RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270356/european-union-run-lloyd-billingsley

Back in March, the League party and anti-establishment Five Star Movement gained victory in what Angelo Codevilla called Italy’s “Trump election.” The governing Democratic Party, descendant of Italy’s Communist Party, managed only 18 percent of the vote, and the biggest loser was the Democrats’ former prime minister Matteo Renzi “the international Left’s Boy Wonder, the Italian Obama.” Nothing like this had happened in a century.

“Italy’s voters choose populists,” CNN proclaimed, “deliver stinging rebuke to Europe.” European Commission boss Jean-Claude Juncker described the election as the “worst-case scenario” for Europe. Since the March populist victory, Italy has been without a government, but that changed on June 1.

As the Telegraph reported, the “anti-immigrant, hard Right” League party and “anti-establishment” Five Star movement have agreed to a compromise, with Guiseppe Conte serving as prime minister. Like the election itself, that had leftist billionaire George Soros reaching for his bullhorn.

Soros conducted considerable election meddling of his own, but said he was “very worried” that Russia was exercising “negative influence” in Europe. “I don’t know if Putin is actually financially supporting him (Matteo Salvini of the League) and his party. This is a question that I think the Italian public has a right to ask, and ask him to tell you whether he’s actually in the pay of Putin.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12448/italy-illegal-migrants

An estimated 700,000 migrants have arrived in Italy during the past five years. — International Organization for Migration (IOM).

“There are not enough homes or jobs for Italians, let alone for half the African continent.” — Matteo Salvini, Interior Minister, Italy.

This law [Article 10 of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights] effectively prevents Italy and other EU members from deporting migrants to most countries in the Muslim world.

Italy’s new interior minister, Matteo Salvini, has vowed to cut aid money for migrants and to deport those who illegally are in the country.

“Open doors in Italy for the right people and a one-way ticket out for those who come here to make trouble and think that we will provide for them,” Salvini said in the Lombardy region, home to a quarter of the total foreign population in Italy. “One of our top priorities will be deportation.”

Salvini, leader of the nationalist League (Lega) party, formed a new coalition government with the populist Five Star Movement (M5S) on June 1. The government’s program, outlined in a 39-page action plan, promises to crack down on illegal immigration and to deport up to 500,000 undocumented migrants.

“The party is over for illegal immigrants,” Salvini said at a June 2 rally in Vicenza. “They will have to pack their bags, in a polite and calm manner, but they will have to go. Refugees escaping from war are welcome, but all others must leave.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/spains-abrupt-left-turn-1528054426?cx_testId=16&cx_testVariant=cx&cx_artPos=6&cx_tag=collabctx&cx_navSource=newsReel#cxrecs_s

His many opponents finally caught up with Mariano Rajoy on Friday when a leftist coalition ousted the Spanish Prime Minister’s center-right government with a no-confidence vote in parliament. The risk now is that Madrid will unwind the reforms that have helped the country grow faster than its neighbors.

Mr. Rajoy’s Popular Party (PP) has itself to blame for Friday’s 180-169 defeat. Last month Spain’s National Court convicted 29 people, including the party’s former treasurer, of a kickback scheme. Mr. Rajoy denied knowledge of the operation, but the scandal has alienated PP voters and the party’s liberal-centrist Citizens coalition partner, whose leader, Albert Rivera, called for snap elections.

Mr. Rajoy ignored Mr. Rivera’s good advice and tried to hang onto power, giving an opening to Socialist Party leader Pedro Sánchez to cobble together a so-called Frankenstein coalition that few Madrid insiders thought possible. The crew includes far-left Podemos, Catalan pro-independence parties and the right-leaning Basque Nationalist Party, which had negotiated pension benefit increases for the region in Mr. Rajoy’s last budget.

Mr. Sánchez has promised to honor that budget, as well as keep Spain’s fiscal commitments to the European Union. But to do that he’ll have to keep Spain’s economic engine purring. That will be hard to do with Podemos in the coalition. The Spanish left wants to roll back the Rajoy Administration’s supply-side reforms, including tax cuts and the 2012 Derecho Laboral reform, which made it easier to hire and fire workers, as well as implement a new wealth and inheritance tax.

Mr. Joffe is an editorial council member at Die Zeit in Hamburg and a fellow of Stanford’s Hoover Institution.

Everybody loves Italy for its savoir vivre and panache—not to mention Rome’s place as the cradle of Western civilization. Yet there is a darker side to the country’s vanguard role. In 1922 Italy gave the world fascism, more than a decade before Hitler’s storm troopers marched through Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate. After World War II, Italy was the only Western country ever to include members of a pro-Soviet Communist Party in its governing coalition. In 1970, the Red Brigades invented modern European terrorism.

