RUTHFULLY YOURS

The European Union has had a bad couple of years. There were the major crises in southern European states, especially in Greece; support for the EU has eroded; and the Dutch voted against an EU treaty with Ukraine last month.

That’s bad enough for the federalists in Brussels, but it may get even worse in the month ahead. In June, British voters will decide whether their country remains in the EU or will cease to be a member state. Although most recent polls show the Remain camp in the lead, they realize they can’t afford to make any unforced errors. Besides, who knows which voters will actually show up? Anti-EU voters may be more passionate than those who wish to remain. If that’s the case, it could be closer on voting day than polls suggest.

This is why Eurosceptics from Britain and other EU countries haven’t given up hope just yet. In fact, Dutch populist Geert Wilders is already promising a similar exit referendum in the Netherlands:

Mr Wilders says that if Brexit happens, he will “immediately” propose a referendum on Dutch exit from the EU.

Sitting in front of a portrait of Winston Churchill, Britain’s wartime leader, in his office, he told the FT: “When after Brexit it turns out that the lights don’t go out and war doesn’t come, that could be an enormous stimulus not just for the Netherlands but for several countries to think of leaving.”

Like many other sceptics of the grand European project, Wilders looks at Switzerland as an example to be followed. Switzerland is a strong and prosperous European nation, but has always refused to become part of the EU. Unlike what Europhiles would like Brits to believe, that hasn’t hurt the Swiss in the least. In fact, it has enabled them to do business with whomever they want and on their terms, which is something EU member states can only dream of. CONTINUE AT SITE

The cognoscenti pronounce Qatar, quite appropriately as “gutter.”….rsk

Many people describe Qatar’s treatment of expatriate laborers on World Cup sites as “modern day slavery.” Some 1,200 workers have already died and, according to warnings, up to 4,000 could perish before World Cup begins.

“The fact that thousands must die to build 12 fine stadiums for us has nothing to do with football,” said William Kvist of the Danish national team.

“We are committed to helping the destitute,” said Hamad bin Nasser al-Thani of Qatar’s royal family, who is chairman of the Doha-based Qatar Charity. How nice!

Why not promote “Islamic values” by taking in even just a few thousand Syrian refugees, instead of praising Turkey for taking in nearly three million Syrian Muslim refugees and praising it for promoting “Islamic values?”

The proud Gulf state of Qatar boasts human habitation dating back to 50,000 years ago. It may not be the only country across the world with such an impressive historical habitation story. But what makes it unique is its skillfully planned preservation tradition, particularly its persistent touch on medieval, not ancient, history.

Qatar is the world’s wealthiest country, or more of a family-run gas station. It boasts abiding by various aspects of the sharia (Islamic religious law), which, according to its constitution, it considers the main source of its legislation. In Qatar, flogging and stoning are legal forms of punishment. Apostasy (leaving Islam) is a crime punishable by the death penalty.

The Qataris, not knowing that their grandchildren would one day be the best strategic allies of their Ottoman colonialists’ grandchildren, fought the Ottomans to gain their independence in 1915, ending the 44-year-long Ottoman rule in the peninsula. Independence came at last, and lasted for about a year — until 1916, when Qatar became a British protectorate, retaining that status until 1971.

Since Khamenei took power in 1989, he has shown no deviation from Khomeini’s revolutionary ideologies. Opposing the United States, “the Great Satan,” and the rejection of Israel’s existence are two of the most critical pillars of Iran’s revolutionary ideals — what defines the raison d’être of the Iranian regime, as well as what shapes Khamenei’s ideological and foreign policy.

Other revolutionary core values that Khamenei desires the next supreme leader to hold include supporting Palestinian and Lebanese armed groups against Israel, maintaining Iran’s nuclear program, and being the supreme leader of the entire Islamic world — not only the leader of the Shiites. Khamenei’s official website refers to him as “the Supreme Leader of Muslims,” not the Supreme Leader of “Iran.”

Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in the past did not seem to wish to discuss topics linked to his successor — — the next Supreme Leader. Nevertheless, recently the trend has altered. Khamenei has begun dictating his policies, preferences, and priorities in what kind of Supreme Leader he would rather the Iranian regime have, and who, after his death, the Assembly of Experts ought to choose.

In a recent meeting, the 76-year-old Ayatollah Khamenei met with some members of the Assembly of Experts, and pointed out that “a supreme leader has to be a revolutionary” and he advised that members not to “be bashful” in selecting the next Supreme Leader.

Iran’s constitution yields the Supreme Leader the greatest authority in the country. The Supreme Leader is the single most crucial figure, the highest-ranking political and religious authority in Iran. He directly or indirectly controls the three branches of the government; the judiciary, the legislature and the executive branch.

