Displaying posts categorized under

WORLD NEWS

The Yellow Jackets Are Right About Green Policies They have distinguished company in questioning the science behind climate-change dogma. By George Melloan

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-yellow-jackets-are-right-about-green-policies-11544991717

Seek out the most basic cause of the French riots and you’ll come to a bizarre answer: carbon dioxide. More specifically, the demonization by political activists of that vital element of the earth’s atmosphere.

French President Emmanuel Macron stirred popular rage by trying to raise the gasoline tax by about 25 cents a gallon. He argued that higher taxes would reduce fuel use and hence emissions of CO2, helping France meet the lower emissions goals to which it is pledged as a signatory to the United Nations’ Paris Agreement to fight climate change.

Mr. Macron has learned the hard way that voters don’t see climate change as a threat demanding personal sacrifices. The rebellion is global. Green measures that caused energy prices to soar damaged Chancellor Angela Merkel in Germany’s 2017 election. Green energy plans were repudiated by voters in Australia and helped cause a political upheaval in the Canadian province of Ontario.

Voters in Washington state and Arizona rejected November ballot measures aimed at reducing CO2 emissions. The Journal’s William McGurn reported last week that 200 prominent civil-rights leaders have filed suit against the California Air Resources Board. Green policies, they argue, are saddling the poor with higher living costs.

France and the Media During the Jihadist War The ravages of Jihad Denial. Howard Rotberg

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272227/france-and-media-during-jihadist-war-howard-rotberg

It is safe to say that there are now two main fronts in what we need to term the Islamist War Against the West. The first has been for many years now the Western liberal democracy of Israel surrounded by genocidal neighbors; the second is France, followed closely by other European countries, Australia, and America.

During the week of December 11th, 2018, two sad things happened and this essay shall attempt to enlighten by placing them together. The first is the recent terrorist attack in Strasbourg France, and the second is the signing by most of the world (with the exception of America, Australia, much of Eastern Europe, and Israel) of the United Nations Global Compact For Safe, Orderly And Regular Migration, which is a mind-boggling attempt to remove sovereignty from nations hesitant to admit Islamist young men and remove freedom of the press to object to the globalist –Islamist agenda.

The Associated Press covered the December 11th shootings at the Strasbourg France Christmas market that killed at least 3 and wounded at least 12 by writing that “The motive for the shooting is unclear. It wasn’t immediately clear if the market was the target of the attack of if there was any link to terrorism.”

It was reported in the article that “France has been hit by several extremist attacks including the 2015 Paris shootings which killed 130 people and wounded hundreds, and a truck attack in Nice that killed dozens in 2016.

Brexit: Now What? by David Brown

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13406/brexit-theresa-may

Ardent Brexiteers are increasingly despondent. Many had hoped for a vote of no confidence in Theresa May with a strong Leave-supporting leader installed in her place, prepared to take the United Kingdom out of the untransparent, unaccountable and unable-to-be-voted-out EU.

Instead, Theresa May’s “deal” not to Leave the EU makes the U.K. a vassal state, locked into the EU but without a voice. Leave voters did not vote for a “deal”. They voted to take back the Britain’s sovereignty.

MPs will be torn. The Establishment does not want a no-deal Brexit…. But their constituents — the people who voted them to be their voice in Parliament – do.

Politicians voting to Remain in the U.K. would be doing it in flamboyant disregard of the will of the people — the very people they need to be re-elected.

Theresa May has survived a no confidence vote in the British Parliament. She says she now has a renewed mission; “delivering the Brexit people voted for, bringing the country back together and building a country that works for everyone”.

Whether she has any troops willing to follow her charge is unclear.

Islam’s Useful Idiots, Cowards and Quislings

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/12/islams-useful-idiots-cowards-and-quislings/

An Islamist ‘known to police’ rampaged through Bourke Street and left a good man dead. Yesterday in Strasbourg one of his co-religionists did likewise and took many more lives. These outrages are now so common they flicker for a moment in the headlines then vanish and are gone. What do our leaders do? Frisk old ladies at airports and say nary a word against Islam.

