RUTHFULLY YOURS

When the asylum is on fire and management is arguing about regulating the volume of fire buckets, even the saddest inmate will grasp that making for the door is good idea. On June 23, in a plebiscite none but the brave or foolish would presume to predict, the UK will take the measure of its sanity.
The folly of the Euro has been discussed ad nauseam. For our purpose, let us just look at the outcomes: Far from harmonising, the most efficient economies, the newly reunified Germany to the fore, reaped the benefits while the least efficient economies, led by France, were left horribly exposed when the whole house of cards collapsed after the financial crisis of 2008. Trying to run a currency union by relying on monetary policy and adherence to the rules alone was always an ill-starred project. Interest rates that suited historically stable German deutschemarks were never suitable for Italy and their inflated Lire.

Where did this leave the EU? Paralysed. The Franco-German axis has tipped. It used to be Merkozy[1], now it’s just Merkel. Her CDU party hold the balance of power in the European Parliament[2]; she herself dominates the Council of Ministers, leaving just the Commission. Their own frustrations with the supposedly democratic arms of EU government were neatly summed up by Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, back when he had to worry about such things, quipping, “We all know what to do, we just don’t know how to get re-elected after we’ve done it”[3]. While the Euro crisis unfolded it became increasingly clear that Angela Merkel was the de facto head of the EU and that the énarques had become little more than her EUnuchs while she cautiously adopted a Grand Wait & See policy.

The status quo, before the migrant crisis at least, suited Merkel very well. Like France pre-enlargement and the Euro, Germany benefits the most from the state of affairs. While the governance of Europe was French, the finances are quintessentially German. The new Members to the east have cultural and economic ties, smoothing their path into the German supply line. Historically however, Germany has never been powerful enough to completely dominate Europe and she is uncomfortable in the role now. The old German Question has resurfaced, namely: How does she deal with the lesser powers surrounding her? Fortunately, while a hundred years ago the question revolved around the military, nowadays it’s the economy[4]. Germans increasingly resent having to pay for the weaker Members who share the Euro and worry that they will club together to make them do so. They themselves see Germany’s trade and budget surpluses rise while theirs’ seem to fall in an inverse proportion and resent German economic growth at what they perceive as their expense[5].

The Euro crisis has brought up all the old European fault lines and the EU’s reaction to the migrant crisis has only deepened those divisions. After trying to ignore the crossings into Italy, the numbers choosing the much shorter route into Greece has led to extraordinary measures. While the Commission came up with a plan to distribute the refugees equally among Member States the Balkan nations, followed by the central European ones, put up fences with an alacrity that Donald Trump would envy. The EU’s passport free Schengen zone has effectively been ended[6] and while the Commission has tried its usual pan-European model that only answers the questions nobody else is asking, the Member States typically fell out over it. Merkel’s response was, against all European treaties, protocols and conventions, to invite a million into her country with no concern as to how they would get there. In doing so she has alienated her central and eastern allies.
The Brexit Countdown: Part I

The rights and wrongs of the migrant crisis will not concern us here. The British model of helping refugees closer to their homes seems eminently sensible if one is furthest away and has a moat to hide behind. The EU has fewer options and little experience in implementing them. The effects have been added political unrest amongst the citizenry and threats to social order unseen in the EU’s, but not Europe’s history. Merkel’s policy, while undoubtedly heartfelt, has undermined her authority and led to a rise in support for ultra-nationalist and xenophobic parties. Her recent Turkish deal and the backlash over the prosecution of the German comedian Jan Böhmermann, who dared exercise his right to free speech by insulting the Turkish president, has diminished her further.

The Empire Strikes Back

Merkel’s loss is the Commission’s gain. The Five Presidents’ Report[7] plots out the short, medium and long-term future of the EU. Progress must be made “towards a genuine Economic Union” – building on that “successful and stable” currency; “towards a Financial Union” which “increases risk-sharing with the private sector” – does anyone remember Moral Hazard? “towards a Fiscal Union” that somehow will deliver “fiscal sustainability” and “fiscal stabilisation” – or in other words, “harmonised” (high) tax rates; “finally, towards a Political Union” that will give the proceeding Unions “legitimacy” – which in the UK is known as the ‘Cart Before the Horse Strategy’. It promises to do all this by creating several new layers of bureaucracy with undoubtedly untold numbers of committees to help form new “Authorities” within Member States to help them towards “harmonised policies”. These Authorities would then form various “Boards” which would then work with the other EU institutions to achieve “convergence and further pooling of decision making on national budgets”. It also looks at “significant policy areas” such as “digital and capital markets” which as yet the EU has not stuck its beak into. The idea of a “Euro area treasury” is also floated. Buried at the back in Annex 3 (on the last page, where else) it has the almost obligatory catch-all that not withstanding the above the Commission reserves the right to ignore all the new levels of bureaucracy and Boards which represent Member States, so long as it can explain itself. To whose satisfaction it must justify its actions is unclear. What the report, and the whole Euro elite for that matter, seemed to have missed in building their harmonious ‘United States of Europe’ is that the United States of America works because traditionally there is variety between the states; if you don’t like the tax or regulatory regime in New York you can move to Texas…

The German Chancellor was not interested in the reinforcement of Europe’s external borders, the re-erection of its internal borders, the institution of a workable asylum vetting system and the repatriation of people who had lied to gain entry into Europe. Instead, Chancellor Merkel wanted to know how Facebook’s founder could help her restrict the free speech of Europeans, on Facebook and on other social media.

