RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/09/brexit-status-boris-johnson-strategy/Any questions?

Last week in British politics, the government lost its majority; MPs voted to take control of the Brexit process; a bill passed that would force Prime Minister Boris Johnson to request a three-month Brexit extension from the EU if no deal is reached by October 19; Johnson attempted to call a snap election, but failed to get the required two-thirds support of the House of Commons; 21 Conservative MPs, including Winston Churchill’s grandson, were kicked out of the party for rebelling against Johnson’s Brexit strategy; Tory cabinet ministers, including Johnson’s own brother, resigned, having lost faith in the government; and the High Court upheld Johnson’s decision to prorogue Parliament, suspending it from tomorrow until October 14.

[Deep breath.]

This week in British politics, the anti-Brexit speaker of the House of Commons, John Bercow, has announced his intent to step down; the Brexit-delay bill has been granted “Royal Assent,” making it the law of the land; the prime minister has visited the Irish taoiseach in Dublin and the have two released a joint statement admitting to “significant gaps” in their visions for Brexit; and the Commons has rejected Johnson’s second request for a general election.

[Another deep breath.]

Soooooooo . . . any questions?

1) Why did Johnson purge the 21 dissenting Tory MPs?

Members of the government, which typically incorporates around half of the parliamentary party and its ministers, are in general expected to support the prime minister on key votes. If they feel they cannot do so, they normally resign. By expelling the rebels, Johnson was turning this implicit expectation of loyalty into an explicit demand, and then applying it to all members of the parliamentary party.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/09/the_best_speech_on_brexit__from_a_shocking_source.html

Keep in mind that, according to most of our media (and even more so the European media), we are supposed to regard with fear the German “ultra-right-wing” political party, the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD).  Also, keep in mind that we are supposed to believe that the Brexit battle pits Brits against a united Europe that is horrified at their effort to shatter the European Union.

But, in fact, the arrogant, unaccountable transnational organizations, of which the E.U. is a leading example, have served global elites better than ordinary citizens of their constituent countries.  

Watch this speech in Germany’as parliament, the Bundestag, by AfD’s co-leader Alice Weidel, and start to realize that populism is a global force in the highly industrialized world and that the complaints we Americans feel against our elites, and the complaints Brits have against ceding control to the E.U., are all of a piece.  She does not hesitate to point her finger at France, which is leading the resistance to a negotiated Brexit.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274890/life-and-death-communist-tyrant-discover-networks

Robert Gabriel Mugabe, the longtime ruthless dictator of Zimbabwe, died on September 6 at a hospital in Singapore where he had been under observation for several months for an undisclosed illness. Let us take a close look at this communist tyrant’s long reign of racist brutality and inhumanity.

Mugabe was born in 1924 at the Kutama Mission in Zvimba, then Southern Rhodesia, only months after the country became a British crown colony. Son of a peasant farmer and carpenter, he began his education at a nearby Jesuit mission and then taught in various schools while studying for certification to go on to the University of Fort Hare in South Africa, from which he received a B.A. in English and History. He then studied at Drifontein, Salisbury (now Harare), Gwelo, and Tanzania, and eventually obtained by correspondence a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of London. Next he began teaching in Accra, Ghana (1958-60), where he met Sally Hayfron, his first wife.

When Mugabe studied at Fort Hare, which was paid for by apartheid South Africa’s white taxpayers, it was the premier black university of all English-speaking Africa, producing a number of famous African leaders. At that institution Mugabe became radicalized, as did such future “freedom presidents” as Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere and Zambia’s Kenneth Kaunda and future rivals over absolute power in Rhodesia like Herbert Chitep. By the time Mugabe returned to Rhodesia in 1960, he was a committed Leninist.

The term “Leninist” is used purposefully. There is no indication that Mugabe ever read Marx. If anything, he perhaps read Lenin and Stalin‘s brief treatises on how to take and keep power.

