RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Dutch Labor Party used to dominate Maastricht. The ancient city gave its name to the Maastricht Treaty that created the European Union. In this election, the Labor Party fell from a quarter of the vote to a twentieth.

Geert Wilders’ Freedom Party, which advocates withdrawing from the EU, is now the largest party in the birthplace of the European Union.

And the growing strength of the Freedom Party can be felt not only on the banks of the Maas River, but across the waterways of the Netherlands. A new wind of change has blown off the North Sea and ruffled feathers in Belgisch Park.

In The Hague, where Carnegie’s Peace Palace hosts the World Court while the humbler Noordeinde Palace houses King Willem-Alexander and Queen Maxima, the internationalist institutions colliding with the nationalist ones, the United Nations rubbing up against the Dutch parliament and Supreme Court, the Freedom Party has become the second largest party despite the 15% Muslim population.

In Rotterdam, where Muslim rioters shouted, “Allahu Akbar” and anti-Semitic slurs and where Hamas front groups are organizing a conference, the Freedom Party is now the second largest political party. In that ancient city on the Rotte that had the first Muslim mayor of a major European city, Mayor Ahmed Aboutaleb of the Labor Party who was being groomed for Prime Minister, estimates are that Labor fell from 32 percent to just 6 percent. That is strikingly similar to what took place in Maastricht.

But nearly half of Rotterdam is made up of immigrants. Muslims make up 13% of the population. But turnout hit 72% and after the Muslim riots, the Freedom Party only narrowly trails the ruling VVD.

The Freedom Party has become the largest party in Venlo while the Labor Party has all but vanished.

And that is the real story of the Dutch election.

The truly final results will only be known next week. But the current numbers show that the Freedom Party has become the second largest political party in Parliament having gained five seats while the Labor Party has disastrously lost 29 seats.

The Greek people have just about reached the limits of their strength. The economic situation is tragic. Illegal immigration is out of control, criminality increases day by day. The political system is steeped in corruption and the media have stopped being the communication channel between citizens and the political system. The Greek media are functioning as the praetorian guard of the euro; they favor the massive admission of Muslim populations into Greece and they fiercely attack every voice that disagrees with them.

Bishop Ambrossios is urging people to revolt. He characterizes the illegal Muslim immigrants entering the country as conquerors. He also says that Christianity is under attack in Greece, while Islam is being daily reinforced. He says that Greek Orthodox churches are being desecrated, robbed and burned by Muslim immigrants while the state just sits by and looks on.

Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras does not fully control his political party; his biggest problem is his cabinet.

When a political system is corrupt, when the media only put out propaganda and not information, when oligarchs control public life, when the political system seems repeatedly directed against the interests of its own people, when a political system ignores the constitution and the will of the majority but draws its legitimacy once every four years through elections, then, although it may be called “democratic”, it is a democracy of junk. It is not the people’s democracy anymore; instead, it belongs to the elites.

If Greeks do not take back their homeland, wrote journalist Makis Andronopoulos on January 3, 2017, the guns may well have the last word. Andronopoulos wrote that he came to this conclusion after polls showed the detachment of the political system from the Greek people and their tragic way of life.

The director of the newspaper Kathimerini, Alexis Papahelas, wrote on January 29, 2017 that the people are exhausted, that democracy still does not have solution to the problems of citizens and that the situation in Greece reminded him of 2012, when the old political system was wiped out.

Bishop Ambrossios is urging people to revolt. He characterizes the illegal Muslim immigrants entering the country, as conquerors. He also says that Christianity is under attack in Greece while Islam is being daily reinforced. He says that Greek Orthodox churches are being desecrated, robbed and burned by Muslim immigrants while the state just sits by and looks.

Members of the governing coalition say that Germany wants to bring down the Greek government and bring the New Democracy party to power. The leader of New Democracy, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, is the most obedient and tenacious follower of the German policy in Greece.

