RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/cyber-criminals-in-the-kremlin-1538685869

Several governments on Thursday made a coordinated release of new information about Russian cyber espionage, including an indictment of seven Russian intelligence agents from the Department of Justice in Washington. Authorities are performing a public service by lifting the veil of secrecy that usually envelops counterintelligence.

The Justice indictment names seven agents in the Kremlin’s intelligence agency, the GRU, for hacking attacks against sports antidoping agencies and Westinghouse Electric Co. As payback for investigations into Russian athletes’ use of banned performance-enhancing drugs, the GRU stole online data about hundreds of other athletes—even sending agents to Rio de Janeiro to hack the computers of antidoping officials at a conference. Then it leaked confidential information to embarrass innocent sportsmen and women.

Meanwhile, the Dutch government says four Russian agents showed up in April intending to hack the wireless network at the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in the Hague. The plan appears to have been to place sophisticated equipment in a rental car and then park outside the building with the trunk pointed toward the offices to pick up wireless computer transmissions.

The OPCW at the time was investigating the Kremlin’s use of a nerve agent to try to assassinate a Russian double agent in the U.K.—an attack that killed an innocent civilian. The agency also was investigating the use of chemical weapons by Russia’s client regime in Syria.

There’s evidence that the spies would have headed to an OPCW-affiliated lab in Switzerland if the Dutch hadn’t nabbed them. The British government says the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Porton Down military lab also were targets of failed Russian cyberattacks at about the same time.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271500/jeremy-corbyn-calls-arms-embargo-israel-hugh-fitzgerald

The Labour Party — Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party –has called for the U.K to impose a total arms embargo on Israel. This would not be the first time the U.K. has imposed such an embargo on Israel. In the 1948-49 Arab-Israeli war, at the time of maximum peril to the Jews of Israel, with the nascent state invaded by the armies of five Arab states, Great Britain also imposed such an embargo. It was not alone. The United States also banned sending arms to the belligerents on either side. The most important weapons deliveries, including airplanes, for the Jews in 1947-49 came from Czechoslovakia.

The British, unlike the Americans, did not impose an arms embargo on both sides in 1948. Instead, they continued to supply arms to Egypt, Jordan, and Iraq. More important, the British armed, trained, and provided officers, to the Arab Legion of Jordan. Under the overall command of General John Bagot Glubb, the Arab Legion was the most effective fighting force on the Arab side, and the only one that could claim a clear victory — at Latrun — over the Jews during the 1948 war. Even before the war was declared by the Arab states, the Arab Legion joined forces with local Arabs, who attacked the four Israeli settlements that made up the Etzzion bloc. The Jewish forces consisted of members of the Hagana militia and kibbutzniks. Of the 129 Haganah fighters and Jewish kibbutzniks who died during the defence of the settlement, Martin Gilbert states that fifteen were murdered on surrendering.

Controversy surrounds the responsibility and role of the Arab Legion in the killing of those who surrendered. The official Israeli version maintains that the kibbutz residents and Haganah soldiers were massacred by local Arabs and the Arab Legion of the Jordanian Army as they were surrendering. The Arab Legion version maintains that the Legion arrived too late to prevent the attack on the kibbutz by men from nearby Arab villages. The surrendering Jewish residents and fighters are said to have been assembled in a courtyard, only to be suddenly fired upon; it is said that many died on the spot, while most of those who managed to flee were hunted down and killed. Israel continues to insist that members of the British-commanded Arab Legion took part in the killing of those who had surrendered.

John Bagot Glubb was one of those old-style British Arabists — some called him a second Lawrence of Arabia — who went native in a big way, even able to converse with the Bedouin in their own dialects. When he was finally discharged by King Hussein in 1956 — Hussein wanted to totally “arabize” the Legion and show other Arabs that he was indeed Jordan’s ruler — Glubb Pasha retired to his home in Great Britain, and wrote a series of books “to dispel Western misconceptions and prejudices about the Arab world and Islam.” Delving deep into the past, he started that series in 1964 with ”The Great Arab Conquests,” a book on seventh-century Arabia where, he wrote, the Bedouins ”established the greatest empire in the world of their day.” A second book, ‘The Lost Centuries,” published in 1966, “traced the destiny of the Moslem empires from the 12th century to the European renaissance in the 15th.” A third book. “The Life and Times of Muhammad” again was an effort to correct cliches he thought had “distorted the image of the founder of Islam and his religion.” Glubb was a great admirer of the Arabs. He adopted two Palestinian Arab children. He also was an apologist for Islam. And the Arab Legion stood for all the military aid that the British lavished on the Arab side in that 1947-1949 conflict.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271504/international-court-justice-sides-mullahs-joseph-klein

