RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14236/palestinians-oppose-economic-prosperity

To advance his goal, Ashraf Jabari recently announced the establishment of a new party that calls for focusing on economic prosperity for Palestinians. The Reform and Development Party seeks to solve the economic problems of the Palestinians, particularly high unemployment, he said. “We have an army of university graduates who are unemployed. We’ve reached a situation where a young [Palestinian] man holding a Master’s degree in law has to work as a street vendor because he can’t find work.”

Instead of giving Jabari a chance to carry out his initiative, Palestinians have waged a massive smear campaign against him, with many denouncing him as a “traitor” and “collaborator” with Israel and Jews. Some Palestinians have even gone as far as calling for his arrest or execution.

The upcoming peace plan, according to various reports, talks about giving the Palestinians billions of dollars and raising money for them from wealthy Arab countries. Yet, as Jabari’s case makes clear, the Palestinians are less invested in gaining economic stability than they are in hating Israel.

For Palestinians, the financial aid is a cynical attempt to lure them away from their struggle against Israel — and no Palestinian leader has the stomach to face the threats that Jabari is currently confronting. So, far from any “deal of the century,” the Palestinian leaders long ago struck a dirty deal of their own: they put their stock in Israel-hatred rather than in their own people.

In most normal societies, a businessman who seeks to improve the living conditions of his people by boosting the economy and creating job opportunities for the unemployed — including a host of jobless university graduates — is treated with respect. The Palestinians, however, do not seem to belong to those societies.Ashraf Jabari is a 45-year-old businessman from the West Bank city of Hebron. A member of a large Palestinian clan in the city, Jabari believes in economic cooperation and peaceful coexistence with his Jewish neighbors, including settlers living in the West Bank.

https://bit.ly/2LYX0p4

“The Middle East and North Africa have a well-deserved reputation for being a region plagued by war and conflict. Every decade since the end of WW2 has seen at least one interstate conflict; it has also witnessed 25 types of intrastate war, including insurgencies, civil wars and protracted terrorism. In the same timeframe, 2.3 million citizens have died as a result of political violence – 40% of the global total of battle-related deaths, although the region accounts for 5% of the world’s population…. 25 of these [intrastate] conflicts have claimed 1.5 million victims – 64% of the region’s total war deaths…. ” (Florence Gaub, Deputy Director, European Union Institute for Security Studies, October, 2017).

Middle East inter and intra-Arab/Muslim conflicts – some of them 1,400 year old – have been largely intractable, defying Western conventional wisdom, which has been dominated by the well-meaning pursuit of peaceful-coexistence, conflict-resolution, democracy and improved standard of living.

According to Dr. Daniel Pipes and Prof. Gunnar Heinsohn, some 11 million Muslims have been killed in wars from 1948-2007, only 35,000 of them in Arab-Israel wars – 0.3%!

According to Dr. Daniel Pipes and Prof. Gunnar Heinsohn, some 11 million Muslims have been killed in wars from 1948-2007, only 35,000 of them in Arab-Israel wars – 0.3%!Middle East inter and intra-Arab/Muslim conflicts – which preceded the 1948 establishment of Israel – have exposed the oversimplification of conventional Western wisdom, which has approached the Arab-Israeli conflict as if it were “the Middle East conflict.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2019/06/03/french-socialism-has-failed/

‘Free’ government services in France are unsustainable and anything but progressive

One of Charles de Gaulle’s most notorious moments of public wit came when he was asked at a press conference whether “Europe” wasn’t the solution to France’s problems. After a long defense of his policies, he exclaimed: “Of course, people can jump up and down on their chairs like mountain goats and shout ‘Europe! Europe! Europe!’ but it means nothing and leads nowhere.” It seems that when it comes to health-care reform in the U.S., progressives often think it’s enough to jump up and down like mountain goats and shout “France! France! France!” But it’s not. I am proudly French, and I have seen the problems of socialism in my nation firsthand.

Let’s get the obvious out of the way first: Yes, the French health-care system is, at the moment, almost as amazing as they say. Taking my frighteningly sick daughter to Necker, the main children’s hospital in Paris, made me proud to be a French taxpayer. Not only was the building gleaming and everything in it high-tech, but the staff was first-class, efficient, and, above all, kind, a world away from bureaucratic cliché. When, on my way out, after my daughter had recovered, I asked whether I had to pay for anything, the staff looked at me as if I’d just flown in from Mars.

