RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-beginning-of-a-trump-trade-deal-1529521189

Like most of the world’s investors, this column sees mostly downside from President Donald Trump’s confrontations with allies over the terms of trade. But the best news of the day is an intriguing possibility for trade peace and more open commerce with our friends in Europe.

At the rancorous G7 meeting recently in Canada, Mr. Trump suggested tariff-free trade among the participants. The proposal received no public endorsement from any of the assembled leaders of Europe or Japan. But maybe the beautiful idea isn’t dead yet. The Journal reports:

Germany’s leading auto makers have thrown their support behind the abolition of all import tariffs for cars between the European Union and the U.S. in an effort to find a peaceful solution to the brewing trade war.

The U.S. ambassador to Germany, Richard Grenell, brought the proposal for a broader industry trade pact to the Trump administration on Wednesday, according to people familiar with the situation.

That would mean scrapping the EU’s 10% tax on auto imports from the U.S. and other countries and the 2.5% duty on auto imports in the U.S. As a prerequisite, the Europeans want President Donald Trump’s threat of imposing a 25% border tax on European auto imports off the table. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270500/new-faces-dutch-anti-islam-front-bruce-bawer

These days in Europe, when you meet a stranger and let slip that you’re an American, you know beyond any doubt what the next question is going to be.

“Who did you vote for in the presidential election?” he asked. It was the other day, and I was in Amsterdam, and I had just sat down next to him at the bar and ordered a gin and tonic.

“Donald John Trump,” I said amiably.

“I’m impressed,” he said.

“By what?”

“When I ask other Americans that question, they get emotional. They act like I’ve attacked them. You’re the first who didn’t react like that.”

We were in a gay bar. “So are you talking about gay guys that you meet here?”

“Yes.”

“And they voted for Trump?”

“Some of them. Not all. The Hillary voters are proud. The Trump voters….”

“They’re defensive.”

“Yes.”

“Well, that’s understandable,” I said. “They’re used to being told that they voted for the incarnation of evil. I find it interesting that so many gay guys you meet did vote for Trump.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12552/turkey-erdogan-holy-war-obsession

When non-Muslims deny Muslim minorities the rights that Muslim-majority countries systematically deny non-Muslim minorities, extremist Muslims in Turkey seem to have the habit of threatening non-Muslim lands with holy war.

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who spoke of “a war between the cross and the crescent” because the Austrian government closed down seven mosques, does not seem to bother with any of those visible, documented cases of religious discrimination against non-Muslims and against Islam’s minority sects.

Muslim leaders complain of travel bans on some Muslim nations, but many Muslim countries have travel bans against other Muslims in addition to banning Israelis.

When non-Muslims deny Muslim minorities the rights that Muslim-majority countries systematically deny non-Muslim minorities, extremist Muslims in Turkey seem to have the habit of threatening non-Muslim lands with holy war.

“Soon religious wars will break out in Europe. You are taking Europe toward an abyss. That’s the way it’s going,” Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s foreign minister, Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu, predicted in a 2017 speech. The minister was angry with the European states that had banned Turkish Islamist political shows in their territories.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12558/switzerland-islam-radicalization

There are approximately 250 mosques in Switzerland, but the authorities do not know who finances them. By rejecting the proposal compelling mosques to disclose who finances them, the Swiss authorities can now remain willfully blind.

The Muslim World League is behind “a whole network of radically-oriented mosques in Switzerland… with the clear intention of spreading Salafist thought here”. — Saïda Keller-Messahli, expert on Islam in Switzerland.

Above all, the Swiss government seems not to have considered the rights of Swiss non-Muslim citizens, who are the ones left to live with the consequences of the government’s ill-thought-out policies.

Switzerland has just rejected a proposed law preventing mosques from accepting money from abroad, and compelling them to declare where their financial backing comes from and for what purpose the money will be used. According to the proposal, imams also would have been obliged to preach in one of the Swiss national languages.

While the proposal narrowly passed in the lower house of parliament already in September 2017, the upper house recently rejected it. The proposal was modeled on regulations in Austria, where already in 2015, a law banning foreign funding of religious groups was passed. The Austrian law aims to counter extremism by requiring imams to speak German, prohibiting foreign funding for mosques, imams and Muslim organizations in Austria, and stressing the precedence of Austrian law over Islamic sharia law for Muslims living in the country.

