RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271778/jordan-cancels-israeli-land-leases-morton-klein

Last week, Jordan’s King Abdullah II, in what has been described as a “sharp tone,” announced that he would annul an appendix to the 1994 Israeli/Jordanian peace treaty under which certain parcels of lands in the border regions –– the Naharayim (Baqura) area near the Sea of Galilee, and Zofar (al Ghamar), some 80 miles north of Eilat in the Aqaba region –– were to have been leased to Israel in perpetuity.

Jews have farmed these lands since 1926, when the then-British Mandatory power authorized it, along with the establishment of a power station by Pinchas Rutenberg.

However, in 1994, when Israel and Jordan concluded a peace treaty, Israel transferred these territories to Jordanian sovereignty. However, Appendix I (b) in the treaty authorized continued Israeli cultivation of these farmlands for 25 years, automatically renewable for 25-year periods “unless one year prior notice of termination is given by either Party, in which case, at the request of either Party, consultations shall be entered into.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has indicated he will be taking up the matter with King Abdullah in a bid to have the termination off the lease rescinded, but Oraib Rintawi, the director of the Quds Center for Political Studies in Amman, has said, probably accurately, “Jordan cannot backtrack on this … This is a decision of the king, government and public. I do not believe there is any possibility to backtrack on this decision.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13205/turkey-qatar-saudi-arabia

The new U.S. leverage that emerged after the Saudi embarrassment is the same leverage that the U.S. can now use to broker an entente between Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

That there may be a Saudi-Qatari rapprochement might be bad news for Erdoğan. A future Saudi-Qatari deal would force Turkey militarily out of the Gulf and force Erdoğan entirely to recalibrate his quest for Turkish leadership in the Sunni ummah (global community).

Qatar’s distance from Erdoğan regarding the Khashoggi murder signals a Qatari-Saudi entente. Qatar may well be breaking away from its alliance with Turkey.

This will give the Saudis an upper hand in their rivalry with Erdoğan in Sunni leadership of the ummah. If Erdoğan loses Qatar to Saudi Arabia, he will be paying geostrategic price as well as an economic one.

A 21st century ideological kinship, based on political support for Hamas and Muslim Brotherhood, has built a strong bond between Turkey’s elected leadership and Qatar’s family of sheiks, despite an unpleasant shared history a century earlier.

The Qataris, not knowing that a 21st version of Islamism — not yet born then — fought the Ottomans to gain their independence in 1915. This event ended the 44-year-long Ottoman rule on the peninsula.

Independence, however, lasted for only about a year, until 1916, when Qatar became a British protectorate, until 1971. Today, hydrocarbon-rich Qatar, often referred to as a family-run gas station, is the staunchest regional ally of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Turkey.

Both countries, Qatar and Turkey, pursue policies that are strongly anti-Israel (Erdoğan once remarked that “Zionism is a crime against humanity”) and share policies that are pro-Hamas and pro-Muslim Brotherhood.

This foreign policy blend, however, is deeply disliked by the House of Saud, a regional heavyweight, as well as by its Gulf and other regional allies: Egypt, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Lebanon and the Palestinian Authority — in addition to the Arab League.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/iran-holds-a-hostage-for-spying-on-the-dead-1540852246

Give President Trump credit for bringing unjustly detained Americans home. Whatever misgivings you may have about his North Korean diplomacy, three American prisoners freed in May are better for it. So is Pastor Andrew Brunson, whom Turkey released this month. “I hope my husband is next,” Hua Qu tells me. “He has literally been taken hostage by Iran.”

Her husband is Xiyue Wang, a history graduate student at Princeton arrested in Tehran in August 2016 and sentenced to 10 years in the notorious Evin Prison. He is one of at least five Americans currently detained in Iran—and the only one who doesn’t also hold Iranian citizenship.

Mr. Wang, then 35, ventured to Iran in January 2016 to research the Qajar dynasty, which ruled Persia from 1794 to 1925. The espionage allegation came after he copied thousands of pages of research material from the National Archives of Iran. As one of his Princeton professors put it, Mr. Wang was accused of “spying on the dead.” The documents he copied were from between 1840 and 1910, according to Ms. Qu.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/geopolitics-trumps-the-markets-1540852514

That crashing sound you heard in world markets last week wasn’t just a correction. It was the sound of the end of an age.

