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WORLD NEWS

CLAREMONT REVIEW OF BOOKS: HUNGARY & THE FUTURE OF EUROPE

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2019/05/crb-hungary-and-the-future-of-europe.php

No English-language newspaper reported on it at the time, nor has any cited it since, but the speech Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán made before an annual picnic for his party’s intellectual leaders in the late summer of 2015 is probably the most important by a Western statesman this century. As Orbán spoke in the village of Kötcse, by Lake Balaton, hundreds of thousands of migrants from across the Muslim world, most of them young men, were marching northwestwards out of Asia Minor, across the Balkan countries and into the heart of Europe.

Already, mobs of migrants had broken Hungarian police lines, trampled cropland, occupied town squares, shut down highways, stormed trains, and massed in front of Budapest’s Keleti train station. German chancellor Angela Merkel had invited those fleeing the Syrian civil war to seek refuge in Europe. They had been joined en route, in at least equal number, by migrants from Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. For Hungarians, this was playing with fire. They are taught in school to think of their Magyar ancestors as having ridden off the Asian steppes to put much of Europe to the torch (Attila is a popular boys’ name), and they themselves suffered centuries of subjugation under the Ottomans, who marched north on the same roads the Syrian refugees used in the internet age. But no one was supposed to bring up the past. Merkel and her defenders had raised the subject of human rights, which until then had been sufficient to stifle misgivings. In Kötcse, Orbán informed Merkel and the world that it no longer was.

Today’s Churchill – and Today’s Chamberlain Like his Hitler-era counterpart, Jacob Rees-Mogg has no grasp of the dire threat facing his nation. Bruce Bawer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273685/todays-churchill-%E2%80%93-and-todays-chamberlain-bruce-bawer

In the South Yorkshire town of Rotherham (pop. ca. 100,000), so-called Islamic “grooming gangs” were responsible for the repeated rape of about 1400 non-Muslim girls, mostly from the working classes, from the late 1980s on. Although local politicians, child-protection officials, police, and journalists were aware of the problem, they kept silent about it for decades, partly out of cowardice, partly out of political expediency, partly out of a misguided fear of inciting “Islamophobia,” and partly out of a classist disregard for the victims and their families. As a result, the perpetrators did not begin to be identified, arrested, and prosecuted until earlier in this decade.

There is nothing unique about Rotherham, of course: it just happens to be the place where the dam burst first. The list of British towns where similar gang activity has been uncovered is continues to grow longer, and the number of perpetrators and victims is increasing apace.

Meanwhile, on July 7, 2005, Muslim suicide bombers killed 52 people and wounded about 700 in London. On May 22, 2013, two Muslims slaughtered a British soldier, Lee Rigby, in Woolwich. On March 22, 2017, on Westminster Bridge, a Muslim behind the wheel of a car mowed down about four dozen pedestrians, four of whom were killed. On May 22, 2017, a Muslim suicide bomber took 22 lives at Manchester Arena. On June 3 of the same year, three Muslims with a van killed eight people on and near London bridge.

In addition, every so often during the past few years, some British newspaper has dared to publish a news story like the one that appeared in the Daily Mail on Saturday: according to a secret government report, more than 48 Islamic madrasas in Britain, all of them run by the Darul Uloom (“House of Knowledge”) network, are staffed by followers of the Deobandi movement, which produced the Taliban. The students, who are preparing to be imams, are thus “being taught that music and dancing comes from the devil and that women do not have the right to refuse sex to their husbands.”

New One-Child Documentary Highlights The Evil Of China’s Communist Party Ben Weingarten

https://thefederalist.com/2019/05/08/new-one-child-documentary-reveals-the-true-evil-of-chinas-communist-party/

The filmmakers show us totalitarianism in its rawest form, in its effort to control the most sacred of all bonds—that of the family.

Students of history right up to present-day Venezuela know that economic central planning inevitably results in poverty and misery. A harrowing new documentary on China’s one-child policy shows that this rule holds true for familial central planning as well—but in the case of parents and their children, the devastation extends far beyond the material to the moral and spiritual realm. “One Child Nation,” a Sundance-winning film coming to select theaters this summer, asks us to stare this man-caused disaster in the face before the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) whitewashes it away.

The film is the work of two Chinese filmmakers, Nanfu Wang and Jialing Zhang, who were born in the 1980s near the dawn of the policy. “One Child Nation” is a story of life and loss, brainwashing and corruption, and man’s capacity to engage in unimaginable cruelty at the point of a government gun. It is a story in which human traffickers represent some of the only protagonists, saving the lives of babies otherwise left for dead in marketplaces and on roadsides, lest their parents face the wrath of the authorities.

The putative rationale for the policy, according to news accounts featured in the documentary, is the belief among the ruling CCP that China could not sustain rapid population growth, or people would starve to death. With some exceptions for sparsely populated areas, the CCP threatened families having more than one child with expropriation, property destruction and, where necessary, forced sterilization, abortions, and even the outright murder of newborns.