The Left’s route to promoting their radical agenda around the world is engineering the enactment of a United Nations treaty that contains their distorted “women’s rights” policies that can then be used to impose their alien feminist views on third world nations. I know this from my experience of more than 20 years at the UN –– including working as an NGO delegate advising official delegates plus being an official U.S. delegate appointed by President George W. Bush to two sessions, The Children’s Summit (2002) and the Commission on the Status of Women (2003). I’ve learned that whatever the theme of the session and whether it’s an official or NGO meeting. And this week, March 13 – March 24, the UN is holding its 61st annual Commission on the Status of Women.

A 2013 article that cited the 10 top accomplishments of the UN lists “promoting women’s rights” as the UN’s #1 accomplishment over the years. That achievement demonstrates the indirect and outsized influence of radical feminist NGOs in the United States and in other Member States. They gained significant, even decisive, power in 2010 with the establishment of a body incorporating all related UN agencies under one billion-dollar entity –– UN Women: United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women. This powerful consolidation of women’s agencies within the UN (often referred to as a “global policy-making body”) gave radical women unprecedented global influence. UN Women is now among the most powerful of the various entities of the UN in working to impose radical policies and practices related to women’s rights and gender identity. It is nothing short of the 21st Century’s most glaring example of arrogant western colonialism: cultural imperialism and domination at its worst.

The establishment of UN Women was the result of significant groundwork to implement a long-term strategy. Ambassador Arvonne Fraser, former ambassador to the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), explained the strategy very simply: “[W]hen you put something in law you change culture.” UN treaties, of course, are not law, but “customary law” has become a direct implication of the treaties and economic benefits that are given or withheld by the UN according to a specific nation’s adherence to the treaties. Thus, a series of women’s meetings were planned to provide a foundation for cultural change, not just in the U.S. but around the world.

The UN’s “International Women’s Year” in 1975 was followed by “The United Nations Decade for Women” from 1976 to 1985 ,including a World Plan of Action and a dramatic increase in non-governmental leaders (NGO), with the establishment of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW). All of this happened following the drafting in 1972 of the controversial Convention on Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW). This proposed treaty is promoted by its proponents as a “women’s rights treaty” (focusing on the “women’s rights” agenda rather than the human rights of women).

THE HAGUE, Netherlands—The Dutch political establishment held on to power Wednesday, despite losing votes to anti-immigrant nationalists and other upstart parties, according to preliminary results published after the country’s most closely watched election in recent times.

Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s center-right People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy won the most seats, putting Mr. Rutte in a strong position to form a new ruling coalition.

Mr. Rutte achieved his goal of finishing ahead of anti-Islam firebrand Geert Wilders , whose Party for Freedom wants to halt Muslim immigration and leave the European Union. The key to Mr. Rutte’s win was offering his own, gentler version of anti-immigrant populism during the campaign.

Preliminary results based on counting 94% of votes put the premier’s center-right party on track to win 33 seats, an 8-seat drop compared with 2012 elections but still ahead of Mr. Wilders’s group, which came second with 20 seats, followed closely by the conservative Christian Democratic Appeal and the centrist D66, both with 19 seats. Turnout was at 77.6%.

The Dutch contest has drawn unusually high global attention as a bellwether for Europe’s string of major elections this year, including in France, Germany and potentially Italy. Across the continent, mainstream political parties are facing challenges from populist and antiestablishment forces, many of them opposed to immigration and the EU.

While results in one country are unlikely to influence another’s voters, similar themes are echoing around the region including migration, security, and alienation from traditional governing parties.

