RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272463/checking-sweden-bruce-bawer

I’ve told this one before. Back in 2005, Mona Sahlin, who from 2002 to 2004 had served as Sweden’s minister of integration, told an audience at a Swedish mosque that many native Swedes envied them, because, she said, immigrants have real cultures and histories while Swedes have only “silliness” such as the commemoration of Midsummer Night. Later that year, at a debate on integration policy, the Norwegian activist Hege Storhaug asked Lise Bergh, who had succeeded to the post of Swedish minister of integration, whether Swedish culture was worth preserving. Blithely, Bergh replied: “Well, what is Swedish culture? And by saying that, I think I’ve answered the question.”

Those two appalling comments reflect a mentality – one that is shared, unfortunately, by a great many Swedes – that goes a long way toward explaining the breathtakingly self-destructive policies that, over the last few decades, have sent Sweden barreling down the road toward cultural self-annihilation. Of course, other Western European countries are headed down the same road, but they aren’t moving quite so quickly and eagerly, and with such a fatuous, pathetic air of self-satisfaction, toward their grim fate. The difference lies entirely in that Swedish mentality. Even more than most other Western Europeans, Swedes, especially the self-consciously sophisticated urban elites, are possessed of a degree of self-abnegation that is nothing short of pathological.

Consider this. In the U.S., we have “Native Americans.” Canada has the “First Nations.” Australia has its “aborigines.” What all these peoples have in common is that they were there first. In Sweden, the native peoples, the ur-folk, are, needless to say, the Swedes themselves. There are ten million of them, and they’ve been there for millennia. But when establishment journalists and politicians in Sweden refer to their country’s “indigenous people,” they’re not talking about themselves. No, they’re talking about the 20,000 Sami (also known as Lapps or Laplanders) who live way up in the far northern reaches of Sweden, tending reindeer and wearing funny red outfits.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/01/free_speech_is_dead_in_canada_the_persecution_of_christian_activist_bill_whatcott.html

In the past year, I witnessed two frightening assaults on free speech by a kangaroo “justice” system. This wasn’t in some banana republic, North Korea, or China; it was in Canada. These were gut-wrenching experiences for me.

These stories from Canada are potent warnings to the U.S.

If Congress and more states pass anti-discrimination “equality” laws giving special protection to LGBTQ identities, “hate speech” prosecutions and compelled speech will surely follow.

There can be no doubt of that, given the LGBT-driven lawsuits we have already seen against florists, bakers, and wedding photographers. The Civil Rights Commission of Colorado has tried to compel speech from Jack Phillips of Masterpiece Cakeshop. We’re seeing numerous battles over bathroom use and forced use of silly pronouns in our media, colleges, and public schools. The EEOC already interprets Title VII (employment) to protect employees from “sexual orientation” discrimination.

So, we’re already on that totalitarian road; Canada is just farther along.

An Enemy of the Canadian State

The victim of Canada’s repressive “injustice” system is Bill Whatcott, a pro-family born-again Christian activist. He is about to have his life ruined by the courts in Canada (with fines, possible jail time, ruined employment prospects, social ostracism). But he will not bend to tyranny and is standing for free speech.

Whatcott’s two ongoing cases are discussed below.

December 2018: His “hate speech” hearing before the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal (with further court action pending). Hundreds of thousands in fines may be assessed.
2019: His ongoing $104-million lawsuit in Toronto for a “hate crime” (preceded by his June 2018 arrest on a national criminal warrant).

What terrible “hate crimes” did Whatcott commit? The Orwellian tyrants in Canada deem it criminal to speak the truth about transgender ideology and the health hazards of homosexuality. Furthermore, he speaks from the unwanted Christian viewpoint. Then he adds a dash of humor. And so he has become an Enemy of the State in Canada.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/guatemala-gives-the-u-n-the-boot-11547411965?cx_testId=16&cx_testVariant=cx&cx_artPos=0&cx_tag=collabctx&cx_navSource=newsReel#cxrecs_s

While President Trump has been tangling with Congress over security solutions along the U.S. southern border, the United Nations has provoked a political crisis in Guatemala. The U.S. is unlikely to make progress on the former without paying attention to the latter.

