RUTHFULLY YOURS

Americans sometimes ask me whether British politics is really as shambolic as it looks. Beyond the 2017 general election, the indecisiveness over what to do post-Brexit vote, and the subsequent slew of Tory resignations, there are some other pressing queries.

Like, why hasn’t Jeremy Corbyn resigned already? Only last week, Labour MP Frank Field decided to leave his party of 40 years because he said its leadership is now “a force for anti-Semitism in British politics.” He’s right. To name but two examples: Corbyn has likened Israel to the Nazis and was caught on video making derogatory comments about Zionists at a Palestinian event in 2013.

Or, what is all this talk of a “People’s Vote”? That’s the increasing push, from what one political journalist rightly calls “a cabal of politicians, celebrities and millionaires,” for another vote on Brexit. Apparently, the 17.4 million people who voted to leave surely must have realized by now that they were wrong.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/politics/knife-crime-acid-attacks-conservatives-now-party-law-disorder

When did it happen? When did we become this ugly society where violent crime is an accepted part of life? See how our reactions are blunted, how hard it is for anything to shock us any more.

Acid thrown at two teenagers causes life-changing injuries? Oh, not again! Now, where did I put the Radio Times? A drive-by shooting on a street in broad daylight leaves an innocent girl dead? Mild flicker of dismay. Thinks: must call daughter to check she’s OK.

Man drives car at speed into cyclists on Westminster Bridge in an alleged copycat terrorist attack? Well, at least nobody died this time, quite lucky really. Another man is stabbed to death on a London street as police announce an inquiry into the murder of a nurse at her home in Teddington? Resigned shrug. Well, it’s the 100th such investigation in the capital this year. What do you expect?

The outrage tank is empty. Truly, it’s shocking how unshockable we are.

“It’s practically one a day,” John Humphrys said on the Today programme. It certainly feels like that. Last year, violent crime soared by 20 per cent, with 1.5 million offences recorded, and those are just the ones the police bother to write down. God knows what the actual figure is.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/german-police-brace-for-more-protests-over-immigration-

BERLIN—The German city of Chemnitz saw renewed anti-immigration protests Thursday, five days after the violent death of a resident turned the city into a rallying point for far-right opponents of the government’s refugee policy.

The demonstrations, which turned violent at times, have shocked the country and are the latest manifestation of the divisions caused by the influx of close to two million asylum seekers since 2015.

Police are currently questioning two men—one from Syria and one from Iraq—over the fatal stabbing early Sunday morning of a local man identified by police only as Daniel H.

Within hours of the killing, protesters had taken to the streets shouting anti-immigration slogans. A video later posted on social media showed a group of white men chasing two foreign-looking youths as one man yelled “You aren’t welcome here.”

On Monday, a demonstration registered by a local anti-immigration group drew around 6,000 protesters—some performing the banned Nazi salute—around the city’s memorial to Karl Marx. About 20 people were wounded in clashes between rival groups of demonstrators and the police, according to regional authorities in Saxony, the eastern state where Chemnitz is located.

The state’s interior ministry had requested police reinforcements ahead of another protest planned during a visit to the city by Michael Kretschmer, the premier of Saxony, on Thursday. Björn Höcke, a right-wing leader of the Alternative for Germany, or AfD party, has urged supporters to conduct a “march of mourning” in Chemnitz on Saturday. Mr. Höcke has previously called for a reassessment of Adolf Hitler’s rule.

Thursday’s protest drew an estimated 900 participants according to the Saxony police, making it much smaller than Monday’s. It ended after two hours in the early evening without any incident.

The refugee crisis that peaked in the summer of 2015 rocked the sedate world of German politics and boosted support for the AfD. The party’s ratings went from low single digits to a 12.6% score at last year’s general election, making it the largest opposition party in parliament. Some of AfD’s best electoral results were in Saxony, where it came second only to Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats.

Earlier this summer, a dispute over whether to tighten immigration rules divided Ms. Merkel’s party and came close to toppling her government. The two sides eventually reached a compromise after Ms. Merkel pledged to negotiate agreements with other European countries allowing Berlin to turn back asylum seekers who have open applications elsewhere. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/08/kings-college-london-safe-spaces-thuggish-violence/

The crisis of free speech on campus is not limited to the U.S.

