RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.steynonline.com/8675/tommy-this-an-tommy-that-an-tommy-go-away

But, just before I came on (about 15 minutes in), Rowan and Ross addressed recent events in the United Kingdom and in particular the fate of, er, someone whose name they weren’t permitted to mention but who, um, had been gaoled for, er, something or other… This was somewhat astonishing to me, as I’d assumed empire-wide D-notices had lapsed with the passage of the Statute of Westminster. But mein hosts circled back, cautiously, to the topic toward the end of my interview – and I observed, as I have before, how in almost the entirety of the western world, whenever anyone draws attention to some of the more problematic aspects of Islam, the state cracks down not on the problematic aspects, but on the guy who draws attention thereto. In Britain and Europe, we are an incident or two away from literally “shooting the messenger”.

Rowan, Ross and I all knew we were referring to a gentleman by the name of Tommy Robinson. I expect many of you know that, too. But I doubt most Australian viewers had much of a clue about it, and I’m pretty certain the overwhelming majority of his fellow Englishmen are unaware of his fate. As readers may recall, I have met Mr Robinson just once, at an event at the European Parliament in Brussels. He is an engaging, charismatic fellow, albeit a bit rough-hewn for the refined sensibilities of the metropolitan media – although I thought he had the better of a rather somnolent Jeremy Paxman in this BBC interview.

On Friday, Robinson was livestreaming (from his telephone) outside Leeds Crown Court where last week’s Grooming Gang of the Week were on trial for “grooming” – the useless euphemism for industrial-scale child gang rape and sex slavery by large numbers of Muslim men with the active connivance (as I pointed out to the Sky guys) of every organ of the state: social workers, police, politicians. Oh, and also the media. Me last year, on my time in a certain municipality about thirty miles south of Leeds:

Tracking down the victims of Rotherham required a bit of elementary detective work on my part, but it’s not that difficult. What struck me, as my time in town proceeded, was how few members of the British media had been sufficiently interested to make the effort: The young ladies were unstoppably garrulous in part because, with a few honorable exceptions, so few of their countrymen have ever sought them out to hear their stories.

You can say a lot of things about Tommy Robinson, but he’s one of the embarrassingly small number of Britons who recognizes the horror inflicted on those young and vulnerable girls on the receiving end of “diversity” and seeks to do something about it.

So on Friday he was outside the Crown Court in Leeds. He was not demonstrating, or accosting or chanting, or even speaking. He was just pointing his mobile phone upon the scene from a distance. Within minutes, seven coppers showed up in whatever they use instead of a Black Maria these days, tossed him inside it and drove off. In other words, these were not “investigating officers” called to the scene: They showed up with the intent to take him away. Within hours, he was tried, convicted and gaoled – at HM Prison Hull, a Category B chokey, or one level below maximum security. The judge in the case, one Geoffrey Marson, spent all of four minutes on trying, convicting and sentencing Robinson. It is not clear whether that leisurely tribunal included his order expressly forbidding “any report on these proceedings” (the case is Regina vs Yaxley-Lennon because that’s Robinson’s real name).

Which is why, all the way over in Sydney, Messrs Dean and Cameron were being so vague and cautious. In Britain itself, early online reports at The Mirror, the Scottish Daily Record, The Birmingham Mail and elsewhere vanished instantly, and silence has been maintained, especially on radio and TV, ever since.

http://thefederalist.com/2018/06/09/meet-virginia-hall-one-of-the-unsung-heroes-of-d-day/

In the spring of 1944, behind enemy lines in occupied France, members of the French Resistance stayed close to their wireless devices, awaiting their call to action. Broadcasting from London, announcers at Radio Londres sent coded instructions to various Resistance factions, disguised as “Personal Messages.” The messages were specifically designed to sound silly but familiar, and as they weren’t a cipher, they drove the Axis powers mad trying to break their code.

Allied forces inundated the broadcasters with codes to send out, knowing that the invasion was in the planning stages, but coming soon. The Allies were depending on the Resistance to choke the German supply lines on the French railroad, and clear the way for their entry into France.

On June 5, as the allies prepared to launch Operation Overlord, a poem familiar to every French man and woman crackled over the airwaves, “Chanson d’automne.” The Resistance had been waiting for months to hear the prose of Paul Verlaine’s 1860 poem.

