RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-commonwealth-option/

With the Brexit issue coming to a head next week when Parliament formally considers PM Theresa May’s Draft Withdrawal Agreement, a number of leading British conservatives and allies — including former NR director Robert Agostinelli and acclaimed historian Andrew Roberts — penned a letter, a version of which was published by the Telegraph, calling for MPs to vote against the agreement (“put it out of its misery”) and instead support a “Super Canada” option. The complete and original version of the letter follows:

The Prime Minister’s proposed Brexit deal has been discussed in detail, and to describe it would replicate the excellent work of many journalists. However, we feel that it has broad and historical implications for the UK’s future relationship with the World, especially our traditional allies in the Commonwealth (and Anglosphere)

Britain is facing a stark choice between two paths.

One path leads to stasis, where the expressed will of the people is delayed indefinitely, and the nation lacks the tools of statecraft necessary to forge a renewed partnership with Europe outside the political structures of the European Union, as well as to pursue new partnerships with our traditional and cultural allies and the world beyond.

Another path leads to a mutually respectful accord with Europe, respect for the democratic process as expressed on June 23, 2016, as well as the opportunity to help build the foundation of a new globalisation – one more resilient, equitable and responsive than its predecessor.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/12/justin_trudeaus_canada_embraces_a_world_without_borders.html

The Liberal government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is set to sign the UN Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration at an intergovernmental meeting in Marrakech, Morocco, on December 10, 2018.

Few Canadians are aware of what this UN Global Compact represents; even fewer have been consulted, and without any mandate except for a parliamentary majority, Justin Trudeau is committed in signing Canada into an agreement with far-reaching consequences — not only for Canadians. Canada agreeing to abide by the agreement will also have consequences for Americans, as among migrants entering Canada might well be those intending to sneak into the United States across the world’s longest open border.

The UN Global Compact spells out, in 34 pages of fine print, requirements for member-states to adopt as policy accommodating unfettered mass migration from the global South to the North.

Human migration is as old as human history. But in modern times, especially in the period following the end of the Second World War, resulting in massive dislocation of the European population, settlement of migrants was arranged and conducted by national governments with support of their citizens. The Global Compact, instead, is a UN top-down arrangement to deal with the migration problem turned into the most disruptive global crisis in recent years. This time, the crisis is the result of the massive failure of UN-engineered policies of socio-economic development of post-colonial societies in Africa, Asia, and Central and South America.

What we have witnessed since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the end of the Cold War in 1992, is a spike in wars, genocide, failed states, and terrorism. These have cumulatively resulted in mass migration as an escape from the collective failure of people in those countries to build and administer an orderly society, despite trillions of aid dollars provided by countries of the North, directly or through the UN agencies.

And despite this record of the failure of UN-driven development policies, the UN remains insistent on demanding more of the same in its 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The Global Compact is a critical part of this agenda, based on the notion that “Migration contributes to positive development outcomes.”

There is little or no evidence of migration from the global South providing for positive development in the developing countries of that global South. Instead, the Global Compact turns migration into a human rights issue and confers “rights” on migrants that are the same as those of the citizens of the host countries, “rights” those governments are obliged to “respect, protect and fulfil.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/isis-finds-a-niche-in-northern-iraq-1544053966

Makhmur District, Iraq

The Qara Chokh mountain range in northern Iraq is remote, parched and inhospitable. That’s what makes it attractive to the core of Islamic State, which has survived the four-year U.S.-led war against its caliphate. ISIS is now regrouping near here and in similar hard-to-reach corners of Iraq and Syria. The terror group isn’t finished.

“It’s more than 15 years that there is al Qaeda here,” says Lt. Col. Surood Barzanji, an officer of the Kurdish Peshmerga’s 14th Brigade, currently tasked by the Kurdish Regional Government with maintaining security in the mountain area. “They changed their name to Daesh”—the Arabic acronym for ISIS—“and now there is another one coming. A new one.” We look across the Hussein al-Ghazi Pass toward an imposing warren of caves where, he says, ISIS fighters are living. Two miles away, the first checkpoints of the Iraqi Security Forces are visible. In the no man’s land between Kurdish and Iraqi forces, Islamic State finds its niche.