It used to be called the Silly Season, now it has turned more into the season of foreboding with the inevitable bloody uptick. The threat of terror attacks across the Western world is the gift from fundamentalist Islam, feckless politicians and a Left intent on diversity at any cost. Today’s atrocity is the terror attack in Strasbourg, France, where three people are confirmed shot dead and numerous injured at a Christmas market. The city is in lockdown and the police are hunting the gunman who was, predictably and unsurprisingly, known to them and on a terrorist watch list. Yet nothing was done until he acted.

All too many people have become so blasé (to use a French word) about these events that Islamist atrocities are the expected, if not fully accepted, normal. The media don’t even report many of the more “minor incidents” such as the stabbing of three women at a train station in the French city of Mulhouse only two days ago. The attacker in that case was captured and, fortunately, none of the victims died. The official story, as is so often the situation now, is that the attacker was suffering from a “mental disorder”. Is anyone even surprised by that explanation anymore?

Christmas Market Gunman Yelled ‘Allahu Akbar’ Before Opening Fire By Jack Crowe

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/christmas-market-gunman-yelled-allahu-akbar-before-opening-fire/

The gunman who killed two and critically wounded seven Tuesday evening at a Christmas market in Strasbourg, France was motivated by Islamic extremism, officials announced Wednesday.

Rémy Heitz, the Paris prosecutor who specializes in terrorism cases, said Wednesday that multiple witnesses heard the man shout “Allahu Akbar” — an Arabic phrase meaning “God is Great” — before opening fire. The attacker, who remains at large, has a criminal record and has served time in prison, according to officials.

“He had been incarcerated multiple times and was known to the prison administration for his radicalization and his proselytizing attitude,” Heitz said of the gunman, a Strasbourg native who has been identified only as Chérif C., 29.

Chérif is one of more than 20,000 individuals identified by French authorities as a potential terror threat, Heitz said. The 29-year-old was flagged with a so-called “S-file,” which stands for La Sûreté de l’État, or security of the state — a designation that doesn’t indicate someone is an imminent threat, but rather that the individual should be monitored.

“The S File can target individuals who aren’t very dangerous, and it is used only to watch their movements and trips around the country,” Mr. Nuñez said. “It isn’t a criterion of dangerousness.”

Police raided Cherif’s home Tuesday morning, just hours before the attack, in an unrelated murder investigation and found a rifle, ammunition, several knives and a grenade. While he had never been convicted on terrorism-related charges, Cerif has an extensive criminal record comprised of 27 convictions for a number of crimes, including several assaults and robberies.

With Friends Like Angela Merkel, Does Israel Need Enemies? By P. David Hornik

https://pjmedia.com/homeland-security/with-friends-like-angela-merkel-does-israel-need-enemies/

Last Saturday, German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union Party voted down a motion to freeze funding for the Palestinian Authority until it stops its “pay to slay” imbursements to terrorists and their families. The motion stated that “with the payments, the PA knowingly and willingly supports terror against Israel and makes this a worthy financial business.” But Merkel’s party wasn’t moved.

One day later, a Palestinian terror attack seriously wounded a pregnant woman. The baby, who was delivered in an emergency procedure, held out for a few days and died on Wednesday.

In October during a visit to Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial museum, Merkel referred to “the everlasting responsibility of Germany to remember this crime and to oppose anti-Semitism, xenophobia, hatred, and violence.”

Opposing anti-Semitism and those other ills, however, means little to Merkel when they bear a “Made in Iran” stamp. Last month, during one of Iran’s hundreds of direct or implicit calls for Israel’s destruction, Iran’s allegedly “moderate” President Hassan Rouhani called Israel a “cancerous tumor in the region” and a “fake regime.” The European Union, of which Germany stands at the helm, called Rouhani’s words “totally unacceptable.”

