RUTHFULLY YOURS

“Health Canada considers sweeping ban on junk food ads aimed at children and teens.” So reads the headline at CBC News. And with that matter-of-fact announcement — just a normal day’s political news in the true north weak and socialist — a nation quietly declares itself lost to freedom forever. D-Day memories of the brave Canadians at Juno Beach washed away in a tide of authoritarian progressivism. Freedom traded for paternalistic social engineering in the name of protecting children from over-salted cheese.

“Most of the foods that are marketed to kids are these ones that are high in fat, high in sugar, high in sodium, so that’s what we’re looking at,” said Hasan Hutchinson, director general at Health Canada, who is overseeing the consultations.

“That would then cut out all of the things like, of course, your regular soda, most cookies, cakes, pies, puddings, ice cream, most cheeses because they are high in fat, they’re high in salt,” he said.

Health Canada would also target foods such as sugar-sweetened yogurt, frozen waffles, fruit juice, granola bars and potato chips.

When Canada elected Justin Trudeau, the foppish son of the foppish Maoist Pierre, I warned that what little was left of Canada as a representative democracy was on the verge of being swept into the ash heap of history by a wave of kneejerk neo-Marxist populism — imagine Barack Obama without any constitutional limits. Many of my fellow Canadians — collectively the most self-righteous “nicest people” in the world — accused me of overreacting to this disturbing new wave of nihilistic Trudeaumania, or of exaggerating the ideological seriousness of “young Trudeau,” as they breathlessly dubbed him.

But there is no way to overreact to the political dangers of a nationwide personality cult. And far from exaggerating Trudeau’s ideological purity, my point was precisely that Canada had fallen to such a level of ethico-political degradation that no ideologue was necessary to tip the scales toward totalitarian government; a vapid, politically correct attention-seeker would do the trick well enough.

And so he has, as his government has aligned itself with that of Kathleen Wynne, the Marxist premier of Ontario — the country’s most populous province — to produce government in a politburo style, with naturally curly hair. From legal preferences for sexual deviancy to legal punishments for emitting carbon, from Castro-loving to Christian-hating, and from outlawing criticism of Islam to normalizing drug abuse, Trudeau’s government is checking all the Euro-socialist boxes, all the while hiding behind the leader’s pretty-boy celebrity and prime ministerial pedigree.

But to remind everyone of that pedigree, Pierre Trudeau was the man who, through his panache and his clever exploitation of social trends of the 1960s and ’70s, shifted Canada irrevocably leftward: a close friend of Fidel Castro, a vocal admirer of Mao Tse-tung, and thus North America’s first openly communist-sympathizing national leader, preceding Obama by forty years.

Beyond all its legislative radicalism, the first Trudeau era was most significant for nudging Canadians into a gradual acceptance of a principle quite out of step with Western classical liberalism, but perfectly in keeping with Eastern collectivist authoritarianism, namely that the state is not a representative of the people whose interests it serves, but rather the rightful micromanager and mother hen of men’s daily lives, determining and enforcing correct attitudes and preferred interest groups with impunity and without restraint. In short, neo-Maoism.

Now “young Trudeau’s” government is proposing a “sweeping ban” on the marketing of legal food products. The absurdity of this proposal is outdone only by its paternalistic offensiveness.

CONTENTS http://www.tomgrossmedia.com/mideastdispatches/archives/001708.html

1. London’s Muslim mayor, previously the recipient of many anti-Semitic messages, says he will now consult Israel on fighting terrorism
2. Would Western intelligence agencies share information with a future prime minister Corbyn, sympathizer with Russia, Iran & Assad?
3. American journalist pleads guilty to anti-Semitic bomb threats
4. Norway to ban full-face veil in pre-schools, schools and universities
5. French-German TV channel under fire for refusing to screen anti-Semitism documentary
6. European MP and French intellectuals accuse France of covering up Jewish woman’s murder
7. Non-Jewish journalist: Two Jews called Halimi murdered, France doesn’t care
8. Memorial and museum finally to be built at France’s first concentration camp
9. Spanish police, originally tipped off by Facebook post, thwart Islamist attack
10. Switzerland legislates to end funding of anti-Semitic NGOs in the Mideast
11. Never too late to say sorry
12. “A single book to understand the 20th century”

Islamic State’s occupation of the Philippine city of Marawi is in its third week with at least 58 soldiers and police killed along with 138 terrorists. With an estimated 500 fighters controlling part of the town, the siege continues to take a heavy toll on civilians. But there is some good news from the past week: U.S. troops and planes are on the scene offering “technical assistance” to the Philippine armed forces.

