RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/11/report_merkel_urged_romanias_president_not_to_move_embassy_to_jerusalem.html

Has Germany changed course on Israel under Angela Merkel toward active, if private, hostility? In an exclusive report that is not being denied by either government, Benjamin Weinthal of the Jerusalem Post writes:

German chancellor Angela Merkel called Romania’s President Klaus Iohannis in April, urging him to stop Bucharest’s declared announcement to move its diplomatic building to Israel’s capital.

A Western source told The Jerusalem Post that Merkel lobbied the Romanian president to put a halt on the relocation of its embassy to Jerusalem. It is believed that Merkel called other European politicians as part of a campaign to block the relocation of European embassies to Jerusalem.

Representatives of Romania, Germany, and Israel all do not deny, but rather refuse to comment on the report, generally a sign that it is true.

With its historical guilt over the Holocaust, and previously-expressed commitments to Israel’s security, this marks a strong, if covert, change of direction, assuming it is true. Merkel, of course, also admitted more than a million Muslim so-called refugees last year, predominantly military-age males, and it is not clear if this new group is adding anti-Israel weight to the German Chancellor’s calculus, through fear of unrest.

http://carolineglick.com/a-desperate-emmanuel-macron-attacks-donald-trump/

French President Emmanuel Macron has apparently decided that with his approval ratings in the toilet, his best bet for a political resurgence is to attack the United States.

This isn’t a bad move, for a French president. Hatred for America has been a powerful mobilizing force in France since shortly after the American army liberated the French from Nazi German occupation in 1944.

In his speech at the official ceremony marking a hundred years since the U.S. saved France from Germany and ended World War I, Macron took a direct swipe at President Donald Trump and his voters. Macron said that the “ancient demons” that caused World War I and millions of deaths are growing stronger.

“Patriotism is the exact opposite of nationalism. Nationalism is the betrayal of patriotism,” Macron pronounced, as Trump and other world leaders looked on.

He added, “In saying ‘Our interests first, whatever happens to the others,’ you erase the most precious thing a nation can have, that which makes it live, that which causes it to be great and that which is most important: Its moral values.”

Macron’s speech on Sunday was his second rhetorical assault against America in under a week. In a radio interview last Tuesday, Macron called for Europe to raise “a true European army,” to defend against the U.S., Russia and China.

In Macron’s words, “We have to protect ourselves with respect to China, Russia and even the United States of America.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/11/theresa-may-brexit-deal-negotiations-crisis/

After what seem like years of a phony war, British and European Union negotiators finally agreed on the terms of Britain’s departure from the EU earlier this week, and Theresa May announced it in the House of Commons. The deal covers more than 500 pages of legal and bureaucratic prose, and few but the negotiators have read it in full. But those who have say that it confirms the earlier leaks: After leaving, Britain will continue to be subject to EU rules and regulations more or less indefinitely but, as a non-EU-member state after March, the country will have no say or vote in designing them.

It doesn’t sound like a very attractive package, but May argues that this deal fully achieves the Brexit that the voters chose two years ago. It’s hard to square this claim with the “red lines” she vowed a year ago to never cross:

Red Line: Britain will leave the single market and its regulations.

Deal: Britain will sign on to a “common rulebook” of regulations that will in fact be the EU single-market rulebook.

Red Line: Britain will leave the Customs Union in order to sign free-trade deals with non-EU countries such as the U.S.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13312/pure-genocide

The majority of those 6,000 Christians massacred this year were “mostly children, women and the aged… What is happening in … Nigeria is pure genocide and must be stopped immediately.” — Christian Association of Nigeria.

“There is no doubt that the sole purpose of these attacks is aimed at ethnic cleansing, land grabbing and forceful ejection of the Christian natives from their ancestral land and heritage.” — Christian Association of Nigeria.

“Realistically speaking, Christianity is on the brink of extinction in Nigeria. The ascendancy of Sharia ideology in Nigeria rings the death toll for the Nigerian Church.” — Christian Association of Nigeria.

“Just one in 400 Syrian refugees given asylum in the UK last year were Christians despite them being subjected to ‘horrendous persecution.'” — Express, UK.

