RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14248/guilt-by-association

During the speeches one of the representatives from ‘Jewish Voice for Labour’ (a shell organisation set up to defend Jeremy Corbyn from accusations of anti-Semitism) claimed that Jews are ‘in the gutter’. Nothing was particularly noteworthy in all of this — except for one interesting fact, spotted by the British-based ‘Campaign Against Anti-Semitism’. This organization, having attended the march to monitor it, noticed a number of extremely interesting attendees. According to the ‘Campaign Against Anti-Semitism’, these included a man called Tony Martin, who is the leader of a neo-Nazi organisation called the National Front. This is not an organisation that is called ‘neo-Nazi’ or ‘fascist’ as some sort of rhetorical colouring required to win a debating point. It is described as that because that is what it is.

Perhaps we can cut out the middle man and just call all the members of the Parliamentary Labour party who attended the May 11 march ‘neo-Nazis’, ‘far-right’ and ‘fascist’. It is hard to see why not. By their own standards and tactics they eminently qualify for the description. Perhaps they will embrace the terms. Or perhaps they will begin to recognise that the stick they have been using to take out perfectly innocent opponents for political gain is in fact a boomerang that can just as easily come right back at them.

One of the favourite tactics of the far-left in the West today is to carry out hit-jobs by utilising the tool of ‘adjacency.’ This is the new only slightly fancy term for what has usually been known as ‘guilt by association’. Where there was once an agreement that people should be held responsible for their own views, now they can apparently be held responsible for the views of anyone beside whom they once stood.

So for instance, last month Jordan Peterson was denied a visiting fellowship at Cambridge University because he had once been photographed (at a post-speaking event meet-and-greet) with somebody wearing a T-shirt saying ‘I’m a proud Islamophobe’. Activists who wish to take decent people out of the parameters of legitimate discussion no longer merely smear them by trying to claim that their opponent is an extremist. Instead, they hint that even if their opponent might not be an extremist, here – for instance – is a photograph of him standing beside someone better able to be described as an extremist. Thus has the smear machine found a happy pastime and a fairly useful tool in its game of political warfare.

This tactic is rarely used by the right against many on the left. Or if it is, its legitimacy is denied. For instance when the British Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn, for instance, is endlessly pictured with Islamist extremists or a whole range of anti-Semites and Holocaust deniers, it is agreed that he is not ‘adjacent’ to these people, but merely to be pursuing his often strangely uncredited role as the international community’s informal peace-keeper-in-chief. His proximity to the worst people is never evidence of ‘adjacency’: merely of saintliness at best, and bad luck at worst.

This week Felix Klein a German official warned against wearing the Jewish kippah in some public places.

Oh Puleez! What’s new?

Early in 2015 there was a backlash against Jewish council leader Dr Josef Schuster after he warned German Jews to “look less Jewish” when walking through predominantly Moslem neighborhoods in Berlin.

Three years ago on January 20th 2016, the headline was:

“German Jews ‘no longer safe’ due to anti-Semitism and ‘deteriorating security’ Some Jews have talked about ‘packing their bags’ after rise in hate crime.”

(https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/german-jews-no-longer-safe-due-to-anti-semitism-and-deteriorating-security-a6823216.html)

Anti-Semitic manifestations in Germany can be traced to the Left’s obsessive and vicious criticism of Israel, National Socialist racism, and Muslim faith driven hatred of Jews.  It can’t be ignored or controlled.

“Auf Wiedersehen” a German song composed in 1950 by Eberhard Storch, has lyrics in English by John Parson and John Turner : ” This lovely day has flown away, The time has come to part”

German Jews have a choice. They can leave or stay and risk the chance that they will hear “Geh Raus Yude!” or اخرج! Alyahudi!

RSK

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/05/anti-semitism-europe-muslim-immigrants/

Downplaying the role of Muslim immigrants distorts the truth.

The latest news about the surge of anti-Semitism in Europe may not surprise people who worry about the rise of European populist parties. The populists opposing European unity and globalism are easily identified with the old Right in many countries. Many of their supporters — whether the right-wing AfD in Germany, the National Front in France led by Marine Le Pen, or the conservative ruling parties in such countries as Poland and Hungary — are also identified with traditional anti-Semitic attitudes.

So when a German federal official recently advised Jews to avoid wearing a kippah or religious head covering in public so they wouldn’t be targeted for violence, most foreign observers concluded that it was right-wing anti-Semites who have been attacking Jews, given that right-wingers have been making gains in elections, including in the recent European Parliament election.

The official, Felix Klein, Germany’s first “Commissioner for Jewish life in Germany and the Fight Against Anti-Semitism,” was criticized by many, including Israeli president Reuven Rivlin, for surrendering to the forces of hate. The outrage inspired the newspaper Der Bild to publish a cutout version of a kipah for readers to wear in solidarity with Jews.

