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Is Multiculturalism Destroying Western National Identities? by Giulio Meotti

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19127/multiculturalism-national-identities

Today, 90% of British demographic growth comes from immigration.

The same shift is taking place in Sweden. In 2015 alone, Sweden welcomed 163,000 immigrants, the equivalent of 1.65% of its total population. Combined with other years, it is a demographic revolution: As of 2015, approximately 17% of the population were foreign-born.

“Therefore, there has been a huge cultural change in the immigrant population, as its largest group has gone from being Finnish to being Muslim… with immigration unchanged, ethnic Swedes will be a minority in 2065.” — Kyösti Tarvainen, professor at the Aalto University of Helsinki, Folkbladet, April 13, 2021.

That is why Swedish people recently voted in a conservative government. It is their last chance to stop an unprecedented national self-destruction.

“Brussels is no longer Belgium…. There are more Brussels residents of Moroccan origin than Flemings or Walloons”. — Philippe Van Parijs, Belgian academic and economist, De Standaard, September 5, 2022.

A country facing demographic suicide (1,707 kindergartens in Italy closed down in the last ten years) cannot afford to be overwhelmed by mass immigration without losing its national identity.

The West is at stake. The choice Europeans urgently need to make is whether they would like to transform their countries into a wholly different culture — as the people who inhabited Turkey did after center of Christendom fell to the Ottoman Empire, or as Egypt did from being the land of the Christian Copts to that of a state where the Copts now face non-stop persecution.

Unfortunately, Europe, whether it likes it or not, has virtually no time left to decide whether or not it wishes to continue embracing open borders, multiculturalism and globalism, and, through passivity, find that its hard-won Judeo-Christian values, freedoms and identity will be quickly made extinct.

Twenty years ago, the United Nations published a document titled “Replacement Migration: Is it A Solution to Declining and Ageing Populations?”. It was not a right-wing conspiracy theory, but a sophisticated working plan for Western democracies dealing with demographic aging. It has since gone mainstream. Just read what Richard Thaler, a Nobel laureate in economics, said this month: “We need more immigrants to pay pensions”.

Xi Dresses Down Trudeau When you get a tongue-lashing from your boss. by Christine Douglass-Williams

https://www.frontpagemag.com/xi-dresses-down-trudeau/

Canada is heavily infiltrated by China, aided by a longtime partnership between the Chinese leadership and Justin Trudeau. See more HERE.

During the G20 meetings, Trudeau, who has been referenced as “little potato” by China, was openly reprimanded by China’s leader Xi Jinping:

Also newly reported:

Yusheng Wang, 35, an employee of Canada’s largest electricity producer Hydro-Quebec, was arrested at his home south of Montreal by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) on Monday. A special national-security investigations unit of the RCMP charged Wang with stealing trade secrets for China.….

“Foreign actor interference is a priority for many law enforcement and intelligence agencies around the world. Hydro-Quebec is considered a critical infrastructure and a strategic interest to be protected,” the RCMP said in a press release announcing the arrest.

China invests heavily in academic research and development, and along with it comes longstanding concerns about China stealing foreign technologies and trade secrets. A 2020 Bloomberg report asked the question in reference to the Nortel Canada, a one-time world leader in wireless technology that seemed suddenly to disappear: “Did a Chinese Hack Kill Canada’s Greatest Tech Company?” In short, the answer is yes. Hackers breached Nortel’s uppermost ranks and “roughly 800 documents” were sent off to China in an elaborate corruption scandal. Then came the rise of the tech giant Huawei.

The Russian-Turkish Bond to Harm the West by Burak Bekdil

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19123/russia-turkey-bond

Turkey’s skies remain open to Russian airlines and its doors remain open to hundreds of thousands of Russians and their money. Turkey’s exports to Russia are surging.

Russian cash helped to plug the growing hole in Turkey’s foreign currency reserves — and at a time when Erdogan needs foreign money to shore up the country’s ailing economy before the presidential and parliamentary elections in June 2023.

Some analysts see this as a scheme to open up room for parking Russian funds in Turkey.

The Erdogan-Putin bond has two main pillars. One is pragmatism: They both strategically, politically and economically benefit. The other is ideological: They both hate Western civilization.

If they had met as presidents of other countries, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Russian President Vladimir Putin would probably have hated each other. Historically, Turkish Islamists have hated both Tsarist and Soviet Russia. Similarly, Russians have never been fond of the Turks. Today, however, Erdogan, with a foot in NATO, is exhibiting a pro-Russian tilt never seen before. What is the secret of this ostensible marriage?

