RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12715/russia-czech-republic

It is wrong to view Russia’s political warfare as merely a kind of “competition” that lacks the seriousness of an actual military confrontation. As the Center for Strategic and Budget Assessments (CSBA) report — detailing Russia’s political warfare — indicates, politics is war by other means.

Since then, however, the Czech Republic seems to be moving in the opposite direction, with an openly pro-Russian leader, President Milos Zeman. As one colleague of mine put it: “Could the land of the Velvet Revolution be slowly falling under the spell of Putin’s propaganda?”

Jakub Janda, director of the European Values Think-Tank in Prague, worries that one measure of the success of Russian propaganda is that four out of ten Czechs blame the U.S. for the Ukrainian crisis, although there are Russian troops occupying part of the territory of Ukraine. And only 20% of Czechs believe that Russian-organized troops are not operating in Ukraine, a view held by President Zeman.

That countries with such promise as the Czech Republic are possibly sacrificing all that they gained after the end of the Cold War for the Russian government is a sad commentary on the condition of European societies. The good news is that there are brave elements within these societies who seek to push back and reclaim their freedom and sovereignty. Their efforts deserve not only our praise, but our full support.

With the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and the official dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991, NATO assumed that the newly freed countries of Eastern and Central Europe (commonly referred to as the ECE) would join with Western Europe and become both free and prosperous. It was not an entirely reasonable assumption, however: the Russians did not want to accept the end of the Soviet empire; nor were they ready to jettison decades of deep suspicion about the aims of the West, particularly the United States and NATO.

Although the Russians sought economic influence throughout Eastern Europe after the end of the Cold War, they were nevertheless supportive of Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev’s full acceptance of the reunification of Germany and independence for the former members of the Soviet bloc.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270740/ethiopias-new-direction-joseph-puder

Ethiopia recently elected Prime Minister Dr. Abiy Ahmed: a 42-year-old reformer intent on making Africa’s second-largest country the only true democracy on the continent. Last week, Prime Minister Abiy’s trip to Eritrea’s capital city Asmara was promising, signaling a thawing of relations with its arch-enemy following two decades of conflict.

During the historic summit, Abiy and Eritrea’s rebel-turned-dictator Isaias Afwerki agreed to jointly open up shared airspace, to rekindle joint communications, and to re-open embassies. Importantly, Eritrea will now permit Ethiopia to use its port, which became landlocked as a result of Eritrea’s secession from Ethiopia 25-years ago. Ethiopia’s trade capital, Addis Ababa, will finally have access to the Red Sea.

According to Abiy, the two leaders agreed,

To bring down the wall between us. Now there is no border between Ethiopia and Eritrea. That borderline is gone today with the display of a true love…love is greater than modern weapons like tanks and missiles. Love can win hearts, and we have seen a great deal of it today here in Asmara. From this time on, war is not an option for the people of Eritrea and Ethiopia. What we need now is love.

Since his swearing in on April 2, 2018, Abiy has promised to reform Ethiopian governance. During his first speech, Abiy espoused western principles including promoting the idea of Ethipoians’ right to choose their own occupation, supporting protections to ensure human rights, and he extolled the virtues of economic security. But what raised eyebrows was Abiy’s bold invitation to Ethiopian exiles saying, “We will welcome you home,” and promised, “the coming season in Ethiopia is a season of peace and reconciliation.”

http://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/07/australia-vanished-slept/

Like the concerned locals of Britain and, increasingly, of Europe, who every day must confront a new world not of their making, many Australians also feel something fundamental has changed. To put that sentiment in a few words, ‘We have lost our country.’

Two current must-reads are Douglas Murray’s The Strange Death of Europe and Sir Roger Scruton’s Where We Are: The state of Britain now. Each in its own way, and with a very British focus, speaks to the current malaise afflicting much of the West, and certainly Australia.

