RUTHFULLY YOURS

MOGADISHU, Somalia—At least 14 people were killed when gunmen stormed a hotel in Somalia’s seaside capital and took hotel guests hostage, police and medical workers said Saturday, before security forces ended the hourslong assault.

Islamic extremist group al-Shabaab claimed responsibility for the attack, the latest in a series of hotel attacks in Mogadishu.

“We have finally ended the siege. The last remaining militants were killed on the top floor,” police Capt. Mohamed Hussein said after security forces pursued the gunmen who had retreated to upper floors of the Nasa-Hablod hotel, setting up sniper posts on the roof and throwing grenades. Police said at least four gunmen were involved in the attack.

“We have so far confirmed the deaths of 14 people. Some of them died in the hospitals,” Capt. Hussein said. The deaths included women who were selling khat, a stimulant leaf popular with Somali men, outside the hotel, he said.

Capt. Hussein said security forces killed two of the attackers. Police and medical workers said another nine people were wounded in the assault.

Security forces rescued most of the hostages; it wasn’t clear whether any of the hostages had been killed.

Police said the attack began when a suicide bomber detonated an explosives-laden vehicle at the hotel entrance, ripping off its gate. Gunmen fought their way inside, and a witness said they began shooting randomly at hotel guests.

The bodies of two men, including one thought to be a hotel guard and an attacker dressed in a military uniform, lay on the first floor.

Bullets pockmarked the hotel walls. Security forces combed through the dark hotel rooms, searching for explosives.

The implications of Britain’s vote to leave the European Union will reverberate through the Continent’s politics and economy for years. But it may have an even more immediate global political significance with resonance here in the U.S. as the most powerful demonstration yet of a rising populist tide transforming the established order across the West.

The victory for the Leave campaign was perhaps the single largest blow the British populace has delivered to its establishment in modern history. Voters defied the impassioned—and unified—opposition of the leadership of all five major political parties. They rejected the advice of more than 1,200 corporate CEOs, including half of the chiefs of the FTSE 100 companies who wrote to The Times newspaper last week urging rejection of “Brexit.”

Banks in the City of London, one of the world’s major financial centers, along with the Bank of England, the country’s central bank, and most of its influential think tanks and academic institutions, had warned of the risks to the U.K.’s economic security and global financial pre-eminence if Britain did not stay in the EU. A procession of eminent foreigners, from most heads of European governments to James Dimon, the CEO of J.P. Morgan Chase, had urged a vote to stay.
In April, President Barack Obama traveled to London to weigh in, telling British voters that Britain would go to “the back of the queue” in negotiations for trade agreements with the United States if they chose to leave.

All to no avail. This unprecedented establishment campaign of persuasion failed to sway a majority of British voters who opted instead to take a step the government had repeatedly described as an act of “economic self-harm.”

Not since universal adult suffrage in the U.K. has the electorate been so willing to reject the concerted and unified advice of its political and economic leadership. Instead they chose to side with politicians who directly challenged the establishment, such as Boris Johnson, the Conservative former mayor of London, and Nigel Farage, the leader of the populist United Kingdom Independence Party.

The Leave campaign, of course, was a singularly British phenomenon, channeling longstanding national resentment of the cession of power by the government to an unelected supranational Brussels bureaucracy. But in its message and its appeal it had much in common with surging popular anger seen across the Continent and in the U.S. Populist movements have been on the rise in Europe and America since the financial crisis eight years ago. As dissatisfaction with slow growth, high unemployment and stagnant wages has risen, political parties such as the Five Star movement in Italy, the Alternative for Deutschland in Germany, the National Front in France and Podemos in Spain have made gains at local and even national levels, and populist parties have actually taken power in smaller countries such as Hungary and Poland.

In the U.S., the Tea Party rode popular resentment against economic weakness, government spending and bailouts for banks beginning in 2010. And of course this year, Donald Trump emerged from outside the established political order to become the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party.

With exquisite timing, Mr. Trump himself happened to land in the U.K. in the midst of the populist triumph. Opening his new golf course at Turnberry in Scotland, he congratulated Britons.

“People want to take their country back,’’ he said. And then to drive home the similarities between his own ascent and that of the Leave campaign, he said: “There are many other cases where they will want to take their borders back. You’re going to see that more and more… I love to see people take their country back.”

