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Arresting Tommy . . . Again This time, it’s Trudeau’s turn. by Bruce Bawer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/arresting-tommy-again/

In the last few years, my friend Douglas Murray has become internationally famous – as much so, anyway, as a serious writer of non-fiction can be. His splendid books The Strange Death of Europe (2017), The Madness of Crowds (2019), and The War on the West (2021) were deserved bestsellers. And since October 7, Murray – born in 1979, a graduate of Eton and of Magdalen College, Oxford – has been rightly hailed around the world for his heroic reportage from Israel during the current war on Hamas. When he hasn’t been in Israel, he’s been traveling all over much of the Western world, giving endless talks and interviews and participating in debates, in which he inevitably triumphs. His writings, his speeches, and his comments have been focused largely on Islam, a topic on which, unlike many other commentators, he admirably refuses to euphemize. Because he recognizes that the brutal Hamas attack on Israel, and the immigrant crisis currently facing Europe, are based in the founding tenets of Islam – period – he refuses to use such phony terms as “Islamism” or “radical Islam” or “Muslim extremism.” It has been heartening to see him applauded by huge audiences – and winning important awards – on both sides of the Atlantic.

Meanwhile the careers of two other Englishmen have been advancing as well. Nigel Farage is also a British hero. For twenty years, the sixty-year-old former businessman led the ultimately successful movement to separate the United Kingdom from the European Union. His principal argument for separation was that the U.K. needed to take back its right to control immigration into its territory. Yet he consistently avoided the reason why it was important to restrict the massive influx of foreigners into Britain. The problem wasn’t with the Hindus or Buddhists or black Caribbeans or sub-Saharan Africans who’d moved to the U.K. These groups did a terrific job of integrating into British society and tended to earn more money than most native Englishmen. No, the problem was Islam. Douglas Murray has no trouble saying so. Nigel Farage, while projecting an image of utter fearlessness, always dodged the issue. In recent times he seems to have begun to tiptoe into these dangerous waters, but he’s still a long way from spelling things out as clearly as Douglas Murray does.

He’s hardly alone. Pretty much the entire British political establishment refuses to breathe a critical word about Islam. And even though the main reason for Brexit was that Brits wanted to retake control of their borders, both main parties, Labour and the Tories, have done little to prevent the large-scale influx of immigrants, mostly illegal, mostly adult men, and mostly Muslim. The Westminster establishment’s attitude toward this issue is perfectly in line with the views of privileged North London – Britain’s equivalent of Northwest Washington, the Upper West Side of New York, and the tonier parts of San Francisco and L.A. – but it’s totally at odds with the wishes of the British (or at least the English) public at large. On July 4, Britain will hold a general election in which the now-reigning Tories, who rode to victory on big promises of tighter border security, are expected to go down to ignominious – and well-deserved – defeat. Labour is expected to do well, although it hasn’t exactly covered itself in glory either. Then there’s the third major party, the Liberal Democrats. But the wild card is Farage’s party, Reform UK, founded in 2018 as the Brexit Party, whose strident calls for immigration reform and tax cuts have gained it a significant following. How significant? We’ll see on July 4.

Douglas Murray. Nigel Farage. And then there’s a third name. Tommy Robinson.

A Conservative Election Victory Puts Canada’s Post-Trudeau Era in Sight By Matthew X. Wilson

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/a-conservative-election-victory-puts-canadas-post-trudeau-era-in-sight/

In news that is sending shockwaves through Canadian politics, the opposition Conservatives claimed victory overnight in a closely watched by-election for a safely Liberal parliamentary constituency in downtown Toronto. The once Liberal “fortress,” known as Toronto-St. Paul’s, is one of the most Liberal-leaning electoral districts in all of Canada — the Liberal Party has carried the seat in the last ten Canadian federal elections, and the Liberal candidate has won by margins of greater than 20 percent in the last three. From an American perspective, this outcome is roughly analogous to Republicans winning a special election for a safely Democratic congressional seat in New York City.

The jolting result, besides an enormous momentum boost for the Conservatives, is a full-throated repudiation of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, one of the most unpopular Canadian leaders in history, who is on track to lose the next Canadian election (which must be held no later than October 2025) by spectacular margins.

