RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/09/9-11-changed-european-radical-to-conservative-president-bush-speech/

‘Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty, have always been at war, and we know that God is not neutral between them.’

On September 11, 2001, I was sitting on the floor of my sister’s living room, babysitting her one-year-old daughter. We were lazily playing, with the afternoon news on the TV in the background. The first thing I noticed was how the anchor’s voice changed. The woman was saying “Wait, wait,” while staring to the side of the camera. There had been a horrible accident, she said, as I watched the smoke pour out of the first tower. When the second plane hit, I hoped beyond hope she was right.

I had just gotten back from a year in France. A few months earlier, I’d been standing in a crowded bar on Place de Clichy, celebrating my 20th birthday. I remember that night, although several bottles of bad white wine say I shouldn’t. I was surrounded by my peers, other upper-middle-class liberals who had fled to Paris to fulfill their fantasy. We had come to this historical city to live the life of songs and books and Technicolor movies. We were radicals. We were heroes. We were going to change the world.

The people with me in that bar were a random sample of the political atmosphere of Europe at the time. Militant feminists, pro-Palestinians, members of the autonomic environmentalist movement, and your run-of the-mill anti-government thugs. Having a friend who had been jailed for rioting was as necessary as a Malcolm X T-shirt and a back-pocket paperback of Catcher in the Rye. I gladly picked up that uniform, just as I picked up rocks and banners knowing that this was the ticket to ride.

Raised in a family of academics, this was a natural evolution on my part and a result of a serious political interest. I identified as an intellectual and as a political thinker with a critical mind. What I failed to acknowledge at the time was that my country was a controlled environment and that the spectrum on which political analysis took place was limited. Not unlike The Truman Show, where the choices you think you are making were already made for you long ago, and any dreams of a different fate are swiftly corrected.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12983/imran-khan-pakistan-minorities

In a move that raised eyebrows both in Pakistan and abroad, the government succumbed to the pressure of Islamists by asking renowned economist Atif Mian to step down from membership of the prime minister’s Economic Advisory Council, solely because he is a member of the persecuted minority Ahmadi community.
Mohammad Abdus Salam was the first Pakistani to receive a Nobel Prize in science, and the second person from an Islamic country, after Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, ever to have been awarded a Nobel Prize in any field.
Mohammad Safdar, a prominent legislator, launched a verbal attack on Ahmadis, calling them a “threat to this country, its Constitution and ideology… Because their’s is a false religion, in which there is no concept of jihad for Allah.”
Let us hope that the Pakistani leadership’s abandonment of Mian is the last such incident.

Radical Islamists took to the streets of Pakistan on September 1, to protest Prime Minister Imran Khan’s appointment of former Princeton University scholar Atif Mian, a minority Muslim of the Ahmadiyya faith, to the Economic Advisory Council (EAC). Demanding that Mian be removed from the EAC, a key forum that advises the prime minister on economic issues, demonstrators threatened to lock down Pakistan’s major cities, including Islamabad, its capital.

Mian’s appointment was opposed by Pakistan’s right wing political parties including “Tehreek-i-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP)”, which strongly objected to his Ahmadi faith.

In addition, a well-orchestrated social-media smear campaign is being waged against Mian — the only Pakistani on the International Monetary Fund’s 2014 list of the world’s “25 brightest young economists” — for the sole reason that he adheres to the Ahmadiyya faith.

Then, in a move that raised eyebrows both in Pakistan and abroad, the government succumbed to the pressure of Islamists by showing the door to Mian: he was asked to step down from membership of the EAC.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-to-join-russian-drills-in-sign-of-growing-military-ties-1536595659?mod=hp_lead_pos8

Chinese and Russian troops begin joint maneuvers Tuesday, marking the first time Moscow has invited a country outside a tight circle of former Soviet allies to its largest annual exercises and offering Chinese generals rare and valuable experience training outside their country’s borders.

The five days of drills in Russia’s far east, near the Chinese border, are also meant to demonstrate the extent to which the two sides are moving beyond symbolic displays of force to coordinate weapons systems and command structures. Washington says the two countries have developed capabilities that could test U.S. military dominance in times of crisis.

The military relationship between Beijing and Moscow has gathered pace in the past few years as both countries have seen their relations with Washington deteriorate. Both countries are undergoing intense military modernization and reform, and Chinese President Xi Jinping wants to turn his armed forces into a more expeditionary fighting force.
Call to ArmsAnnual military spending*Source: Stockholm International Peace ResearchInstitute*In constant 2016 dollars
.billionU.S.ChinaRussia19952000’05’10’150200400600$800U.S.x2017x$597.18 billion

“Their exercises with Russia give them access to much-needed foreign experience that is crucial if Beijing wants to establish an internationally-capable fighting force,” said Vasily Kashin, an expert of Russian-Chinese relations and senior researcher at the Moscow-based Higher School of Economics. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/seven-injured-in-paris-knife-attack-authorities-deny-terrorist-motive/

A knife attack in a popular Paris neighborhood Sunday night left seven people injured but French authorities are not characterizing the incident as terrorism.

