RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://standpointmag.co.uk/february-2019-features-giles-udy-jeremy-corbyn-britain-road-to-socialism

When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 it seemed that communism, as a force in politics, was finally dead. The ideas that had inspired radicals around the world had lost their shine. As Marxism seemed discredited, market economies prospered. Only an older generation of greying revolutionaries remained to tend the faltering flame of world revolution. While they continued to squabble over minutiae of revolutionary history, the world moved on. By the turn of the millennium British students, once the vanguard of radicalism, were decried for their political apathy. The 2001 9/11 terrorist attacks ended that.

Fear took over from complacency. As the 2003 Iraq war loomed, the fractious British Left, in a rare moment of unity, formed the Stop the War Coalition and brought a million people out on the streets. Few of the unwitting participants knew that the march’s organisers’ ultimate goal was the overthrow of parliamentary democracy; none could have guessed that, 15 years later, the movement’s first two leaders, the British Communist Party member Andrew Murray and left-wing activist Jeremy Corbyn, would be within reach of forming the first communist government in British history, Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party, Murray appointed as his “Special Adviser”.

The crash of 2007 shook Western confidence still further. Left-wing commentators such as Guardian journalist Seumas Milne, an old communist comrade of Murray’s, openly voiced nostalgia for the “huge social benefits” enjoyed under Soviet communism in the USSR and Eastern Bloc. Milne is now Corbyn’s Director of Strategy and Communications.In 1920 Lenin urged British communists to enter the Labour Party to subvert it from within. In 1936, Trotsky told his followers to do the same, but successive generations of Labour leaders resisted this “entryism”, most famously in Neil Kinnock’s 1980s campaign against the Trotskyite group Militant. Two young members of a group which tried to thwart Kinnock’s campaign were Corbyn and Jon Lansman, later the founder of Momentum. That failure, reinforced by Tony Blair’s New Labour reforms, convinced many leftists that the only option left was bring the government down by extra-parliamentary action. This was the context when John McDonnell, now Corbyn’s Shadow Chancellor, made his call for “insurrection”, a general strike and street protests in 2013.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/a-young-woman-from-libya/

I’ve done a podcast, a Q&A, with Asma Khalifa: here. She is in Mexico City, participating in a meeting of the Oslo Freedom Forum. Asma is an extraordinary person. She is a young woman from Libya, a Berber. She is a democracy leader and human-rights activist.

Last year, I heard her tell a very moving story. I asked her to tell it again, on this podcast. During the Libyan Civil War, she sided with the rebels against the dictator Muammar Gaddafi. After a close friend of hers was killed — executed, along with many others — she decided to join up: as a field nurse. She witnessed many terrible things.

She did not like what was happening to her. She was engulfed in hatred. “That’s not me,” she said. So she asked a doctor to assign her to a particular ward of a military hospital: a ward where enemy soldiers — Gaddafi’s forces — were kept. Almost no one went there.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/sweeney-agonistes-tommy-robinson-turns-the-tables-on-the-bbc/

Tommy Robinson’s courageous truth-telling about Islam has not only resulted in years of harassment by the British authorities, an endless cascade of death threats, and, last year, a thoroughly unjust prison term that might have spelled his demise, but also, of course, a pattern of coverage by the mainstream media that has been almost uniformly deceitful and poisonous. When he heard that the BBC series Panorama, which is the UK’s answer to 60 Minutes, was planning a story on him with the working title “Tommy Takedown,” and that its producers were collaborating with the vile group Hope Not Hate (HNH), which is Britain’s version of the Southern Poverty Law Center — i.e., a shady far-left smear machine masquerading as a noble monitor of bigots, fascists, and hate groups — he decided to go on the offensive.