This March brings another nasty first: power to the populists of the left-wing 5 Star Movement and the far-right League. Radical parties have won seats in several European legislatures, but nowhere have they captured a majority. Forget Marine Le Pen’s National Front in France, which can’t win more than a third of the French public. The outcome in Italy is historic: Europe’s fate may well be decided in Rome.

Imagine, in American terms, a coalition between Bernie Sanders and the tea party: an orgy of government spending on one side, tax cuts and small government on the other. Can’t be done? In Italy, non fa niente—it doesn’t matter. We can eat our pizza and have it too. While 5 Star seeks a guaranteed income of €780 (around $900) a month, the League will pursue its suggested flat tax of 15%.

Now do the arithmetic. Italy’s public debt has already surpassed 130% of gross domestic product, and European hedge-fund manager Joseph Oughourlian predicts that the new government’s goodies could swell the annual deficit by more than €150 billion.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12435/rape-gangs-oxford

What price has been paid, is being paid, or might be paid at some stage, by all those public officials who tacitly or otherwise allowed these modern-day atrocities to go on, doing nothing to stop them?

Families of some of the abused girls related that they had tried consistently to raise the alarm over what was happening to their daughters, but that every door of the state was closed in their faces.

If Britain is to turn around the disgrace of its culture of ‘grooming gangs’, it should start by changing the risk-reward ratio between those who identify these monstrous crimes and those who have been shown to have covered them up.

Since the arrest of Tommy Robinson on May 25, the presence generally — and incorrectly — referred to as ‘Asian grooming gangs’ has been back in the news. This has reignited a debate about whether victims are getting justice and whether perpetrators are encountering it.

In all this at least one key element is missing. What price has been paid, is being paid, or might be paid at some stage, by all those public officials who tacitly or otherwise allowed these modern-day atrocities to go on, doing nothing to stop them? The policemen, politicians, council workers and others who were shown to have failed time and again. They have never been sentenced to prison for any of their oversights — and perhaps criminal charges (not even charges of criminal negligence) could never be brought against them. It is worth asking, however, if any of these people’s lives, career paths, or even pension plans were ever remotely affected by their proven failure to confront one of the greatest evils to have gone on in Britain. That is the mass rape of young girls motivated by adults propelled by (among much else) racism, religiosity, misogyny and class contempt.

Perhaps the post grooming-gang career of just one public official might help to answer that question. Her name is Joanna Simons. In 2013 she was the Chief Executive of the Oxfordshire County Council. She had been at the centre of that Council’s ‘care’ programme for nearly a decade: that is, throughout the period in which the mass rape of local girls (subsequently investigated under the name ‘Operation Bullfinch’) was carried on. The barbarism, which was carried out by local men of what is erroneously described as ‘Asian’ origin, included branding one of the girls with an ‘M’ on her body. The abuser’s name was ‘Mohammed’ and the Mohammed in question wanted people to know that this girl ‘belonged’ to him and as such was his property.

http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/2018/05/mr-and-ms-plod-abet-maiden-tribute-of.html

William Thomas Stead (1849-1912), was a prominent British journalist whose series of articles in the Pall Mall Gazette under the heading ‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’ exposed the horrible sexual exploitation of and traffic in vulnerable underage girls by seemingly respectable members of Victorian society shocked the nation and led to the passage of the Criminal Law Amendment Act (1885).

StephenYaxley-Lennon (b. 1982), better known as Tommy Robinson, a working class lad with in some respects a rather controversial past, is a ‘citizen journalist’ who was livestreaming outside Leeds Crown Court three days ago when he was arrested by a group of Mr and Ms Plods, charged with causing a ‘breach of the peace’, and thrown in the slammer the very same day.

In his footage he was focusing on that dastardly maiden tribute of modern Britain, the grooming and gang-rape of non-Muslim girls (mainly but not entirely white girls) by men whose cultural heritage is that of backward tribal societies so steeped in primitive misogyny that wives are routinely beaten for producing daughters instead of sons and females are gang-raped at the behest of village elders to atone for the misdeeds of male members of their families.

As I mentioned here, Mohammed Shafiq, head of the Manchester-based Ramadhan Foundation, declared (to his credit) some years ago:

“There is a significant problem for the British Pakistani community, there is an over-representation amongst recent convictions in the crime of on-street grooming, there should be no silence in addressing the issue of race as this is central to the actions of these criminals.

They think that white teenage girls are worthless and can be abused without a second thought; it is this sort of behaviour that is bringing shame on our community.

I urge the police and the councils not to be frightened to address this issue, there is a strong lesson that you cannot ignore race or be over sensitive.”