The Jihad on Nigerian Christians

In what the Christian Association of Nigeria called a “pure genocide,” 238 more Christians were killed and churches desecrated by Muslims throughout the month of June. This brings the death toll of Christians to more than 6,000 between January and June of 2018 alone. According to a joint statement by the Christian Association, an umbrella group of various Christian denominations, “There is no doubt that the sole purpose of these attacks is aimed at ethnic cleansing, land grabbing and forceful ejection of the Christian natives from their ancestral land and heritage.” In one of the attacks, “over 200 persons were brutally killed and our churches destroyed without any intervention from security agencies in spite of several distress calls made to them.”

The majority of those 6,000 Christians massacred this year were “mostly children, women and the aged… What is happening in … Nigeria is pure genocide and must be stopped immediately.” The details of the murder of these thousands, though seldom reported, are often grisly; many were either hacked to death or beheaded with machetes; others were burned alive (including inside locked churches or homes); and women are often sexually assaulted or raped before being slaughtered.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/terrorism-studies/

The murder and attempted murder in Bourke Street, Melbourne, last month by the Somali-born terrorist Hassan Khalif Shire Ali produced one positive outcome. It prompted Prime Minister Scott Morrison to break the mold of over-cautious political statements that has so far determined responses to acts of this kind. Morrison declared radical Islam a threat to the Australian way of life. “We would be kidding ourselves if we did not call out the fact that the greatest threat of religious extremism in this country is the radical and dangerous ideology of extremist Islam.” He called on Islamic religious leaders to use their unique position to prevent the radicalisation of youth, “to ensure that dangerous teachings and ideologies do not take root here.”

While Morrison’s comments appeared well-received in the wider electorate, Islamic religious leaders did not like the advice to take a more proactive stand against terrorists. Instead, they reacted as they have in the past. They not only rejected Morrison’s appeal but demanded an apology for his statement which, in their view, insulted the whole Muslim community. At the same time, they absolved the terrorist of any moral responsibility for his actions. The Forum on Australia’s Islamic Relations (FAIR) said:

The Muslim community will not be scapegoated and we will endeavour to keep Australia safe where we can, but the actions of a mentally ill person suffering from a psychotic episode, is not the fault of a whole religious community … We demand the withdrawal of his comments and an apology to the Muslim community.

An even more belligerent response came from Labor’s Anne Aly, the first Muslim woman elected the Australian Parliament. She mocked the idea that Islamic terrorism was a major threat to Australia and also absolved the Bourke Street terrorist of moral responsibility. “The biggest victims of violence in Australia aren’t victims of violent terrorism,” she said, “they are victims of domestic violence.” She said violence by jihadists “pales in comparison to the number of women who are being killed every week in domestic and partner violence.”

Some readers will recall this last statement reprises an argument made on the ABC’s Q&A program in May last year when Aly shared a platform with the American physicist Laurence Krauss. To downplay the threat of Islamic terrorism, Krauss claimed that in the United States “you’re more likely to be killed by a refrigerator falling on you”. Aly’s comparison of domestic violence with terrorism deploys the same kind of moral contortion.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13264/sweden-orphan-deportation

Self-proclaimed “humanitarian superpower” Sweden, with its pride in upholding “human rights,” decided to take a 6-year old boy, who lost his mother, away from his grandparents and deport him to an orphanage in Ukraine. Meanwhile, Sweden refuses to deport the worst criminals and terrorists if there is the tiniest perceived risk that they might be harmed in the country to which they would be sent.

In spite of sharp criticism from Sweden’s highest government agencies, the Swedish government defied Swedish law to allow 9,000 mainly undocumented Afghan men, whose asylum applications were rejected, to study in high school alongside Swedish adolescents.

As early as 2001, a news report by newspaper Dagen showed that Christian asylum seekers had their applications rejected in Sweden far more frequently than Muslim asylum seekers.

In October, Sweden, which apparently likes to see itself as a “humanitarian superpower,” decided to expel and deport a 6-year old boy to the Ukraine. The boy had been technically orphaned when his mother died and his father, who lives in the Ukraine, formally renounced custody of his child in a Ukrainian court. The boy, Denis, has no other relatives in the Ukraine and would therefore have to go straight to an orphanage.

