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Media Justifies Ethnic Cleansing With Fake Stats About South African Farmers FACT CHECK: 72% of South Africa’s land is not owned by white farmers.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271126/media-justifies-ethnic-cleansing-fake-stats-about-daniel-greenfield

After President Trump tweeted about the mistreatment of white farmers in South Africa, the media rushed out stories justifying the ANC regime’s plans to ethnically cleanse white farmers by seizing land without compensation. These stories invariably contained a popular fake statistic abused by racists.

Bloomberg pretended to conduct a fact check by accusing Trump of misleading the public and claimed that, a “land audit released in February showed that whites own 72 percent of the land.”

“Land reform is a highly divisive issue in South Africa, where white residents, who make up 8 percent of the population, own 72 percent of land, according to official figures,” the New York Times observed.

“Whites own 72 percent of the 37 million hectares held by individuals,” the Washington Post contended.

The hedging isn’t hard to spot.

Is it 72% of the land or 72% of the land owned by individuals? There’s a huge difference. A sizable amount of South Africa’s land is actually owned by the government. That is, it’s owned by the ANC. Quite a lot of it is held by assorted organizations, including the tribal authorities of black South Africans.

For example, the Ingonyama Trust, controlled by the Zulu king, has 3 million hectares of land. The ANC’s decision to seize the king’s land has made fewer headlines, but has been even more explosive.

Europe Takes a Second Look at Conscription The Continent needs better preparation for disaster of all kinds, as well as more soldiers. By Elisabeth Braw

https://www.wsj.com/articles/europe-takes-a-second-look-at-conscription-1535311309

Conscription is back. After the Cold War, most European countries suspended mandatory military service, but now they’re rediscovering the institution that added muscle to the armed forces and some measure of social cohesion. The practice is often more a burden than an aid to the military. But with natural disasters and other emergencies increasing, what we really need is citizen resilience training.

“I can promise you one thing: We’ll have to discuss the issue of military service and national service very intensively again,” Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, secretary-general of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union, said in a video message released earlier this month. That sentence unleashed this summer’s biggest debate in Germany.

The government suspended conscription seven years ago. In its final years, only about one-third of young Germans performed military service, about one-third chose civilian national service, and the remaining third were not called up or signed up as professional soldiers—Germany’s post-Cold War armed forces simply didn’t need that many soldiers. But with the armed forces—the Bundeswehr—now struggling to recruit professional soldiers, Ms. Kramp-Karrenbauer’s suggestion is not surprising. Sweden has reinstated selective conscription to beef up its active-duty forces, as has Lithuania. Norway has expanded the selective draft to women, while French President Emmanuel Macron is planning a new form of mandatory national service that includes a civilian and a military segment.

These initiatives are laudable, but only the best-executed conscription models generate substantial military value. “People fill the conscription concept with all kinds of problems they want to solve: integration, unruly youths, teaching young people rules,” noted Annika Nordgren Christensen, a Swedish former member of Parliament who wrote the report that led to the selective draft, told me. “But what really matters is its military value.” Ms. Kramp-Karrenbauer’s proposal is essentially an updated, co-ed return to Germany’s previous model; young men and women would be required to serve in the Bundeswehr or in a civil-society organization such as a fire brigade or an assisted-living facility. CONTINUE AT SITE

Rouhani Suffers Fresh Blow After Iran’s Parliament Ousts Economy Minister Hard-liners have seized on Iran’s growing rich-poor divide and plummeting currency to gut Rouhani’s economic team By Asa Fitch in Dubai and Aresu Eqbali in Tehran, Iran

https://www.wsj.com/articles/rouhani-suffers-fresh-blow-after-irans-parliament-ousts-economy-minister-1535296186?cx_testId=16&cx_testVariant=cx&cx_artPos=8&cx_tag=collabctx&cx_navSource=newsReel#cxrecs_s

Iran’s parliament ousted the country’s economy minister Sunday, stepping up an overhaul of President Hassan Rouhani’s cabinet amid deep domestic opposition to his response to harsh new U.S. sanctions.