Then, on May 31, the European Union announced a new online speech code to be enforced by four major tech companies, including Facebook and YouTube.

It was clear from the outset that Facebook has a definitional problem as well as a political bias in deciding on these targets. What is Facebook’s definition of ‘racism’? What is its definition of ‘xenophobia’? What, come to that, is its definition of ‘hate speech’?

Of course the EU is a government — and an unelected government at that — so its desire not just to avoid replying to its critics — but to criminalise their views and ban their contrary expressions — is as bad as the government of any country banning or criminalising the expression of opinion which is not adulatory of the government.

People must speak up — must speak up now, and must speak up fast — in support of freedom of speech before it is taken away from them. It is, sadly, not an overstatement to say that our entire future depends on it.

It is nine months since Angela Merkel and Mark Zuckerberg tried to solve Europe’s migrant crisis. Of course having caused the migrant crisis by announcing the doors of Europe as open to the entire third-world, Angela Merkel particularly would have been in a good position actually to try to solve this crisis.

But the German Chancellor was not interested in the reinforcement of Europe’s external borders, the re-erection of its internal borders, the institution of a workable asylum vetting system and the repatriation of people who had lied to gain entry into Europe. Instead, Chancellor Merkel was interested in Facebook.

Where are the campus “justice warriors” and boycott and divest groupies? Too busy bashing a true democracy….not this internatinal outrage…..rsk

Slaves in the American South numbered four million in 1860, the last time the U.S. Census Bureau counted the victims of the “peculiar institution” before it was abolished. Today there are 18.4 million slaves in India alone and 45.8 million world-wide. The modern slave trade is as cruel as its 19th-century forerunner—and much larger than previously thought.

That’s according to the Walk Free Foundation, founded by Australian mining magnate Andrew Forrest, which publishes a Global Slavery Index to measure the scale and prevalence of modern slavery. This year’s index was compiled using a rigorous methodology involving in-person interviews with 42,000 respondents in 53 languages and 25 countries.

The report defines a slave as someone who is held against his or her will or otherwise forced to work through violence or threats of violence or abuse of authority. Modern-day slaves range from Burmese men working on Thai shrimp boats and punished with stingray tails, to Yazidi girls captured for sex slavery by Islamic State in Iraq, to Uzbek citizens forced by their government to pick cotton in harvest season, to North Koreans toiling in Kim Jong Un’s vast gulag.

How someone ends up enslaved varies by country and region, but dictatorship and slavery tend to go together. In some of the world’s least-free nations, governments do the enslaving, including China’s “re-education through labor” camps, which continue to operate despite Beijing’s claim to have formally abolished them in 2014. CONTINUE AT SITE

LONDON—British Prime Minister David Cameron and former London Mayor Boris Johnson have a lot in common. Two years apart in age, they attended the same boarding school, the same university, then entered Parliament together. Their odd-couple alliance—Mr. Cameron is refined and on message, Mr. Johnson, tousled and hip-shooting—helped their Conservative Party last year win its first general election in more than two decades.

Thirteen months later, they are at each other’s throats. The reason is Britain’s divisive June 23 referendum on whether it should remain a member of the European Union.

Mr. Cameron, 49 years old, is spearheading the push to persuade Britons to vote to remain, asserting that Britain would face economic peril if it detached from Europe. Mr. Johnson, 51, is leading the campaign to exit, or so-called Brexit, with a sharp-tongued assault on Brussels, which he says saps Britain’s sovereignty and burdens it with regulation.

Their rivalry flared in February, when Mr. Johnson informed his longtime friend and party leader Mr. Cameron, by text message moments before making his decision public, that he would support the exit campaign. Since then, both men have infused their campaign rhetoric with barbs about one another.

Mr. Johnson attacked Mr. Cameron’s case for staying in the EU as “baloney” and dismissed the prime minister’s monthslong negotiation to secure concessions from other EU leaders as having achieved “two-thirds of diddly squat.”

Mr. Cameron has accused Brexit campaigners of “resorting to total untruths” and of “literally making it up as they go along,” and has suggested Mr. Johnson is motivated by personal political ambition.