During the long era of relatively stable international relations that succeeded the Cold War, markets enjoyed an environment uniquely conducive to economic growth. The U.S. faced no peer competitors, and the most important great powers generally (if sometimes selectively) supported Washington’s emphasis on opening markets and reducing barriers to investment and trade. The positive-sum logic of economics trumped zero-sum international politics in the halls of power world-wide.

The results were extraordinary. Between 1990 and 2017, world-wide gross domestic product rose from $23.4 trillion to $80.1 trillion, the value of world trade grew even faster, more than a billion people escaped poverty, and infant-mortality rates decreased by more than 50%. The number of people with telephone service grew roughly 10-fold.

This hiatus from history was, by most measures of human flourishing, a glorious era. Now it has come to an end, or at least a pause, and the world is beginning to see what that means.

During the Obama administration, foreign-policy observers began to speak of “the return of geopolitics”—the idea that the international arena was increasingly defined by competition among strategic rivals. Russia, China and Iran were “revisionist” powers that aimed to upend the post-Cold War era of American dominance. These powers enjoyed growing success, particularly during President Obama’s second term. By the time Mr. Trump took office, there was little doubt a much more challenging geopolitical environment had taken shape. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://pjmedia.com/michaelwalsh/angela-merkel-down-and-soon-out/

After another disastrous showing in local elections, German chancellor Angela Merkel will step down as the leader of her political party, the Christian Democratic Union, and not seek re-election as chancellor.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel announced on Monday that she would not seek re-election when her term expires in 2021. Merkel, who has been Chancellor since 2005, made the announcement during a news conference today in Berlin. “It is time today for me to start a new chapter,” Merkel told reporters in Berlin.
“This fourth term is my last term as Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany. In the next Bundestag election in 2021, I will not run again as Chancellor. I will not run for the German Bundestag any more, and I do not want any other political office.” Merkel told reporters that being Chancellor has been a “very challenging and fulfilling task.”

Better late than never — or perhaps not. Merkel’s decision to admit upward of a million Muslim “refugees” in 2015, ostensibly in the name of humanitarianism but in reality to combat Germany’s anemic birthrate by importing the next generation of “Germans” and hoping against all evidence that they will assimilate into Teutonic society, was the inciting incident in her fall from grace, but its effects will linger long after she is gone.

And gone she needs to be, long before 2021. The fig leaf is that while she’s quitting as CDU party leader, she’ll stay in office until the next election. The reality is, with her power base gone, she’ll be vacating the chancellery long before that. Merkel has been unable to admit her catastrophic error, and has been busily trying to bridge the yawning gulf between bien-pensant thinking about “immigration” and the reality on the ground by cobbling together an ad hoc coalition government with her nominal opposition, the Social Democrats. That coalition has now effectively cratered. So what comes next?

Over the past three years I’ve received many calls from the British media asking me whether Angela Merkel had finally received a knockout blow. And I’ve always replied: she’s down but not out. Now, however, she’s down and out. Her party’s top brass have forced her to announce that she won’t be running for the leadership of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) at their conference in December. At the time of writing, she wants to remain chancellor. But by this time next year at the very latest, she’ll be out of that job, too. CONTINUE AT SITE

http://www.ruthfullyyours.com/?s=AUGUSTO+ZIMMERMAN October 18

This was posted last week-
Augusto Zimmermann : Brazil’s Crime

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/10/brazils-crime/

It is not the jaw-dropping murder rate or endemic corruption which marks every aspect of public life and office in the South America nation, for they are but symptoms of the greater affliction: decade upon decade of left-wing government. Reformer Jair Bolsonaro aims to change that.

I had the chance to meet Mr Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s leading presidential candidate, about two decades ago. He is now on the verge of a significant victory in a run-off to be held on October 28. Back in those days, Bolsonaro was a city councillor in Rio de Janeiro and I was starting my professional career as a legal academic. His wife, one of my law students, invited me to join them for lunch at the City Council. I spoke with Bolsonaro for about 30 minutes and my interaction with him was rather pleasant and insightful. He clearly demonstrated love for his family and for the country. The brief conversation was enough to convince me that he was a different politician — completely different from the usual Brazilian politician normally inclined to embrace a leftist view of the world.