Canada’s Liberals find themselves in a similar place to Britain’s governing Conservative Party: technically still in government, but facing an extinction-level electoral wipeout when they finally go before voters. But unlike Britain, where the central question with just nine days until the country’s July 4 election is how badly the Conservatives will lose, the Trudeau-led Liberals have 15 months before voters’ verdict must be heard.

The Liberals have some hard decisions to make. The obvious last-ditch play to rescue their party’s fortunes ahead of the next election is to replace their leader, and that is no doubt a possibility that both Trudeau and his rank-and-file parliamentarians are currently weighing.

France: Towards a Year of Uncertainty? by Amir Taheri

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20724/france-election-uncertainty

The election [French President Emmanuel Macron] unnecessarily provoked could produce a hung parliament in which no party has a majority.

That could make France ungovernable for at least a year, as the president cannot dissolve the parliament within a year of a previous dissolution.

It is still too early to decide how French President Emmanuel Macron might be remembered by history. But one distinction he is unlikely to win is that of “master of timing.” Yet his entourage claims that his decision to call an early general election was a master stroke in good timing.

This is how the argument goes:

With the ultra-right National Rally topping the polls in the European Parliament election earlier this month, Macron saw the danger that it would also win the next presidential election in 2027. So he decided to bring the parliamentary election forward so that the ultra-right’s youthful standard-bearer Jordan Bardella would get the premiership and more than two years in which to be exposed as a disagreeable and incompetent figure, thus allowing Macronists to keep the presidency with a new candidate of their own.

But what if things don’t happen the way Macron the super-strategist fantasized?

In the European election, Bardella’s list won what many see as a “stunning victory” with over 31 percent of the votes and 30 of the 81 French seats in the European Parliament.

Macron’s coalition received only 14.6 percent of the vote, translated into 13 seats. A normal reaction would have come in the form of “too bad, but so what?”

European Parliament elections have never been part of the mainstream of the French political process. These elections are held on a single-round proportional representation basis, which magnifies the rewards.

Held under a different electoral system, parliamentary elections in France do not mirror Euro-elections.

Here, a two-round voting system means 577 separate constituency elections affected by a variety of factors beyond a straight ideological duel.

To win a majority and thus get to name a prime minister, a party or coalition of parties must win at least 289 seats.

No party or coalition of parties has won that many seats in the first round of any parliamentary election in France.

That means you need coalition partners to secure a majority in the second round. Without that, the votes you get in the first round are simply wasted ballots.

Iran Mullahs Drastically Speed Up Their Nuclear Program, US Administration Sits Idly By by Majid Rafizadeh

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20722/iran-speed-nuclear-program

The United Nations’ International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) recently issued an unusually jarring warning, highlighting a development in Iran’s nuclear program. IAEA inspectors confirmed that, for the first time, Iran has commenced the process of feeding uranium gas into three cascades of advanced IR-4 and IR-6 centrifuges at its Natanz enrichment facility.

By waiving sanctions on Iran, the Biden administration has effectively provided financial support amounting up to an estimated $100 billion to the mullahs. Worse, the Biden administration has turned a blind eye to Tehran’s destabilizing and aggressive policies, both within the region and without.

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has explicitly articulated his vision for Israel’s destruction in his 416-page book, Palestine. This manifesto serves as a detailed guide to eliminating Israel, often referred to in Iran as “The Little Satan,” and vehemently condemns the United States, referred to as “The Great Satan.”

By acquiring nuclear weapons, the regime could also equip its proxies — Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis — with these weapons to use against Israel. Using its proxies as its “human shields” allows Iran’s regime to maintain plausible deniability, so it can continue hiding behind them while escalating the real threat to Israel, which is Iran itself.

The Biden administration needs urgently to take decisive action to curb Iran’s aggressive nuclear advancements. The US needs to stop its current practice of waiving sanctions on Iran and start reimposing — and enforcing — severe sanctions on the country’s oil and gas industry. The US also needs to cut off the financial flow to the regime by imposing secondary sanctions: any country that does business with Iran may not do business with the United States.

US failure to act will only rapidly lead to a nuclear-armed Iran, significantly upending global stability and providing a potential vacuum for America’s adversaries to fill.

