RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15245/eu-migrants-relocation-quota

The continuing debate over migration is, at its core, about European federalism and the degree to which the European Union will be allowed to usurp decision-making powers from its 28 member states.

If everything goes according to plan, the draft legislation would be adopted by the European Parliament in the second half of 2020 when Germany holds the presidency of the EU. It would then be ratified by the European Council, made up of the leaders of the EU member states.

“We fundamentally reject illegal migration. We also reject allowing smuggling gangs to decide who will live in Europe.” — Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babiš.

“The V4’s [Visegrád group: Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia] position is clear. We are not willing to admit any illegal migrants into central Europe. The success and security of central Europe is thanks to our pursuit of a firm anti-migration policy, and this will endure…. Hungarians insist on our right to decide whom to allow into our country and with whom we wish to live.” — Hungarian Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó.

German Interior Minister Horst Seehofer has unveiled a new plan to reform the European asylum system. A draft of the proposal leaked to the media shows that all member states of the European Union would be required to take in illegal migrants.

Countries in Central and Eastern Europe are opposed to mandatory relocations on the basis that decisions about the granting of residence permits should be kept at the national level. They have noted that by unilaterally imposing migrant quotas on EU member states, unelected bureaucrats in Brussels are seeking to force the democratically elected leaders of Europe to submit to their diktat.

Indeed, the continuing debate over migration is, at its core, about European federalism and the degree to which the European Union will be allowed to usurp decision-making powers from its 28 member states.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15244/nato-divisions

While getting NATO’s finances in order clearly remains a pressing priority for the Trump administration, the real divisions at the summit have been caused by the conduct of the Europeans, most notably France and Turkey.

Turkey’s recent decision to purchase Russia’s S-400 anti-aircraft missile system, which was designed specifically to shoot down NATO warplanes, has been another serious bone of contention at the summit.

Turkey’s important geographical location means that NATO leaders have previously been reluctant to sanction Ankara for its increasingly pro-Russian outlook, which is very much at odds with NATO’s position that Russia poses the most significant threat to the alliance’s security.

If there is one clear lesson to be drawn from the NATO summit just held in London to mark the alliance’s 70th anniversary, it is that the Europeans, and not Donald Trump, are to blame for many of the divisions that exist between NATO’s 29-member states.

Prior to the summit, during which leaders of the alliance attended glitzy receptions at Buckingham Palace and Downing Street, much of the focus centred on the American president and persistent fears that he might carry out his threat to withdraw the US from the alliance.

Mr Trump’s unhappiness with NATO is well-documented, and dates back to the NATO summit in Brussels in July 2018 when, during a testy exchange over the failure of most European member states to pay their fair share towards NATO’s running costs, Mr Trump made a direct threat to withdraw the US from the organisation.

It still remains the case that, despite Mr Trump’s hectoring on the subject, a significant number of European powers — most notably Germany, Italy and Spain — fail miserably to meet the defence spending target of 2% of GDP, which is the minimum requirement for NATO membership. In all three cases, their contributions are just above 1%, which lends credence to Mr Trump’s accusation that American taxpayers are footing the bill to ensure the security of feckless Europeans.

https://jamieglazov.com/2019/12/04/katie-hopkins-they-plotted-to-behead-me/

When a female Jihadi wants your head as a wedding present.

https://quillette.com/2019/12/01/gm-crops-like-golden-rice-will-save-the-lives-of-hundreds-of-thousands-of-children/

Any day now, the government of Bangladesh may become the first country to approve the growing of a variety of yellow rice by farmers known as Golden Rice. If so, this would be a momentous victory in a long and exhausting battle fought by scientists and humanitarians to tackle a huge human health problem—a group that’s faced a great deal of opposition by misguided critics of genetically modified foods.