The key to Tommy’s plan was Lucy Brown, a former employee whose job with him had ended in a shouting match. After their split, she was offered £5,000 by HNH to badmouth Tommy for a cover story, and had to contact a lawyer to prevent a major daily from falsely claiming she’d accused Tommy of sexual allegations. When Panorama reporter John Sweeney asked her to talk to him for what he promised would be a “definitive documentary” uncovering Tommy in all his “horribleness,” Brown got in touch with Tommy and agreed to wear a hidden camera when she met with Sweeney to discuss his plans.

http://thefederalist.com/2019/02/26/doctors-insist-canadian-14-year-old-needs-no-parent-consent-trans-hormone-injections/

Clark* first found out that his 12-year-old daughter Maxine was being treated as a boy by her school when he saw her new name in her class’s grade seven yearbook. “Quinn” was the new name her counselor had helped her pick out, and Maxine’s school district in Delta, British Columbia, Canada, had decided that “Quinn” should be treated, for all intents and purposes, as a boy.

The district apparently felt justified in leaving Maxine’s father completely out of the loop. Maxine’s school district was operating by the BC Ministry of Education’s Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity (SOGI) Policy, according to which Clark had no right to know his daughter’s “preferred sex, gender, or name” at school.

Presented with a fait accompli from the school district and a daughter who was becoming increasingly passionate about her transgender identity, Clark found himself in a difficult situation. He did not want to reject his daughter’s newfound passion outright but, at the same time, he was cautious about her moving into transgenderism too quickly.

Ever since her parents separated in 2013, Maxine had struggled emotionally to cope, experiencing behavioral problems and depression which Clark felt left her “very vulnerable” and searching for a place to belong. During the same school year that she took on a transgender identity, Maxine had apparently also gone through a lesbian phase. Clark couldn’t help but wonder if her new transgender identity might likewise come and go.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/holding-its-tongue-on-democracy-eu-presses-arab-leaders-to-stem-migration-11551121873?cx_testId=16&cx_testVariant=cx&cx_artPos=4&cx_tag=contextual&cx_navSource=newsReel#cxrecs_s

SHARM EL SHEIKH, Egypt—European Union officials used a first-of-its-kind summit here this week to press Arab leaders to create stability and stem migration but played down calls for democracy, reflecting a desire for calm after years of border tumult.

The two-day meeting between the EU and the Arab League ended Monday without a formal agreement on migration or security cooperation. The assembled leaders issued a declaration that calls for unspecified efforts to address issues ranging from climate change to wars in Yemen, Libya and Syria.

But the gathering in this Red Sea resort town reflected European leaders’ desire to seek new partners to halt to migration across the Mediterranean Sea following years of war and an influx of refugees after the Arab Spring revolts of 2011.

EU leaders such as European Council President Donald Tusk gathered with autocrats the bloc once shunned, including Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Al Sisi, and asked for help. EU leaders have in the past loudly called out leaders like Mr. Sisi for brutal crackdowns on political opponents, including torture and killings of civilians.

But Mr. Sisi and other leaders here have reasserted their hold on power after the tumult of 2011 uprisings.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-saudis-hedge-their-american-bets-11551138149

It is, in its way, the most shocking spectacle in world politics since the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union: Even as Beijing is stepping up its persecution of Muslim Uighurs, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia cozied up to Chinese President Xi Jinping on his trip to China last week.

More than a million Uighur Muslims are said to be held in Chinese concentration and “re-education” camps, where beatings and mass rapes are reliably reported to be perpetrated against detainees. Yet the crown prince of the leading Sunni Islamic state signed almost $30 billion in trade agreements with China, hailed the long problem-free relationship between the two countries, pledged support for the Belt and Road initiative, and announced that Saudi Arabia respected China’s need to protect its domestic security in its own way.

God may be great, but Xi Jinping, apparently, is greater. Or at least more useful.

Saudi Arabia is not the only Muslim power kowtowing to China. Pakistan has also fallen strangely silent when it comes to the concentration camps now dotting the landscape in Xinjiang. A country that regularly whips itself into fits of murderous rage over the supposed plight of Muslims in Indian-controlled Kashmir remains rigorously calm about the massive religious repression by its more powerful neighbor.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13786/ireland-raw-bigotry

The Irish legislation, banning the import of goods from Israeli communities located beyond the 1949 armistice lines, not only coincides ironically with the U.S. Senate passage of a motion to prevent anti-Israel boycotts, but also constitutes a breach of European trade law.

These Irish “humanitarians” also do not seem to care about the suffering of the inhabitants of the Palestinian Authority and the Gaza Strip, who continue to suffer from large-scale abuse and persecution at the hands of their own despotic leaders.