During his address to the United Nations General Assembly last week, President Trump rejected the notion of global governance institutions purporting to override national sovereignty. President Trump called out the International Criminal Court, which “has no legitimacy or authority,” he said. The president vowed to “never surrender America’s sovereignty” to such an “unelected, unaccountable” globalist body. The UN’s top court, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague, has just rendered a decision against the United States and in favor of Iran that demonstrates why President Trump is so correct. The ICJ judges ruled that some sanctions imposed by the Trump administration on the Iranian regime were inconsistent with the “Treaty of Amity, Economic Relations, and Consular Rights” between Iran and the United States, which was signed in Tehran in 1955 and entered into force in 1957.

The ICJ disgracefully relied on this treaty to both assert jurisdiction over Iran’s complaint, and to decide at least provisionally in Iran’s favor on the merits. It ordered the immediate removal of U.S. sanctions on certain products for import into Iran, pending the court’s final decision in the case. President Trump must, as he is expected to do, disregard this disgraceful ruling, and any follow-on rulings. The ICJ decision is an affront to the United States’ sovereign right to decide what nations it chooses to do business with and which countries it decides not to do business with, for whatever reasons it chooses including national security.

Following the ICJ ruling, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that the United States would cancel the treaty that anachronistically still includes “Amity” and “Consular Rights” in its title. That’s good, but unnecessary. The treaty is already dead as a result of the Iranian Islamist regime’s own gross violations of the treaty itself and of conventional international law principles, capped by the unlawful seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran and the detention of hostages under inhumane conditions by the regime’s supporters in 1979, which the regime endorsed.

The International Court of Justice’s entire rationale for its decision rests on this dead treaty. “The Court considers that the United States, in accordance with its obligations under the 1955 Treaty,” the ICJ declared unanimously, “must remove, by means of its choosing, any impediments arising from the measures announced on 8 May 2018 to the free exportation to the territory of Iran of goods required for humanitarian needs, such as (i) medicines and medical devices, and (ii) foodstuffs and agricultural commodities, as well as goods and services required for the safety of civil aviation, such as (iii) spare parts, equipment and associated services (including warranty, maintenance, repair services and safety-related inspections) necessary for civil aircraft. To this end, the United States must ensure that licences and necessary authorizations are granted and that payments and other transfers of funds are not subject to any restriction in so far as they relate to the goods and services referred to above.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13072/le-pen-dissent-mental-illness

A 615-page report was recently released, written by an adviser to President Emmanuel Macron, Hakim El Karoui, who is in charge of designing the new institutions of an “Islam of France.” The report defines Islamism as an “ideology totally distinct from Islam” and also never addresses the links between Islamism and terrorism. The report also insists on the urgent need to spread “true Islam” in France and adopt the teaching of Arabic in public high schools.
The court’s request, for Marine Le Pen to undergo a psychiatric evaluation to determine if she is sane, indicates that French authorities might be reviving the old Soviet use of “psychiatry” to silence dissidents or political opponents.
The legal offensive against Marine Le Pen was actually added to the financial offensive. Even if Le Pen is not sent to prison, the law seems to have been used to open the possibility of declaring her ineligible for the European Parliament elections scheduled for May 2019.

On December 16, 2015, a French journalist on a mainstream radio station compared France’s right-wing National Front Party to the Islamic State (ISIS) by saying that there is a “community of spirit” between them and that both push those who support them to “withdraw into their own identity”. Marine Le Pen, the president of the National Front party, speaking of a “unacceptable verbal slippage,” asked the radio station for the right to answer. She then published on Twitter images showing the bodies of victims of the Islamic State and adding: “ISIS is this!”

The French media immediately accused her of broadcasting “indecent” and “obscene” images, and shortly after that, the French government ordered the Department of Justice to indict her. On November 8, 2017 the French national assembly also lifted her parliamentary immunity.

