RUTHFULLY YOURS

President Trump’s speech yesterday in Warsaw was better than inspiring. It was calculating and subtle, and sent strong messages to both our friends and adversaries. The crowd of cavilers who abhor Trump as an ignoramus should hang their heads in shame.

The president said:

We are confronted by another oppressive ideology — one that seeks to export terrorism and extremism all around the globe. America and Europe have suffered one terror attack after another. We’re going to get it to stop … While we will always welcome new citizens who share our values and love our people, our borders will always be closed to terrorism and extremism of any kind.

…

Today, the West is also confronted by the powers that seek to test our will, undermine our confidence, and challenge our interests. To meet new forms of aggression, including propaganda, financial crimes, and cyberwarfare, we must adapt our alliance to compete effectively in new ways and on all new battlefields.

We urge Russia to cease its destabilizing activities in Ukraine and elsewhere, and its support for hostile regimes — including Syria and Iran — and to instead join the community of responsible nations in our fight against common enemies and in defense of civilization itself.

There is a double message to Moscow here.

First, the United States has drawn a red line at the Polish border, making clear that America will shed blood if need be to defend its Polish ally. Second, the line is drawn around Poland, not Ukraine. The United States is prepared to reach an agreement with Russia over Ukraine if Russia stops destabilizing Ukraine and if it leashes its Iranian dog. The United States has sent a clear message — as the president reminded his Warsaw audience — that it will not tolerate the tolerance of terror by the Saudis or other Sunni allies. We expect Russia to do the same with its Shi’ite allies.

That is tough, but realistic. Trump is willing to negotiate with the Russians, but from a position of strength, in solidarity with our allies who have suffered historically from Russian aggression, and with unambiguous lines in the sand. It was a brilliantly crafted speech, the slickest as well as the most inspiring foreign policy address of any American president since Ronald Reagan.

Trump also gave Poland and other Eastern European countries critical backing in their fight against the European Union’s attempt to force them to accept their quota of Muslim migrants.

That’s the good news.

The bad news is that Poland itself is probably past the demographic point of no return. The president intoned:

While Poland could be invaded and occupied, and its borders even erased from the map, it could never be erased from history or from your hearts. In those dark days, you have lost your land but you never lost your pride.

So it is with true admiration that I can say today, that from the farms and villages of your countryside to the cathedrals and squares of your great cities, Poland lives, Poland prospers, and Poland prevails.

Maybe not so much. With a total fertility rate of just 1.3 children per female, Poland is headed for demographic disaster. Poland today has one retiree for every four working-age citizens. By 2045 there will be one retiree for every two working-age citizens, and the burden of elderly dependence will crush the Polish economy. In a century, the Polish population will shrink to insignificance:

Only one major country has come back from the demographic brink, and that is Russia. At the collapse of Communism, Russian women were bearing just 1.1 children on average. That has since risen to almost 1.8, just below the American level. The demographers have not yet offered us an adequate explanation of this unprecedented turnaround, but I suspect that it coincides with a revival of religion in the former fortress of atheism. Some 80% of Russian women now identify as Orthodox Christian compared to 30% just after the collapse of Communism, according to the Pew Forum.

The refugee crisis in France is getting worse as authorities say that up to 500 migrants arrive in Paris every week and join makeshift encampments that pose a “security and public health risk” to residents.

The camps are situated on the sidewalks near a refugee processing center. Paris police are now conducting round-ups of the migrants, moving them to temporary lodgings all over the city.

Reuters:

The migrants were being escorted onto buses to be taken to temporary lodgings such as gymnasium buildings in Paris and areas ringing the capital. Live TV footage showed what appeared to be a peaceful evacuation.

Interior Minister Gerard Collomb said earlier this week the situation was getting out of hand with more than 400 arrivals a week in the area.

“It’s always the same problem,” he said on Thursday. “First off you say ‘I’m going to open a center for 500 people’ and next thing you know you have 3,000 or 4,000 people and you’re left having to sort the problem out.”

He has been asked by President Emmanuel Macron to produce a plan to accelerate processing of asylum requests with a view to deciding within six months who will be granted refugee status and who gets sent back.

The camp in Paris has swollen despite the creation of two new centers by Paris City Hall to register and temporarily house migrants arriving in the city.

Local authorities have also reported a rise in recent weeks in the number of migrants roaming the streets of the northern port city of Calais, where a sprawling illegal camp was razed to the ground last November and its inhabitants dispatched to other parts of France.

Calais, from which migrants hope to reach Britain, has come to symbolize Europe’s difficulty in dealing with a record influx of men, women and children who have fled their native countries.