“Les sanglots longs

Des violons

De l’automne”

The first three lines served as a warning that the invasion would begin within 2 weeks

“Blessent mon cœur

D’une languer

Monotone”

The final part of the message indicated that the invasion would reach France in 48 hours. It was time. This was their official call to action. Plans to sabotage the German supply lines were to be enacted at once.

Outside of the Resistance, there were already members of the Allied Forces behind enemy lines, assisting the Resistance and paving the way for victory in France. Among them, Virginia Hall, a young American woman. Hall had already spent years living in occupied France, gathering information for the British Special Operations Executive (SOE). Early in her assignment, she lived openly as an American, though with a code name, masquerading as a journalist, while actually wreaking havoc on the Germans as an Allied spy. When The United States entered the war in 1942, and Germany officially seized the remainder of France, Hall was forced to flee the country — but she wouldn’t stay away for long.

https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/italys-populist-government/

In Italy’s general election on March 4, two parties routinely derided by the corporate media as “populist” won almost 70 percent of the votes cast. A coalition led by Matteo Salvini’s League(Lega, formerly known as Lega Nord, LN) won 37 percent of the vote and a plurality of seats both in the Chamber of Deputies and in the Senate; the anti-establishment Five Star Movement (M5S) led by Luigi Di Maio came second with just over 32 percent. The centre-left coalition, strongly pro-EU and led by former Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, came a distant third with 23 percent.

On May 31, after 88 days of negotiations and several impasses, Giuseppe Conte was appointed prime minister, with Salvini of the League and Di Maio of the M5S as vice premiers. The news of this unlikely coalition has been greeted with dismay by les bien pensants on both sides of the Atlantic. The German magazine Der Spiegel published a deeply offensive cover (“Ciao, amore!”)which featured a fork of spaghetti with one piece dangling as a noose. “Italy is destroying itself—and dragging down Europe with it,” was the headline. “At a time when the EU could be proving itself as an alternative to Trump’s unilateralism,” it wrote, Europe may instead be facing months, if not years, of squabbling:

“If the populists now govern in Italy, the country could steer itself on a course of constant confrontation with Brussels—by for example, expressing its solidarity on key issues with right-wing populists in France, Austria or Finland or with the EU-critical governments in Hungary and Poland. Or it could take the side of half or full-on autocrats like Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin and undermine European unity in the process.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jun/09/tommy-robinson-supporters-arrested-after-clash-with-police

A group of Tommy Robinson supporters has blocked off a major road in central London in a tense stand-off with police, who made several arrests.

Hundreds of demonstrators descended on the capital and blocked off the road around Trafalgar Square.

Rows of riot police blocked the gate down the Mall leading to Buckingham Palace, where the Royal Family has gathered on the balcony after celebrating Trooping the Colour just hours earlier.

The protest on Saturday afternoon was the latest in what appears to be a bid to secure the release from jail of the former leader of the English Defence League (EDL).

Supporters chanted “Free Tommy Robinson” and hurled missiles and smoke bombs at police.

Hundreds of supporters crowded on to an open-top sightseeing bus, waving union flags, while one supporter posed on the roof in a Donald Trump mask.

By 6pm, officers had removed protesters from the bus and had kettled many of the remaining protesters on the traffic island overhead.

Other Robinson supporters crowded on to the steps of Nelson’s Column and continued to chant slogans.

A spokesperson for megasightseeing.com said: “Our London sightseeing bus was on its normal route when it got caught up in the demonstrations. The bus was stormed by demonstrators, and the driver and a small number of customers got off.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/ireland-abortion-referendum-irish-exceptionalism-ending-european-identity/

The long experiment in cultural transformation has proved to be a mere detour on the way to becoming West Britain.

In Bernard Shaw’s great play John Bull’s Other Island, an English liberal character who at first seems a silly-ass Englishman but who later emerges as a more Machiavellian one, exclaims enthusiastically at one point: “Home Rule will work wonders under English guidance.” This is a surefire laugh line in the theater. It is also a prediction of something that finally happened on Friday, May 25, with the landslide passage of the referendum to liberalize Ireland’s abortion law more or less in line with English precedents. And it symbolizes the end of a 100-year diversion in Irish history from West Britain to a prickly independent Catholic Republic back to West Britain again.

