RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13002/turkey-education-religion

In 2017, Turkey stopped teaching evolution at secondary school: for extremists, Darwinism remains a taboo subject. Instead, school textbooks started teaching Turkish pupils “jihad.”
A good school, according to extremists, is not where science is taught at universal standards; it is where pious students grow.
Turkey’s Higher Education Board in 2016 asked 1,577 university deans (reportedly every dean in the country) to resign “for the sake of democracy.”

Secular Turks were shocked when Binali Yıldırım, then Minister of Transport, explained to an interviewer why, in his youth, he changed his choice of university:

“I visited Bogazici University and saw that girl and boy students were sitting together… I feared I could go astray. And I decided to attend the technical university.”

Yıldırım who later became President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s choice for prime minister now serves as parliament speaker.

It is not surprising that for Turkey’s extremists, governance broadly means the Islamization of everything, including education at every level. In a 2017 speech, Erdoğan boasted that, after his Justice and Development Party came to power, the number of students at the religious imam hatip schools rose from 60,000 to 1.3 million.

Unsurprisingly, Erdoğan has often declared his political ambition not as raising honest, well-educated, free minds, but as “raising pious generations.”

A good school, according to extremists, is not where science is taught at universal standards; it is where pious students grow.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/koreas-talks-begin-with-goodwill-if-no-quick-results-1537270274?cx_testId=0&cx_testVariant=cx_1&cx_artPos=0#cxrecs_s

SEOUL—North Korea agreed to allow outside inspectors to visit its missile test site and said it would be open to decommissioning its nuclear-enrichment facility, a bold gambit by Kim Jong Un that is aimed at breaking an impasse in negotiations with the U.S. and keeping engagement with Seoul on track.

On Wednesday, the second of three days of talks in Pyongyang, Mr. Kim and South Korean President Moon Jae-in emerged from an hourlong private meeting to sign a document and hold a joint news conference where they each reaffirmed their goal of ridding the Korean Peninsula of nuclear weapons.

Under the agreement, outside inspectors and experts will be allowed to witness the dismantling of North Korea’s Sohae satellite launching facility, located in the country’s northwest. In recent months, commercial satellite imagery has showed North Korea taking apparent steps to break down the site.

The two Koreas also said that the North would permanently decommission its Yongbyon nuclear-enrichment facility—provided the U.S. took “corresponding steps” to fulfill the terms of the agreement signed by the U.S. and North Korea in June. The two leaders didn’t mention the involvement of any international inspectors at Yongbyon.

The announcements offer fresh hope of a breakthrough between Mr. Kim and President Trump, who has floated the idea of a second U.S.-North Korean meeting following their Singapore summit three months ago.

Mr. Trump, in a pair of tweets written just after midnight in Washington, signaled optimism in the diplomatic process. “Very exciting!” he wrote.

Stalled talks between the U.S. and North Korea had loomed over this week’s Pyongyang summit. The U.S. has insisted that the North make concrete steps toward dismantling its nuclear and missile program as a precondition for further diplomacy, while Pyongyang says the U.S. has dragged its feet on signing a treaty to end the Korean War. The Korean Peninsula has remained technically in a state of war for more than six decades after the 1950-53 Korean War ended in armistice without a formal peace treaty.

Wednesday’s agreement will also create a joint military commission aimed at reducing tensions between the two sides. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.wsj.com/articles/extremism-advances-in-the-largest-muslim-country-1537225520?mod=searchresults&page=1&pos=3

Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim nation, has long stood as a role model for religious pluralism. That’s changing. Political Islam and violent extremism have been taking root in society and may soon do so in the government. President Joko Widodo’s choice of Ma’ruf Amin, a 75-year-old cleric, as his running mate in next year’s election marks an ugly turn for Indonesian politics.

Religious minorities had regarded Mr. Widodo as their defender. His rival, retired general Prabowo Subianto, was expected to play the religion card, questioning the incumbent’s Islamic credentials and building a coalition supported by radical Islamists. By choosing Mr. Amin, the president’s defenders argue, he not only has neutralized the religion factor, but might have prevented it from spilling over into violence against minorities. In office, they believe, Mr. Amin will be contained.