Meanwhile, other nations actually guilty of serious human rights abuses, war crimes and ethnic cleansing — such as Syria, Iran, China, North Korea, Turkey and Russia, to name a few — are spared Irish indignation and legislation.

Ireland’s legislation appears to be less about actually helping Palestinians to have better lives than an effort to eradicate Israel.

Parliamentarians in the Republic of Ireland are displaying an unprecedented level of hostility towards Israel, unparalleled by that of any other member state of the European Union — inviting the question about Ireland’s long, distasteful history of anti-Semitism, which clearly predates the frequently used pretext of hating the State of Israel.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13795/trump-putin-ukraine-venezuela

If Nicolás Maduro is removed from office in Venezuela, Putin might act as he did when a popular revolution overthrew Yanukovych in Ukraine, in 2014: with a surprise invasion of the Crimea. This time, Putin may launch a surprise naval and land attack on Mariupol, set up a land bridge from Crimea to Russia and continue intensifying his attempt to strangle Ukraine’s economy in order to subjugate Ukraine to Russia. Trump needs to take immediate preemptive measures to prevent Putin from doing that by increasing naval aid to Kiev.

So far, Putin seems to have been counting on a lack of American resolve regarding Venezuela, and has just succeeded in getting China to support him.

If America abdicates its role in Venezuela, you can bet Russia will eventually build intelligence facilities there. Russia has also been providing Nicaragua with “sophisticated weaponry,” including “T-72 tanks, war boats, warplanes, and powerful bombs.”

Above all, President Trump must continue as he is doing now, to work towards liberating the Venezuelan people. Any hesitation will be counterproductive.

America is facing two dangerous crises. In Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, the illegitimate winner of a reportedly sham election, has, with his socialist policies, created a catastrophic situation. The struggle in Venezuela between his challenger, Juan Guaidó, and him is reaching a crescendo. Millions of Venezuelans, suffering under his radical regime, have been flooding neighboring Brazil and Colombia. Yet, with the help of Russian President Vladimir Putin, Maduro is clinging to power, as Fidel Castro did in the early 1960s with the aid of Nikita Khrushchev.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/sanctions-were-supposed-to-cripple-north-koreas-economy-theyre-not-working-11551116032

The U.S. has been leading a world-wide campaign to pressure North Korea into giving up its nuclear arsenal through an increasingly stringent sanctions regime. Available evidence suggests it’s not working.

Economic indicators show day-to-day commerce in the country has remained resilient. And many residents, having lived through much harsher conditions in the 1990s, appear to be adapting as market forces take deeper root, according to three dozen defectors, humanitarian workers, government officials and other visitors interviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

The lack of impact is making things tricky for Donald Trump as he heads to this week’s summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Hanoi. The U.S. wants Pyongyang to freeze its nuclear weapons and missile programs while the two sides continue far-reaching talks on denuclearization.

Tougher sanctions, including new restrictions on foreign trade approved in 2016 and 2017, have caused North Korea some pain, depriving the regime and elites of revenue from commerce with other countries, including China.

In other ways, North Korea’s economy appears to be holding up well. Rice prices have remained stable, and gasoline prices, which rose after sanctions were tightened, have fallen significantly from highs in the fall of 2017.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/in-france-popular-support-for-yellow-vests-cools-off-11551124011

The French public has begun to turn against the yellow-vest movement, according to a new poll, in a fresh sign of relief for President Emmanuel Macron.

The yellow-vest demonstrations began in November to protest proposed increases in fuel taxes before quickly becoming a rallying cry against Mr. Macron and his pro-business agenda. The yellow vests, or “gilets jaunes,” named after the reflective safety vests worn by participants, initially won the support of more than three quarters of the population, who backed some of the protesters’ many demands.

But on Monday Odoxa, an independent French polling agency, published a poll in which 55% of the 1,004 people surveyed said they wanted the protests to stop. That is the first time since the start of the movement that a clear majority has opposed the protesters. The poll was conducted online on Feb. 20 and Feb. 21.

In an Oxoda poll last month, 49% of respondents reported wanting demonstrations to end.