RUTHFULLY YOURS

After Israel’s ambassador to Poland criticized that nation’s bill to outlaw words that suggest Polish complicity in the Holocaust, a spokesperson for Poland’s ruling party retweeted the comment that the ambassador’s action “makes it difficult for me to look at Jews with kindness and sympathy.”

The bill, which has passed Poland’s parliament and which President Andrzej Duda has until Feb. 21 to decide whether to sign, would set prison terms of up to three years for using phrases like “Polish death camps” and suggesting “publicly and against the facts” that Poland or its government was complicit in Nazi Germany’s slaughter of more than 3 million Jewish Poles.

To be sure, Poland deserves a fair shake about the World War II murder of Jews within its borders, and other nations have long sought to allay its concerns. German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel said just the other day that the term “Polish death camps” was wrong, Israel says it doesn’t oppose Poland’s efforts to discourage its use, and President Barack Obama apologized for using the term in 2012.

Rather than correct history, however, this bill is designed to curtail efforts to speak openly about the past. And it’s driven far less by the government’s concerns for accuracy than by its desire to nourish its right-wing, nationalistic base at the expense of Jews and other targeted minorities.

First, a few facts about Poland’s experience during the war: For one thing, it was treated savagely by both Germany and the Soviet Union, which conspired to carve it up. For another, and unlike its neighbors, it was never ruled by a pro-German collaborationist government in Warsaw. For still another, the death camps within its borders were built by the Nazis, not by Poles.

A warning for Taiwan about unification with China….rsk
Hong Kong’s Court of Final Appeal overturned prison sentences Tuesday for three students who led prodemocracy protests in 2014. But the defendants didn’t celebrate, because the justices also upheld tougher sentencing guidelines for future cases, and the government is barring other democracy advocates from taking part in elections.

Two years ago a magistrate sentenced Joshua Wong, Nathan Law and Alex Chow to community service and suspended jail terms for leading the civil-disobedience campaign that occupied downtown streets for 75 days. Most of the population supported their request that Beijing honor its promise of universal-suffrage elections for the city’s chief executive. But Beijing refused, and prosecutors then took the rare step of asking for tougher punishment in the Court of Appeal, which imposed jail terms of six to eight months.

The government’s motivation was clear: Convicts sentenced to three months or longer are banned from running for public office for five years. If the activists won seats in the city’s legislature, they could use that platform to demand Beijing honor its promises of autonomy and democracy. Mr. Law was elected to the legislature in 2016. But the Beijing-backed government created new rules that retroactively disqualified him and five others.

By-elections for four of those seats will be held on March 11, and another popular protest leader, Agnes Chow, was expected to replace Mr. Law. An election official disqualified her on grounds that she would not uphold the city’s constitution, the Basic Law, that says Hong Kong is part of China.

French Interior Minister Gérard Collomb described the level of violence in Calais as “unprecedented.” He attributed the fighting to an escalating turf war between Afghan and Kurdish gangs seeking to gain control over human trafficking between Calais and Britain, which many migrants view as “El Dorado” because of its massive underground economy.

During his visit to Calais, Macron outlined his government’s new immigration policy: food and shelter for those entitled to remain in France, and deportation of those in the country illegally.

“Emmanuel Macron did it. Never before has a president of the Republic fallen into unpopularity so fast and then become popular again.” — Paris Match.

Hundreds of Africans and Asians armed with knives and iron rods fought running street battles in the northern port city of Calais on February 1, less than two weeks after French President Emmanuel Macron visited the area and pledged to crack down on illegal immigration.

The clashes plunged Calais — emblematic of Europe’s failure to control mass migration — into a war zone and reinforced the perception that French authorities have lost control of the country’s security situation.

The mass brawls, fought in at least three different parts of Calais, erupted after a 37-year-old Afghan migrant running a human trafficking operation fired gunshots at a group of Africans who did not have money to pay for his services. Five Africans suffered life-threatening injuries.

Within an hour, hundreds of Eritreans, Ethiopians and Sudanese took to the streets of Calais and attacked any Afghans they could find. More than a thousand police officers using batons and tear gas were deployed to restore order. Two dozen migrants were hospitalized.

The single terrorist survivor of the horrible 2015 ISIS attack in Paris that killed 130 people refused to answer any questions when he appeared in court today in Brussels, Belgium.

The 28-year-old mass murderer Salah Abdeslam even refused to confirm his own identity. During the proceedings, he made clear that his silence will continue throughout.