Although Mr. Rutte’s party lost ground compared with 2012, its losses are smaller than expected as his party performed better than opinion polls indicated. CONTINUE AT SITE

It is an overstatement to call Hochschild a “Schindler”……Schindler worked under the noses of the Nazis putting his life at risk every single hour. Hochschild was never at risk, but his efforts were noble. I was born in Bolivia where my parents went after my father finished medical school. He was an acolyte of Jabotinsky who told him at a Zionist meeting in Geneva to get out of Europe. My father joined the Bolivian army and fought in the Chaco War where he became the surgeon general. For his military stint he was rewarded with full Bolivian citizenship and government access. He participated in Hochschild’s efforts and was instrumental in persuading the Bolivian government into opening its borders to Jews. To their eternal credit the Bolivians were kind, welcoming, and gave the Jews a haven. rsk

Old files have revealed the story of a businessman hailed as the “Bolivian Schindler” for helping thousands of Jews flee to the South American country to escape the Nazis.

Piles of documents had stood stacked for decades in the headquarters of a mining company formerly run by German Jewish entrepreneur Mauricio Hochschild.

In his time Hochschild was vilified as a ruthless tycoon, but when researchers started sorting through the paperwork decades later, they began to unravel the tale of how he helped Jews flee from persecution in the 1930s.

“He saved many souls from the Holocaust by bringing them to Bolivia and creating jobs for them,” Carola Campos, head of the Bolivian Mining Corporation’s information unit, told AFP.

Along with fellow magnates Victor Aramayo and Simon Patino, Hochschild had his mining company nationalized in 1952 by the Bolivian government. It accused them of plundering the nation by mining its tin reserves for their own profit.

But the documents revealed what else Hochschild had been up to.

They include work contracts drawn up for Jews from Europe by the mining firm in the 1930s, says the head of the corporation’s archives, Edgar Ramirez.

There is a letter from a kindergarten housing Jewish children in La Paz asking for Hochschild’s help to expand the facility “in view of the number of children who are here and others who want to come.”

One letter was from French authorities, asking him to receive a thousand Jewish orphans.

There are letters sent at the time by the British embassy to Hochschild with blacklists of companies linked to the Axis powers, whom he was forbidden to do business with.

Of the many Jews who fled from repression under Adolf Hitler in 1930s Germany, thousands came to Bolivia.

For many it was a stepping stone on to the United States, Brazil, Argentina or Israel.

Here’s one perverse consequence of Europe’s insane immigration policies: international election campaigns. Case in point: there are now so many Pakistanis who hold Norwegian citizenship (and collect Norwegian benefits) but who spend most of their time in Pakistan (where they can live like kings on those benefits) that Norwegian politician now routinely travel to Pakistan – this is not a joke – to campaign in a part of the that has come to be known as “Little Norway.” But it works the other way, too. So many Turks live in the Netherlands that President Tayyip Ergodan, in advance of a forthcoming referendum on expanding his powers, sent some of his flunkies to Rotterdam the other day to court votes. To the surprise of many, however, the normally docile Dutch government pushed back: it banned a scheduled pro-Erdogan rally, expelled one Turkish cabinet minister, and denied entry to another.

It was a small but cheering action. For too long, European elites have viewed their own countries as “humanitarian superpowers” (yes, seriously) whose mission is to give a leg-up to the downtrodden of the Muslim world. The elites in the Muslim world, however, regard European nations as colonies in the making, whose treasuries are annually drained of colossal sums in welfare handouts that end up juicing up Muslim economies, and whose leaders are docile, appeasing patsies who dare not breathe a negative word about anything Islamic.

The Dutch government’s response to Erdogan, then, marked a major departure from standard practice. It was a shocker, in fact, and perhaps a game-changer. Erdogan, accustomed to European bowing and scraping, clearly wasn’t prepared for it. He went ballistic, comparing the Dutch to the Nazis and blaming them for the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, in which Serb units murdered 8,000 Muslims while Dutch UN peacekeepers stood passively by. Turks in Rotterdam went ballistic too, holding massive riots that drew participants from as far away as Germany. Dutch authorities declared a state of emergency.