Tea Party supporters also identified with the victorious Leave campaign Tea Party Nation, a leading umbrella group, congratulated the British on their “Independence Day” and said in a statement “the land that gave us Magna Carta decided they wanted freedom and not a socialist dictatorship.” CONTINUE AT SITE

In a major speech in November, the PM sought to move the debate off what he called “trade and commerce, pounds and pence” and on to “our national security”.

Three days later the world was shocked by the horror of the Paris bombings. Then came the organised sexual harassment of women in Cologne and other German cities. Now the abomination in Brussels. And, all the while, a migration crisis.

Safer in? Seriously? How are we safer as part of this collapsing project? How are we more secure giving clumsy Brussels institutions more control over our affairs?

Does it make sense for the EU to create, with Turkey, a visa-free zone that stretches from the Channel to the borders of Syria and Iran?

One by one, defence and security professionals have expressed their concerns.

Major-General Julian Thompson, who commanded our land forces in the Falklands, warns that “membership of the EU weakens our national defence in very dangerous times”.

Richard Walton, who until recently led Scotland Yard’s Counter-Terrorism unit, notes collaboration against terrorism has nothing to do with Brussels, and that “membership of the EU does not really convey any benefits”.

Security … two armed police officers patrolling St Pancras International Airport in London

The former head of Interpol, Ronald Noble, says the EU’s border policy “is like hanging a sign welcoming terrorists to Europe”. Now our former intelligence chief, Sir Richard Dearlove, has written a devastating piece explaining why Britain will be safer outside the EU.

Sir Richard sees two big advantages in Brexit. First, Euro judges will no longer be able to stop us from deporting dangerous or undesirable foreigners.

Only last month, for example, we found out we couldn’t expel Abu Hamza’s daughter-in-law from the UK after a criminal conviction as it would violate her “fundamental status” as an EU citizen.

The second advantage is that we would have more control over who is allowed to enter Britain.

The Paris and Brussels atrocities tragically showed us that many potential terrorists hold EU passports.

We know, too, that Europe has lost control of its external borders, and that extremists are using the migration crisis to enter EU states.

Seven percent of respondents agreed that “violence is justified to spread Islam.” Although these numbers may seem innocuous, 7% of the three million Turks living in Germany amounts to 210,000 people who believe that jihad is an acceptable method to propagate Islam.

The survey also found that labor migration is no longer the main reason why Turks immigrate to Germany: the most important reason is to marry a partner who lives there.

A new statistical survey of Germany — Datenreport 2016: Social Report for the Federal Republic of Germany — shows that ethnic Turks are economically and educationally less successful than other immigrant groups, and that more than one-third (36%) of ethnic Turks live below the poverty line, compared to 25% of migrants from the Balkans and southwestern Europe.

“In our large study we asked Muslims how strongly they feel discriminated against, and we searched for correlations to the development of a fundamentalist worldview. But there are none. Muslim hatred of non-Muslims is not a special phenomenon of Muslim immigration, but is actually worse in the countries of origin. Radicalization is not first produced here in Europe, rather it comes from the Muslim world.” — Ruud Koopmans, sociologist.

Nearly half of the three million ethnic Turks living in Germany believe it is more important to follow Islamic Sharia law than German law if the two are in conflict, according to a new study.

One-third of those surveyed also yearn for German society to “return” to the way it was during the time of Mohammed, the founder of Islam, in the Arabia of the early seventh century.

The survey — which involves Turks who have been living in Germany for many years, often decades — refutes claims by German authorities that Muslims are well integrated into German society.

The 22-page study, “Integration and Religion from the Viewpoint of Ethnic Turks in Germany” (Integration und Religion aus der Sicht von Türkeistämmigen in Deutschland), was produced by the Religion and Politics department of the University of Münster. Key findings include:

