RUTHFULLY YOURS

You expect the Left’s scribblers to work themselves into a foot-stomping lather about Donald Trump — outrage is, after all, what the Left does best. But what of your normally more sensible commentators? If he doesn’t fit the presidential mould, so what! His policies are terrific.

Donald Trump’s magnificent Warsaw speech was discussed on CNN and MSNBC as being white nationalism in disguise for, among other things, citing symphonies as an achievement of Western civilisation. You couldn’t make it up. Except that leftist hacks can make up anything once a fall guy has been thoroughly demonised as human vermin. They are practised at the dark art.

I have heard Trump described by media commentators as a schmuck, buffoon, pig, crass, grotesque, mentally unstable, racist, sexist, homophobic, Islamophobic, vulgarian, narcissistic, coarse, egotistical, shallow, horrible, one-dimensional, an embarrassment, and much more beside; some much worse. How about this from our own Nikki Sava: “Ruts deep in mud.” Even the otherwise estimable Andrew Bolt agreed with Richard Alston[i] that Trump might not “pass the character test.”

No one, apparently, can resist virtue signalling. Just when did media commentators become self-righteous arbiters of good taste and character? And just when did manners trump policies? Pun intended. When Trump became president, that’s when. This brings me to Greg Sheridan

Recently Sheridan offered his opinion that “Trump is a poor president.”[ii] As you would appreciate, this is very mild-mannered when set against most of the personal barbs aimed at Trump. Why have I picked it out? I have picked it out because unlike the rest it is a serious charge. It can be construed as being policy-related, rather than fitting into the usual script of gratuitous insults.

Trump’s policies matter to over 300 million Americans and, in fact, to all of us. His supposed personality flaws not so much; particularly as none of us should cast the first stone. The question is simple. Is Trump a poor president; and, to boot, after only six months in office? Put it this way. What egregious things has he done? What egregious things does he intend doing?

First things first. If he is a poor president it must mean that he is poor compared with a number of others. Is he poor when compared with, say, Barrack [ISIS, Iran nukes] Obama, George [Iraq] Bush, Bill [North Korean nukes, Monica Lewinsky] Clinton, or with Jimmy [Iran hostages] Carter? It’s too early, you might say, to form any kind of judgement. You’re darn tootin’ it is. At the same time, it is possible to assess what he has done so far, and intends to do, and give him a provisional mark.

I don’t have a complete list of his actions. But try these for size. He has appointed an accomplished cabinet, including Rex Tillerson (State) and General Mattis (Defence). He has succeeded in getting a conservative constitutional judge (Neil Gorsuch) appointed to the Supreme Court.

He has visited Saudi Arabia and urged representatives of the fifty-four Muslim countries who were present to drive out Islamic extremism. He has given his military commanders freedom on the ground to take effective action against ISIS and the Taliban. He is trying (if so far unsuccessfully) to persuade China to do something about North Korea. He has leant on NATO countries to meet their defence obligations; with some success. He has stood up to al-Assad and Russia in Syria. He has improved the US relationship with Israel. He has begun the process to rebuild America’s armed forces. Contrast all of this with Obama’s appeasement and passivity.

He has reduced and removed a host of regulations hampering industry and mining. He is working valiantly with a motley and divided crew of congressional Republicans to get better health insurance, to markedly reduce taxes, and to renew America’s infrastructure. He is taking concrete steps to improve the delivery of health services to veterans. He has appointed talented and committed people to improve schooling (Betsy DeVos) and housing (Ben Carson) for those in depressed inner-city areas. He has tightened border security.

BRUSSELS—European diplomats say they are increasingly concerned the Trump administration will stretch out its review of the Iranian nuclear deal, undermining the agreement by curbing the economic benefits designed to ensure Iran’s compliance.

President Donald Trump has attacked the agreement, reached in 2015, as a “terrible deal” for the U.S.

European officials have remained publicly upbeat about the U.S. remaining a party to the deal, but diplomats privately voice serious concerns about where the U.S. review is headed. They say Washington is providing little feedback, has given no firm end-date for the review and hasn’t made clear who is shaping the process.

European officials still believe the Trump administration won’t abandon the nuclear deal, but many fear Washington will keep it under a rolling review. That, they say, would crimp economic benefits Iran expected from the agreement by persuading already cautious Western banks and investors to stay away—whereas President Barack Obama’s top officials urged engagement with Tehran. European diplomats also worry that if the U.S. commitment remains uncertain, Iran may respond by attempting limited violations.

