RUTHFULLY YOURS

You must have heard of the “the rich”, the people who pay nearly all income taxes flowing into government coffers and yet are pilloried for doing so. Never mind Labor and the Greens, the safe politics of shaking down the rich is thriving in Coalition ranks.
Budgets are getting terribly tedious. I think this because the scope for action is narrowing, as every initiative is loudly bagged these days by somebody or other. Joe Hockey took a walk on the wild side and that served him badly – which he deserved, to be fair — because he was monumentally inept.

“We all know what to do, but we don’t know how to get re-elected once we have done it.” So the Prime Minister of Luxemburg, Jean-Claude Juncker, recently said. But do politicians at large really know what to do? I don’t think they do.

Hockey was a poster child for political incompetence. Why do we think a bunch of self-promoters who are good at getting people to vote for them will be competent at running government? Sir Humphrey had it right: politicians can’t be trusted to run governments. What then is the answer? There isn’t one.

Imagine yourself as Treasurer and it is your first budget. You try to cut the deficit by screwing pensioners, denying young people unemployment pay, and charging poor people for doctors’ visits in order to underwrite gee-wiz medical research. You couldn’t write home about such ineptness. This is not an example of a politician knowing what to do and bearing the electoral pain. It is an example of a typically blundering politician who has not the least idea of what to do.

Budget deficits can only be reduced sustainably by cutting the growth in future expenditure below aspirational levels. Of course, even this can’t be done without incurring the wrath of special interests. But it possibly can be done without losing too many votes. Actually cutting expenditure is largely impossible; except for relatively minor amounts in insensitive areas.

Raising taxes doesn’t work because governments can’t resist spending the revenue. To them, an extra dollar of tax revenue is an extra dollar to splurge. That is why they are fond of trumpeting — incurable spendthrifts and debtors that they are — that additional spending has been fully funded; perish the thought that the funds might have been used to pay down debt.

ROME—Italy and Germany expressed their opposition to border-control measures within the European Union on Thursday, saying such restrictions may lead to the loss of the free movement that has helped turn the 28-country bloc into a success.

Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi and German Chancellor Angela Merkel at a joint press conference in Rome criticized an Austrian plan to construct a 250-meter (820-foot) long checkpoint at the Brenner Pass, which connects Italy and Austria.

Border-control measures could contravene the Schengen accord, which governs passport-free travel between member states.

“I am strongly against any closure” of the Brenner Pass, said Mrs. Merkel at the joint news conference, stressing that Europe needs to find common responses to migration issues. “We can’t abandon whoever defends our borders. We need to remain loyal to each other,” she added.

Thousands of migrants that have reached Italy use the Brenner Pass to head to countries such as Germany and Sweden, where welfare benefits are more generous. Some migrants also aim to settle in Austria and this has alarmed Vienna.

Free movement of people and goods could be put at stake as the EU faces its biggest migration challenge since the end of World War II, the German chancellor warned.

“We either defend our [EU] external borders or we will return to nationalism and lose our freedom of movement of businesses and people,” Mrs. Merkel said.

On Thursday, Mr. Renzi said that about 26,000 migrants had reached Italy via sea so far this year, about 1,000 more than in the same period in 2015.

The Italian premier reiterated Rome’s strong opposition to the Austrian border-control plans.

“We have expressed our clear disagreement with the Austrian positions on the Brenner Pass. They are wrong and anachronistic,” Mr. Renzi said. CONTINUE AT SITE

Love the headline….now Hamas terrorists are just militants??? Here is article 15 from the Hamas Charter: “The day the enemies conquer some part of the Muslim land, jihad becomes a personal duty of every Muslim. In the face of the Jewish occupation of Palestine, it is necessary to raise the banner of jihad. This requires the propagation of Islamic consciousness among the masses, locally [in Palestine], in the Arab world and in the Islamic world. It is necessary to instill the spirit of jihad in the nation, engage the enemies and join the ranks of the jihad fighters.” rsk

TEL AVIV—Israeli forces and Hamas fighters traded direct fire for the first time since the two sides went to war in 2014, Israel’s military said Thursday, as tensions escalated along Israel’s border with the Hamas-run Gaza Strip.

