RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.steynonline.com/8757/the-surrender-of-the-public-square
~I see my old friend Boris Johnson is in trouble for comparing burqas to “letterboxes”. Like letterboxes, the body bags on European streets are useful for delivering a message – and the message is getting through loud and clear:

A few months ago, a global media tempest erupted after Polish Catholics held a mass public prayer event across the country. The BBC deemed it “controversial”, due to “concerns it could be seen as endorsing the state’s refusal to let in Muslim migrants”.

The same controversy, however, did not erupt in Britain when 140,000 Muslims prayed in Birmingham’s Small Heath Park, in an event organized by the Green Lane Mosque to mark the end of Ramadan.

Post-Ramadan beanos in municipal parks: who could object? Giulio Meotti runs the numbers:

The annual Birmingham event began in 2012 with 12,000 faithful. Two years later, the number of the faithful rose to 40,000. In 2015, it was 70,000. In 2016, the number was 90,000. In 2017, it was 100,000. In 2018, the number was 140,000. Next year?

Two hundred thousand? A quarter-million? You could ask them, as they do of Polish Catholics, to keep this stuff walled up in their houses of worship. But no matter how big you build the mosque, it’s always too small:

France is debating whether or not to block prayer on the street. “They will not have prayers on the street, we will prevent street praying” Interior Minister Gerard Collomb announced.

“Public space cannot be taken over in this way”, said the president of the Paris regional council, Valérie Pécresse, who led a protest by councilors and MPs.

In fact, the annexation of the public space, early and often, is a conscious strategy on the part of Islamic supremacists that serves to accelerate demographic trends. While the Muslim population is not yet a majority, taking over parks and streets usefully gives the impression that your numbers are greater than they are, and thereby helps speed the process by which “multicultural” neighborhoods become uniculturally Islamic neighborhoods. Same with burqas. Notwithstanding the effusions of Guardian columnists and BBC commentators, most other people react to the Islamization of the streets by moving out (if they can). Thus the flight of Jews from Molenbeek and gays from London’s East End. You can say a lot of things about Islam, but it acts with great strategic clarity.

~Speaking of public space, it’s not accidental that the famous final scene of the original film of Planet of the Apes shows a shattered Statue of Liberty: the toppling of statuary is perhaps the easiest shorthand for civilizational overthrow. Of course, in our age of ahistorical vandalism, we are our own apes – hence, the toppling of President McKinley in California, Sir John A Macdonald in British Columbia, and at Cambridge University of its former chancellor. Field Marshal Smuts is one of only two South Africans honored by a statue in Parliament Square in London (the other being Nelson You-know-who), but I wonder how long that will be permitted to stand. My old boss Charles Moore addresses what the Speccie’s headline writers call Smuts-shaming:

Cambridge University, of which Jan Smuts was once Chancellor, has removed his bust from public display. According to John Shakeshaft, the deputy chairman of the university’s governing council, Smuts has ‘uncomfortable contemporary significance’, as ‘part of the system that led to apartheid’.

That’s one way of putting it. It was the National Party that introduced apartheid to South Africa in 1948, and the only reason they were able to do so was because they defeated Smuts’ United Party in the general election. Smuts’ party won 49.18 per cent of the vote, whereas Malan’s Reunited National Party got under 38 per cent, but through the various quirks of constituency boundaries won a narrow majority of the seats – and immediately went full steam ahead on dismantling the pre-apartheid South Africa built by Smuts. In other words, Jan Smuts was the civilized alternative to apartheid, and a fat lot of good it does him in the eyes of the hack mediocrities on Cambridge’s governing council.

True, Smuts, like virtually every white leader of his generation, did not want full democratic rights for black people in South Africa, but there are other things to be said. That he helped Britain win two world wars, put forward the plan for the League of Nations after the Great War and helped compose the UN Charter after the next, that he was a leading botanist, a great general, and the man who created the Union of South Africa, thus bringing into being the most important country in Africa.

I cited just a few weeks ago Churchill’s characterization, in a very famous speech to the House of Commons, of Smuts as “that wonderful man, with his immense profound mind”. He was the only man to serve in the Imperial War Cabinet in both world wars, and during the first, as I wrote earlier this year, he played the key role in creating the Royal Air Force:

On this day exactly a century ago the RFC and the RNAS were merged to form an entirely separate third branch of the British military – the Royal Air Force, the first such independent air force in the world.

A hundred years on, if you walk into the RAF Club in Piccadilly, the first chap you see as you enter the foyer is not an Englishman but a South African – that’s to say, a bust of General Jan Smuts, later Prime Minister of South Africa, and the only South African to be honored with a statue in Westminster’s Parliament Square until Nelson Mandela’s went up. Smuts was a member of Lloyd George’s Imperial War Cabinet, and it was his report arguing that air power should be treated as entirely distinct from land and sea that led to to the creation of the RAF.