The U.N.’s Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala, or CICIG, began work in 2007 with a mandate to investigate illicit security forces and clandestine organizations and to support the Guatemalan attorney general in prosecuting organized crime. Yet in 11 years, CICIG has secured precious few successful prosecutions and none among high-level politicians.

Meanwhile it has undermined confidence in the Guatemalan justice system, and CICIG Commissioner Iván Velásquez has become a lightning rod for controversy. Last Monday Guatemalan President Jimmy Morales gave the commission 24 hours to leave the country. CICIG complied—for now.

According to people familiar with the matter, the Morales government had brought credible complaints to U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres about CICIG witness tampering, illegal negotiations with convicted criminals, and prolonged, illegal preventive detention as a form of psychological torture. It complained that a CICIG official publicly stated that the commission is above the Guatemalan Constitution.

Stéphane Dujarric, the U.N. secretary-general’s spokesman, told me by email on Thursday that the U.N. doesn’t believe CICIG is above the constitution. But he said “the management and running of the commission are the responsibility of the Commissioner. Questions relating to personnel should be addressed to the Commission itself.” In the U.N.’s eyes, Mr. Velásquez answers to no higher power.

Mr. Morales wanted Mr. Velásquez replaced. One person familiar with the matter told me that the secretary-general gave his word to Mr. Morales in September that within two weeks the U.N. would provide names of three candidates to take over the job.

According to Mr. Dujarric, the secretary-general “had proposed the appointment of a CICIG Deputy Commissioner. The President of Guatemala had expressed his agreement with such a plan, as had Commissioner Velásquez.”

The U.N. version of events may well be true. But by last week, Mr. Velásquez still had not been replaced. On Jan. 5, a CICIG employee who had been expelled by the Guatemalan government for security reasons forced his way back into the country. Two days later the foreign minister announced CICIG had to leave.

CICIG supporters claim the commission was close to exposing rampant corruption by Mr. Morales. But he has been in office since January 2016, and CICIG has launched only two formal investigations that might affect him. Neither involves a serious crime.

In the first case, the president’s brother and son were found to have made false invoices for 564 Christmas gift baskets sold to the National Property Registry Office in 2013. Multiple invoices seem to have been drafted at the request of the government office to hide the aggregate value of the purchase (roughly $30,000) because it would have triggered the need for a bidding process.

This is an administrative violation, hardly the heist of the century. Even so, CICIG locked up the president’s relatives for 35 days in January 2017. The case still hasn’t been resolved.

A second case concerns the hiring, by Morales backers, of poll watchers for his National Convergence Front party during the 2015 presidential election. The party didn’t record this “in kind” donation worth roughly $1 million.

This was probably also an administrative violation. Regardless, Congress has already said that there is insufficient evidence against Mr. Morales in the case to warrant the removal of his immunity. There is another alleged campaign-finance violation, but there has been no formal accusation. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://worldisraelnews.com/watch-venezuela-exposed-as-hotbed-for-hezbollah-terr

Venezuela is not only plagued by economic hardship and political strife, is has also been infiltrated major terror groups like Hezbollah, which use the unstable Latin American dictatorship as a staging ground for training and narcotics trafficking according to an exclusive interview granted by an underground fighter to the Israel media.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/paris-police-use-water-cannon-to-battle-growing-yellow-vest-protests/

Another weekend, another massive series of protests across France by demonstrators wearing yellow vests, as Paris police were forced to use tear gas and water cannons to keep demonstrators away from the Arc de Triomphe monument.

The government says the protests were larger than last week’s and hundreds of people were arrested.

