RUTHFULLY YOURS

This “intifada” is simply a further phase in a larger plan to destroy Israel. When the plan began officially, with the establishment of the PLO in 1964, there were no “settlements” — not until after the June 1967 War — so what exactly were the Palestinians planning to “liberate”?

The current conflict is not about “defending” any mosque from being contaminated by the “filthy feet” of Jews: it is about seeing Israel forced to its knees. Abbas and others seek to reap delicious political fruits from this “intifada.”

Here is a novel idea: Kerry could put pressure on the Palestinian and Jordanian leadership to cease anti-Israeli incitement and indoctrination. Now that would be pressure well applied.

Abbas is expected to become a partner in the fight against ISIS and radical Islamist groups. All well and good. Why then is he not expected to stop cheering on and glorifying young Palestinians who attack Jewish Israelis?

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry is back in town. This time he is meeting with Jordanian and Palestinian leaders about “ongoing security issues in the region and continued tensions between Israel and the Palestinians.”

“The destruction of Israel is non-negotiable.” — Mohammad Neza Naghdi, Commander of Iran’s Basij paramilitary force.

Sanctions relief will mainly benefit Ayatollah Khamenei and members of the Revolutionary Guards: they control up to one-third of Iran’s economy.

Part of the Iranian regime’s grand strategy is to inflict “death to America” and replace it with its own radical version of Islamic governance. Ayatollah Khamenei himself called for America’s destruction amid nuclear negotiations.

Officials also believe Iran is indirectly funding the Islamic State (IS) in the Sinai. “Suitcases of cash” are sent directly to Hamas officials in the Gaza Strip; part of the money is then transferred to IS.

Iran now poses an even greater threat. If democracies today continue their present policies towards Iran, it will only embolden Iran’s regime to continue its quest to obtain nuclear weapons as well as its terrorism and human rights violations.

Humanity seldom seems to learn its lessons. The governments of the world’s leading democracies appear to be suffering from this predicament in their nuclear dealings with the Islamic Republic of Iran. To avoid catastrophe, democracies need quickly to correct their course.

In 2006, the Sunday Times columnist India Knight wrote a piece arguing that Muslims are “the new Jews”, in which she attacked Jack Straw for asking female Muslim constituents consulting him at his Blackburn surgery to consider uncovering their noses and mouths in order to allow better communication. (I use the word “attacked” loosely; if, as Denis Healey said, being dissed by Geoffrey Howe was like “being savaged by a dead sheep” then being attacked by Knight is akin to being traduced by a twice-used tea-bag.)

A decade later, so many sad souls have clambered aboard this ship of fools that it’s a wonder it stays afloat, so extreme is the level of dysentery masquerading as discourse which issues from it. Most recently, Holocaust Memorial Day was used by Islamists and their grisly groupies as the opening steps to a danse macabre of what-aboutery, comparing the Kindertransport to the current influx of refugees from the Muslim world and implying that if we do not welcome them all to our shores with open arms, we are as bad as the Nazis.

But those who make such hysterical comparisons are, in my view, the silly led by the sinister, as the Sainted Hitchens once dismissed the Not In My Name mob.

How are Muslims not the New Jews? Let me count the ways.

For a start, there seems to be no sign of any sort of Kindertransport in action – rather, the modus operandi would appear to be “women and children last” judging by the huge groups of able-bodied young men who have found their way to the West. And this of course leads to the sort of trouble we saw in Cologne. Though no one could accuse Jewish men of not being interested in sex, I don’t recall any accounts of marauding bands of Jewish youths mob-handedly molesting gentile women on the streets of countries which gave them refuge.

Splendidly Chinese girls from poor homes are now the highest achieving group of school children in Britain

Western women are now being told by the governors of some European cities that they should do their best not to inflame men, many of whom are coming from countries where child-marriage is legal, where scholars say it’s fine to sexually assault non-believers and where it is allowable to attack young women out on their own, singly or in groups. The Muslim Brotherhood was behind the gangs of men attacking young women who dared leave their homes unescorted in Egypt from the 1960s onwards.