Smuts’ was an extraordinary life, rich and varied: as Charles Moore acknowledges, he was a man of his time, but one whose greatness transcended it. And his influence lingers to this day, in that perhaps the most famous speech the Queen has ever given (and one whose commitment she has stood by) was made with significant input from Smuts:

Above all, in this context at least, he is a fascinating study as a white man who fought the colonial power, led his country to independence, yet maintained the value of the British connection. It was partly under Smuts’s influence that the present Queen made her famous promise to the Commonwealth in Cape Town (‘All of my life, whether it be long or short…’) in 1947. I wonder if his detractors have thought about any of this. Whether they have or not, Cambridge should.

It is so depressing to watch, almost on a daily basis, the erasure of great men by know-nothing non-entities who can build nothing, create nothing, do nothing but destroy all that does not conform to the ever shifting pieties of present-tense virtue-signalling. A few years ago, I wrote about the contrast between Smuts’ South Africa and today’s. That applies to the imperial metropolis, too.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12910/cyprus-journalists-prosecution

“The atrocities of the Turkish army included wholesale and repeated rapes of women of all ages, systematic torture, savage and humiliating treatment of hundreds of people, including children, women and pensioners during their detention by the Turkish forces, as well as looting and robbery on an extensive scale, by Turkish troops and Turkish Cypriots.” — The Cyprus Federation of America.

“You are hostile. Hostile to everything that is good, beautiful and right… You are not protesters, you are terrorists. You hit, broke, destroyed and attempted to murder us. You call that a protest? You are like the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi, Boko Haram in Nigeria, and jihadist marauders who carry out beheadings in Syria.” — Şener Levent, the editor-in-chief of the Turkish-language daily newspaper Afrika in Cyprus, who is being tried by Turkey for two articles he recently wrote.

In an attempt to change the demographic structure of the area, thousands of illegal settlers have been brought from Turkey to the occupied part and around 43,000 Turkish occupation troops have been stationed there.

Turkey does not want any of its crimes against the island to be exposed — particularly by Turkish Cypriots. It appears that what is once again being targeted in these lawsuits against Afrika is not only Levent’s courageous journalism but also the freedom and sovereignty of Cyprus.

https://wp.tomgrossmedia.com/mideastdispatches/

In a tweet last week, Dan Hogan, who worked on the British Labour Party’s internal disciplinary inquiries (but has now quit), revealed the scale of allegations investigated. Hogan said: “I’ve done plenty of disciplinary cases against Labour members who compared Israel to the Nazis, peddled conspiracy theories about Israel, promoted Holocaust deniers, praised terrorists, and who questioned the Britishness or loyalty of British Jews.”

Other MPs from the party’s moderate wing said that the party does not have enough staff to handle all the anti-Semitic allegations coming in about Labour Party members.

This is another in an occasional series of dispatches about British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, who continues to rise in some opinion polls (largely because of the government’s difficulties over Brexit) and is currently a favorite to be the next prime minister of the United Kingdom. The UK is, of course, a nuclear-armed power and a permanent member of the UN Security Council.

(This dispatch is primarily for readers in America and elsewhere since papers such as the New York Times have inadequately explained what is happening in the UK.)

The cover of yesterday’s Times of London comes is hardly surprising. The far left in many ways share the same anti-Semitic ideology of the extreme right. It led to the murder and persecution of Jews in Soviet Russia, for example. (Because there are laws against race hatred and anti-Semitism in many countries today, including the UK, they often disguise their anti-Semitism as anti-Zionism.)

https://amgreatness.com/2018/08/26/sweden

American progressives are often beside themselves when extolling the apparent and deceptive wonders of the Scandinavian model.

Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) doesn’t stop yapping about Denmark. Indeed, whenever “democratic socialists” are asked to enumerate a country in which their creed has actually worked and not ended in the repression and slaughter of countless people, or the immiseration of many more, they always point to one of the Scandinavian countries.

Trouble is, those countries are certainly not socialist.

Swedish Social Democrats Are In Trouble
Sweden is often the first pick. And for good reason. The consensual, unashamedly egalitarian high-tax, high-spend Nordic model has been the darling of Western progressives for decades. Even The Economist once said the Nordic model was the future.

The Swedes are cosseted from cradle to grave. They’re some of the happiest people on earth. And some of the most trusting. The Swedish economy is booming. Strong collaboration-minded unions ensure wages are high. Those willingly steep taxes fund “free” healthcare and “free” college. Lose your job in Sweden, and the government will pay 80 percent of your previous salary for the first 200 days of your unemployment. Sweden, in the progressive mind at least, works.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/08/the_war_continues_isis_searching_for_new_land.html

In his first State of the Union address in January 2018, President Donald Trump declared ISIS militarily defeated and reminded the Congress of his 2017 pledge to work with America’s allies to extinguish ISIS from the face of the Earth. He declared that “one year later, I’m proud to report that the coalition to defeat ISIS has liberated very close to 100 percent of the territory just recently held by these killers in Iraq and Syria.” Indeed, since President Trump took office, ISIS has lost around 21,400 square miles, or 96%, of its territory.

