RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/hong-kongs-desperate-cry-11562264502

Protesters stormed Hong Kong’s Legislative Council building Monday, the 22nd anniversary of the city’s handover to China. The world was shocked, Beijing demanded prosecutions, and Hong Kong’s Chief Executive Carrie Lam condemned what she called “extreme use of violence.” But it’s important to consider why this happened.

I don’t condone violence, and I applaud the vast majority of protesters in Hong Kong, who in recent weeks have remained peaceful, sometimes in the face of police brutality. But instead of simply condemning those who smashed their way into LegCo, understand that it was an act of desperation after years of frustration that their voices are ignored.

Five years ago the peaceful Umbrella Movement inspired the world but changed little. The erosion of Hong Kong’s freedom, autonomy and rule of law has continued. Booksellers have been abducted and disappeared in mainland China. Pro-democracy candidates and lawmakers have been disqualified from office. Academic and press freedom have come under increasing pressure. Lawmakers have introduced a bill that would criminalize “insults” to China’s national anthem. Pro-democracy protesters have been sentenced to long prison terms. The final straw was the bill to authorize the extradition of criminal suspects to the mainland. The decision to suspend it indefinitely, while welcome, does nothing to reassure Hong Kong people, who have seen their rights stripped. They want it withdrawn permanently.

Recent weeks have seen all these frustrations boil to the surface, turning a movement against the extradition bill into a broad call for democratic reform. Hong Kong residents rightly feel they have no say in how they are governed. The chief executive is handpicked by Beijing and rubber-stamped by a 1,200-member electoral college. The legislature is packed with pro-Beijing lawmakers from so-called functional constituencies (professional and other special-interest groups), and the disqualification of some pro-democracy legislators and candidates has further undermined confidence that the body represents the people.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14362/germany-self-censorship

There appears to be a significant gap between what Germans say in public and what they think…. Fifty-seven percent of Germans say that it is getting on their nerves that they are “increasingly being told what to say and how to behave”.

“It makes a big difference… whether citizens feel that they are increasingly being watched and evaluated… Many citizens miss being respected in the sense that they want their concerns and positions to be taken seriously, [and] that important developments are openly discussed…” — From a survey on self-censorship in Germany, conducted by Institut für Demoskopie Allensbach.

This retreat [from respect for free speech], so far, culminated in 2018 with Germany’s censorship law, which requires social media platforms to delete or block any alleged online “criminal offenses”, such as defamation or incitement, within 24 hours of receipt of a user complaint. If the platforms fail to do so, the German government can fine them up to 50 million euros. People in Germany have been prosecuted for criticizing the government’s migration policies….

Dániel Tóth-Nagy, a candidate for the Liberal Democrats in the UK, was suspended from the party for comments he made, such as: “There is no such thing as Islamophobia,” and, in response to a tweet, “What about FGM? Honor Killings? Forced marriage? What do you think about the protest of women in Iran, Saudi-Arabia and other Islamic countries against the compulsory hijab? What about Sharia in Britain? LGBT rights and education denied by Muslims in Birmingham?”

A new survey on self-censorship in Germany has shown that Germans censor their own speech to an astounding degree. Asked whether it is “possible to express oneself freely in public” a mere 18% answered yes. By contrast, 59% of Germans said that in their circle of friends and acquaintances they express themselves freely.

“Nearly two-thirds of citizens are convinced that ‘today one has to be very careful on which topics one expresses oneself’, because there are many unwritten laws about what opinions are acceptable and admissible” according to the survey, conducted by Institut für Demoskopie Allensbach for the newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ).

“A man started running behind him saying ‘I’m going to kill you, I’m going to chop your head off,’” said Nizza Fluss, a councilor in the London Borough of Barnet.

By World Israel News Staff 

In east London, a knife-wielding man threatened to behead an Orthodox Jew as he walked down a street on Monday, says the Evening Standard, a London newspaper.

Police arrested a man on suspicion of “a racially aggravated public order offense after the incident” in Whitechapel, the newspaper reported.

“A man started running behind him saying, ‘I’m going to kill you, I’m going to chop your head off,’” said Nizza Fluss, a councilor in the London Borough of Barnet, the paper added.

The victim, in his 40s, reportedly was said to have been threatened and called a “f****** Jew” by a man while he made his way to work.