This is an embarrassment for President Rodrigo Duterte, who called on U.S. forces to leave Mindanao last September and proclaimed that his country would move into China’s orbit. Now he says he didn’t request U.S. help in Marawi. That leaves Filipinos to wonder who is calling the shots in their fight against terrorism.

Mr. Duterte spent his first year as President promoting extrajudicial killings of drug pushers and users, a campaign that led to more than 8,000 deaths. Meanwhile, Islamist fighters converged on the southern island of Mindanao from as far away as Chechnya. Indonesia’s National Counter-Terrorism Agency reports that 40 terrorists from the Islamic State-affiliated Jamaah Ansharut Daulah are fighting in Marawi.

Islamic State has made no secret of its plan to make Mindanao a new caliphate. But Mr. Duterte boasted that he would pacify or wipe out the local separatist groups that have pledged allegiance to Islamic State. He set two deadlines for retaking Marawi, including the country’s Independence Day on Monday. Mr. Duterte was absent from the celebrations due to illness, according to his office.

The Philippine military has a history of losing fights with Abu Sayyaf, one of the groups holding Marawi. The discovery in the city of safe houses with large amounts of cash shows that the group has significant resources. In the past Abu Sayyaf bought arms from government soldiers and bribed them to slip out of encirclements.

The Marawi fighting shows the military’s familiar limitations. Ten Philippine soldiers were killed by friendly air-force fire on May 31, and on Friday 13 Philippine marines were killed in street fighting.

The U.S. is helping with battlefield surveillance, coordination and training. Even limited nonkinetic assistance will shore up morale among government troops and prevent more friendly fire losses, but more is needed. In the decade after 9/11, a larger and more active U.S. force in Mindanao turned the tide against lawless groups like Abu Sayyaf.

Defeating the terrorists quickly is important because a lengthy siege would allow Islamist groups to recruit fighters and dispatch them to start more uprisings in Mindanao. As northern Iraq shows, once Islamic State is entrenched it can destabilize the wider region. Mr. Duterte’s tacit acceptance of U.S. help is a step forward, but the Philippines’ struggle to retake Marawi and prevent similar occupations requires that he swallow his pride and ask for an international force in Mindanao.

LONDON—The death toll from a blaze in west London rose to at least 12 in a high-rise tower that residents had complained was a fire hazard, raising questions about maintenance and safety of low-income housing.

The fire started early Wednesday and spread rapidly through the 24-story public-housing block, which residents said lacked adequate emergency exits. Witnesses said they saw people jumping from the building to escape the flames. Dozens of residents were injured, and police said they expected the death toll to rise.

Firefighters were still battling pockets of fire Wednesday evening, but had searched most of the Grenfell Tower in the otherwise upscale North Kensington neighborhood, clambering through the ruins and also using drones, authorities said. It was too early to pinpoint the cause of the blaze, police said.

The London Fire Brigade said 65 people were rescued from the building, which a structural engineer said isn’t in danger of collapsing.

Residents said they heard few, if any, alarms. One man who got out described a chaotic race through a central staircase that was the only escape route.

London Fire Commissioner Dany Cotton called the blaze unprecedented, saying she hadn’t seen anything like it in her 29-year career.

Michael Paramasivan, who lived on the seventh floor, said he woke to the smell of burning plastic and heard people shouting. He, his girlfriend and their children fled down a crowded central staircase. He said he wasn’t sure if there were sprinklers, but said none had activated.

“I saw three kids near the top floor, and next thing we knew, bang, it went up in flames,” he said. “They must have perished. It was horrific.”