But what does a “revolutionary” exactly mean to Khamenei? From Khamenei’s perspective, a revolutionary supreme leader would be someone who forcefully pursues the ideological principles of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic, and the core ideals of Iran’s 1979 Revolution.

Since Khamenei took power in 1989, he has shown no deviation from Khomeini’s revolutionary ideologies. Opposing the United States, “the Great Satan,” and the rejection of Israel’s existence are two of the most critical pillars of Iran’s revolutionary ideals — what defines the raison d’être of the Iranian regime, as well as what shapes Khamenei’s ideological and foreign policy.

This past Friday, President Obama became the first sitting American president to visit Hiroshima. There, in that solemn setting, he delivered a speech so grandiose, so full of sophistries, so stuffed with America-denigrating baloney, that on those grounds alone it ought to qualify as historic — except in essence he’s said it all before. I don’t know if White House Boy Wonder Ben Rhodes wrote this particular riff on the The Narrative. But if he did not, we may safely assume that Obama has found another speechwriter who is a perfect replica.

No, Obama did not explicitly apologize for America’s dropping of the atomic bomb. Rather, he worked around to it by implication, stripping the act of almost all historical context, lumping together all civilizations and nations, and all wars — whatever the reasons — in one big stew, and urging, as his solution for the planet (imperfect America included), a “moral revolution” of which he evidently considers himself the prophet.

How humanity might achieve this moral revolution, Obama did not clarify. (I doubt that Moscow, Beijing, Tehran or Pyongyang were chastened by Obama’s urging that “we must reimagine our connection to one another as members of one human race.”). Neither did he mention that in the 71 years since America used atomic bombs to end World War II, it has never used them again, and with America standing as guardian of the free world, neither has anyone else — though with Obama’s shrinking of the American military, apology tours for America’s past, snubbing of America’s allies and favors to America’s enemies, the chances of nuclear war are again on the rise.

In his Hiroshima speech, Obama skipped right past such matters as why America entered and fought World War II, what it meant or why it made a difference who won. He made no mention of Pearl Harbor, or the agonizing decisions of his predecessors, or the blood and sacrifice of a generation of Americans who fought for freedom against Nazi fascism and for liberty against the onslaught of Japanese imperial conquest. He said nothing about the colossal benefits that an American-led victory delivered to the world.

Instead, Obama began his speech by conjuring a cosmos in which, out of a blue sky, the bomb dropped itself: CONTINUE AT SITE

“I told him that peace in the Middle East was in his hands, that he had a unique opportunity to either bring it into being or kill it….” (U.S. President Jimmy Carter to Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin) [1]

Blaming Israel is a common practice in the media and in the West. In a conversation with Professor Graham Allison, at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry attributed the escalation in violence in Israel in 2016 to the “massive increase in settlements over the course of the last years. Now you have this violence because there’s a frustration that is growing.” He feared that “unless we get going, a two-state solution could conceivably be stolen from everybody.” [2]

Kerry’s public rebuke provides the Palestinian Arabs with the justification to pursue their random stabbings, stoning and car-rammings, which they consider to be an inalienable right. The Palestinian Authority is even seeking international recognition for the “right” to kill Israelis. Itamar Marcus, founder and director of Palestinian Media Watch, reports that the PA asserts “it has the right to kill Israeli civilians, and they quote UN resolution 3236 of 1974 which ‘recognizes the right of the Palestinian people to regain its rights by all means.’ The PA interprets ‘all means’ as including violence and killing of civilians.”

Marcus points out the PA deliberately ignores the rest of the resolution that declares “the use of ‘all means’ should be ‘in accordance with the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations…’ The UN Charter forbids targeting civilians, even in war. [3]

For Kerry, Netanyahu and Israel are the problem. Only pressuring the Israelis will bring about a resolution to the conflict. That the Arabs have never accepted a two-state solution for religious and political reasons has not deterred American administrations from pursuing this fantasy. So long as they deny the independent nation-state status of Israel as a Jewish state, they are the root cause of a dispute that they make inherently impossible to be international in nature, thereby unresolvable under international auspices. Only when the Palestinian Arabs are willing to recognize the right of the Jews to their ancestral homeland, can there be any hope of resolving this dispute.”[4]

Today, as the leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition, Jeremy Corbyn has the opportunity either to tackle anti-Semitism or mainstream it into the UK body politic. The evidence that he has any interest in doing the former are not good.