Setting aside muddled and weak leadership (with the now notable exception of the United States); universal cultural and moral decline; confusion over shared and, increasingly, disagreement over non-shared values; awful corporate behaviour, now revealed on a regular basis; gangs in suburbia; the disgrace that our national parliament has become; the bullying and non-platforming of opinions disagreeable to the elites; and fawning political correctness by the comfortable yet “woke” inner-city trendoids and their cheer squads – setting all this aside – there is something else at work that is creating a sense of deep and broad malaise among the so-called Deplorables and Dis-cons among us.

That something is the growing sense that “our country isn’t ours any more”.

The markers are there and all around us – the unease at China- linked companies buying land and key infrastructure assets (a concern shared, extraordinarily, by both Clive Hamilton and the National Civic Council); whole suburbs of our cities becoming ghettoes, often violent and unsafe; that feeling of walking into the public reception area at Sydney Airport and wondering, “Where am I? Is this Australia?”; being forced by our politicians and cultural elites to bow and scrape before the religion and religion-related regulations, objectives and lifestyles of our recent Middle Eastern arrivals. And so on.

Douglas Murray speaks to this unease, as does Roger Scruton. Murray hones in on the sudden and, for Britain, unprecedented mass migration that has occurred in the UK since the late 1990s, initially championed by Tony Blair’s Government and pursued in a bi-partisan way thereafter. He also claims, in particular, that this sudden new policy was justified in very dubious ways, and was effected without the permission of the public. The push-back, as seen in the Brexit vote, has been palpable.

Scruton has provided what will one day become the go-to conservative case against rampant globalisation, with its free movement of capital across borders and the mass movement of people around the globe. These developments, were allowed, indeed encouraged and championed, by governments in the West, andc they took place largely without anyone’s explicit, democratic permission and subtly, piece by piece, without even the knowledge of most of the public. Scruton refers in particular to the decision taken by the UK Government of the day to allow the ownership of land by foreigners as a critical development – but merely one – in a chain of events that has seen, ultimately, the dismembering of communities, regions, traditions and sub-cultures.

https://www.city-journal.org/html/killing-of-the-romanovs-16030.html

The family was roused early in the morning and told to dress in preparation for an immediate change of location. They were brought to a dingy basement room and ordered to wait, while their killers fortified themselves with liquid courage. One hundred years ago, in the early hours of July 17, 1918, the abdicated Czar Nicholas II and his immediate family, along with four retainers, were murdered, and buried in haste under cover of night.

Studying the years that led to that savage night, it’s hard not to want to shout across time at the last Romanov, to wake him from his walking stupor. His feckless rule was marked by indecision and half-steps at political reform, the necessity of which was obvious to everyone. Sergei Witte, the brilliant diplomat and reformer who engineered Russia’s first constitution, warned Nicholas in 1905 that “Russia has outgrown its existing governmental forms. . . . You must give the people their constitution; otherwise, they will wrest one away.”

Nicholas dithered, while also imploring his cousin Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich to become dictator. The Grand Duke (known as “Tall Nicholas,” for his imposing height) took out his pistol and said that he would shoot himself in the head if the czar refused to sign the decree authorizing the formation of a parliament. Nicholas, himself incapable of dramatic, decisive gestures, signed.

From the outset of his reign, Nicholas was as detached from authority as he was captivated by the weight and romance of its history. His own mother told Witte, years before the premature death of her husband, Czar Alexander III, that Nicholas was incapable of ruling and lacked the character and will to become emperor. His rule bears out this judgment. Inspired by the ideal of the mystical union of the “people and the czar,” Nicholas possessed the political worldview of an early-modern absolutist, along the lines of King James I of England. He tried to convince himself, while revolt and turmoil boiled around him, that the 300-year legacy of the divinely inspired Romanov rule could not possibly end with him.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-putin-agree-to-try-to-solve-syria-crisis-preserve-israels-security-1531771710

President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin agreed to work together on solving the Syrian crisis—with both focusing on the need to guarantee Israel’s security.