The deadline for a ceasefire in Syria by 19 February has passed with no indication that it will be achieved at any time in the foreseeable future. Hopes for that ceasefire were high after the UN Security Council had unanimously passed Resolution 2254 on 18 December 2015 requesting:

“the Secretary-General to lead the effort, through the office of his Special Envoy and in consultation with relevant parties, to determine the modalities and requirements of a ceasefire as well as continue planning for the support of ceasefire implementation, and urges Member States, in particular members of the ISSG, to support and accelerate all efforts to achieve a ceasefire, including through pressing all relevant parties to agree and adhere to such a ceasefire”

The ISSG mentioned in the Resolution is the International Syria Support Group – comprising the Arab League, China, Egypt, the EU, France, Germany, Iran, Iraq, Italy, Jordan, Lebanon, the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, Oman, Qatar, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, the United Nations, and the United States.

ISSG has proved totally ineffective in ending the five year conflict in Syria that has seen more than 300000 deaths and seven million Syrians internally displaced or fleeing to neighbouring States and swamping Europe to escape the horrific carnage unleashed in Syria during that time.

Islamic State was spawned in Syria and Iraq in July 2014 and now occupies more land than the area of Great Britain. Together with Al Nusra Front – a Syria-based Sunni extremist group that adheres to the global jihadist ideology of al-Qa’ida – both have been declared terrorist organisations by the UN Security Council. Meeting in Munich on 12 and 13 February the ISSG members agreed that:

“The UN shall serve as the secretariat of the ceasefire task force. The cessation of hostilities will commence in one week, after confirmation by the Syrian government and opposition, following appropriate consultations in Syria.”

The West is doomed because, as Europe is demonstrating, there aren’t enough births to sustain culture and traditions under assault by exuberantly fecund new arrivals who simply do not share them. The solution: subsidise larger families rather than immigrant benefits
A French novel has changed my mind on an expensive piece of entitlement largesse championed by Tony Abbott. Mr Abbott was right and I was badly wrong, along with all conservative commentators. I have also been wrong about opposing the increasing amounts of taxpayer money paid and promised for child care. The reason is simple: we pay it, and a lot more of it, or we die. Bear with me.

“Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past,” came to mind when reading: “If you control the children, you control the future.” The first is the familiar Party slogan in Nineteen Eighty-Four. The second is a description of the Muslim Brotherhood’s motivation in Michel Houellebecq’s novel Submission (2015). I was struck by the parallel, and it didn’t end there.

I was not familiar with Houellebecq’s work before reading Submission. For those like me, Douglas Murray provides an excellent review of Submission and some of the author’s earlier works, together with a little about the man, in the November, 2015, edition of Quadrant. Murray recounts that Houellebecq was the target of legal proceedings for having one of his characters in Platform (2001), whose girlfriend had been killed on a tourist beach by jihadists, express hatred for Islam and Muslims. He speculates that this may have been one of the reasons Houellebecq decided to live in Ireland. Whatever the truth of that, it says something sinister about where we are heading when a novelist is held to legal account for the expressed feelings of one of his characters. Perhaps the local Thought Police suspected he was venting his own secret Islamophobic thoughts?

http://www.wsj.com/articles/where-obama-fails-on-iran-sanctions-the-gulf-states-can-step-in-1456096639

Meaningful new U.S. sanctions on Iran will have to wait for the next administration. President Obama continues to oppose congressional efforts to inflict financial pain on Tehran for its malign activities. In January the Treasury Department finally did react to Iran’s unlawful ballistic-missile tests, but those sanctions will cause no economic damage. Instead they targeted individuals and companies—procurement networks that Tehran can easily reconstitute.

The Gulf States might not be so timid: Saudi Arabia and its allies have potent financial weapons they can deploy against Iran. The sectarian war between the Sunni and Shiite states is intensifying militarily, with proxies fighting from Syria to Yemen, and economically. On Jan. 4 Riyadh announced an end to all commercial relations with Iran and said it would cut off travel, with an exception for pilgrims visiting holy sites. In response Tehran banned imports of all Saudi products.