King’s College London’s student union has a “Safe Space Policy” enforced by marshals who are paid the equivalent of $16 an hour to restrict free speech on campus. Under the policy, a speaker or student can be forced to leave a room if they are accused of using speech that discriminates against someone on the basis of ideology, culture, gender, race, religion, or age, among other characteristics. These categories are so ill-defined that almost any speech could be deemed a violation of the policy. The rationale is that if students have the unequivocal right to shut down those who offend them, the university can create a “Safe Space” where everyone is emotionally protected at all times. The administration believes that this approach is key to keeping student satisfaction high and preventing unrest on campus. But declaring the majority of student events “Safe Spaces” has in reality only served to encourage recurring unsafeness, in the form of violence against visiting speakers.

In January 2016, the Safe Space policy was in place when a mob of anti-Israel students prevented former Israel Security Agency head Ami Ayalon from finishing his talk on the university’s main campus. After the protesters barricaded the room, screamed deafening chants, and set off fire alarms, attendees were forced to flee the event through underground tunnels. This March, an offshoot of Antifa stormed a debate organized by the Libertarian Society between Ayn Rand Institute president Yaron Brook and political YouTuber Carl Benjamin. A familiar scenario unfolded in which smoke bombs were set off, a security guard was seriously injured, and the entire event was ultimately shut down by the actions of masked vigilantes who were invited onto campus by students at the university. At both events, declaring a “Safe Space” failed to stop students from making it unsafe.

https://pjmedia.com/homeland-security/heres-what-happened-when-zimbabwe-seized-white-farmers-land/

Last week’s controversy over President Donald Trump’s call for his State Department to examine South Africa’s coming land reform policy — in which white farmers purportedly are to have their farmlands seized — recalled a similar tragic situation in neighboring Zimbabwe in the early 2000s.

Fox News host Tucker Carlson apparently started the ball rolling when he reported on South Africa’s plan to begin expropriating white farmers’ land. Carlson drew comparisons with a similar program in Zimbabwe 20 years ago that led to economic collapse and hunger there. The president apparently took his cue from Carlson; the talk show host called on the U.S. to take a human rights stand on the basis of how things turned out then in Zimbabwe for both blacks and whites. All of this has been portrayed elsewhere as “dog-whistling” to alt-right nationalists and white supremacists.

Even if the South Africa plan coincidentally excites some racists, Carlson is correct about naming Zimbabwe as the poster child for what can happen down this road. Zimbabwe was that bad — and the United States should put South Africa on notice that it and the whole world is watching if it chooses to follow Zimbabwe down this path.

I know a little about this. Some 17 years ago, while working as a reporter covering federal court systems for the Dallas Morning News, I’d had an interesting connection to the Zimbabwe situation referenced by Carlson. Back then, I heard through my source grapevine that a white family from Africa had arrived in Dallas and was pursuing a U.S. asylum claim. They, because they were white, claimed they had suffered racial persecution at the hands of a black-majority government.

This was classic man-bites-dog stuff, ironic beyond threshold as a news story to a broad general audience far wider than a few white supremacists. Naturally, I jumped all over it. Soon, I was interviewing Dave and Amber Penny and followed them in and out of the immigration courtroom.

A little background: Rebels supporting Mugabe and armed by the Soviet Union achieved independence in 1980 for the country once known as Rhodesia, about the size of Montana. Long before apartheid was dismantled in neighboring South Africa, Zimbabwe was seen as a model of how whites and blacks could live together after blacks replaced white minority rule, despite resentment that whites got to keep the nation’s land wealth. White farmers, who made up about 1 percent of the country’s population of 12 million but formed the backbone of its economy, were urged to stay as a minority class protected by law. The arrangement had been supported by the United States for decades, with appropriately little regard for whatever white supremacists in the U.S. might have had to say about it. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://jamieglazov.com/2018/08/30/anni-cyrus-sold-by-my-father-into-child-slaver

On this new Anni Cyrus Moment, Anni discusses: Sold By My Father Into Child Slavery Under Islam, where she shares her harrowing personal story and unveils the barbaric world of Islamic child marriage.

Don’t miss it!

https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/national/2018-08-23-stay-out-of-sas-affairs
The US president tweeted earlier that he had asked his secretary of state to look into land expropriation without compensation in SA.

On Thursday, EFF leader Julius Malema lashed out at US President Donald Trump‚ whom he referred to as a pathological liar‚ demanding that he stay out of SA’s domestic affairs.

This comes after Trump tweeted that he had asked his secretary of state to look into land expropriation without compensation in SA.

Malema said at a media briefing at the party’s headquarters in Braamfontein that the EFF would not be intimidated by the US. “We want to send a strong message to the US authorities‚ just like we did to the Australian authorities: stay out of SA’s domestic affairs.