Golden yellow rice ear

Compare two plants. Golden Rice and Golden Promise barley are two varieties of crop. The barley was produced in the 1960s by bombarding seeds with gamma rays in a nuclear facility to scramble their genes at random with the aim of producing genetic mutations that might prove to be what geneticists used to call “hopeful monsters.” It is golden only in name, as a marketing gimmick, with sepia-tinged adverts helping to sell its appeal to organic growers and brewers. Despite the involvement of atomic radiation in its creation, it required no special regulatory approval or red tape before being released to be grown by farmers in Britain and elsewhere. It went almost straight from laboratory to field and proved popular and profitable.

Golden rice

Golden Rice, by contrast, was produced in the 1990s by carefully inserting just two naturally occurring genes known to be safe—from maize and from a common soil bacterium—into a rice plant, disturbing no other genes. It is quite literally golden: its yellow color indicates that it has beta carotene in it, the precursor of vitamin A. It was developed as a humanitarian, non-profit project in an attempt to prevent somewhere between 200,000 and 700,000 people, many of them children, dying prematurely every year in poor countries because of vitamin A deficiency. (Vitamin A deficiency causes children to go blind and lose immune function.) Yet the rice has been ferociously opposed by opponents of GM foods and, partly as a result, has been tied up in red tape for 20 years, preventing it from being grown. One study in 2008 calculated that in India alone 1.38 million person-years of healthy life had been lost for every year the crop has been delayed.

Golden Rice was the brainchild of two scientists, Ingo Potrykus and Peter Beyer, aimed at helping the 250 million children—predominantly in Asia—who subsist mainly on rice and suffer from vitamin A deficiency. Telling the parents of these children to grow vegetables (most don’t have land), or distributing vitamin capsules—the preferred alternative of some environmental activists—has not proved remotely practical.

Potrykus hit upon the idea of awakening the molecular machinery in the seed of a rice plant—it is active in the leaves—to make vitamin A while casting around for something he could do to help the world towards the end of his career. Within a few years, and with Beyer’s help, he had succeeded. With additional assistance from scientists at the agricultural company Syngenta, organized by Adrian Dubock, they eventually produced a version of Golden Rice that was sufficiently rich in beta carotene to supply all the vitamin A a person needs. (Dubock wrote about the development of Golden Rice here.) With some difficulty, they cleared the many intellectual property hurdles, getting firms to waive their patents so that the rice could be sold or given away. Potrykus and Beyer insisted that the technology be donated free to benefit children suffering from vitamin A deficiency and Syngenta gave up its right to commercialize the product even in rich countries.

Given the scale of human suffering Golden Rice could address, there may be no better example of a purely philanthropic project in the whole of human history. Yet some misguided environmental activists still oppose Golden Rice to this day.

https://www.algemeiner.com/2019/12/04/thousands-of-brazilians-take-part-in-israeli-

Thousands of Brazilians gathered on Sunday at Sao Paulo’s Estaiada Bridge to take part in a popular Israeli social musical initiative held for the first time in Latin America.

The Koolulam project centers around mass singing events in which large groups of non-professionals come together “from all walks of life to do one thing: stop everything for a few hours and just sing,” according to its Facebook page.

The group in Brazil, comprised of Jews and non-Jews, sang “Tempos Modernos,” or “Modern Times,” a famous Brazilian song from the 1980s composed and sung by Lulu Santos, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported.

The show includes a rehearsal of one song led by a conductor and performed by the audience members, who are given music sheets with the lyrics and divided into different voices. The final performance is filmed, edited and posted online.

Conductor Ben Yaffet said about the experience, “Participants go through a creative process surrounded by a sense of unity and belonging rarely achieved in our daily lives.”

Producer Jussara Gontow added, “Koolulam’s main goal is to bring together strangers who have no singing experience and provoke an innovative, creative, sensory and unforgettable musical moment. Children, youth, adults and the elderly become artists.”