Last week the Saudis teamed up with Russia to propose capping oil production at January levels, putting pressure on Tehran to do the same as it tries to rescue its battered economy. Riyadh has deployed oil as a weapon before. In 2012 and 2013, after sanctions halved Iranian oil exports, Saudi Arabia raised production to prevent global price shocks. As the Iran nuclear deal was being negotiated in 2014-15, the Saudis increased oil production again. That helped to push prices below $35 a barrel. Now as Iran re-enters energy markets, desperate for economic relief, it will get only about half the price for its oil on which it based its budget last year. READ MORE ATE SITE

Xi Jinping appears to be building a personality cult around him as Mao did (Li Tao)

CHINA is moving towards one-man rule as the state media step up demands for personal loyalty to President Xi Jinping, a departure from the Communist party’s collective leadership of recent decades.

Last week the party’s flagship newspaper issued a call for Xi to have the power to “remake the political landscape of China”. The article, supposedly written by one of a literary group, was put out on a social media account run by the People’s Daily. It said all communists must be loyal to Xi and “line up with the leadership”.

The campaign to enshrine Xi as the infallible “core” of authority is worrying many inside the political elite and coincides with China exerting its military muscle and possibly preparing to change its nuclear weapons strategy.

The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has just stationed surface-to-air missiles on a disputed island in the South China Sea. The Chinese expansion comes as Barack Obama rallies Asian nations to support free navigation in the strategic waterway. The prospect of one man dominating the party, the state and the army in China could be the most challenging test in the next American president’s in-tray.

Xi’s grand plans include a total reorganisation of the Chinese military command structure that has included an internal debate about its nuclear weapons. Xi recently formed a dedicated PLA rocket force to control the nuclear ballistic missile arsenal. A report for the Union of Concerned Scientists, a US-based group, says China may be considering placing its nuclear forces on alert, which means that, like America and Britain, its weapons would be ready to fire on command.

The outrage is that Hijab Solidarity Day will be taking place under the auspices of the City of Ottawa, the capital of Canada. It is not the role of a democratic government to celebrate religious symbols or to help religions proselytize.

The government’s acceptance of an Ottawa Hijab Solidarity Day amounts to accepting a radical legal system that is completely contrary to Canada’s democratic values, and crosses the line that separates Church and State. Endorsing the hijab is endorsing the first step of an extremist ideology that leads to and condones honor killings, female genital mutilation (FGM) and the oppression of women.

In 2007, Aqsa Parvez, a 16-year-old Pakistani Muslim living in Toronto, was strangled to death by her father. Her crime was that, as a free woman in Canada, she chose not to wear a hijab. In another case in Canada, in 2012, four Muslim women were murdered by their own family for refusing to wear a hijab and preferring Western clothing.

This Thursday, February 25, 2016, the city of Ottawa will be holding a public event celebrating the hijab, Islam’s physical repression of women.

The City for All Women Initiative (CAWI) organization, backed by the City Council of Ottawa, is hosting the Ottawa Hijab Solidarity Day celebration, also called “Walking with Our Muslims Sisters,” at City Hall. According to CAWI, the main purpose of this event is to encourage non-Muslim women to wear a hijab to understand life as a Muslim woman.

The outrage is that such an event will be taking place under the auspices of the City of Ottawa, the capital of Canada. Under Islamic Shari’a law, the hijab is an expression of the suppression of women and is used as a tool to persecute women by their male counterparts.

The actual number of crimes in Germany committed by migrants in 2015 may exceed 400,000.

The report does not include crime data from North Rhine-Westphalia, the most populous state in Germany and also the state with the largest number of migrants. North Rhine-Westphalia’s biggest city is Cologne, where, on New Year’s Eve, hundreds of German women were sexually assaulted by migrants.