Last year, police cleared a huge refugee camp outside Calais, but it didn’t do much good. Another one has sprung up to take its place.

As for Paris, police made no mention of it, but the city has become a “no-go” zone for tourists because of the increase in crime. It doesn’t help that authorities allow the refugees to sleep and congregate on the sidewalks in the middle of the city. Spreading the problem out by moving the migrants to various places around the city is likely to increase crime in those areas, too.

France has been stricter than some European countries in granting asylum requests, but the number of refugees keeps climbing. Immigration was not the top issue in the recent presidential and parliamentary elections, but it’s still there as a problem. Eventually, it’s probable that, like almost everywhere else in Europe, there will be a voter backlash. What, then, will new president Macron do?

Good Friday Morning.

Here is what’s on President Trump’s agenda today:

In the morning, President Donald J. Trump will attend the G-20 Summit Leaders’ Retreat.
In the afternoon, the President will participate in an expanded meeting with President Peña Nieto of Mexico. The President will then join the G-20 Summit Leaders Working Lunch.
Later in the afternoon, the President will attend the G-20 Summit Leaders’ Working Session II.
The President will then participate in an expanded meeting with President Vladimir Putin of Russia. IT’S HAPPENING!
In the evening, the President will attend the G-20 Summit Reception.
The President will then attend the G-20 Summit Concert.
Later in the evening, the President will attend the G-20 Summit Social Dinner.

Trump to meet RUSSIAN Putin today

Or perhaps they will “reunite,” if you get your news from CNN. The meeting will take place during the G-20 summit in Hamburg, Germany.

The New York Times says the meeting will be a win-win for Putin.

Whatever the outcome of the encounter on Friday — which will be on the sidelines of the Group of 20 summit meeting of world leaders in Hamburg, Germany, but is expected to overshadow it — the Kremlin is betting that Mr. Putin can stage-manage the event so that he comes out looking like the stronger party.

If nothing much emerges from the meeting, analysts said, the Kremlin can repeat the standard Russian line that Mr. Trump is weak, hamstrung by domestic politics.

But if Mr. Trump agrees to work with Mr. Putin despite a list of Russian transgressions beginning with the annexation of Crimea and ending with its interference in the 2016 presidential election, he will also look weak while Mr. Putin can claim that he reconstructed the relationship.

“It is a win-win situation for Putin,” said Andrei V. Kolesnikov, a political analyst at the Carnegie Moscow Center.

Whatever Russia hopes to get from the meeting, the fake news stories about RUSSIAN hacking will loom over the discussions.

The Kremlin is aware that Trump critics will be watching for further signs that the American leader is soft on Russia. “Trump is being accused of cooperating with Russia, so if he makes any concessions to Moscow, these accusations will gain strength,” said Aleksei Makarkin, deputy head of the Center for Political Technologies, a Moscow think tank.

The Kremlin has watched, chagrined, as the Trump administration has rolled back various positions stated during the campaign — his questioning of the viability of NATO, for example, or his expressions of sympathy for the Russian position on Crimea.

“The Kremlin is astonished that the president cannot behave like a real president, like ours, so what can they do in this situation?” Mr. Kolesnikov asked.

Commentary in the official Russian news media suggested that Moscow was baffled by the lack of a confirmed agenda, while various senior officials and the Kremlin press service have listed possible talking points that cover virtually every major international issue.

DANGEROUS REFUGEES: Afghans 79 TIMES More Likely to RAPEhttps://www.10news.one/dangerous-refugees-afghans-79-times-more-likely-to-rape/

New data from Sweden shows how immigration and refugees from Islamic countries puts especially women in danger.

92 percent of all severe rapes (violent rapes) are committed by migrants and refugees. 100 percent of all attack rapes (where victim and attacker had no previous contact) are committed by that same group. In other words, thousands of Swedish women would not have been raped and thereby traumatized for life, had it not been for the influx from Islamic countries.

The top-10 list over rapists’ national back ground shows only one non-Islamic country (Chile). Most rapists have Iraqi back ground, followed by refugees and migrants from Afghanistan, Somalia, Eritrea, Syria, Gambia, Iran, Palestine, Chile and Kosovo.

When taking into account the number of people from the different nationalities in Sweden, Afghans are 79 times more likely to commit a sexual crime than people born from Swedish citizens.

Also read: Driving instructor: “If it wasn’t Ramadan, I would have F**CKED THE SH*T out of you”

Last year Peter Springare, a Swedish police officer, broke the political correct silence on the rape epidemy in the liberal-feminist governed Sweden.