Mr. Rouhani, a relative moderate in Iran’s system, had surrounded himself with a cabinet of technocrats, vowing to fight corruption, promote transparency and open Iran’s economy to the West with the 2015 nuclear deal.

But after the economy faltered and the Iran deal came under threat from the Trump administration last year, hard-line opponents have seized on Iran’s growing rich-poor divide and plummeting currency to gut Mr. Rouhani’s economic team and undercut that strategy.

Slightly more than the required majority of 260 parliamentarians present on Sunday voted to fire the economy minister, Masoud Karbasian, state television reported. Parliamentarians criticized him for allegedly failing to address the currency crisis or tame high inflation, and for his unfitness to fight an economic war with the U.S. since Mr. Trump withdrew from the deal in May and began imposing new sanctions.

The move against Mr. Karbasian, who held his position for little more than a year, followed the parliament’s impeachment early this month of Mr. Rouhani’s labor minister on grounds that he failed to properly address unemployment, which the International Monetary Fund forecasts at around 12% this year.

Mr. Rouhani also removed and replaced the central bank governor, Valiollah Seif, last month after Iran’s currency fell to new lows against the dollar. It now takes around 105,000 Iranian rials to buy a dollar, compared with about 43,000 in January.

Venezuela’s Tyranny of Bad Ideas Socialism was a proven failure, but Hugo Chávez got his countrymen to try it. Daniel Pipes

https://www.wsj.com/articles/venezuelas-tyranny-of-bad-ideas-1535311573

Ideas run the world. Good ones create freedom and wealth; bad ones, oppression and poverty. You are not what you eat, but what you think.

Politicians in particular fall under the sway of ideas. As John Maynard Keynes put it, “Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. . . . It is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil.”

The story of Venezuela makes this point with singular clarity. In 1914 the discovery of oil brought the country vast revenues and produced a relatively free economy. By 1950 Venezuela enjoyed the fourth-highest per capita income in the world, behind only the U.S., Switzerland and New Zealand. As late as 1980, it boasted the world’s fastest-growing economy in the 20th century. In 2001 Venezuela still ranked as Latin America’s wealthiest country.

Venezuela’s troubles, however, had begun long before. Starting around 1958, government interference in the economy, including price and exchange controls, higher taxes, and restrictions on property rights, led to decades of stagnation, with per capita real income declining 0.13% from 1960-97. Still, it remained a normal, functioning country.

Today the country with the world’s largest oil reserves suffers from a severely contracting economy, runaway inflation, despotism, mass emigration, criminality, disease, hunger and starvation, with circumstances deteriorating daily. Venezuela’s economy contracted by 16% in 2016, 14% last year and a predicted 15% in 2018. Inflation was at 112% in 2015 and 2,800% at the end of last year. Economist Steve Hanke finds an annualized rate of around 65,000% for 2018, making Venezuela’s one of the most severe hyperinflations ever. Food shortages led to an average weight loss among Venezuelans of 18 pounds in 2016 and 24 pounds in 2017.

What caused this crisis? Foreign invasion, civil war, natural disaster, substitutes for oil, or agricultural plagues? No, bad ideas, pure and simple. CONTINUE AT SITE

Holding Turkey Accountable By Brandon J. Weichert

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

The increasingly autocratic government of Turkey has lost its mind. Or, at least, it has returned to its historical form.

Under Turkish strongman Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the country has slipped away from a nascent form of democracy into an autocracy informed increasingly by Islamism. Whereas Turkey was once a bulwark against Soviet Communism in southern Europe—a secular power run by pro-Western leaders increasingly seeking to become enmeshed in the Western socioeconomic system—since Erdogan’s rise, Turkey has sprinted as far away from Europe and the West as possible. Now, Turkey exists as just another dictatorship in the Islamic World.

Truth is, Turkey and the West were always allies of convenience. When push-came-to-shove in accepting Turkey into the EU, Brussels opted to push back against Turkey’s membership until Ankara met certain political conditions. By that time, though, Erdogan had already begun his rapid Islamization of the once-secular Turkey. No compromise could be brooked.

