RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12378/tommy-robinson-injustice

The swiftness with which injustice was meted out to Tommy Robinson is stunning. No, more than that: it is terrifying.

Without having access to his own lawyer, Robinson was summarily tried and sentenced to 13 months behind bars. He was then transported to Hull Prison.

Meanwhile, the judge who sentenced Robinson also ordered British media not to report on his case. Newspapers that had already posted reports of his arrest quickly took them down. All this happened on the same day.

In Britain, rapists enjoy the right to a full and fair trial, the right to the legal representation of their choice, the right to have sufficient time to prepare their cases, and the right to go home on bail between sessions of their trial. No such rights were offered, however, to Tommy Robinson.

The very first time I set foot in London, back in my early twenties, I kicked up into an adrenaline high that lasted for the entire week of my visit. Never, in later years, did any other place ever have such an impact on me — not Paris, not Rome. Yes, Rome was a cradle of Western civilization, and Paris a hub of Western culture — but Britain was the place where the values of the Anglosphere, above all a dedication to freedom, had fully taken form. Without Britain, there would have been no U.S. Declaration of Independence, Constitution, or Bill of Rights.

In recent years, alas, Britain has deviated from its commitment to liberty. Foreign critics of Islam, such as the American scholar Robert Spencer, and for a time, even the Dutch Parliamentarian Geert Wilders have been barred from the country. Now, at least one prominent native critic of Islam, Tommy Robinson, has been repeatedly harassed by the police, railroaded by the courts, and left unprotected by prison officials who have allowed Muslim inmates to beat him senseless. Clearly, British authorities view Robinson as a troublemaker and would like nothing more than to see him give up his fight, leave the country (as Ayaan Hirsi Ali left the Netherlands), or get killed by a jihadist (as happened to the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh).

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12376/wilders-tommy-robinson-arrest

Written questions by Geert Wilders, Marie-Fleur Agema and Raymond de Roon, Members of the House of Representatives of the Netherlands belonging to the Party for Freedom (PVV), submitted to the Dutch Minister of Foreign Affairs about the arrest of British activist and Islam critic Tommy Robinson:

1) Have you heard about the arrest of British activist and Islam critic Tommy Robinson for “breaching the peace,” while he was covering a trial of Islamic rapists, and that he was within a few hours convicted to 13 months imprisonment? What do you think of this madness?

2) Do you realize that, if the said Islam critic has to spend his jail sentence among Islamic criminals, this may cost him his life? What is your opinion of this?

3) Does, according to you, freedom of speech also apply to Islam critics in the EU and are you willing to immediately voice your dissatisfaction about this violation of freedom of speech by the United Kingdom to your British colleague and demand his attention for the personal safety of the person involved? If not, why not?

4) Do you and your colleagues in the EU realize that you cannot silence the dissatisfaction in society about Islamization by prosecuting or arresting Islam critics, and that a large segment of the population will at a certain time no longer accept
this and turn against you and your colleagues?

5) Can you answer these questions before Tuesday, May 29, 11 am?

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/italy-again-the-euro-again/

“Revenge,” it is said, “is a dish best served cold”. The creation of the euro, it is said, was the triumph of politics over economics. The eurozone crisis a decade or so later, it is said, was the revenge of economics.

Well, economics has returned for another helping.

Accepting Italy as one of the eurozone’s founding members was a decision only made possible by ignoring common sense, by twisting statistics, and by making a mockery of the rules. But it was a Pyrrhic victory: Italy was allowed to trick its way onto a voyage that damned it. The euro simply did not fit the realities of Italy’s economy or its politics. By dramatically cutting the country’s financing costs (borrowing lire would have carried a significantly higher nominal cost) adopting the single currency allowed Rome to avoid tackling the country’s high debt load, a debt load that was made all the more dangerous now that it was all denominated in a ‘foreign’ currency. Italy could no longer print lire to pay off its creditors.

When the eurozone crisis hit, Italy was one of the victims, and so, in some respects was its democracy. In something that came uncomfortably close to a coup, the eurozone leadership essentially used Italy’s financial fragility as a lever to secure the replacement in 2011 of Prime Minister Berlusconi by a Brussels man, Mario Monti, a pliable, unelected proconsul. Next time you hear Brussels lecturing Eastern Europeans on democracy remember that.

Italy weathered the crisis in a ‘just a flesh wound’ sort of way. Its problems became chronic, rather than acute, if that’s the correct adjective to describe the consequences of staying stuck in the euro’s deflationary trap: High rates of unemployment and anemic economic growth.

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2018/05/italian-elections-endless-appeal-easy-money/

The two political champions of ‘moderate’ Italy — Berlusconi and Renzi — have both fallen, rejected resoundingly by voters very much imbued with the spirit of Brexit and Trump’s deplorables. ‘Populism’ has been the ready explanation, but there is much more to it than that.

On March 5, Italy looked like France without Emmanuel Macron. The national elections, held the day before, were hailed as a triumph for the so-called populists. Added together, the political parties that could be so labelled gained 58 per cent of the votes. “Moderates” of the Left and the Right, namely the Democratic Party and Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia, performed badly.

This seems to be another tile falling down in a domino effect. Since Brexit (June 2016) and the election of Donald Trump to the Presidency of the United States (November 2016), observers have looked for a pattern in political shocks. Some analysts have suggested that middle- and lower-middle-class voters are protesting, all over Western democracies, against globalisation, as they feel its costs (businesses moving to emerging economies) and fail to see its benefits (lower prices, more innovation, better international division of labour). Others have pointed to a sense of frustration people are developing with international organisations, beginning with the EU, that are perceived as an attempt to shield political decision-making from democratic accountability. Almost everybody believes social media has changed the rules of the game, making “mainstream media” less and less relevant and perhaps transforming the world of news into a series of “echo chambers”, where like-minded people listen exclusively to other like-minded people.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2018/05/amnesty-morally-corrupted/

When Amnesty International concerned itself with campaigning on behalf of individual and identifiable political prisoners of regimes of whatever political colour it did some real good.

However, it now appears to have become an expensive exercise in wholesale and futile virtue-signalling, with some highly dubious choices of targets. If it is still campaigning for individual prisoners, one doesn’t hear much of this.

Kate Allen, UK Director of Amnesty International (the world’s third-biggest Amnesty Organisation), would-be Labour politician and long-time former mistress of extreme leftist and anti-Israel activist Ken Livingstone, appears to have had much to do with radical changes in Amnesty’s policies and political colour in Britain. Acccording to Wikipedia, ‘Allen undertook a major restructure.’

She was quoted in the International Express of May 7 on planned demonstrations at President Trump’s proposed British visit: ‘We and thousands of our supporters will very definitely be making our voices heard. In the 15 months of his presidency we’ve seen a deeply disturbing human rights rollback.’

Huh? I do not believe there is one single instance of ‘human rights rollback’ that can be blamed on Trump. His attempted crackdown on illegal immigration has nothing whatever to do with human rights, but with stopping the law of a democratic nation being flouted and damage being done with impunity to its polity, economy and identity. The accusation is not only false but will achieve nothing good. Amnesty, in Britain at least, appears to have gone from being a respected and effective defender of persecuted individuals to being just another bunch of virtue-signalling creeps.