The attack took place just before 11p.m. in Parc de la Villette by the Ourcq Canal, a 19th arrondissement neighborhood frequented by young people and tourists.

The attacker, whom authorities believe to be an Afghan national, has been arrested.

“Nothing at this stage shows signs of a terrorist nature in these assaults,” a source close to the investigation told Agence France-Presse, adding that the man targeted “strangers in the street.”

“This is not being treated as a terrorist attack,” a French Interior Ministry spokesperson told CNN.

That Jeremy Corbyn, who hopes someday to occupy the office previously held by Winston Churchill, Benjamin Disraeli and William Pitt, is an anti-Semite seems no longer in question. No anti-Israeli terrorist entity is too drenched in Jewish blood for him to cheer on. Hamas, Hezbollah, the mullahs of Iran—their sins against freedom of speech, against freedom of assembly, and against women and gays may be crimson, but if they hate the Jewish state enough, Labour has a leader who will wash them as white as snow.

But not all anti-Semites are alike. Different forms of anti-Semitism can have very different consequences. What kind does Jeremy Corbyn profess, and how does it relate to the rest of his worldview?

Mr. Corbyn and his colleagues in the hard-left Labour elite are, above all, modern. They don’t hate the Jews for killing Christ as medieval Christians did. They don’t think the Jews use the blood of gentile children to make matzoh. Whatever some of the less enlightened members of Mr. Corbyn’s base among the British Muslim community may think, the secular Labour elite doesn’t blame the Jews for rejecting Muhammed.

Nor is their hatred racial. Mr. Corbyn’s worldview is blinkered and sadly skewed, but he is neither wicked nor delusional enough to imagine that the Jewish “race” is competing with the “Aryan” Anglo-Saxons to dominate the world.

It is Zionism that drives Mr. Corbyn’s anti-Jewish passion. He is not anti-Israel because some or even many of Israel’s policies are wrong. He is existentially anti-Zionist. He does not believe that the Jewish people are a nation. From this point of view, the notorious U.N. Resolution 3379 of 1975 got it exactly right: Zionism is racism, and the Jewish state is racist to the core.

What elevates the Jewish state from an irritation to an obsession in the Corbynite world is Israel’s relationship with the U.S. The U.S. is the center of international capitalism. Destroying American capitalism and the imperialist system it imposes on the world is the overarching goal of the Marxist zealotry that drives Mr. Corbyn’s worldview and justifies his sympathy for otherwise dubious regimes. The Iranian mullahs may hang homosexuals and stone the occasional adulteress, but in the all-important struggle against American imperialism and its Zionist sidekick, they are a natural and necessary part of the Resistance.

It’s a short step for hard-left Labour from hating Israel to finding “Zionist” conspiracies on every side. Marxism typically rejects liberal democracy as a sham. Rich and powerful capitalists make all the big decisions: They control the political parties, they control the press, and they use the facade of democratic politics to amuse, befuddle and ultimately control the masses. From this standpoint, conspiracy thinking isn’t a sign of ignorance or emotionalism; to the contrary, perceiving the hidden plots of our true rulers is a necessary and vital step in seeing through the myth of liberal democracy.

The hard-line Marxist and the classic anti-Semite agree that the world is really run by a cabal of greedy men behind closed doors. But where the Marxist sees capitalist string-pullers, some of whom may happen to be Jewish, the anti-Semite sees only Jews. This is the meaning behind the famous statement, once popular on the European left, that anti-Semitism is the “socialism of fools”: the anti-Semitic conspiracy theories are too narrow and miss the real point.

But for Jeremy Corbyn and his Labour colleagues, the perceived special relationship between American imperialism and Zionism collapses the distinction between the socialism of fools and the “real” thing. The urban legend that “the Jews” control America’s Middle Eastern policy and that Jewish power forces the U.S. to march in lockstep with right-wing Israeli governments is also an organizing principle of the Corbynite worldview. The supposed control exerted by Zionist Jewish billionaires over American politics makes the fight against imperialism also a fight against a powerful Jewish conspiracy.

https://www.thejc.com/comment/comment/howard-jacobson-speech-intelligence-squared-1.469525

Something tells me you’re expecting me to call Jeremy Corbyn an antisemite. There’s been a bit about it in the press, and I… well, you know…

But I’m not going to call him anything. He says he isn’t an antisemite, Hamas says he isn’t an antisemite, the white supremacist David Duke says he isn’t an antisemite, and that’s good enough for me.

Am I being ironical? Ladies and Gentlemen, I’m incapable of irony.