Reuters:

Thousands of protesters in Paris marched noisily but mostly peacefully through the Grands Boulevards shopping area in northern Paris, close to where a massive gas explosion in a bakery killed two firefighters and a Spanish tourist and injured nearly 50 people early on Saturday.

But small groups of demonstrators broke away from the designated route and threw bottles and other projectiles at the police.

Around the 19th-century Arc de Triomphe at the top of the Champs Elysees boulevard, riot police fired water cannon and tear gas at militant protesters after being pelted with stones and paint, witnesses said.

Groups of protesters also gathered on and around the Champs Elysees, the scene of disturbances in recent weeks, many of them calling loudly for Macron to resign.

“Macron, we are going to tear down your place!” one banner read.

The Interior Ministry estimated that there were a maximum of about 84,000 demonstrators nationwide on Saturday – more than the 50,000 counted last week but well below the record 282,000 estimated on Nov. 17, the first day of the protests.

In Paris, the ministry counted 8,000 demonstrators, more than in the past two weekends, when authorities tallied just 3,500 people on Jan. 5 and only 800 on Dec. 29.

The government has been toughening its rhetoric against the demonstrators in recent weeks and has deployed 80,00 police to contain them.

Bourges authorities said nearly 5,000 yellow vests stuck to the designated demonstration area. The historical city center was off-limits for demonstrators, but some 500 protesters made their way to the center where they scuffled with police and set garbage bins on fire.

Many businesses in Bourges had boarded themselves up to avoid damage and authorities had removed street furniture and building site materials that could be used for barricades.

In Strasbourg, up to 2,000 demonstrators gathered in front of the European Parliament building and later marched to the center of the city on the Rhine river border with Germany. No serious violence or looting was reported there.

More than 80,000 police were on duty for the protests nationwide, including 5,000 in Paris.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13520/eu-censorship

Sadly, the main victims of many of the abuses that the European Commission seemingly wishes to silence are often Muslims, often women and children, and often too scared to speak out.

One of the foremost tools used by the EU is its “Code of conduct on countering illegal hate speech online,” including hate speech against Muslims. By signing up to the Code, the major technology and social media corporations have committed themselves to censoring the internet on behalf of the EU.

Apparently, it is no longer enough, as “each offense to a religion” is now “an offense to all”, that members of one religion are offended. Now, it seems, according to the OSCE, every European is supposed to be offended in solidarity with them, as well.

On December 3, the European Commission hosted a “high-level conference to address intolerance, hate speech and discrimination affecting Muslims in the EU”. According to the EU press release, “By sharing good practices, the aim of the event is to identify key actions at all levels to address intolerance, racism and discrimination against Muslims in the coming years”. The event brought together over 100 “representatives of national authorities, civil society, academia, the religious community, EU agencies and international organisations.”

There is, according to the European Commission, a “need for action”, as “unfavourable views of Muslims appear to have surged in the past few years”. The European Commission does not, of course, offer up the possibility that such unfavorable views might be due to the fact that an overwhelming majority of all terrorist attacks on European soil in recent years have been committed primarily by one group, among several other signs of transformation on the European continent. Examples include preaching jihad against “infidels” in mosques; the rise of rape, as well as rape grooming gangs — not exclusively, but overwhelmingly run by the same group in countries such as the UK, the Netherlands and now also apparently Finland; brutal misogynist practices such as female genital mutilation (FGM), honor killings, forced marriages and polygamy — in addition to an exponential rise in anti-Semitism, especially in France. Sadly, the main victims of many of the abuses that the European Commission seemingly wishes to silence are Muslims, often women and children, and often too scared to speak out (here, here and here).

http://thefederalist.com/2019/01/11/bolsonaros-election-indicates-brazil-can-anti-socialist-ally/

Brazil might not be perfect, but their recent elections provide a chance at political recalibration in Latin America. Washington shouldn’t miss such an opportunity.