The Zimbabwe liberation movements of the 1970s — primarily Mugabe’s ZANU and its competitor ZAPU (Joshua Nkomo’s Zimbabwe African People’s Union) — had a confused history of idealistic rhetoric, Marxism-Leninism, and systematic atrocities.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14839/denmark-crime-sweden

“Denmark is still relatively far from having reached the kind of crime epidemic that is currently plaguing Sweden. However, given the proximity of the two countries, the open borders and the apparent free flow of criminals across the borders — not to mention Denmark’s own crime level — there seems little to stop the situation in Denmark from getting out of control and becoming increasingly more like Sweden. ”

Sweden is exporting not only its bombings to Denmark. Gang crime, with its shootings and murders, has also traveled across the border.

Denmark has experienced 10 bombings since February. The latest took place on August 27 in a residential complex, Gersager, in the Greve area, very close to Copenhagen. No one was injured, but the building was seriously damaged. This year, the Swedish city of Malmö has experienced 19 bombings. An August 16 editorial in the Danish newspaper Berlingske Tidende said:

“No one wants Swedish conditions where shootings and bombings have reached an extreme degree. In addition to conflicts in the gang environment, there have been bombing attacks against police stations as well as courthouses, a town hall and the Swedish Tax Agency in Malmö in recent years.”

The piece was published after the Danish Tax Authority in Copenhagen was bombed on August 6, destroying its façade; one person was injured. Two Swedish citizens were charged with the attack. “The Swedish suspects have names that indicate that they have a different ethnic background than Swedish, but there is as yet no knowledge of the motives that may have driven them,” Berlingske wrote.

A few days later, on August 10, Copenhagen experienced another bombing that caused material damage, this time against a police station in Nørrebro.

Shortly after the bombings of the Danish Tax Authority and the Copenhagen police station, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen held a press conference. The government, she said, views the bombings “as an attack on our authorities and thus also our society”. She added that the government plans to strengthen the border with Sweden. “We have a challenge. It should not be the case that you can travel from Sweden to Denmark and place dynamite in the middle of Copenhagen”. She stressed that the border “has our full attention. And it needs to be strengthened”.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14848/turkey-israel-revolution

“Hatice Karahan, Erdogan’s top economic advisor, told DW that economic relations between the countries represented a ‘win-win situation’ for both: ‘Turkey exports automobiles, iron, steel, electrical devices and plastic to Israel. And in return, it imports Israeli fuel and oil.'” — Deutsche Welle, December 12, 2017.

Erdoğan was unjust, wrong and unrealistic in his quest internationally to isolate Israel. The world has not quite moved in the direction he wished for.

“[T]he rapprochement that significant sections of the Israeli military and security establishment have long wanted with the GCC [Gulf Cooperation Council] has taken root since 2011, as the post-Arab Spring landscape has provided the opportunity to deepen unofficial ties in areas of shared concern.” — Baker Institute, Rice University.

Turkey’s Islamist leaders, including President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, have been pledging to their voters that they would “internationally isolate Israel” ever since they launched a diplomatic war on the Jewish state in 2010.

In a 2011 speech, Turkey’s foreign minister at the time, Ahmet Davutoğlu (later prime minister), said that his country’s Turkey’s policies in the Middle East “have brought Israel to its knees” and isolated the Jewish state both regionally and internationally.

The facts, however, could not have been more distant.

According to official reports, Israel’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) rose by a healthy 3.3% in 2018, compared to 1.3% in 2009, while Turkey reported a drop from 8.5% in 2010 to 2.8% in 2018. The unemployment rate in Israel stood at 3.7% in July 2019. Turkey, meanwhile, boasted an unemployment rate of 14.7% in the December-February 2018-2019 period, its highest level in nearly a decade.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-myanmars-military-duped-the-west-11568069031

Yangon, Myanmar

Is the American foreign-policy community wise enough, disciplined enough, and knowledgeable enough about Asia to build an effective coalition to balance a rising China? The example of Myanmar is a worrying one.

Myanmar received extraordinary attention from the last administration, with visits from both Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and President Obama. But the crucial Southeast Asian country turned out not to be the human-rights miracle many in both parties envisioned. And when events in Myanmar failed to follow the idealistic script written in Washington, the U.S. responded in ways that undermined the country’s reformers, empowered its military and strengthened China’s hand. The U.S. failed even to demonstrate a balanced approach to human rights the people of Myanmar might have respected.