Russian Collusion in Venezuela Why does Donald Trump believe Putin instead of his advisers?

https://www.wsj.com/articles/russian-collusion-in-venezuela-11557271219

‘I had a very good talk with President Putin — probably over an hour,” President Trump said on Friday. “And we talked about many things. Venezuela was one of the topics. And he is not looking at all to get involved in Venezuela, other than he’d like to see something positive happen for Venezuela. And I feel the same way.” Mr. Trump added: “I thought it was a very positive conversation I had with President Putin on Venezuela.”

It’s also the opposite of what the rest of his Administration and nearly every outside observer believes.

Since the mid-2000s Mr. Putin has made it a priority to strengthen economic, military and diplomatic ties with Venezuela. Moscow has sold more than $10 billion in weapons—assault rifles, jet fighters, tanks and missile systems—to Caracas. In 2008 Mr. Putin sent two Russian Tu-160 bombers on a training mission to Venezuela. The late dictator Hugo Chávez celebrated their arrival, declaring “Yankee hegemony is finished.”

In 2014 Russian defense minister Sergei Shoigu announced plans to put Russian military bases in Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba. Last December Venezuela and Russia again held joint training exercises.

Leftist Clown Justin Trudeau Follows in the Footsteps of Obama By David Solway

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/ronald-mcdonalds-at-the-helm-leftist-clown-justin-trudeau-follows-in-the-footsteps-of-obama/

Over the last year, I’ve met a growing number of fellow Canadians who have begun to yearn for a Donald to lead the country. They have belatedly recognized that they have a Ronald McDonald at the helm in Justin Trudeau, whose antics may delight children but who is quite incapable in any adult capacity.

Most recently, our dear leader in sensitive trade talks with the Japanese prime minister referred to the country as China. We recall that Trudeau wished the Canadian Olympic team in Seoul, South Korea, best of luck in Pyongyang, North Korea. We learn from an interview in The New York Times that Canada has no core identity—not how a sober statesman speaks of his country. This is the man who, as the beneficiary of a family trust fund, never had to run a household out of his own earnings, could say “The budget will balance itself,” while leading the country into astronomical debt. According to his way of thinking, the Boston Marathon bombers needed to be sympathetically understood, since they must have felt “completely excluded.” He sought a gender-balanced cabinet “because it’s 2015.” This is the zany who on a diplomatic visit to India can affect Bollywood and dress in a ceremonial costume to the bemusement of his hosts.

The EU Courts the Arab League by Judith Bergman

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14188/eu-courts-arab-league

[President of the European Council, Donald] Tusk referred to the value gap between the states of the Arab League and those of the European Union as “differences between us”. Such euphemisms however, do not explain the evident lack of even the pretense, on the part of the EU, to comply with its own stated human rights policies.

“We’ve been witnessing a spike in gross human rights violations across the Arab region, including in extrajudicial executions, enforced disappearances, arbitrary detentions, and torture and other ill-treatment. The region is in dire need of a credible and independent judicial mechanism to provide justice for human rights violations, the overwhelming majority of which presently go unaddressed”. — Said Benarbia, MENA Programme Director of the International Commission of Jurists.

In uncomfortably Orwellian fashion, the summit “Reaffirmed our resolve to combat cultural and religious intolerance, extremism, negative stereotyping, stigmatisation and discrimination leading to incitement to violence against persons based on religion or belief and condemn any advocacy of religious hatred against individuals that constitutes incitement, hostility or violence, including on the internet and social media”.

Instead, Mogherini’s words came across as references to the EU’s own continued efforts to monitor and police free speech and thus, gradually, to extinguish any kind of diversity of opinion within the EU.

The first summit between the European Union (EU) and the Arab League, formally known as the League of Arab States (LAS), took place on February 24-25. “Europeans and Arabs have a long and rich history of cultural, economic, commercial and political exchanges. This, together with the geographical proximity and interdependence, has contributed to institutionalise a strong relationship between the EU and the League of Arab States (LAS). Within this framework, the common aim is to develop closer cooperation to realise their shared aspirations to ensure peace, security and prosperity in both regions,” the website of the European Union announced.

The Increasingly Narrow, Parochial Prism of Journalism by Douglas Murray

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14176/narrow-parochial-journalism

What is strangest — and most defamatory — is to call people “far-right”, or insinuate that they are linked to the far-right because they are saddened by the fire at Notre Dame.

For those who know the journalism business… the degradation exemplified by Tharoor, Taylor and Noack is no surprise. It is the consequence of a shrinking industry with shrinking budgets which cannot afford foreign reporters and finds itself instead paying low-grade hacks to sit in America and write about people in Europe who are tweeting about a massacre in Sri Lanka.

Apart from demonstrating quite a remarkable freedom with facts and ignorance of libel laws, these “journalists” also do something else. They see the world, and the terrible actions of some terrible people in it, only through their own narrow and deeply parochial vision.

