RUTHFULLY YOURS

Ten million dollars is apparently nothing to a free spending socialist like Justin Trudeau, but it’s pretty clear his sneaky little payoff to a Guantanamo-jailed terrorist, Omar Khadr, isn’t going over well with the U.S. veteran he blinded.

According to the Daily Caller:

The wounded warrior who was blinded by Omar Khadr’s grenade attack that killed Sgt. Chris Speer says Canadian Prime Minster Justin Trudeau should be charged with treason.

In an interview with the Toronto Sun on Saturday, Layne Morris says Trudeau’s decision to reward the former al-Qaida terrorist with a formal apology and $10.5 million cash settlement feels “like a punch in the face.”

“I don’t see this as anything but treason,” said Morris. “It’s something a traitor would do. As far as I am concerned, Prime Minister Trudeau should be charged.”

Morris is also angry that Trudeau delivered the “compensation” money to Khadr in secret so that the settlement would be unknown to any U.S. court.

Paying anything to a sworn terrorist who killed our men and who will use his taxpayer winnings to kill us again, is a sign of pure insanity in the West. Was there a war on, or was there a legal dispute about terrorists’ rights to take down the Twin Towers in 2001? Why are any of these people getting money? The sneakiness of the maneuver defies the imagination showing that people of Trudeau’s ilk care so much about terrorists’ feelings they are willing to pay billions from other people’s money to succor them even as veterans go neglected. Yet they are just canny enough to know that the public won’t stomach it – the public they have such contempt for – and do it in secret.

It goes to show how far gone the left is when it comes to matters of war and peace. To them, there is no such thing as war, there are only lawsuits to be litigated. This explains why these people can never be trusted with the powers that go with war. They will just find a way to pay off the enemy.

It’s time to fix this problem from the stateside fast.

Iran is currently one of the youngest countries in the world, 70% of the current population of 80,957,894 are under 35.

Despite having rich oil and gas fields, culture and civilization, the youth and especially children in Iran are still deprived of basic human rights.

Today in Iran, the common belief is that child labor is ‘normal’. Parents regard their children as additional sources of income. Some families attempt to combine school attendance with excessively long and heavy work.

At a very early age children often separate from their families, to earn a few cents per hour, and are consequently exposed to serious hazards and illnesses. You may find them on the streets of large cities like Tehran, Esfahan, and Tabriz, in large numbers. They simply do not have enough time to go to school and improve their future prospects.

Recently Iranian media published reports on seven million child laborers, as well as a significant number of children abused in the drug trade.

The state-run ISNA news agency quoted three officials of Iranian regime on June 2, 2017.

Sarah Rezaie, a member of the so-called Imam Ali population, reduced the dimension of this social problem by claiming that there are two million working children in Iran, but unofficial statistics show the number of child laborers is at seven million.

She announced that these children are between 10 to 15 years old and added: “There are some pieces of evidence that show even 5-years-old children and babies are also caught in forced labor.”

She described the situation of children working in some of the metropolitan areas of Iran as “disastrous… and this has become a kind of norm.”

Rezaei pointed to the existence of shops where adolescents, often addicted themselves, sell addictive substances such as nas, pan, glass, and crack, adding that “these children are used in other cities of Sistan and Baluchestan province.”

These children swallow these drugs and after they crossed the border they expel them. Many have died in the process.

Sousan Maziarfar speaks of the children who search in garbage dumps for food… said the average age of these children is 12 years. “41% of these children are illiterate and 37% of them have dropped out of the school in order to work,” she added.

Maziarfar revealed that many of these children not only face disease but also having their faces, fingers and toes chewed and wounded by rats.

Soraya Azizpanah, a member of the association for the protection of the rights of the Children, also quoted Iranian regime parliament’s research center, which according to ISNA news agency, indicates 3.2 million children have dropped out of school to work.

With the Trump administration considering how to break the stalemate between Taliban-allied groups and the government of Afghanistan, terrorists detonated a car bomb in Kabul on May 31, killing more than 150. Afghan intelligence blamed the violence on Haqqani, a terror network with close ties to the Taliban, al Qaeda and Pakistan’s spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence. The attack demonstrates that Washington needs to focus on the threat from Haqqani, which has also consolidated militant factions across strategic regions of the war zone.