Trump administration officials have raised concerns—echoed in some European capitals—that the deal doesn’t curtail Iran’s nuclear activities once its key commitments expire over the next 15 years. Washington has also repeatedly criticized the deal for not committing Iran to change its behavior in the region, where it has intervened to support the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and moved to increase its influence elsewhere through proxy forces such as Hezbollah.

While Obama administration officials toured Europe to encourage companies to take advantage of the lifting of most sanctions, the new administration has taken the opposite approach. White House Deputy Spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Monday that Mr. Trump used last weekend’s Group of 20 leaders meeting in Germany to press his counterparts “to stop doing business with nations that sponsor terrorism, especially Iran.”

The limbo over the deal could strain U.S. ties with Europe, where the governments of France, Germany, and the U.K., as well as the European Union, helped negotiate the deal and strongly support it. They argue the deal averted a military conflict over Iran’s nuclear program and is now allowing the continent to start rebuilding investment ties with Tehran. CONTINUE AT SITE

With America’s global attention largely focused elsewhere, Iran continues to expand its military capabilities – legally and otherwise – forcing the question of what Washington and its regional allies plan to do about it.

Iran’s military expansionism of late encompasses a host of activities: pursuing illegal means to expand its nuclear and ballistic missile technology and expertise; continuing to test its longer range and increasingly sophisticated ballistic missile; and building underground facilities in Lebanon to manufacture missiles and other weapons for its most powerful terrorist client Hezbollah.

This expansionism is boosting the capacity of Iran, a Shiite nation, to threaten Israel and the region’s U.S.-backed Sunni states – most notably Saudi Arabia – raising the stakes for a U.S. administration that has wisely discarded President Barack Obama’s efforts at U.S.-Iranian rapprochement but not yet enunciated a comprehensive alternative.

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson recently articulated the broad elements of a strategy: “Our policy towards Iran,” he told the House Foreign Affairs Committee in response to a question, “is to push back on [its regional] hegemony, contain their ability to develop, obviously, nuclear weapons and to work towards support of those elements inside of Iran that would lead to a peaceful transition of that government.”

The question now is whether Tillerson was speaking for an administration that agrees on those elements and, if so, whether it is serious enough to put the building blocks of a comprehensive strategy in place – e.g., a close monitoring of Iranian compliance with the 2015 global nuclear agreement; greater U.S. economic sanctions in response to both Iran’s violations as well as its continuing terror-related efforts; closer U.S. military cooperation with its regional allies to counter Iran’s hegemonic ambitions; and a serious effort to engage with an Iranian populace that, to a great extent, finds the regime repugnant and yearns for more freedom and democracy.

In three recent reports, German intelligence and other authorities have revealed that Tehran is working to illegally acquire technology and expertise to advance both its nuclear and ballistic missile programs. The reports revealed, for instance, that three German citizens were charged in connection with “the deliveries of 51 special valves to an Iranian company” that Iran could use for its Arak heavy water reactor – a reactor that can develop plutonium for nuclear weapons and that Iran was supposed to dismantle under the nuclear agreement. They also revealed that Iran was seeking the “products and scientific know-how” to develop “weapons of mass destruction as well [as] missile technology.”

Meanwhile, Tehran dismissed Friday’s call by United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon that it stop its ballistic missile testing that he said violates the spirit of the nuclear agreement. That’s because Iran is testing missiles that could carry a nuclear warhead, reinforcing concerns that – despite its statements to the contrary – it plans to pursue nuclear weapons either by violating the agreement or waiting until it expires over the next decade or so.

According to an Ipsos survey, commissioned and published by Le Monde, 65 percent of French people believe that there are “too many foreigners” in France, while 60 percent say that they “don’t feel at home as they did before.”

Also, over 60 percent said that migrants “in France do not make the effort to integrate,” and 46 percent believe that integration isn’t a complicated process.

The percentages vary depending on the political views of the respondents, with 95 percent of far-right National Front supporters saying that there are too many foreigners in France. The figure for Republicans is 83 percent (up seven percent since last year), while the left-leaning Socialists’ figure is 46 percent.

Similarly, social divisions remain clear; 77 percent of laborers think that there are too many foreigners in France, compared with 46 percent of managers.

Islam also remains a hot topic for the French. Another Ipsos annual survey, ‘French Fractures 2017,’ indicated that 60 percent of the respondents believe Islam is incompatible “with the values of the French Republic.”

In another question, an overwhelming 78 percent of the French regard Islam as a religion “seeking to impose its way of life on others.”

About 46 percent said that “even if it is not its main message, Islam still contains within it the seeds of violence and intolerance.” The figure is five percent up from the previous year.

The surveys were conducted amid a state of high alert, following two years of jihadist attacks. In November 2015, 130 people were killed in Paris; in July 2016, 86 people died in a truck attack in Nice.