In the early years of the Obama administration, many Americans fell in love with a fantasy: the idea that Aung San Suu Kyi, the Burmese political leader who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 and endured 15 years of house arrest, was in the process of taking power from a defeated military junta. They misread the situation fundamentally.

In 2010 the military was frustrated. Decades of failed socialist planning had left the economy relatively backward, even as other Asian countries grew rich. Myanmar was largely dependent on Chinese investment, which made the generals nervous. They decided to begin to liberalize their domestic economy to promote faster growth and attract investment from Japan, the U.S. and Europe.

https://voiceofeurope.com/2019/09/belgium-mp-climbs-atop-antwerps-city-hall-to-demand-an-end-to-islamic-occupation/

Filip Dewinter, a well-known Flemish MP and city councilor, climbed the roof of Antwerp’s 500-year-old city hall building to call for an end to what he referred to as the “occupation of the city by Islam”.

The leader of the right-wing populist Vlaams Belang party in the Flanders part of Belgium, Filip Dewinter, posted a video on Twitter of himself delivering an Islam-critical message while he stands on top of Antwerp’s city hall roof beside a golden eagle. 

“At the beginning of the political year a special initiative: a statement from the roof of the Antwerp town hall, flanked by a recently restored eagle!” Dewinter wrote in the tweet.

During his message, Dewinter gives a short history lesson about the city, the city hall building, and how both relate to the idea of freedom. Dewinter also cites all of the different outside forces who have, at one time, occupied the city.

“This town hall has been around since 1565,” Dewinter said. “In those five centuries that the town hall has existed, it was besieged, set on fire and has experienced countless revolutions, wars, and invasions of our city. This town hall symbolizes the freedom of Antwerp.”

“It is not without reason that the office of the mayor of Antwerp is made of the wood of the tree of freedom that used to stand just in front of the town hall on the Grote Markt. Freedom is the essence of what the people of Antwerp believe in.”

https://quillette.com/2019/09/09/the-political-excommunication-of-erin-weir-betrays-the-face-of-modern-political-cowardice/

Erin Weir is not well-known outside of Canada. Even many Canadian readers won’t recognize the politician’s name. But the story of how he was smeared and excommunicated by his own political party presents a stunning indictment of political cowardice in the age of #MeToo. And what happened to him could happen to virtually anyone who runs for office.

Weir is a federal Member of Parliament (MP), having been elected in 2015 to represent the Saskatchewan riding of Regina-Lewvan. He ran in that election as a candidate for the New Democratic Party (NDP), which sits to the political left of Justin Trudeau’s governing Liberals, and constitutes the third-largest party in the Canadian parliament. His downfall began on January 30, 2018, the day he announced his candidacy for NDP caucus chair by sending an email to other NDP MPs, and to the leader of the federal NDP, Jagmeet Singh (who, at the time, had not yet become a Member of Parliament). The email set off a chain of events that eventually led to his expulsion from the NDP caucus, and stripped him of the opportunity to stand as a candidate for the party in the upcoming Fall, 2019, federal election. Under the Canadian political system, party leaders are free to unilaterally block candidates, no matter the views of voters or the rank-and-file. Without party affiliation, Weir’s political career is effectively over.

Weir’s undoing was the work of Christine Moore, an NDP MP for the Quebec riding of Abitibi-Temiscamingue. In a reply-all email responding to Weir’s expressed interest in becoming caucus chair, she wrote that she could never support him because “there are too many women (mostly employee[s]) who complained to me that you were harassing to them.” She then added: “As a woman, I would not feel comfortable to meet with you alone.”

Like Weir, Moore was not well-known—except insofar as she already had helped ruin the career of two MPs in Justin Trudeau’s Liberal party after advancing claims that they, too, were sexual harassers (a subject discussed in more detail below). And her new accusation would have come as a surprise (and still does) to anyone who knows Weir, a 37-year-old economist who once worked for the Canadian section of the United Steelworkers union.