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Geert Wilders: If Britain Leaves the EU, the Netherlands Will Follow Suit-By Michael van der Galien

Posted By on May 31st, 2016

The European Union has had a bad couple of years. There were the major crises in southern European states, especially in Greece; support for the EU has eroded; and the Dutch voted against an EU treaty with Ukraine last month.

That’s bad enough for the federalists in Brussels, but it may get even worse in the month ahead. In June, British voters will decide whether their country remains in the EU or will cease to be a member state. Although most recent polls show the Remain camp in the lead, they realize they can’t afford to make any unforced errors. Besides, who knows which voters will actually show up? Anti-EU voters may be more passionate than those who wish to remain. If that’s the case, it could be closer on voting day than polls suggest.

This is why Eurosceptics from Britain and other EU countries haven’t given up hope just yet. In fact, Dutch populist Geert Wilders is already promising a similar exit referendum in the Netherlands:

Mr Wilders says that if Brexit happens, he will “immediately” propose a referendum on Dutch exit from the EU.

Sitting in front of a portrait of Winston Churchill, Britain’s wartime leader, in his office, he told the FT: “When after Brexit it turns out that the lights don’t go out and war doesn’t come, that could be an enormous stimulus not just for the Netherlands but for several countries to think of leaving.”

Like many other sceptics of the grand European project, Wilders looks at Switzerland as an example to be followed. Switzerland is a strong and prosperous European nation, but has always refused to become part of the EU. Unlike what Europhiles would like Brits to believe, that hasn’t hurt the Swiss in the least. In fact, it has enabled them to do business with whomever they want and on their terms, which is something EU member states can only dream of. CONTINUE AT SITE

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Excluded Middles By David Solway

Posted By on May 31st, 2016

Aristotle’s third law of thought, the law of the excluded middle, has enjoyed a long and to some degree controversial history. Briefly, it posits that a statement must be either true or false, excluding any middle ground, which on the face of it makes perfectly good sense. Extrapolating from the domain of logic to the social world, however, the excluded middle takes on a different and indeed opposite connotation, for its absence spells not propositional rigor but cultural disaster.

Consider, for example, the operation of the law in the realm of everyday economic activity. Much has been written about the withering of the middle class in our over-regulated, tax-unfriendly times. See, for example, Vahab Aghai’s America’s Shrinking Middle Class, where we learn that “between 2000 and 2012, the United States lost 10 percent of its middle class jobs.” Meanwhile, low income jobs have grown commensurably.

The fiscal policy of holding interest rates below the rate of inflation wipes out the value of middle class savings. The glut of government regulations garrotes economic initiative while indirect taxes eat up a substantial chunk of the scraps direct taxation has left. Modest businesses cannot compete with large corporations, state-controlled industries and intrusive government bodies, sending many small entrepreneurs onto the welfare rolls. Craftsmen and trades people depend on the black market to avoid the department of revenue and its crushing value-added cash grab. Start-up innovators find themselves snagged in the Byzantine warrens of the patent office. Ranchers and cattle breeders have been targeted by the EPA and BLM (and similar agencies in other countries), whose bureaucrats have run amok in invasive and confiscatory practices with tacit administrative approval. And the rot is spreading. The old adage that the rich and the poor will always be with us skips over the fact that the middle may not.

It is a precept of economic wisdom that when the middle class is put out of business, as it were, economic stagnation and social decay inevitably ensue, and national unity is beset by civil unrest, unsustainable levels of poverty and cultural decline. According to reputable historians, this was one of the major causes of the implosion of Imperial Rome in the fourth and fifth centuries. When the tax burden grew so onerous that remittances began to dry up, “taxes no longer flowed to the seven hills,” writes James O’Donnell in The Ruin of the Roman Empire, “nor did the food supplies sent in lieu of taxes.” The crushing weight of taxation destroyed the farming sector—essentially the middle class of the empire—which formed the backbone of Roman society, and the social apparatus gradually collapsed with it. Famine and revolt were principal factors in facilitating the onslaught of the barbarian hordes, which completed the debacle.

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The Violent Extremism that Dare Not Speak Its Name by Elliott Abrams

Posted By on May 31st, 2016

The Department of State and USAID have just issued a report entitled the “Joint Strategy on Countering Violent Extremism.”

There are some ideas in this “strategy” for what is now called CVE, but at bottom it is hopeless. If this is really the United States’s strategy, we are in even bigger trouble than we thought.

Here’s just one fact that will show you why: The word ‘Islam’ does not once appear in the US government’s CVE document. Neither does ‘Islamism’, ‘Islamist’, ‘radical-Islam’, ‘radical-Islamist’ or any other such formulation.