Yet Mr. Subianto is unlikely to be deterred from playing identity politics, and rumors that Mr. Amin is reaching out to radical Islamists for support are troubling. Mr. Amin has a history of intolerance. He signed a fatwa that put a Widodo ally, Jakarta’s former Gov. Basuki Tjahaja “Ahok” Purnama, in jail on blasphemy charges. Ahok, who is Christian and ethnically Chinese, was a symbol of Indonesia’s diversity, and as a popular governor was expected to be re-elected. Instead he lost after rivals told Muslims not to vote for a non-Muslim.

Mr. Amin also signed the anti-Ahmadiyya fatwa in 2005, which led to severe restrictions and violence against the Ahmadiyya, an Islamic sect some Muslims regard as heretical. I met recently with Ahmadis in Depok, a Jakarta suburb, where their mosque is closed. The previous week they were visited by 15 local officials ordering them to stop all activities.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/imperialism-will-be-dangerous-for-china-1537225875

China’s real problem isn’t the so-called Thucydides trap, which holds that a rising power like China must clash with an established power like the U.S., the way ancient Athens clashed with Sparta. It was Lenin, not Thucydides, who foresaw the challenge the People’s Republic is now facing: He called it imperialism and said it led to economic collapse and war.

Lenin defined imperialism as a capitalist country’s attempt to find markets and investment opportunities abroad when its domestic economy is awash with excess capital and production capacity. Unless capitalist powers can keep finding new markets abroad to soak up the surplus, Lenin theorized, they would face an economic implosion, throwing millions out of work, bankrupting thousands of companies and wrecking their financial systems. This would unleash revolutionary forces threatening their regimes.

Under these circumstances, there was only one choice: expansion. In the “Age of Imperialism” of the 19th and early-20th centuries, European powers sought to acquire colonies or dependencies where they could market surplus goods and invest surplus capital in massive infrastructure projects.

Ironically, this is exactly where “communist” China stands today. Its home market is glutted by excess manufacturing and construction capacity created through decades of subsidies and runaway lending. Increasingly, neither North America, Europe nor Japan is willing or able to purchase the steel, aluminum and concrete China creates. Nor can China’s massively oversized infrastructure industry find enough projects to keep it busy. Its rulers have responded by attempting to create a “soft” empire in Asia and Africa through the Belt and Road Initiative.

Many analysts hoped that when China’s economy matured, the country would come to look more like the U.S., Europe and Japan. A large, affluent middle class would buy enough goods and services to keep industry humming. A government welfare state would ease the transition to a middle-class society.

That future is now out of reach, key Chinese officials seem to believe. Too many powerful interest groups have too much of a stake in the status quo for Beijing’s policy makers to force wrenching changes on the Chinese economy. But absent major reforms, the danger of a serious economic shock is growing.

The Belt and Road Initiative was designed to sustain continued expansion in the absence of serious economic reform. Chinese merchants, bankers and diplomats combed the developing world for markets and infrastructure projects to keep China Inc. solvent. In a 2014 article in the South China Morning Post, a Chinese official said one objective of the BRI is the “transfer of overcapacity overseas.” Call it “imperialism with Chinese characteristics.”

But as Lenin observed a century ago, the attempt to export overcapacity to avoid chaos at home can lead to conflict abroad. He predicted rival empires would clash over markets, but other dynamics also make this strategy hazardous. Nationalist politicians resist “development” projects that saddle their countries with huge debts to the imperialist power. As a result, imperialism is a road to ruin.

China’s problems today are following this pattern. Pakistan, the largest recipient of BRI financing, thinks the terms are unfair and wants to renegotiate. Malaysia, the second largest BRI target, wants to scale back its participation since pro-China politicians were swept out of office. Myanmar and Nepal have canceled BRI projects. After Sri Lanka was forced to grant China a 99-year lease on the Hambantota Port to repay Chinese loans, countries across Asia and Africa started rereading the fine print of their contracts, muttering about unequal treaties. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/09/jeremy-corbyn-labour-party-anti-semitism-crisis/

Corbyn is leading Labour toward anti-Semitism, and British Jews are right to be worried.