In recent weeks, Russian-backed forces of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime made major advances toward Israel and Jordan in the southwest of the country, routing the remaining pockets of the Sunni Arab opposition the U.S. once supported.

At the same time, Israel ramped up airstrikes against Iranian military targets and pro-Iranian militias across Syria, part of its drive to prevent the establishment of a permanent Iranian military presence there.

For Israel, the key demand is that Syrian regime forces stay away from the demilitarized buffer zone along the 1974 cease-fire line between Syria and the Israeli-held Golan Heights—an area the United Nations supervised before the Syrian war erupted in 2011.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said after talks with Mr. Putin in Moscow last week that Israel had no problem with Mr. Assad as long as his forces didn’t attempt to penetrate that demilitarized zone.

Mr. Putin on Monday endorsed that request.

“After the definitive defeat of the terrorists in the southwest of Syria, the situation on the Golan Heights must be brought into full compliance with the 1974 disengagement agreement,” Mr. Putin said. “This would return calm to the Golan, restore the cease-fire, and safely guarantee the security of the State of Israel.”

Mr. Putin remained silent about Israeli strikes against Iranian targets in Syria—attacks that Russia’s formidable air-defense systems haven’t attempted to prevent.

Mr. Trump said he and Mr. Putin shared a commitment to Israel’s security, adding, “I made clear we will not allow Iran to benefit from our successful campaign against ISIS,” referring to Islamic State. Mr. Netanyahu thanked both presidents after the Helsinki meeting.

A key issue left unaddressed for now, at least in public, was the future of U.S. troops in Syria. These forces are mostly deployed in the Kurdish-controlled areas of eastern Syria that have been liberated from Islamic State—and that contain a large share of Syria’s oil and gas resources. U.S. airstrikes repulsed an attempt by regime troops and Russian mercenaries to advance into those areas in February—an event that resulted in massive casualties among the mercenaries, embarrassing Mr. Putin.

Mr. Trump has repeatedly said he wants all U.S. forces gone from Syria—something that would likely lead to the demise of the Kurdish statelet there. One proposal making the rounds in Washington and backed by some Israeli officials would attempt to trade that American withdrawal for a Russian agreement to an Iranian military pullout from Syria.

“Assad should respect the 1974 separation agreements, and it is important that Putin and Trump both expect him to do it,” said retired Brig. Gen. Yossi Kuperwasser, the former head of analysis at Israel’s military intelligence. “But Israel wants Iran not to be allowed to stay in all of Syria, not just the Golan Heights.”

It is far from certain, however, that Mr. Putin has the capacity to force Iran out of Syria even if he wanted to do so.

“The maximalist position of a full Iranian withdrawal from Syria is neither achievable for Moscow nor is it desirable for it as long as the political settlement in Syria has yet to be reached,” said Ellie Geranmayeh, an Iran expert at the European Council on Foreign Relations. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.hoover.org/research/why-europe-gets-no-respect

After the recent G-7 meeting, some European nations such as France and Germany expressed anger that their views were given short shrift by Donald Trump—displaying fits of pique memorialized in a now infamous photo of standing G-7 leaders who were leaning into a surrounded and sitting Trump. “International cooperation,” huffed an unidentified senior French official, “cannot depend on being angry and on sound bites. Let’s be serious.” The former British ambassador to the U.S., Peter Westmacott, sniffed, “Trump is readier to give a pass to countries that pose a real threat to Western values and security than to America’s traditional allies. If there is a ‘method to the madness,’ to use the words of British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, it is currently well hidden.”

Yet in current foreign policy journals, a constant theme is European leaders who lament that Europe does not get its due on the world stage. Why would that be?

After all, if “Europe” is defined by the membership of the 28-member European Union, then it should easily be the world’s superpower. The European project now has an aggregate population (512 million) that dwarfs that of the United States (326 million). Even its GDP ($20 trillion) is often calibrated as roughly equivalent to or even larger than America’s ($19 trillion).