There is a deep divide within the U.K. over whether the country should cut its 40-year-old ties with Europe, as represented by the tussle between the two conservative lawmakers. The pro-EU side say a vote to leave would cause havoc to the economy and create years of uncertainty as the U.K. renegotiated international trade agreements. CONTINUE AT SITE

How Israel’s “peace partners” react when women and children are ruthlessly murdered.

The calm in Tel Aviv was shattered Wednesday night when two Arab gunmen in their 20s from the Palestinian Authority-controlled village of Yatta drew automatic weapons and began to systematically gun down every civilian in sight. When the carnage was over, four people – two men and two women – were dead and about a dozen others were wounded, three of them critically. Both terrorists were caught alive, though one sustained serious wounds during his apprehension. Israeli doctors performed life-saving emergency surgery on him while his victims were either dead or dying.

The blood on the pavement hadn’t even dried before “Palestinians,” as is their custom, celebrated the “heroic Tel Aviv operation.” In Palestinian lexicon, terrorist attacks targeting innocent civilians – men, women and children – are routinely referred to as “heroic” or “martyrdom operations.”

As Israelis were burying their dead, celebratory fireworks were going off in Hamas-controlled Gaza while elsewhere, in the PA-controlled West Bank, Palestinian Arabs were cheering and passing out sweets in recognition of their comrades’ bestial slaughter. Even the so-called “moderate” Palestinian President for Life, Mahmoud Abbas, couldn’t bring himself to call the Tel Aviv massacre, “terrorism” or “murder.” Instead, all he was able to muster was half-hearted disapproval. He issued a repulsive and disingenuous statement noting that the PA is opposed “to any ‘operation’ that harms civilians by anybody, regardless of the justifications.” Note use of the word “operation” to describe wanton violence and depravity.

A window slightly opening or simply more window dressing?

That is the question anti-slavery activists are asking after a court in the West African country of Mauritania surprisingly jailed two persons last month for owning slaves.

“Two men were… handed five-year prison sentences – one year to be served and four years suspended – and ordered to pay compensation to two victims in only the country’s second ever prosecution for slavery since it was criminalized in 2007,” reported a Thomson Reuters story.

The activists’ hesitation to heap praise on Mauritania for the recent legal decision is understandable. Mauritania is regarded as the world’s worst slave state, achieving this number one ranking on the Global Slavery Index in 2013. It was also the last country in the world to outlaw this obscenity in 1981, while declaring it a crime against humanity only last year.

The one person successfully prosecuted since criminalization in 2007 served only four months of a two year sentence for owning two boys, aged 10 and 11. In last month’s case, the maximum prison sentence the slaveholder could have received was ten years. This was doubled to 20 years in 2015.

While Mauritania’s top ranking as a slave state is not in dispute, the actual number of slaves in this largely desert country is. Some are owned by nomadic tribes that are often on the move, which makes it difficult to determine a true figure. But the estimated number is about 140,000 in a country of 3.5 million people. Indigenous anti-slavery organizations say the number may even be as high as 600,000.

The slaves in Mauritania are all black Africans, called the Haritin class. They are chattel slaves, belonging body and soul to their masters, who can buy and sell them at will. Children born to slaves also become property of their parents’ masters.

For a decade, the top search result for “EU referendum” on Google was the political blog EU Referendum. Then it was abruptly displaced by solidly pro-EU media outlets. It appeared that someone at Google had decided that search traffic should be driven to pro-EU sites. Ingrid Carlqvist, a Swedish columnist who covers, among other things, migrant violence, at Gatestone, had her Facebook account deleted after posting a video detailing migrant rapes in Sweden.

These seemingly isolated incidents fit into a larger pattern as Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Twitter helped create and signed a “code of conduct” banning hate speech. Facebook had already become notorious for its political agenda while Twitter had created a Trust and Safety Council filled with extremist left-wing groups like Feminist Frequency to censor the politically incorrect.

Google has historically been a pro-free speech outlier. Its politics have never been ambiguous, but it has eschewed the overt censorship of some of its new partners working to keep the EU free of political dissent. But the code of conduct goes well beyond censorship. The companies will be working to strengthen their “ongoing partnerships with civil society organisations who will help flag content that promotes incitement to violence and hateful conduct”. That amounts to empowering left-wing advocacy groups to dictate content removal to major companies. It means that not only Twitter, but Facebook, Google and Microsoft will get their own Trust and Safety Council. It may be called something else. It may not even have a name. But it will have power. That’s what this really means.

And it’s only a starting point in a larger propaganda initiative.

From the Republic of China on Taiwan, freely elected President Tsai Ing-wen tells the People’s Republic of China that democracy is nothing to fear: “Democracy is a good and fine thing.”

