RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/boris-johnson-victory

All elections matter, but some matter more than others. Yesterday’s British general election will be remembered as one of the most consequential in decades. The immediate effects are beyond doubt. Boris Johnson’s 80-seat victory—the biggest Conservative win since Margaret Thatcher—means that Brexit will happen next month. Britain will leave the European Union by the end of January. The emphatic defeat for Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn—the worst defeat for the party since the 1930s—means that, for the foreseeable future, socialism in Britain remains something to be debated in the abstract, rather than tested on the country.

Finishing Brexit and finishing off Corbyn are huge achievements. But they are only part of a bigger shift. Last night, British politics didn’t just escape a three-and-a-half-year doom loop of squabbling over the 2016 referendum; it changed in fundamental ways. As the results trickled in, it soon became clear that the realignment many had forecast ahead of polling day was really happening, and on a remarkable scale. Voters in Brexit-supporting seats in the North and Midlands that have always returned a Labour MP to Parliament abandoned the party in droves. While the Conservatives demolished Labour’s red wall, it was a different story in London and the South East, where things trended in the other direction, even if the Conservatives held onto all but a few of the seats they were defending in and around the capital.

The upshot is that Britain’s two major parties now answer to very different sets of voters than before. The Conservative base has become more working-class, older, and whiter. The Labour Party’s constituency is getting wealthier, younger, more metropolitan, and more ethnically diverse.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/12/post-wwii-order-ending-and-nothing-has-replaced-it/

The post-WWII order is ending — and nothing has replaced it.

Economists at the World Bank and International Monetary Fund must feel pretty lucky these days. They work for just about the only institutions set up in the aftermath of World War II that aren’t in the middle of an identity crisis. From Turtle Bay to Brussels, from Washington to Vienna, the decay of the economic and security infrastructure of the postwar world has accelerated in recent weeks. The bad news: As the legacy of the 20th century recedes into the past, the only 21st-century alternatives are offered from an authoritarian surveillance state.

The pressure is both external and internal. Revisionist powers such as China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea undermine the foundations of global governance and hijack institutions to the detriment of the liberal international order. The institutions themselves lack the self-confidence necessary to further the cause of human freedom. Meanwhile, the most powerful nation in the world has turned inward. Its foreign policy is haphazard and improvisational, contradictory and equivocal. The confusion and zigzagging contribute to the erosion of legitimacy. It delays the emergence of new forms of international organization.

The breakdown was visible at last week’s NATO summit in London. Remarkably, the source of the immediate ruckus wasn’t President Trump. It was French president Emmanuel Macron, who doubled down on his criticism of the Atlantic alliance that he’d expressed in a recent interview with The Economist. Trump disagreed with Macron’s description of NATO as “brain dead.” He and other allies didn’t back Macron’s call for rapprochement with Russia and China and renewed focus on terrorism.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15248/sweden-confronting-reality

One problem is that the Swedish state itself contributes indirectly to the spread of extremism. The Swedish Security Service (Säpo) has found that a “relatively large” number of organizations with links to violent extremism have been using Sweden’s state and municipal grant systems, which Säpo says could “contribute to radicalization and thus growth in extremist environments in Sweden.”

According to Säpo, individuals from Islamist groups are using public-funded schools, cultural associations and foundations as platforms to spread extremist ideology within Sweden.

“Of course, the segregation, exclusion and long-standing uncontrolled immigration that is now driving serious crime did not suddenly arise. Responsibility for years of ill-conceived policies — and the inability to address the problems — is shared by many…. [I]t is quite clear that gang criminality, shootings and executions are strongly linked to excessive immigration and to bad integration. How can you even pretend anything else?” — Ulf Kristersson, leader of the Moderate Party, Facebook, November 17, 2019

The question now is how the Moderate Party will transform Kristersson’s apology into “concrete political action” that can stop Swedish reality from deteriorating even further.

Back in February and March 2017 BBC News ran a number of articles about Trump’s much vilified remarks about Sweden, including one with the headline, “Trump’s wrong, it’s ‘quiet and safe’ in Malmo.” One article in particular, “All eyes on Malmo but not because of Trump” painted an idyllic picture of the lives of expats in Malmö. It spoke, among others, about a young American woman working in Malmö, Susanna Lewis, in the following way:

“As a woman, she is also used to being prepared and watchful as she walks alone in other places, yet she does not feel afraid in Malmö city centre or its outer suburbs”.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15268/iran-plan-gaza-ceasefire

The protesters are saying, in other words, that the Iranian people are fed up watching their country deliver hundreds of millions of dollars to Palestinian and Lebanese terrorist groups instead of improving the economic situation in Iran.

Iran is apparently determined to pursue its goal of exporting its “Islamic Revolution” to as many Arab countries as possible, including the Palestinian arena. Another Iranian goal: the elimination of Israel.

This is how Iran’s leaders see the situation: “We are not sending these groups and militias cash and guns so that they can strike ceasefire deals.”

