RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13009/erdogan-germany-soccer

Two German national soccer team players of Turkish origin had a photo-op with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and gave signed club shirts as gifts to him. One of the shirts bore the message (in Turkish): “With respect to my president. Yours faithfully”.
After the first exit poll, thousands of Turks in German cities took to the streets, honked car horns and waved Turkish and AKP flags, celebrating Erdogan’s election victory until well after midnight.
“When do you finally realize that the most important requirements for integration are not language and upward mobility, but emotional bonds and identifying with the country in which one lives?” — Hamed Abdel-Samad, German-Egyptian political scientist.

This summer, the German public began to realize that there are hundreds of thousands of Germans of Turkish origin who revere as their leader not German Chancellor Angela Merkel, but Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

In a country where Erdogan is arguably the most-despised foreign leader, this revelation was probably bound to create a dust-up. For years, Erdogan’s human rights violations, his slander against Germany (where he sees “Nazi practices” at work) and the imprisonment in Turkey of German citizens on trumped-up terrorism charges have been regular news in the German media. The fate of German-Turkish journalist Deniz Yücel, arrested by the Turkish police in February 2016, then held in solitary confinement in a Turkish prison for almost a year, has caused as much public outrage in Germany as the imprisonment and subsequent house arrest of Pastor Andrew Brunson has in the United States. Cem Özdemir, a former chairman of Germany’s Green Party — who in 1994 became the first member of the German parliament who had Turkish roots — has called Erdogan a “hostage taker”.

So it was not surprising, shortly before the soccer World Cup, when two German national soccer team players of Turkish origin had a photo-op with Erdogan, that there was a national outcry.

In a meeting at London’s Four Seasons Hotel on May 15, Mesud Özil (Arsenal London) and Ilkay Gündoğan (Manchester City), two midfielders who had been called up by Germany’s coach, Joachim Löw, for the World Cup in Russia, gave signed club shirts as gifts to the Turkish president. The shirt given by Gündoğan — who holds only German citizenship — bore the message (in Turkish): “With respect to my president. Yours faithfully”. Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) immediately distributed the pictures through its media channels and used it in its election campaign.

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2018/09/genocide-lite-massacre-meaning/

Vehemence is the tribute egotism pays to guilt: ‘I ought to feel the wrongs of the world deeply because that is how good people feel them: therefore, if I express myself strongly enough, I will be seen as good.’ The stronger the words, even when grossly misused, the more radiant the projected virtue.

A young Frenchman whom I know had just returned from a year in Australia. For many young French people a year in Australia has become almost a rite de passage, their favoured destination for such a rite. And the young Frenchman did not regret his choice before he knuckled down to the serious business of having a career that he did not really want and would not really enjoy. Such is the fate, perhaps, of most of mankind, or at least of educated mankind.

Naturally I asked him how he had liked Australia. He had liked it very much. What he missed about France, though, was the sense of history, missing in Australia. I said that Australia had a very interesting history, though of course not a long one by European or Asian standards.

“You mean the genocide?” he said.

He was an intelligent young man, but not the kind to devote much attention to the details of history as against a general feeling of its presence or absence. And he knew that there had been a genocide in Australia, a fact that he had absorbed by a process of cultural osmosis rather than by more scholarly means.

I said that I thought there had been no genocide in Australia, that the claim that there had been such a genocide was misleading. It was true that the fate of the Aboriginal population had been in many respects an awful one, and no doubt very bad things had been done by settlers, but there was a tragic dimension to the encounter which required no genocidal intent to produce its results.

It turned out that we were talking at cross-purposes. He did not mean by genocide the attempt to kill an entire race of people, such as occurred in Rwanda. He meant something more along the lines of the effective destruction of a culture or extinction of a way of life by, for example, removal of children from their parents and bringing them up in a completely different culture, speaking a different language.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12975/killing-free-speech

The OIC’s media strategy encourages “accurate and factual portrayal of Islam. Emphasis should be directed at avoidance of any link or association of Islam with terrorism or the use of Islamophobic rhetoric… such as labeling criminal terrorists as ‘Islamic’ fascists, ‘Islamic’ extremists.”

That part of the strategy has already had much success across the Western world, where authorities and media do not want to label Muslim terrorists as Islamic, but routinely describe them as “mentally ill.”

The OICs highly ambitious plans to do away with freedom of speech go severely underreported in the West. Mainstream journalists do not appear to find it dangerous that their freedom of speech should be supervised by the OIC, while Western governments, far from offering any resistance, appear, perhaps for votes, to be cozily going along with everything.

The Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) is trying to curb your freedom of speech — yet again[1].

In June, the first “I 1st Islamic-European Forum for examining ways of cooperation to curb hate speech in the media,” initiated by the OIC, ironically but sadly took place at the Press Club Brussels Europe.