47% of respondents agreed with the statement that “following the tenets of my religion is more important to me than the laws of the land in which I live.” This view is held by 57% of first generation Turkish immigrants and 36% of second and third generation Turks. (The study defines first generation Turks as those who arrived in Germany as adults; second and third generation Turks are those who were born in Germany or who arrived in the country as children.)
32% of respondents agreed that “Muslims should strive to return to a societal order like that in the time of Mohammed.” This view is held by 36% of the first generation and 27% of the second and third generation.
50% of respondents agreed that “there is only one true religion.” This view is held by 54% of the first generation and 46% of the second and third generation.
36% of respondents agreed that “only Islam is able to solve the problems of our times.” This view is held by 40% of the first generation and 33% of the second and third generation.
20% of respondents agreed that “the threat which the West poses to Islam justifies violence.” This view is held by 25% of the first generation and 15% of the second and third generation.
7% of respondents agreed that “violence is justified to spread Islam.” This view is held by 7% of the first generation and 6% of the second and third generation. Although these numbers may seem innocuous, 7% of the three million Turks living in Germany amounts to 210,000 people who believe that jihad is an acceptable method to propagate Islam.
23% of respondents agreed that “Muslims should not shake the hand of a member of the opposite sex.” This view is held by 27% of the first generation and 18% of the second and third generation.
33% of respondents agreed that “Muslim women should wear a veil.” This view is held by 39% of the first generation and 27% of the second and third generation.
31% of female respondents said that they wear a veil in public. This includes 41% of the first generation and 21% of the second and third generation.
73% of respondents agreed that “books and movies that attack religion and offend the feelings of deeply religious people should be banned by law.”
83% of respondents agreed that “I get angry when Muslims are the first to be blamed whenever there is a terrorist attack.”
61% of respondents agreed that “Islam fits perfectly in the Western world.”
51% of respondents agreed that “as an ethnic Turk, I feel like a second class citizen.”
54% of respondents agreed that “regardless of how hard I try, I am not accepted as a member of German society.”

The study also found that Turks and native Germans hold radically different perceptions about Islam:

In France, before the British vote, the weekly JDD conducted an online poll with one question: Do you want France out of the EU? 88% of people answered “YES!”

In none of the countries the surveyed was there much support for transferring power to Brussels.

To calm a possible revolt of millions of poor and unemployed people, countries such as France have maintained a high level of social welfare spending, by borrowing money on international debt markets to pay unemployment insurance benefits, as well as pensions for retired people. Today, France’s national debt is 96.1% of GDP. In 2008, it was 68%.

In the past few years, these poor and old people have seen a drastic change in their environment: the butcher has become halal, the café does not sell alcohol anymore, and most women in the streets are wearing veils. Even the McDonald’s in France have become halal.

What is reassuring is that the “Leave” people waited for a legal way to express their protest. They did not take guns or knives to kill Jews or Muslims: they voted. They waited an opportunity to express their feelings.

“How quickly the unthinkable became the irreversible” writes The Economist. They are talking about Brexit, of course.

The question of today is: Who could have imagined that British people were so tired of being members of The Club? The question of tomorrow is: What country will be next?

In France, before the British vote, the weekly JDD conducted an online poll with one question: Do you want France out of the EU? 88% of people answered “YES!” This is not a scientific result, but it is nevertheless an indication. A recent — and more scientific — survey for Pew Research found that in France, a founding member of “Europe,” only 38% of people still hold a favorable view of the EU, six points lower than in Britain. In none of the countries surveyed was there much support for transferring power to Brussels.

With Brexit, everybody is discovering that the European project was implemented by no more than a minority of the population: young urban people, national politicians of each country and bureaucrats in Brussels.

All others remain with the same feeling: Europe failed to deliver.

On the economic level, the EU has been unable to keep jobs at home. They have fled to China and other countries with low wages. Globalization proved stronger than the EU. The unemployment rate has never before been so high as inside the EU, especially in France. In Europe, 10.2% of the workforce is officially unemployed The unemployment rate is 9.9% in France, 22% in Spain.

And take-home salaries have remained low, except for a few categories in finance and high-tech.

For many years, Palestinians hoped that one day they would enjoy public freedoms under the leadership of the Palestinian Authority (PA), like the freedoms their neighbors in Israel have. But more than two decades after the establishment of the PA, democracy and freedom of speech are still far from being introduced to Palestinian society.

A PA court sentenced Anas Saad Awwad to a year in prison for posting on Facebook a photoshopped picture of Abbas wearing a Real Madrid shirt.

“Come and invest in the Palestinian areas, but if you don’t bribe their corrupt officials, the Palestinian Authority will arrest you. This is a desperate political arrest by an undemocratic Palestinian Authority president who has no credibility amongst his people. ” — Khaled al-Sabawi, son of Palestinian-Canadian investor Mohamed al-Sabawi, who was jailed for recommending the removal of Mahmoud Abbas from power.