Tremendous progress in fighting ISIS was made in May, when a Coalition strike that was a part of Operation Roundup, which began on May 1 to accelerate the defeat of ISIS in the Middle Euphrates River Valley and Iraq-Syria border region, killed ISIS leader Abu Khattab al-Iraqi, who oversaw revenue generation through the illicit sale of oil and gas. Overall, during the last two years, ISIS oil revenue was slashed by more than 90%.

Moreover, Operation Roundup recently resumed in mid-August to gain ground and remove terrorists from the battlefield through offensive operations coupled with precision coalition strike support, Department of Defense officials said.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/08/left_declares_trumps_concern_about_south_african_farm_expropriations_racist_dog_whistle.html

See also Rick Moran’s: Did Trump endorse ‘white nationalist conspiracy theory’ in South Africa tweet?

A hideous specter is descending over the once-promising South African political landscape: Race hate. An end to property rights. Poverty. The grotesque inequality of all socialist regimes. And an inevitable Zimbabwe-like ruin.

The country of course, has rather insanely started expropriating the country’s white-owned farms without compensation, imagining that in doing so, its government will finally make black South Africans rich and equality the reality. It’s simple: End the niceties of rule of law, and all you do is add free stuff. Or, get your free stuff (and vote for us!) How’d that work out in Venezuela? Heck, how’d that work out in Zimbabwe next door? We are looking at the most prosperous and developed nation on the African continent about to become an absolute dump in a striking parallel to its fellow formerly rich country across the Atlantic, Venezuela.

To see this happen is astonishing. South Africa 20 years ago was a nation so full of promise in its commitment to a ‘non-racial’ society. To see a smart nation like this go off the cliff like another lemming in the name of ‘equality’, after all we know about how this works out elsewhere, shows the amazing disconnect from reality that infects the minds of socialists.

http://carolineglick.com/john-bolton-warns-u-s-wants-hezbollah-out-of-syria/

U.S. National Security Advisor John Bolton told Breitbart News in an exclusive interview on Wednesday that the Trump administration insists “Hezbollah forces in Syria have to go back to Lebanon.”

In a wide-ranging conversation following several days of meetings with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and senior Israeli defense officials, Amb. Bolton discussed the U.S. position on Iranian and Hezbollah operations in Syria and the threat they pose to Israel and to U.S. interests in the region.

Syria and Iranian deployment in Syria, he said, dominated President Donald Trump’s discussions with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki last month. That came after Netanyahu had previously expressed grave concern regarding the threat Iran’s entrenchment in Syria poses to Israel.

In Bolton’s words: “Syria was the main topic of discussion during President Trump’s meeting with President Putin in Helsinki. This was the case both during their meeting with their advisors and during their one-on-one meeting. Prime Minister Netanyahu’s discussion of the issue during his phone call with the president earlier that week and during his visit with Putin during the FIFA [World Cup] tournament [on July 12] contributed to making Syria such an important issue.”

During his press conference with President Trump, Putin prompted concerns from critics about his intentions regarding the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12909/macron-partition-france

The first legislative rider abolished the obligation of religious associations to declare themselves as lobbying groups — a measure that clearly opens the way for entities such as Muslim Brotherhood to lobby Members of Parliament without leaving a trace.

Is it, however, the business of the secular State of France to organize Muslims and train “republican” imams?

The tradition in France ever since the 1905 secularism law — one accepted by all religions except Islam — is that religion may not to impose its rules on secular society. Now it is France that must adapt to Islam.

The big question is: Who will be heading and managing this new framework? Will it be the Muslim Brotherhood, the most powerful organization, which controls more than 2,000 mosques in France? Or a young guard of Muslim technocrats close to the president but with no ties to mosques, imams and the organized Muslim community in general?

In a confessional book, “A President Shouldn’t Say That…”, published in 2016, a few months before the 2017 French presidential election, France’s then President François Hollande admitted that France has “a problem with Islam. No one doubts it,” he wrote. He wrote as well that France has a problem with veiled women in public and with mass immigration. Then he added: “How can one avoid a partition? Because that is still what is happening: a partition”.

The “partition” about which Hollande was talking was the partition of France — one part for Muslims and another for non-Muslims.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/another-upheaval-down-under-1535151472

Australia’s ruling Liberal Party deposed another Prime Minister on Friday, its second internal coup in three years, and with an election approaching the hope is that new PM Scott Morrison is the charm. Malcolm Turnbull had led a coup against the admirable if rough-edged Tony Abbott in 2015, but Mr. Turnbull’s poll numbers have sagged even as he clashed with the party’s conservatives.

A former investment banker from the Sydney suburbs, Mr. Turnbull deserves credit for slowing the growth of spending and cutting individual income taxes. He had help from Mr. Morrison, a 50-year-old former tourism executive, who has been Treasurer in the Turnbull cabinet, the equivalent of U.S. Treasury Secretary.

But Mr. Turnbull contradicted his tax-cutting message with a large levy on banks. And he had the bad luck to contend with a record drought, a constitutional crisis over whether dual citizens could serve as legislators, and a scandal over Chinese political donations to Australian parliamentarians.