“Here is, what I have been handling last week: rape, rape, severe rape, attack rape, extortion, extortion, violence, illegal threats, violence against the police, threats against the police, drug dealing, severe drug dealing, attempted murder, rape, extortion, and violence.”

Springare also published the criminals’ nationality:

“The criminals’ country of origin: Iraq, Iraq, Turkey, Syria, Afghanistan, Somalia, Somalia, Syria, Somalia, unknown country, unknown country, Sweden. With half of the suspects we do not know the country of origin because they have no valid papers. This usually means that they are lying about their nationality and identity.”

Also read: Father “honor rapes” daugther’s boyfriend

Other Western European countries are experiencing similar challenges to womens’ security. Since Denmark caved to UN pressure in 2015 and started taking in thousands of asylum seekers from Islamic countries, rapes soared 163 percent in just one year.

On New Year 2015, thousands of sexual crimes was committed in Cologne, Germany, and other major European cities by Muslim migrants and asylum seekers.

100 percent of attack rapes in Oslo are committed by foreign men, often asylum seekers. According to Norwegian police, the many rapes happen because the men are raised in a culture that promotes such behaviour:

“The greatest difference is that in Europe, politics and religion have been separated from one another, but in the case of Islam it is religion that determines politics” — Zoltan Balog, Hungary’s Minister for Human Resources.

It is no coincidence that President Donald Trump chose Poland, a country that fought both Nazism and Communism, to call on the West to show a little willingness in its existential fight against the new totalitarianism: radical Islam.

“Possessing weapons is one thing, and possessing the will to use them is another thing altogether”. — Professor William Kilpatrick, Boston College.

In a historic speech to an enthusiastic Polish crowd before the meeting of the G20 Summit leaders, US President Donald Trump described the West’s battle against “radical Islamic terrorism” as the way to protect “our civilization and our way of life”. Trump asked if the West had the will to survive:

“Do we have the confidence in our values to defend them at any cost? Do we have enough respect for our citizens to protect our borders? Do we have the desire and the courage to preserve our civilization in the face of those who would subvert and destroy it?”

Trump’s question might find an answer in Eastern Europe, where he chose to deliver his powerful speech.

President Donald Trump gives a speech in Warsaw, Poland, in front of the monument commemorating the 1944 Warsaw Uprising against the Germans, on July 6, 2017. (Image source: The White House)

After an Islamist suicide-bomber murdered 22 concert-goers in Manchester, including two Poles, Poland’s prime minister, Beata Szydło, said that Poland would not be “blackmailed” into accepting thousands of refugees under the European Union’s quota system. She urged Polish lawmakers to safeguard the country and Europe from the scourges of Islamist terrorism and cultural suicide:

“Where are you headed, Europe? Rise from your knees and from your lethargy, or you will be crying over your children every day”.

For more than a decade now, Vladimir Putin has sought to reverse what he called in 2005 the “major geopolitical disaster of the [20th] century,” that is, the collapse of the Soviet Union. Playing a very weak economic hand as oil prices fell, and beset by major demographic problems and an aging Soviet-era military, Putin has done quite well. At minimal risk, he invaded Georgia, and he keeps it under his thumb today using economic, military, and diplomatic pressure. Energy remains an important tool for Moscow; a recent agreement allows Russia to pipe natural gas through Georgia to Russia-friendly Armenia.

Russia seized the Crimea, continues military operations in Eastern Ukraine, and is the major power in the Black Sea, from which it has projected power into the Middle East. Russian arms and support have prolonged Syria’s civil war and all but assured the brutal Syrian dictator’s throne. To the north, Putin threatens the Baltic states with cyberattacks, the possibility of quick and mass mobilizations, and propaganda aimed at dividing ethnic Russians and Russian-speakers within those States.

Traced on a map, Russia’s influence is an incomplete parabola that reaches from the Black Sea through the Eastern Mediterranean and curves northeast into the Baltic Sea. Moscow is now meddling in the Balkans. If it is successful in restarting the ethnic/religious disputes there, the unfinished parabola that Russia has carved since Vladimir Putin’s rise to power will be completed with major influence that reaches its western vertex in the Balkan heart of central Europe. A cordon sanitaire this is not, yet; but Putin’s aims are clear.

Russian tampering in the Balkans goes back centuries. In their struggles with the Ottomans, Russia aided Serb rebels with arms in the 19th century. Russian “volunteers” for the Slav cause and its mobilization in the face of the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s declaration of war against Serbia in July 1914 helped ignite World War I. The pattern of Russia’s behavior in the Balkans has not changed.