Abdeslam wore a white jacket and appeared with his thick beard in court. When one of the judges asked him “are you Salah Abdeslam,” the terrorist refused to respond. Instead of answering, he simply stared at the floor. This attitude is undoubtedly the result of his hatred for everything not radically Islamic. Extremists like Abdeslam refuses to accept the authority of secular institutions. So no, he’s not going to answer this question — or any other question for that matter. He considers himself well above the judgments of “unbelievers.”

Although the trial is important, this particular trial in Belgium isn’t about the Paris terror attack, but about his shoot-out with police in March 2016 when they came to arrest him. He’s accused of possession of (banned) weapons and of attempted murder in a terrorist context.

Belgian and French prosecutors and intelligence officers were hoping that Abdeslam would give them some insight into the inner workings of ISIS and similar terror organizations. That is, clearly, not going to happen.

Poland’s nationalist government is in the process of enacting legislation to criminalize speech that “claims, publicly and contrary to the facts, that the Polish Nation or the Republic of Poland is responsible or co-responsible for Nazi crimes committed by the Third Reich.” The proposal would exempt “artistic or academic activity” but would prohibit ordinary citizens and politicians from accusing Poland of complicity in the murder of three million Polish Jews. Both the Israeli and U.S. governments have denounced the proposal, which restricts free speech and falsifies history.

True, the Germans built Auschwitz and other death camps on Polish soil. But the Germans could not have murdered the Polish Jews, and millions of other Europeans imported to death camps in Poland, without the active assistance of many Poles in identifying and rounding up victims. This complicity was incited by generations of anti-Semitic church sermons. Poles also murdered Jews during and after the German occupation—including in the Jedwabne pogrom in July 1941 and in Kielce in July 1946.

On the positive side, there were Polish Catholics, including priests and nuns, who risked their lives protecting Jews. There were many other righteous Polish individuals as well. Jan Karski risked his life by dressing as a death-camp guard so he could document the horrors, and the Ulma family was murdered for harboring Jews.

Poland’s role in the Holocaust is a mixed picture of complicity, heroism, complacency and willful blindness. It is up to historians to sort out the specifics and moralists to apportion blame. But it is not the role of law to stifle debate and to threaten those who question the current self-serving Polish government narrative.

Muslim-majority areas typically consist of poor, unattractive housing projects, remote from the city center, which long ago were abandoned by their original indigenous, working-class populations. They often feature men sitting around cafes and women cooped up at home. They suffer from a range of social pathologies, including unemployment, criminal gangs, and drug-trafficking.

In some instances, store names are only in Arabic.

The Muslim presence is implicit in the intense, pervasive, and depressing security measures installed against jihadi threats of violence. These range from signs urging “Run, Hide, Tell” to bollards, barriers, and gates.

To understand the development of Islam in Western countries, I make a habit of visiting Muslim-majority areas such as Lakemba in Australia, Lodi in California, and Lunel in France. But London, England, is unique in the extent of its Islamic impress.

Muslim-majority areas typically consist of poor, unattractive housing projects, remote from the city center, which long ago were abandoned by their original indigenous, working-class populations. They often feature men sitting around cafes and women cooped up at home. They suffer from a range of social pathologies, including unemployment, criminal gangs, and drug-trafficking.

London too has such areas, and they are very large; but what makes the English capital unique is the intense Muslim presence in the very most central and expensive parts of the city, where Muslims do not constitute a majority. This presence takes two main forms.

On January 12, President Trump set a deadline for Congress — and the five nations that joined President Obama in signing his nuclear weapons deal with Iran — to make major changes to the deal. He said it was the last chance to either fix the deal’s disastrous flaws, or the United States would withdraw from it.

Nine days later Iran’s foreign minister Mohammed Zarif, in an op-ed in the Financial Times, one of Europe’s most highly-regarded newspapers, presented his European counterparts with arguments for “security cooperation” in a new “post-Western global order” artfully stated in the terms of the European leaders’ most fervently-held globalist beliefs.

It was an elegant attempt at diplomatic seduction, aiming to increase European — and Iranian — strong opposition to any changes in the agreement. Mr. Zarif appealed to Germany, France and Britain for their appeasement of Iran stated in the diplomatic terms those nations’ leaders use most often.

Mr. Zarif posed what he called an opportunity for nations to cooperate in a post-ISIS world in pursuit of regional strength in the Middle East and Southwest Asia. He argued that the historical modes of forming alliances have become obsolete because they assume a commonality of interests.

Instead, he proposes “security networking” that is ” Iran’s innovation to address issues that range from divergence of interests to power and size disparities.”