Haqqani’s ties to Pakistan make political solutions essential. Islamabad has shown no sign it is genuinely willing to end its support of terror proxies and reconcile with the Kabul regime. Yet the success of the administration’s recent decision to deepen U.S. involvement in the Afghan war will depend on whether Haqqani can be defeated, co-opted, or separated from the ISI, which for decades has relied on militant proxies to further Pakistani interests in Afghanistan.

Since 9/11, Haqqani has evolved from a relatively small, tribal-based jihadist network into one of the most influential terrorist organizations in South Asia. It is largely responsible for the violence in Kabul and the most notorious attacks against the coalition. It masterminded the 19-hour siege on the U.S. Embassy and NATO headquarters in 2011, and allegedly facilitated an assault on a U.S. Consulate near the Iran border in 2013 and a 2009 suicide bombing of a U.S. base in Khost province, which killed seven CIA operatives. The group also holds five American hostages in Pakistan. Since the 2013 death of Taliban leader Mullah Omar, Haqqani has become the only group with the cohesion, influence and geographic reach to provide Pakistan with “strategic depth”—a territorial buffer on its western border.

Pakistan denies sponsoring terror proxies and continues to work with the U.S. in counterterrorism against certain anti-Pakistan groups. But Western and Afghan officials say Islamabad also sponsors terrorism in order to undermine Afghanistan and India. In 2011 Adm. Mike Mullen, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called Haqqani a “veritable arm” of the ISI.

Haqqani is a central element of the strategic challenge that faces the U.S. and its allies. The network’s expanding operations in northern and southeastern Afghanistan, and especially in Kabul, over the past decade have enabled its Taliban affiliates to “control or contest” territory accounting for about one-third of the Afghan population, or nearly 10 million. That’s a higher proportion of the population than Islamic State controlled in Syria and Iraq at the height of its power in 2014, according to CNN’s Peter Bergen. The militants’ wide reach makes it hard for NATO forces to build enduring partnerships with Afghan civilians.

As the debate intensifies over how the U.S. should respond in Afghanistan, Washington must also change its approach to Pakistan. As a first step, the president should appoint an envoy who would lead diplomatic and intelligence efforts to buttress the Kabul regime against terrorism. The envoy would also sharpen the focus on Pakistan in bilateral diplomacy with countries that have good relations with Islamabad, such as China, Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf states.

The envoy would also oversee relations among Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Russia and India, focusing on the formulation of political solutions. A U.S. alignment with India would more effectively check Pakistan, while improved U.S. relations with China, cemented over shared concerns about escalating violence and economic security, could pressure Islamabad and its proxies into a political settlement.

The U.S. should also press Pakistan to stop providing sanctuary to terrorists. That would require Washington to consider publicly exposing the extent to which officials at the highest levels of the Pakistan military and ISI support terror. Such moves against an ostensible ally would be unusual and would require advanced measures to protect intelligence sources and methods. But the U.S. has tolerated Pakistan’s duplicity for 16 years, and it hasn’t worked.

Equally important, the Afghan National Security Forces are unequipped for infiltration by Haqqani factions. The U.S. and NATO allies should increase political intelligence and military resources to ease into a strengthened combat-support role, training and mentoring the Afghan forces. A more adaptive political-military NATO campaign would help reduce the threat from Haqqani, eventually enabling Afghan troops to move from defense to offense against increasingly capable adversaries. CONTINUE AT SITE

OTTAWA—Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau defended the apology and financial compensation his government issued to Omar Khadr, saying Saturday they were the price for violating Mr. Khadr’s constitutional rights while he was held at Guantanamo Bay for over a decade.

Canada’s constitution “protects all Canadians, even when it’s uncomfortable,” Mr. Trudeau told reporters at the end of the Group of 20 leaders’ summit in Hamburg, Germany. “This is not about the details or the merits of the Khadr case. When the government violates any Canadians’ [constitutional] rights, we all end up paying for it.”