Political tensions are rising in Bosnia-Herzegovina. More than two decades removed from the country’s bloody, ethnically fueled war and the collapse of Yugoslavia, the divided country is experiencing a resurgence in separatist rhetoric from Bosnian Serbs in the Republika Srpska, Bosnia’s autonomous Serbian enclave. Separatist talk is certain to push Bosnian Croats toward Zagreb and increase the fragility of the Dayton Accords, the 1995 arrangement that established the Republika Srpska as an autonomous part of Bosnia and ended the Balkans conflict. There’s a good reason “Balkanization” has entered our vocabulary as a description of splintering states. Russian involvement has helped inflame the Serbs’ resentment toward their neighbors. Increased instability in the Balkans challenges the NATO alliance, threatens the European Union, and offers Vladimir Putin another low-cost option to stick it to the West.

Specifically, Russia has increased its public support of Milorad Dodik, the president of the Republika Srpska, who has called for a referendum on independence within the Serbian-majority region of Bosnia. In September 2016, Dodik held a referendum in Republika Srpska that reestablished January 9 as a day of celebration for the region’s 1992 declaration of “independence” from Bosnia. Dodik held the referendum, which won 99.8 percent of the vote in the region, in defiance of a ruling by the Bosnia-Herzegovina Constitutional Court that it discriminated against non-Serb citizens. The international High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina, Valentin Inzko, declared the September 2016 referendum to be both “illegal and unconstitutional.”

The North Koreans put on their own pyrotechnic display over the July 4th weekend with a successful launch of an ICBM into the Sea of Japan. With a working ICBM, Kim Jong-Un’s regime is now capable of reaching Alaska. If they continue testing and learning from their previous launch, it is only a matter of time before the North Koreans could strike any major American city.https://amgreatness.com/2017/07/06/madmen-nukes-north-korean-edition/

Time is all that stands in the way between Kim and the ability to incinerate Los Angeles or Chicago or New York. It wasn’t that long ago the North didn’t have nukes at all.

In 1994, the Clinton Administration wanted to strike a nuclear reactor in Yongbyon to prevent the North Koreans from recovering the raw materials necessary for making nuclear bombs. However, after looking at his options—the costs, both in terms of lives and treasure, that another Korean war would incur—former President Clinton chose to create a multilateral framework that would encourage the North to abandon its nuclear weapons program in exchange for Western concessions.

The North’s demand was simple: if the United States did not want to see a nuclear-armed North Korea, they had to pay the Kim regime not to develop nukes.

The international community happily agreed. As it is with most blackmailers, however, paying the ransom only encouraged them to double down on bad behavior. The only difference in this instance was that the international community became complacent about the threat that North Korea posed because an “agreement” had been reached.

Meanwhile, the North Koreans took the blackmail money and invested it in their military—including their nuclear program—and in a program of enriching the corrupt members of the regime. They then systematically raised the stakes on the international community.

From George W. Bush to Barack Obama, different combinations of carrots-and-sticks were paraded in front of the North Koreans in an attempt to stabilize relations and bring security and stability to the Korean Peninsula. Each time, the Kim Regime was unfazed. Indeed, in spite of sanctions, the North Koreans successfully tested a nuclear weapon in 2006. So, whether you’re Hillary Clinton demanding that Trump replicate her husband’s schemes from 1994, or if you’re Elliot Abrams insisting that Trump reinstitute the George W. Bush-era sanctions regime, you’re making an argument that—however different in particulars—is the same in its level of utter ineffectiveness. .

Over the last two decades, the North has become the hub of international criminal schemes, a critical point in the global human trafficking system; it has suborned international terrorism; and more importantly, it has become a major player in a global, illicit network of nuclear proliferation. On the international stage, North Korea’s nuclear shenanigans are protected by the Chinese and the Russians. The primary beneficiaries of all this are other rogue states, such as Iran. Clearly, this is not the kind of regime with which Americans should feel comfortable in the knowledge that it possesses nuclear weapons.

Many (until recently, myself included) had hoped China would apply pressure to goad Pyongyang into being more cooperative. It’s clear now that China won’t lift a finger to help (though Beijing will happily string the United States along, so the Chinese can extract more concessions from us). China fears what would happen if the Kim regime collapsed: their worst nightmare is for a human tidal wave of North Korean refugees to swamp their borders and destabilize their country. Plus, the Chinese historically favor “stability” above all else. They cannot be relied upon. And, now with Russia getting involved on behalf of North Korea, there is little hope for an international settlement on this issue. The autocrats will have each other’s backs.

