RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/lessons-from-the-tory-landslide-11576540523?mod=opinion_lead_pos9

Last week’s U.K. general election revealed two political dynamics that the rest of the world should study closely.

The first is very old: Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.  Jeremy Corbyn and the tightly knit clique of pro-Hezbollah, pro-Maduro doctrinaire Marxists and viscerally anti-Semitic conspiracy fans clustered around him mistakenly thought the British working class was hungry for revolutionary social change. They have received their just reward.

The second dynamic, which helped propel Boris Johnson to the greatest Tory majority since Margaret Thatcher’s 1987 landslide, will haunt his premiership and determine its outcome. More than a personal triumph for a man whose political career last year appeared over, more than a historic recasting of the British electoral map, more than the ignominious collapse of the Liberal Democrats, more than the triumph of Scottish nationalism, the election result demonstrates the power of the most disruptive force in global politics today.

Mr. Corbyn misdiagnosed that force as a rejection of capitalism. It’s more subtle. Voters around the world want the prosperity and opportunity that global capitalism provides, but many fear and reject the social consequences of the free market. Large-scale immigration, job losses to automation and foreign competition, the unequal distribution of capitalism’s rewards, and the financial instability and risk associated with innovation are all massively disruptive and inspire backlash—a global surge of populism and identity politics. From Hungary and Turkey to India and beyond, voters are embracing politicians who attack classic liberal political and economic values and vow to defend the cultures and communities this avalanche of change seems to threaten.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2019/12/15/ninety-peers-call-baroness-tonge-issue-unqualified-apology-blaming/

Nearly 90 peers from the main political parties are calling for Baroness Tonge to apologise for claiming that the Tories won the general election due to Israeli attacks on Jeremy Corbyn. 

The letter, from an “unprecedented” number of former cabinet ministers, senior lawyers and leaders of industry and commerce, calls on Lady Tonge to apologise for bringing the House of Lords into disrepute over the remarks.

Lady Tonge, a former Liberal Democrat MP, wrote on social media after the result last week: “The Chief Rabbi must be dancing in the street. The pro-Israel lobby won our General Election by lying about Jeremy Corbyn.”

But in a letter to Monday’s Daily Telegraph, 88 peers from across the House of Lords said: “We the undersigned believe that members of the House of Lords are required to conform to the highest standards of Public Life. 

“The use of language by Baroness Tonge in a published statement that the General Election outcome was a result of ‘the pro-Israeli lobby’ [and] ‘lying about Jeremy Corbyn’ falls well short of that high standard.”They added: “Her language is both shameful and in clear contravention of the United Kingdom’s adoption of IHRA’s definition of Antisemitism.”Baroness Tonge has brought Parliament into disrepute and we demand that she withdraws her remarks and issues a full and unqualified apology without delay.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/trumps-america-first-trade-vision-comes-into-focus-on-three-fronts-11576436055

President Trump claimed a multi-front victory last week in his bid to reshape U.S. trade policy, extracting fresh commercial concessions from Mexico and China while stripping the World Trade Organization of its powers to restrain the tactics he used to secure them.

Combined, the efforts show an approach toward U.S. trading partners and multinationals that is focused more on pressuring companies to produce domestically and sell American-made goods abroad than on helping them expand their global manufacturing footprint.

On Tuesday, the White House announced the rewrite of the country’s largest trade deal, the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement, winning approval not only from the compact’s Mexican and Canadian partners but from longtime Nafta opponents among congressional Democrats and organized labor. On Friday, the administration brokered a truce with Beijing in its year-and-a-half-long trade war, putting further tariffs on hold and securing an unusual Chinese pledge to boost imports of U.S. goods by a specified dollar amount while trade talks between the two sides continue.

In between those two announcements, the U.S. on Wednesday effectively crippled the Geneva-based WTO trade court that was launched in 1995 to prevent the kinds of trade tactics Mr. Trump has deployed to coerce America’s trading partners to the bargaining table. Over the past two years, the administration has blocked the appointment of judges to the court and, after two remaining members’ terms expired, the panel as of last week no longer had enough members to issue decisions and enforce WTO rules. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15289/austria-bds-antisemitism

The initiative is being spearheaded by Sebastian Kurz, a former (and most likely the next) chancellor of Austria who also leads the center-right Austrian People’s Party (Österreichische Volkspartei, ÖVP).

“For Austria, Israel’s right to exist is non-negotiable, and any form of anti-Semitism, including Israel-related anti-Semitism, is unacceptable and must be severely condemned. Of course, factual criticism of individual measures by the government of Israel must be allowed.” — Austrian Parliamentary Resolution condemning the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement as anti-Semitic.

“This [BDS] movement calls for a boycott of… Israeli artists, scientists and athletes. It demonizes and measures Israel by double standards, makes Austrian Jews jointly responsible for Israeli politics, and by calling for the right of return for Palestinian refugees and all their descendants, it questions the right of existence of the Jewish state.” — Austrian Parliamentary Resolution condemning the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement as anti-Semitic.

The BDS campaign “undermines the possibility for a negotiated solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by demanding concessions of one party alone and encouraging the Palestinians to reject negotiations in favor of international pressure.” — U.S. House of Representatives Resolution 246.

All of the major parties represented in the Austrian Parliament have agreed to support a resolution condemning the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement as anti-Semitic.

The measure calls on Austria’s federal government to fight anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, and to withhold any form of financial and other state support from anti-Semitic organizations and advocates of BDS principles.

The resolution will be submitted to the lower house of Parliament, the National Council, in January 2020. It is expected to be passed with an overwhelming majority. While anti-BDS laws have been passed in Vienna and Graz, the largest and second-largest cities in Austria, this would be the first time that such a measure is enacted at the federal level.

On December 11, legislators from all five major parties — including the left-leaning Greens and the right-leaning Freedom Party (Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs, FPÖ) — formally agreed to co-sponsor the resolution, which is being spearheaded by Sebastian Kurz, a former (and most likely the next) chancellor of Austria who also leads the center-right Austrian People’s Party (Österreichische Volkspartei, ÖVP). The resolution states:

“Anti-Semitism has existed since antiquity, although the term itself was not used until the 19th century. The core, however, was always the same: it was — and is — the fomenting of prejudices and hatred in word and deed against Jews. Throughout history they have been victims of violence and exclusion, which reached a devastating climax in the murderous cruelty of National Socialism and the declared goal of the systematic destruction of Jewry by the Nazi regime.

“In total, more than six million Jews, many of them children, fell victim to the Shoah. They were murdered in the extermination camps by poison gas or otherwise. But even this unimaginably cruel genocide and the memory of it has not caused many people to rethink, and so Jews, even in the present, are exposed, once again, to hate and prejudices, which in the worst cases culminate in violence.