That something this important was at stake was realized very early by William Butler Yeats, who had commissioned the play from George Bernard Shaw to open Dublin’s Abbey Theatre. Yeats rejected the play and gave several reasons for doing so, but his main motive was almost certainly that it was alien, both politically and in literary form, to the kind of Irish national theater that Yeats was trying to establish. Shaw thought so and many years later described the incident as follows: “Like most people who have asked me to write plays, Mr Yeats got rather more than he bargained for. . . . It was uncongenial to the whole spirit of the neo-Gaelic movement, which is bent on creating a new Ireland after its own ideal, whereas my play is a very uncompromising presentment of the real old Ireland.”

Andrei Gromyko believed that the so-called Westphalian system, in place at least until the Second World War, had been replaced by a duopoly in which only the USSR and the United States counted as powers that could truly affect things. Moscow these days is full of rumors and speculation regarding an impending bid by Putin to revive at least in part and in a new form, the Gromykan “duopoly” by reaching out to the Trump administration in Washington.

Putin knows that without reaching out to the US, he may not be able to consolidate his gains in Crimea, eastern Ukraine and Georgia, while he could become stuck in the Syrian quagmire with no prospect of getting out anytime soon.

Russia’s isolation was best illustrated during the big annual military parade in May 2017, when of all the foreign dignitaries invited by Putin only one turned up: the President of Moldova.

“Consolidation”. In Moscow these days this is the word that most flavors discussions in political circles. The idea is that, thanks to President Vladimir Putin’s bold and risk-taking strategy, Russia has made a number of major gains on the international scene and must now act to consolidate those gains and reduce the diplomatic, economic and political price it has had to pay for them.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12483/london-al-quds-terrorism

The leader of last year’s London Al Quds Day rally, Nazim Ali – director of the “Islamic Human Rights Commission”, which organizes the annual march – called for the annihilation of Israel. They also carried banners that said, “We are all Hezbollah,” (what a comforting thought for the British). If, however, like the scholar Robert Spencer, one reports on these activities, one is barred from entering England.

The real problem is the contrast in how the slightest criticism of Islam in the UK is perceived by British police, who readily go about arresting and prosecuting people for it.

An afternoon of racism is in store for Londoners on Sunday, but as long as the hate is directed against Jews by Muslims, British authorities apparently have no problem with it.

On Sunday June 10 in London, the yearly so-called Al Quds Day march — Al Quds is the Arabic name for both Jerusalem and for the day, invented by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who led Iran’s 1979 revolution that overthrew the Shah — will take place. The march is, basically, a call for the destruction of Israel, sometimes also Jews in general. Many other cities, among them Toronto, Berlin and Tehran, will also be “celebrating” the day.

Last year in London, around 1000 people waved countless Hezbollah flags, in honor of Iran’s proxy terrorist organization, while chanting slogans such as “Zionists/ISIS are the same, only difference is the name” and “From the river to the sea – Palestine will be free”. They also carried banners that said, “We are all Hezbollah,” (what a comforting thought for the British).

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/kim-jong-un-murderous-dictator-tyrannical-regime/Summits won’t change the nature of the North Korean tyranny.

‘This will not be just a photo op,” President Trump said Thursday of his meeting next week with Kim Jong-un. “This will be — at a minimum, we’ll start with, perhaps, a good relationship. And that’s something that’s very important toward the ultimate making of a good deal.” Later that day the president added that he might, if things go well, invite Kim to visit him in the United States, perhaps even at the White House. “He has also discussed [possibly] golfing with Kim,” a “senior Trump administration official” told the Daily Beast.

Golf? Too soon, Mr. President. Unless this is part of a strategy to get under Kim’s skin — he’ll be uncomfortable, after all, when he hits the links at Mar-a-Lago wearing charcoal fatigues. More likely it’s another example of the president’s view that relations between leaders are more important than the relationships between states, regimes, cultures, and ideas. You try to woo Xi Jinping with “a most beautiful” piece of chocolate cake, for example. Even if the results are not ultimately what you wished for.

Let’s remind ourselves of whom, exactly, President Trump plans to meet next week. For Kim Jong-un is no ordinary man. The Dear Leader occupies the summit of a hierarchical system of some 25 million people whose lives are controlled by his central government in Pyongyang. Some years ago, Christopher Hitchens described the ruling juche ideology this way: “It is based on totalitarian ‘military first’ mobilization, is maintained by slave labor, and instills an ideology of the most unapologetic racism and xenophobia.” He did not mention the troops and artillery North Korea has amassed on its southern border, and the engineers who toil in underground laboratories, building nuclear-tipped missiles capable of reaching South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and the United States.