Israeli jet fighters carried out airstrikes against Hamas targets Thursday morning in response to 10 exchanges of fire with Israeli soldiers in the past three days, said Israeli military spokesman Lt. Col. Peter Lerner.

Hamas continued to fire mortar shells at Israeli forces until late afternoon, the military said. But no further exchanges were reported in the evening.

The tensions were compounded by what Israel said was its discovery earlier Thursday of a Hamas tunnel extending into Israeli territory from Gaza.

Hamas began firing in response to Israel’s efforts to locate the tunnel on the Gaza border, Col. Lerner said, and a search for other tunnels was continuing.

“Tunnels that have been built on the border between Gaza and Israel are for infiltration,” he said. “We aren’t willing to have tunnels leading into Israel.”

Moussa Abu Marzouk, a senior leader of the Islamist movement, blamed Israel for the latest outbreak of violence, saying Hamas fighters had fired on Israeli soldiers only after Israel made moves to reduce the width of an unofficial buffer zone that divides Gaza from Israel.

Palestinian media reported that Israeli airstrikes largely hit open, unpopulated areas. A Palestinian women was hit by shrapnel from an airstrike and died from her injuries, Hamas’s semiofficial Safa news agency reported.

Mr. Marzouk said Egyptian officials were mediating between Israel and Hamas to try to restore the open-ended cease-fire that ended the nearly seven weeks of fighting in 2014.

The Israeli military spokesman denied Egypt was undertaking mediation efforts. He said Israel had no desire for full-scale fighting with Hamas. CONTINUE AT SITE

A 20-year-old asylum seeker from Iraq confessed to raping a 10-year-old boy at a public swimming pool in Vienna. The Iraqi said the rape was a “sexual emergency” resulting from “excess sexual energy.”

Those who dare to link spiraling crime to Muslim mass migration are being silenced by the guardians of Austrian multiculturalism.

According to data compiled by the Austrian Interior Ministry, nearly one out of three asylum seekers in Vienna was accused of committing crimes in 2015. North African gangs fighting for control over drug trafficking were responsible for roughly half of the 15,828 violent crimes — rapes, robberies, stabbings and assaults — reported in the city during 2015.

Austria received 90,000 asylum requests in 2015, the second-highest number in the EU on a per capita basis, but this pales in comparison to what may lie ahead. Interior Minister Wolfgang Sobotka warned last month that up to one million migrants are poised to cross the Mediterranean from Libya to Europe.

The brutal gang rape of a woman by three Afghan asylum seekers in central Vienna on April 22 has shocked the Austrian public and drawn attention to a spike in migrant-related rapes, sexual assaults and other crimes across the country.

The migrant crime wave comes as the anti-immigrant Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) has surged in opinion polls. The party’s candidate, Norbert Hofer, won the first round of Austria’s presidential elections on April 24, and is on track to win the presidency in the second round, run-off election scheduled for May 22.

Central Bank of Iran (CBI) governor Seif Valiollah mentioned that Iran has a reputation for not being exactly transparent on countering financial support for terrorist operations. He further blamed the regime’s willingness to facilitate money-laundering schemes as another factor discouraging investment from abroad, and indirectly criticized the overweening influence of the huge business conglomerates run by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) on the Iranian economy.

Nasser Hakimi, another CBI official blamed Iran’s own banks for access problems with the Society for Worldwide International Transactions (SWIFT) network.

Several of Iran’s key banks had not yet purchased or installed the required software and financial identifier codes that would enable SWIFT to become operable in Iran.