Historically, European geography has been strategically influential—with windows on the Atlantic, Baltic, and Mediterranean, the ancient maritime nexus of three continents. Rome is the center of Christianity, by far the world’s largest religion. Some of the world’s great nations—Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, New Zealand, and the United States—were birthed as European colonies. Some two billion people speak European languages, including hundreds of millions outside of Europe whose first language is English, Spanish, Portuguese, or French.

European products—Airbus, BP, Shell, and Volkswagen—are global household names. France each year hosts the greatest number of the world’s tourists. Europe as a whole is more visited than any other nation or geographical area—and no wonder, given Europe was the home to civilization’s most significant breakthroughs: the birth of the city-state, the emergence of Roman republicanism and its later globalized empire, the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the Industrial Revolution.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12607/mass-migration-european-union

Today, 510 million Europeans live in the European Union with 1.3 billion Africans facing them. If the Africans follow the example of other parts of the developing world, such as the Mexicans in the US, “in thirty years… Europe will have between 150 and 200 million Afro-Europeans, compared with 9 million today”. Smith calls this scenario “Eurafrique”.

The controversial quota system for migrants has already failed. The European Court of Human Rights condemned Hungary for detaining migrants. European governments cannot stop, deport, arrest or repatriate the migrants. What do the authorities in Brussels suggest? Bring everyone to Europe?

French Jews have fallen victim to a form of ethnic cleansing, according to a manifesto signed by, among others, former French President Nicholas Sarkozy and former French Prime Minister Manuel Valls.

“Far from leading to fusion, Europe’s migration crisis is leading to fission”, Stanford’s historian Niall Ferguson recently wrote. “Increasingly, I believe that the issue of migration will be seen by future historians as the fatal solvent of the EU”. Week after week, Mr. Ferguson’s prediction seems to be turning into a reality.

Not only does Europe continue to fragment as anti-immigration sentiment gathers political strength, but, as a result of the migrant crisis, the EU’s border-free internal zone, Europe’s most cherished prize after the Second World War, is now defined as “at risk” by the Italian government, among other governments, such and Austria.

Immigration is also redefining the intra-EU contract.

The Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia, the so called “Visegrad Group”, recently called for EU border defense. “We have to have a Europe capable of defending us”, Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz said as well, after he was invited to join the Visegrad meeting.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12695/islam-multiculturalism-britain-june

Karam Majdi, a 19-year-old failed asylum seeker believed to be from Egypt, was sentenced to seven years in prison for raping a 14-year-old girl he met online. Majdi claimed to be an unaccompanied minor from Syria when he arrived in the UK in 2016.

During the 2018 Quds Day rally in London, Sheikh Mohammad Saeed Bahmanpour of the Islamic Centre of England sent a message “to the Jewish people of Palestine”: “You can be sure that the resistance will come, free Palestine, and wipe Israel off the map.”

A protection order was issued in Sheffield for three sisters, aged one, four and six, deemed at risk of female genital mutilation (FGM).

June 1. Karam Majdi, a 19-year-old failed asylum seeker believed to be from Egypt, was sentenced to seven years in prison for raping a 14-year-old girl he met online. Majdi met the girl and a friend at East Croydon train station in 2017 and raped her in a nearby youth hostel. Majdi claimed to be an unaccompanied minor from Syria when he arrived in the UK in 2016.

June 2. A group of up to five “Asian” males drove over a teenage rugby player and beat him with a golf club in an incident police described as a hate crime. Police said Littleborough RUFC player Matthew Hayden, 17, suffered a fractured skull in the unprovoked attack in Rochdale. Littleborough RUFC said that a car in which Hayden was riding was rammed by another car. When Hayden got out of the car, another car struck him; he was then hit on the head with a golf club. The attackers shouted racial abuses during the assault, which is being treated as a hate crime. Detective Mark McDowall of Greater Manchester Police described the attack as “brutal,” “unprovoked” and leaving Hayden with “life-changing injuries.”