London — Brits just had their hottest recorded summer since 1976, and the political temperature is also turned up to full blast. Throughout the summer, civil wars have consumed both of Britain’s main political parties. While the Tories are now preoccupied with a looming Brexit decision and a potential leadership challenge, Jeremy Corbyn has become the focus of Labour’s all-consuming anti-Semitism row.

The Labour leader has for years now been dogged by a seemingly endless stream of scandals involving anti-Jewish bigotry. In 2009, he invited Islamist “friends from Hamas” to the House of Commons and said that the idea that the group “should be labelled as a terrorist organisation by the British government is really a big, big historical mistake.” In 2010, he hosted an event (also at the House of Commons) on Holocaust Memorial Day in which a Jewish Auschwitz survivor compared the Israeli government to the Nazi regime. In 2014, he attended a ceremony in Tunisia and reportedly laid a wreath on the grave of one the Black September terrorists who murdered eleven Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. Before the Iranian state broadcaster, Press TV, was banned in January 2012, he reportedly accepted up to £20,000 for his appearances on the channel.

In 2016, amid mounting pressure from inside and outside Labour, Corbyn announced an independent inquiry into anti-Semitism and racism in the party. The report concluded that there was a toxic environment within the party. He later apologized for the “concerns and anxiety” caused by his past appearances “on platforms with people whose views I completely reject.” But these vague gestures struck many as empty, and a war for Labour’s very soul is now being fought between the party’s moderate old guard and its Corbynite radicals.

https://pjmedia.com/homeland-security/isis-dressing-up-like-women-in-battle-for-deir-ez-zor-territory/

ISIS is “trying hard to preserve their remaining space” in Syria “by using tactics like burning tires, using innocent civilians as human shields, and dressing up like women,” the spokesman for Combined Joint Task Force-Operation Inherent Resolve said today.

Speaking via video from Baghdad, Col. Sean Ryan noted that the Syrian Democratic Forces — the multi-ethnic, multi-sectarian coalition of Kurds, Arabs, Assyrians and other minority groups who have recaptured most of ISIS’ formerly held caliphate in the country — launched this month the third phase of Operation Roundup, a ground offensive to clear out stubborn ISIS pockets in the Middle Euphrates River Valley.

Phase two of the operation ran from June to September.

“Hajin and the surrounding villages are the last remaining territory acquired by ISIS in the coalition’s area of responsibility, and the victory by the Syrian Democratic Forces there will mean that ISIS no longer holds territory,” he said. ISIS fighters remain scattered throughout surrounding areas, though, and outside of the coalition’s area of responsibility.

The U.S. is “confident that the SDF will prevail” in Hajin, Ryan said. The coalition estimates there are about 1,500 to 2,000 ISIS fighters in the city.

“In both Iraq and Syria, the success of our partner forces is creating stability in areas that have not seen peace since the arrival of ISIS more than five years ago. Lives are being rebuilt again because the ISF and the SDF are providing the necessary security for residents to go back home, rebuild their lives and again hope for their future,” he continued. “However, the truth is military stabilization efforts are not enough. Security creates the space for rebuilding. Residents only gain hope for the future when their children can go to school free from harm, women go buy basic necessities in local shops, and when they can go to their jobs that allow them to support their families. Ultimately, the military cannot fight its way to stability.”

https://pjmedia.com/trending/norway-fetes-young-muslim-refugee-writer-for-trashing-norway/

I only met him in person once, many years ago. We met for beers in downtown Oslo. We didn’t agree on everything: among other things, he had an irrational hostility toward the United States, which I put down, in part at least, to the fact that he had never set foot in the U.S. and that his English was surprisingly poor (we spoke in Norwegian), so that his image of my country was shaped largely by the mainstream Scandinavian media and by various sources in his native tongue, Arabic. But never mind. What mattered was that he loved freedom, hated jihadist Islam, and was brave enough to say so. His name was Walid al-Kubaisi. Educated as a civil engineer at the University of Baghdad, he came to Norway as a political refugee in 1981 and died this past July at the age of sixty.