And Nazir Afzal, Chief Crown Prosecutor for North West England, is on record as saying that such men ‘think that women are some lesser beings’.

http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/2018/06/enough-is-enough-video.html

‘There have been countless incidents, from Europe to North America. These are just a few recent examples… In Ukraine, antisemitic attacks nearly doubled between 2016 and 2017. There were more than a dozen incidents recorded in April alone. In Berlin, a man was attacked in an upscale neighborhood for wearing a kippah. In Paris, Holocaust survivor Mireille Knoll was brutally murdered in her apartment. Her attacker stated that he carried out the crime because she was Jewish. 2017 set a record for antisemitic activity in Sweden. Authorities prevented a neo-Nazi march in front of a synagogue on Yom Kippur after receiving intense pressure. In Bulgaria, far-right nationalists marched in commemoration of a war time Nazi collaborator. And in the United States, a Georgia town was the site of a Neo-Nazi march despite protests from residents. Marchers there set a swastika ablaze after nightfall. Italian fans of the Lazio football club used images of Anne Frank to insult supporters of rival club Roma. British Jews rallied in response to rampant and institutionalized antisemitism within the Labour Party.’

http://standpointmag.co.uk/node/7179/full
Why has the Left become so averse to free speech? Whether it is Labour MPs, such as the redoubtable Thangham Debbonaire, bullied and laid into by Momentum thugs for attending a rally against anti-Semitism, or the transgender cabal hell-bent on destroying anyone who disagrees with a single word of their Orwell-ian propaganda, silencing by some leftists has become ridiculous in the extreme.

In an article for the New York Times recently, the German academic Ulrich Baer wrote: “The idea of freedom of speech does not mean a blanket permission to say anything anybody thinks. It means balancing the inherent value of a given view with the obligation to ensure that other members of a given community can participate in discourse as fully recognised members of that community.” How true.

By far the worst censors and McCarthyites are the transgender activists and their allies. Guardian commentator and Corbynista Owen Jones has angered a number of feminists by telling them they are “on the wrong side of history” because they believe they have the right to discuss their rights as women, and because they refuse to accept that “trans women are women” and that “some women have penises, some men menstruate”, as goes the trans-lunatic mantra.

There are currently any number of men on the Left who are happy to see women like me silenced and bullied for not toeing the party line. It suits men such as Jones to be able to scream “transphobe” at feminists whilst being seen as a “progressive” by other leftist men.

I recently attended a meeting organised by a group of feminists in Bristol who were concerned about the proposed changes to the Gender Recognition Act that would enable any man to “self-identify” as a woman (or vice versa) without any medical intervention whatsoever.

http://standpointmag.co.uk/node/7177/full

“Sorry we didn’t make it to you yesterday,” said the delivery man. “We had to come from the other side of the city and there was all that trouble in Mitchell’s Plain. They were stoning the vehicles on the highway and there was a lot of shooting. There was more shooting due to the bus strike too. Today the trouble seems to have shifted to Grassy Park and Hout Bay — we have heard of shooting in both those places but luckily they’re not on our route.”

I nodded — I’d heard about the Mitchell’s Plain trouble but these days civil strife is so common in South Africa that it often doesn’t make the papers at all, only the traffic news, and nobody bothers any more to say what the cause of the trouble is. Instead, it is all put under the general rubric of “service delivery protests”.

What seemed to be the problem, I asked. “Oh, you know how it is,” says the delivery man, who is Coloured. “Some of them say their housing conditions are bad, others are demanding houses or land to build shacks on. That’s what it’s like in the new South Africa, hey? Some people think they will be given property if they just make enough trouble.” A black workman, overhearing this, tells me more bleakly: “What’s happening at Mitchell’s Plain is that the Coloured people and the blacks are fighting one another.”

On April 21 the Kaiser Chiefs soccer team played at the World Cup stadium in Durban — and lost. Their angry fans went on the rampage, burning and looting vehicles and committing some Rand 2.6 million (£150,000) of damage to the stadium itself. On April 1 on the main N3 motorway at Mooi River, more than 100 miles out of Durban, protesters had attacked and burnt 35 large trucks and looted and destroyed a considerable number of other vehicles. This was only a small item in the news and no reason was given for the violence. However, a friend phoned me from the scene, describing a situation of utter chaos. The protest had been against the employment of Zimbabweans as truck-drivers — there is usually a xenophobic element to such troubles — but once the vehicles had been successfully stormed an army of looters joined in. My friend said that the police were just standing watching. When he asked them why they made no move to stop the looting, they had explained that it wouldn’t be safe — some of the looters had guns. This complete passivity on the part of the police is also part of the new normal — it had been just the same at the soccer riot.