Turkey has refused to join Western sanctions against Russia over Ukraine, thereby throwing Putin a lifeline. Turkey’s skies remain open to Russian airlines and its doors remain open to hundreds of thousands of Russians and their money. Turkey’s exports to Russia are surging. In July alone, exports to Russia shot up by a dizzying 75% year-on-year.

It Is Time for NATO to Confront Iran by Con Coughlin

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19125/nato-ukraine-iran

For decades Tehran has consistently lied about the true extent of its nuclear ambitions, so it should come as no surprise that Iran’s instinctive response when confronted about its military support for Russia has been to issue a denial.

Iran’s belated admission that it is actively supporting the Russian war effort is certainly an alarming development, one that completely destroys the argument that Iran’s malign activities are solely confined to the Middle East.

The implications of Iran’s deepening involvement in the Ukraine conflict can no longer be ignored, as they now constitute a direct threat to European security, a development that Nato leaders need to take on board as a matter of urgency.

Nato has already demonstrated a welcome display of unity in providing vital military support for Ukraine in its battle to defeat Russian aggression. Nato leaders must now take similar measures to support all those states, whether they are in Europe or the Middle East, that want to protect themselves against Iran’s intimidating conduct.

Iran’s belated admission that it has provided Russia with sophisticated drones to boost its war effort in Ukraine should serve as a wake up call to all those Western policymakers who claim the threat posed by Tehran’s aggressive regime is only limited to the Middle East region.

Despite credible reports that Russian forces have been deploying Iranian-made drones to launch attacks against Ukraine’s critical infrastructure, inflicting electricity and water shortages on the country’s civilian population, Tehran has consistently denied the weapons originated from Iran.

Egyptians: We Do Not Want the Islamists to Return to Power by Khaled Abu Toameh

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19124/egypt-islamists

The Islamists, in other words, failed in their latest attempt to instigate unrest and violence in Egypt with the hope of returning to power.

President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and many other Egyptians seem to prefer less democracy and freedom of speech to the return of the Islamists to power.

“The Muslim Brotherhood’s eyes are on [wanting] the authority to control the people who rejected them.” — Moneer Adib, Egyptian counter-terrorism expert, Al-Ain, November 14, 2022.

“They lied to the Egyptians when they said that they were good for Egypt and when they claimed that they had magical solutions to the economic, social and religious problems.” — Ahmed El-Messiri, Egyptian former Muslim Brotherhood member, Al-Ain, November 11, 2022.

Habusha warned that the Islamists’ “desperate attempts” to undermine Egypt and its people are not accepted because the Egyptians said no to the organization 2013.

The collective sigh of relief expressed by Egyptians over the failure of the Islamists to ruin their country and return to power is a refreshing approach in Egypt and other Arab countries. It is good to see that the Egyptians are eager to keep the Muslim Brotherhood away from their lives and centers of power.

It now remains to be seen whether the Palestinians will follow suit and get rid of the Iranian-backed Islamists in the Gaza Strip, where they have destroyed the lives of tens of thousands of Palestinians. Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad continue to hold the two million Palestinians of the Gaza Strip hostage, offering them terror attack tunnels and weapons instead of schools and hospitals.

It also remains to be seen whether the apologists in the West who continue to search for ways to appease Iran’s mullahs and other Islamists will learn from the Egyptians’ horrific experiences and distance themselves from the terrorists.

Is the banned Muslim Brotherhood organization trying to return to power in Egypt?

Many Egyptians believe that the Muslim Brotherhood was behind calls to Egyptians to hold nationwide protests during the UN Climate Change Conference (COP27), which is now in progress at the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm al-Sheikh. The Islamists, they say, justified their call by arguing that the planned demonstrations were designed to protest human rights violations and bad economic conditions in Egypt.

A True Progressive Top Court Takes On Climate Change: The Case Of Germany Francis Menton

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2022-11-14-how-a-true-progressive-top-court-handles-climate-change-the-case-of-germany

Two of my recent posts have looked at critiques from the left of the Supreme Court’s decision in West Virginia v. EPA — the June 30 decision that held that the Clean Air Act did not clearly give EPA authority to order the phase-out of all fossil-fuel generated electricity in the U.S. My July 5 post, “How To Think Like A Liberal Supreme Court Justice,” summarized Justice Elena Kagan’s dissent in the West Virginia case. My September 12 post, “How The Left Views Administrative Law,” discussed the presentation at the Federalist Society convention by Professor Sally Katzen of NYU Law School, where she stated her belief that EPA did have the authority in question, and criticized the Court for having taken “an extreme action to shut down rule-making.”

But the Kagan dissent and Katzen presentation are just critiques of the approach to this matter taken by our constitutionalist-dominated Supreme Court. A separate question is, what would the liberals do if they suddenly found themselves in control of the top court — say, if a new Democrat-controlled Congress decides to create six new justices to be appointed by President Biden?