A few months later, a judge mandated by the French government, charged Marine Le Pen with “disseminating violent images,” citing article 227-24 of the French Penal Code, which defines the crime of:

“… disseminating… a message of a violent nature, inciting terrorism, pornographic or likely to seriously violate human dignity or to incite minors to engage in games that physically endanger them, or to commercialize such a message.”

http://www.investigativeproject.org/

The Austrian government is considering outlawing a four-fingered salute representing support for the Muslim Brotherhood. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan popularized it and began using it after Egypt’s military toppled the Brotherhood in 2013.

Muslim Brotherhood members and sympathizers around the world use the image on websites, posters and literature. If the ban is approved, anyone in Austria who flashes the salute could be fined $4,600.

It also has been used by Muslim Brotherhood supporters in the United States, including members of Egyptian Americans for Freedom and Justice (EAFJ) and former Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official Mohamed Elibiary.

Erdogan’s role in popularizing the gesture seems to be driving the Austrian ban. It also would outlaw a wolf-head like salute used by the pro-Erdogan Turkish fascist group the Grey Wolves. Its most infamous member, Mehmet Ali Agca, tried to assassinate Pope John Paul II in 1981. The Wolves have become some of Erdogan’s greatest non-Islamist supporters and aim to unify all Turkic peoples in Turkey across and throughout Central Asia into a single nation.

It was the only group besides Erdogan’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) that backed constitutional changes allowing him to consolidate power.

So far Turkey hasn’t responded.

http://standpointmag.co.uk/dispatches-november-2018-jeffrey-gedmin-chemnitz

Recently, I sat in my hotel a few steps away from the Gedächtniskirche — West Berlin’s iconic “church of remembrance,” left in ruin at the end of World War II to remind Germans of the horror of their aggression — preparing for a meeting with Reiner Haseloff, minister president of the east German state of Saxony-Anhalt. The 64-year-old Haseloff is a member of Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU). Like the Chancellor, Haseloff grew up on the country’s communist side, in the so-called German Democratic Republic. He, too, was trained as a scientist. Merkel holds a PhD in quantum chemistry; Haseloff’s doctorate is in physics.

I wanted to speak with Haseloff about the growing tensions between East and West Germans, three decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall; about the country’s shifting political landscape, about social cohesion and security, and Germany’s migration policies, the last being a subject where Haseloff and Merkel part ways. Haseloff has distanced himself from the Chancellor’s liberal migration policy; in 2015, Germany permitted some one million refugees from mostly Muslim majority countries to enter the country.

At the last minute my meeting with Haseloff was cancelled. The minister president was on his way to Köthen where a fight at a playground between two young Afghan men and a 22-year-old German man resulted in the German suffering a fatal heart attack. In Köthen, the mood was tense. Two weeks earlier, on August 26, violent protests had erupted in the east German city of Chemnitz where a 35-year-old German man was stabbed to death at a festival celebrating the city’s founding. A 22-year-old Iraqi and a 23-year-old Syrian were arrested for murder. If that were not enough, the same Sunday afternoon of the death in Köthen, September 9, a killing occurred in Neukölln, a Berlin neighbourhood where Turks and hipsters rub shoulder. In this case, a 36-year-old Lebanese-born man was shot to death, with five men fleeing the scene by car. Authorities suspect a clan dispute. Police estimate that 20 large families of foreign extraction in Berlin are involved in drug running, prostitution, and other organised crime. After Neukölln, Chemnitz, and Köthen a senior Berlin official said to me, with resignation, “People will have to accept some of this violence as the new normal.”

http://standpointmag.co.uk/features-november-2018-david-abulafia-antisemitism-labour-party-jeremy-corbyn

J’accuse . . . It may seem impudent to use Émile Zola’s famous opening to his defence of Alfred Dreyfus. And yet, as on that occasion, the issue of anti-Semitism has become intertwined with wider political questions, in this case a party leader who consorts with terrorists in Ireland and the Middle East and admires repressive regimes in Cuba and Venezuela, and a party whose members (including Members of Parliament) are being intimidated by extremists whose loathing for Israel has spilled over into contempt for Jews. This crisis has developed without much more than a murmur from the man at the top, although many, not just those on the Left, were willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, assuming that his blindness to anti-Semitism within the Labour Party was another example of the chaotic management of his party that characterised the first year of his reign. But more recent revelations have shown clearly that Jeremy Corbyn is very much part of the problem; he passionately believes what Ken Livingstone or indeed George Galloway believes: that the history of Zionism and of Israel proves his case, and he is happy to keep the company of the Iranians and others who propose to wipe Israel off the map.

