RUTHFULLY YOURS

Talk to Israelis about the United States these days and you will provoke a physical reaction. Barack Obama is an eye roll. John Kerry is a grimace. The administration’s conduct of regional policy is a slow, sad shake of the head. The current state of the presidential race makes for a full-blown shudder. The Israeli rundown of the candidates goes roughly as follows: “Hillary—she doesn’t like us.” “Cruz—I don’t like him.” “Rubio—is he done for?” “Sanders—oy vey.” “Trump—omigod.”

As for Israel’s own troubles—a continuing Palestinian campaign of stabbings; evidence that Hamas is rebuilding its network of terror tunnels under the Gaza border and wants to restart the 2014 war; more than 100,000 rockets and guided missiles in the hands of Hezbollah—that’s just the Middle East being itself. It’s the U.S. not being itself that is the real novelty, and is forcing Israel to adjust.
I’ve spent the better part of a week talking to senior officials, journalists, intellectuals and politicians from across Israel’s political spectrum. None of it was on the record, but the consistent theme is that, while the Jewish state still needs the U.S., especially in the form of military aid, it also needs to diversify its strategic partnerships. This may yet turn out to be the historic achievement of Benjamin Netanyahu’s long reign as prime minister.

On Sunday, Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon publicly shook hands with former Saudi intelligence chief Prince Turki al-Faisal at the Munich Security Conference. In January, Israeli cabinet member Yuval Steinitz made a trip to Abu Dhabi, where Israel is opening an office at a renewable-energy association. Turkey is patching up ties with Israel. In June, Jerusalem and Riyadh went public with the strategic talks between them. In March, Egyptian President Abdel Fatah al-Sisi told the Washington Post that he speaks to Mr. Netanyahu “a lot.”

Washington should think more than twice about allowing Turkey and Saudi Arabia, its Sunni allies, militarily to engage their Shiite enemies in Syria. Allowing Sunni supremacists into a deeper sectarian war is not a rational way to block Russian expansion in the eastern Mediterranean. And it certainly will not serve America’s interests.

Turkey and Saudi Arabia are too weak militarily to damage Russia’s interests. It is a Russian trap — and precisely what the Russians are hoping their enemies will fall into.

After Russia’s increasingly bold military engagement in war-torn Syria in favor of President Bashar al-Assad and the Shiite bloc, the regional Sunni powers — Turkey and its ally, Saudi Arabia — have felt nervous and incapable of influencing the civil war in favor of the many Islamist groups fighting Assad’s forces.

Most recently, the Turks and Saudis, after weeks of negotiations, decided to flex their muscles and join forces to engage a higher-intensity war in the Syrian theater. This is dangerous for the West. It risks provoking further Russian and Iranian involvement in Syria, and sparking a NATO-Russia confrontation.

After Turkey, citing violation of its airspace, shot down a Russian Su-24 military jet on Nov. 24, Russia has used the incident as a pretext to reinforce its military deployments in Syria and bomb the “moderate Islamists.” Those are the Islamists who fight Assad’s forces and are supported by Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. The Russian move included installing the advanced S-400 long-range air and anti-missile defense systems.

The reports of the death of Polish democracy, to paraphrase the oft told line of the eminent American writer, satirist, and political critic Mark Twain, have been greatly exaggerated.

Contrary to the alarmist media reports emanating from the media mandarins of the mainstream Western press, most Poles on the ground, constituting a silent majority as clearly indicated by the recent Presidential and Parliamentary elections, want to reassure those in the West that in Poland today the threats to democracy being “spun” by the global media complex are grossly mischaracterized and even wholly manufactured.

Democracy in Poland is the healthiest it has ever been in the post-1989, modern era.

The mainstream Western press apparatus however, taking its cues from the Polish mainstream press and those connected to the last government – freshly ejected from office due to its brazen, systemic corruption and its agenda of deeper EU integration – continues to criticise the recently and democratically elected new government and to deliver egregiously incomplete accounts of the actions on the ground; well parsed to ensure no inconvenient truths make it to the Western reader.

This active “spin” is meant to obfuscate the truth about the last eight years as well as to “poison the well” for those elected with the largest democratic mandate in modern Polish history, the former opposition party, Law and Justice (Prawo i Sprawiedliwosc– PiS).