Pyongyang has paid close attention to what has happened to similar autocratic dictatorships around the world that did not possess nuclear arms: America toppled them. Whether speaking about Saddam Hussein or Muammar Gaddafi, a lack of nuclear arms makes such regimes susceptible to being overthrown by the United States. Meanwhile, similar regimes that may have nuclear arms—such as Iran—are given a wide berth by the United States.

One day last year, Evan Mawarire was feeling very low. He had just turned 39 — and he considered himself a failure. He had a wife and two children, which was great. And there was a third child on the way — also great. But Mawarire could barely make ends meet.

The family was living hand to mouth. Mawarire could not afford school fees for the children. He owned no home of his own. Prospects seemed negligible.

“I was dejected and frustrated,” Mawarire says, “but also, for the first time in a long time, I was angry.”

That was April 19. The 18th had been Zimbabwe’s independence day. And on the 19th, Mawarire sat down and made a four-minute video, with the Zimbabwean flag wrapped around his neck.

That flag is a colorful one. And all the colors have meanings. For example, red is supposed to stand for the blood that patriots shed in the liberation effort. But what would those patriots say about Zimbabwe now? What had they died for? That’s the kind of thing Mawarire asked in his video.

At the end of it, he asked Zimbabweans to stand up: for themselves, for their flag, and for their country.

He hesitated to post this video, naturally: He lives in a dictatorship. He knew the video could get him into big trouble. But post it he did, around midnight. After a hard, emotional day, he went to bed.

The next morning, he received a call from a friend, who had unexpected news: The video was going viral. It had struck a nerve among Zimbabweans. And it would lead to a democracy movement that travels under a hashtag, #ThisFlag.

Evan Mawarire does not see himself as a political leader. “I’m someone who has been able to express the views, the frustrations, and the hopes of an oppressed population.” But others see him as a political leader, including the regime. “I didn’t find it,” says Mawarire, of politics. “It found me.”

A word about pronunciation. That name is pronounced “Mah-wah-REER-ay.” And his first name, interestingly enough, is pronounced “Ee-VAHN” (though he also answers to the familiar “EH-vin”).

He was born in 1977, during the final days of Rhodesia. He spent his early childhood in a ghetto of Salisbury, the capital city (now Harare). In 1980, when independence came, Robert Mugabe took power. He still has it, 37 years later.

At 93, he is one of the oldest men ever to rule a country. Next year, there will be another of those sham elections that dictators sometimes feel the need of holding. Mugabe will run. If he dies, his wife has said, the ruling party will run his corpse.

Mawarire was brought up in a Christian home. His parents were civil servants. Evan worked in business for a while. But he also worked at church, teaching Sunday school and the like. And he found this much more fulfilling. “So I decided I would give my life to pastoring,” he says. He quit his job, went to Bible school, and indeed became a pastor. That was 15 years ago.

When he made his “flag” video, he did not stop there: He made 25 more videos, one a day from May 1 to May 25, which is Africa Day on the continent. Mawarire wanted Zimbabweans to think, “What kind of African nation do we wish to be?” In those videos, he discussed the various problems of Zimbabwe.

And he continued to strike nerves. The democracy movement grew. Mawarire’s repeated message was, It’s up to us to save ourselves. No one’s going to swoop in and help us. We have to claim our own country.

He tells me that, year after year, he watched rigged elections. “And I always yearned for someone to come to our rescue: regional powers, or the African Union, or the United Nations. But there is so much happening across the world, there is no one to listen to your own troubles. We have to rescue ourselves.”

Mawarire and his movement have a slogan: “If we cannot cause the politician to change, then we must inspire the citizen to be bold.”

Zimbabwe is in desperate shape — it is desperately poor. Unemployment is something like 95 percent. And more than half the population is under the age of 25. Silvanos Mudzvova has something funny to say, regarding this mass joblessness.

He is a Zimbabwean actor, playwright, and activist. He is also a guest of the Oslo Freedom Forum, as is Pastor Mawarire. (It is in Oslo that I talk with Mawarire.) In Zimbabwe, Mudzvova used theater as a form of protest. In a country where nobody’s working, he quips, “you are assured of an audience within minutes.”

They arrested him many, many times — so many times, he lost count. Finally, they tortured him almost to death, leaving him paralyzed on one side. Mudzvova now lives in exile, in Britain.

Last July 6, there was a mass protest in Zimbabwe. And, six days later, Evan Mawarire was arrested. The charge was incitement to violence. What happened next, as people have noted, is straight out of a movie.

The courthouse for Mawarire’s hearing was packed to the rafters. People were singing: worship songs, church songs. Outside, there were thousands of people, also singing. Mawarire could hear it from his prison cell. The young guards were amazed: They had never seen anything like it, and neither had anyone else.