The United Nations’ International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) recently issued an unusually jarring warning, highlighting a development in Iran’s nuclear program. IAEA inspectors confirmed that, for the first time, Iran has commenced the process of feeding uranium gas into three cascades of advanced IR-4 and IR-6 centrifuges at its Natanz enrichment facility. These cascades, which consist of multiple centrifuges working in unison, increase the efficiency of uranium enrichment by spinning the uranium gas at extremely high speeds, allowing Iran to enrich it at a much faster rate and significantly reducing the time required to produce nuclear weapons.

Europe: Nazis’ ‘Do Not Buy from Jews’ 2.0 by Robert Williams

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20713/europe-nazis-boycott-israel

Since October 7, when Iranian proxies Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad committed unspeakable atrocities against men, women, children and babies in Israel, large parts of the international community have been in a frenzy over the Jews’ puzzling inclination to defend themselves.

This is the same French government [which banned Israel from participating in Eurosatory 2024 defense industry trade fair] so obsessed with appearing inclusive and non-discriminatory that it recently supported a bill that outlaws discrimination based on hair texture, length, color or style.

Meanwhile, the French government did not think it necessary to ban the participation of China, presently indulging in two genocides – against Tibetans and against Uyghurs – from participating in Eurosatory. China’s representation at the trade fair counts around 61 defense companies.

The French government also did not ban… Turkey, which has been taken to the International Criminal Court for committing crimes against humanity against hundreds of thousands of opponents of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s ruthless regime…

When there are no Jews to blame, evidently, crimes against humanity, genocide and human rights abuses are perfectly acceptable.

Since October 7, more than 19,000 rockets have been launched into Israel, a country smaller than New Jersey, primarily by the terrorist groups ruling Gaza, as well as from another of Iran’s terrorist proxies, Hezbollah in Lebanon

Never mind that John Spencer, Chair of Urban Warfare Studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point, determined that Israel has consistently implemented more measures to prevent civilian casualties than any military in the history of warfare.

“The Middle East does not need more weapons, it needs more peace,” said Spanish Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Albares. The remark, oddly, did not appear to be addressed the entities that started the war: Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran and Qatar.

Iran, the Middle East’s warmonger par excellence, and — along with major funding from Qatar, which seems never to have met an Islamic terrorist group it did not finance or promote — was the originator of the current war in Gaza.

Iran’s terrorist proxies span the region — Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza; Hezbollah in Lebanon; the Houthis in Yemen, and various proxy militias in Syria and Iraq — well-funded because of the Biden administration’s lifting sanctions. Yet Albares has nothing but praise for Iran.

The submission to the Islamic regime by European leaders such as Albares, who knows full well that Iran is behind the war in Gaza, tells us more about them than about Israel.

In April, however, the EU imposed sanctions on Israeli “settlers.” Regrettably, to many Palestinians, all of Israel is “one big settlement” that needs to be uprooted, and everyone there, a “settler.”

Jihadists Brutalize Non-Muslim Women, Feminists in West Remain Silent by Uzay Bulut

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20710/jihadists-brutalize-non-muslim-women

Today, June 19, the United Nations will observe the annual International Day for the Elimination of Sexual Violence in Conflict. Yet, it took the UN five months to document and condemn Hamas’ sexual crimes on October 7.

These crimes are reminiscent of the crimes ISIS (Islamic State) committed against Christians and Yazidis during and after their violent takeover of large parts of Iraq and Syria in 2014.

Sexual assault as a military tactic has commonly been used by Islamic terrorists since the seventh century, worldwide.

More than 2,600 abducted Yazidi women and children are to this day still waiting to be rescued from the hands of ISIS terrorists.

Teenage girls abducted by Islamic State terrorists in Iraq and Syria were sold in slave markets “for as little as a pack of cigarettes,” the UN envoy on sexual violence, Zainab Bangura, said.

“Since October 7th, the media has suppressed your [Israelis’] story, even going so far as to claim it never happened while others justified it as warranted resistance to Israeli oppression. Someone please tell me where children bound and shot to death with their guts cut out constitutes a warranted resistance… We live in a time where intelligent people are being silenced so that stupid people are not offended…. The media is actively suppressing the events of October 7th to rewrite history according to their chosen narrative…. It all boils down to likes, views, and revenue for them.” — Steve Maman, founder of The Liberation of Christian and Yazidi Children of Iraq.

