Ashfield, has defected to Reform UK, the upstart right-wing party led by Richard Tice. It follows his suspension from the Conservative Party last month after he said Islamists have ‘got control’ of London and its mayor, Sadiq Khan. ‘Islamophobe!’, hollered the liberal media. Centrist arseholes and tedious podcasters obsessed over his ‘racist’ comments for days. That Anderson also said Keir Starmer is in the pocket of Islamist loons didn’t help his cause: he was branded a Muslim-basher whose very mention of the word ‘Islamist’ was likely to inflame the bovine bigotries of his fellow Red Wall meatheads.

You didn’t have to agree with Anderson’s comments to find the response to them chilling. My view is that it’s just wrong to say Sadiq is a marionette of religious hotheads. London’s preening, pint-sized overlord is a woke despot, not an Islamist one. He smuggles his intolerance under the Pride flag, not the Shahada flag, and damns as blasphemers less those who query the Koran than those who think men can’t become women or who don’t fancy stumping up £12 a day to drive their car in London. But it wasn’t the inaccuracy of Anderson’s ‘Islamist’ jibe that earned him the week-long wrath of media hysterics – it was the fact he said the word ‘Islamist’ at all.

‘Islamism’ is the great unutterable in 21st-century Britain. Representatives of the state have even flirted with erasing the i-word from public discourse – remember when counter-terrorist police considered ditching phrases like ‘Islamist terrorism’ and ‘jihadis’ and replacing them with ‘faith-claimed terrorism’ and ‘terrorists abusing religious motivations’? In the end, such brazen Orwellian meddling in everyday speech wasn’t necessary. Instead, as Anderson found out, an informal moratorium on open chatter about Islamism has been enforced by our fretful cultural elite, who wield the charge of ‘Islamophobe’ against anyone who asks too many questions or feels too many feelings about the scourge of radical Islam.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/03/12/china-is-in-crisis/

Since January, when elections in Taiwan returned the independence-leaning Lai Ching-te as president, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in Beijing has been very quiet. But we shouldn’t mistake the relative silence for calm. Beneath the surface, the CCP is clearly experiencing quite a bit of turmoil at the moment.

Take its armed wing, the two-million strong People’s Liberation Army (PLA). At the end of last year, President Xi fired nine of his top generals, several of whom oversaw China’s nuclear deterrent. The word is that one or more were guilty of fiddling the books around weapons procurement.

Yet there is more to the latest firings than meets the eye. China’s spending on weapons and armed services has more than doubled since Xi took power in 2012. It is set to rise by a further 7.2 per cent in 2024 alone. This is causing problems as the enormous scale of funds is tempting senior military people to skim something off the top. What’s more, China will have to divert yet more national resources to warfare if Beijing’s military budget, currently at $236 billion, is to get close to America’s, set for $850 billion in 2025.

Xi hasn’t just strengthened his hold over the military. He has also tightened his grip over all aspects of Chinese life. This means that political debate is more stifled than ever. And since 2021, when Alibaba co-founder and billionaire Jack Ma was forced to sell off many of his assets, Xi has sought greater control of the private sector, repeatedly clipping the wings of large private corporations.

Xi is clearly worried about political dissent. He won’t have forgotten how, in late 2022, large protests swept China over his Zero Covid lockdown policy and related deaths in a fire in Xinjiang’s capital of Urumqi. Just last week, China’s parliament, the National People’s Congress (NPC), passed new laws that further subordinated the State Council, China’s cabinet, to CCP control.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/03/propalestine_maniacs_destroy_painting_of_balfour_at_cambridge_university.html

A menacing new low from the savages and barbarians who attack art.
So now we learn again why we can’t have nice things:

According to the New York Times:

A pro-Palestinian group slashed and spray-painted a century-old portrait of Arthur James Balfour at the University of Cambridge on Friday, defacing a painting of the British official whose pledge of support in 1917 for “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people” helped pave the way to Israel’s founding three decades later.

The group, Palestine Action, said in a statement that the destruction of the portrait in Trinity College, Cambridge, was intended to call attention to “the bloodshed of the Palestinian people since the Balfour Declaration was issued,” particularly in light of the current conflict in Gaza.

A spokeswoman for Trinity, whose alumni include King Charles III as well as Balfour himself, said in a statement on Friday that the college “regrets the damage caused to a portrait of Arthur James Balfour during public opening hours” and that it had notified the police. A Cambridge police statement said officers were on the scene to investigate a report of “criminal damage.”

We’ve been outraged before by this rubbish from activists, none of whom could draw a stick figure if they were playing ‘hangman.’

But this represents a new low in activist barbarism. In the past, environmental activists, such as those I described here, in 2022, merely chose to damage glass covering artwork, or color water of historic fountain sculptures, or glue themselves to the floor or the frame of western masterpieces, they always justified their acts by claiming they weren’t actually damaging the paintings, though that is arguable to some extent.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20469/europe-fear-trump

European dislike for the person of Trump, who is cast as the antithesis of the Davos-approved globalist worried about global warming, not interested in chest-beating about Palestine, and demanding that others not treat the US as a “room service” reachable by pressing a button, is running shivers down many spines in Paris and Berlin among other places.