His silence was not indolence, incompetence or stupidity, but the silence of one who is content to look the other way and cannily let things develop in the direction he has always wanted. Hence his own lack of fury at what are quite astonishing statements repeated again and again in the press and by public figures that he, the Leader of her Majesty’s Opposition, is an anti-Semite, statements that with any other senior politician would be countered by angry, vigorous, firm denial, a dose of righteous (or unrighteous) indignation, and maybe even recourse to the courts. He should also be aflame with rage at the extraordinary threats and slurs that those professing to be his supporters have flung into the ether by way of social media, some of the most revolting of which are now under investigation by the police for racist incitement. Indeed, it is now reported that the Labour Party itself is under police investigation for sitting on stomach-turning comments about the Holocaust and about exterminating Jews that were apparently supplied by its own members.

Of course, his way of thinking should have been obvious from the moment that he installed Shami Chakrabarti and her colleagues on his commission to examine the presence of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party. The most significant feature of their conclusions was the way references to anti-Semitism were wrapped up alongside other forms of racism — in other words, it was always being relativised, shown to be inherently implausible because it was inconceivable that a party committed to anti-racism and the fight against Islamophobia would be hostile to Jews. Far from generating action, the report was seen as an opportunity to declare that action had been taken.

https://www.steynonline.com/8895/the-majority-as-identity-group

The sold-out Mark Steyn Club Cruise departed Quebec City just as a wild tsunami of an election result crashed on the Plains of Abraham and washed away the National Assembly. On Monday François Legault’s brand new party, the CAQ (Coalition Avenir Québec), won 74 out of 125 seats and became the first government in half-a-century to be neither Liberal nor separatist. The CAQ is described as “center-right”, but that term doesn’t really cover it: Like many of the emerging parties in the new Europe – from Sweden to Italy, France to Hungary – M Legault concluded that the sweet spot on the spectrum lay in being both fiscally protective and socially protective. That’s to say, these new parties are not “center-right” in terms of Milton Friedman economics – they do not seriously challenge expectations of the big welfare state – but they are nationally assertive on the cultural front.

And so it was that Quebec’s new premier, in his first press conference, pledged to cut immigration by twenty per cent and to use the Notwithstanding clause to uphold the government’s ban on the niqab in the public service. Once again we see a clear difference between the English world (America, Britain, anglo-Canada) and the rest of the west (continental Europe, Quebec) when it comes to the rights of the majority versus the provocations of Islam. Here’s what I had to say on the subject in Maclean’s in 2010 :

The other day, a reader wrote to say that, while en vacances au Québec, he had espied me in a restaurant. With a couple of obvious francophones. And, from the snatches of conversation he caught, I appeared to be speaking French. “Appeared” is right, if you’ve ever heard my French. Nevertheless: “You’re a fraud, Steyn!” he thundered. The cut of his jib was that I was merely pretending to be a pro-Yank right-wing bastard while in reality living la vie en rose lounging on chaises longues snorting poutine with louche Frenchie socialists all day long.

I haven’t felt such a hypocrite since I was caught singing The Man That Got Away in a San Francisco bathhouse two days after my column opposing gay marriage. But yes, you’re right. I cannot tell a lie. I have a soft spot for Quebec. Not because of its risible separatist movement, for which the only rational explanation is that it was never anything but one almighty bluff for shakedown purposes. Yet, putting that aside, I’m not unsympathetic to the province’s broader cultural disposition. I regard neither Trudeaupian Canada nor Quietly Revolutionary Quebec as good long-term bets, or even medium-term bets. But, if I had to pick, I’d give marginally better odds to the latter. And the reasons why can be found in the coverage of Ms. Naema Ahmed and her “illegal” niqab, the head-to-toe Islamic covering that only has eyes for you.

The facts—or, at any rate, fact—of the case is well-known: a niqab-garbed immigrant from Egypt has been twice expelled from her French-language classes at the Saint-Laurent CEGEP and the Centre d’appui aux communautés immigrantes by order of the Quebec government. That much is agreed. Thereafter, the English and French press diverge significantly. The ROC reacted reflexively, deploring this assault on Canada’s cherished “values” of “multiculturalism.” In the Calgary Herald, Naomi Lakritz compared Quebec’s government to the Taliban. So did the Globe and Mail, in an editorial titled “Intolerant Intrusion.” In La Presse, Patrick Lagacé responded with a column called “The Globe, Reporting From Mars!”