It is not easy for an Arab journalist to criticize his or her leaders. If there is one thing Arab dictators cannot tolerate, it is criticism, especially when it comes from an Arab journalist, columnist or political opponent.

For many years, Palestinians were hoping that one day they would enjoy freedom of expression under the leadership of the Palestinian Authority (PA). But more than two decades after the establishment of the PA, Palestinians have learned that democracy and freedom of speech are still far from being introduced to their society.

Since then, Palestinians have also learned that their leaders are “untouchable” and above criticism. Both Mahmoud Abbas and his predecessor, Yasser Arafat, have even taught Palestinians that “insulting” their president is a crime and an act of treason.

The momentous victory for the Brexit campaign signals a new era of freedom for the British people.

After more than four decades of being shackled to the European Union (previously the European Economic Community), Great Britain has declared its independence.

The vote for Brexit (52 percent of Britons cast ballots to leave the EU) is a vote for sovereignty and self-determination. Britain will no longer be subject to European legislation, with Britain’s Parliament retaking control. British judges will no longer be overruled by the European Court of Justice, and British businesses will be liberated from mountains of EU regulations, which have undermined economic liberty.

Indeed, Brexit will result in a bonfire of red tape, freeing the city of London and enterprises across the nation from European Union diktat. And at last, Britain is free again to negotiate its own free trade deals, a huge boost to the world’s fifth largest economy.

The United States should seize upon Brexit as a tremendous opportunity to sign an historic free trade agreement with the United Kingdom-a deal that would advance prosperity on both sides of the Atlantic. Brexit will also strengthen the Anglo-American special relationship, the most important bilateral partnership in the world.

Britain outside the EU will be a stronger ally for the United States, from confronting Russian aggression in Eastern Europe to defeating the Islamist terror threat.

Britain’s decision to leave the EU should be a cause for celebration here in America. Brexit embodies the very principles and ideals the American people hold dear to their hearts: self-determination, limited government, democratic accountability, and economic liberty. A truly free and powerful Great Britain is good for Europe and the United States.

As Margaret Thatcher famously declared after the liberation of the Falkland Islands by British forces in 1982: “Rejoice.” The Iron Lady believed firmly that Britain would be better off outside the European Union.

The British people can rejoice in their rediscovered freedom. It is a cause for celebration for America, too.

“Rule, Britannia!” hasn’t been relevant for a century, since Jutland in 1916. With sheer willpower, and clever leveraging of U.S. assets, by 1940 Winston Churchill could only evoke the first four lines of a stanza from James Thomson’s stirring, and endearing patriotic anthem:

‘Thee haughty tyrants ne’er shall tame:

All their attempts to bend thee down,

Will but arouse thy generous flame;

But work their woe, and thy renown.’

Britain’s vote Thursday to exit the EU is a hopeful reprise of Thomson’s chorus.

“Rule, Britannia! rule the waves:

“Britons never will be slaves.”

Presumably freed via an orderly decoupling from Brussels’ electronic bracelets, “Leavers” assert Britain should now set its own trade regimen, immigration rules, economic and environmental regulatory schemes, return to unmolested British jurisprudence, and void communitarian taxes.

In 1940 Churchill’s speech was about survival. “We shall defend our island, no matter what the cost may be…” By 1946, Churchill spoke of the need for a European Alliance, an economic coalition, vital for postwar recovery, but his sentiments preceded the U.S. Marshall Plan that largely supplanted Churchill’s Pan-Europe recovery sketch.

Churchill today would be horrified at how the EU has evolved into a virulent bureaucracy stifling economic growth, while frustrating Churchill’s foundational tenets — the supremacy of Western civilization, free trade outside the union, and political liberty.

Ruth Dudley Edwards is an Irish historian, crime novelist and broadcaster.

Close to 10,000 have been killed in Ireland in the last century because of political violence, tens of thousands have been injured and many more bereaved or traumatised. Irish nationalists still honour their “patriot dead”, but the legacy is no longer sacrosanct. The country is growing up.
Whatever else the centenary of 1916 has done for Ireland, it’s been a bonanza for booksellers. Whole shop windows are devoted to books about every aspect of what was commemorated this year on Easter Sunday, even though that wasn’t actually the anniversary of the rising, insurrection, rebellion or whatever you like to call an event which involved—in a democracy—a seven-man clique within an oath-bound secret society leading around 1600 people to occupy buildings in Dublin and shoot soldiers and unarmed policemen. For some of them, like the front man, Patrick Pearse, chosen by the seven to be President of the Provisional Government, it was a form of suicide by cop.