Whenever the specific question of anti-Semitism was raised, Corbyn would say how opposed he was to all forms of racism, “including Islamophobia.” It has apparently proven impossible for Corbyn to realize the specific nature of anti-Semitism; whenever it has come up, he has used the opportunity to talk not about racial hatred against Jews but what he believes to be an epidemic of hatred towards Muslims.

The British Labour party today evidently is riddled with anti-Semitism from top to bottom, and led by people who want to divert attention from the fact or cover it over entirely. Things can only get worse.

How would you push away a problem you did not want to deal with? The best way, as any addict could tell you, is to pretend that you have dealt with it. The drug-addict pretends to have given up drugs. The alcoholic pretends to have cut down on drink. And the British Labour party pretends to have dealt with its anti-Semitism problem.

The UK’s Co-operative Group is closely linked to — and a major funder of — the Co-operative Party, which has an electoral pact with the Labour Party, the UK’s official opposition.

This assumes that those advocating the boycott know exactly where the new borders between Israel and a future Palestinian state will be, despite that they are yet to be determined through negotiation. The enterprises boycotted by the Co-op Group employ many local Arab workers, whose livelihoods are endangered by the boycott.

The Co-op Group continues to refer to Israel’s “illegal settlements” as if these were the only disputed territories in the world. There is no boycott, of course, of major exporting countries with appalling human rights records, such as China (invasion of Tibet), Russia (invasion of the Ukraine) and other countries whose occupation of other areas is not recognized internationally, such as Nagorno-Karabakh or Northern Cyprus.

As usual, of all the countries in the world, Israel is being singled out. For the boycotters of the Co-op Group, Israel is the usual soft target.

The Co-operative Group is the only major British retailer to boycott Israeli goods. It is the fifth-largest retail grocery chain in the UK, with thousands of Co-op minimarkets throughout the United Kingdom. The Co-operative Group (formerly known as the Co-operative Wholesale Society) is closely linked to — and a major funder of — the Co-operative Party, which has an electoral pact with the Labour Party, the UK’s official opposition. The Co-operative Party has, like the Labour Party itself, been infiltrated by a strong anti-Israel faction.

The new law applies only to legitimate asylum seekers, not to the hundreds of thousands of economic migrants from Africa, Asia and the Middle East who have entered Germany illegally by posing as asylum seekers.

Of the more than 1.1 million migrants who arrived in Germany in 2015, only 476,649 have applied for asylum. Many of the rest have gone underground and are sustaining themselves through petty crime and drug dealing.

Nearly half (49%) of the migrants in Germany whose asylum applications were rejected during the past two years have not left the country, according to leaked government data.

“Regaining control of our borders is an existential issue for our culture and the survival of our society.” — Thilo Sarrazin, renowned German central banker and a former member of the Social Democrats.

The European Union, the New European Soviet? Vladimir Konstantinovich Bukovsky was prominent in the Soviet dissident movement of the 1960s and 1970s and spent a total of twelve years in psychiatric prison-hospitals, labor camps and prisons within the Soviet Union.  

We’ve known for many months that Islamic State terrorists have been using the flood of refugees going to Europe to hide their fighters. But how are they doing it?

A CNN report shows how easy it is – at least in Libya – for the terrorists to mingle with innocent civilians to make it to Europe – and perhaps points beyond.

Abu Walid knew his caller to be a devout man, a member of ISIS. And his request was chilling. Could he ship 25 of his people from Libya to Europe on a small boat for $40,000?

Abu Walid — not his real name — declined. But it is a request that’s becoming increasingly common, he told CNN, in the past two months.

ISIS is trying to infiltrate this trade to get their people to Europe from the chaotic and near-failed state of Libya as the route from Turkey to Greece becomes more heavily policed.

“Exploitation of migrant smuggling networks by ISIS in North Africa has only been a matter of time … the U.S. and Europe need to act quickly, and together,” a Western diplomat told CNN.

He also heard of a recent case of 40 Tunisian ISIS members leaving from the militant stronghold of Sirte. Thwarted by bad weather, they tried again ten days later. He didn’t know if they made it.

A senior Libyan military intelligence official in Misrata, Ismail Shukri, said that ISIS militants sought to disguise themselves by traveling with “their families, without weapons, as normal illegal immigrants.”

“They will wear American dress and have English language papers so they cause no suspicion.”

European officials insist they’re trying to be better prepared. A senior EU counter-terrorism official told CNN there were more Europol officers working at potential “hotspots” of entry for migrants.

Still, the prospect of such an influx is a nightmare for Europe.

“If confirmed it is indeed very alarming. It is not one or two trying to move — it seems more organized,” the official told CNN.