At the lunch following the panel where Professor Katzen spoke, I found myself sitting next to two lawyers who had come from Germany to attend the convention. One of them said to me, in essence, you have no idea what a country’s top court might do when it feels that its powers are unconstrained. He then referred me, on the subject of climate change, to a Decision from the German Federal Constitutional Court (Bundesverfassungsgericht) from March 2021; and he gave me sufficient pointers to find information about the Decision in English.

It turns out that the Constitutional Court has an English-language portion of its website, where can be found both a press release of April 29, 2021, summarizing the Decision, as well as a full translation of the Decision itself. The full Decision has some 270 “paragraphs,” some quite long, and would likely be around 200 pages if typed out in the format used by our courts. It is unanimous, and there are no concurrences or dissents. Unlike cases from our Supreme Court, the Decision does not have a caption naming plaintiffs and defendants. They suggest referring to the Decision as the “Order of the First Senate of 24 March 2021.” (The Constitutional Court is divided into two halves, called “Senates,” of eight judges each. They divide the cases between themselves based on subject matter.)

A Cold Winter for Europe: Blame Strategic Blindness by Burak Bekdil

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19065/europe-energy-strategic-blindness

In 2008, the “flawless democrat” Putin invaded Georgia. The West was shocked. Putin critics… were shocked that the West was shocked. In 2014, Putin invaded the Crimean Peninsula, sovereign Ukrainian territory. The West remained shocked. In February 2022, Putin invaded Ukraine and annexed parts of the sovereign state. Was the West still shocked? It should not have been.

Apparently the “flawless democrat” Putin is hoping to weaponize winter and force Europe to surrender, but giving in to the Kremlin would be disastrous.

The EastMed pipeline project was designed to improve Europe’s energy security by diversifying its routes and sources and providing direct interconnection to the production fields while reducing dependence on Russian gas supplies…. U.S. President Joe Biden stepped in with a historic strategic miscalculation that came with a strategic cost: appeasing NATO’s pro-Putin, part-time ally Turkey and jeopardizing Europe’s energy security.

Only a few weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine in February, Biden surprised the EastMed partners by abruptly withdrawing U.S. support for the pipeline, thereby effectively killing the project, preventing a diversified energy supply to Europe, and further assuring Putin’s energy blackmail against Europe.

The White House said the $6.7 billion project was antithetical to its “climate goals.” Biden presumably hopes no one will actually still be using fossil fuels by 2025, the date for the planned completion of the EastMed pipeline. The Biden administration also cited a supposed lack of economic and commercial viability, even though a 2019 study financed by the EU confirmed that “the EastMed Project is technically feasible, economically viable and commercially competitive.”

If the Europeans freeze this winter or must pay sky-high bills, they should drink a toast to the likes of Schroeder and Biden.

The story goes back to early 2000’s when German’s then Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder decided to develop strategic relations between Berlin and Moscow. He went so far as to offer partnership to Russia in EADS, a multinational European defense and aerospace powerhouse. In November 2004, Schroeder called Russian President Vladimir Putin a “flawless democrat.” Unsurprisingly, in 2004, Schroeder hailed Turkey’s Islamist autocrat, then prime minister (now president) Recep Tayyip Erdoğan as a “great reformer.”

In Egypt, Climate Catastrophism as Usual Michael Kile

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2022/11/climate-business-as-usual-in-egypt/

Another year, another United Nations Conference of the Parties (COP) on how to persuade the bogeyman of our age, climate change (CC), to cease misbehaving. Time – and money – is running out yet again.

With more than 30,000 delegates attending this “watershed moment” – yes, over 30,000 — COP27 will be full of sound and fury, dire warnings, purveyors of dodgy carbon credits (including the UN’s own carbon offset platform), utopian fantasists and the usual crowd of jeremiahs, politicians and bureaucrats preaching “climate chaos”. Many will have form too, having spent years hyping the issue at every opportunity.

The event is being held in Sharm El Sheikh, a resort city located at the southern tip of Egypt’s South Sinai Protectorate. There has not been as much excitement there since the 1967 Six-Day War. The discovery of the Great Green Pyramid of Gaia a decade ago in the Ruba’ el-Khali (Empty Abode) also drew world attention to the region.

As the days turn into weeks, around midnight on the final day “transformative climate solutions”  could emerge from COP27’s so-called “innovation hubs”. If so, they will include demands for more climate finance. Yet many developed countries are themselves moving closer to recession (or worse) after joining the UN’s Race to Zero. Aptly named, given its ultimate destination is surely the Valley of the Jackals or the Tomb of Anubis.