Walid came to Norway at a time when the Muslim population of Norway was tiny and the Norwegian cultural elite was still willing to lend a respectful ear to a severe criticism of Islam by someone who had grown up as an adherent of the faith. Kubaisi was nothing if not critical. He condemned the hijab. He recognized Tariq Ramadan as a two-faced snake who was out to Islamize Europe. He saw through the dissimulations of the Muslim Brotherhood. In 2010, after a number of other Norwegians with Muslim backgrounds had begun to make high-profile careers for themselves as politicians and commentators, he warned that despite their images as democracy-loving bridge-builders, several of the most prominent of them were nothing more or less than Trojan horses for jihadism.

Well, Walid is dead now — and those Trojan horses are still alive. And while there don’t seem to be any new Walids on the horizon — the Norwegian media are no longer as open to such voices as they they used to be — there are plenty of new Trojan horses. One of them is a hijab-wearing young woman named Sumaya Jirde Ali. Born in 1997, she came to Norway from Somalia at age six. Two years ago, she stepped onto the national stage with an opinion piece in Aftenposten. She had just been in London, and was impressed by the “diversity” on display there. By contrast, she charged, Norway is way behind. “During the last few decades Norway has become more multicultural,” she wrote. “Why is it that in 2016, there aren’t more non-ethnic Norwegians in advertisements, movies, magazines, and in government agencies?” She maintained that “for integration to work, it must go both ways. It’s not enough for immigrants to adapt.”

No, there was nothing new about it. By 2016, her argument was an embarrassing cliché, a platitude. But in 21st century Norway, the cultural elite eats this sort of thing up, at least if it’s under the byline of a teenage girl in a hijab. If Sumaya had written a piece about how grateful she was to have been brought up in a free and prosperous Norway rather than in her native Somalia, would Aftenposten even have published it? No, too sappy. And anti-African! What if she’d submitted an article critical of female genital mutilation in her community? Or honor killing? No, that’s old hat. But her familiar whining about insufficient Muslim visibility in today’s Norway was right up their alley. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13004/sweden-election-immigration

Swedish police received more than 2,300 reports of potential crimes linked to this year’s election, including voter intimidation and threats of violence against property or persons. An international team of observers found irregularities in 46% of the polling stations visited. The team expressed particular concern over the lack of secrecy in voting. Swedish authorities allow more than one voter (normally from the same family) to enter the polling booth together, ostensibly to ensure that the more literate family member can assist the less literate ones to correctly fill in the ballot paper.
“We are concerned about the significant level of family voting where women, older voters and the infirm can be guided or even instructed how to vote by another family member… We feel this may be a way of suppressing some voters from freely choosing their own choice.” — Statement on the Swedish election from Democracy Volunteers, election observers.

With tens of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands, of migrants receiving welfare payments without having made any contributions, Sweden’s current welfare system seems destined to collapse, according to Sweden Democrats leader Jimmie Åkesson.

A strong showing by the anti-immigration Sweden Democrats in the Swedish elections on September 9 drained away so many votes from the establishment parties that the two main parliamentary blocs were left virtually tied and far short of a governing majority.

The Sweden Democrats won 17.5% of the vote and emerged as the third-largest party in the country, according to the official election results released on September 16. The result, a 4.6% improvement on the 12.9% it won in 2014, placed the Sweden Democrats into a situation of holding the balance of power in the next parliament.

Incumbent Prime Minister Stefan Löfven’s center-left Social Democrats came in first, with 28.3% of the vote — the party’s worst result in more than 100 years. The center-right Moderate party came in second, with 19.8% of the vote, a 3.5% drop from 2014.

With eight political parties in the Swedish Parliament, the establishment parties traditionally have organized themselves into two rival parliamentary blocs: On the left, the Social Democrats and their allies garnered 40.7% of the vote. On the right, the Moderates and their allies won 40.3% of the vote.

Although the Sweden Democrats are now in a position to play kingmaker in Parliament, the mainstream blocs have vowed not to cooperate with them because of their “nationalist” positions on immigration and the European Union.

Sweden, with a largely homogenous population of around 10 million people, received nearly 500,000 asylum seekers from Africa, Asia and the Middle East since 2010. The arrival of so many overwhelmingly male migrants from different cultural and religious backgrounds has created massive social upheaval, including a surge in sexual assaults and gang violence in cities and towns across Sweden.