RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.steynonline.com/9791/the-banana-vote-song-tallying-time

The Prime Minister of Canada is a pathological narcissist weirdo. Last year’s tour of India dressed as a Bollywood bridesmaid strongly suggested as much, and his multiple blackface capers stretching into early middle age merely confirm it. The Liberal establishment, wittingly or not, chose to build a personality cult around the pathological weirdo. In the normal course of events, and in a healthy functioning polity, that would invite a strong rebuke from the electorate.

Yet, as we game out various likely scenarios for Monday night’s results, that strong rebuke appears to be the one thing that’s not on the cards. If anything, the revelation that Justin Trudeau is Jolson Trudeau only confirmed the Grits and the media in their determination to drag the Prime Minstrel over the finish line: After four years of hammering anyone who dissents from the New Trudeaupia as a hateful racist, the exposure of Justin as a shallow over-promoted nitwit who can’t even be left alone with a tub of shoe polish is too much: it taints them, it daubs them with Justin’s Kiwi, all the clever people who presume to lecture the ignorant masses and regulate and coerce them into the new virtues. For if the coolest PM on the planet is just a third-rate mammy singer who wants you to tally his banana, what does that say about the backstage boys and the media panjandrums who anointed him “because it’s 2015”?

So they have worked hard to contain the damage. On Monday night, absent a massive polling upset, everyone is expecting either (if he holds it together) a Liberal minority government led by Trudeau or (if not) a Conservative minority government led by Andrew Scheer. In a parliamentary democracy, what matters is not who wins the most seats but who can command a majority in the House of Commons – which is why the media and the Tory leadership are now engaged in a semi-literate constitutional dispute about whether, in the Westminster system, the Queen invites the outgoing PM or the head of the largest party to take first crack at forming a government.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15042/brexit-last-call

Having put everything on the line by staking his reputation and premiership in defiance of his detractors’ shameless cynicism, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson seems to be energised by the new Brexit deal. With a bit of luck, his tenacity might just pay off — and the agonising wait to be free of the EU will finally be over.

“We’ve got a great new deal that takes back control,” British Prime Minister Boris Johnson tweeted after last minute negotiations with European Union leaders in Brussels. The deal will now require the approval of both the European Parliament and UK Parliament – who have so far tried everything they can to derail the UK’s exit from the European Union (EU). According to the BBC:

MPs have voted to hold an extra sitting in the Commons on Saturday to discuss the next steps.

Cabinet Office minister Michael Gove said the government would hold a vote on the deal and was not “not contemplating defeat”.

But, he added, if the plan did not get the backing of MPs, the alternative was leaving without a deal.

The no-deal Brexit mentioned by Gove is something with which many might be quite happy.

Those who voted to leave the EU in 2016 might well find it hard not view the latest proceedings with a cynical eye, but it finally looks as though a departure from the EU could be real — despite one half of the Conservative Party’s coalition government — Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) — failing to support it. Stating the obvious by insisting that the Johnson is “too eager by far to get a deal at any cost”, Nigel Dodds, the leader of the Conservatives’ DUP bedfellows, appears not quite to get the point. After releasing a statement stating that the DUP could not back the proposals “as things stand,” they somewhat unhelpfully failed to provide much further information.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15038/isis-prisoners-return

US President Donald Trump personally made a number of appeals to European leaders requesting they do more to take responsibility for their ISIS-affiliated nationals… the Europeans refused to budge, arguing that having them return home would increase the risk of Islamist-inspired acts of terrorism….

There is now the very real prospect that ISIS, which only a year ago had suffered a catastrophic defeat with the destruction of its so-called caliphate, will be able to regroup as hordes of liberated fighters from Europe and elsewhere rejoin its ranks.

If that happens, and ISIS succeeds in launching a new wave of terror attacks against Western targets, European leaders will have only themselves to blame for failing to accept responsibility for the actions of their citizens, no matter how reprehensible they might be.

Ever since the US-led coalition succeeded in destroying most of ISIS in Syria, one vital issue has left been unresolved, namely: what to do with the thousands of ISIS fighters who were taken prisoner and confined to Kurdish-run detention centres.

The problem is particularly acute with regard to the estimated 2,500 foreign fighters — the majority of them holding European passports — and their dependents who abandoned their home countries for fight for ISIS.

Given the depth of their betrayal — turning their backs on nations where they have been raised and nurtured to join the barbarians of ISIS — it is quite understandable that Western governments should recoil in horror when defeated ISIS fighters and their associates then announce they want to return home.

In Britain, for example, there was much controversy earlier in the year concerning the case of Shamima Begum who, as a 15-year-old teenager, left her home in east London in 2015 to become the bride of an ISIS fighter.