The man allegedly then pulled a knife and chased him down the street while shouting additional “anti-Semitic abuse,” according to the Evening Standard. 

Police said that a knife was recovered from the scene, the newspaper reports.

While rising anti-Semitism has been recorded in many countries, the conversation in the U.K. also involves the leading opposition party, Labour, and accusations of anti-Semitism on the part of party head Jeremy Corbyn.

Labour MP Catherine West has said it is a matter of “deep shame” that Jews can no longer support the party because of its anti-Semitism crisis, The Jewish Chronicle reported on Tuesday.

“It is very clear that Labour has to do more and it has to do it quickly,” said West, a Corbyn supporter, to the British Jewish news outlet.

https://greekcitytimes.com/2019/07/02/istanbuls-mayor-imamoglu-cyprus/

Turkey’s main opposition, the Republican People’s Party’s (CHP) mayoral candidate Ekrem Imamoglu won the do-over election in Constantinople, now known as Istanbul, on June 23, which will be his second mayoral position in the city.

The “Cyprus monument” he erected in Istanbul in 2017 represents his nationalistic stance on Cyprus, which takes pride in Turkish occupation of the island and disregards its Greek history and identity.

Imamoglu’s interest in Cyprus has a lot of history behind it. He moved to Turkish-occupied northern Cyprus at the age 18 in the late 1980s. He studied at university there for two years and played football for the team “Turkish Hearths Limassol” (Türk Ocağı Limassol – TOL). During his mayoral election campaign in May, Imamoglu went back to the occupied territories in Cyprus or the “Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus” (TRNC) and was also welcomed by its ‘President,’ Mustafa Akinci.

He also visited the memorial tomb of Rauf Denktas, the once head of the “Turkish Resistance Organization” (TMT) that is known to have committed many crimes in Cyprus and paved the way for Turkey’s invasion of the island in 1974. Denktas became the “founding president” of the “TRNC” that is recognized only by Turkey.

During his speech at Denktas’s memorial tomb, Imamoglu said he is honored to have personally known Denktas. He continued:

“When you get elected to any government office, you should make your first state visit the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. That is why I am here.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14477/real-emmanuel-macron

Charles de Gaulle refused to speak of the many French who had collaborated with the authorities of the German occupation. He refused to commemorate D-Day. He even went on to claim that the Normandy landings had “not been the beginning of the liberation of France,” but “the starting point of an American attempt to colonize France”.

President Emmanuel Macron went one step further, saying that France and Germany should create a European army to “protect themselves against Russia, China, and even the United States”.

France also supported the PLO at a time when it was openly a terrorist movement, unreservedly dedicated to destroying Israel and murdering Jews….. Macron continues the same policy as his predecessors. He never misses an opportunity to invite the current Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas to the Elysée Palace and he never forgets to kiss him.

President Donald Trump now knows Macron. Trump probably remembers that during Macron’s visit to Washington 14 months ago, Macron seemed friendly toward him; then, when he went to the Congress, spent his whole speech running down the essential decisions of the Trump administration.

June 6, 2019. Normandy, France. The remains of 9,387 American military dead are buried at the Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial; 9238 Latin crosses for Christians and 149 Stars of David for Jews are aligned on the bluff overlooking Omaha Beach, one of five sectors on the Normandy coast where 132,000 soldiers of the Western allies landed on June 6, 1944. US President Donald J. Trump delivers a speech praising heroism, duty, honor and freedom, and pays tribute to the young Americans who gave their lives; he also speaks of the other soldiers who fought in the Normandy landings: Canadians, British, French. He behaves as a great statesman.

Just before he spoke, French President Emmanuel Macron also paid tribute to those brave soldiers. He added some remarks — that immediately were seen as a way to lecture the American President:

“America is never as great as when it fights for the freedom of others. It is never as great as when it is faithful to the universal values defended by its founding fathers when two and a half centuries ago, France came to support its independence”.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2019/07/02/eu-leaders-pick-women-rule-brussels-first-time/

EU leaders have nominated two women to Brussels’ most important jobs for the first time, picking Ursula von der Leyen, a German defence minister who supports a United States of Europe and an EU army, to be the next president of the European Commission and Christine Lagarde to lead the European Central Bank. 

