RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://harpers.org/archive/2018/

This is the story of how the institutions of British Jewry went to war with Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the Labour Party. Corbyn is another feather in the wind of populism and a fragmentation of the old consensus and politesse. He was elected to the leadership by the party membership in 2015, and no one was more surprised than he. Between 1997 and 2010, Corbyn voted against his own party 428 times. He existed as an ideal, a rebuke to the Blairite leadership, and the only wise man on a ship of fools. His schtick is that of a weary, kindly, socialist Father Christmas, dragged from his vegetable patch to create a utopia almost against his will. But in 2015 the ideal became, reluctantly, flesh. Satirists mock him as Jesus Christ, and this is apt. But only just. He courts sainthood, and if you are very cynical you might say that, like Christ, he shows Jews what they should be. He once sat on the floor of a crowded train, though he was offered a first-class seat, possibly as a private act of penance to those who had, at one time or another, had no seat on a train.

When Corbyn became leader of the Labour Party, the British media, who are used to punching socialists, crawled over his record and found much to alarm the tiny Jewish community of 260,000. Corbyn called Hez­bollah “friends” and said Hamas, also his “friends,” were devoted “to long-term peace and social justice.” (He later said he regretted using that language.) He invited the Islamist leader Raed Salah, who has accused Jews of killing Christian children to drink their blood, to Parliament, and opposed his extradition. Corbyn is also a patron of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and a former chair of Stop the War, at whose rallies they chant, “From the river to the sea / Palestine will be free.” (There is no rhyme for what will happen to the Jewish population in this paradise.) He was an early supporter of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement and its global campaign to delegitimize Israel and, through the right of return for Palestinians, end its existence as a Jewish state. (His office now maintains that he does not support BDS. The official Labour Party position is for a two-state solution.) In the most recent general election, only 13 percent of British Jews intended to vote Labour.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/french-court-orders-psychiatric-evaluation-for-national-rally-leader-le-pen/

Le Pen is obviously crazy because she posted images of ISIS executions on Twitter.

Marine Le Pen, the French nationalist leader who lost in the second round of the presidential elections last year to Emanuel Macron, has been ordered to undergo a psychiatric evaluation by the judge presiding over her trial on charges of disseminating violent images.

Le Pen posted three graphic images of executions by Islamic terrorists, including the beheading of American journalist James Foley, on Twitter.

Reuters:

The tribunal declined to confirm it had ordered the evaluation but said the assessments were a normal part of such probes.

“I thought I had seen it all: but no! For having denounced the horrors of #Daesh in tweets, the ‘justice’ is submitting me to a psychiatric evaluation! How far will they go?” Le Pen wrote on Twitter. “It’s UNBELIEVABLE.”

She later told reporters she would skip the test. “I’d like to see how the judge would try and force me do it,” she said. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2018/09/sacks-hypocrisy/

Women in European cities have been attacked, slashed and had acid thrown in their faces for wearing ‘immodest’ dress in areas where Islamic misogyny prevails. Yet what garners the most reactive ink? Boris Johnson and his column decrying the burka
In the last month several Iranian women have been sentenced to long years of imprisonment in the country’s harsh jails for the crime of removing the burka in public. Wearing a garment that covers most of the body and head is mandatory in Iran and Saudi Arabia. Demonstrations by women against this and similar rules have been spreading in both countries and have subsequently been broadcast on Twitter, YouTube and other social media. It’s a movement of great cultural significance, and the women who lead it meet street attacks as well as official punishments. They are extraordinarily heroic.

Yet if you type the single word burka into Google, the first three visual stories that pop up are all related to the recent article by Boris Johnson in the London Daily Telegraph in which he criticised the burka as resembling a “letterbox”. If you then type in both burka and Boris, no fewer than 13 million links to stories involving both words then appear. If you have a morbid curiosity to find out about the rebellion of Iranian women against wearing the burka, however, Google will link you to 5 million stories—a solid number but only just over a third of the number involving Boris.