Earlier this month, a New York Times Magazine story titled “The New German Anti-Semitism” reported that “police statistics attribute 89 percent of all anti-Semitic crimes to right-wing extremists.” But the same article went on to question that statistic. According to the Times, when German authorities can’t directly attribute a motive for an attack on a Jewish target (and they often cannot), they ascribe it to the Right. But a European Union survey of German Jews conducted last year showed that a plurality of Jews who say they experienced anti-Semitic harassment said the perpetrators were Muslim extremists. Yet, as the Times noted, the German government has been insisting that country’s anti-Semitism problem has not been imported from the Middle East.

https://www.israelhayom.com/2019/05/27/in-solidarity-with-jews-german-daily-prints-cutout-of-kippah-on-front-page/

Days after Germany’s anti-Semitism czar lamented that Jews would be ill-advised to wear kippot in public because of anti-Semitism in the country, one of the nation’s leading dailies printed a “do-it-yourself kippah” cutout on its front page on Monday, as an act of solidarity with the Jewish community.

Ahead of the publication, which occupied about a quarter of the front page, Editor-in-Chief Julian Reichelt wrote: “If only one person in our country cannot carry [a] kippa without endangering himself, the answer can only be that we all wear a kippah. The Kippa belongs to Germany!”

In an open letter printed next to the cutout, Reichelt called on Germans to embrace their Jewish compatriots. The online site of the paper also included a video of how to cut out the paper kippah.

The gesture came in reaction to anti-Semitism commissioner Felix Klein’s interview from Saturday, in which he warned that it was probably too risky to wear a kippah in public.

“My opinion has unfortunately changed compared with what it used to be on the matter,” Klein said. “I cannot recommend to Jews that they wear the skullcap at all times everywhere in Germany.”

He did not elaborate on when and where he thought doing so might be risky.

The remark has drawn mixed reactions in Germany and in Israel.

President Reuven Rivlin said on Sunday that he was “shocked” by the statement.

https://www.steynonline.com/9417/the-base-gets-itself-a-new-elite

In any normal UK election, it would be inconceivable for either of the two main parties – Conservative and Labour – to attract just 23 per cent of the vote. The fact that that is all they could muster between them is hilarious, and greatly to be enjoyed. As I put it on the radio last week, the departing Theresa May has led the Tories to their worst result in two hundred years. But, really, that’s praising with faint damns. I saw Daniel Hannan on the telly extending Mrs May’s impressive feat back through the pre-Reform Act era and accounting it the Tories’ worst result since 1678. Which is kind of hard to spin. Her forced resignation last Friday morning (by which point her party had made it clear they wouldn’t stick with her past lunch) ensures that she and that election result will be yoked together for all time. And jolly well deserved it is.

When the party of government falls from favor, the beneficiary is usually the principal opposition. Instead, Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party saw its vote fall almost as precipitously as the Tories’. Against the Conservatives’ single-digit nine per cent, Labour could muster only fourteen per cent, its own worst result in a century – in fact, since 1910. Which would also be hard to spin, had Theresa May not done Corbyn the favor of pulling off an unbeatable record.

As I’ve been saying for four years in a Trump context, it’s easier for the base to get itself a new elite than for the elite to get itself a new base. Three years ago the Brexit referendum revealed that Parliament and the people had become misaligned: If over half the people support a policy that no “mainstream” party supports, then in what sense are those parties mainstream? Mrs May should have enacted the people’s wishes, exited the EU on WTO terms, left it largely to civil servants to smooth the technical adjustments, and then invited Brussels to take its time and make proposals for such new arrangements as they might wish to entertain. By now, Brexit would be receding in the rear-view mirror, and normal politics – that’s to say, two-party Tory-Labour politics – would have resumed.

https://www.city-journal.org/narendra-modi-victory

As Western media focus on China’s rise, India remains a geopolitical enigma. While America’s trade wars with Beijing dominate headlines, news outlets relegate India to buried stories of intrigue—a destructive monsoon, a derailed train, a guru in saffron robes with sacred cows.

Why the difference in treatment? Fault may lie with the Jesuits who, beginning in the seventeenth century, evangelized the Chinese instead of the polytheistic Hindus. Modern China also figures prominently in our daily lives. Look at your shoes or your telephone—they probably come from China, not India. India’s economy focuses on its internal market and on exports to poor countries, rather than on trade with the West. Yet India’s population now equals China’s, with its rate of growth projected to surpass the Communist country. And the Indian middle class, with a standard of living comparable with its counterparts in Europe and America, hovers around 200 million people—equivalent in size to the Chinese middle class. India, nonetheless, remains poorer than China, in part because it was late to reform its economy.

In 1979, Chairman Deng Xiaoping renounced collectivism and opened his nation’s economy to market reforms, permitting the Chinese to accumulate personal wealth. It wasn’t until 2004 that India embraced the free market, with former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh renouncing the state socialism that dated to the country’s independence in 1949. Under the long reign of India’s Congress Party, which claimed the mantle of Mahatma Gandhi, the country’s economy grew 1 percent annually. Without irony, economists, called this the “Indian rate,” as if it were a cultural sentence.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/strange-claims-about-britains-european-elections/

After the Brexit referendum and the election of Donald Trump, an awful lot of bad articles and books poured forth. Among the worst were those that claimed we had entered a “post truth” era. Oxford Dictionaries — never missing an opportunity to look like the cheapest publicity hounds — declared “post truth” to be their Word of the Year for 2016.