But this was just lip service. As Iran threatens Israel with destruction, funds and trains terror organizations along Israel’s borders, denies the Holocaust, builds ballistic missiles, sows mayhem throughout the Middle East, and commits severe human rights abuses at home, Germany “remains Iran’s most important trade partner.” Last month, flouting U.S. sanctions on Iran, the German government extended 911 million euros in export credits to 58 German companies. The credits are aimed at “protecting [these companies’] business dealings with Iran from the high risks of its markets.” Indeed, German firms’ exports to Iran had already soared in October.

Theresa May survives confidence vote

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-46547246

Prime Minister Theresa May has won a vote of confidence in her leadership of the Conservative Party by 200 to 117.

Mrs May is now immune from a leadership challenge for a year.

But the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg said the result was “not at all comfortable” for the prime minister and a “real blow” to her authority.

Mrs May won the confidence vote with a majority of 83, with 63% of Conservative MPs backing her and 37% voting against her.

The confidence vote was triggered by 48 of her MPs angry at her Brexit policy, which they say betrays the 2016 referendum result.

Jacob Rees-Mogg, who led calls for the confidence vote, said it was a “terrible result for the prime minister” and called on her to resign.

The result was greeted by cheers and applause from Tory MPs as it was announced by backbench Tory chairman Sir Graham Brady.

The prime minister still faces a battle to get the Brexit deal she agreed with the EU through the UK Parliament, with all opposition parties and dozens of her own MPs against it.

Mrs May earlier vowed to fight on to deliver her Brexit deal, which she argues is the only option for leaving the EU in an orderly way on 29 March.

But in a last-minute pitch to her MPs before the vote she promised to stand down as leader before the next scheduled election in 2022.

France: A Revolt against Europe’s Elites? by Bruce Bawer

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13401/france-revolt-elites

Maybe this is it — the start of the Western European public’s pushback against the elites’ disastrous multicultural and globalist project.

For years, those of us who write and worry about the rise of Islam in Western Europe have known that eventually, if the governments of these countries did not change course dramatically, something had to give. So far, the natives had, for the most part, been remarkably tame. They had swallowed a lot. Their leaders had filled their countries with huge numbers of immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa, a disproportionate number of whom were making it clear that they had no intention of fully joining or contributing to their host societies but, rather, were content to take, to harm, to damage, and to destroy, and were determined, in the long run, to conquer and rule.

No one had ever asked the citizens of Western Europe whether they wanted their countries radically transformed in this manner. This transformation, moreover, was intensifying by the year. At some point, surely, the native peoples of Western Europe would react.

But what form would it take? Those of us who are professionally preoccupied with these topics spent untold hours pondering this question. We asked one another: what do you think will happen? Some prophesied Balkanization. Already there were no-go zones – enclaves in and around major cities where “infidels” were unwelcome and where police and fire personnel were routinely pelted with rocks if they dared to intrude. It was easy enough to imagine those areas expanding, their de facto sovereignty under sharia law officially recognized and some kind of relatively stability established. Other observers forecast riots by natives — not the elites whose personal lives were minimally affected by the Muslim presence in their countries, but the less privileged types whose neighborhoods and schools had become danger zones, whose taxes had been raised repeatedly to bankroll massive payouts to immigrant-group members, and whose doctors and hospitals had been so overburdened by the newcomers that vital treatments were increasingly rationed and waiting times increasingly long.

In 2016, the British shocked the world by voting for Brexit, and later the same year Americans pulled off an even bigger stunner by electing Donald Trump to the presidency. Some commentators expected that elections in France, Sweden, and the Netherlands would also yield sensational results, but although there were advances for parties that favor immigration controls, such as Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (formerly National Front), the Sweden Democrats, and Geert Wilders’s Freedom Party and Thierry Baudet’s Forum for Democracy, both in the Netherlands, those gains were smaller than expected. On the other hand, last year the Austrians elected as their Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, a vocal opponent of EU-imposed asylum quotas, and this year the Italian premiership went to Giuseppe Conte, who takes a strong stance against illegal immigrants and has barred migrant ships from Italian ports.