To be fair, the Boris column generated a lot of secondary stories. There were attacks on him by Prime Minister Theresa May, by the chairman of the Tory party, Brandon Lewis, by “Muslim community leaders” and their “spokesmen” (denouncing his descent into Islamophobia), by various Tory MPs from the party’s Remainer faction (two of whom threatened to leave the party if he ever became its leader), by columnists from several newspapers, notably the Guardian, and even from faraway New York by the US news program the Daily Show, which issued one of its standard solemn moral reproofs in “satirical” disguise.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12996/unrwa-funding

Iran’s average annual contribution to UNRWA in recent years has been $2,000.
Iran does spend billions of dollars a year outside its borders in the Middle East. Iran provides weapons and cash to terrorist groups such as Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Lebanon’s Hezbollah. Iran helps these groups because they want to destroy the “Zionist entity.” Iran is now devoting huge resources in Syria to help dictator Bashar Assad in his fight against the rebels, as well as substantial sums of money helping Houthi militias in Yemen.
Lebanon’s laws treat Palestinians as a special group of foreigners, even denying them the same rights granted to other foreigners. Palestinians in Lebanon are not only denied basic rights enjoyed by Lebanese citizens and other foreigners, but also denied rights as refugees under international conventions.
Arab and Muslim states could start to think of ways to help Palestinians achieve a better life and improve their children’s future instead of sitting in refugee camps and waiting for handouts from the UN and other Western countries. Or is continuing to beg non-Arabs and non-Muslims for money the better deal?

At a meeting in Cairo this month, Arab and Muslim foreign ministers expressed concern about the fate of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) after the US administration decided to cut all US aid to the agency. The ministers “underscored the importance of allowing UNRWA to continue playing a pivotal role in providing humanitarian aid” to Palestinian “refugees.” They also warned that “harming” UNRWA will aggravate the crisis in the Middle East.

If these Arab and Muslim countries are so worried about UNRWA and the Palestinian refugees, why don’t they step in to fill the vacuum and pay for the loss of the US funds? What is keeping them from pulling out their checkbooks and solving this “refugee crisis”?

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13008/international-criminal-court

Ambassador John Bolton was prescient in his 1998 warning, when the formation of body was first being debated in Rome, that it would be ineffective, unaccountable and overly political.

The reconciliation commissions of South Africa and Morocco aimed to rehabilitate victims, and pay compensation for state outrages against them. That method would be a better model for Africa than a court funded and run from Europe.

The International Criminal Court is a noble ideal but a flawed institution. Far better to encourage nations to develop courts that are accountable to the victims and free from charges of selective enforcement or foreign intervention.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) is “already dead to us” National Security Adviser John Bolton told the Federalist Society recently. The U.S. will, he said, resist the court “by any means necessary.”

Why would the Trump Administration take such a hard line against “the world’s court of last resort”? Founded in 2002, in the wake of the Rwandan and Yugoslavian genocides and mass rapes, the international body was supposed to try evildoers who would otherwise escape justice due to broken legal systems in failed states.

Opposing the court is not a new position for the U.S. or Ambassador Bolton. The Bush Administration refused to sign the court’s implementing treaty in 2003, contending that it would lead to trials of U.S. soldiers and spies by a politically turbo-charged body located in Europe. At the time, many European leaders opposed President Bush’s war in Iraq and questioned its actions in the war on terror, including rendition and holding prisoners indefinitely at Guantanamo Bay. Ambassador Bolton was even more prescient. He warned, in 1998, when the formation of body was first being debated in Rome, that it would be ineffective, unaccountable and overly political.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13002/turkey-education-religion

In 2017, Turkey stopped teaching evolution at secondary school: for extremists, Darwinism remains a taboo subject. Instead, school textbooks started teaching Turkish pupils “jihad.”
A good school, according to extremists, is not where science is taught at universal standards; it is where pious students grow.
Turkey’s Higher Education Board in 2016 asked 1,577 university deans (reportedly every dean in the country) to resign “for the sake of democracy.”