“[On October 7], humiliation, mutilation and murder took place during those rapes. Woman raped in front of their loved ones and then shot. Knives inserted into their private parts. Scalped heads. Nails inserted into woman’s private areas. Indescribable pain must have taken place before death…. Attacking innocent people and subjecting hostages to torture is not an act of freedom fighting…. The global response to victims of radical Islam has consistently been one of silence, allowing such atrocities to continue unchecked, perpetuating a cycle of violence.” — Steve Maman.

Regarding the Israeli women who were brutally raped by Hamas terrorists and their supporters, many of those women’s organizations have engaged in total denial, refusing to believe Israeli women and all the evidence in front of their eyes…. What their silence and denials have actually done is only to cover up and further the crimes of Hamas and other terrorist groups. In April 2024, the NGO CyberWell released a report on the widespread online denial of Hamas’s October 7 sexual violence…. The Women’s Alliance for Security Leadership, for instance, still has not issued a statement.

Many feminist and human-rights groups — such as Amnesty International and the National Organization for Women— have said little about the sexual crimes Gazans committed against Israelis. The United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (also known as UN-Women) waited until December 1, nearly two months after the October 7 massacre, to make a superficial statement of condemnation.

Among others, UN-Women released a statement on October 13 equating the Hamas brutalities with Israel’s self-defense. Likewise, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) neglected to explicitly condemn Hamas’s atrocities. And the international #MeToo movement completely failed to mention Hamas — or the Israeli victims.

When it comes to abused and raped Israeli women, those women’s rights and human rights organizations have chosen to be on the side of rapists and murderers and to enable jihadist terrorism.

NEW GROUP RAISES AWARENESS OF ISLAMIC TERROR IN AFRICA

http://(www.africanjewishalliance.org

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Many Americans are unaware that terror attacks, like the October 7 massacre of Israelis, are committed every few days in Africa against innocent Christians and moderate Muslims. In Nigeria, Sudan, and other African nations, Islamists routinely converge upon villages while burning, raping, murdering, abducting, and enslaving the innocent inhabitants.

Because they have been shockingly ignored and under-reported in the West, these ongoing atrocities in Africa have been called a “silent genocide.”

The African-Jewish Alliance was formed to bring awareness to the shared origin of these crimes against humanity: the Islamist supremacist ideology which motivates Hamas in Gaza, Boko Haram in Nigeria, the Janjaweed and its derivatives in Darfur, and many other actors throughout Africa. All operate in the same manner: raids, murder, torture, burning, rape, and abduction of innocents for ransom or use as slaves. The slaughter and kidnapping of Israeli Jews is but one arm of a global jihadist movement that extends to Africa and beyond.

On June 25 and 26, the African-Jewish Alliance will host a groundbreaking summit in which representatives from the African and Jewish communities will join U.S. officials and journalists in raising awareness of this silent genocide, as well to expose the ideological connections between the “free Palestine” movement in the U.S. and Islamic terrorism in Africa and Israel.

The ‘acceptable’ face of racism in Britain As elites wring their hands over a moribund far right, surging middle-class anti-Semitism gets a free pass. Neil Davenport

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/06/17/the-acceptable-face-of-racism-in-britain/

Former Tory PM David Cameron, aka Lord Cameron of Chipping Norton, has gone on the offensive against Nigel Farage and Reform UK.

In an interview with The Times last week, Cameron accused Farage of using ‘inflammatory language’ and promoting ‘divisive policies’. Citing the Reform leader’s claim that Tory leader Rishi Sunak ‘doesn’t understand our culture’ after he left the 80th anniversary D-Day commemorations early, Cameron claimed Farage was deploying ‘dog whistle’ politics designed to appeal, presumably, to Britain’s racist masses. Apparently, Reform-curious, working-class voters are only a Farage quip away from beating up British Asians. (Cameron launched this attack despite Farage making it abundantly clear at the time he made them that his comments had nothing to do with race.)

Cameron’s prejudices about Farage supporters are shared by many among the British political and media class. Times columnist Matthew Parris wrote disparagingly last week of Clacton, where Farage is campaigning to be an MP. Its residents, Parris said, are people who eat ‘bumper packs of crisps’ and drink lager in Wetherspoons (the horror!). These are the supposedly uneducated types who respond all-too-easily to Reform’s so-called dog whistles.