“It was the towering inferno, like lighting a bonfire,” said Piers Thompson, who lives in a neighboring building and said he was awakened by shouts at about 1:15 a.m. and watched fast-moving flames spread.

“I couldn’t believe it. You could see people flashing” lights in an effort to attract rescuers attention, especially on high floors, he said. “Someone was waving a blanket.”

People-smugglers bring the migrants to the NGOs’ ships, which then reach Italian seaports. Another legal enquiry has been opened about the mafia’s economic interests in managing the migrants after their arrival.

One cannot compare the migrants to the Jews fleeing Nazism. Pope Francis, for example, recently compared the migrants’ centers to Nazi “concentration camps”. Where are the gas chambers, medical “experiments,” crematoria, slave labor, forced marches and firing squads? These comparisons are spread by the media for a precise reason: shutting down the debate.

By 2065, it is expected that 14.4 million migrants will arrive. Added to the more than five million immigrants currently in Italy, 37% of the population is expected to be foreigners: more than one out of every three inhabitants.

First, it was the Hungarian route. Then it was the Balkan route. Now Italy is the epicenter of this demographic earthquake, and it has become Europe’s soft underbelly as hundreds of thousands of migrants arrive.

With nearly 10,000 arrivals in one recent three-day period, the number of migrants in 2017 exceeded 60,000 — 48% more than the same period last year, when they were 40,000. Over Easter weekend a record 8,000 migrants were rescued in the Mediterranean and brought to Italy. And that is just the tip of the iceberg: during the summer, the number of arrivals from Libya will only increase.

A wooden boat carrying migrants waits to be escorted to the Topaz Responder vessel, as members of the Migrant Offshore Aid Station make a rescue at sea on November 21, 2016 in Pozzollo, Italy. (Photo by Dan Kitwood/Getty Images)

A replacement of population is under way in Italy. But if you open the mainstream newspapers, you barely find these figures. No television station has dedicated any time to what is happening. No criticism is allowed. The invasion is considered a done deal.

In 2016, 176,554 migrants landed in Italy — an eight-fold increase since 2014. In 2015, there were 103,792. In 2014, there were 66,066. In 2013, there were just 22,118. In the last four years, 427,000 migrants reached Italy. In only the first five months of this year, 2017, Italy received 10% of the total number of migrants of the last four years.

There are days when the Italian navy and coast guard rescue 1,700 migrants in 24 hours. The country is exhausted. There are Italian villages where one-tenth of the population is already made up of new migrants. We are talking about small towns of 220 residents and 40 migrants.

One of the major aspects of this demographic revolution is that it is taking place in a country which is dramatically aging. According with a new report from the Italian Office of Statistics, Italy’s population will fall to 53.7 million in half a century — a loss of seven million people. Italy, which has one of the world’s lowest fertility rates, will lose between 600,000 to 800,000 citizens every year. Immigrants will number more than 14 million, about one-fourth of the total population. But in the most pessimistic scenario, the Italian population could drop to 46 million, a loss of 14 million people.

“Today, Muslim public opinion is shaped by schools, mosques and the media. Everywhere in the Islamic world, these three channels are state-controlled. This triad is how terrorism is bred.” — Ayad Jamal Aldin, Iraqi Shiite cleric and former parliamentarian.

The Muslim Brotherhood, too, is linked to the House of Saud, which, Aldin said, “offers every kind of required support to the White House. In exchange, they enjoy the U.S.’s cover, which they use to spread Wahhabism even farther. From Minnesota, to Canada, to Latin American, to Asia, Africa, and Europe — they claim they only build mosques. Through their literature, they constitute a more lethal danger than that posed by nuclear technology proliferation.”

“Let the U.S. and others pressure the Iranians and Saudis to stop their support for extremist movements. You will be surprised how soon people will start to think and act differently.” — Ayad Jamal Aldin.

In the wake of the ISIS’s Palm Sunday bombings of Coptic churches in Egypt, Cairo’s Al-Azhar University, Sunni Islam’s most revered institution, not only refused to denounce the terrorist organization as “un-Islamic,” but repeated its implausible boast of being a bulwark against extremism in the Muslim-Arab world, and accused those calling for religious reform of treason.