Central Bank of Iran (CBI) officials have admitted that the regime’s own financial policies, and not the United States, are responsible for some of the country’s banking problems. CBI governor Seif Valiollah admitted recently that Tehran’s failure to reap more economic benefits from the JCPOA agreement is, at least in part, Iran’s own fault.

These revelations by Iran’s top banking officials refute charges by Iranian hardliners that the United States has been orchestrating a toteyeh bozoorg (“grand conspiracy”) to deny Iran access to international banking networks.

CBI officials and others have detailed the shortcomings of Iran’s own banking system. These CBI statements challenge the skewed comments in the Iranian press that America’s refusal to grant foreign banks access to U.S financial services is what is responsible for Iran’s bank problems. Some of the negative commentary came from economists disappointed with President Rouhani’s management of the economy.

Anti-Semitism, poetically dubbed “the oldest hatred, forever young,” is rearing its ugly head in a rapidly unfolding scandal within the United Kingdom’s Labour Party. To clean house and/or try to contain the fallout, Labour chair Jeremy Corbyn has initiated an independent inquiry. On May 2, a British paper reported that fifty members of the Labour party have been “secretly suspended” in the past two months over anti-Semitic remarks. But there have been public suspensions and resignations as well. On May 3, Naz Shah stepped down from the Home Affairs Committee, pending the results of Labour’s investigation into her past anti-Semitic social media posts. On May 2, Labour suspended three councillors (Ilyas Aziz, Shah Hussain, and Salim Mulla) for anti-Semitic remarks discovered in their social media. On March 15, Vicki Kirby, who was elected vice chair of the Parliamentary Labour Party following being suspended in 2014 for anti-Semitic writings on Facebook, was suspended a second time for posting anti-Semitic remarks (this time, on Twitter). On April 28, former London mayor Ken Livingstone was suspended following a statement he made claiming Hitler was a Zionist. Other recent suspensions include Khadim Hussein (March 23) and Mohammad Shabbir (April 27).

These perpetrators of the anti-Semitism that has been reported so far are mostly posting on social media, and thus projecting their hatred with ease around the world. They include common canards that: equate Israel’s policies towards the Palestinians and Nazi treatment of the Jews; propagate the blood libel; advocate for the expulsion of Jews out of Israel; and maintain that Israel created and controls the Islamic State. Here are some examples, from the political elite in Britain that were introduced above:

Calls for the Relocation of Israel

“Jews and Muslims lived together in the Middle East, in peace pre 1948. Perhaps it would have been wiser to create Israel in America it’s big enough. They could relocate even now.” -Ilyas Aziz, July 2014
A post of an image on Facebook titled “Solution for Israel-Palestine Conflict” that had Israel superimposed in the United States, with the statement “relocate Israel Into the United States,” with comment “problem solved” –Naz Shah, August 2014

[The “peace pre 1948” reference ignores the lethal Arab riots against Jewish civilians, including in the British Mandate for Palestine (1920, 1921, and 1929), Morocco (1875, 1903, 1907, 1912), Algeria (1934), Iraq (also known as the Farhud, 1941), Egypt (1945), Libya (1945 and 1948), Aden (1947), and Syria (1947); the Arab leadership’s genocidal incitement against Jews during Israel’s War of Independence; and the dhimmi/lower class status institutionalized for Jews throughout the Arab world, all which predate Israel’s conquest of the territories in 1967, and the rebirth of the modern state of Israel. Calls to relocate Israel deny the Jews their historic and internationally-recognized right to Israel where it is currently. Aziz’s and Shah’s quotes above also imply that Israel instigated its wars against the Arabs, which is patently false.]

Londoners head to the polls on Thursday to decide who should succeed Boris Johnson as their next mayor. With the Paris and Brussels attacks fresh on voters’ minds, Islamism and terror have emerged as central themes of the campaign. And Sadiq Khan, the Labour candidate, is struggling to distance himself from his party’s growing radicalism.

