RUTHFULLY YOURS

The new constitution “will emphasize Islam and faith in Allah.” — Abdulkadir Selvi, pro-government columnist.

“We are a Muslim country. That is why we need a religious constitution,” said Ismail Kahraman, Speaker of Turkey’s Parliament. He lamented that, unlike in other Middle Eastern countries, the word Allah did not appear in the current version of the Turkish Constitution even once.

“The chaos in the Middle East is the result of politics instrumentalizing religion.” — Kemal Kilicdaroglu, leader of the opposition Republican People’s Party.

“One cannot be secular and Muslim at the same time.” — Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

The Speaker of the Parliament is no ordinary office in Turkey. The speaker comes second in the state protocol only after the president (and even before the prime minister). Such is the seat occupied since November by Ismail Kahraman, an MP from the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Along with Erdogan, former president Abdullah Gul and eight AKP heavyweights (mostly cabinet ministers) Kahraman comes from the ranks of the National Turkish Student Union (MTTB in its Turkish acronym). Another MTTB bigwig, Huseyin Velioglu, later formed what became the militant Islamist group, “Turkish Hizbullah.” Especially between 1965 and 1980 when a military coup administration dissolved it, the MTTB operated as the youth organization of Turkish political Islam. Kahraman, in late 1960s and early 1970s, was MTTB’s president.

Once, the left was for the rights of women, minorities and free speech. Now, as we await the next Islamist massacre, its purpose is to weave rationalisations and sophistries into the whole cloth of a dissembling drapery tailored to obscure the obvious.
In the aftermath of every latest Islamist assault on civil society, mainstream news coverage and commentary invariably follows the same path. First, after the initial horror, there is a restriction on language: one may speak of Islam or of terror, but not in the same breath. Break this rule and expect to be charged with Islamophobia at best, rank and racist bigotry at worst. Next, the death toll of the incident is balanced against the many alleged depredations of the West which, of course, is said to be the cause of all terrorism in the first place. For intellectual support, voices crying “Perspective! Perspective!” drift down from the ivory tower. Weeks after 9/11, a Melbourne University academic was conceding that, yes, it had been a jolly nasty sort of day, but such a fuss! Smart people like herself understood that bad hamburgers kill more people than terrorists. Always, amid the moral relativism and equivalence, we are the real monsters.

To put it in a nutshell, the left’s response to terror is an aggressive denial borne of a civilizational self-hatred. In the so-called ‘quality press’, a category that most certainly includes our publicly funded ABC, such sentiments are artfully portrayed — take the ubiquitous Waleed Aly, for example, who reacted to the bomb slaughter at Boston’s marathon by dismissing it as “an irritation” and positing that it was, most likely, the work of white rednecks.

Further downmarket, we encounter publications such as New Matilda, a digital scrapbook often mistaken for a news source, whose principal merit, if I can lend the word a measure of charity, is in its headlines. Even in the current depths of its dying days, Fairfax’s subs would never have been so gauche as to headline Aly’s effort with a bluntly accurate, ‘Terrorism: nothing to worry about (except if white men did it)’. New Matilda, by contrast, prefers language to match in bluntness the imbecility of the article below. It is an editorial style that exalts in a telling precision. For example, Sam Oldham’s response to last year’s atrocity in Paris was bannered, The Awful Truth About France: The Citizens are Innocent Victims. The State is Not. Not much doubt about who had it coming. I also recall John Salisbury’s personal essay reflecting on his march from Sydney to Canberra in support of Palestinian rights. Now, however, he is sparing the shoe leather: Why I Won’t Walk to Protest Against Islamic State.

Now that you have some idea of New Matilda’s editorial and foreign policies, consider Michael Brull’s recent column, The Truth About Modern Jihad: It’s Not Really About Religion. It is nonsense, but that is New Matilda‘s stock in trade when it rises above the sleazy. This is the “news” site that rifled Barry Spurr’s private emails and splashed the stolen details of a private scholarship awarded to Tony Abbott’s daughter — all trumpeted in “the public interest”, it goes without saying. Not that association with sleaze is an obstacle to membership and influence within the New Establishment. New Matilda’s publisher and editor, Chris Graham, is an “industry nominee” on the Press Council.

You must have heard of the “the rich”, the people who pay nearly all income taxes flowing into government coffers and yet are pilloried for doing so. Never mind Labor and the Greens, the safe politics of shaking down the rich is thriving in Coalition ranks.
Budgets are getting terribly tedious. I think this because the scope for action is narrowing, as every initiative is loudly bagged these days by somebody or other. Joe Hockey took a walk on the wild side and that served him badly – which he deserved, to be fair — because he was monumentally inept.

“We all know what to do, but we don’t know how to get re-elected once we have done it.” So the Prime Minister of Luxemburg, Jean-Claude Juncker, recently said. But do politicians at large really know what to do? I don’t think they do.

Hockey was a poster child for political incompetence. Why do we think a bunch of self-promoters who are good at getting people to vote for them will be competent at running government? Sir Humphrey had it right: politicians can’t be trusted to run governments. What then is the answer? There isn’t one.

Imagine yourself as Treasurer and it is your first budget. You try to cut the deficit by screwing pensioners, denying young people unemployment pay, and charging poor people for doctors’ visits in order to underwrite gee-wiz medical research. You couldn’t write home about such ineptness. This is not an example of a politician knowing what to do and bearing the electoral pain. It is an example of a typically blundering politician who has not the least idea of what to do.

Budget deficits can only be reduced sustainably by cutting the growth in future expenditure below aspirational levels. Of course, even this can’t be done without incurring the wrath of special interests. But it possibly can be done without losing too many votes. Actually cutting expenditure is largely impossible; except for relatively minor amounts in insensitive areas.

Raising taxes doesn’t work because governments can’t resist spending the revenue. To them, an extra dollar of tax revenue is an extra dollar to splurge. That is why they are fond of trumpeting — incurable spendthrifts and debtors that they are — that additional spending has been fully funded; perish the thought that the funds might have been used to pay down debt.

ROME—Italy and Germany expressed their opposition to border-control measures within the European Union on Thursday, saying such restrictions may lead to the loss of the free movement that has helped turn the 28-country bloc into a success.

Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi and German Chancellor Angela Merkel at a joint press conference in Rome criticized an Austrian plan to construct a 250-meter (820-foot) long checkpoint at the Brenner Pass, which connects Italy and Austria.

Border-control measures could contravene the Schengen accord, which governs passport-free travel between member states.

“I am strongly against any closure” of the Brenner Pass, said Mrs. Merkel at the joint news conference, stressing that Europe needs to find common responses to migration issues. “We can’t abandon whoever defends our borders. We need to remain loyal to each other,” she added.

Thousands of migrants that have reached Italy use the Brenner Pass to head to countries such as Germany and Sweden, where welfare benefits are more generous. Some migrants also aim to settle in Austria and this has alarmed Vienna.

Free movement of people and goods could be put at stake as the EU faces its biggest migration challenge since the end of World War II, the German chancellor warned.

“We either defend our [EU] external borders or we will return to nationalism and lose our freedom of movement of businesses and people,” Mrs. Merkel said.

On Thursday, Mr. Renzi said that about 26,000 migrants had reached Italy via sea so far this year, about 1,000 more than in the same period in 2015.

The Italian premier reiterated Rome’s strong opposition to the Austrian border-control plans.

“We have expressed our clear disagreement with the Austrian positions on the Brenner Pass. They are wrong and anachronistic,” Mr. Renzi said. CONTINUE AT SITE