Ergodan’s slam at the Dutch will probably boost his support among his own people. But what impact will this imbroglio have on today’s Dutch elections? The Netherlands, which despite its small size has an extraordinary number of parties represented in its parliament, is currently governed by the center-right People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) in coalition with the social-democratic Labor Party (PvdA). But a great deal has changed since the last elections, which took place in 2012. The PvdA, which won 38 percent of the vote in 2012, is now down to around 10 percent in polls. The VVD, which received four out of ten votes in 2012, now stands to earn only one in four.

Bureaucrats and diplomats at the United Nations are scrambling to adjust to the new Trump administration. One thing seems certain. The Obama days of wine and roses for the UN are over. The Trump administration is reportedly laying the groundwork for cuts of at least 50% to U.S. funding for United Nations programs. U.S. diplomats warned key UN member states to “expect a big financial restraint” on American spending at the UN at a meeting earlier this month in New York City, according to sources cited by Foreign Policy.

The United States spent nearly $10 billion in total on the United Nations in 2015 alone, based on available data. This includes U.S. payment of 22 % of the UN’s regular budget and about 28.5% of its peacekeeping budget, which together add up to over $3 billion annually. The U.S. has contributed billions of dollars more in voluntary donations to various UN agencies, programs and flash humanitarian appeals. Based on available 2015 data, cutting just the U.S. voluntary contributions by 40 % would save about $2.7 billion a year.

It has been estimated that the U.S.’s mandatory assessment for funding of the UN’s regular budget is more than that of 176 other UN member states combined. The 56 member states of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation are estimated to have constituted approximately 8.6% of global production in 2015. However, they only paid 5.6% of the UN’s regular budget and 2.4% of the UN’s peacekeeping budget.

United Nations mandatory assessed budget funding is based on the socialist formula of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” The starting point is to calculate each member state’s mandatory budget assessments based on the proportion of each member state’s gross national product in comparison to the global gross national product. However, that is only the starting point. Many “less developed” nations’ assessments are then adjusted downward through manipulative concessions such as a debt burden discount and a low per capita income discount. Wealthier nations find themselves having to make up the shortfalls.

The United States is bearing an unfair burden in the funding of the United Nations. Yet the U.S. has only one vote out of 193 member states in the General Assembly when it comes to approval of the final budget for which it pays the lion’s share. This redistributionist practice must end and give way to more equitable sharing of mandatory assessments so that all member states have some real skin in the game.

The UN is also way overdue for a major overhaul, including significant cuts in its bloated budgets.For example, UN bureaucrats based in New York have been receiving net remuneration (i.e., take-home salary) at a level about 25% higher than that of their U.S. equivalents, according to the International Civil Service Commission. There are highly generous benefits that the UN provides its staff on top of that. UN salaries and benefits need to be frozen, or even rolled back, to eliminate any differential that still remains with what comparable U.S. civil servants receive, as a condition for continued U.S. funding.

The UN’s aid agencies are cumbersome and non-transparent. One independent study published a few years ago concluded that “many of the UN agencies have an extremely bad record on transparency” and are “among the least accountable aid agencies.” UN agencies also carry heavy overhead costs, which reduce the amount of contributions from donor countries going directly to those who need the assistance. The United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and United Nations Population Fund “actually spend more on administrative costs than aid disbursements (129% and 125%, respectively),” according to the study. The UNDP also has the highest salary/aid ratio at 100 percent. Perhaps for that reason, the UNDP’s transparency record is particularly bad.

As it now turns out, Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán was right about a “secret deal” all along.

In a government report published last month by the German newspaper Rheinische Post, experts recommended an annual intake of up to 300,000 migrants a year for the next 40 years, to counter lower German birth rates.

As they embark on a bizarre social engineering project on a continental scale, members of Germany’s political class evidently do not see the need to consult even their own electorates. Instead, they apparently believe in creating irreversible facts on the ground, and giving voting rights to migrants permanently residing in Germany.