Jihad in Strasbourg Cherif Chekatt reminds Emmanuel Macron that climate change is not the only threat France faces. Robert Spencer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272217/jihad-strasbourg-robert-spencer

Emmanuel Macron, France’s youthful wunderkind, Europe’s poster child for globalism and socialism, has been absorbed lately with furious protests and riots over a confiscatory new tax he placed on gasoline in order to fight what he thinks of as the greatest threat France and the world face today: climate change. But on Tuesday in Strasbourg, a Muslim named Cherif Chekatt reminded Macron that France faces another threat, one that could prove to be immensely more serious: jihad. Chekatt opened fire at a Christmas market in his native Strasbourg, murdering four and injuring eleven.

As of this writing, Chekatt is on the run, and in a departure from the recent tendency to wave away all such attacks as manifestations of “mental illness” and insist that they’re not terrorism, much less jihad, French authorities are, according to the Telegraph, “treating the attack as a terrorist act. Anti-terrorist prosecutors have opened an investigation.”

In fact, Chekatt was “on a list of ‘security threats,’” France’s “Fiche S” list of people who pose a serious terror threat. RT reported that the regional prefecture announced: “The author of these acts, listed as a security threat, had been sought by police” on Tuesday, but they hadn’t been able to catch up with him before he opened fire. A former London police inspector, Peter Kirkham, explained to RT: “There are so many people that are involved around the edges of this sort of terrorism if this is what it turns out to be, that you can’t keep any sort of meaningful surveillance on them. Even just monitoring the use of communications and social media would be too much.”

And that’s especially true when, like Macron, you don’t want to admit that there is any significant threat at all.

Populist Revolt Against Climate Change Yellow Jackets may take on UN Migration Pact next. Rael Jean Isaac

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272168/populist-revolt-against-climate-change-rael-jean-isaac

President Emanuel Macron’s agreement to scrap the gas tax due to take effect in January marks the first round in the populist revolt against European elites on the issue of climate change. It is all but certain to be followed by more such confrontations in the years ahead, not just in France but throughout the EU.

While the broad populist revolt on immigration has been widely reported, if usually in a tone of moral disapproval, the emergence in France of a new front directed against the obsession with climate change by the political class is in danger of being missed altogether by many in the mainstream media. The New York Times described the movement as “among the most serious challenges yet to President Emanuel Macron’s pro-business government.” Even the news pages of The Wall Street Journal (Dec. 4) depict an “essentially leaderless movement, which has voiced opposition to Mr. Macron’s pro-business agenda.” To describe Macron’s war on fossil fuels as a “pro-business agenda” is Orwellian.

Yes, in the way typical of social movements, this one has widened its scope, embracing other discontents, but there is no doubt about its origins. The protests began on November 17 explicitly to demand the roll back of an additional 30 cents a gallon tax on diesel fuel (less for regular gas) scheduled to go into effect in January. A gallon of gas already costs over $7, over 60% in green taxes. Initially doubling down, Macron called the taxes essential to fighting climate change. Adopting the high-flying rhetoric of global warming zealots, he promised to create a “high council for the climate” with the aim of saving the planet and avoiding “the end of the world.” When the Yellow Jackets (named after the neon vests French drivers must wear in roadside emergencies) were undeterred and public support for them remained stubbornly strong, Macron first agreed to postpone implementing the taxes for six months, then to abandon them when one of the movement’s emerging leaders insisted “The French do not want crumbs. They want the entire baguette.” In his December 10 speech seeking to defuse the movement the climate all but disappeared. Macron promised minimum wage hikes and lower taxes on pensions. There was no mention of a “high council for the climate.” He devoted a mere eleven words to the subject: dealing with climate change was a question of the day.