RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/nigerias-democracy-survives-11551400619

The question never asked: Are African nations that were British colonies better off since decolonization? How many years of tribal wars, corruption and chaos did it take for Nigeria to achieve this fragile state?…..rsk

There’s enough going wrong in Africa that it’s easy to miss the positive developments. Nigeria’s presidential election on Saturday is one of them, even if it was imperfect.

Voters decisively re-elected President Muhammadu Buhari with 56% of the vote, according to the country’s electoral commission. Former Vice President Atiku Abubakar took home 41%. Mr. Abubakar, perhaps taking advantage of pre-election confusion, says he doesn’t accept the result. But this doesn’t square with the reality on the ground.

In 2015 Mr. Buhari became the first democratically elected Nigerian leader to take office in a peaceful transfer of power. But the former military dictator—he briefly ruled the country in the 1980s—seemed to be returning to his old ways. He suspended the Nigerian supreme court’s chief justice in January, and for years critics have complained that his anticorruption drive focuses on political opponents. After the election was delayed a week, it seemed Mr. Buhari might be seriously backsliding on Nigeria’s democratic progress.

Independent observers reported some irregularities and violence around the election, but both sides earned criticism. Critically, the shenanigans weren’t widespread enough to tip the result. The country has a long way to go from being a perfect democracy, but it still held an election in which the majority’s candidate won.

Success in Nigeria matters beyond its borders. With some 200 million people, it is easily Africa’s biggest democracy. Dashed hopes for democratic progress in Zimbabwe and the Democratic Republic of Congo were disappointing but all too typical. Serious regression in Nigeria would have been a disaster for democrats across the continent.

Neither choice in Saturday’s contest was inspiring, and Mr. Buhari’s statist economic policies hold back the oil-rich nation. The country could have benefited from the more market-oriented approach offered by Mr. Abubakar, who promised to privatize the state oil company, despite his baggage after decades in politics. But the Nigerian people made their decision, and it’s welcome news that they could control their own political destiny.

Participating in Nigeria’s democracy isn’t always easy. Voters often travel great distances and wait patiently in the sun for a chance to pull the lever. Even with turnout down, millions of Nigerians deserve credit for not losing faith in the process. Now the burden is on Mr. Buhari to live up to their expectations.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/poland-judaism-and-historical-memory-11551397831

Call it the pangs of intimacy. As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu cultivates relationships with Central European heads of state, he has had some uncomfortable moments. A recent spat shows how quarrels over Judaism’s history in the region can complicate cooperation.

During a foreign-policy conference in Warsaw two weeks ago, an Israeli reporter asked Mr. Netanyahu to comment on the controversial “Polish death camps” bill. Signed into law in February 2018, the legislation made it a crime to claim “contrary to the facts” that the Polish nation was “responsible or co-responsible” for crimes committed by the Third Reich during its occupation of Poland. After critics objected in Israel and around the world, Warsaw downgraded the crime to a civil offense.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/political-scandal-worsens-for-canadas-justin-trudeau-11551312209

OTTAWA—A political firestorm surrounding Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau became more damaging Wednesday, as his ex-justice minister accused his top aides of repeatedly pressuring her to drop the prosecution of a global engineering and construction firm.

The testimony delivered by Jody Wilson-Raybould to a parliamentary committee offered the most detailed version yet of events fueling a scandal that risks upending Mr. Trudeau’s re-election effort later this year. She said that between September and December, she and her staff had roughly 10 phone calls and 10 meetings about the matter involving SNC-Lavalin Group Inc. with Mr. Trudeau’s senior aides and other government officials, including staff from the finance minister’s office.

“I experienced a consistent and sustained effort by many people within the government to seek to politically interfere in the exercise of prosecutorial discretion,” Ms. Wilson-Raybould said.

The former justice minister recounted how senior government officials, mostly from Mr. Trudeau’s office, attempted to persuade her to order prosecutors to cut a plea deal with SNC-Lavalin, which is based in the politically important province of Quebec. A plea deal would have allowed SNC-Lavalin to avoid a decadelong ban on bidding on government contracts in Canada and elsewhere.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273004/ocasio-cortez-trumps-wall-berlin-wall-humberto-fontova

“I think it’s [Trump’s proposed border wall] a moral abomination… I think it’s like the Berlin Wall. I think it’s like any other wall designed to separate human beings and block out people who are running away from the humanitarian disasters. I just think it’s wrong.” — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, February 20, 2019.