One such “traitor” was Egyptian TV presenter Islam Behery, a British-educated writer and Sunni Muslim who had been exposing the roots of violence within Islamic tradition itself, until he was forced off the air after protests by Al-Azhar in 2015.

According to Behery, who was later convicted of blasphemy and sentenced to a year in prison, the tradition in question

“has very little good amid a multitude of evil, least of which is the insistence by all the four schools of Sunni Islam that Christians can be killed with impunity [as] a Muslim life is ‘superior’ to that of a non-Muslim.” (Kol Youm show, ON TV with Amr Adib, 25 April).

Across the West, restless voters and mainstream parties are reinforcing one another in a mutual race to the fringes, hollowing out the political center and threatening the basic canons of our post-war liberal order – the human values, diplomatic alliances and economic relationships that have generally served us well.

The middle-class struggles economically, fears the next terrorist attack and feels abandoned by political and economic elites who decide their futures in stately rooms, often behind closed doors. Frustrated and angry, voters are increasingly disgusted by traditional candidates and tempted by outlandish alternatives.

The parties, meanwhile, are driven to the fringes by their most activist elements who provide the enthusiasm, resources and voluntarism that helps to elevate those outlandish candidates to the role of party standard-bearers.

To push back, we need mainstream leaders with the credibility and courage to educate Western voters about what’s at stake if we loosen our alliances, leave a global vacuum for China, Russia and other authoritarian powers to fill, and wall ourselves off economically. At the same time, we need such leaders to craft policies that help address the legitimate anxieties that many voters express.

The latest dagger to the heart of the liberal order comes via Britain. Though his Labour Party fell short of victory, Jeremy Corbyn’s rise in Britain’s elections inserts anti-Zionism (and tolerance for anti-Semitism), anti-Westernism, far-left collectivism and mindless pacifism more forcefully into the mainstream of a nation that was once led by the likes of Churchill, Thatcher and Disraeli.

Corbyn is morally challenged and ideologically misguided – all of which helps elevate him in the eyes of middle-class voters who want to lash out at traditional politics, and of young voters who lack the historical perspective to fully understand the benefits and fragility of freedom and democracy.

Asked once whether he could envision any circumstance for deploying British military force, Corbyn replied, “I’m sure there are some but I can’t think of them at the moment.” He can’t because, when it comes to the West, he aligns himself much more closely with its enemies than its defenders.

It will take a good deal of courage, but Islamic leaders can get into the fight against extremism in very practical and proactive ways. Inaction can only make life more difficult for moderate Muslims who have embraced Australian values and just want to get on with their lives.

Finally, the two major political parties have been dragged kicking and screaming into the reality of the Islamic terrorism debate. They have spent several years cowering like abused dogs in an animal shelter, unwilling to either stand up or bark with confidence or conviction.

The slowness to act on the Islamic threat by Western democracies, including our own, has come at a great cost. It has undermined public confidence in key government agencies, our political processes, and eroded our sense of personal security and wellbeing. We have had the chief of ASIO misinforming parliament in an apparent strategy to not offend Muslims for fear they will stop acting as responsible Australians and intelligence information will dry up. The primary duty of government is to protect its citizens from those who would do it harm. Cultivating informers is a secondary goal.

Yet while more of Australia becomes aware of the existential threat that radical Islam presents to our way of life, influential Muslim leaders in the Islamic community still appear to be largely in denial. They need to get some skin in the game and do so quickly. The tolerance of long suffering Australians is wearing very thin.

Increasingly, Australians could be forgiven for thinking that many Muslims living here either condone or are sympathetic to the goals of various Islamic terror groups – though they might object to their brutal methods. It can appear that some within the Muslim community are acting as fifth columnists, building a beachhead in which to influence the future direction of Australian politics, our cultural values, and our legal system. The Islamic Council of Victoria has just withdrawn its support for Corrections Victoria’s de-radicalisation program, instead wanting public money to set up safe spaces for angry young Muslims to vent their rage. There appears to be a determined blindness to the Muslim-terror link by Islamic leaders, even to the extent of tacitly acknowledging that young Muslims really do have bona fide reasons for that rage.