“For years the policy has been to leave the [German] population in the dark about the actual crime situation… The citizens are being played for fools. Rather than tell the truth, they [government officials] are evading responsibility and passing blame onto the citizens and the police.” — André Schulz, director, Association of Criminal Police, Germany.

10% of the migrants from the chaos in Iraq and Syria have reached Europe so far: “Eight to ten million migrants are still on the way.” — Gerd Müller, Development Minister.

Migrants committed 208,344 crimes in 2015, according to a confidential police report that was leaked to the German newspaper, Bild. This figure represents an 80% increase over 2014 and works out to around 570 crimes committed by migrants every day, or 23 crimes each hour, between January and December 2015.

The actual number of migrant crimes is far higher, however, because the report, produced by the Federal Criminal Police Office (Bundeskriminalamt, BKA), includes only crimes that have been solved (aufgeklärten Straftaten). According to Statista, the German statistics agency, on average only around half of all crimes committed in Germany in any given year are solved (Aufklärungsquote). This implies that the actual number of crimes committed by migrants in 2015 may exceed 400,000.

Moreover, the report — “Crime in the Context of Immigration” (Kriminalität im Kontext von Zuwanderung) — includes data from only 13 of Germany’s 16 federal states.

The report does not include crime data from North Rhine-Westphalia, the most populous state in Germany and also the state with the largest number of migrants. North Rhine-Westphalia’s biggest city is Cologne, where, on New Year’s Eve, hundreds of German women were sexually assaulted by migrants. It is not yet clear why those crimes were not included in the report.

The report also lacks crime data from Hamburg, the second-largest city in Germany, and Bremen, the second most populous city in Northern Germany.

Further, many crimes are simply not reported or are deliberately overlooked: political leaders across Germany have ordered police to turn a blind eye to crimes perpetrated by migrants, apparently to avoid fueling anti-immigration sentiments.

According to the report, most of the crimes were committed by migrants from: Syria (24%), Albania (17%), Kosovo (14%), Serbia (11%), Afghanistan (11%), Iraq (9%), Eritrea (4%), Macedonia (4%), Pakistan (4%) and Nigeria (2%).

The catastrophic failure of Peronist populism was sealed at last by November’s presidential elections and the victory of conservative free-marketeer Mauricio Macri. In the Vatican, however, one can only wonder if the brilliantined dictator’s direct and indirect influence lives on
History is a fair-minded goddess. The Soviet Union got nowhere in the seventy years it applied for, and which the goddess granted, to change the world. In compensation, a leader is now at the helm of the Russian government able to restore a sense of national pride and achievement which augurs well for the future and, all things considered, is vastly preferable compared to what the Soviets had to offer. German Nationalism and Socialism put the hand up, got the nod, but ran out of puff in less than the thousand years they had asked for. To make amends history showered the ruined country with more than a sufficiency of economic prosperity.

Argentine populism staked its claim in 1946, was given the call, and for the following sixty-nine years, in and out of government, with or without its founding leader or any of his wives, retained a pre-eminent political position mostly influenced by the Justicialista ideology bequeathed by Juan Perón and principally responsible for bringing the country to its knees. The catastrophic failure of Peronist populism was sealed in November’s presidential elections with the victory of the conservative advocate of free-market economics, Mauricio Macri, whose victory preceded by only a few days the equally decisive triumph of the opposition in the Venezuelan parliamentary elections. Taken together, these two events mark a definitive turning point in the political climate of Latin America, away from the clownish antics of Chávez and the corrupting populism of the Peronists towards a restoration of economic sanity and civic virtue.

Macri brings to his high office valuable experience gained during a successful career in business followed by three impressive terms as the elected mayor of Buenos Aires, which ranks as the principal political office outside the national presidency. It is also quite probable that the consolation that history has up her sleeve for Argentina’s melancholy populist twilight is the appointment of an Argentinian Jesuit to the Holy See, as many of Pope Francis’ public pronouncements are alarmingly consistent with what his Peronist compatriots have been uttering during the past seven decades and it is therefore apposite for his arrival in the Vatican to become immortalised as Perón’s last hurrah.