June 3. Paigham Mustafa, a Scots-Muslim writer, was threatened with death after he wrote in a Facebook post that fasting between dawn and dusk during the month of Ramadan is not decreed by the Quran. In a series of threatening messages under the post, one critic said:

“Shut up or else you will get your head chopped off…shut up or else you will be beheaded…shut up you kafir [disbeliever] dog… you will get beheaded… we will kill you kafir.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270718/germanys-collusion-muslim-anti-semitism-daniel-greenfield

On April 25th, thousands in Berlin rallied for the “Berlin Tragt Kippa” or “Berlin Wears a Kippah” march. The march had been called after an Israeli Arab Christian had worn a Kippah, a Jewish religious head covering, to test the level of anti-Semitism only to be violently attacked by a Syrian Muslim refugee screaming anti-Semitic slurs. The video of the attack went viral and the march went viral too.

People of good will wore kippahs, took selfies and no one was assaulted by a Syrian refugee.

In June, the perpetrator, Knaan al-Sebai, pled guilty to the attack. He claimed that despite screaming “Jew” in Arabic at his victim, often used as a slur in the Muslim world, he wasn’t anti-Semitic. Instead he blamed hashish and exhaustion. Despite being 19-years-old, Al-Sebai was sentenced to 4 weeks in juvie.

In Germany, if you’re under 20, you too can be treated as a juvenile after a violent anti-Semitic attack.

The Syrian-Palestinian migrant “fell out of the nest too early and had not yet learned to properly fly,” Judge Günter Räcke tenderly summed up the violent assault by the adult man.

Judge Räcke diagnosed the violent criminal with a bad case of frustration. Jews were just an outlet for his “bad mood”. The job center had cut off his support. When he attacked the man he thought was a Jew, he “felt that he was in the right. That’s a powerful thing.” Indeed it is. Just ask any Nazi.

Knaan al-Sebai had assaulted his victim with a bottle and a belt. He would later claim that despite the assaults, “I did not want to beat him, I just wanted to scare him.” He also screamed anti-Semitic slurs at the Arab Christian veterinary student. When a local German woman told him that you can’t behave this way in Germany, he had shouted back at her, “I don’t give a damn. I’m Palestinian. “

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270749/trumps-blunt-talk-just-what-nato-needs-bruce-thornton

At last week’s NATO meeting in Brussels, Donald Trump took the European members to the woodshed. Using his customary blunt straight-talk abhorred by diplo-sophists, he accused the “delinquent” allies of treating the U.S. like “schmucks” and America like a “piggy bank” by not paying their fair share of NATO’s costs. And he shocked them further by saying they shouldn’t wait till 2024 to reach the goal of spending 2% of GDP on their militaries, but get it done now. Then he literally doubled-down by saying they should be paying 4%.

Our free-riding allies need this straight talk. But more important, everybody needs to recognize that the received foreign policy wisdom about the “rules-based international order” built on transnational institutions is a tottering paradigm well past its sell-by date.

Back at home, Trump’s scolding provoked the same howls that followed his remarks on this subject during the campaign. Forget the hysteria from the Dems. Their over-the-top reactions to Trump’s every syllable are so lunatic and banal that they have become a political dog-bites-man story. But Republican NeverTrumpers need their feet kept to the fire so everybody remembers a pique so incoherent and politically suicidal that they would have preferred a corrupt harpy running our country rather than a president who has delivered a have a booming economy and two originalist Supreme Court Justices.

Listen to this bit of a Weekly Standard editorial about Trump’s NATO dust-up:

Three points seem especially relevant. First, Trump’s rhetoric is foolish and unhelpful. His obsession with NATO spending commitments grows from his bizarre sense that the world’s lone superpower is always and everywhere getting screwed. This victim mentality reflects Trump’s view of himself. The president spends much of his time complaining about the various forces he imagines are out to get him. And he talks about the country in the same way.