Earlier this year, she resurfaced, languishing in a Kurdish-run camp, from where she made an impassioned call to be allowed to return home, even though, during her absence, the British government had already cancelled her British citizenship. Her request received short shrift from London, which insisted she had lost her right to be a British citizen by dint of her decision to join a banned terrorist organisation, one of whose prime objectives is to carry out terrorist attacks against British targets.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/10/free-canan-kaftancioglu-mark-tapson/

A month ago, Canan Kaftancioglu, a leading secular politician in Turkey and a critic of Islam, was sentenced to nine years, eight months and 20 days in prison on the transparently political charge of “insulting” authoritarian President Recep Erdogan and the Turkish state in social media posts dating back several years, as well as the Orwellian charge of “spreading terror propaganda.” This inspired a young Turkish activist named Kursat Christoff Pekgoz here in the United States to launch an online petition to bring attention to this injustice and help secure Kaftancioglu’s freedom.

Pekgoz recently wrote about this for FrontPage Mag here, and I reached out to him for more details.

Mark Tapson: Can you give us a little background about yourself and your own activism in Turkey, as well as your activism since coming here to the United States?

Kursat Pekgoz: I grew up in Turkey fin de siècle, during the late 1990s and throughout the 2000s. I took up various human rights causes as I became increasingly concerned with Erdogan’s tyranny, and my focus was mainly the civil rights of religious minorities. Some of my past efforts include: attending protests against Islamists (2007), attending Turkan Saylan’s funeral (2009), active participation in a forum/protest against compulsory Islamic education (2010), working as a pro bono teacher for secularist CYDD (2009-2010), attending the Gezi protests as a volunteer/bodyguard (2013), advocacy against electoral fraud (2014), signing a human rights declaration to protest the persecution of Kurdish civilians (2016), and visiting the Armenian Genocide memorial (2017). I have advanced degrees in Molecular Biology and English Literature. I have studied seven languages (English, Turkish, Ancient Greek, Russian, Latin, German, French).

Will the last man in Turtle Bay please turn out the lights?

Venezuela, Poland and Sudan amongst 14 new Human Rights Council members

I like how the UN’s own house news headlines the fact that Venezuela, a brutal socialist dictatorship full of starving people, worthless money and whose people are fleeing by the millions, has been elected to the UN Human Rights Council.

And then there’s Sudan, which is responsible for actual genocide.

Africa had four seats up for grabs, and four candidates, who were duly elected: Libya, Mauritania, Namibia and Sudan

As Hillel Neuer of UN Watch has pointed out, Mauritania has sizable numbers of slaves.

The UN has a slave state, a genocidal Muslim tyranny, and a murderous socialist tyranny on its Human Rights Council. And the only qualification for a seat is who kills and oppresses the most people, and violates the most human rights.

UN Watch is calling for a campaign to remove Venezuela. But the next review will inevitably condemn the human rights violations of America and Israel, while praising Venezuela for its commitment to social justice.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/boris-gets-brussels-to-say-yes-11571340220

There’s still no guarantee the United Kingdom will leave the European Union by the current Oct. 31 deadline, but Prime Minister Boris Johnson deserves credit for negotiating an exit agreement many wrote off as impossible. The question now is whether he can win over Parliament.

“The negotiators reached an agreement on a revised Protocol on Ireland/Northern Ireland and on a revised Political Declaration,” European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker wrote in a letter Thursday. He’s referring to negotiations to prevent a hard border on the island of Ireland, which is divided between the independent Irish Republic and Northern Ireland, which is part of the U.K. The 1998 Good Friday Agreement relies on a frictionless border between the two countries.

Mr. Johnson managed to scrap a U.K.-wide backstop, which could have kept the country in the EU customs union indefinitely. Now the backstop essentially is limited to Northern Ireland, and the Northern Ireland Assembly will vote on the arrangement every four years.

Mr. Johnson accepted nonbinding language about maintaining a level-playing field with the EU on competition. This will create tension if London tries to turn the U.K. into a low-tax alternative to the Continent, but that can be dealt with later. The deal isn’t perfect, but neither are the alternatives of another aimless withdrawal extension, an economically damaging no-deal Brexit, or a new referendum that would poison British politics for a generation.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/an-election-for-the-boo-birds/

As Canada approaches its October 21 federal election, it is obvious that it would take someone like Donald Trump to rescue this country from a crater of socialist lies, faddist memes, rampant welfarism, “social justice” debauchery, climate boondoggles, economic bankruptcy, unsustainable immigration, and, in short, a veritable Pandora’s Box of cultural and political ills.