That phrase comes from the assessment of the Henry Jackson Society in London, an NGO named after the late Senator Henry M. Jackson (for whom I had the honor to work in the 1970s). Here is their full text:

The US government has released a new CVE (Countering Violent Extremism) strategy consisting of a 12-page document, with a foreword by Secretary of State John Kerry. Although the release has been little commented upon either in the US or the UK, both countries should take an urgent interest in the document.

Firstly because the whole framing of the strategy is an import from the UK. It was the UK government that first came up with the presentation of its counter-extremism strategy as ‘countering violent extremism’. Many UK government experts extolled the virtues of the British strategy to the US. In fact through this process Britain has exported some of our worst habits to America.

For the glaring problem with the strategy is that it lacks any apparent desire to deal with the problem, or even to identify it. The new strategy is a follow-on document from last year’s White House convened conference on the same subject. The resulting document, like the conference, is notable for its attempt to avoid pin-pointing the problem. For although there are multiple domestic and foreign security threats to the US as there are to the UK, there is no point in setting up strategies to counter them unless you are willing to say which ones you are talking about.

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Where are the journalists with courage?

Posted By on May 31st, 2016

In today’s environment, it’s easy for the coverage of the inquest into the Lindt Café terrorist attack to be lost in all the other ho-hum reporting of blown up airliners, massacred Syrian Christians and the odd mob that refuses to stand up for a judge after being arrested towing a tinnie to Indonesia.

In other words, in the time it’s taken for the last census to be filed in the national archives and the next one to come around, terrorism has been normalised across Australia and the world.

That’s not a bad effort in just five years.

Unfortunately, the evidence that continues to flow from the Lindt Café inquest shows just how unprepared our military, security and intelligence agencies are for this new version of normality.

Three days ago it was revealed that the lead negotiator at the Lindt Café had only received training in ‘Islam 101’.

This was a nice headline and a quick soundbite. Then this important issue disappeared off the news webpages to be replaced by stories about Johnny Depp.

I guess that also shows the media is entirely unprepared to play its supposedly important role holding the government to account and strengthening our democracy.

Helloooooo? Journalists? Where are you?

There’s a Walkley Award waiting here for someone with the courage to start asking the right people the right questions.

Like this: what exactly makes up the ‘Islam 101’ package presented to military, law enforcement and intelligence officers?

And this: who teaches ‘Islam 101’ to these officers?

Maybe this: do these officers ever get to study ‘Islam 201’?

Or this: are any of the instructors of the ‘Islam 101’ package not pro-Islamic?

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1948 Arab refugees: concocted circumstances and numbers Ambassador (Ret.) Yoram Ettinger

Posted By on May 31st, 2016

The truth about the circumstances and numbers of the 1948 Arab refugees has been sacrificed – by the UN, Arab regimes, the “elite” Western media and most Western Foreign Offices – on the altar of Arab-appeasement and Israel-bashing.

For instance, the Palestinian Arab leadership collaborated with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, seeking Nazi support to settle “the Jewish problem” in British Mandate Palestine in accordance with the practice used in Europe. Thus, the top Palestinian Arab leader, Haj Amin Al-Husseini, incited his people in a March 1, 1944 Arabic broadcast on the Nazi Berlin Radio – consistent with anti-Jewish Arab terrorism during the 1920s and 1930s – “Kill the Jews wherever you find them. It would please God, history and religion.”

On January 9, 2013, Mahmoud Abbas honored the Nazi collaborator: “We pledge to continue on the path of the martyrs [suicide bombers]…. We must remember the Grand Mufti of Palestine, Haj Amin Al-Husseini….” In 2016, Hitler’s Mein Kemp and the anti-Semitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion feature prominently in Mahmoud Abbas’ hate-education and incitement systems.

On October 11, 1947, Abdul Rahman Azzam Pasha, the first Secretary General of the Arab League told the Egyptian daily Akhbar al Yom: “…This will be a war of extermination and momentous massacre, which will be spoken of like the Tartar massacres, or the Crusaders’ wars…. Each fighter deems death on behalf of Palestine as the shortest road to paradise….The war will be an opportunity for vast plunder…. ” On August 2, 1948, the NY Times reported that the founder of the largest Islamic terror organization, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan al-Banna, instigated: “Drive the Jews into the sea… and never accept the Jewish State.”

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Qatar: The World’s Wealthiest Family-Run Gas Station by Burak Bekdil see note please

Posted By on May 31st, 2016

The cognoscenti pronounce Qatar, quite appropriately as “gutter.”….rsk

Many people describe Qatar’s treatment of expatriate laborers on World Cup sites as “modern day slavery.” Some 1,200 workers have already died and, according to warnings, up to 4,000 could perish before World Cup begins.

“The fact that thousands must die to build 12 fine stadiums for us has nothing to do with football,” said William Kvist of the Danish national team.

“We are committed to helping the destitute,” said Hamad bin Nasser al-Thani of Qatar’s royal family, who is chairman of the Doha-based Qatar Charity. How nice!