Nonetheless, the French system offers virtually no lessons applicable to the United States.

Progressives either dislike private insurance or want to ban it outright; the French system relies on private insurance. Health-care wonks left and right agree that the biggest problem of the U.S. system is that it is employer-based. French health care? Also employer-based.

Theresa May has confirmed she will announce a date for her departure next month – regardless of whether she has delivered Brexit or not.

The Prime Minister has agreed to meet with the executive of the 1922 committee, the powerful backbench committee of Tory MPs, at the beginning of June, when they will “agree a timetable for the election of a new leader”.

In a joint statement issued this afternoon, the committee and Mrs May announced that they will meet again in the week beginning 3 June, following the second reading of the Withdrawal Agreement Bill in the House of Commons.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2019/05/16/brexit-latest-news-theresa-may-set-showdown-meeting-senior-tories/

It comes after Mrs May was told last night that she would face a vote of no confidence unless she agreed to set out a clear timetable for her departure.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2019/05/the-justice-system-and-cardinal-pell/

While recently away in the UK I read the “best-selling” book The Secret Barrister (2018) authored by, well, a secret barrister. The barrister in question is apparently a junior barrister specialising in criminal law in England and Wales. I figure it’s a man (and will use ‘he’ where applicable) but the forward blurb disguises this by disconcertingly using the pronouns ‘they’ and ‘their’ for a singular person. Most annoying. Why not use the awkward ‘he or she’ rather than butcher the language? Just asking.

The book is a damning indictment of the British criminal justice system, at least as it applies in England and Wales. From amateur magistrates to sloppy gathering of evidence to missing evidence to poorly-funded legal aid and much, much more, the secret barrister provides an alarming picture of the law gone wrong and justice at grave risk. The Observer described the account of the justice sytem as “terrifying.”

My impression is that the situation simply can’t be as shambolic as described. Nevertheless, if you were falsely accused of a criminal offence (providing, perhaps, it is not child abuse) it might be best to be in Australia rather than in Britain; I hope anyway. On the other hand, the guilty might have a better chance of the incriminating evidence being mislaid in Britain. So, it evens out in an Alice in Wonderland kind of way.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14235/iran-hatred-america

It was Iran, not the US, that breached international law by carrying out the US Embassy takeover in Tehran…. It was also Iran, not the US, that immediately began using its proxies, such as Hezbollah, to commit terrorism and incite antagonism towards America.

Should the mullahs be appeased for killing thousands of Americans? For continually taking Americans as hostages? For being the leading executioner of children in the world? For ranking the first in the world per capita when it comes to executing people? For being the world’s top state sponsor of terrorism? For making every possible effort to damage US national security and scuttle US foreign policy objectives?

The Iranian government’s hatred towards the US often seems the most important reason for its existence. As long as the ruling mullahs remain in power, the Islamic Republic will continue its acts of terror and deep antagonism against Americans, their Sunni neighbors, the lands they try to control — such as Iraq, Syria, Yemen, parts of Gaza and Venezuela, Lebanon — and the West.

The argument that the US must take an apologetic stance towards the theocratic establishment of Iran is being repeatedly made without the evidence of any effectiveness to back it up.

Former President Barack Obama created this policy, and insisted that it would be successful. Even as Iran flaunted its disregard for the American government, as well as human life, President Obama would continually apologize to the Iranian leaders. He made it sound as if America was to blame for initiating the hatred that the Iranian government projects toward the United States.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273705/socialism-leaves-south-africa-dark-daniel-greenfield

Nearly 150 years after electricity came to South Africa, the country is in the dark. The blackouts can strike at any time and then lights, hot water and even major industries vanish into the darkness.

Storing perishable food in the fridge has become a gamble. The meat you buy today may be inedible tomorrow if the rolling blackout arrives and lasts long enough to destroy all the food you cooked.

With rolling blackouts that can last for as long as twelve hours, South Africans have grown used to eating by candlelight and heating water the old-fashioned way. Those who can afford it have been stocking up on generators. But the demand is so high that it can take a month to even obtain a generator.

It’s not just homes and small businesses. Factories and mines are struggling to maintain the country’s industrial base when power can vanish for the entire workday. Traffic lights run off the same power grid and when it goes into ‘load-shedding’ mode, the roads become a snarled maze of honking cars.

South Africa is out of power. The load-shedding blackouts are a last-ditch effort to avert a national blackout that will send the entire country spiraling into a deeper and more enduring darkness.