The geo-strategic ripple effects of the 2018 US nuclear negotiation with North Korea and the 1994 US nuclear agreement with Pyongyang have been closely scrutinized by Iran’s Ayatollahs. Similarly, North Korea has studied the geo-strategic consequences of the 2015 US-led nuclear accord with the Ayatollahs (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action).

The track record of the nuclear negotiations with the Ayatollahs and North Korea verifies a clear and direct interconnection between the two processes. Moreover, the nuclear agreements with both the Ayatollahs and North Korea were largely shaped by the State Department establishment, in general, and Wendy Sherman, the former Chief Negotiator and Acting Deputy Secretary of State, in particular.

Furthermore, the overall conduct of both rogue regimes – as far as abandoning or advancing nuclearization, ending or expanding terrorism, subversion and ballistic capabilities – has been immensely impacted by the US negotiation posture. Thus, the less assertive and more eager is the US, and the more reluctant it is to use the military option, the less deterred and the more radicalized are Iran and North Korea.

They consider concessions made by the US and other Western democracies to be a sign of weakness, especially when the concessions are tangible and immediate – in return for future reciprocity – ignoring the tenuous, violent, unreliable and lawless track record of the two rogue regimes.

May 22. Religious advisers at the Masjid Ramadan mosque in Dalston, east London, said that bitcoin, the cryptocurrency, is halal (permissible according to Islamic law) for donations if it is “transacted in a lawful manner.” The mosque, also known as Shacklewell Lane Mosque, will accept donations in two different cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin and Ethereum. Zayd al Khair, a religious adviser at the mosque, said: “Any money or currency is neither halal, permissible, nor haram, impermissible. Guidance is about the value which it represents. If money is transacted in a lawful manner then it is halal. We do not always know the source of cash donations, but we take these in good faith too.”

May 22. Farooq Rashid, 43, of Bradford, was sentenced to two years in prison for possessing and sharing jihad-related material online. “Terrorist groups such as Daesh [ISIS] rely heavily on their propaganda being shared online to encourage support, radicalize, and provoke individuals to carry out attacks abroad and in the UK,” said Martin Snowden, the head of Counter Terrorism Policing in North East England.

May 23. A mother who forced her daughter to marry a relative almost twice her age was sentenced to four-and-a-half years in prison. It was the first time a forced marriage case was successfully prosecuted in an English court. Forced marriage has been a punishable offense in Britain since 2014. Birmingham Crown Court heard how the woman duped the then 17-year-old into travelling to Pakistan to wed the man, who was 16 years her senior. Years before the ceremony, the girl was entered into a “marriage contract” with the man and became pregnant aged 13.

May 23. The Daily Mail reported that Amazon, the online retailer, was selling terrorist recruitment material and bomb-making manuals: “Many of the books, which have radicalized thousands of international terrorists, are available for next-day delivery. Some can be downloaded instantly as Kindle editions anywhere in the world. The inflammatory titles are sold by third parties using Amazon’s platform, allowing them global reach and lending them an aura of legitimacy.” Labour MP John Mann said: “This is Amazon giving assistance to terrorists and putting lives at risk. We’ve just had the anniversary of the Manchester bombing. They need to be held to account. Amazon is allowing terror material to circulate. Free speech arguments don’t apply when it comes to terrorists trying to recruit. There must be a full police investigation into Amazon.”

May 24. Baroness Cox and other members of the House of Lords called on the British government to “respond urgently” to a 2015 review on Sharia courts by drafting a law to protect vulnerable Muslim women. Lord Elton said that the problem of Sharia councils “seems to me bigger and more urgent than Her Majesty’s Government are giving it credit for.” Baroness Flather accused Whitehall of not taking the issue seriously. Baroness Cox asked whether the government “will make it a priority to respond urgently with appropriate legislation.” In April 2015, Baroness Cox authored a 40-page report — “A Parallel World: Confronting the Abuse of Many Muslim Women in Britain Today” — which documented how Muslim women across Britain are being systematically oppressed, abused and discriminated against by Sharia law courts, which treat women as second-class citizens. The report warned against the spiraling proliferation of Islamic tribunals in the United Kingdom.