Why not promote “Islamic values” by taking in even just a few thousand Syrian refugees, instead of praising Turkey for taking in nearly three million Syrian Muslim refugees and praising it for promoting “Islamic values?”

The proud Gulf state of Qatar boasts human habitation dating back to 50,000 years ago. It may not be the only country across the world with such an impressive historical habitation story. But what makes it unique is its skillfully planned preservation tradition, particularly its persistent touch on medieval, not ancient, history.

Qatar is the world’s wealthiest country, or more of a family-run gas station. It boasts abiding by various aspects of the sharia (Islamic religious law), which, according to its constitution, it considers the main source of its legislation. In Qatar, flogging and stoning are legal forms of punishment. Apostasy (leaving Islam) is a crime punishable by the death penalty.

The Qataris, not knowing that their grandchildren would one day be the best strategic allies of their Ottoman colonialists’ grandchildren, fought the Ottomans to gain their independence in 1915, ending the 44-year-long Ottoman rule in the peninsula. Independence came at last, and lasted for about a year — until 1916, when Qatar became a British protectorate, retaining that status until 1971.

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Iran: Ayatollah Khamenei Plans Next Supreme Leader by Majid Rafizadeh

Posted By on May 31st, 2016

Since Khamenei took power in 1989, he has shown no deviation from Khomeini’s revolutionary ideologies. Opposing the United States, “the Great Satan,” and the rejection of Israel’s existence are two of the most critical pillars of Iran’s revolutionary ideals — what defines the raison d’être of the Iranian regime, as well as what shapes Khamenei’s ideological and foreign policy.

Other revolutionary core values that Khamenei desires the next supreme leader to hold include supporting Palestinian and Lebanese armed groups against Israel, maintaining Iran’s nuclear program, and being the supreme leader of the entire Islamic world — not only the leader of the Shiites. Khamenei’s official website refers to him as “the Supreme Leader of Muslims,” not the Supreme Leader of “Iran.”

Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in the past did not seem to wish to discuss topics linked to his successor — — the next Supreme Leader. Nevertheless, recently the trend has altered. Khamenei has begun dictating his policies, preferences, and priorities in what kind of Supreme Leader he would rather the Iranian regime have, and who, after his death, the Assembly of Experts ought to choose.

In a recent meeting, the 76-year-old Ayatollah Khamenei met with some members of the Assembly of Experts, and pointed out that “a supreme leader has to be a revolutionary” and he advised that members not to “be bashful” in selecting the next Supreme Leader.

Iran’s constitution yields the Supreme Leader the greatest authority in the country. The Supreme Leader is the single most crucial figure, the highest-ranking political and religious authority in Iran. He directly or indirectly controls the three branches of the government; the judiciary, the legislature and the executive branch.

But what does a “revolutionary” exactly mean to Khamenei? From Khamenei’s perspective, a revolutionary supreme leader would be someone who forcefully pursues the ideological principles of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic, and the core ideals of Iran’s 1979 Revolution.

Since Khamenei took power in 1989, he has shown no deviation from Khomeini’s revolutionary ideologies. Opposing the United States, “the Great Satan,” and the rejection of Israel’s existence are two of the most critical pillars of Iran’s revolutionary ideals — what defines the raison d’être of the Iranian regime, as well as what shapes Khamenei’s ideological and foreign policy.

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The Obama Narrative Goes to Hiroshima: Claudia Rosett

Posted By on May 31st, 2016

This past Friday, President Obama became the first sitting American president to visit Hiroshima. There, in that solemn setting, he delivered a speech so grandiose, so full of sophistries, so stuffed with America-denigrating baloney, that on those grounds alone it ought to qualify as historic — except in essence he’s said it all before. I don’t know if White House Boy Wonder Ben Rhodes wrote this particular riff on the The Narrative. But if he did not, we may safely assume that Obama has found another speechwriter who is a perfect replica.

No, Obama did not explicitly apologize for America’s dropping of the atomic bomb. Rather, he worked around to it by implication, stripping the act of almost all historical context, lumping together all civilizations and nations, and all wars — whatever the reasons — in one big stew, and urging, as his solution for the planet (imperfect America included), a “moral revolution” of which he evidently considers himself the prophet.

How humanity might achieve this moral revolution, Obama did not clarify. (I doubt that Moscow, Beijing, Tehran or Pyongyang were chastened by Obama’s urging that “we must reimagine our connection to one another as members of one human race.”). Neither did he mention that in the 71 years since America used atomic bombs to end World War II, it has never used them again, and with America standing as guardian of the free world, neither has anyone else — though with Obama’s shrinking of the American military, apology tours for America’s past, snubbing of America’s allies and favors to America’s enemies, the chances of nuclear war are again on the rise.