Later, in a Peshmerga briefing room on the mountain, Col. Barzanji traces the route ISIS men use to reach their haven in the caves. It begins on the western side of the Tigris River, south of Mosul around the town of Hamam Alil. This region of Iraq is known to local residents, Peshmerga and Arab fighters alike as “Kandahar”—like the famously violent province of Afghanistan—because of the strength of support there for the Sunni jihadist cause.

“They cross the Tigris and they head southeast,” says Col. Barzanji, “passing through the villages here” via the Great Zab river and finally to the sanctuary of the Qara Chokh caves. “The villages along the way were Daesh supporters. One place, Tel al-Reem, there’s nine emirs”—commanders—“from Daesh that came from there. So the fighters pass through those areas and the villagers leave food for them. They come through on foot or on motorcycles.”

Once in the caves on the steep mountain, the fighters are relatively safe. Finding water is their main challenge. Iraqi forces have poisoned the one natural well, limiting the number of men able to live there.

Efforts to flush the jihadists out continue. Coalition aircraft strafed the mountain a day before our arrival, firing 12 rockets. Four ISIS members were killed and a pickup truck destroyed in another coalition airstrike here on Nov. 14. On Oct. 31, according to the coalition media office, some 20 ISIS fighters were killed on the mountain following airstrikes and a ground assault by Iraqi special-operations forces. But the jihadists remain, moving back and forth from the caves through the friendly villages and the countryside. In early November they set off an improvised explosive device near the mountain, killing four Iraqi federal policemen.

Qara Chokh is only one district in what some observers call ISIS’ “mountain state.” A recent report from the Institute for the Study of War found ISIS maintains similar networks of support and de facto control in the Hamrin Mountains in Diyala Province, the Hawija District, eastern Salah al-Din Province, Daquq and south of Mosul city—all in Iraq’s central Sunni heartland.

The report, entitled “ISIS’ Second Resurgence,” puts the number of fighters available to Islamic State in Iraq and Syria at 30,000. It also estimates that ISIS has smuggled as much as $400 million out of Iraq and invested it across the region. The terror group’s traditional revenue generators, including kidnapping, extortion and drug smuggling, still continue within Syria and Iraq. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/sweden-liberalism-jews/

For anyone curious to see just how ugly ultraliberalism can get, Sweden is the ideal case study. The deep presence of anti-Semitism in Sweden reveals that the country’s image as a near perfect liberal democracy is false. So serious is the problem that the country is in dire need of a national anti-Semitism commissioner who can point out the threats coming from neo-Nazis and Muslims, the flaws of the police and the justice system, and other failures of the authorities to deal with anti-Semitism. But Sweden’s purported love of free speech is unlikely to extend so far as to give a mouthpiece to such a person.

In this century, only one Jewish community in all of western Europe has decided to dissolve itself because of nonstop threats from neo-Nazis: the community in the town of Umea, in northeastern Sweden. Jews in Sweden account for less than 0.2% of the population, but they are the targets of profound hatred. This does not comport very well with Sweden’s image as a near-perfect liberal democracy.

Major anti-Semitic threats to Swedish Jews have come out of parts of the Muslim community. In 2017, a movie was shown on Bavarian television about the visit to Malmö, Sweden’s third-largest city, by the German Jewish author Henryk Broder and the Egyptian writer Hamad Abdel Samad. They met several local Jews, including the town’s American rabbi. He told them the shrinking community had installed bullet-proof windows at the synagogue, but even that precaution didn’t keep them safe. A bomb went off in front of the synagogue and another was thrown into the chapel of the Jewish cemetery, which was totally destroyed. The rabbi himself is regularly harassed when walking on the street. Objects thrown at him have included an apple, a lighter, a glass, and a bottle. In an indication of the lack of police control, when Broder and Samad came to Malmö, they were told by police not to open the windows of their car when they were driving through a Muslim neighborhood.