This is why many Europeans prefer to see the Democrat donkey rather than the Republican elephant in the room. They miss the fact that the absent, that is present in the room, is neither the elephant nor the donkey but the leviathan.

In the recent summit in Paris of European Union leaders on Ukraine, there was an elephant in the room: The US Republican Party and its current mahout, former President Donald J. Trump.

According to those who were able to peep into the session, much of the discussion was about what the US will or won’t do in case the volatile mahout rides his elephant into the White House in November.

Trump’s musings about ending the war in Ukraine and taming Vladimir Putin without war and his quip about refusing to support a NATO member not paying its share, if attacked by Russia, took up a disproportionate part of the discussions. Then came the French President Emmanuel Macron’s bombshell about boots on the ground in Ukraine.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20465/iran-sham-elections

Iran’s so-called “elections” stand out as a grotesque parody of democracy. Yet… the mainstream Western media persistently mislabel these charades as “elections,” thereby bestowing legitimacy upon a regime entrenched in authoritarianism and dictatorship.

For decades, Iranians have endured oppression, censorship, and violence at the hands of a regime that masquerades as a legitimate government while trampling on their basic rights. To dismiss their struggle by equating their aspirations for freedom with a sham electoral spectacle is to disregard the sacrifices made by countless activists, journalists and ordinary citizens who dare to dream of a better future.

It sends a dangerous message to the Iranian people and to the world at large: that autocracy masquerading as democracy is acceptable, and that tyranny can cloak itself in the trappings of legitimacy.

Now, as the Iranian regime is about to realize its dream of obtaining nuclear weapons, does anyone think that a government that treats its own people so brutally will treat its neighbors any better?

Iran’s sham “elections” are nothing more than a thinly veiled attempt to legitimize authoritarian rule. By mislabeling these orchestrated spectacles as elections, mainstream Western media perpetuate the regime’s propaganda and undermine the struggle for democracy within Iran. It is time to call out this charade for what it is and lend our voices to the chorus demanding true democracy and freedom for the Iranian people.

In the annals of political theater, Iran’s so-called “elections” stand out as a grotesque parody of democracy. Yet, despite the blatant manipulation and lack of genuine choice, the mainstream Western media persistently mislabel these charades as “elections,” thereby bestowing legitimacy upon a regime entrenched in authoritarianism and dictatorship.

https://victorhanson.com/the-mythologies-of-the-middle-east-part-two/

The Myth of “Proportionality”

As a general rule, in the long history of war, victory is found only by being disproportionate in the use of force. That is a truism so banal as to need little elaboration. When both sides are “proportionate” in their ability to harm their opponents, the result is either a bloody tactical deadlock such as at Verdun or the Somme, or an open strategic sore like Vietnam and Afghanistan, or decades-long “proportionate” killing such as the Peloponnesian War or Thirty Years’ War.

The whole point of Western aid to Ukraine apparently and logically is to allow it to harm Russia disproportionally, especially given the vast imbalance in resources, both human and material. The great tragedy of this horrific two-year war is the reality that Ukraine has only been able to achieve proportional success against Russia, as the current deadlocked map of the battle space attests.

Hamas began its war on October 7, seeking to achieve a disproportionate success; that is, to kill more Jewish civilians in any single day since the gas chambers at Auschwitz. It knew the Israelis possessed a disproportionate ability in strictly military terms to retaliate and do real damage to Hamas. But the Hamas terrorist leaders in turn assumed they had a disproportionate ability to appeal to the larger Muslim and Arab Middle East of 500 million people, as well as hundreds of millions of supporters in the old Third World as well as in the U.S. and Europe. Their logic was brutally simple: while the West, the UN, and the rest would for a moment deplore their tactics, Hamas assumed that privately they either would approve of the damage inflicted on Israelis or at least tolerate it and thus use their various levels of influence to restrain the Israeli response.

https://victorhanson.com/the-mythologies-of-the-middle-east-part-three/

The Myth of the Oppressed Palestinians

There are lots of refugees in the world with much longer claims of displacement than the Palestinians, and also some with much more recent suffering. And yet we hear nothing about them. Does anyone challenge Turkish president Erdogan for his ongoing threats to send missiles into Athens or to brag that he has a solution like his “grandfathers” for the Armenian “problem”?

Or do they lament the 1974 ethnic cleansing of northern Cyprus that resulted when the Turkish military invaded the island, created a puppet separatist regime in the north, appropriated land that had been Greek for three millennia, and then slaughtered Greeks and drove them down into the south of the island? Are there protests today demanding justice and a “right of return” for the Greek Cypriots? Do we talk of “colonialist” or “settler” Turks who were moved from the mainland to Cyprus to alter the demography of the island?

For that matter, do any lament the fate of the Volga Germans (nearly two million) who were packed up by Joseph Stalin and uprooted from their ancient homes in 1941–42?

Are we aware that until 1939 western Ukraine was the ancient home of millions of Catholic Poles, who were driven out by communist Russia in its hideous 1939 deal with Hitler and never returned after the war?

Or do we lament the 13 million East Prussians who were ethnically cleansed after World War II to give lands to a new Poland that was robbed by Stalin of its old domains? Are any of these peoples today considered UN refugees? Do octogenarian Germans dangle the keys of their old homes in Danzig to cameras, as if they will someday have “a right of return” to present-day Poland?