The leaders of our traditional parties can only be charitably described as, to be blunt, imbeciles or scoundrels, or both. Much has been written about Liberal prime minister Justin Trudeau as Canada’s Embarrassment-in-Chief, a bezomian who has regularly beclowned himself in public, praised China’s “basic dictatorship,” assured us that budgets balance themselves, embroiled himself in scandals, been found in violation of the Conflict of Interest Act, bribed the media with the promise of a $600 million gift, and indebted Canada’s future generations to the tune of $685.5 billion and counting—indeed, Trudeau is projected to be the largest debt accumulator in Canadian history. No wonder he has recently been endorsed by Barack Obama.

A self-promoting paragon of virtue, photos have recently surfaced of Trudeau in blackface, which the press is frenetically excusing. Like the opportunistic cullion that he is, Trudeau’s latest hijinks involve his wearing a bulletproof vest at a Liberal rally in response to an alleged security threat whose source has not been identified—unless, of course, as Rebel News journalist Sheila Gunn Reid points out, quoting a Liberal flak on CBC TV, we blame Conservative free-speechers, yellow-vesters and the little that remains of an honest media. Ezra Levant’s just released The Librano$—merging the words “Liberals” and “Sopranos”—tells us all we need to know about Trudeau’s corruption and unfitness for office.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15035/saudi-arabia-palestinians-disappearing

The Geneva-based Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor (Euro-Med), a youth-led independent organization that advocates for human rights across Europe and the Middle East, said it has collected names of about 60 Palestinians detained by the Saudi authorities in recent months

Euro-Med said it considers the “practices of the Saudi authorities a flagrant violation of the requirements of justice, which guarantees everyone the right to a fair trial, including knowing charges against and the right to defense and access to a lawyer… [and] affirms that the relevant authorities do not comply with the international legal rules that guarantee the simplest rights of litigation for any individual…”

The Saudi authorities have offered no explanation for the widespread campaign targeting Palestinians in the kingdom. It appears that PA President Mahmoud Abbas and his officials in Ramallah fear that any critique of this behavior would jeopardize the financial handouts and political support they receive from Saudi Arabia…. For Palestinian leaders, Saudi money and political backing far outweigh the fate of a few dozen Palestinians held without trial in an Arab country.

It is only Palestinians who are held by Israel for terrorist-related crimes who Abbas and his friends remember to mention in their endless litanies of complaints.

Dozens of Palestinians have been “disappearing” in Saudi Arabia in recent months and are believed are being held in detention in the kingdom’s prisons, according to Palestinian sources and international human rights organizations.

The Palestinian Authority (PA) leadership in the West Bank, which regularly condemns Israel for arresting Palestinians suspected of involvement in terrorism and other anti-Israel activities, has been reluctant to speak out against the Saudi purge of Palestinians, ostensibly for security reasons, not to harm its relations with the kingdom.

The PA is not only keeping mum about the unprecedented Saudi crackdown, but it is also trying to prevent the families of the detainees from protesting in public. Last week, the PA’s Preventive Security Service summoned the family of Palestinian engineer Abdullah Odeh, being held in a Saudi prison, and warned them not to protest their son’s detention.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14981/greece-government-fear

A press report on September 24 revealed that Greece’s National Intelligence Service is investigating five Greek NGOs operating in tandem with Turkish intelligence agencies and people-smugglers to transport illegal immigrants to the Greek islands.

Ankara’s goal in this operation is an open secret: to unleash a flow of Muslim migrants on Europe.

On September 27, Greek Minister of Defense Nikos Panagiotopoulos said that illegal immigration “is taking on the dimensions of a national crisis, and poses a threat to the country’s internal security.”

The emergency measures appear laughable, however, when one considers that about 500 people are entering Greece illegally each day, and millions more are waiting to come over from the other shore of the Aegean Sea.

Illegal immigration into Greece cannot be tackled as long as the left-wing elites and media — with a solid push from neighboring Turkey — continue to cloak what constitutes a hostile invasion in a mantle of political correctness.

A resolution adopted by the European Parliament on September 20, “paying tribute to the victims of communism, Nazism and other totalitarian and authoritarian regimes,” was passed by an overwhelming majority. This is as it should be, given that communist regimes around the world have caused the deaths of more than 100 million people.

Surprisingly, however, only one out of 21 Greek members of the European Parliament — the New Democracy Party’s MEP, Anna Michel Asimakopoulou — voted in favor of the resolution. This was in spite of the thousands of casualties and massive damage resulting from the Greek Civil War in 1945-1949 between the communists and the democratic forces in the country.