Secular Turks were shocked when Binali Yıldırım, then Minister of Transport, explained to an interviewer why, in his youth, he changed his choice of university:

“I visited Bogazici University and saw that girl and boy students were sitting together… I feared I could go astray. And I decided to attend the technical university.”

Yıldırım who later became President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s choice for prime minister now serves as parliament speaker.

It is not surprising that for Turkey’s extremists, governance broadly means the Islamization of everything, including education at every level. In a 2017 speech, Erdoğan boasted that, after his Justice and Development Party came to power, the number of students at the religious imam hatip schools rose from 60,000 to 1.3 million.

Unsurprisingly, Erdoğan has often declared his political ambition not as raising honest, well-educated, free minds, but as “raising pious generations.”

A good school, according to extremists, is not where science is taught at universal standards; it is where pious students grow.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/koreas-talks-begin-with-goodwill-if-no-quick-results-1537270274?cx_testId=0&cx_testVariant=cx_1&cx_artPos=0#cxrecs_s

SEOUL—North Korea agreed to allow outside inspectors to visit its missile test site and said it would be open to decommissioning its nuclear-enrichment facility, a bold gambit by Kim Jong Un that is aimed at breaking an impasse in negotiations with the U.S. and keeping engagement with Seoul on track.

On Wednesday, the second of three days of talks in Pyongyang, Mr. Kim and South Korean President Moon Jae-in emerged from an hourlong private meeting to sign a document and hold a joint news conference where they each reaffirmed their goal of ridding the Korean Peninsula of nuclear weapons.

Under the agreement, outside inspectors and experts will be allowed to witness the dismantling of North Korea’s Sohae satellite launching facility, located in the country’s northwest. In recent months, commercial satellite imagery has showed North Korea taking apparent steps to break down the site.

The two Koreas also said that the North would permanently decommission its Yongbyon nuclear-enrichment facility—provided the U.S. took “corresponding steps” to fulfill the terms of the agreement signed by the U.S. and North Korea in June. The two leaders didn’t mention the involvement of any international inspectors at Yongbyon.

The announcements offer fresh hope of a breakthrough between Mr. Kim and President Trump, who has floated the idea of a second U.S.-North Korean meeting following their Singapore summit three months ago.

Mr. Trump, in a pair of tweets written just after midnight in Washington, signaled optimism in the diplomatic process. “Very exciting!” he wrote.

Stalled talks between the U.S. and North Korea had loomed over this week’s Pyongyang summit. The U.S. has insisted that the North make concrete steps toward dismantling its nuclear and missile program as a precondition for further diplomacy, while Pyongyang says the U.S. has dragged its feet on signing a treaty to end the Korean War. The Korean Peninsula has remained technically in a state of war for more than six decades after the 1950-53 Korean War ended in armistice without a formal peace treaty.

Wednesday’s agreement will also create a joint military commission aimed at reducing tensions between the two sides. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.wsj.com/articles/extremism-advances-in-the-largest-muslim-country-1537225520?mod=searchresults&page=1&pos=3

Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim nation, has long stood as a role model for religious pluralism. That’s changing. Political Islam and violent extremism have been taking root in society and may soon do so in the government. President Joko Widodo’s choice of Ma’ruf Amin, a 75-year-old cleric, as his running mate in next year’s election marks an ugly turn for Indonesian politics.

Religious minorities had regarded Mr. Widodo as their defender. His rival, retired general Prabowo Subianto, was expected to play the religion card, questioning the incumbent’s Islamic credentials and building a coalition supported by radical Islamists. By choosing Mr. Amin, the president’s defenders argue, he not only has neutralized the religion factor, but might have prevented it from spilling over into violence against minorities. In office, they believe, Mr. Amin will be contained.