In Beijing, the authorities tighten security and carry out arrests. When Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, during a visit to Canada, is questioned by a reporter about China’s human rights record, he rejects the question as “irresponsible.” He says, “We welcome goodwill suggestions but we reject groundless or unwarranted accusations.”

And so we arrive at the 27th anniversary of Tiananmen: June 4, 1989, when China’s Communist Party rulers turned the guns of the People’s Liberation Army against their own people, to end China’s 1989 democratic uprising.

Does it still matter? On many counts, 27 years is a long time. In Beijing, a generation has more than come of age with no firsthand memory of the gunfire, or of the ruts in the streets in the summer of 1989, made by the treads of tanks. Whatever China’s one-party rulers could pave over of that uprising, they have long since paved. Outside China, we now read articles such as an anonymously authored piece, published June 3, and apparently written from inside China: “China’s Youth Think Tiananmen Was So 1989.”

The implication is that Tiananmen, June 4, 1989, will fade away, officially erased inside China and antiquated abroad — a relic of the past century. The suggestion is that beyond fodder for professional historians, there will be little left except the photo of the lone man facing down a column of tanks — a symbol of heroic, peaceful defiance, adopted by the world, but increasingly detached from today’s China.

Except that’s wrong. Tiananmen has not gone away. It haunts China still. It haunts us all. It was too big to just disappear.

Tiananmen was not solely a student protest, though the students occupying Beijing’s vast Tiananmen Square were the epicenter. It was a mass uprising, spreading through the major cities of China — of students, workers, ordinary people desperate for justice. It was an uprising in which the murderously repressive apparatus of the world’s most populous communist state lost control of its country’s capital for two full weeks.

It is important to understand just how big that was, and what determination and courage it took on the part of China’s people to defy their government. The Soviet-engendered communist experiment of the 20th century, responsible for the deaths of scores of millions, was starting to crack up. But in the spring of 1989, that had not happened yet. The Berlin Wall had not yet fallen; the Ceausescus still ruled Romania; the Soviet Union still stood. In Burma, beggared by decades of the “Burmese Way to Socialism,” the military regime just a year earlier, in 1988, had put down mass protests by killing thousands.

China’s uprising, in 1989, was the leading edge of a desperate bid by people living under the brutal constraints of communism to break free. Materially, they were far more deprived than are most of China’s more than 1.3 billion people today. But their chief demands were not for more food, or lucre, or any of the things that the children of the free West are currently demanding under the rubric of “free stuff.” What they demanded was democracy, accountable government, freedom of speech and assembly. They wanted liberty. CONTINUE AT SITE

When Europe agreed to open its borders to Syrian refugees in response to one of the greatest humanitarian crises of our age, officials assured the Western world: we’ve got this. There will be no jihadists among them; and if there are, we’ll be sure they won’t get in.

But it wasn’t exactly true. Jihadists, we now know, have been among them. They have gotten through. And now those same officials are starting to admit things might get even worse.

On Saturday, only weeks after Germany’s national security agency confessed it had been alerted to the presence of jihadists who posed as asylum-seekers, German police arrested three Syrians on charges of planning a major attack in Dusseldorf. The arrests followed a confession by a fourth suspect, arrested earlier in France, who had informed officials there about the plot. All four suspects, reported the Washington Post, had traveled to Europe along the well-worn, so-called Balkan Route. Prosecutors say the attack aimed to kill “as many bystanders as possible with guns and other explosives,” as had a plot foiled days earlier in Antwerp.

Europeans already are on edge as a result of the multiple terrorist attacks in Paris and Brussels over the past 18 months. But news of these arrests, coupled with heightened concerns among German intelligence officials, alarmed communities both in Germany and in neighboring countries. Yet despite this development, intelligence officials in the Netherlands, which shares a border with Germany, maintained until just last week that there is minimal chance that any asylum seeker there is a terrorist.

That changed suddenly on Tuesday, with the disclosure by the same French suspect that the militants arrested in Dusseldorf had been part of a group of 20, divided between asylum centers there and in the Dutch city of Nijmegen.

Not that this should be a surprise. Since the beginning of the crisis, Holland’s screening of migrants has been sloppy. A report released in May by Holland’s Ministry of Security and Justice noted that several screening centers were careless and inadequate, failing to meet established standards. Perhaps as a result of hastened procedural demands as the stream of refugees has increased, neither computer systems nor inspectors seems prepared to meet the challenges: as Dutch daily the Telegraaf observed, the system for checking fingerprints crashes daily; document screeners fail several times a week; and “it is unclear whether all baggage of the asylum-seekers is being properly inspected.”

Across Europe, cartoonists, artists and writers are forced to live under police protection, and also often face criminal prosecution — all for the “crime” of offending Islam. “‘Respect’ means, for them, submission.” It starts with censoring cartoons… Here is Gatestone Institute’s Giulio Meotti in our latest video:

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