In 2015, Denis’s mother brought him from the Ukraine to Sweden — where his mother’s parents were already living. She applied for a residence permit for herself and her son, but it was rejected, for reasons apparently still undisclosed. News outlets do not seem to have been digging into why her original request was rejected. The Swedish Migration Agency (Migrationsverket) decided to deport Denis, even though he is living with his maternal grandparents, who have applied to adopt the child.

Denis “has not given probable cause that he will not be suitably taken care of upon [his] return to Ukraine” wrote the migration authority in its decision. They also mystifyingly referred to the decision as being “in the child’s best interest”.

That the boy is technically an orphan and that his grandparents, with whom he lives in Sweden, have begun adoption proceedings, is not enough to stop the deportation, said Karin Fährlin, unit head at Migrationsverket.

“This is a matter of… a boy who is a Ukrainian citizen, and then it is primarily family, or the father, or Ukrainian authorities who must answer for this child. That’s the reason [for the deportation]”, she said.

The decision to deport Denis, after it became known to the public in Sweden, caused an enormous scandal. More than 60,000 Swedes signed a protest against the deportation on Facebook and several celebrities and politicians expressed their revulsion over the decision. “His mother just died. He has no father. He is six years old and cannot stay with his grandparents in Sweden but will be deported to a Ukrainian orphanage. This is inhuman and disgusting,” wrote one TV personality, Jessica Almenäs.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/11/16/the-menace-of-

“The enemies of Western civilization fear nationalism, and do their best to prop up soppy pathological altruists like Macron….”

There is an old joke that if you look up French military victories on Google, it says nothing can be found, and asks “Did you mean French military defeats?” Back when Google was an accurate search engine, the result would be imaginable. Given, however, that looking up “American inventors” on Google now produces a parade of nobodies apparently selected only on the basis of their skin color, one imagines Google probably has found a way to turn Hitler’s destruction of the Maginot Line into the French merely advancing in an alternative direction. Which is to say, the wrong direction.

That is as good a description of French President Emmanuel Macron’s recent speech at the World War I centennial, and of the tendency he exemplifies, as any I can think of in Western thought: advancing in the wrong direction.

The quote that everyone has seized on from Macron’s otherwise tedious and workmanlike speech has since been reproduced on Macron’s Twitter feed:

It is worth noting, as a matter of academic interest, that a literal translation of the original quote does not say that nationalism is merely a betrayal of patriotism: it says, instead, that “nationalisme en est la trahison,” i.e., “nationalism is treason.”

No doubt Bill Kristol will sue Macron for stealing his lines.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/11/17/the-bells

If I had one British pound for each time I was convinced of Prime Minister Theresa May’s end, I could purchase premium tickets to an Evening with Bill and Hillary Clinton. That abject cultural wreck dutifully has been cancelled. Though, the evening with Bill and Hillary stutters on.

Theresa May will go down as the most consequential prime minister in recent British history. For all the wrong reasons.

Yet, at the time of writing, May remains in office, not in power, as the once-ruthless Conservative party sharpens its pencils to the pitter-patter drip-feed of no-confidence letters. The slow death of Theresa May drips and drips and drips.

She is the Tinder date that just won’t leave. It was nice. Thanks for the Rioja. But I have work now. Please hail an Uber. I’ll pay.

But Theresa is in it for the wedding bells. After her Brexit secretary Dominic Raab resigned on Thursday morning, he was followed soon by another cabinet member, Esther McVey.

May didn’t take the brutal hint. Instead, just hours later, she told the nation she would resist any vote of confidence: “Am I going to see this through? Yes.”

This is despite arch-Euroskeptic Jacob Rees-Mogg, head of the influential European Research Group, handing in his own letter of no-confidence, and imploring his 80-plus lawmakers to do the same. So far, 20 Conservatives have publicly demanded she go.

Math doesn’t lie. May already relies on the minor Democratic Unionist Party to prop up her minority government. Without the ERG, her Brexit deal won’t get through parliament. May will be fortunate to get through the weekend.