Yet Mr. Subianto is unlikely to be deterred from playing identity politics, and rumors that Mr. Amin is reaching out to radical Islamists for support are troubling. Mr. Amin has a history of intolerance. He signed a fatwa that put a Widodo ally, Jakarta’s former Gov. Basuki Tjahaja “Ahok” Purnama, in jail on blasphemy charges. Ahok, who is Christian and ethnically Chinese, was a symbol of Indonesia’s diversity, and as a popular governor was expected to be re-elected. Instead he lost after rivals told Muslims not to vote for a non-Muslim.

Mr. Amin also signed the anti-Ahmadiyya fatwa in 2005, which led to severe restrictions and violence against the Ahmadiyya, an Islamic sect some Muslims regard as heretical. I met recently with Ahmadis in Depok, a Jakarta suburb, where their mosque is closed. The previous week they were visited by 15 local officials ordering them to stop all activities.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/imperialism-will-be-dangerous-for-china-1537225875

China’s real problem isn’t the so-called Thucydides trap, which holds that a rising power like China must clash with an established power like the U.S., the way ancient Athens clashed with Sparta. It was Lenin, not Thucydides, who foresaw the challenge the People’s Republic is now facing: He called it imperialism and said it led to economic collapse and war.

Lenin defined imperialism as a capitalist country’s attempt to find markets and investment opportunities abroad when its domestic economy is awash with excess capital and production capacity. Unless capitalist powers can keep finding new markets abroad to soak up the surplus, Lenin theorized, they would face an economic implosion, throwing millions out of work, bankrupting thousands of companies and wrecking their financial systems. This would unleash revolutionary forces threatening their regimes.

Under these circumstances, there was only one choice: expansion. In the “Age of Imperialism” of the 19th and early-20th centuries, European powers sought to acquire colonies or dependencies where they could market surplus goods and invest surplus capital in massive infrastructure projects.

Ironically, this is exactly where “communist” China stands today. Its home market is glutted by excess manufacturing and construction capacity created through decades of subsidies and runaway lending. Increasingly, neither North America, Europe nor Japan is willing or able to purchase the steel, aluminum and concrete China creates. Nor can China’s massively oversized infrastructure industry find enough projects to keep it busy. Its rulers have responded by attempting to create a “soft” empire in Asia and Africa through the Belt and Road Initiative.

Many analysts hoped that when China’s economy matured, the country would come to look more like the U.S., Europe and Japan. A large, affluent middle class would buy enough goods and services to keep industry humming. A government welfare state would ease the transition to a middle-class society.

That future is now out of reach, key Chinese officials seem to believe. Too many powerful interest groups have too much of a stake in the status quo for Beijing’s policy makers to force wrenching changes on the Chinese economy. But absent major reforms, the danger of a serious economic shock is growing.

The Belt and Road Initiative was designed to sustain continued expansion in the absence of serious economic reform. Chinese merchants, bankers and diplomats combed the developing world for markets and infrastructure projects to keep China Inc. solvent. In a 2014 article in the South China Morning Post, a Chinese official said one objective of the BRI is the “transfer of overcapacity overseas.” Call it “imperialism with Chinese characteristics.”

But as Lenin observed a century ago, the attempt to export overcapacity to avoid chaos at home can lead to conflict abroad. He predicted rival empires would clash over markets, but other dynamics also make this strategy hazardous. Nationalist politicians resist “development” projects that saddle their countries with huge debts to the imperialist power. As a result, imperialism is a road to ruin.

China’s problems today are following this pattern. Pakistan, the largest recipient of BRI financing, thinks the terms are unfair and wants to renegotiate. Malaysia, the second largest BRI target, wants to scale back its participation since pro-China politicians were swept out of office. Myanmar and Nepal have canceled BRI projects. After Sri Lanka was forced to grant China a 99-year lease on the Hambantota Port to repay Chinese loans, countries across Asia and Africa started rereading the fine print of their contracts, muttering about unequal treaties. CONTINUE AT SITE