Mrs von der Leyen’s selection as replacement for the outgoing Jean-Claude Juncker is a victory for Angela Merkel, who will have succeeded in placing a German member of her centre-Right European People’s Party (EPP) at the top of the EU’s executive for the next five years from Nov 1. But Germany abstained from the decision because Mrs Merkel’s socialist coalition partners did not support the choice for commission president.

Emmanuel Macron was persuaded to swing behind Mrs von der Leyen in return for Mrs Lagarde, the French head of the International Monetary Fund, taking the presidency of the European Central Bank. 

Donald Tusk, the outgoing president of the European Council had said the allocation of the EU top jobs had to reflect gender diversity.  “After all, Europe is a woman,” said Mr Tusk in reference to Europa, who in Greek Mythology was abducted by Zeus in the shape of a bull.

http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/sharpe

“Islamic hatred for Jews and Christians alike dates from Mohammed, is expressed in many passages of the Koran and repeated daily in mosques in every corner of the world.”

Of the three monotheistic religions, Judaism may be considered the mother faith and the other two, Christianity and Islam, her daughters.

The first daughter, Christianity, under the influence of the early church fathers, rejected the mother and distanced herself from Judaism, even to the extent of changing the Sabbath from the seventh day, Saturday, to Sunday and renaming it the Lord’s Day. Seventh-Day Adventists still retain Saturday as the Sabbath.

The youngest daughter, Islam, under Muhammad, turned on both the Jewish and Christian tribes of Arabia, who declined to accept Muhammad claim that he ushered in God’s final revelation.

After Rome embraced Christianity under Constantine, the Church fathers increasingly used temporal powers to discriminate against the Jews and proscribe the practice of their faith. For Jews this tragically led to the horrors of the Crusades, the Catholic inquisition, forced conversions, pogroms, and ultimately, the Holocaust.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2019-7-1-finally-the-us-aka-trump-has-ca

Everybody knows what the G20 is about. Everybody, that is, except high-ranking members of the Democratic Party, the “establishment” branch of the Republican Party, the mainstream press, and the U.S. State Department career bureaucracy. Those people somehow think that what the G20 is about is reasonable people trying to work together in good faith to solve the world’s problems. Really! (Could anybody be that dumb? Yes. In fact, the “smarter” they appear to be from their credentials, the dumber they prove to be when it comes to understanding world affairs.)

And by the way, I don’t mean particularly to single out the G20, other than by the fact that they were just holding their annual meeting last week in Japan. Essentially all major international organizations, from the UN on down, are about the exact same thing.

And here’s the thing that all those organizations are about: They are about trying to disadvantage the United States in international competition, and to hit up the United States for big money to be redistributed by the international bureaucrats. But then, I think you already knew that.

So there was President Trump over at the G20 meeting in Japan last week, and they present him with a draft of a so-called “Joint Statement” that everybody is supposed to sign. A lot of it is the usual anodyne diplomatic bafflegab. But then there is the section headed “Climate Change” (starting at paragraph 35). “Climate” is the issue on which the international bureaucrats have come to believe that self-respecting Americans can be made to feel so guilty that they will give you anything you want, and pay any number you might name. So here are a few of the things that they have thrown in under the heading of “Climate”:

https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/sweden-antisemitism-conference/

Sweden’s Social Democrat PM Stefan Löfven has announced that his country will host an international antisemitism conference to commemorate the Holocaust. This gathering of heads of state and governments is planned for October 27-28, 2020, and is to be held in Sweden’s third-largest city, Malmö.

This is a perplexing announcement. One would expect the initiative for such a conference to come from a country that has made serious efforts to fight antisemitism. Sweden has a long history of unanswered antisemitic incidents. The Board of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) in Sweden voted in 2016 to accept the definition of antisemitism – yet the country does not accept the definition domestically (while the UK, Germany, Austria, Israel, and a number of other countries do). Extreme manifestations of antisemitism, unequaled elsewhere, have taken place in Sweden. The Jewish community of the Swedish town of Umea had to disband entirely because it was threatened by neo-Nazis and harassed by radical Muslims.

In May of this year, the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention (BRA) released a report on antisemitic hate crimes. The report notes that Jew-hatred in Sweden stems from the left wing, the right wing, and the Muslim population. Antisemitism is openly expressed, and “there are few places where people with a Jewish background feel safe.”