The former lawyer has vowed to be “the British Muslim who takes the fight to extremists.” Yet the Labour Party under leader Jeremy Corbyn has veered sharply to the left on these matters, and Mr. Khan has been an enabler of that transformation.

For days Labour’s “anti-Semitism row” has dominated U.K. headlines. The proximate cause was a series of TV interviews by Ken Livingstone, the Labour mayor of London from 2000 to 2008. Coming to the defense of a Labour MP accused of anti-Semitism, Mr. Livingstone claimed that Hitler had been a Zionist. “A real anti-Semite,” he said, is someone who hates all Jews, not just those in Israel.

Mr. Khan quickly distanced himself from Mr. Livingstone, who has since been suspended from the party. “Sadiq has said repeatedly that he is disgusted at the growing problems of anti-Semitism within the Labour Party,” a spokesman told me. He added that Mr. Khan opposes the so-called boycott, divest and sanction movement targeting the Jewish state, adding that “we must not turn our face against Israel.”

The party’s mainstream blames Mr. Corbyn for this state of affairs. They’re right—up to a point. Mr. Corbyn came from the party’s red-flag-waving fringes. Labour reflects Mr. Corbyn’s ideological preferences now that he has moved to the center of party power. But other, more respectable Labour figures paved his path. Sadiq Khan was one of those figures, rising to prominence toward the end of former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s tenure as a voice of the party’s anti-antiterror wing.

Mr. Khan in 2004 shared a platform at a pro-Palestinian conference with Daud Abdullah of the Muslim Council of Britain, which at the time boycotted Holocaust Memorial Day. Another speaker was Ibrahim Hewitt of Interpal, which in 2003 was added to the U.S. Treasury’s list of Specially Designated Global Terrorist organizations for funneling funds to Hamas, an allegation the U.K. pro-Palestinian charity denies. CONTINUE AT SITE

Lingchi língchí; ling-ch’ih, alternately transliterated ling chi or leng t’che), translated variously as death by a thousand cuts, (shā qiān dāo/qiāndāo wànguǎ), the slow process, the lingering death, or slow slicing, was a form of torture and execution used in China from roughly AD 900 until it was banned in 1905. It was also used in Vietnam In this form of execution; a knife was used to methodically remove portions of the body over an extended period of time, eventually resulting in death.

Death, in the context of this column, means Islam. Islam is a death worshipping cult. Death is the end of Islam for anyone who encounters it, Muslim or non-Muslim. One exists and lives for the sole purpose of dying to meet Allah in Paradise. Allah owns your life and it is your duty to obey his every command and whim, even if it means….death.

“Death to America!” is the familiar chant of Muslim demonstrators, from New York City to London to Berlin and Cologne, from Cairo to Gaza to Damascus, from Kuala Lumpur to Sydney and Kabul. Death is what is intended by the Muslim Brotherhood. It states that quite explicitly in the 1991 Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal of the Brotherhood in North America. Here is what it says:

In order for Islam and its Movement to become “a part of the homeland” in which it lives, “stable” in its land, “rooted” in the spirits and minds of its people, “enabled” in the live [sic] of its society and has firmly-established “organizations” on which the Islamic structure is built and with which the testimony of civilization is achieved, the Movement must plan and struggle to obtain “the keys” and the tools of this process in carry [sic] out this grand mission as a “Civilization Jihadist” responsibility which lies on the shoulders of Muslims and – on top of them – the Muslim Brotherhood in this country.

The process of settlement is a “Civilization-Jihadist Process” with all the word means. The Ikhwan must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and “sabotaging” its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions. Without this level of understanding, we are not up to this challenge and have not prepared ourselves for Jihad yet. It is a Muslim’s destiny to perform Jihad and work wherever he is and wherever he lands until the final hour comes, and there is no escape from that destiny except for those who chose to slack. But, would the slackers and the Mujahedeen be equal.