Mogg’s letter to Sir Graham Brady, chairman of the 1922 Committee—a political murder squad—could force a leadership challenge, if the required 15 percent of the Parliamentary party—48 letters from lawmakers—hits the mat. A political death panel could convene next week.

Not only is she now opposed by most of her own party, but twice as many British people oppose her deal than support it. The Uber is beeping outside. Theresa just wants to chat. Theresa isn’t leaving.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/11/asia-bibi-blasphemy-laws-western-asylum/

Pakistan has released the purported blasphemer against Islam. Now what nation will have the courage to grant her asylum?

Asia Bibi, the Catholic mother imprisoned in Pakistan for nine years and condemned to hang for violating that country’s strict blasphemy law, has drawn broad sympathy throughout the West. Lacking credible evidence, and despite her denials, lower courts plainly yielded to Islamist pressure in making the illiterate field hand the first Pakistani woman to be given a death sentence for insulting Islam’s prophet, Mohammed. Then on October 31, Bibi finally received justice in an acquittal by Pakistan’s supreme court. But when she was released a week later, she found that mobs were baying for her blood throughout Pakistan — and, most surprisingly, that the West held out no firm offer of a safe haven.

Islamabad has given assurances that Bibi has been taken to a secret, secure location inside Pakistan, pending a permanent place of refuge. But her escape seems stalled. The West’s response so far of passive hand-wringing while Bibi faces mortal danger indicates more than poor planning; it shows a failure to fully comprehend the deeply radicalizing effects of the blasphemy taboo within the world’s second-largest Muslim nation — and the inroads it has made in the West.

Western leaders have consistently expressed concern for Bibi during her nearly decade-long ordeal. Human-rights advocates, such as the indefatigable Lord David Alton, who just last month met personally in Pakistan with the chief justice, have vigorously championed Bibi in the British parliament. Yet when the moment of truth arrived, London quickly decided it would not give her asylum owing to security concerns. The U.K. has its own radical Islamist leaders within its million-strong Pakistani community to worry about, including Anjem Choudary, paroled last month following a terror-law conviction. Lord Alton called the British decision “craven.”

In Paris, the city hall had an enlarged photo of Bibi by its front entrance when I last visited several years ago, and France has long been discussed as a place of asylum for her. But deadly Islamist attacks against Charlie Hebdo’s editors for blasphemy, and most recently against French Jews, make asylum there unthinkable. Last week Italy and Canada revealed their engagement in “sensitive” multilateral talks on Bibi’s case, but so far neither has offered an actual legal grant of asylum. Also last week, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau apologized for Canada’s turning away the MS St. Louis and its 907 desperate Jewish passengers seeking refuge from German Nazis 79 years ago. Hopefully, he will apply the St. Louis lesson to throw a lifeline to Bibi.

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/middle-east-watch/world-should-back-trumps-strategy-iran-36002

The JCPOA has not engendered a more moderate stance on the part of the Islamic regime, which has become more aggressive in the pursuit of its regional aspirations across the Middle East.

The round of sanctions slapped on Iran in early November—targeting the oil and energy sectors, banks and shipping companies—are the latest step in the pressure campaign that the Trump administration has been mounting on Iran since it came into office in early 2017, and with greater impetus since it left the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), known as the Iran nuclear deal, in May 2018.

The goal of the Trump administration is primarily to leverage the pressure of these sanctions to compel the Iranian regime to negotiate a much improved nuclear deal. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has noted that reimposing the sanctions that were lifted as part of the 2015 nuclear deal is also designed to ensure that the regime has fewer resources with which to continue to support terror and its other aggressive activities throughout the region, in line with its declared hegemonic aspirations.

Cutting off resources is a rather straightforward aim that has a good chance of achieving the desired result. With regard to the expected effectiveness of sanctions as a means of bringing Iran back to the table to renegotiate the nuclear deal, the situation is more complicated. It depends on the regime’s assessment as to whether it can withstand the pressure—at least until a new president is elected in 2020; one that might adopt a more favorable approach toward Iran—or whether it concludes that it cannot do so, and is compelled to make additional nuclear concessions in order to ease the pressure.