RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-palestinians-worst-enemy-is-their-own-leaders-1540936966

There’s a rule of thumb for journalists reporting on the Palestinians: If it can’t be blamed on Israel, it isn’t news. But some rules demand to be broken.

After a two-year investigation and nearly 100 interviews with detainees, Human Rights Watch released a report last week documenting the Palestinian leadership’s gross violation of its people’s human rights. Both Hamas, which rules Gaza, and the Palestinian Authority, which governs in the West Bank, are implicated. The two groups conduct arbitrary arrests for offenses as ludicrous as critical Facebook posts and regularly torture detainees.

Titled “Two Authorities, One Way, Zero Dissent,” the report details cases of horrific violence and repression. Hamas kept Fouad Jarada, a journalist accused of “harming revolutionary unity,” in a notorious room called “the bus” for a month, forcing him to stand blindfolded on a small child’s chair days at a time and whipping him with a cable. In the West Bank, detainees tell of being punched, kicked, beaten with batons, slammed against walls, and electrically shocked until they confess.

Both Palestinian organizations said they reject torture and consider the incidents Human Rights Watch compiled to be “isolated cases that are investigated when brought to the attention of authorities, who hold perpetrators to account.” But Human Rights Watch couldn’t find a single official in either jurisdiction convicted of mistreating detainees or making arbitrary arrests.

“The habitual, deliberate, widely known use of torture, using similar tactics over years with no action taken by senior officials in either authority to stop these abuses, make these practices systematic,” the report concludes. “They also indicate that torture is governmental policy for both the PA and Hamas.” Since this likely constitutes a crime against humanity, Human Rights Watch recommends the International Criminal Court open an investigation.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/new-brazilian-president-says-hell-move-embassy-in-israel-to-jerusalem_2702644.html

Newly elected Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro said that he’ll move Brazil’s embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, following President Donald Trump’s lead.

Bolsonaro made the pledge to move the Brazilian embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in August, reported JTA. After the United States moved its embassy to Jerusalem, a number of other countries followed suit, including Guatemala.

Bolsonaro also said he would shut down the Palestinian embassy in Brazil, noting that Palestine isn’t a country.

“Is Palestine a country? Palestine is not a country, so there should be no embassy here,” he said.

“You do not negotiate with terrorists,” he added, referring to how the Palestine territories are mostly controlled by the terrorist group, Hamas.

Bolsonaro, 63, has spoken highly of Israel during his campaign and said at one point that his first international trip as president would be to the Middle Eastern country.

“Bolsonaro stood out among the many candidates for including the State of Israel in the major speeches he made during the campaign,” Israel’s honorary consul in Rio, Osias Wurman, told JTA. “He is a lover of the people and the State of Israel.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/irans-european-hit-squads-1540939557

One of President Trump’s most controversial foreign-policy initiatives—withdrawing from President Obama’s nuclear-arms deal with Iran—is heating up again.

On Tuesday Denmark announced it had interrupted an Iranian plot to carry out assassinations of Iranian dissidents on Danish soil. This comes as the Trump Administration is planning to announce wider sanctions against Iran next week.

Recall Europe’s reaction after Mr. Trump withdrew the U.S. from the nuclear deal in May. The European Union not only denounced Mr. Trump’s decision but has vowed since to restore its economic relationship with Iran. Europe’s Iran policy is looking other-worldly.

In July, Germany foiled another Iranian plot to bomb dissidents in Paris. Press reports said then that Western intelligence services were concerned about the possibility of Iran stepping up terrorist attacks in Europe and the U.S.

Denmark wants the EU to impose new sanctions on Iran. Federica Mogherini, the EU’s pro-Iran foreign-policy chief, replied blandly that “we are following events.”

Even as Iranian hit squads are setting up shop across the Continent, the European Union is displaying a fundamental lack of seriousness about a country uninterested in distinctions between bombs, missiles and assassinations.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/bolsonaros-hope-and-change-1540853512

‘Bolsonaro threatens the world, not just Brazil’s fledgling democracy,” declared a headline last week in the Guardian, referring to presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro. And that was one of the milder warnings in the international press. Yet Brazilians elected him anyway on Sunday with 55% of the vote. Maybe the world should show a decent respect for Brazilian democracy and try to understand what happened.