Negative reaction to the formal settlement unveiled Friday has been swift, with former Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper weighing in, saying the deal is “simply wrong.”

The formal settlement with Mr. Khadr, a Canadian held by the U.S. at Guantanamo Bay for over a decade following the death of a U.S. Army medic, marked an attempt to bring closure to a case that fueled a bitter debate on how to handle national security threats.

Canada’s Liberal government said it wished to “apologize to Mr. Khadr for any role Canadian officials may have played in relation to his ordeal abroad and any resulting harm.”

Settlement details, such as a payment for damages, weren’t publicly disclosed. A person familiar with the details said the payment was about 10 million Canadian dollars ($7.75 million).

The settlement brings an end to a drawn-out lawsuit Mr. Khadr’s lawyers launched against the Canadian government. It sought C$20 million in damages over his detention in Guantanamo Bay and what it claimed were a violation of his constitutional rights by Canadian officials, who interviewed Mr. Khadr while he was in custody. Canada’s top court ruled in 2010 that Mr. Khadr’s rights under Canada’s Charter of Rights were infringed.

Mr. Khadr, now 30 years old, was born in Canada and later brought to Afghanistan, where at age 15 he was captured by the U.S. Army in July 2002 and transferred to Guantanamo Bay. In October 2010, he pleaded guilty to a series of charges including murder, attempted murder, providing support for terrorism and spying. He came to Canada years later to serve the remainder of his eight-year sentence. He was released on bail in 2015, and has lived in western Canada since. CONTINUE AT SITE

In his magnificent speech in Poland, President Trump asked whether the west “still has the will to survive”.http://www.melaniephillips.com/trump-in-poland/

If he’d listened to BBC Radio’s Today programme this morning (approx 0840), he might have lost his own.

The issue that seemed to have startled the BBC was the suggestion that there were now threats to western bonds of culture, faith and tradition. (The fact that some of us have been writing about this for years has of course totally passed the BBC by). Two guests were invited to discuss this question: Margaret MacMillan, professor of international history at Oxford university where she is also Warden of St Anthony’s college, and Lord Dannatt, former Chief of the General Staff.

The interviewer’s loaded question about Trump’s speech, “Is he in any sense right?” invited them to agree that no, there could be no sense in which he was. Both duly agreed. Three against Trump, then. But if anything illustrated precisely what he was talking about, this conversation could scarcely have been bettered.

Opined Professor MacMillan: “There are bonds that hold us together and there are often bonds of history, but the idea there is something called ‘the west’ seems to me very dubious indeed. There are many wests, there are many different ways of looking at who we are, and I’m worried by the whole tenor of his speech. The talk of the ‘will’, the family, traditional values, what does that all mean?”

Lord Dannatt was equally perplexed. “What threat does he have in mind? From Russia? Islamic State? From climate change? Well he ruled that one out by pulling out of the Paris agreement. Or is it the nuclear threat from North Korea?”

Helpfully, the interviewer observed that what Trump had meant was a waning of cultural self confidence; he further ventured to suggest, with appropriate BBC diffidence, that “the project that we’ve all been involved in for centuries is a decent one”.

Professor MacMillan agreed there was a “decent side to what the west has done”. But just in case anyone might have thought she believed it to be better than other societies, she added there were many sides that weren’t decent at all “when you think of some of the things we’ve unleashed on the world” (presumably as opposed to the unlimited decencies that countries which don’t subscribe to respect for human life, freedom and democracy have bequeathed to humanity).

She conceded that the west had built a “liberal intentional order since the first and second world wars”. She agreed that respect for the rule of law and democratic institutions were very important and that these should be defended. “But if you talk about defending the power of the west and the dominance of the west that’s very different and I’m not sure that does make the world more stable… What worries me is that part of the enemy is seen as those who live among us… Islam, or Islamic fundamentalism, is [as presented by Trump] in some way a threat, and that means not just from outside but inside and that to me is really troubling”,

This professor of history, who teaches the young and thus transmits the culture down through the generations, didn’t even seem to know what that culture was. She implied that the will to survive was something out of Nietzsche or fascist ideology rather than the impulse to defend a society and a civilisation. She seemed to find incomprehensible the very idea that certain values defined western civilisation at all, or that it had a coherent identity.