The headline was in English, and on the whole M. Lagacé’s English is better than the Globe’s French. He began by noting their unbelievably stupid editorial on O Canada, in which they endeavoured to balance their charge of sexism in the English lyrics (“in all thy sons command”) by uncovering sexism in the French—”terre de nos aïeux” or “land of our forefathers.” Where, fretted the Globe for a couple hundred words, are the foremothers? This is what happens when your claims to be Canada’s national newspaper rest on the translation services of Babel Fish. As M. Lagacé pointed out, “aïeux, en français, englobe hommes et femmes.” Englobe maybe, but not in Globe.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271473/speech-i-never-gave-bruce-bawer

A few prefatory words: I was invited to give a talk in Gothenburg, Sweden, on Saturday, September 29, as part of an “Alternative Book Fair.” The Gothenburg Book Fair was being held that weekend, and the point of the alternative event was to highlight books – mostly about Islam, I gathered – that the official fair had rejected. I was asked to talk about freedom of speech, a freedom that is in increasingly short supply in Sweden, as elsewhere in Western Europe. As if to prove the point, civic officials – at the urging of police, who were spooked by Antifa threats – banned the “Alternative Book Fair.” Here’s what I planned to say.

When I was twenty years old, there was a famous free-speech case in the state of Illinois. Nazis wanted to march in a Chicago suburb called Skokie, which had a large population of Jews, many of them Holocaust survivors. Skokie sued successfully in county court to prevent the march. The Nazis, with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union, took the case to the state appellate court and the Illinois Supreme Court. Long story short, after the case had gone to the United States Supreme Court, the Nazis were allowed to march.

As I say, I was twenty years old at the time. The Supreme Court’s decision filled me with admiration. Not because I liked Nazis, but because that ruling demonstrated that in the United States of America, even the most reprehensible expression was protected. Innocuous speech doesn’t need protection. What requires protection is controversial speech, extremist speech, speech that perhaps everyone on earth except the speaker finds offensive. Without such protections, any dissent from received opinion is in danger of being shut down. It’s a simple point but a crucial one. Without absolute freedom of speech, freedom itself – all freedom, every freedom – is threatened, period.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13064/turkey-alliances-russia-china

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Chinese President Xi Jinping are discussing more trade — and in their local currencies, rebuffing the dollar.

As of now, Turkey sees the United States as an ungrateful ally and Russia is Turkey’s new love affair. For Erdoğan, it is still “Russia time.”

Germany needs Turkey’s cooperation in halting the flow of Islamic jihadists currently stationed in Syria but who may always use Turkish territory to reach the EU. Turkey needs German technology, investment and money.

Turkey’s President does it all the time. In 2009, then-prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan accused China of genocide for the deaths of hundreds of Uighur Turks. Less than a decade later, with his newfound “Eurasianism,” Erdoğan’s Turkey and President Xi Jinping’s China are discussing more trade — and in their local currencies, rebuffing the dollar .

In 2015, the Turkish Air Force shot down a Russian Air Force fighter jet along Turkey’s troubled border with Syria. Russia responded strongly in 2016 by imposing punishing sanctions on Turkey. At the time, Erdoğan was courting Washington. In fear of further — and even military — punishments from Moscow, Erdoğan described Turkey’s relations with Washington as a “strategic partnership.”

A Turkish apology for the downed Russian plane eventually ended sanctions in 2016 and Erdoğan, once again, rediscovered his anti-Western, pro-Eurasian self. This time, Erdoğan described Turkey’s relations with Russia as a strategic partnership. This strategic partnership will probably survive until Erdoğan will have to turn to his NATO partners after potential — and possibly serious — divergences with Russia over the future of Syria.

As of now, Turkey sees the United States as an ungrateful ally and Russia is Turkey’s new love affair. Earlier this year, the Trump administration imposed tariffs on Turkish steel and aluminum at a time when Turkey’s national currency had lost 40% of its value since the start of the year. The nominal NATO allies had found themselves in a multitude of geostrategic and other disputes, including Turkey’s arrest of an America pastor on bogus terrorism and espionage charges (he is now under house arrest in Turkey).