Start with the fact that this was a transparent, competitive and fair contest. Mr. Bolsonaro didn’t steal the election. He won it by persuading voters. A 27-year member of the legislature, Mr. Bolsonaro was also fortunate to be running against Fernando Haddad, the hand-picked candidate of the Worker’s Party (PT) that has ruled Brazil for most of the last 15 years. Mr. Bolsonaro was able to run as the reformer against a legacy of economic and political failure.

Brazil has yet to recover from the leftwing populism of PT President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-2010) and successor Dilma Rousseff (2011-2016). Deficits, public debt and inflation soared, as the PT expanded the number of state-owned enterprises. It also squandered the opportunity to boost capital flows, most notably by failing to create attractive auction rules in the huge deepwater oil reserves discovered in 2007. By the time the Workers’ Party was done, Brazil was in a recession that lasted nearly three years.

The PT also built a legacy of graft. Construction companies padded bids and paid kickbacks to politicians, executives and the PT. The national development bank extended loans to facilitate the transactions, including to Cuba and Venezuela. The head of the bank said in September that the dictatorships in Havana and Caracas have outstanding loans of $1 billion and both are in arrears.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271778/jordan-cancels-israeli-land-leases-morton-klein

Last week, Jordan’s King Abdullah II, in what has been described as a “sharp tone,” announced that he would annul an appendix to the 1994 Israeli/Jordanian peace treaty under which certain parcels of lands in the border regions –– the Naharayim (Baqura) area near the Sea of Galilee, and Zofar (al Ghamar), some 80 miles north of Eilat in the Aqaba region –– were to have been leased to Israel in perpetuity.

Jews have farmed these lands since 1926, when the then-British Mandatory power authorized it, along with the establishment of a power station by Pinchas Rutenberg.

However, in 1994, when Israel and Jordan concluded a peace treaty, Israel transferred these territories to Jordanian sovereignty. However, Appendix I (b) in the treaty authorized continued Israeli cultivation of these farmlands for 25 years, automatically renewable for 25-year periods “unless one year prior notice of termination is given by either Party, in which case, at the request of either Party, consultations shall be entered into.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has indicated he will be taking up the matter with King Abdullah in a bid to have the termination off the lease rescinded, but Oraib Rintawi, the director of the Quds Center for Political Studies in Amman, has said, probably accurately, “Jordan cannot backtrack on this … This is a decision of the king, government and public. I do not believe there is any possibility to backtrack on this decision.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13205/turkey-qatar-saudi-arabia

The new U.S. leverage that emerged after the Saudi embarrassment is the same leverage that the U.S. can now use to broker an entente between Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

That there may be a Saudi-Qatari rapprochement might be bad news for Erdoğan. A future Saudi-Qatari deal would force Turkey militarily out of the Gulf and force Erdoğan entirely to recalibrate his quest for Turkish leadership in the Sunni ummah (global community).

Qatar’s distance from Erdoğan regarding the Khashoggi murder signals a Qatari-Saudi entente. Qatar may well be breaking away from its alliance with Turkey.

This will give the Saudis an upper hand in their rivalry with Erdoğan in Sunni leadership of the ummah. If Erdoğan loses Qatar to Saudi Arabia, he will be paying geostrategic price as well as an economic one.

A 21st century ideological kinship, based on political support for Hamas and Muslim Brotherhood, has built a strong bond between Turkey’s elected leadership and Qatar’s family of sheiks, despite an unpleasant shared history a century earlier.

The Qataris, not knowing that a 21st version of Islamism — not yet born then — fought the Ottomans to gain their independence in 1915. This event ended the 44-year-long Ottoman rule on the peninsula.

Independence, however, lasted for only about a year, until 1916, when Qatar became a British protectorate, until 1971. Today, hydrocarbon-rich Qatar, often referred to as a family-run gas station, is the staunchest regional ally of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Turkey.

Both countries, Qatar and Turkey, pursue policies that are strongly anti-Israel (Erdoğan once remarked that “Zionism is a crime against humanity”) and share policies that are pro-Hamas and pro-Muslim Brotherhood.