She found something frightening or sinister about traditional values or the emphasis on the family: the very things that keep any society together. The one good thing she conceded was associated with the west – the “liberal international order” – had developed only after the two world wars. So much for the 18th century western Enlightenment, the development of political liberty and the rise of science.

The idea of the west having power filled her with horror; but without power the west can’t defend itself. And she thought the idea the west was threatened from within as well as from without was “troubling”. In other words, she doesn’t believe home-grown radicalised Islamists pose a threat to western countries. Now that really is troubling.

As for Lord Dannatt complaining Trump wasn’t specific about the threats he had in mind – well, talk about missing the point! Russia, Isis and North Korea are all threats to the west. The question was whether the west actually wanted to defeat any or all of these and more.

And Lord Dannatt’s reference to climate change was unintentionally revealing – about himself. Climate change supposedly threatens the survival of the planet. No-one suggests it poses a threat to the west alone! So it was irrelevant to the issue under discussion. Its inclusion implies that Lord Dannatt knows one thing: that Trump is wrong about EVERYTHING. So he just threw in climate change for good measure to show how wrong about everything Trump is.

So what exactly did Trump say to produce such finger-wagging disdain? Well, he produced an astonishing, passionate and moving declaration of belief in the west, its values of freedom and sovereignty and his determination to defend them.

He summoned up Poland’s resistance against two terrible tyrannies, Nazism and the Soviet Union, to make a broader point about western civilisation. Most strikingly, he identified Christianity as the core of that civilisation, that it was Christianity that was crucial in Poland’s stand against Soviet oppression – and that, in an echo of Pope Benedict’s warning years ago, the west has to reaffirm its Christian values in order to survive.

“And when the day came on June 2nd, 1979, and one million Poles gathered around Victory Square for their very first mass with their Polish Pope, that day, every communist in Warsaw must have known that their oppressive system would soon come crashing down. They must have known it at the exact moment during Pope John Paul II’s sermon when a million Polish men, women, and children suddenly raised their voices in a single prayer. A million Polish people did not ask for wealth. They did not ask for privilege. Instead, one million Poles sang three simple words: ‘We Want God.’

“In those words, the Polish people recalled the promise of a better future. They found new courage to face down their oppressors, and they found the words to declare that Poland would be Poland once again.

“As I stand here today before this incredible crowd, this faithful nation, we can still hear those voices that echo through history. Their message is as true today as ever. The people of Poland, the people of America, and the people of Europe still cry out “We want God.”

“Together, with Pope John Paul II, the Poles reasserted their identity as a nation devoted to God. And with that powerful declaration of who you are, you came to understand what to do and how to live. You stood in solidarity against oppression, against a lawless secret police, against a cruel and wicked system that impoverished your cities and your souls. And you won.”

“Our adversaries, however, are doomed because we will never forget who we are. And if we don’t forget who are, we just can’t be beaten. Americans will never forget. The nations of Europe will never forget. We are the fastest and the greatest community. There is nothing like our community of nations. The world has never known anything like our community of nations.”

“We write symphonies. We pursue innovation. We celebrate our ancient heroes, embrace our timeless traditions and customs, and always seek to explore and discover brand-new frontiers.

“We reward brilliance. We strive for excellence, and cherish inspiring works of art that honor God. We treasure the rule of law and protect the right to free speech and free expression.

“We empower women as pillars of our society and of our success. We put faith and family, not government and bureaucracy, at the center of our lives. And we debate everything. We challenge everything. We seek to know everything so that we can better know ourselves.

“And above all, we value the dignity of every human life, protect the rights of every person, and share the hope of every soul to live in freedom. That is who we are. Those are the priceless ties that bind us together as nations, as allies, and as a civilization.

“What we have, what we inherited from our — and you know this better than anybody, and you see it today with this incredible group of people — what we’ve inherited from our ancestors has never existed to this extent before. And if we fail to preserve it, it will never, ever exist again. So we cannot fail.”

But the danger is that we might do just that.