The Federal Council, which constitutes the federal government of Switzerland, was also against the proposal, and claimed that it constituted ‘discrimination’: “We must not discriminate against Muslim communities and imams and put them under general suspicion,” Justice Minister Simonetta Sommaruga said. The Federal Council noted that in Austria, Islam is officially recognized, whereas it is not in Switzerland. According to the Swiss government, therefore, the model applied in Austria does not apply to Switzerland, as “One cannot demand obligations without rights”. Instead, the Federal Council evidently believes that the risks posed by extremist Islamist preachers and communities can be combated within existing law.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/06/the_mullahs_and_hanging.html
The Iranian government is using execution as an instrument for spreading fear among its citizens.

“I am innocent and I had to confess under the torture.”

These are the last words of Mohammad Salas, who was executed by the Iranian regime authorities at dawn on June 18, 2018.

Mohammad Salas was a 51-year-old bus driver from one of Iran’s largest Sufi communities, the Nemattolah Gonabadi. He was arrested on February 19, 2018 while taking part in a protest against Sufi repression which turned violent after regime security forces resorted to beatings and the use of live ammunition, water cannons, and tear gas to disperse the crowd.

Accused of killing three policemen during the protests, Mohammad Salas’s attorney, Ms. Zaynab Taheri, stated several times that “We have many documents indicating Mohammad Salas is innocent.”

The sole piece of evidence used to convict him was a “confession” that Mohammad Salas said was forcibly extracted after he was severely beaten by police officers. He later retracted his “confession,” but the Supreme Court rejected his request for a judicial review.

In spite of an international campaign by human rights organizations, Amnesty International in particular, calling for Sala’s sentence to be dropped, it appears that the Iranian authorities have been more interested in vengeance at any cost than in justice.

There is an international organization whose members include the repressive regimes of Cuba, Venezuela and China.

This organization recently added the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which is obstructing an investigation into the murder within its borders of two United Nations human-rights experts.

In the past decade, this organization has passed more resolutions to condemn Israel specifically than to condemn Syria, Iran and North Korea combined.

Most people would not imagine that such an organization would be dedicated to protecting human rights. Yet all of these details describe the misnamed U.N. Human Rights Council. In truth, the council provides cover for governments with awful human-rights records, and it refuses to eliminate its Agenda Item 7, which targets Israel unfairly by mandating that each session include a discussion of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

After more than a year of unsuccessful efforts to fix these fundamental defects, the U.S. delegation announced Tuesday our withdrawal from the council. Our country will no longer be party to this deeply flawed institution, which harms the cause of human rights more than it helps it.

There are two major reasons that so many countries have resisted U.S.-led reform efforts. The first is baked into the council’s composition. One look at this rogue’s gallery explains why the organization has such appalling disrespect for the rights Americans take for granted. A credible human-rights council would pose a threat to these countries, so they oppose the steps needed to create one. Instead they obstruct investigations and reports, while interfering with the council’s ability to name and shame the perpetrators of the world’s worst atrocities.

https://www.aol.com/article/news/2018/06/19/us-withdraws-from-united-nations-human-rights-body/23463117/

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The United States withdrew from the United Nations Human Rights Council on Tuesday accusing it of a “chronic bias against Israel,” a move that activists warned would make advancing human rights globally even more difficult.

Standing with U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Haley slammed Russia, China, Cuba and Egypt for thwarting U.S. efforts to reform the council. She also criticized countries which shared U.S. values and encouraged Washington to remain but “were unwilling to seriously challenge the status quo.”

The United States is half-way through a three-year term on the main U.N. rights body and the Trump administration had long threatened to quit if the 47-member Geneva-based body was not overhauled.

“Look at the council membership, and you see an appalling disrespect for the most basic rights,” said Haley, citing Venezuela, China, Cuba and Democratic Republic of Congo.

Haley also said the “disproportionate focus and unending hostility toward Israel is clear proof that the council is motivated by political bias, not by human rights.”

Washington’s withdrawal is the latest U.S. rejection of multilateral engagement after it pulled out of the Paris climate agreement and the 2015 Iran nuclear deal.