Koolulam, established in 2017, has been performed in Israel, the United States, Canada and South Africa.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/0/shouldnt-take-tragedy-get-jihadis-streets/

It was one of those glittering frosty mornings in Cambridge on Monday, the kind of day that makes you glad to be alive. It only added to the terrible poignancy of the gathering in Market Square to mark the deaths of Jack Merritt, 25, and Saskia Jones, 23.

Some of my friends’ kids, who had known Jack socially (“he was popular, really lovely”), were there to lay flowers. The minute’s silence went on and on as if returning to the normal babble of life were intolerable. In a chilling irony, the two young criminologists had been murdered at a conference to mark five years of Learning Together, a programme for students and prisoners, by one of the very men who had benefited from Jack and Saskia’s shared passion for rehabilitation.

Usman Khan was let out of jail last December on licence after serving only eight years, because his sentence had been reduced (by Lord Leveson) on appeal. A crazy change in the law meant that the release was automatic. Khan didn’t need to appear before the parole board, although the judge at his original trial had been clear that this cunning fanatic should not be released if he posed a continuing danger to the public.

Now wearing an electronic tag, Khan was given permission to travel from his home in Staffordshire to the event at Fishmongers’ Hall, even though he was once part of a terrorist group that had planned to blow up the London Stock Exchange, and the beautiful livery hall lay right next to London Bridge, scene of a horrific attack in 2017.

Did alarm bells really not ring? I’m afraid not.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15240/norway-free-speech-koran

Norwegian police chief Marie Benedicte Bjørnland is unable to rid from her mind the certainty that mistreating a copy of the Koran is wrong and that she and her fellow flatfoots should, under some statute or other, have the power to do something about it. In short, for the Norwegian police, the Koran is, in a way, as holy as it is for Muslims.

Once again, one was reminded of the cartoon crisis, when the Norwegian diplomatic corps saw it as urgent to apologize to authoritarian governments for whatever is left in Norway of individual liberty.

A teacher at the school explained that she had “made a conscious decision not to buy napkins with ‘Merry Christmas’ written on them” or to use a red tablecloth or red tree ornaments because “certain religions are very sensitive” and care needs to be taken “not to offend anyone.”

The Norwegian government has recently spent well over $100,000 to convert churches in Stavanger and Skien into mosques and is kicking in a huge sum of taxpayer money for the construction of a mega-mosque in Bergen with, according to journalist and political activist Hege Storhaug, “open ties to extremism.”

Recently I wrote here about how, on November 16, the group Stop Islamization of Norway (Stopp Islamisering av Norge – SIAN) set fire to a copy of the Koran in a public square in Kristiansand, only to have the fire doused pronto by a group of 30 or more police officers. It later emerged that they were under secret orders from the chief of the Norwegian police, Marie Benedicte Bjørnland, not just to put out any such fire but to prevent SIAN members from committing any such act.

Bjørnland defended her orders by citing the so-called “racism clause” of Norway’s criminal law, and the Minister of Justice, Jøran Kallmyr, stood behind her, making the baffling statement that while burning a Koran was not illegal, it could (depending on how you translated his words) “become” or “morph into” a crime.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/12/a_womans_murder_reignites_visions_of_frances_antisemitism.html

Kobili Traore, 29, a Muslim immigrant to France, killed Sarah Halim, 65, his Jewish neighbor, while armed French police stood outside her door, listened to her anguished screams, and did not respond until she was thrown off her balcony to her death.

Sarah Halim was the mother of three, a physician, and a kindergarten teacher.  She had long feared Traore.  Her death was a minor item in the French media.

The French government is refusing to prosecute Traore for his crime because he was high on cannabis and deemed not responsible for his actions.

If Traore had run over someone while drinking, he most certainly would be held responsible, for France has some of the strictest drunk driving laws in Europe.  Drinking does not mitigate one’s responsibility for vehicular homicide.

Whether that would apply if the driver were Muslim and the victim were Jewish, however, now seems a fair question.  Since 2003, twelve Jews have been killed in France for being Jews.  Their assailants were Muslims.