“We have to remember that our defense is not just a commitment of money, it is a commitment of will. Because as the Polish experience reminds us, the defense of the West ultimately rests not only on means but also on the will of its people to prevail and be successful and get what you have to have. The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive. Do we have the confidence in our values to defend them at any cost? Do we have enough respect for our citizens to protect our borders? Do we have the desire and the courage to preserve our civilization in the face of those who would subvert and destroy it?

“We can have the largest economies and the most lethal weapons anywhere on Earth, but if we do not have strong families and strong values, then we will be weak and we will not survive”.

President Trump’s speech in Warsaw was a remarkable statement from a western leader in the 21st century – which is why the enforcers of our public discourse have gone bananas over it and denounced it as “blood and soil” “nativism” (The New Republic), “racial and religious paranoia” (The Atlantic), and “tinpot dictator sh*t” (some comedian having a meltdown on Twitter). Much of the speech was just the usual boosterish boilerplate that one foreign leader sloughs off while visiting the capital of another. But that wasn’t what caused the mass pearl-clutching. This was the offending passage:

There is nothing like our community of nations. The world has never known anything like our community of nations.

We write symphonies. We pursue innovation. We celebrate our ancient heroes, embrace our timeless traditions and customs, and always seek to explore and discover brand-new frontiers.

We reward brilliance. We strive for excellence, and cherish inspiring works of art that honor God. We treasure the rule of law and protect the right to free speech and free expression.

We empower women as pillars of our society and of our success. We put faith and family, not government and bureaucracy, at the center of our lives. And we debate everything. We challenge everything. We seek to know everything so that we can better know ourselves.

And above all, we value the dignity of every human life, protect the rights of every person, and share the hope of every soul to live in freedom. That is who we are. Those are the priceless ties that bind us together as nations, as allies, and as a civilization.

I’m not certain we do put “faith and family” ahead of “government and bureaucracy”, not in Germany or even Ireland, but we did once upon a time. Nor am I sure we still “write symphonies”, or at any rate good ones. But Trump’s right: “The world has never known anything like our community of nations” – and great symphonies are a part of that. I’m not sure what’s “nativist” or “racial” about such a statement of the obvious, but I note it’s confirmed by the traffic, which is all one way: There are plenty of Somalis who’ve moved to Minnesota, but you can count on one hand Minnesotans who’ve moved to Somalia. As an old-school imperialist, I make exceptions for sundry places from Barbados to Singapore, which I regard as part of the community of the greater west, and for India, which is somewhat more ambiguously so, but let’s face it, 90 per cent of everything in the country that works derives from England.

But otherwise Trump’s statement that “the world has never known anything like our community of nations” ought to be unexceptional. It’s certainly more robust than Theresa May’s and David Cameron’s vague appeals to “our values” or “our way of life”, which can never quite be spelled out – shopping, telly, pop songs, a bit of Shakespeare if you have to mention a dead bloke, whatever… For his part, The Atlantic’s Peter Beinart preferred the way Trump’s predecessor expressed it:

To grasp how different that rhetoric was from Trump’s, look at how the last Republican President, George W. Bush, spoke when he visited Poland. In his first presidential visit, in 2001, Bush never referred to “the West.” He did tell Poles that “We share a civilization.” But in the next sentence he insisted that “Its values are universal.”

I wish that were true. It would be easier if it were. But it’s not. These values are not “universal”: They arise from a relatively narrow political and cultural tradition, and insofar as they took root elsewhere across the globe it was as part of (stand well back, Peter Beinart!) the west’s – gulp – “civilizing mission”. Alas, left to fend for themselves, those supposedly universal values have minimal purchase on millions upon millions of people around the planet – including those who live in the heart of the west. Bush’s bromide is easier to swallow because it’s a delusion – as we should surely know by now, after a decade and a half of encouraging Pushtun warlords to adopt Take Your Child Bride To Work Day. In contrast to Bush’s happy talk, Trump concluded his laundry list of western achievement on a sobering note:

What we have, what we inherited from our — and you know this better than anybody, and you see it today with this incredible group of people — what we’ve inherited from our ancestors has never existed to this extent before. And if we fail to preserve it, it will never, ever exist again. So we cannot fail.