That is why it is safe to assume that even if the Egyptians manage to secure any kind of a ceasefire between the Palestinian groups and Israel, the leaders of Tehran will do their utmost to obstruct such an agreement.

Iran seems concerned that its Palestinian allies in the Gaza Strip may reach a long-term ceasefire with Israel. That is probably why Iran summoned leaders of Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) to Tehran after reports in the Arab media suggested that the Egyptians have made significant progress in their efforts to achieve a long-term ceasefire between the Gaza-based Palestinian factions, including Hamas and PIJ.

According to the reports, the leaders of Hamas and PIJ who visited Cairo agreed to a long-term ceasefire with Israel. Both groups reportedly told the Egyptians that they would commit to the proposed ceasefire only if Israel halts targeted killings of Hamas and PIJ operatives.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/12/germany-vs-muslim-criminal-clans-stephen-brown/

It’s a story for which police have no solution.

Since the beginning of the year until last October there have been 237 police actions against mostly Muslim Arab and Kurdish criminal clans in Berlin alone. In the last one, 400 federal policemen searched clan members’ residences and business premises.

Clan criminality involves itself in Shisha-Bars, gambling offices and amusement arcades. But their more illegal activities concern protection money, bodily injury, extortion, drug dealing, money-laundering, control of the red-light scene, making false documents, murder and contract murders.

A senior state prosecutor stated that there are 20 to 25 clans in Berlin of whom seven to eight are criminal. All areas of Berlin are affected as well as all German states. Each clan also has hundreds of members with most living from welfare.

“Their male members play a considerable roll in drug dealing and red-light criminality,” stated a state prosecutor. “However, there are also family members who are quiet that support the criminal structure.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2019/12/11/security-establishment-will-terrified-prospect-prime-minister/

PM Corbyn would be a ‘useful idiot’ to the enemies of Britain

Boris Johnson and the Tories are not the only ones who will be having sleepless nights about the prospect of Jeremy Corbyn entering Downing Street. The possibility that Mr Corbyn, aided and abetted by the Liberal Democrats and Scottish Nationalists, could end up becoming Britain’s next prime minister will be viewed with deep concern by the various agencies responsible for safeguarding our national security.

Numerous warnings have been issued about Mr Corbyn’s profound unsuitability for assuming responsibility for the defence of the realm, from his well-documented history of associating with avowed enemies of the state, like the IRA and Iran, to the prospect of  Britain being excluded from the exclusive Five Eyes intelligence-sharing network in the event of the Labour leader becoming prime minister.

Sir Richard Dearlove, the former head of MI6, has gone so far as to denounce Mr Corbyn as being a threat to national security, as well as being totally unfit to lead the country. Now we discover senior members of Mr Corbyn’s own Labour front bench privately entertain serious misgivings about the national security implications of him becoming prime minister, after Shadow Health Minister Jonathan Ashworth was secretly recorded giving a less-than-flattering depiction of his leader.

Asked by a friend about the risk Mr Corbyn posed, Mr Ashworth, who has personal experience of working at No 10, conceded that the Whitehall machine “will pretty quickly move to safeguard security”.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15246/turkey-murder-of-women

The cause of 50% of the killings was not determined, but 16% of the women were killed because they wanted to make decisions about their lives, such as wanting a divorce, rejecting offers of reconciliation or even for not answering the phone when called by their men. 13% of the women were killed for “economic reasons.”

According to the Turkish women’s-rights platform, “We Will Stop Femicide,” 652 women were killed by men in the year-and-a-half period prior to November 2018 — 36 of whom were murdered in October of that year.

“One of the reasons why such a large number of women fall victim to violence is the reluctance and even prevention of relevant institutions to implement current laws.” — The Central Women’s Committee of Turkey’s Human Rights Association (HRA), “Violence against women is a result of discriminatory policies,” August 26, 2019.

“There was no finger left unbroken, no women left unbeaten for the last two seasons of a show aired on a pro-government TV channel…” — İlhan Taşcı, Republican People’s Party deputy and Radio and Television Supreme Council Member.

“In our religion, the life, dignity and rights of women are untouchable and entrusted [to men].” — Ali Erbaş, President of Diyanet, Turkey’s Directorate of Religious Affairs.

On November 25, the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, thousands of Turkish women took part in demonstrations at Istanbul’s Taksim Square. The women were protesting the increasing number of murders in the country committed by men against female family members. After reading a statement to the press, the demonstrators were attacked by police with tear gas and plastic bullets.

The murder of women by male relatives — particularly spouses or former spouses — has become a dangerous trend in Turkey. The brutal murder, on August 18, of 38-year-old Emine Bulut by her ex-husband — in front of their 10-year-old daughter — is one particularly noteworthy case.

Bulut was stabbed multiple times in the neck at a café in the city of Kirikkale, where she had gone to meet the man from whom she had been divorced for several years. In a video of the attack, which went viral on social media, Bulut is seen covered in blood, shouting, “I don’t want to die,” as her terrified child screams along with her.

In response to the attack, women across Turkey held demonstrations to condemn the killing and called on the government to guarantee their protection.