RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12702/france-bataclan-jihad

Organizations representing the families of the Bataclan victims said that an Islamic rap concert praising jihad, in a place where people were murdered and tortured by jihadists, would be an insult to the memory of the victims, and asked that the concerts be canceled.

“France is at war, and leaves the enemy in peace”. — Ivan Rioufol, journalist, in Le Figaro.

Macron and the French government speak and act as if the enemy has won and as if they want to gain some time and enjoy the moment before the final surrender.

“The French Suicide” (“Le suicide français”) is a book published by the author Éric Zemmour in October 2014. Just one year later, on November 13, 2015 in Paris, a horror took place at the Bataclan Theater, when three terrorists fired into the crowd during a concert, murdered 130 people, and injured 413. Some of the victims had been tortured.

The French population reacted as usual: shock and horror quickly gave way to resignation and submission. Flowers, candles and teddy bears were placed at the scene of the attacks. The government promised to act, but did almost nothing. A ceremony was organized that ended with a song that said, “When All You Have is Love”.

A parliamentary commission of inquiry drafted a report. Military forces, deployed in the streets before the attacks, were reinforced. A climate of resignation and submission reigned.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/07/15/nato-now-serves-the-interests-

If we’re to believe the recent NATO summit’s communique and the mainstream media’s commentaries about it, the alliance serves roughly the same essential purpose today as it did in 1948, and Americans had better heed European Council President Donald Tusk’s thinly veiled warning: rein in President Trump’s criticisms of NATO, because its members are about the only allies America has got.

But although the people who run today’s European and American societies are perhaps closer to each other than in 1948—which accounts for their dogged defense of “the alliance”—in fact, they themselves have changed in ways that obviate the purposes for which the alliance originally was formed.

The point of departure for understanding U.S.-European relations is that the relationship between “the people who count” on both sides of the Atlantic are so good precisely because they have become aliens to their own peoples. And, since all are in the process of being rejected by their own peoples, they are each others’ natural allies. But against whom are they allied?

What is the purpose of this alliance and what does it mean to us Americans?

Herewith, a summary of these moral and political changes, whose importance dwarfs the massive material transformations that the world has undergone in the past 70 years.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/eleven-killed-in-nicaragua-as-government-targets-opposition-strongholds-1531699706

MEXICO CITY—Nicaragua’s embattled President Daniel Ortega moved to tighten his grip on power, as paramilitary forces loyal to his government attacked antigovernment protesters at several key points over the weekend, killing an estimated 11 people.

Three students were killed after clashes at Managua’s main university campus. Meanwhile, as many as eight people died on Sunday as masked gunmen attacked opposition barricades in two provinces, according to the Nicaragua Human Rights Association, a local human-rights group that has been tracking violence during three months of opposition protests.

Among the dead was a 10-year-old girl, the group said.

“It was butchery,” said Alvaro Leiva, the group’s spokesman, describing how armed groups believed to be linked to the government descended on several towns. Many of the men wore black ski masks and some wore military-style fatigues.

The actions appear aimed at clearing out opposition strongholds after nearly three months of protests that have killed roughly 300 people, mostly unarmed protesters.

Mr. Ortega’s government has described the protests as an undemocratic effort to dislodge him from power before his term ends in 2022. He has been in power since 2007, having previously been in power during the 1980s.

At least 25 have died since Tuesday, as police, working in coordination with armed gangs, attacked barricades set up by protesters on the sprawling campus of the National Autonomous University of Nicaragua in Managua and elsewhere in the country, according to local news reports, human-rights groups and Catholic church leaders.

On Friday, two students were killed and 15 badly injured in a coordinated attack on the university, sending students fleeing to a nearby church, where another student died. CONTINUE AT SITE

Hatred against Britain and Israel surfaced in Gaza as England progressed its way through the World Cup to meet Sweden in the quarter finals.

One Gaza fan was outspoken:

“Of course I will support Sweden.

I can’t imagine a Palestinian supporting England, which created the Balfour Declaration, or not supporting the country that stood before the world and recognized our state.”

The 1917 Balfour Declaration has never been forgotten or forgiven by the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) and Hamas – both of whom consider the Declaration to be null and void – spending decades in spruiking this false message to their respective constituencies – fomenting Arab hatred against the Jews since the Declaration first called for the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.

The fuming Gaza fan was expressing his resentment by barracking for Sweden – even though Sweden was one of the 51 countries that transformed the Balfour Declaration into binding international law by unanimously incorporating it in the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine in 1922.

Our anguished fan was blissfully unaware of these facts having obviously not studied the 100 years old Arab-Jewish conflict. Anti-England prejudice was enough to back his decision to go for Sweden. True – Sweden had purged itself of its 1922 decision when officially recognizing the State of Palestine in October 2014 – making it the first major European Union member state to back the PLO’s statehood bid.

However in atoning for its 1922 sin, Sweden’s recognition of the “State of Palestine” was a fiction that failed to meet the requirements demanded in international law by Article 1 of the 1933 Montevideo Convention which states:

“The state as a person of international law should possess the following qualifications:

a. A permanent population

b. A defined territory

c. Government

d. Capacity to enter into relations with the other states

FIFA’s admission of the Palestinian Football Federation as a member of FIFA in 1988 had also contravened Article 10.1 of FIFA’s then governing articles:

‘Any Association which is responsible for organising and supervising football in its country may become a Member of FIFA. In this context, the expression “country” shall refer to an independent state recognised by the international Community.’

FIFA started living in its own dream world 26 years before Sweden joined it. Who will replace Sweden as Britain’s nemesis was summed up by another fan: