RUTHFULLY YOURS

Amid so much post-Brexit gloom about Europe, Sunday brought some especially welcome news in the unlikely vehicle of a Spanish election. The country’s voters increased support for Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy’s center-right Popular Party (PP) while rejecting the bid for power by the left-wing Podemos movement.

The election improves on the muddled results of six months ago in which no party won a majority. This time the PP increased its seats in the new Parliament to 137 from 123. The Socialists retained second place with 85 seats, blocking Podemos’s attempt to become the main party of the left. Markets responded with relief, pushing the Spanish 10-year government bond yield down 0.17 percentage points, the sharpest drop since 2014.

Mr. Rajoy is short of an absolute majority, but this is nonetheless a case of sound policy rewarded. Since taking power in 2011, the PP has ignored the Keynesian councils of Brussels and Washington in favor of supply-side economic reforms. Mr. Rajoy has cut personal and corporate taxes and simplified the tax system, trimmed civil-service spending and made it easier to hire and fire Spaniards.

And what do you know, faster growth has followed. Spain’s economy grew 3.2% last year and about 3% over the past eight quarters, according to the European Union’s statistical agency, while the jobless rate has fallen to 22.7% from a crisis-era peak of 26%.

This Spanish revival is all the more remarkable considering the lackluster growth in most of the rest of Europe. Growth in Germany was 1.7% last year and a mere 1.3% in France, where the jobless rate continues to be above 10%.

These results no doubt helped to blunt the appeal of Podemos, which fancies itself a version of Greece’s hard-left Syriza party. Left-wing populism prospers amid economic stagnation. Some credit also belongs to the Socialists, who have behaved like a responsible center-left opposition that favors more government intervention but rejects Podemos’s anticapitalist platform. CONTINUE AT SITE

Herbert London is President of the London Center for Policy Research
Now that the London fog has cleared, a dispassionate analysis of the Brexit vote is possible, even with murky clouds over the British Isles. The pound plunged with the Brexit vote as did global markets. Political elites from Cameron to Obama shuddered. Investors on both sides of the Atlantic were pummeled. Some say the British vote to leave the European Union is an invitation to anarchy.

I would say the vote represents a monumental assertion of free will, a vindication of a millennium of democracy and self-government. While those in London favored remaining in the E.U., the rest of Britain rebelled against the stain of migration that has disrupted the countryside, even leading to the massive rape of underage girls in one community by recent Muslim immigrants. The idea that Britain could absorb another 650,000 immigrants under E.U. mandate is, in the minds of many, a prescription for disaster.

Multiculturalism is in retreat as are the politically correct nostroms that have unsettled life for the average Brit. Brexit speaks to the Grand Old England, the one led by Margaret Thatcher who was the original Euroskeptic. She understood that the arrogant assertion of a united European entity undoing 500 years of history since the Westphalian accord was a fantasy. It has taken forty years for that fantasy to reveal itself, but now it has and dissolution is on the horizon. Brexit will lead to Czechit and Italianit and the slow but inexorable splitting of the elitist conception of Europe.

Most Brits were tired of a group of bureaucrats in Brussels telling them whether the use of an electric teapot was permissible or the allowable size of a lawn mower. Who are these bureaucrats anyway? They weren’t elected by British citizens. In fact, the entire E.U. is supra – democratic – a reach beyond sovereignty to unassigned authority. Ordinary people understand the disconnect with a government over which their control cannot be exercised.

The catastrophe that has hit Syria — hundreds of thousands dead, millions dislocated, and a multi-year stream of refugees headed to Europe that now numbers in the millions — is a political and human disaster with multiple godfathers. After several years of war, there is still no evidence that the fighting will soon end, or that a political solution is at hand.

One of the biggest reasons for this calamity has been the near complete abdication of responsibility for or interest in addressing the conflict by the Obama administration, a neglect that history will not regard as benign. When over 50 State Department officials expressed their dismay at American policy towards Syria in a written statement, and their disgust was made public, it was, unfortunately, only a one-day story for the national networks and leading papers.

This is, after all, a press corps that was never eager to embarrass the administration, which they have so ably served for more than seven years. This history of journalistic obeisance was what enabled White House adviser Ben Rhodes to gloat over how easy it was to deceive the reporters on what was really in the Iran nuclear deal. Rhodes

classified most of the reporters as young know-nothings. Of course, there were also those who were knowingly in the bag for the deal for other reasons (such as former Ambassador Thomas Pickering, who was bought and paid for by Boeing while he was lobbying Congress for the Iran deal, never disclosing his financial arrangement with the plane manufacturer).

It is obvious in one regard why the Obama administration shied away from any serious military involvement in Syria, including the time when the president reversed course on responding to Syria’s use of chemical weapons, the supposed red line that he set up that was crossed and presumably demanded military action. The president saw his role as being the un-Bush, the leader who would take America out of conflicts into which his predecessor had led it. These conflicts included the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The president put little effort into achieving a separation agreement with the Iraqi government that would have enabled a modest American force to remain in the country. The rise of Islamic State in Iraq and Syria was hastened by the American withdrawal and the perception in Iraq among the minority Sunni population that the Shiite government in power, now linked up with Iran, would make life miserable for the country’s Sunnis. The American “surge” effort in the final years of the Bush administration enabled President Barack Obama to begin his term with the country in far better shape than had been the case a few years earlier in terms of both military status and political arrangements. Today Iraq and Syria are in a state that makes the worst days of the conflict during the Bush years seem like a stroll in the park.