EFF leader Julius Malema addressed the media in Johannesburg on August 23 2018 on his response to US President Donald Trump’s tweet on land expropriation.

“SA is a post-colonial country with deep racial inequalities that were long designed by apartheid and colonisation. Our land expropriation programme seeks to realise the ideal of equality and human dignity‚” Malema said.

He said that the process of land expropriation was a means to force white people to share land which was gained through a crime against the humanity of black and African people.

“We must put it on record‚ unequivocally‚ [to] Donald ‘the pathological liar’ Trump: we are not scared of you and your US or Western imperialist forces‚” Malema said.

https://www.steynonline.com/8785/danes-davos-and-denial

A quarter-century ago this summer, Samuel Huntington published the first version of what would become his book The Clash of Civilizations. I’ve quoted it many times over the years, not least its passages on what Huntington called “Islam’s bloody borders”. The man himself has been dead a decade now, and so on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his famous thesis it falls to Francis Fukuyama, Huntington’s former pupil and author of The End of History, to do the honors:

Since Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations has been contrasted with my own End of History in countless introductory International Relations classes over the past two decades, I might as well begin by tackling at the outset the issue of how we’re doing vis-à-vis one another. At the moment, it looks like Huntington is winning.

That’s big of him, all things considered. Fukuyama has attempted to modify his thesis over the years but it doesn’t get any sounder: He argued a book or two back that democratic societies were all trying to “get to Denmark”, but, if you’ve actually set foot in Denmark recently, you might be inclined to think that the challenge for Danes is to figure out a way to get back to Denmark. Elsewhere in Scandinavia, it’s easier to imagine Sweden getting to Sudan than Sudan getting to Sweden. Huntington discerned a lot of this, as Fukuyama concedes:

Huntington was very prescient in his depiction of “Davos Man,” the cosmopolitan creature unmoored from strong attachments to any particular place, loyal primarily to his own self-interest. Davos Man has now become the target of populist rage, as the elites who constructed our globalized world are pilloried for being out of touch with the concerns of the working class. Huntington also foresaw the rise of immigration as one of the chief issues driving populism and the fears that mass migration has stoked about cultural change. Indeed, Carlos Lozada of the Washington Post has labeled Huntington as a prophet of the Trump era.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271134/europes-mullah-appeasement-joseph-puder

Germany’s foreign minister, Heiko Maas, is seeking a way to undercut the Trump administration sanctions against trade with Iran. At a cabinet meeting in Berlin earlier this month he stated that “Europe needs to set up payment systems independent of the United States if it wants to save the nuclear deal between Iran and major powers that were abandoned by President Donald Trump…That is why it is indispensable that we strengthen European autonomy by creating payment channels that are independent of the U.S., a European monetary Fund and an independent Swift system.” He added, “Every day the deal is alive is better than the highly explosive crisis that would otherwise threaten the Middle East.”

Politico reported (August 12, 2018) “EU leaders including U.K. Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt, France’s Jean-Yves LeDrian, Germany’s Heiko Maas, and EU top diplomat Federica Mogherini issued a statement making clear they are actively working to thwart renewed U.S. sanctions against Iran.” They added, “We deeply regret the re-imposition of sanctions by the U.S., due to the latter’s withdrawal from JCPOA, the EU is taking legislative action – activating a so-called blocking statute – in a bid to protect EU businesses operating in Iran from U.S. economic sanctions.”

According to his official website, Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani has “threatened” Europe while meeting with British ambassador to Iran, Rob Macaire. He stated, “After the U.S. illegal withdrawal from the nuclear deal, the ball is in Europe’s court now.” Rouhani and Iranian senior military commanders have recently threatened to disrupt oil shipments from the Gulf countries through the Strait of Hormuz if Washington tries to strangle Iran’s oil exports. Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei has threatened the Europeans with the resumption of Iran’s nuclear activities. He said, “If the Europeans linger over our demands, Iran has the right to resume its nuclear activities. When we see that the JCPOA is useless, one way forward is to restart those halted activities.” In his May 23, 2018 address to Iranian government officials, he conditioned Iran’s remaining in the nuclear deal on European compliance with such demands as: a resolution against the U.S. violation of the UN Security Council resolution 2231, which endorsed the JCPOA; a promise to stop objecting to missile testing and (Iran’s) actions in the Middle East; that the Europeans stand against U.S. sanctions; and European protection for Iran’s oil sales and financial transactions.