Undeniably, this is the first government elected in the post-Communist period with a unilateral imprimatur to govern without coalition partners, but that rarely gets disclosed in recent printed “analysis” as that would undermine the “fascist coup” narrative being vociferously peddled by media, foreign and domestic, and unelected EU apparatchiks who are seeing widespread European rejection of their policies and control.

1. Abject surrender to PLO demands for unilateral recognition of a Palestinian State outside the parameters defined by Security Council resolutions 242 and 338, the Oslo Accords and the Bush Roadmap.

2. A desperate attempt to appease France’s 4.7 million Muslims as they protest against the continuing state of emergency declared after the series of co-ordinated attacks by Islamic State in Paris last November that saw 130 people murdered and 368 wounded.

France made its intentions clear in the following statement released on 30 January by Foreign Affairs Minister Laurent Fabius:

“France will engage in the coming weeks in the preparation of an international conference bringing together the parties and their main partners, American, European, Arab, notably to preserve and make happen the two-state solution”

Mr Fabius issued this veiled threat on France 24:

“If this attempt to achieve a negotiated solution reaches a dead end, we will take responsibility and recognize the Palestinian state”

Respected commentator Aaron David Miller has already delivered his verdict on the proposed International conference in a scathing tweet:

“Another bone headed French play.Convene a peace conference doomed to fail; then recognize a faux Palestinian state”

In its Spring 2015 Global Attitudes Survey the Pew Research Centre found that 76 per cent of France’s population had favourable views of France’s Muslim population whilst 24 per cent had unfavourable views.

France no doubt hopes that calling this pro-Arab international conference will stem any growth in the anti-Muslim view in the next Pew Survey. Given the violent ongoing Muslim demonstrations such hope is doomed.

Whenever Christians attempt to repair, renovate, or build a church — all of which contradict Islamic law — the same chain of events follows. Local Muslims riot and rampage, and local (Muslim) officials conclude that the only way to prevent “angry youths” from acts of violence is to ban the church, which is then declared a “threat” to security.

Repeatedly, Christian leaders accuse local officials of inciting Muslim violence against churches. Muslim leaders then point to this violence to deny the church a permit on the grounds that it has attracted violence.

On February 1, Tharwat Bukhit, a Coptic Christian member of Egypt’s parliament, announced “there are approximately 50 churches in Egypt closed for reasons of security.”

When the “Arab Spring” broke out in 2011, Egypt’s Christians compiled a list of 43 churches that had been shut down by local authorities over the years. This list was given to the prime minister of Egypt at the time, Dr. Essam Sharaf, who said that the churches would be opened as soon as possible. Yet since then, according to Bukhit, “Today, the number of closed churches has grown to almost 50.”

Why are Christian churches being “closed for reasons of security”? Whenever Christians attempt to repair, renovate, or build a church — all of which contradict Islamic law[1] — the same chain of events follows. Local Muslims riot and rampage, and local (Muslim) officials conclude that the only way to prevent “angry youths” from acts of violence is to ban the church, which is then declared a “threat” to security.

Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said tensions between Russia and the West have sent the world into a ‘new Cold War’, while speaking at the Munich Security Conference today.

‘We have slid into a new period of Cold War,’ he said. ‘Almost every day we are accused of making new horrible threats either against NATO as a whole, against Europe or against the US or other countries.’Amid an escalating war of words, the Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said a lack of trust could return the continent to ‘40 years ago, when a wall was standing in Europe’.

He rejected claims that Russian planes had killed more than 1,000 civilians in Syria, and insisted that Russia was ‘not trying to achieve some secret goals in Syria’ but was ‘trying to protect our national interests’.
He added: ‘Nearly on a daily basis, we are being blamed for the most terrible threat to Nato as a whole, to Europe, to America, to other countries. They make scary movies where Russia starts a nuclear war. I sometimes wonder, are we in 2016 or 1962?’

His comments comes after France’s Prime Minister Manuel Valls called on Russia to stop bombing civilians in Syria, saying this was crucial for achieving peace in the country.France’s Prime Minister Manuel Valls also warned that the European project could ‘disappear’ if policymakers were not careful

‘France respects Russia and its interests … But we know that to find the path to peace again, the Russian bombing of civilians has to stop,’ Valls said in a speech at a security conference in Munich.