Over the weekend, friends asked my opinion of Brexit. You lived abroad, they said, and you’re an analyst or something, so what can you tell us?

It wasn’t what they wanted to hear.

Most Americans who support Britain remaining in the European Union have characterized “leavers” as ignorant, backward-looking bumpkins, motivated by chauvinism or even racism: the British version of Trump supporters.

In a way, that’s what they are — a sizable group of ordinary people with valid concerns who’ve been neglected and misled by elites for so long that they’re seizing their only chance to register their rage at the established order. But just like in the U.S., Britons’ concerns have been buried under an avalanche of prejudice and mischaracterization.

Can we Americans learn anything from this … or is it too late?
The Shadow on the Cave Wall

Like the shadows in Plato’s allegory of the cave, politics is never what it seems. Brexit is a case in point.

Elite opinion says that English cultural chauvinism explains Thursday’s “leave” vote. Many “leavers” were bigots, but for most, anti-immigrant sentiment was just one way they dressed up their underlying frustrations. Tellingly, “leave” seems to have been just as popular amongst nonwhite lower-class British as amongst whites. Second- and third-generation South Asians and West Indians voted the same way as the Andy Capp pub-and-darts set.

Here’s my take on what happened — and why it’s going to happen here, too.

The EU is essentially a supersized free-trade agreement. It provides for the free movement of capital, labor, goods and services throughout the EU. But to avoid competition between member states, EU rules override laws that were previously decided by sovereign parliaments, such as agriculture, fisheries, external trade, the environment and, above all, budget policy.

The decision of the British electorate to reject all the advice and browbeatings from the Great and Good, and vote to leave the European Union, is above all a display of nationalism.

That word was mostly absent in the discussions I watched on the BBC and in much coverage here in the United States. And when pundits mentioned the word, they used it as a synonym for chauvinism, isolationism, and ignorance much more frequently than as a synonym for patriotism.

This should not be a great surprise: Nationalism is out of favor. It has, especially in Europe and for obvious historical reasons, been understood as a basis for fascism and extreme chauvinism. Orwell wrote that nationalism is “power hunger.” Einstein considered it infantile — the view most officials in Brussels probably take. Nationalism is considered by European elites to be a primitive view — indeed, not even a view but an emotion.

In the Brexit vote, Brits chose to reject those patronizing views and express their nationalism. By this, they seem to have meant that they want to make the key decisions about their future, and about how they live, through their own democratic institutions. On the BBC on Friday morning, a typically biased interviewer spoke with Radek Sikorski, the former foreign minister of Poland, who denounced Brexit as dangerous and malevolent. His anger and resentment were so great that they finally moved even the BBC to defend the vote. How? On democratic grounds. Don’t people have a right to vote? Isn’t self-rule sacred? It was half amusing, half inspiring to see the interviewer rise to the defense of his countrymen and -women when they were treated with contempt for choosing Westminster over Brussels.

There is a message here for Israelis — and for Americans.

For Israelis, the referendum fight helps explain their unpopularity among European elites. If nationalism is primitive and infantile and dangerous, it is no wonder that Israel is criticized endlessly and its efforts to defend itself are seen as excessive. Its basic demand — to be understood and acknowledged as a Jewish state — is itself considered illicit; ethno-national states are out of the question these days. Defending your state with actual guns is positively medieval in the eyes of today’s European leaders.

How is Hizbullah doing after about four years of fighting in Syria on behalf of the Assad regime, as part of the axis led by Iran?

In terms of bluster, and particularly threats against Israel, Hizbullah hasn’t changed much. But in other ways—and not only with regard to the often-cited 1500 fighters Hizbullah has lost on Syrian soil—the war is taking a toll on the Shiite terror organization. That includes growing unpopularity in Lebanon itself—even among its traditional supporters.

On June 18, speaking to a Lebanese audience on Hizbullah’s Al-Manar TV channel (as translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute, MEMRI), Hizbullah MP Walid Sukkarieh painted a scenario in a future war between Hizbullah and Israel.

He asked: “What would the capturing of settlements mean?”

Hizbullah has indeed been planning for years to capture Israeli communities in the Galilee in a prospective war.

Answering his own question, Sukkarieh said:

First, we would be liberating land. Second, we would take hostages, prisoners. The Israeli people would be a prisoner in your hands. This would prevent Israel from targeting civilians on your side. It would not be able to implement the Dahiya Strategy. They have threatened that in the next war, they will implement this strategy and destroy all of Lebanon. What will they destroy if we hold settlements hostage? We will have hostages. If they kill us, we will kill them.

It is hard to believe that the party once led by Prime Minister Tony Blair, who assisted President Bush in leading the war on terror and fighting expansionist Islamist movements, is now being fought over and led by a man who voted against banning Al Qaeda as a terrorist organization.