Bolsonaro has always been labelled ‘far right’ by the Brazilian media. This is a label usually given to anyone who opposes such things as the radical feminist lobby and/or the LGBTQI agenda. Bolsonaro apparently is very ‘far right’ because he also sees a few positive aspects in the military regime that ruled over the country from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s. Above all, he is called a ‘fascist’ because he wishes to fight crime and to introduce policies that can somehow address the breakdown of law and order in Brazil. Above all, Bolsonaro is deeply hated by those who reject his correlation between the rampant levels of criminality and the disorder caused by the incapacity of successive let-wing governments to protect the people from dangerous criminals.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271776/after-pittsburgh-synagogue-massacre-anti-semites-ari-lieberman

Sabbath for me represents a day of rest and time to spend with my family. I do not access the internet, listen to radio or watch TV. For one day of the week, I take it upon myself to completely distance myself from the problems of the world. As a result, I did not hear of the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre until after sunset.

Aside from the horrific magnitude of the attack, two things immediately jumped out at me. The first was the advanced age of the victims, which included 97-year-old Rose Mallinger. This aspect of the dreadful slaughter reminded me of the Park Hotel Massacre when on the evening of March 27, 2002, during the start of the Jewish holiday of Passover, a Palestinian terrorist entered the dining area of the Park Hotel located in the resort city of Netanya, and detonated his shrapnel-laced bomb. The massive explosion killed thirty holiday-goers most of whom, like in Pittsburgh, were elderly.

The second thing that struck me was the sheer disingenuousness and hypocrisy of well-known anti-Semitic leaders and groups looking to score political points on the backs of dead Jewish victims. The Hamas terrorist organization, which has the blood of thousands of Jewish victims on its hands contemptibly said it was, “sorry to hear about the terror attack,” and then outrageously linked the attack to legitimate efforts undertaken by Israel to defend her citizenry.

Hamas’s enablers like Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan joined in on the action and issued faux condolences. Erdoğan is an anti-Semite to his core. He has dabbled with Holocaust revisionism, has compared Israel to Nazi Germany, claimed that Israel committed “genocide” against the Palestinians, alleged that Israel along with Jewish intellectual Bernard Henri Levy engineered the coup that saw the overthrow of Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood leader, Mohammed Morsi, and linked Jews to the fomenting of the 2013 Gezi Park riots.

Joining the chorus of fake expressions of sympathy was the Palestinian Authority, whose noxious octogenarian leader Mahmoud Abbas, is a confirmed Holocaust denier. On April 30, 2018 he publicly stated in a rambling televised address that the Holocaust was not the result of inherent German anti-Semitism but was rather brought upon by the Jews themselves due to their “social behavior” and alleged usurious conduct. Some other gems of his longwinded speech included the claim that Hitler was a Zionist sympathizer (a claim that has been regurgitated in British Labour Party circles), that Ashkenazi Jews are fake and descendants of the Khazars, and that Jews are not indigenous to Israel but are rather a foreign colonialist implant. In his 1982 dissertation Abbas alleged that gas chambers were never used to asphyxiate Jews and dismissed as a “fantastic lie” that six million Jews perished in the Holocaust. He claimed that the figure was less than 1,000,000.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271763/now-its-official-europeans-cant-criticize-islam-bruce-bawer

Founded in 1949 and headquartered in Strasbourg, the Council of Europe – which today counts every European state except Belarus and Vatican City as a member – is supposed to be a guardian of democracy and human rights. That’s its official raison d’être. It is separate from the European Union, and its court, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), whose judges are elected by the Council of Europe’s Parliamentary Assembly (a legislative body whose 324 members are drawn from Europe’s national parliaments), should not be confused with the EU’s European Court of Justice (ECJ). It began hearing cases and handing down verdicts in 1959.

How many Europeans are even aware of the Council of Europe’s existence – or, if they are, could explain what it does? How many know the difference between the ECHR and the ECJ? Relatively few, I suspect. But this is par for the course in Europe, where the elected governments, in the decades since World War II, have built up a network of international bodies that wield considerable power while operating in the shadows with little or no accountability to the people. Guardian of democracy, indeed.