Could the irony be any richer? Could AOC’s “powers of reasoning” be showcased any more starkly? To wit:

The Berlin Wall (which even die-hard leftists like AOC seem to recognize as a “moral abomination”) was designed to keep desperate suffering people from escaping en masse from what Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders prescribe to make people happy.

Trump’s proposed border wall is designed to keep people who would elect people like Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders to afflict us with their socio-economic prescriptions from becoming future U.S. voters.

Given the above, can you imagine a worthier project than the border wall?

And speaking of people (literally) dying to flee socialism, did many of my amigos realize that OVER TEN TIMES as many people (and counting) have died attempting to flee Communist Cuba (which liberals routinely praise) than died trying to flee Communist East Germany (which even liberals recognize as a horrible place, despite it’s “free healthcare and education”)?

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13802/germany-stabbings-knife-crimes

Police reported more than 4,100 knife-related crimes in 2018, compared to around 3,800 reported during 2017 — and only 400 in 2008. Overall, during the past ten years, knife-related crimes in Germany have increased by more than 900% — from one a day to more than ten a day.

German media do not report most knife-related violence. Crimes that are reported are often dismissed as “isolated incidents” that are unrelated to mass immigration. Moreover, many crime reports, including those in police blotters, omit references to the nationalities of the perpetrators and victims — apparently to avoid inflaming anti-immigration sentiments…. Many Germans have the sense that danger lurks everywhere, but the lack of official statistics seemingly allows German authorities to pretend that the problem is imaginary.

Germany’s knife-crime epidemic has continued nonstop into 2019. During the first 45 days of 2019, police reported more than 500 knife crimes — an average of 11 a day.

Mourtala Madou, a 33-year-old illegal immigrant from Niger, has been sentenced to life in prison for stabbing to death his 34-year-old German ex-girlfriend and decapitating their 21-month-old daughter at a subway station in Hamburg.

The grisly crime has drawn renewed attention to Germany’s spiraling epidemic of stabbings and knife violence, which has raged since Chancellor Angela Merkel allowed into the country more than a million mostly male migrants from Africa, Asia and the Middle East.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-price-of-failure-in-venezuela/

Nicolás Maduro and Juan Guaidó are engaged in a struggle for the future of Venezuela. Their rivalry is not merely personal. It also has an ideological dimension. Maduro, heir to socialist authoritarian Hugo Chávez, draws strength and support from the world’s autocracies, including Cuba, Russia, China, and Iran. Meanwhile, the United States and some 50 other countries recognize Guaidó, a 35-year-old democrat, as the legitimate president. The duel between these various international antagonists serves as a reminder that the outcome in Venezuela will have consequences beyond that impoverished country’s borders.

Maduro has lost support across the globe, in the streets, and among some members of his regime, who transfer money and even family out of the country. He maintains a monopoly of deadly force through his control of the security forces, including the paramilitary colectivos, and through the help of his sinister allies, who assist him in controlling the flow of information into and out of Venezuela. Dislodging him requires the persistent threat of force combined with diplomatic isolation and economic constriction. That is what the Trump administration has sought to achieve in the five weeks since it recognized Guaidó.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13800/turkey-missing-priests

“Prior to the kidnapping, the bishops were on their way to Aleppo to secure the release of two other abducted priests…. When Paolo Dall’Oglio, an Italian Jesuit priest, went to Raqqa to secure their release, he too was kidnapped, and is still missing. I believe he was murdered.” — Erkan Metin, an Istanbul-based Assyrian human-rights lawyer.

Metin noted that the Assyrian and other Christian peoples indigenous to the region are still awaiting justice for the kidnapped priests and other Christian victims of persecution in Syria.

“Unlike Turkey, which has failed to investigate the crimes committed against the clergymen, there is an ongoing investigation in the U.S. on their kidnappings and another is being conducted by Russia… and the U.N. is investigating the financing of terrorism in Syria.” — Erkan Metin, an Istanbul-based Assyrian human-rights lawyer.

It has been six years since two archbishops and other members of the Christian clergy went missing in Syria; their whereabouts still are unknown. Yohanna Ibrahim, head of the Syriac Orthodox Church of Aleppo, and Boulos Yazigi, head of the Greek Orthodox Church, also in Aleppo, were abducted from their car in 2013. Their driver was later found killed.