Major General Amos Yadlin is a former general in the Israeli Air Force, Israel Defense Forces military attaché to Washington, D.C. and was head of the IDF Military Intelligence Directorate. He and Gen. David Petraeus prove here that military men are often fools when it comes to politics and policy. rsk
EX-IDF INTEL CHIEF: TRUMP MOVES MAY LEAD IRAN TO GO FOR NUKES

US President Donald Trump’s recent foreign policy moves make it more likely that Iran will attempt to make a nuclear bomb and bring Israel closer to war, former IDF intelligence chief Amos Yadlin said on Sunday.

Speaking at a Tel Aviv University conference on national security and cyber issues, Yadlin said the North Korea summit will push Iran to renew its uranium enrichment and eventually pursue a nuclear bomb.
He said the same thing about Trump’s decision to pull out of the Iran nuclear deal.Yadlin said he hoped Iran will wilt under the pressure of renewed US sanctions, saying, “We do not know if new sanctions will be as effective as in 2013. If they are not effective, we achieve nothing. Let’s hope the sanctions will be crippling… [maybe] Iran will need to choose between regime collapse or… come back to the negotiating table.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-italy-dares-to-turn-away-refugees-1529363157

Italy’s new populist government signals a major challenge to the European status quo, but not in the way most observers initially expected. The governing coalition has put its challenge to euro policy on hold. Instead it is turning to a subject on which the European establishment is more vulnerable: migration. The force behind the shift is Matteo Salvini, Italy’s new minister of the interior. He is also the leader of the League, the smaller and more right-wing of Italy’s two ruling parties.

Mr. Salvini shocked Brussels last week by denying Italian entry to the MS Aquarius, a rescue ship that had plucked 629 drowning would-be migrants from the seas off Libya. As human-rights activists reacted with anger, Mr. Salvini doubled down, banning all migrant rescue ships from all Italian ports.

French President Emmanuel Macron denounced Mr. Salvini for abandoning refugees; Mr. Salvini torched the French for hypocritically leaving Italy alone to bear the burden of helping them. Roiling matters further, German Interior Minister Horst Seehofer, the head of Bavaria’s conservative Christian Social Union and an essential partner in Angela Merkel’s national coalition, gave Mr. Salvini a congratulatory phone call and asked to meet with him.

For many Italians, starved for a national show of strength after years of marginalization, the standoff was almost as gratifying as a World Cup victory. As interior minister of a weak debtor nation, Mr. Salvini had done what Britain’s euroskeptics can only dream of: smack down France and split the German establishment against itself. According to the polling firm Ipsos, about 60% of Italians backed Mr. Salvini’s stance. Those who dissented, perhaps following Pope Francis, were swept aside in a surge of patriotic and anti-immigrant sentiment.

It has been confirmed that Tommy Robinson, who was incarcerated at HMP Hull in a secure and safe wing, has been moved to HMP Onley in Warwickshire, where there are a preponderance of violent Muslim inmates, who have already threatened to murder him.
Leicestershire times According to information published on the Tommy Robinson official Facebook page, during the transfer, all the information in his file that mentioned that he was a high-risk prisoner had been removed. It is believed the intention was to transfer him to I wing, reportedly the only wing in the prison without cameras.
When Tommy protested that his life would be in danger, in a prison with a population where 1 in 3 of the inmates are Muslims in a facility a prison inspector deemed it unsafe, the response from the Governor was ‘Your name is downs as Lennon on the prison system, so you will be fine as no one will know who you are!’ (But most people in the UK already do know his real name)
However, inmates had apparently been informed by the prison imam the day before that Tommy was being transferred to Onley. How did the imam know?
Far from being safe and incognito, the first night Tommy spent in HMP Olney, he was housed next to a Muslim inmate who spent the entire night smashing things at the wall telling him that he will murder him in the morning.
The only reason he was not seriously injured, or worse, was that one officer decided to go against the orders from above and took him from his cell to the punishment block for his own protection.
Tommy is now being treated as a punished prison solitary confinement. Isolation cells to punish prisoners are meant to be a short-term measure, more than 30 days in isolation can have serious impacts on inmates mental health.