All of this dry information is by way of prefacing news of a sensational and sobering verdict that was handed down by the ECHR last week. Although the full name of the petitioner is not mentioned – she is identified only as an Austrian woman with the initials “E.S.” – the case, as Robert Spencer has noted, is obviously that of Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff, who in 2011 was convicted in her native country of “disparaging religious doctrines” for having stated, in seminars entitled “Basic Information on Islam” that she held in October and November 2009, that Muhammed, the prophet of Islam, was a pedophile. Of course, any minimally knowledgeable student of that religion knows that, according to the canonical records of Muhammed’s life that are known as hadith, he wed his wife Aisha when she was a child of six and (perfect male role model that he was) waited until she was nine to consummate the marriage.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13204/european-court-human-rights-sharia

The European Court of Human Rights — which has jurisdiction over 47 European countries, and whose rulings are legally binding on all 28 member states of the European Union — has effectively legitimized an Islamic blasphemy code in the interests of “preserving religious peace” in Europe.

The ruling effectively establishes a dangerous legal precedent, one that authorizes European states to curtail the right to free speech if such speech is deemed to be offensive to Muslims and thus pose a threat to religious peace.

“In other words, my right to speak freely is less important than protecting the religious feelings of others.” – Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff.

The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has ruled that criticism of Mohammed, the founder of Islam, constitutes incitement to hatred and therefore is not protected free speech.

With its unprecedented decision, the Strasbourg-based court — which has jurisdiction over 47 European countries, and whose rulings are legally binding on all 28 member states of the European Union — has effectively legitimized an Islamic blasphemy code in the interests of “preserving religious peace” in Europe.

The case involves Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff, an Austrian woman who in 2011 was convicted of “denigrating religious beliefs” after giving a series of lectures about the dangers of fundamentalist Islam.

Sabaditsch-Wolff’s legal problems began in November 2009, when she presented a three-part seminar about Islam to the Freedom Education Institute, a political academy linked to the Austrian Freedom Party — which today forms part of the Austrian government. A left-leaning weekly magazine, News, planted a journalist in the audience to secretly record the lectures. Lawyers for the publication then handed the transcripts over to the Viennese public prosecutor’s office as evidence of hate speech against Islam, according to Section 283 of the Austrian Criminal Code (Strafgesetzbuch, StGB).

The offending speech was an offhand comment by Sabaditsch-Wolff that Mohammed was a pedophile because he married his wife Aisha when she was just six or seven years old. Sabaditsch-Wolff’s actual words were, “A 56-year-old and a six-year-old? What do we call it, if it is not pedophilia?”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/bolsonaro-takes-brazil-1540768718

Sunday’s runoff presidential election in Brazil pitted Jair Bolsonaro, a former army captain who has spent 27 years in Brazil’s Congress, against Fernando Haddad, a former one-term mayor of the city of São Paulo. On Sunday evening with 97% of the vote in, Mr. Bolsonaro was handily beating Mr. Haddad, 55.4% to 44.6%.

Much was made during the campaign of Mr. Bolsonaro’s history of rude comments about women and minorities and about his pledge to use an iron fist to fight crime in poor neighborhoods.

He was labeled a racist, a misogynist, a homophobe, a fascist, an advocate of torture and an aspiring dictator. His opponents gathered in the streets to denounce him and wrote withering diatribes against him in the press. The proudly “progressive” international media joined the fray, declaring him a threat to the environment and democracy.

It ought to have been enough to sink the Bolsonaro candidacy. Yet he prevailed, and it isn’t hard to see why: Brazilians are in the midst of a national awakening in which socialism—the alternative to a Bolsonaro presidency—has been put on trial. The resounding victory of Novo Party’s classical-liberal gubernatorial candidate Romeu Zema in the large state of Minas Gerais confirms that theory.

Mr. Haddad was the candidate of Brazil’s gigantic left-wing populist Workers’ Party, known as PT. He was also the handpicked successor to former two-term President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who is in jail on a bribery conviction but remains popular with his supporters. Against Mr. Bolsonaro’s small Social Liberal Party, Mr. Haddad should have won walking away.

How Mr. Bolsonaro triumphed is worth examining because it suggests that something changed in this election. It can always change back, and it probably will. But for now the momentum is on the side of reform, and policy makers have a unique opportunity to advance liberty and prosperity in South America’s largest economy. CONTINUE AT SITE