This foreign policy blend, however, is deeply disliked by the House of Saud, a regional heavyweight, as well as by its Gulf and other regional allies: Egypt, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Lebanon and the Palestinian Authority — in addition to the Arab League.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/iran-holds-a-hostage-for-spying-on-the-dead-1540852246

Give President Trump credit for bringing unjustly detained Americans home. Whatever misgivings you may have about his North Korean diplomacy, three American prisoners freed in May are better for it. So is Pastor Andrew Brunson, whom Turkey released this month. “I hope my husband is next,” Hua Qu tells me. “He has literally been taken hostage by Iran.”

Her husband is Xiyue Wang, a history graduate student at Princeton arrested in Tehran in August 2016 and sentenced to 10 years in the notorious Evin Prison. He is one of at least five Americans currently detained in Iran—and the only one who doesn’t also hold Iranian citizenship.

Mr. Wang, then 35, ventured to Iran in January 2016 to research the Qajar dynasty, which ruled Persia from 1794 to 1925. The espionage allegation came after he copied thousands of pages of research material from the National Archives of Iran. As one of his Princeton professors put it, Mr. Wang was accused of “spying on the dead.” The documents he copied were from between 1840 and 1910, according to Ms. Qu.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/geopolitics-trumps-the-markets-1540852514

That crashing sound you heard in world markets last week wasn’t just a correction. It was the sound of the end of an age.

During the long era of relatively stable international relations that succeeded the Cold War, markets enjoyed an environment uniquely conducive to economic growth. The U.S. faced no peer competitors, and the most important great powers generally (if sometimes selectively) supported Washington’s emphasis on opening markets and reducing barriers to investment and trade. The positive-sum logic of economics trumped zero-sum international politics in the halls of power world-wide.

The results were extraordinary. Between 1990 and 2017, world-wide gross domestic product rose from $23.4 trillion to $80.1 trillion, the value of world trade grew even faster, more than a billion people escaped poverty, and infant-mortality rates decreased by more than 50%. The number of people with telephone service grew roughly 10-fold.

This hiatus from history was, by most measures of human flourishing, a glorious era. Now it has come to an end, or at least a pause, and the world is beginning to see what that means.

During the Obama administration, foreign-policy observers began to speak of “the return of geopolitics”—the idea that the international arena was increasingly defined by competition among strategic rivals. Russia, China and Iran were “revisionist” powers that aimed to upend the post-Cold War era of American dominance. These powers enjoyed growing success, particularly during President Obama’s second term. By the time Mr. Trump took office, there was little doubt a much more challenging geopolitical environment had taken shape. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://pjmedia.com/michaelwalsh/angela-merkel-down-and-soon-out/

After another disastrous showing in local elections, German chancellor Angela Merkel will step down as the leader of her political party, the Christian Democratic Union, and not seek re-election as chancellor.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel announced on Monday that she would not seek re-election when her term expires in 2021. Merkel, who has been Chancellor since 2005, made the announcement during a news conference today in Berlin. “It is time today for me to start a new chapter,” Merkel told reporters in Berlin.
“This fourth term is my last term as Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany. In the next Bundestag election in 2021, I will not run again as Chancellor. I will not run for the German Bundestag any more, and I do not want any other political office.” Merkel told reporters that being Chancellor has been a “very challenging and fulfilling task.”

Better late than never — or perhaps not. Merkel’s decision to admit upward of a million Muslim “refugees” in 2015, ostensibly in the name of humanitarianism but in reality to combat Germany’s anemic birthrate by importing the next generation of “Germans” and hoping against all evidence that they will assimilate into Teutonic society, was the inciting incident in her fall from grace, but its effects will linger long after she is gone.

And gone she needs to be, long before 2021. The fig leaf is that while she’s quitting as CDU party leader, she’ll stay in office until the next election. The reality is, with her power base gone, she’ll be vacating the chancellery long before that. Merkel has been unable to admit her catastrophic error, and has been busily trying to bridge the yawning gulf between bien-pensant thinking about “immigration” and the reality on the ground by cobbling together an ad hoc coalition government with her nominal opposition, the Social Democrats. That coalition has now effectively cratered. So what comes next?

Over the past three years I’ve received many calls from the British media asking me whether Angela Merkel had finally received a knockout blow. And I’ve always replied: she’s down but not out. Now, however, she’s down and out. Her party’s top brass have forced her to announce that she won’t be running for the leadership of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) at their conference in December. At the time of writing, she wants to remain chancellor. But by this time next year at the very latest, she’ll be out of that job, too. CONTINUE AT SITE