The director of the information department of the OIC, Maha Mustafa Aqeel, explained that the forum is part of the OIC’s media strategy[2] to counter “Islamophobia”:

“Our strategy focuses on interacting with the media, academics, and experts on various relevant topics, in addition to engaging with Western governments to raise awareness, support the efforts of Muslim civil society bodies in the West, and engage the latter in developing plans and programs to counter Islamophobia.”

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2018/09/20/checkmate-chequers-miserable-day-theresa-may/

Well, at least someone seemed to be enjoying himself. “No deal is not my working assumption,” purred Jean-Claude Juncker, the President of the European Commission, “but should it happen, we are prepared. The Commission has prepared in detail for all the consequences of a no deal. So don’t worry. Be happy!”

Looking somewhat less carefree was Theresa May. At the end of the EU’s summit in Austria, the Prime Minister gave a brief press conference. Her day had not gone well. Donald Tusk, the President of the European Council, had just announced to the world that Mrs May’s plan for Brexit “will not work”. For the Prime Minister, it was a public humiliation. At the weekend, she’d declared that MPs would be forced to choose between two options: support her Chequers plan, or face no deal. Thoughtful of the EU, I suppose, to save them the time.

Mrs May stalked into the press room. She looked pale. Perhaps it was just the contrast created by the dazzlingly bright red jacket she was wearing. Or perhaps not.

Still, if we know one thing about Mrs May, it’s that, no matter how bad things get for her, she has a matchless ability to put on a brave face and act as though all is going to plan. Even as the light bulb blows, the door falls from its hinges, and the lumps of plaster flutter down around her like snow.

She spoke briskly. She had, she said, had a “frank” meeting with President Tusk. She had “always said these negotiations were going to be tough”. But she was, she claimed, “confident that we will reach a deal”. And her Chequers plan, she maintained, was still “the only serious and credible proposition on the table”.

https://harpers.org/archive/2018/

This is the story of how the institutions of British Jewry went to war with Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the Labour Party. Corbyn is another feather in the wind of populism and a fragmentation of the old consensus and politesse. He was elected to the leadership by the party membership in 2015, and no one was more surprised than he. Between 1997 and 2010, Corbyn voted against his own party 428 times. He existed as an ideal, a rebuke to the Blairite leadership, and the only wise man on a ship of fools. His schtick is that of a weary, kindly, socialist Father Christmas, dragged from his vegetable patch to create a utopia almost against his will. But in 2015 the ideal became, reluctantly, flesh. Satirists mock him as Jesus Christ, and this is apt. But only just. He courts sainthood, and if you are very cynical you might say that, like Christ, he shows Jews what they should be. He once sat on the floor of a crowded train, though he was offered a first-class seat, possibly as a private act of penance to those who had, at one time or another, had no seat on a train.

When Corbyn became leader of the Labour Party, the British media, who are used to punching socialists, crawled over his record and found much to alarm the tiny Jewish community of 260,000. Corbyn called Hez­bollah “friends” and said Hamas, also his “friends,” were devoted “to long-term peace and social justice.” (He later said he regretted using that language.) He invited the Islamist leader Raed Salah, who has accused Jews of killing Christian children to drink their blood, to Parliament, and opposed his extradition. Corbyn is also a patron of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and a former chair of Stop the War, at whose rallies they chant, “From the river to the sea / Palestine will be free.” (There is no rhyme for what will happen to the Jewish population in this paradise.) He was an early supporter of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement and its global campaign to delegitimize Israel and, through the right of return for Palestinians, end its existence as a Jewish state. (His office now maintains that he does not support BDS. The official Labour Party position is for a two-state solution.) In the most recent general election, only 13 percent of British Jews intended to vote Labour.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/french-court-orders-psychiatric-evaluation-for-national-rally-leader-le-pen/

Le Pen is obviously crazy because she posted images of ISIS executions on Twitter.

Marine Le Pen, the French nationalist leader who lost in the second round of the presidential elections last year to Emanuel Macron, has been ordered to undergo a psychiatric evaluation by the judge presiding over her trial on charges of disseminating violent images.

Le Pen posted three graphic images of executions by Islamic terrorists, including the beheading of American journalist James Foley, on Twitter.

Reuters:

The tribunal declined to confirm it had ordered the evaluation but said the assessments were a normal part of such probes.

“I thought I had seen it all: but no! For having denounced the horrors of #Daesh in tweets, the ‘justice’ is submitting me to a psychiatric evaluation! How far will they go?” Le Pen wrote on Twitter. “It’s UNBELIEVABLE.”