May 25. Tommy Robinson, a 35-year-old anti-Islam activist, was arrested and jailed for contempt of court after livestreaming footage of participants in a criminal trial outside Leeds Crown Court. The trial involved members of a Muslim pedophile gang charged with sexually exploiting young girls. Outrage ensued after Judge Geoffrey Marson ordered a media blackout on Robinson’s arrest and incarceration.

May 29. A Pew Research Study found that 73% of Britons identify as being Christian, but only 18% attend church. In the UK, 45% of church-attending Christians say Islam is fundamentally incompatible with British values and culture, as do roughly the same share of non-practicing Christians (47%). Among religiously unaffiliated adults, 30% say Islam is fundamentally incompatible with their country’s values. The poll found that 69% of those who identify as Christian were in favor of reducing the levels of immigration, compared to 32% of non-affiliated adults.

May 29. A couple was convicted of forced marriage for luring their 19-year-old daughter to Bangladesh in an attempt to force her to marry her first cousin — so that he could obtain a British visa. Leeds Crown Court heard how the girl’s parents had told her they were going on a six-week holiday to Bangladesh to visit relatives. Just days after arriving, however, she was told by her father that he had found a husband for her. The victim, who was not named for legal reasons, told the court: “He said, ‘I have planned this for years, the guy is really suitable, I’ve given him money for university, and he’s a really attractive guy for round here.’ He was trying to get me to say yes, but at no point did I say yes. I thought it was disgusting because it was my first cousin and stood my ground.” She was rescued by British authorities before the marriage took place. The judge told the two defendants that they should expect an “immediate imprisonment” when they are sentenced on June 18.

May 29. The trial began of Anthony Small, a 36-year-old former boxing champion who converted to Islam in 2007, for terrorism offenses. Prosecutor Karen Robinson told the Old Bailey that Small “implored Muslims to take violent action against the West.” On his YouTube channel, Small described himself as “a former professional champion boxer who now works to take mankind out of the oppression of democracy and liberating themselves with Islam/Sharia.” In the video, he spoke out against McDonald’s and Coca Cola and other symbols of Western culture. He said the choice was to “either accept the flame-grilled burger or we are going to flame grill you from the sky.”

May 30. The Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) called on the Conservative Party to conduct an inquiry into allegations of Islamophobia within the party. At least five Tory candidates have been suspended in recent weeks for making so-called Islamophobic comments. On April 17, for example, Alexander van Terheyden, a council candidate in Hackney, was suspended after, on social media, he called Islam, a “violent political ideology” comparable to fascism and communism. In response to allegations of Islamophobia, Van Terheyden said: “I’ve stated Islam is a violent political ideology. Note the word ‘political’ and not religious. Note I do not refer to Muslims, I refer to the political ideology. My views have always been public. If you mean the fact that I’m happy to voice my discontent for communism, fascism, Islam and other extreme political ideologies there is no secret to this.” In December 2015, a government report found that the MCB is “secretly linked” to the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamic fundamentalist group committed to a “civilizational jihad” aimed at undermining liberal democracies in the West.

May 31. Khurram Javed, 35, of Rotherham was sentenced to two years in prison for sexually assaulting a 16-year-old girl. The trial was part of the National Crime Agency’s Operation Stovewood, which is investigating child sexual exploitation and abuse in Rotherham between 1997 and 2013.

May 31. Husnain Rashid, 32, of Lancashire, pled guilty at Woolwich Crown Court to three terrorism offenses, including one in which he called for an attack against Prince George, son of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and third in line to the throne. Rashid will be sentenced on June 28 for the offenses spanning from October 2016 to April 2018.

May 31. Mohammed Aslam Rabani, a 61-year-old twice-married former imam at a mosque in Nottingham, was sentenced to five years in prison for sexually assaulting a teenage boy in the mosque’s attic. Rabani repeatedly assaulted the boy between June 1990 and June 1993, when the victim was 12 years old. The victim, who is now married and a father, said: “He was a father figure to me and everyone. Not even my own family would believe what he was doing to me. I was scared, because beatings at home and at the mosque were commonplace in our community. Children just did as they were told and adults were always right. As a result, I didn’t speak out. Additionally, I thought it was normal, because I also believed that Rabani should be trusted. I assumed that because he was the imam, that whatever he did was right and that he was closest to God.”

Soeren Kern is a Senior Fellow at the New York-based Gatestone Institute.