Turkey also rankled the West when it continued zealously to hold influence over northern Cyprus. The government of Turkey also clashed routinely with those in the West who (rightly) supported Kurdish independence (at least in northern Iraq). Turkey was so concerned that the United States ultimately would grant the Kurds of northern Iraq a state after they toppled Saddam Hussein’s government, that Turkey—a fellow NATO ally—refused to allow American military units to use Turkish territory to conduct offensive operations against Iraq.

U.S. Set to Reject Palestinian Fantasy of ‘Right of Return’ By Rick Moran

https://pjmedia.com/trending/us-set-to-reject-palestinian-fantasy-of-right-of-return/

According to an Israeli TV news report, the Trump administration is preparing to formally reject the long-standing Palestinian demand of a “right to return” to lands lost since the 1948 war for Israel’s independence. The administration will also change the U.S. position on Palestinian refugees.

Times of Israel:

According to the Hadashot TV report Saturday, the US in early September will set out its policy on the issue. It will produce a report that says there are actually only some half-a-million Palestinians who should be legitimately considered refugees, and make plain that it rejects the UN designation under which the millions of descendants of the original refugees are also considered refugees. The definition is the basis for the activities of UNRWA, the UN’s Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees.

The US — which on Friday announced that it had decided to cut more than $200 million in aid to the Palestinians — and has also cut back its funding for UNRWA — will also ask Israel to “reconsider” the mandate that Israel gives to UNRWA to operate in the West Bank. The goal of such a change, the TV report said, would be to prevent Arab nations from legitimately channeling aid to UNRWA in the West Bank.

Created in 1949 in the wake of the 1948 War of Independence, UNRWA operates schools and provides health care and other social services to Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria.

THE SURRENDER OF THE PUBLIC SQUARE: MARK STEYN

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.

Ankara Tries Turkish Cypriot Journalist for Criticizing Turkey by Uzay Bulut

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.

Peter O’Brien One Word: Paris

http://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/08/one-word-paris/

If Scott Morrison PM can’t see how carbonphobia is hurting Australia and wrecking the party he now leads, further voter desertions and electoral carnage are guaranteed. Yes, he’s preferable to his predecessor, but that’s not saying much — especially if current energy policy isn’t repudiated.

Well Malcolm Turnbull is gone, the blow to that monumental ego perhaps somewhat mitigated by the martyr’s canonisation being bestowed beneath the bylines of left-wing pundits who would never vote for him in a month of Sundays. He once famously vowed he wouldn’t “lead a party that’s not as committed to effective action on climate change as I am”. By ‘effective’ he meant, as Humpty Dumpty told Alice, whatever he wanted the word to mean. To Australians dreading their next power bills, the word translates as ‘cold homes and economy-destroying imposts’. It took a while but the party eventually and narrowly took him at his word and forced him to make good on that threat/promise. Full disclosure: I wanted Dutton to be the outcome of this process, for all the reasons outlined at Quadrant Online late last week. But it was not to be. So let me indulge in what is, admittedly, the lament of someone who has come reluctantly to accept that half a loaf is indeed better than none.

The myth now being sown and copiously fertilised by the effusions of Turnbull’s ABC and Fairfax admirers is that he was a colossus torn down by a party that never wanted him in their midst. The more ardent keyboard-ticklers seem almost to be suggesting that the Liberal Party, unworthy of such a leader, had failed him The irony, revealed most tellingly by Graeme Richardson, is that he had to direct his upward gaze via the party of Menzies because Labor wouldn’t have a bar of him. Labor has inflicted gross damage on Australia at various times, but such an appraisal indicates they are not entirely lacking in wits. As for the commentariat’s current line, that is hardly a surprise. It was their paeans that helped to persuade the Liberal party room in 2015 that this leather-jacketed wonder of a man was their natural-born leader. That and their campaign of endless abuse of Tony Abbott, of course.

TOM GROSS ON ANTI-ANTISEMITISM IN ENGLAND

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.)