That said, the Race to Zero is promising to deliver virtually everything on a green activist’s wish list: “A healthy, resilient, zero carbon recovery that prevents future threats, creates decent jobs, and unlocks inclusive, sustainable growth.” Led by “high-level champions” Mahmoud Mohieldin and Nigel Topping, it strives to “mobilize actors outside of national governments to join the Climate Ambition Alliance.”

The Dangerous Nexus: Russia and Iran’s Mullahs by Majid Rafizadeh

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19100/iran-russia-nexus

The Iranian regime, which has long argued that it is not seeking to develop nuclear weapons… has lately changed its tone and is boasting that it currently has the ability to build a nuclear bomb.

Biden’s new nuclear deal, if reached, will also allow Russia to cash in on a $10 billion contract to further expand Iran’s nuclear infrastructure.

Sadly, this still seems to be the legacy that the Biden administration wants to leave: Iran’s predatory regime, the top state sponsor of terrorism, armed with nuclear bombs, and an empowered Russia that does not hesitate to use aggression and military force to invade other countries.

No wonder Biden is being called a “Russian stooge.”

The Iranian regime is now providing weapons and troops to Russia with full impunity. What are the ruling mullahs of Iran getting in return?

First of all, Iran’s theocratic establishment is rushing to cross the nuclear threshold in order to become a nuclear-armed state. Iran wants Russia to help it bolster and speed up its nuclear program. On October 24, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky accurately warned:

“In eight months of full-scale war, Russia has used almost 4,500 missiles against us. And their stock of missiles is dwindling. Therefore, Russia went looking for affordable weapons in other countries to continue its terror. It found them in Iran.”

How They Count Votes in Brazil Augusto Zimmermann

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2022/11/how-they-count-votes-in-brazil/

The second round of Brazil’s presidential elections was held on Sunday, October 30. The former president, Lula da Silva, who has served prison time for corruption, apparently won 50.90% of the vote and the incumbent, Jair Bolsonaro, received 49.10%. In other words, Lula was declared winner with less than 1 per cent lead over Bolsonaro. This is according to judges of the Superior Electoral Tribunal (TSE), Brazil’s top electoral authority. It was an unexpected comeback for the former president, who was directly responsible for the biggest series of corruption scandals in the nation’s history.[1] Lula is “back at the scene of the crime”, according to the description made not a long time ago by his own vice-president in the presidential ticket. According to J.R. Guzzo, one of Brazil’s most accomplished journalists, the 2022 election in Brazil has been “a legal and political fraud as we have never seen in this country”.[2]  In an article entitled De Volta à Cena do Crime (Back at the Scene of the Crime), he commented:

Lula returned to the presidency via the general collapse of the Constitution and Brazilian laws throughout the electoral process – the result of an unprecedented meddling of the judiciary, which was entirely illegal in each step of the process. The basic fact is that the judiciary, with Justice Alexandre de Moraes issuing orders and Lula in the role of its sole beneficiary, did everything it could for any neutral observer to conclude this was a rigged election … Basically, Supreme Court justices and its electoral arm, the Superior Electoral Tribunal, put together piece by piece a mechanism designed to favour the leftist candidate. The first step was for these unelected judges to simply overturn the four criminal convictions against Lula and, with it, perform the “magic” of disappearing with all the dirty record which precluded him from being a candidate.[3] 

But there is a rather decisive international element in Lula’s victory as well. Just after a few outlets called the election in Brazil, U.S. President Joe Biden orchestrated a rapid international embrace of Lula. In a statement released immediately after the result was officially announced, Biden claimed that Lula had won “following free, fair, and credible elections”.[4]  In short order, Canada’s Justin Trudeau, French President Emmanuel Macron, and British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak all released statements congratulating Lula. “The people of Brazil have spoken”, said Trudeau, writing within an hour and a half of the result.[5]

In August 2021, US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan visited Brazil to issue the following warning to the Brazilian president: do not even dare even to question the reliability of your country’s electronic voting system.[6] A month earlier, in July 2021, the newly installed Biden sent his CIA director, William Burns, to travel to the country to meet with senior Brazilian officials. During that meeting, the U.S. delegation warned the Brazilian government that President Bolsonaro “should stop casting doubt in his country’s [entirely electronic] electoral process”.[7] Next, at the June 2022  Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles, the Biden administration notoriously repeated the same warning that the U.S. government would not tolerate Bolsonaro casting any doubt on the reliability and security of the nation’s voting machines.[8] Since these messages came before the outcome of the election, this was a clear warning of dire consequences should the Brazilian president contest the alleged fairness and transparency of the electoral process