The number of complaints about hate crimes in Malmö reached a record in 2010 and 2011. It did not lead to any convictions.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13381/sweden-parliamentary-crisis

This morning, December 5, we will get more information from speaker Norlén when a third vote on who is going to be prime minister will be held. Once again, Löfven (S) will most likely be running for the position. If C and L betray their Alliance-coalition and supports Löfven, he wins; if negotiations fail, he loses for the second time.

The main reason Sweden will probably not have a re-election is that if we did, the party that has the most to gain from another election is SD – which all the other parties are fervently trying to stop.

Also, if there were a re-election, both the Liberal party and the Green party have a high likelihood of failing to get enough votes even to get into parliament.

In fact, out of the 349 seats in Swedish parliament, it would take only 21 more seats to go to SD, M or KD for these three parties to get a majority in parliament.

Sweden has always been extremely stable when it comes to our governments and the time it takes to form them.

After the election in 2014 (we have elections every four years) the government took office 19 days later. Until this year, in fact, it has never taken more than 25 days after an election to form a government; the average time is just six days.

Today, however, 86 days have passed since Sweden’s last election without a government having formed – a record by a wide margin.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/macrons-climate-plan-b-1543965655

‘There is no Plan B because there is no Planet B,” Emmanuel Macron lectured Donald Trump—in English—when the American President withdrew from the Paris climate agreement last year. Well, apparently there is a Plan B after all. Mr. Macron on Tuesday stopped his fuel-tax increase after concluding that marginal carbon reductions aren’t worth kneecapping an economy and sacrificing his political career. Mr. Trump could have warned him.

The French President views stopping climate change as a grand legacy project, and he had hoped to use higher fuel taxes to discourage driving for the sake of slashing carbon emissions. It didn’t matter to him that French emissions already are very low on a per capita basis and further cuts to transport emissions would be extremely difficult to achieve. But this matters a great deal to lower-income rural voters whose use of cars for daily life and business was about to become much more expensive.

Those voters produced the yellow-vest movement—named for the safety gear they wear—that in turn has created a political crisis for Mr. Macron. What began as a few hundred thousand protesters scattered around the country became more than a million last weekend, including inexcusable rioting mobs in Paris.

Mr. Macron’s tax backtrack, which his government says is only for six months, might induce the protesters to return home. But the movement grew so large and garnered so much public sympathy that his entire economic-reform agenda is now in jeopardy. The fuel tax was not part of his election campaign.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/its-full-out-war-between-nigel-farage-and-tommy-robinson/

“It feels like Westminster is tumbling towards a political crisis without modern precedent,” wrote the BBC’s Ben Wright on November 27. On July 23, 2016, British subjects voted to leave the EU; on December 11, the House of Commons will decide whether or not to approve the horrible deal that Prime Minister Theresa May has struck with the EU honchos and that, her claims to the contrary, comes nowhere close to returning full independence to the UK. If, as seems likely at the moment, the MPs turn down May’s deal, it’s not clear what will happen next, even though, one way or the other, Britain’s EU membership is scheduled to expire on March 29 of next year.

The most important thing at stake in all of this is Britain’s ability to control its own borders, formulate its own immigration policies, and expel certain individuals from the country without having to ask permission from some court in Brussels. These things are important, in turn, because the only hope for Britain’s long-term survival as a Western democracy lies in a radical change in its approach to, in a word, Islam.