In fact, as I have pointed out here before, it is more true to say that we have entered an era in which (to borrow a phrase from the Irish writer Kevin Myers) the truth becomes “whatever you’re having yourself.”

The aftermath of the European Elections in Britain has provided a fine example of this. Of course the fact that Britain had European Elections this year is in itself something to marvel at. Three years ago the British people voted to leave the European Union. But thanks to the ineptitude and malfeasance of nearly an entire political class there we were again last week, invited to the polls to vote on who we would like to represent us at a body the majority of the public voted three years ago to leave.

But what a response. By any honest analysis the night belonged to Nigel Farage’s newly formed Brexit party, which won 31.6 percent of the overall vote, winning 29 seats. The next-largest party was the Liberal Democrats, just over 20 percent of the vote and 16 seats, which is quite a lead for Farage. The runners-up of Labour (ten seats), the Greens (seven seats), and the Conservatives (four seats) struggled to make their performance look like a success. But the most striking thing about the reaction to the results was the effort to claim them as evidence that Britain wants to remain in the EU.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273873/eu-elections-usher-new-era-bruce-bawer

Not only was the turnout in last week’s European Parliament elections the highest in at least 20 years; the results themselves were nothing less than spectacular. In Italy, Matteo Salvini pronounced: “A new Europe is born.” Writing in De Volkskrant, Dutch journalist Marc Peeperkorn declared that the vote tallies marked the end of the “omnipotence” in Brussels of Christian Democrats and Social Democrats, a significant step forward for Green parties, and a “modest” advance for “Euroskeptic populists.”

“Modest” strikes me as a classic example of calculated mass-media understatement. In fact, to judge by the results, the main reason that millions of Europeans flocked to the polls was to tell Brussels that they’re sick of being ruled by Brussels. Almost everywhere on the continent, results for Euroskeptic parties were, at the very least, encouraging, and at most downright stunning: in France, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally came in first; ditto Salvini’s Northern League in Italy and the Freedom Party in Austria (whose leader, chancellor Sebastian Kurz, has just been ousted as a result of a scandal); in Germany, Alternative for Germany finished a strong fourth place; in Sweden, the Sweden Democrats almost tied for third with the Moderates; in the Netherlands, Thierry Baudet’s fledgling Forum for Democracy secured a promising fourth. (Geert Wilders’s Freedom Party came in eighth.)  

But the biggest news of all was in Britain, where the ruling Tories dropped to fifth place and Nigel Farage’s just-founded Brexit Party topped them all, securing 28 MEPs to the Liberal Democrats’ 15, Labour’s 10, the Greens’ 7, and the Conservatives’ 3. It was the first time in British history that so new a party had won such a sensational victory. Brexit will now have the largest delegation of any party in the European Parliament. It triumphed even in cities that had voted to remain in the EU in the 2016 referendum, suggesting that former Remainers, perhaps in reaction to Brussels’ arrogant response to Brexit, have changed their mind about the EU – and/or that Remainers, despite their views on EU membership, resent their Tory-led Parliament’s failure to carry out the electorate’s clearly stated will.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/05/understanding-the-results-of-the-european-parliamentary-elections/

The legacy parties continued to decline and the populist right advanced only so far. Now, the pro-EU left, which gained ground, may grow more assertive.

Sunday’s results in the European Parliament elections are like a clever modernist painting, apparently formal, abstract, and meaningless, which as you move back from it, looks increasingly like a busy city street with cars, taxis, buses, and people going quite clearly in their different directions. You can even guess where some of the drivers will end up. Similarly, if you step back and glance at the election returns with, as yet, not a great deal of exit-polling data on which to base deeper judgments, you will probably reach these preliminary conclusions:

1) The mainstream parties of the center-Left and center-Right (or so-called legacy parties) continue a decline that has now been going on, at different speeds in different countries, for several decades. Italy’s Christian Democrats fell apart in the 1990s; its post-Communist socialists more recently; Berlusconi’s once-dominant Forza Italia fell into single figures this time; and the socialists are still struggling, at 22 percent. In this election, Italy’s insurgent populist partners — the League and the Five Star Movement — got 51 percent of the total vote between them, and they’re not getting a divorce. It was a less happy story in Germany where the two main parties in the “Grand Coalition” — Angela Merkel’s CDU-CSU and the Social Democrats — both lost ground compared with their performance in 2014, scoring only 45 percent jointly when they would once have been in the high seventies. France’s traditional parties of government almost disappeared from the results, all scoring in single figures. And so on. The most dramatic collapse of the centrist parties was in Britain, where the governing Tories fell to below 10 percent. But that story will get fuller treatment elsewhere.