The actual anniversary is April 24, which fell in 1916 on Easter Monday, but because it became popularly known as the Easter Rising, and because of the success of Pearse, its chief propagandist, in tying it into Catholicism, there is a tendency to mark the religious festival, rather than the actual anniversary.

A measure of home rule had been passed by the Westminster Parliament, but had been suspended for the duration of the First World War—not least because there was armed opposition to it among the (mainly Protestant) unionists in the northern part of the island. The government of the United Kingdom feared civil war. In 1916, the immediate result of the rebels’ actions was almost 500 deaths, innumerable injuries and the destruction by British artillery of important chunks of Dublin. Owing to the execution of sixteen of the rebel leaders (who included a few poets) tapping into the Irish appetite for tragic, romantic, eloquent heroes, the insurrection would go on to receive retrospective nationalist legitimisation in an election in 1918. It would help people of violence to groom generations to follow the example of the “martyred dead”.

In the north of the island, the main effect was the hardening of opposition to any form of independence. With the exacerbation of tribal hatred on the island, it would be left with two confessional and mutually hostile bourgeois states with unhappy minorities, hundreds of thousands of refugees, isolationism, poverty, bigotry and philistinism.
These days the political establishment of the Republic of Ireland mostly retrospectively endorses political violence until 1921—the end of the so-called war of independence, which was begun by another small handful of unelected revolutionaries. A distinguished exception is the ex-Taoiseach (prime minister), John Bruton, from Fine Gael, traditionally the law-and-order party, who contends forcefully that Ireland would have been a happier place had independence been gained gradually through the peaceful route of democratic reform. For Fianna Fail (whose antecedents were on the losing side of a civil war begun in opposition to an Anglo-Irish treaty endorsed by the Irish electorate) the magic date after which violence became unacceptable was the surrender in 1923.

The longer the process is dragged out, the more the plebiscite’s result will be re-cast in whatever nuanced perspective best suits the political elite. ‘Leave’ is going to mean whatever they succeed in making it mean. Those who led the campaign have most of the work still to do.
I don’t want to be a party-pooper but the celebrations have to be kept short. What does this mean? It means that the Brexit vote, far from necessarily being “seismic” in its implications (the favoured description, so far as I can tell) could, potentially, become a damp squib. The political elite have already started to backslide. My fear is that a formula will be found which will pay only lip service to the Leave campaign victory.

The likes of UKIP’s Nigel Farage will not call the tune. The likes of longstanding Euro-sceptic Daniel Hannan will. He already has the exit process elongated. He conceives of an agreement which will preserve the common market for goods allied with free movement of labour. By the latter he means the free movement of people who can show they have jobs waiting; but, if that is your opening gambit, it doesn’t take much imagination to see where negotiations will end up. Listening to him, when frequently interviewed on the BBC, brought the Stockholm syndrome to fresh life in my mind.

One conservative chap, with a polished accent, whose name escapes me, said that he thought a general election should be called and that it would be perfectly proper if a party sought a mandate to stay in the EC. When you think you have heard it all, listen to an English public school old boy and no longer wonder why working people in Burnley, Bolton and Bradford feel betrayed.

The problem is not just that a large majority of parliamentarians favour staying in; it is that the popular vote was close. The 52% of those who voted to leave was far short of the two-thirds who voted for staying in the EU in 1975. The mandate for resolute action is far thinner and boon for those who believe they know better than do common folk. A further complication is the strong vote in Scotland (62%) to stay and in Northern Ireland (56%). And more complicated still is the gulf between younger and older voters. According to the BBC, 73% of those aged from 18 to 25 voted to stay.

I heard one younger commentator say that she thought that older people had been selfish. This prompted historian David Starkey to ask whether she thought there should be an upper age limit on voter eligibility. My own view is that people younger than 25, whose brains are still developing, should be excluded from voting. But this is regarded as an eccentric view by most so I better keep quiet about it.