France has been engulfed by disputes over Islam – one particularly hot topic being burkinis, an Islamic piece of beachwear.

Last summer, it was forbidden for a while to swim in burkinis on French beaches, though the Supreme Court ruled the measure unconstitutional in August. This year, the row has been renewed. A few days ago, the mayor of Lorette in central France banned the full-body swimsuit from a new leisure park, despite a high court ruling the bans illegal last year. Also, an activist tried to arrange a burkini beach party during the Cannes Film Festival, and the city administration pulled the plug on the plan.

Last Thursday, Dressed in battle fatigues and adopting a martial tone, Iraq’s Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi entered the remains of the historic al-Nuri Mosque in Mosul to announce the end of ISIS.

“The return of al-Nuri Mosque and al-Hadba minaret to the fold of the nation marks the end of the Daesh state of falsehood,” Abadi asserted.

The prime minister took part in a number of photo-ops, including several with the famous al-Hadba (The Hunchback), the 850-year old minaret as background.

Al-Hadba looked like an apt symbol for Iraq today, a nation bent down by decades of tyranny and war.

Iraqi Army commanders and soldiers in Mosul, Iraq on June 23, 2017. (Photo by Martyn Aim/Getty Images)

The question is: will the “hunchback” straighten up its back? In other words, are the Iraqi leaders capable of offering their people a chance to build a better future?

“The liberation of Mosul will be a new birth for Iraq,” Vice President Ayad Allawi told us in conversation last April. “A pluralist, non-sectarian Iraq is possible. We must all work together to make it a reality.”

Abadi’s triumphal speech in Mosul contained no hint of future moves apart from continuing to hunt down ISIS fighters and, presumably, sleeping cells across Iraq and, perhaps, even beyond in Syria.

Abadi is right in telling Iraqis that though the false caliphate is over, the fight against ISIS isn’t. Many Iraqis wonder what ISIS might do?

Citing reports by Iraqi Intelligence, Allawi says that ISIS has already opened “a dialogue” with its original “mother”, Qaeda, about a possible merger or at least coordination at tactical operational levels.

That view is partly shared by US and British intelligence analysts who report “intense debates” within the global Jihadi movement regarding future strategy.

However, though a child of Qaeda in Iraq, ISIS developed its own strategy. Qaeda was not interested in control of territory and had learned to live under the protection of others, the Turabi-dominated government in Sudan in the early 1990s, the Taliban emirate in Afghanistan until 2001, and tribal chiefdoms in South Waziristan after that Qaeda focused its energies on fighting the “distant enemy” including with spectacular attacks on the United States.

In contrast, ISIS, cast itself as a state with a distinct territory, an economy, an army and an administration. ISIS was focused on “eliminating” the “near enemy” including non-Muslim minorities or “deviant Muslims” who had to be massacred. The attacks made in ISIS’ name in Europe and the United Sates were ad-hoc operations, often prompted by copycats and endorsed by ISIS after the fact.

A 10-year-old girl from a former republic of the Soviet Union was raped by an asylum seeker from Ghana, but police and the local government allegedly suppressed information about the crime for more than two weeks.

A student sexually assaulted an 11-year-old girl and punched another boy in the face, breaking his glasses. At least six other students have been beaten bloody. The school’s leadership has refused to discipline the child, apparently because of his migrant background, and instead has lashed out at the parents for demanding a safe environment for their children.

Police in Lübeck suspect that refugees are taking over illegal drug trade in the city.

June 1. A Syrian migrant was stabbed to death in Oldenburg by another Syrian because he was eating ice cream during Ramadan. The murder, which occurred in broad daylight in a busy pedestrian shopping area, was just the latest example of Islamic law, Sharia, being enforced on German streets.

June 2. Around one million non-Europeans living in Germany are now on welfare, an increase of 124% in just one year, according to new statistics from the Federal Employment Agency (Bundesagentur für Arbeit). The top welfare beneficiaries are from: Syria (509,696); Turkey (276,399); Iraq (110,529) and Afghanistan (65,443).

June 2. Police temporarily halted the annual Rock am Ring music festival in Nürburg because of a possible jihadist threat. Authorities asked the 90,000 visitors to leave the concert grounds in a “controlled and calm” manner. The move was based on “concrete leads which do not allow us to eliminate a possible terror threat,” the police said.

June 3. Bavarian Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann called on Germany’s BfV domestic intelligence agency to begin surveilling minors suspected of being involved with Islamist groups:

“I would strongly urge for the age limit for surveillance to be lowered throughout Germany. Minors have already committed serious acts of violence. Normally, the domestic intelligence agency in Bavaria would not place children under surveillance. But if there is concrete evidence that a 12-year-old is with an Islamist group, we have to be able to monitor them, too.”