The idea that a single totalitarian Caliphate would bring increased democracy and stability, let alone civil and political rights, to an increasingly factional, corrupt and unstable Middle East, appears more a childlike, logic-defying fantasy.

Isn’t it usually secular societies that protect the rights of religious minorities, including Muslims, to practice their faith?

I am not a Jew, and I have no links to Judaism. But if being a Jew offends antisemitic racists, then I am happy to call myself Jew, and to stand up and be counted with the Jews as a minority facing increased persecution across Europe.

The UK Labour Party, which once stood proudly in solidarity with the victims of terrorism, now, under the would-be leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, seems to have become a haven for antisemites, Islamists and their apologists.

It is hard to believe that the party once led by Prime Minister Tony Blair, who assisted President Bush in leading the war on terror and fighting expansionist Islamist movements, is now led by a man who voted against banning Al Qaeda as a terrorist organization months after more than 200 people were killed in the 1998 terrorist attacks on the American embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam.

Michael Kuttner is a Jewish New Zealander who for many years was actively involved with various communal organisations connected to Judaism and Israel. He now lives in Israel and is J-Wire’s correspondent in the region.http://www.jwire.com.au/state-of-the-union/#more-64484

By the time you read this, the results of the British referendum will be known…writes Michael Kuttner.Whether the UK remains or exits the European Union the repercussions of its decision will be felt by Israel and Jews in Europe alike. My observations are based on many discussions held with British Jews and observing past, current and potential actions emanating from the continent of Europe.

The EU was originally conceived as a free trade union known as the Common Market. Its original intentions were laudable and designed to benefit all members and create a strong and peaceful cohesive trading bloc on a continent which in past generations had been torn apart by nationalistic tendencies. The United Kingdom did not join at first because the British were suspicious of getting too tangled up with European problems. However it soon became apparent that in order to safeguard the UK’s trade relationships and guarantee future beneficial trading deals joining this venture would be advisable. Thus in 1973 it joined and this action was confirmed in 1975 by a referendum. I still remember the chaos this caused in New Zealand because at one stroke the country’s preferential trade agreements with the UK were ditched and instead of Commonwealth solidarity the long and slippery slope towards a continent dominated by Germany commenced.

It is safe to say that the British public at that time generally were not overly enthusiastic about abandoning a traditional wariness of Europe and embracing a love affair with a continent which had in the past caused so much death and misery. However the prospect of enhanced trading partners and a better economic prospect replaced any uneasy feelings as to where it might all lead. Inevitably the Common Market morphed into something much bigger and its advocates made plans for what they envisaged to be a union with enormous centralised powers which would inevitably supersede national parliaments and dictate policies.

The introduction of a common currency presented the UK with a challenge and in a move which in hindsight was brilliantly perceptive the British Government decided against adopting the Euro and instead to retain Sterling as its currency.

Over time, slowly but inexorably, the Common Market mutated into the monstrous union it is today with unelected officials based in palatial buildings in Brussels dictating policies to member States. National Parliaments now find themselves unable to enact legislation which can be challenged by an EU Court and deemed incompatible with EU laws.

Today we have the spectacle of a widely disparate union ranging from the economic powerhouse of Germany to the economic basket cases of Greece and Spain sinking deep into a gigantic sinkhole of debt where its banks are owed billions and where there is not the slightest prospect of any of this debt ever being repaid. Undeniably one of the gravest threats to the EU’s long term survival was the insane removal of national border controls which was touted at the time as the end of nationalistic tendencies and the beginning of an era of universal love, tolerance and mutual cohesiveness. Those who warned of the perils associated with a free flow of criminals were vilified as fascists in much the same way that today’s opponents are called Islamaphobes. Not many foresaw the mortal dangers posed by terrorists having unrestricted access across the continent but now that this has hit the fan it is all too obvious, except to those who continue to deny reality.

How does all this impact on Israel and Jews?

We’ve been hearing a great deal about how opening Cuba will bring in Americans with their dollars and democratic ways. Well, not all Americans are welcomed by the Castro regime, as The Hill reports:

“At a time when the Obama Administration is rolling out the red carpet for Havana, the Cuban government refuses to be open and transparent with the peoples’ Representatives,” McCaul said in a statement on Friday.

“Sadly, it appears to be easier for Cubans to come to the United States than for Members of the House Homeland Security Committee to get to Cuba.”

Other lawmakers who were planning to visit Cuba include Reps. John Katko (R-N.Y.), Martha McSally (R-Ariz.), Richard Hudson (R-N.C.) and Henry Cuellar (D-Texas).

“The Administration is eager to have as many people as possible visit Cuba — except for those who are attempting to examine Cuban security infrastructure,” said Katko, chairman of the transportation security subcommittee.

“We still don’t know if Cuba has the adequate body scanners and explosive detection systems in place, whether it has the technology to screen for fraudulent passports or ID, whether or how aviation workers are screened, and if Federal Air Marshals will be allowed to fly missions to Cuba on commercial flights.”