Peter Beinart recently wrote a bizarre article in The Atlantic, which blamed the rise of right-wing populists across the world as a reaction to feminism and women’s rights. The central thesis of the essay is so patently absurd, it barely needs any refutation. It is the type of social science garbage you can find in any sociology or gender studies paper.

For example, Beinart cites Valerie Hudson of Texas A&M University with an insane claim bereft of any evidence stating that the history of humanity is men agreeing to be ruled by other men in return for all men ruling over women. This is, of course, politically, biologically, and historically absurd, as no such global understanding existed at any point of history. Humanity rarely evolved in a similar fashion all over the globe — otherwise there wouldn’t be Valerie Hudson teaching at a university, and Texas would have looked like Islamic State-controlled Raqqa, in Syria.

Beinart takes his argument to its logical extreme, cherry-picking quotes and tying it up with populist movements across the world, hinting that all populism is inherently misogynist. Beinart never seeks to explain why Germany’s right-wing AFD is currently ruled by Alice Weidel––a lesbian former Goldman Sachs banker––who has a Sinhalese partner and has rallied her country against mass Islamic immigration, or that the significant majority of supporters of Swedish, Danish, and Finnish right-wing parties are female, increasingly afraid of rising sexual assaults and street crimes. I could carry on, but for a terrific takedown, please read my colleague here.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2019/01/28/snowplow-politics/

Trump, Brexit, and the divides deepening between us

We have now had more than two clear years since the votes for Brexit and Trump. And although most Brexit voters dislike the tendency to link the events, the two are unavoidably intertwined.

A neutral way to interpret both surprise results was to describe them as “disruptions.” But very swiftly a range of carefully pejorative terms (“populist,” “reactive,” etc.) came to be deployed to suggest that these disruptions were not morally neutral. Soon a counter-narrative was adopted that went much further.

It was the identical nature of the pushback in both countries that was immediately striking. Shortly after the Brexit vote, the British public was inundated with media claims of “spikes” in racist incidents, “hate crimes,” and more. Whatever way people had voted, this was genuinely alarming. Had such beasts lain dormant that they had now been unleashed simply because more people ticked the box marked “Leave” than did “Remain”? Two months after the Brexit vote, a 40-year-old Polish man was murdered in Essex. The press and pro–European Union politicians pounced on it. The Guardian claimed that the killing “exposes the reality of post-referendum racism.” Even the conservative Telegraph asserted that the killing raised fears that “migrants are being targeted in post-Brexit hate-crimes.” The head of the EU Commission blamed the murder on “galloping populism.”

By the time that the man’s 16-year-old killer was convicted of his murder one year later, the story had fallen out of the news. Before the trial it had become clear that the killing was the result of nothing more than a pointless, late-night street row, awful, terrible, and with lessons of its own to impart. But the victim’s race had nothing to do with it. Neither did the British public’s decision to vote Leave.

Still, the narrative continued. The enthusiasm for the “outbreak of racism” line was such that whatever facts or counter-arguments emerged to the contrary, the “spike” in hate crimes was clung to as an article of faith. It vindicated the worst suspicions of Remainers and cowed many Leavers. That the police had been urging people to report “hate crimes” during this period (the police generally find it more restful to investigate online offense-taking than, say, deal with the upsurge in knife crime) was ignored. The narrative of “racist vote leads to upsurge in racism” was too useful to be dispensed with.

Precisely the same claim was pumped into the American system after the election of Donald Trump. A collection of offhand, occasionally off-color quotations were characterized as flagrant “dog whistles.” One joke about Mexicans — unwise though it was for a candidate — was declared to be a racist assault on all Mexicans. And once that link was made, it was the smallest of steps to pronounce the vote for Trump “racist” and some sort of green light for real racists. Politicians and pundits tied a spate of bomb threats made against Jewish community centers in the U.S. and abroad in January 2017 to the inauguration of President Trump.