June 4. Mostafa J., a 41-year-old asylum seeker from Afghanistan, stabbed to death a five-year-old Russian at a refugee shelter in Arnschwang. The Afghan, who had been arguing with the boy’s 47-year-old mother, was shot to death by police after a standoff. It later emerged that the man had a criminal history in Germany and should have been deported but was not. In October 2009, for example, a court in Munich sentenced Mostafa J. to six years in prison for arson. In July 2011, he received a deportation order, but in 2014 he fooled a judge into believing that he had converted to Christianity and would be killed if he were deported to Afghanistan.

June 5. A study conducted by the Hanns Seidel Foundation, a think tank affiliated with Bavaria’s Christian Social Union, found that half the asylum seekers in Bavaria subscribe to classic anti-Semitic views about Jewish power. Around 60% of Afghans, 53% of Iraqis and 52% of Syrians said Jews wield too much influence.

June 7. A 27-year-old migrant from Syria stabbed and killed a Red Cross mental health counselor in Saarbrücken. The attacker and the psychologist allegedly got into an argument during a therapy session at a counselling center for traumatized refugees.

June 9. A court in Cottbus sentenced a 32-year-old Chechen migrant named Rashid D. to 13 years in prison for slitting his wife’s throat and throwing her out of the second-floor window of their apartment. The couple’s five children now live in Chechnya with their grandparents. The man was charged with manslaughter rather than murder because, according to the court, the “honor killing” was done in the heat of passion: the man thought that his wife had been unfaithful.

Obama’s Cairo Address, June 4, 2009

About five months after the inauguration of Barack Obama, the president gave a strange address in Cairo. The speech was apparently designed to win over the Muslim world and set Obama apart from the supposed Western chauvinism of the prior and much caricatured George W. Bush administration.

Obama started off by framing past and present tensions between Muslims and the West largely in the context of explicit and implied Western culpability: past European colonialism, and the moral equivalence of the Cold War and disruptive Westernize globalization.

In a pattern that would become all too familiar in the next seven years, Obama reviewed his own familial Muslim pedigree. This was his attempt to persuade Islam that a president of the United States, no less, now uniquely stood astride the East–West divide with a proverbial foot in both America and the Middle East.

Obama nobly lied that Islam had been “paving the way” for the West’s Renaissance and Enlightenment (neither claim was remotely true). Equally fallacious was Obama’s additional yarn that Muslim Cordoba was a paragon of religious tolerance during the Spanish Inquisition (it had been liberated by the Reconquista Christian forces nearly 250 years before the beginning of the Inquisition, and by 1478 few Muslims were left in the city). The message — its veracity was irrelevant — was that a humble and multicultural Barack Hussein Obama alone had the historical insight and cultural background and authenticity that would allow him to serve as a bridge to peace between two morally equivalent rivals.

Obama then rattled off a series of relativist, on-the-one-hand and on-the-other-hand, split-the-difference remedies to the current tensions with radical Islamism (all couched in vague euphemisms). The proposition was that the West should accept blame, and so should the sometimes culpable Islamic world. Only then would good compromises follow — given the assumption that conflict always arises out of ignorance and misunderstanding rather than that the guiltier side of a dispute knows precisely why it has chosen an aggressive and hostile path.

Seven years later, Obama’s outreach and his successive lengthy recitals of all the bad things America has done in the world and all the good America has done to encourage and placate Muslims (including redirecting NASA to the agenda of Muslim outreach) had come to nothing.

Indeed, the years of Obama’s presidency saw a sharp uptick in jihadists attacks against Europe and the United States, the rise of ISIS in Iraq, the genocide in Syria, and a series of appeasing gestures that spiked tensions, from the false red line in Syria to the bombing of and skedaddle from Libya to the disastrous and deliberate laxity in diplomatic security that culminated in the tragedy in Benghazi. Obama left office having alienated the moderate Sunni Arab nations, appeased an anti-Western Iran, and abdicated American power in the Middle East. Calm did not follow. For Middle Easterners, the Obama era meant that the United States was a lousy friend and a harmless foe, the common denominator being that one could ignore the pretensions of such a naive rhetorician.

A realist might have asked Obama, “If the president of the United State did not believe in the singularity of his nation, then why in the world would foreigners?” And if the nominal head of the West contextualized his culture when abroad, then why wouldn’t its autocratic enemies see that concession as weakness to be exploited rather than magnanimity to be reciprocated?