So, how is Islam “eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within”? By working every little gambit to dissolve Western institutions, principles, traditions, and norms, and replace them with Islamic ones, first as “co-equals,” and eventually as the dominant ones

By applying a thousand little, barely noticed and hardly earth-shattering concessions by the West to Islamic demands for “respect” or the enforcement of Islamic religious observation or deference to Muslim sensibilities and prejudices, the Brotherhood agenda is on schedule. There will always be the spectacular, headline-grabbing massacres to remind us that Islam declared war on the West long, long ago and that the bombings and beheadings and stabbings are not forgotten as the end-all of life for infidels and those who do not submit to Islam. Islam means, after all, submission.

This year commemorates the 80th anniversary of the notorious Nuremberg Laws, the Nazi racist enactments that formed the legal basis for the Holocaust. Ironically, it also marks the 70th anniversary of the Nuremberg Trials, which provided the legal basis for prosecuting the Nazi war criminals who murdered millions of Jews and others following the enactment of the Nuremberg Laws.

There is little dispute about the evil of the Nuremberg Laws. As Justice Robert H. Jackson, who was America’s chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials, put it: “The most odious of all oppressions are those which mask as justice.”

There is some dispute, however, about the Nuremberg trials themselves. Did they represent objective justice or, as Hermann Göring characterized it, merely “victor’s justice?” Were the rules under which the Nazi leaders were tried and convicted ex post facto laws, enacted after the crimes were committed in an effort to secure legal justice for the most immoral of crimes? Did the prosecution and conviction of a relatively small number of Nazi leaders exculpate too many hands-on perpetrators? Do the principles that emerged from the Nuremberg Trials have continued relevance in today’s world?

Following the Holocaust, the world took a collective oath encapsulated in the powerful phrase “never again”, but following the Nuremberg Trials, mass murders, war crimes and even genocides have been permitted to occur again and again and again and again. Cambodia, Rwanda, Darfur, the former Yugoslavia and now Syria. Why has the promise of “never again” been so frequently been broken? Why have the Nuremberg principles not been effectively applied to prevent and punish these unspeakable crimes? Will the International Criminal Court, established in 2002, be capable of enforcing the Nuremberg principles and deterring future genocides by punishing past ones?

Whether the captured Nazi leaders — those who did not commit suicide or escape — should have been placed on trial, rather than summarily shot, was the subject of much controversy. Even before the end of the war, Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau had proposed that a list of major war criminals be drawn up, and as soon as they were captured and identified, they would be shot. President Roosevelt was initially sympathetic to such rough justice, but eventually both he and President Truman were persuaded by Secretary of War Henry Stimson that summary execution was inconsistent with the American commitment to due process and the rule of law.

It was decided, therefore, to convene an international tribunal to sit in judgment over the Nazi leaders. But this proposal was not without considerable difficulties. Justice must be seen to be done, but it must also be done in reality. A show trial, with predictable verdicts and sentences, would be little better than no trial at all. Indeed, Justice Jackson went so far as to suggest, early on, that it would be preferable to shoot Nazi criminals out of hand than to discredit our judicial process by conducting farcical trials.

The challenge of the Nuremberg tribunal, therefore, was to do real justice in the context of a trial by the victors against the vanquished — and specifically those leaders of the vanquished who had been instrumental in the most barbaric genocide and mass slaughter of civilians in history. Moreover, the blood of Hitler’s millions of victims was still fresh at the time of the trials. Indeed, the magnitude of Nazi crimes was being learned by many for the first time during the trial itself. Was a fair trial possible against this emotional backdrop?

Even putting aside the formidable jurisprudential hurdles — the retroactive nature of the newly announced laws and the jurisdictional problems posed by a multinational court — there was a fundamental question of justice posed. Contemporary commentators wondered whether judges appointed by the victorious governments — and politically accountable to those governments — could be expected to listen with an open mind to the prosecution evidence offered by the Allies and to the defense claims submitted on behalf of erstwhile enemies.