In his Hiroshima speech, Obama skipped right past such matters as why America entered and fought World War II, what it meant or why it made a difference who won. He made no mention of Pearl Harbor, or the agonizing decisions of his predecessors, or the blood and sacrifice of a generation of Americans who fought for freedom against Nazi fascism and for liberty against the onslaught of Japanese imperial conquest. He said nothing about the colossal benefits that an American-led victory delivered to the world.

Instead, Obama began his speech by conjuring a cosmos in which, out of a blue sky, the bomb dropped itself: CONTINUE AT SITE

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Hillary’s Crooked Defense In Clintonworld, anything that isn’t found criminal becomes permissible.By William McGurn

Posted By on May 31st, 2016

“I’m not a crook.”

In 1973 the sitting president, Richard Nixon, used these words at a news conference to deny allegations he had profited off his public service.

In 2016 an aspiring president, Hillary Clinton, as part of her campaign for the White House, is advancing an aggressive variant of the Nixon defense. It runs like this: Anything that isn’t criminal is permissible—and therefore none of it should be disqualifying for the Oval Office.

This has become the go-to argument for Team Clinton these days. Thus Maryland Democrat Rep. Elijah Cummings was quick out of the box last week when the State Department’s inspector general released a damning report finding that then-Secretary of State Clinton had defied the department’s rules by setting up her private email server. Mr. Cummings, ABC News said, pointed out that the inspector general’s report “does not accuse Clinton of any crime.” The implication is that it therefore doesn’t matter.

Chalk it up as one legacy of the first Clinton presidency, which has prepared the way for the second. Because by refusing to resign after being caught out in an affair with an intern, President Bill Clinton successfully lowered the bar for would-be President Hillary.

In his fight to remain in office, Mr. Clinton’s argument was that because sex between two consenting adults—even between the president of the United States and a subordinate 27 years his junior—wasn’t a crime, it was nobody’s business but his and his family’s. In this brave new world, even perjury turned out not to be a crime when Bill Clinton did it, because it was about sex.

Today the No Crime/No Foul defense defines the case for Mrs. Clinton. And she and her defenders have been invoking it for years:

“There were no criminal violations involved here.” The speaker was Clinton Budget Director Leon Panetta in July 1993, putting forward the White House party line on the firing of seven people in the travel office, in which some had detected Hillary’s hand. Three years later, an internal memo would surface confirming Mrs. Clinton as the force behind the sackings.

“As far as even a breath of criminal activity by either the president and the first lady, it will turn out to be nothing at all.” This time it was White House counsel Lloyd Cutler in March 1994, dismissing the inquiry into the smelly Whitewater land deal. The remark came at the same time Mrs. Clinton was explaining to the press that she hadn’t been forthcoming about the details because she had been trying to protect her family’s privacy. CONTINUE AT SITE

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Out-Clintoning the Clintons We’re all semioticians now, trying to decode the meaning of Donald Trump’s doublespeak. Bret Stephens see note please

Posted By on May 31st, 2016

Oh Puleez! The Clintons take the Olympic gold in chicanery, lying, and fraud…..you don’t have to like or vote for Trump…..but nothing beats Hillary for prevarication and poor judgement with respect to Israel (Max Blumenthal’s e-mails), trying to overthrow democracy in Honduras, resetting the button with Russia, Benghazi, blind spots on North Korea, and mum on global jihad….rsk
The other day I briefly caught sight of—who else?— Donald Trump, on—what else?—“The O’Reilly Factor,” talking about the Middle East. The presumptive Republican nominee was airing his opinion that we “should have never gone into Iraq, but when we got out we should have kept the oil.”

Kept the oil? Like, slipped it in our pocket on the way out?

This wasn’t the first time Mr. Trump has expounded on this theme, and frequent repetition has not made his views any more coherent. Mr. Trump says we ought to steer clear of the Middle East’s imbroglios—but then says we should seize its oil fields. He lambastes our allies as freeloaders and military nincompoops who throw down their arms at the first sign of danger—but then says he would expect these same allies to provide perimeter defense for the oil fields we’ve stolen from them.

Point out these contradictions to the candidate, and he’s likely to rejoin that you’re a loser who’s been wrong about everything and doesn’t understand the art of leadership. Point them out to his admirers and apologists, and they’ll say you’re missing the deeper point, which is that Mr. Trump is reflecting the anger of everyday Americans who want a pragmatist in the White House whose instinct is to put America first and negotiate the details later.

What you won’t get is a satisfactory response to the basic question: How, other than massively garrisoning the Middle East, does Mr. Trump propose to keep the oil?

There was a time when there was a price to be paid in American politics for evading questions. “What did the president know, and when did he know it?” Sen. Howard Baker famously asked in 1973 of Richard Nixon’s involvement in the Watergate scandal. The country never got a believable answer from the White House, and Nixon resigned the presidency the following year.CONTINUE AT SITE