We know what an antisemite look like. He wears jackboots, a swastika arm-band, and shouts Juden Raus; Jeremy Corbyn wears a British Home Stores vest under his shirt and is softly spoken. Antisemites accuse Jews of killing Jesus; Corbyn is an atheist and seems not to mind if we did or didn’t. Whether that’s because Jesus was Jewish and killing him meant one less Jew in the world, is not for me to say. And – and – he doesn’t deny the Holocaust…

Mind you, he knows a man who does. In fact he knows a surprising number of men who do. That he denies ever having been in their company – until photographs turn up of him rubbing noses with them at the gravesides of mass murderers, offering to show them his belief systems if they’ll show him theirs – ‘Gosh, they’re the same size!’ – should come as no surprise. You can’t spend your whole life in the company of blood-libellers and holocaust-deniers and expect to remember them all by name.

If I may quote from Oscar Wilde’s missing play The Self-Importance of Being Jeremy- ‘To associate with one antisemite you don’t know to be antisemitic, Mr Corbyn, may be regarded as a misfortune, to associate with antisemites on a regular basis looks like a predilection.’

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/kremlin-officials-war-games-are-largest-in-decades/

This year’s annual Russian war games, which begin on Tuesday, will be the largest since Ronald Reagan was inaugurated during the Cold War, Kremlin defense minister Sergey Shoygu claimed to NBC News Monday.

The military exercises, called Vostok 2018 by the Russian government, will put to use almost 300,000 troops, over 1,000 airplanes, helicopters, and drones, as many as 80 ships, and 36,000 tanks, armored personnel carriers, and other vehicles, Russian officials said. They will take place in Siberia and Russia’s Far East, and are a necessary response to the “current international situation, which is often aggressive and unfriendly,” according to Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov.

China will also send a military contingent to participate jointly in the exercises. NATO was made aware of the drills months ago, officials said.

Back in June, the U.S. led NATO drills involving 18,000 troops from 19 countries, most of them NATO members, in the Baltic states and Poland. But U.S. Army Europe denied the war games were a “provocation of Russia” and said they were meant to “demonstrate the commitment and solidarity of the alliance.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12959/turkey-prisons-torture-sexual-abuse

Inmates in a jail in Şanlıurfa in southeast Turkey tell of the plight of 27-year-old Uğur Yeloğlu, who they say has been isolated and tortured so badly since his imprisonment seven months ago that his level of functioning is like that of a baby.

Yeloğlu was arrested in Istanbul in January for allegedly “aiding a terrorist organization.” His lawyer, Abdülkadir Aslan, said that in spite of the many months his client has been in jail, his indictment has not yet been prepared by prosecutors: “The investigation file is also marked ‘confidential,’ so we do not know what it contains.”

“Prisoners are beaten up and sometimes killed, when they refuse to roll-call standing up, give military salute, reject strip searches, or ask to see a doctor.” — Report by the opposition Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP).

In the early 2000s, after the Justice and Development Party (AKP) first came to power in Turkey, its leader, then Prime Minister (now President) Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, proclaimed a policy of “zero tolerance” for torture.

In June of this year, Turkish Justice Minister Abdulhamit Gül repeated the same mantra. “We — as the AKP government — are implementing a policy of zero tolerance for torture,” he said.

Statements by many prisoners, their lawyers and human-rights defenders, however, tell a much different story; victim and witness accounts reveal that torture and other forms of unlawful abuse are increasingly widespread in Turkish jails and prisons. Inmates in a jail in Şanlıurfa in southeast Turkey, for example, tell of the plight of 27-year-old Uğur Yeloğlu, who they say has been isolated and tortured so badly since his imprisonment seven months ago that his level of functioning is like that of a baby. He has apparently lost his memory and is unable to walk, or even eat, on his own. In addition, these inmates said, the prison’s healthcare staff are lax in their treatment of him.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/swedens-political-warning-1536531909

Swedes went to the polls on Sunday and although it will take some time for a ruling coalition to emerge, the biggest immediate winner appears to be the party that won’t form a government. The Sweden Democrats, born as a far-right political movement and now an anti-immigration party, garnered a little under 18% of the vote. That third-place finish is their best electoral result.

The governing party is still likely to be either the first-place center-left Social Democrats or the second-place center-right Moderate Party, the anchors of Swedish politics for decades. But they will govern with reduced vote tallies, and no coalition is likely to enjoy a majority in parliament.

As in so many recent European elections, the authority of mainstream parties is eroding. The Moderates were the biggest losers Sunday compared to 2014, down 3.5 points to 20%. The ruling Social Democrats have been hemorrhaging voters for years. Their better-than-expected result Sunday is that they finished at 28%, three percentage points down from the last election but well shy of the 40% tally they used to achieve.

The Sweden Democrats have won over many disaffected working-class voters, as the party’s share of the vote has risen from under 6% in 2010. Others have shifted to the Left coalition, a far-left faction whose vote total also rose more than two percentage points Sunday.

Many commentators—and more than a few Swedish and European Union politicians—will mourn growing support for the “far right” by Sweden’s historically tolerant voters. That misses much of the story.