‘The European project can go backwards or even disappear if we don’t take care of it,’ he said.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/nationalism-wreaks-havoc-in-divided-europe-1455477856

There are many different ways the European Union could fall apart in the coming weeks, but all of them have a common thread: the inability of national politicians to adopt a European perspective when confronted by common European challenges.

This is as true of the crisis surrounding the U.K.’s membership of the EU and the migration crisis, which will dominate a crunch EU leaders’ summit this week, as it is true of the eurozone economic crisis, which have burst back on the agenda following recent moves in financial markets.

Take Britain’s EU membership: When Prime Minister David Cameron first said that he wanted a new deal for the U.K. ahead of a referendum he has pledged to hold by the end of 2017, he insisted that the reforms he was seeking would benefit the whole of Europe.

Yet the draft deal that EU leaders will discuss does nothing of the sort. It consists of a series of carve-outs for the U.K. carefully crafted to stop other countries taking advantage of them. Indeed, EU officials are clear that if other member states try to make use of a controversial “emergency brake” that will allow the U.K. to restrict welfare payments to EU migrants for four years, the deal with the U.K. government would fall apart.

The deal may fall apart anyway: European Council President Donald Tusk has warned that the process is “fragile”. Mr. Cameron can’t even be sure he will achieve even his limited objective of persuading key figures in his party to back his deal, complicating his efforts to win the referendum, which he hopes to hold in June.

Either way, the deal looks likely to make the EU harder rather than easier to manage. The price of trying to keep Britain in the EU has been to put in question core EU principles including nondiscrimination against EU citizens, the free movement of workers and the integrity of the single market rule book. That looks like a recipe to embolden nationalists across the continent, showing that unilateral threats can deliver results. CONTINUE READING AT THE SITE

As Alec Guinness says at the end of The Bridge on the River Kwai: “What have I done?”

When the refugee crisis began last summer, about 1,500 people were coming to Sweden every week seeking asylum. By August, the number had doubled. In September, it doubled again. In October, it hit 10,000 a week, and stayed there even as the weather grew colder. A nation of 9.5 million, Sweden expected to take as many as 190,000 refugees, or 2 percent of the population — double the per capita figure projected by Germany, which has taken the lead in absorbing the vast tide of people fleeing the wars in Syria, Iraq, and elsewhere.

That afternoon, in the cafeteria in the back of the Migration Agency building, I met with Karima Abou-Gabal, an agency official responsible for the orderly flow of people into and out of Malmo. I asked where the new refugees would go. “As of now,” she said wearily, “we have no accommodation. We have nothing.” The private placement agencies with whom the migration agency contracts all over the country could not offer so much as a bed. In Malmo itself, the tents were full. So, too, the auditorium and hotels. Sweden had, at that very moment, reached the limits of its absorptive capacity. That evening, Mikael Ribbenvik, a senior migration official, said to me, “Today we had to regretfully inform 40 people that we could [not] find space for them in Sweden.” They could stay, but only if they found space on their own.

The Turkish state authorities have made it clear that calling for an end to state violence in Turkey’s Kurdish regions is “treason.” This means that in Turkey, requesting peace and political equality between Kurds and Turks is illegal.

The 1128 original signatories of the “Academics for Peace” declaration have been subjected to sustained attacks and threats from the Turkish government and nationalist groups. In the week after the publication of the declaration, at least 33 academics were detained by police. Some have lost their jobs. Associate Professor Battal Odabasi from Istanbul Aydin University, for instance, was fired for supporting the petition. At least 29 academics have been suspended from their jobs at universities.

On January 11, 2016, a group of academics and researchers from Turkey and abroad called “Academics for Peace” signed and issued a declaration entitled, “We will not be a party to this crime.” In it, they criticized the Turkish government for its recent curfews and massacres in Kurdish districts, and demanded an end to violence against Kurds and a return to peace talks.

“We declare that we will not be a party to this massacre by remaining silent and demand an immediate end to the violence perpetrated by the state,” the declaration said.

In total, 2212 academics and researchers from Turkey, and 2279 from abroad, signed their names onto the declaration.