Last month, immediately after fire had almost destroyed the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, the Washington Post ran a piece with the headline, “The Notre Dame fire ignites the West’s far-right.” The author, Ishaan Tharoor, used his piece to expand on that untimely and inaccurate claim. He wrote:

“A strange — though not altogether surprising — thing happened in the shadow of Monday’s tragedy. As many around the world watched an iconic cathedral in Paris go up in flames, others immediately set about trying to spark new fires. On both sides of the Atlantic, denizens of the far right took to social media to grind their culture-warring axes, locating in the calamity a parable for the political moment — or, at least, their understanding of it.”

Tharoor then went on to list the various people he wanted to grab at to make this prefabricated argument.

Palestinian Rocket Terror Against Israel High time for Israel to deal a decisive blow. Joseph Klein

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273678/palestinian-rocket-terror-against-israel-joseph-klein

Palestinian terrorists fired at least 650 rockets into Israel this past weekend. Although most of the rockets either landed in open fields or were intercepted by Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system, the rocket attacks killed at least four Israelis and injured more than 100 others. Israel retaliated with airstrikes against more than 320 key targets that included an attack tunnel, an underground rocket factory, rocket launcher sites and other military facilities used by Hamas and Islamic Jihad, Gaza’s second-largest terror group and a proxy of Iran. Israel also went after specific militants, including, the New York Times reported, “a man who the Israeli military said had been responsible for large transfers of cash from Iran to Hamas…”

Moreover, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) appears to be preparing for a possible land war by deploying to the Gaza area on Sunday two reinforcement brigades – the Golani Infantry Brigade and the 7th Armored Brigade. Commenting on the deployment of the 7th Armored Brigade, IDF Lieutenant Colonel Jonathan Conricus said, “An armoured brigade is ready for various contingencies but earmarked for an offensive mission being by definition a mission that goes inside enemy terrain.” The Golani Brigade is considered one of the IDF’s most highly decorated infantry units and has fought in all of Israel’s wars.

Why isn’t the Iron Dome stopping these deadly rocket attacks? Yaakov Amidror tells the ‘Post’ that if a rocket is shot at a location less than a few kilometers away, “we don’t have enough time to intercept it.” By Maayan Jaffe-Hoffman

https://www.jpost.com/Arab-Israeli-Conflict/Why-isnt-the-Iron-Dome-stopping-these-deadly-rocket-attacks-588823

Yaakov Amidror tells the ‘Post’ that if a rocket is shot at a location less than a few kilometers away, “we don’t have enough time to intercept it.”

Israel has a critical gap in its protection system, said Yaakov Amidror, a former head of Military Intelligence’s Research Department and currently a senior fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Strategic Studies.

He told The Jerusalem Post that if a rocket is shot at a location less than a few kilometers away, “we don’t have enough time to intercept it.”

Amidror explained that there is nothing unique about these particular rockets – “they are within the capabilities of the Iron Dome.”

The challenge is that sometimes, such as in the case of the rocket that hit the vehicle near Kibbutz Yad Mordechai, “from the point of view of the system, this was an open area without people. We don’t intercept such rockets.”

Amidror said that the rockets currently being fired at Israel had either been smuggled into the Gaza Strip before the 2013 regime change in Egypt from the Muslim Brotherhood to General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, or are being produced on the Gaza side but using a manufacturing system that was built during that same time frame.

“Before the change of regime,” Amidror explained, “Egypt informally but practically allowed terrorist groups to bring in all the facilities needed to produce these rockets.”

He said that the rockets are paid for by Iran.

How can Islamic Jihad manage to launch so many rockets in one day?

According to Amidror, “It is very easy to launch rockets when you are launching them at close range and you don’t really need to be accurate.”

Iran’s ‘Terror Factory’ Targeting Christians by Uzay Bulut

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14164/iran-targeting-christians

“In Iran, any practice that contradicts Islam is regarded as a national security threat, punished severely by the court system.” — International Christian Concern, 2019.

“Revolutionary courts were created to guard against all threats to Islam. These courts have evolved into a well-oiled machine of oppres­sion that operates with impunity under state protection. The courts are closely intertwined with the Intelligence Ministry. Judges have at their disposal Revolutionary Guards (secret police) and a network of prisons used to torture and interrogate Christians.” — International Christian Concern.

“If you recant and repent, you’ll go to jail. And if you don’t, you’ll be killed.” — Dr. Mike Ansari from Heart4Iran, an Iranian Christian minister, reported by International Christian Concern.

“Christians may be looking at large fines, detention, lengthy prison sentences, or even execution under Islamic Sharia law. The sentences of Christian converts are left up to the interpretation of the judge and may be founded on anything — the judge’s mood that day, what he had for breakfast, his interpretation of Sharia law, or his level of hatred toward Christianity.” — International Christian Concern.

The daughter of a former pastor in Iran — Dabrina Bet-Tamraz — recently described the persecution and suffering to which her family is being subjected after being sentenced to lengthy prison terms for “crimes” related to Christianity.