She later told reporters she would skip the test. “I’d like to see how the judge would try and force me do it,” she said. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2018/09/sacks-hypocrisy/

Women in European cities have been attacked, slashed and had acid thrown in their faces for wearing ‘immodest’ dress in areas where Islamic misogyny prevails. Yet what garners the most reactive ink? Boris Johnson and his column decrying the burka
In the last month several Iranian women have been sentenced to long years of imprisonment in the country’s harsh jails for the crime of removing the burka in public. Wearing a garment that covers most of the body and head is mandatory in Iran and Saudi Arabia. Demonstrations by women against this and similar rules have been spreading in both countries and have subsequently been broadcast on Twitter, YouTube and other social media. It’s a movement of great cultural significance, and the women who lead it meet street attacks as well as official punishments. They are extraordinarily heroic.

Yet if you type the single word burka into Google, the first three visual stories that pop up are all related to the recent article by Boris Johnson in the London Daily Telegraph in which he criticised the burka as resembling a “letterbox”. If you then type in both burka and Boris, no fewer than 13 million links to stories involving both words then appear. If you have a morbid curiosity to find out about the rebellion of Iranian women against wearing the burka, however, Google will link you to 5 million stories—a solid number but only just over a third of the number involving Boris.

To be fair, the Boris column generated a lot of secondary stories. There were attacks on him by Prime Minister Theresa May, by the chairman of the Tory party, Brandon Lewis, by “Muslim community leaders” and their “spokesmen” (denouncing his descent into Islamophobia), by various Tory MPs from the party’s Remainer faction (two of whom threatened to leave the party if he ever became its leader), by columnists from several newspapers, notably the Guardian, and even from faraway New York by the US news program the Daily Show, which issued one of its standard solemn moral reproofs in “satirical” disguise.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12996/unrwa-funding

Iran’s average annual contribution to UNRWA in recent years has been $2,000.
Iran does spend billions of dollars a year outside its borders in the Middle East. Iran provides weapons and cash to terrorist groups such as Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Lebanon’s Hezbollah. Iran helps these groups because they want to destroy the “Zionist entity.” Iran is now devoting huge resources in Syria to help dictator Bashar Assad in his fight against the rebels, as well as substantial sums of money helping Houthi militias in Yemen.
Lebanon’s laws treat Palestinians as a special group of foreigners, even denying them the same rights granted to other foreigners. Palestinians in Lebanon are not only denied basic rights enjoyed by Lebanese citizens and other foreigners, but also denied rights as refugees under international conventions.
Arab and Muslim states could start to think of ways to help Palestinians achieve a better life and improve their children’s future instead of sitting in refugee camps and waiting for handouts from the UN and other Western countries. Or is continuing to beg non-Arabs and non-Muslims for money the better deal?

At a meeting in Cairo this month, Arab and Muslim foreign ministers expressed concern about the fate of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) after the US administration decided to cut all US aid to the agency. The ministers “underscored the importance of allowing UNRWA to continue playing a pivotal role in providing humanitarian aid” to Palestinian “refugees.” They also warned that “harming” UNRWA will aggravate the crisis in the Middle East.

If these Arab and Muslim countries are so worried about UNRWA and the Palestinian refugees, why don’t they step in to fill the vacuum and pay for the loss of the US funds? What is keeping them from pulling out their checkbooks and solving this “refugee crisis”?

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13008/international-criminal-court

Ambassador John Bolton was prescient in his 1998 warning, when the formation of body was first being debated in Rome, that it would be ineffective, unaccountable and overly political.

The reconciliation commissions of South Africa and Morocco aimed to rehabilitate victims, and pay compensation for state outrages against them. That method would be a better model for Africa than a court funded and run from Europe.

The International Criminal Court is a noble ideal but a flawed institution. Far better to encourage nations to develop courts that are accountable to the victims and free from charges of selective enforcement or foreign intervention.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) is “already dead to us” National Security Adviser John Bolton told the Federalist Society recently. The U.S. will, he said, resist the court “by any means necessary.”

Why would the Trump Administration take such a hard line against “the world’s court of last resort”? Founded in 2002, in the wake of the Rwandan and Yugoslavian genocides and mass rapes, the international body was supposed to try evildoers who would otherwise escape justice due to broken legal systems in failed states.

Opposing the court is not a new position for the U.S. or Ambassador Bolton. The Bush Administration refused to sign the court’s implementing treaty in 2003, contending that it would lead to trials of U.S. soldiers and spies by a politically turbo-charged body located in Europe. At the time, many European leaders opposed President Bush’s war in Iraq and questioned its actions in the war on terror, including rendition and holding prisoners indefinitely at Guantanamo Bay. Ambassador Bolton was even more prescient. He warned, in 1998, when the formation of body was first being debated in Rome, that it would be ineffective, unaccountable and overly political.