To be sure, it may be too late to rescue the UK. The Muslim population may already be too large and the demographic trends irreversible. Certainly a divorce from Brussels won’t be enough by itself to save the day. The two main parties refuse to talk honestly about Islam, as do the mainstream media. Authorities would rather ban Islam critics from the country than deport preachers of terror. Even Mr. Brexit himself, Nigel Farage, has consistently taken a see-no-evil approach to the Religion of Peace. In recent months, however, his successor as head of the UK Independence Party (UKIP), Gerard Batten, has started speaking the truth about Islam – and has even taken on Tommy Robinson as a personal advisor – and has thereby made that party even more of a ray of hope for Britain than it was before.

Unsurprisingly, these actions on Batten’s part have outraged Farage, resulting in some very unpleasant conflict in the top ranks of the pro-Brexit crowd. In recent days, Farage has repeatedly called Tommy a racist – an allegation that anyone familiar with Tommy’s record knows to be untrue. By associating with the likes of Robinson, Farage complained on his December 2 radio/TV program on LBC, “UKIP becomes the BNP,” i.e., the British National Party, a genuinely racist group that Robinson joined in his youth and quit shortly thereafter as soon as he realized that it was racist.

On that same show, Farage also labeled Robinson a “thug,” citing his prison record without acknowledging that British authorities have been going after Robinson for years in much the same way that Robert Mueller is going after Trump, desperately looking for crimes to pin on him. Robinson’s most recent incarceration, of course, was the result of a shamefully irregular courtroom exercise that was later condemned in the sternest terms by the nation’s highest judge, but Farage made no mention whatsoever of that farcical miscarriage of justice. Farage further maintained that participants in the pro-Tommy rallies that took place across Britain this summer had committed acts of violence on a large scale. This, too, was untrue.

“I am disgusted,” Farage said about Robinson’s newfound ties to UKIP, charging that thanks to this connection, and thanks to Batten’s public comments about Islam, UKIP now looks like a party that is “fighting a religious crusade against Islam.” Noting that Robinson is scheduled to speak at a pro-Brexit rally on December 9, Farage fretted that his presence would draw the wrong sort of people and result in widespread acts of public disorder: “I don’t want Gerard Batten and Tommy Robinson to be seen to lead something that is violent, nasty, and unpleasant and that will be used…to say ‘this is what Brexit represents.’”

On his show, Farage takes phone calls from listeners and also answers questions apparently sent in by text message. Some of his listeners on December 2 shared his concern about the changes in UKIP. Others did not. They pushed back at his characterization of Tommy’s followers and his claims of violence at Tommy’s rallies. “You are insulting a lot of decent people,” one listener told Farage. “You are demonizing Tommy Robinson.” Another listener pointed out that Farage, too, had long been smeared as a racist and Islamophobe. “Yes,” Farage replied, “but in my case it was unfair.”

Several listeners felt, as I did, that Farage’s remarks about Tommy and Tommy’s “background” (as Farage put it) and Tommy’s followers (whom Farage actually dismissed as “convicts and thugs”) reeked of class condescension. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://spectator.us/emmanuel-macron-united-france/

I would say we’ll always have Paris. But maybe not. It was only a few weeks ago that French president Emmanuel Macron promised a red carpet for bankers fleeing Brexit Britain. As matters have unfolded, the carpet has become one of broken glass.

On the Avenue Kléber, one of the toniest streets in Paris and heart of the district where Macron will have been expecting to resettle his beloved bankers, fleeing London like the sans culottes, every bank has been attacked, every shop window broken, upscale apartments have been attacked and every Porsche and Mercedes within blocks set on fire. Invest in France?

Emmanuel Macron is undoubtedly brilliant. He won all the glittering academic prizes. He had a supersonic ascent into the stratosphere of the French civil service. He even did a spell as a courtier with David de Rothschild’s investment bank, before ascending to minister of the economy under François Hollande, and then winning the most glittering prize of all, the presidency of the republic, aged 39 ¾.

But his hubris, arrogance and almost autistic detachment from the French in the street is in a class with Marie Antoinette. Except that this time around, the courtier whispers, ‘Mr President, the people cannot afford diesel.’ To which the cloth-eared Macron has, in effect replied: ‘Let them buy Teslas.’