“Never believe anything until it has been officially denied,” people use to say in days of the Soviet Union. Today, the same seems to be true for the European Union’s migrant policy. When German Chancellor Angela Merkel engineered the EU-Turkey deal on migrants, it was widely described by the European politicians and the media as a “breakthrough”. Merkel and other EU leaders agreed on offering a down payment of €3 billion to the regime of Turkey’s President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in return for its promises to “stem migrant flows”.

In December 2015, nearly four months before the EU-Turkey agreement was even formalized, Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán accused Chancellor Merkel of working on a “secret deal” with her Turkish counterparts. President Orbán was quite specific in his claims, apparently certain that Berlin would soon reveal the details to the public.

“Beyond what we agreed with Turkey in Brussels there’s something that doesn’t figure in the agreement,” President Orbán said in December 2015. “We’ll wake up one day — and I think this will be announced in Berlin as soon as this week — that we have to take in 400,000 to 500,000 refugees directly from Turkey.”

President Orbán was ridiculed for his claims. European Commission Vice President Frans Timmermans dismissed President Orbán’s allegations of a secret deal with Turkey as “nonsense”.

Bloomberg News reported the German and French outrage to President Orbán’s allegations at that time:

“France and Germany are working together to manage the flow of migrants, which is a challenge to everyone,” French government spokesman Stephane Le Foll told reporters in Paris on Wednesday. “Last weekend the union reached an agreement with Turkey,” and Orban should be aware of the details since he was there, Le Foll said.

A German government official, requesting anonymity because EU-Turkey talks are ongoing, said Orban’s claim that Germany made a secret deal is false.

As it now turns out, PM Orbán was right about a “secret deal” all along. According to the latest revelations made by the German newspaper Die Welt, Chancellor Merkel, along with Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, had agreed to accept 150,000 to 200,000 Syrian migrants from Turkey into the EU without consulting other European member states.

BRUSSELS—The European Union’s top court ruled that private employers can ban the Muslim head scarf, saying in its first decision on the continentwide controversy that curbs on religious symbols in the workplace don’t constitute discrimination.

Tuesday’s ruling by the 15-judge panel of the European Court of Justice comes as Europe is roiled by disagreement over how to address the influx of mostly Muslim migrants from the Middle East and North Africa and what represents an acceptable level of religious expression at work and in public.

The issues are at the center of Wednesday’s elections in the Netherlands, where the Freedom Party of Geert Wilders, a far-right, anti-Islam lawmaker, is posing a stiff challenge to Prime Minister Mark Rutte.

They are also reverberating in France, where polls indicate that anti-Islam right-wing politician Marine Le Pen will win the first round of voting in April’s presidential elections.

In their decision, the judges of the Luxembourg-based court said a private company’s prohibition on wearing a head scarf didn’t constitute “direct discrimination based on religion or belief.”

It follows years in which populist movements have ramped up attacks on Islam, portraying the religion as incompatible with European values. Their anti-immigrant rhetoric has resonated with many voters, forcing centrist political parties that for decades championed EU diversity to also embrace tough stances on divisive matters.

“The ruling is surely an ingredient for cohesion and social peace throughout Europe and notably in France,” said François Fillon, the conservative French presidential candidate who lost his lead in the polls amid a corruption probe.

Ms. Le Pen publicized her stance against Islam during a February visit to Lebanon, where she refused to cover her head to meet the country’s top Sunni Muslim cleric.

Last summer, France was gripped by controversies as dozens of towns pushed to ban the full-body swimsuit known as burkini worn by Muslim women. A top French court suspended the orders, citing fundamental freedoms.

In the Netherlands, Mr. Wilders has seen his popularity peak as he called for shutting mosques and banning the Quran. Mr. Rutte eventually hardened his stance to counter Mr. Wilders’s rise, telling immigrants to either adapt to the Netherlands or go home.

Amid a groundswell of populism, Tuesday’s court decision risks being a harbinger of broader discrimination, rights activists said. CONTINUE AT SITE