What’s odd is that aside from there being no evidence that Farage was making a racist statement, there is also no evidence that Britain’s working classes are gravitating towards racism or white nationalism. Quite the opposite. The National Front is long gone, and the British National Party is to all intents and purposes defunct, having seen its membership virtually disappear during the early 2010s. The explicitly anti-Islam English Defence League is also considered to be defunct, although founder Tommy Robinson can sometimes draw crowds to his rallies. Put simply, far-right, racist politics is simply not a meaningful force in Britain today.

A New Europe? Reflections on the EU election. Bruce Bawer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/a-new-europe/

This is perhaps nothing more than wishful thinking, but my sense is that in Europe, when it comes to Islam, things may just possibly be coming increasingly to a head. I suspect that the monstrous Hamas attacks of October 7 awakened the imaginations of millions of Europeans who, although on some level surely knowing better, had lulled themselves into passivity with the notion that those surly-looking Muslims living in their midst, some of whom occasionally spoke out loud about conquering Europe in the name of their prophet, couldn’t possibly mean what they said or be as dangerous as they looked. Surely, moreover, the far from peaceable pro-Hamas protests that have taken place every weekend in any number of major cities around Europe have impressed upon people who, until recently, had their heads firmly stuck in the sand, that over the last few decades they had imported into their countries huge numbers of people who not only loathed and looked down on them but who might very well be prepared, early on any given morning, to do to them more or less what Hamas did to innocent Israelis on October 7.

Which brings us to the recent elections for the European Parliament (EP). Now, the parliament itself, for all its air of self-importance, is a rather meaningless and impotent organ, a rubber-stamp legislature whose function within the European Union brings to mind the role of the Supreme Soviet back in the USSR. Traditionally, European citizens, recognizing its irrelevance, have tended not to bother voting in EP elections. Even this year, the voter turnout was nothing to write home about. Nonetheless, those people who did bother to cast their ballots produced a set of results that have caused an earthquake from one end of the continent to the other. The French President immediately called for new elections. The Belgian Prime Minister resigned, reportedly in tears.

In 2006, I published a book entitled While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West from Within. If I had written the book a couple of years later, I’d have omitted the word “radical” – and removed references within the text to “extreme Islam” and the like. Because in the meantime I had come to realize that Islam is Islam. So-called “radical Islam” isn’t some kind of aberration, some twisted deviation from the peaceful norm – it’s Islam itself, the Islam of the Koran, the Islam of the prophet. It’s what Islam looks like when it’s taken seriously and practiced by the book. In the nearly two decades since that book came out, I’ve been writing endlessly about the topic – and, along with fellow truth-tellers, being dismissed as a racist, a conspiracy theorist, an Islamophobe, and a subscriber to an apparently bizarre, far-out, cult-like set of ideas known as the “Eurabia theory.”

Far-right gains in Europe: Good for the Jews? By David Isaac

https://www.jns.org/far-right-gains-in-europe-good-for-the-jews/

Far-right parties made dramatic gains in the June 9 European parliamentary elections. Israel supporters celebrated, anticipating the exit of some of the worst purveyors of anti-Israel hatred. Even so, European Jewish Association (EJA) chairman Rabbi Menachem Margolin advises caution.

While acknowledging that he isn’t sorry to see “the biggest antisemites” exit Europe’s parliament and saying he understands the excitement of many about the right-wing gains, Margolin told JNS that “the rise of far-right parties is something that requires all of us to be really careful; to analyze very carefully the situation.”

While Europe’s right has expressed support for Israel, that doesn’t necessarily translate into support for European Jewish life. “Many of them and, of course, many of their supporters, hate Jews no less than they hate Muslims,” he said.

It’s “absolutely” possible there could arise a situation where a far-right party’s rise will be good for Israel but bad for the Jews of that country, he said.

While many far-right parties support Israel, almost all, with the notable exception of Hungary’s Fidesz Party headed by Viktor Orbán, oppose ritual slaughter and circumcision.

Clinging to its values is what sustained the Jewish people for 3,000 years, Margolin noted, but those values are not congruent with far-right European values.

EJA is still sifting out those political actors it can work with from those it cannot. “We need to analyze what are the policies of the different political parties,” said Margolin. “We could work with some of them, but it has to be in a very specific, very practical, very detailed way.”