RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13470/turkey-turns-on-america

How interesting that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan called Turkey and the U.S. “strategic partners,” when he has repeatedly stated that Turkish campaigns in northern Syria are aimed at eliminating U.S.-backed Kurdish groups. Erdogan referred to these groups as “terrorists” whom Turkey is “burying in the wells that they have dug.”

On December 20, Erdogan held a joint press conference with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, in which Erdogan announced that Ankara is siding with Tehran against Washington.

President Trump said Turkey “should be able to easily take care of whatever remains” of ISIS in Syria. But Turkey did not bomb or invade Syrian or Iraqi territories when ISIS invaded and took over those lands. In fact, ISIS members and supporters have been operating in Turkey, and the Turkish government has at times treated those who expose ISIS activities more harshly than ISIS supporters themselves.

The U.S. withdrawal will end up costing Americans far more in blood and treasure down the line than the small but deterrent footprint there now. The damage a withdrawal will do at this time is inestimable — and will go down in history as Trump’s legacy, just as Neville Chamberlain’s is the bogus deal Hitler dangled in front of him. It would have been so much less costly in blood and treasure to defeat Hitler before he crossed the Rhine. How ironic it would be if Trump were to go down in history as one of those “losers” he so detests.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13461/andrea-leadsom-brexit

The whole kerfuffle over the Protocol on Ireland/Northern Ireland – the so-called “backstop” – could be ended by making one simple addition to Article 20 of the Protocol.

The EU keeps insisting that, in order to protect Ireland, the “backstop” cannot be modified. But if that insistence leads to a no-deal Brexit, it will guarantee that Ireland suffers the very damage that the “backstop” was supposed to prevent!

Among the Conservative MPs opposed to May’s deal, there is now an emerging consensus that if she can obtain convincing assurances over the “backstop” from the EU, accepting her deal may be the least bad option. This may be a turning of the tide.

If the EU refuses to give May legally binding assurances to ensure a brief application – if any – of the “backstop,” it alone will be responsible and worthy of condemnation for every misery that ensues from a no-deal Brexit.

Andrea Leadsom is the Leader of the House of Commons, that is, she is responsible for arranging government business. She has also proposed a solution to the problem of the “backstop” which is based on the same principle as our own earlier suggestion, namely, to limit the application of the “backstop” to one year renewable by mutual consent.

If there is anyone fresh to the Brexit drama, let us recall that the deal to leave the European Union negotiated by UK PM Theresa May consists of two documents, the Withdrawal Agreement (WA, 585 pages) and the Framework for the Future Relationship (FFR, 26 pages). The WA both winds up the current UK-EU relationship and defines the nature of the “transition period” from March 29 next, the day that the UK officially leaves the EU, to the end of 2020. During that transition period, the FFR is due to be turned into a full-fledged treaty defining the future trading and other relations of the two parties.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272320/how-canada-protects-sharia-frontpagemagcom

[Below is a review by Fergus Hodgson in Epoch Times of Fired by the Canadian Government for Criticizing Islam, which is Frontpage Associate Editor Christine Douglass-Williams’ account of how she was fired by the Canadian government for criticizing Islam. Get Fired! Here.]

If you denounce Sharia law in a public fashion you will suffer. Outside of the arab world, this also holds true in Canada, where a member of the Canadian Race Relations Foundation board was fired over comments on Sharia law.

Such intimidation elicits self-censorship and an incremental downward spiral for Canada’s proudly modern, liberal society.

Christine Douglass-Williams was a director of the Canadian Race Relations Foundation (CRRF) from 2012 to late 2017, and she has documented her story in a courageous new book: Fired by the Canadian Government for Criticizing Islam. Published in September by the Center for Security Policy—a neoconservative-leaning think tank in Washington—this 103-page story leaves no doubt about the swift enforcement of political correctness under the Liberal Party government.

A mulatto migrant from Trinidad and Tobago and self-described “visible minority,” Williams is an accomplished journalist and expert on Islam, author of The Challenge of Modernizing Islam. As a widely read contributor to Jihad Watch and sought-after speaker, she became a victim of her own success. Her profile rose to include engagements throughout Canada and abroad, notably in Iceland alongside Robert Spencer, author of The Truth about Muhammad and a fellow of the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
The Straw That Broke the Camel’s Back

Her concerns about the nature of Sharia law, particularly its implications for women and migrant integration, were right out in the open and never kept a secret. However, as her perspective garnered traction, murmurings grew.

At a May 2017 event in Reykjavik, titled “Everything You Wanted to Know about Islam but Were Afraid to Ask,” she offered a “personal warning to Icelanders.” She believed the Icelandic population was “being duped,” and she warned that “Westerners need to be street smart as citizens of a culture that idolizes multiculturalism.”

To be fair, she didn’t mince words. Consider the following excerpt from her message to Icelanders:

“Islamic supremacists will smile at you, invite you to their gatherings, make you feel loved and welcome, but they do it to deceive you and to overtake you, your land and your freedoms. … [Sharia] stipulates—among other abuses—death for apostasy, death for gays, a lower value to women, and the full covering of women.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272313/no-room-inn-asia-bibi-christmas-jules-gomes

Like Joseph, Mary and Jesus fleeing the murderous King Herod, Asia Bibi and her family will spend Christmas dodging murderous Muslim mobs in Pakistan. Not a single Western country has made room in the immigration inn for the world’s most famous persecuted Christian.

Theresa May, Britain’s Christian PM, has opened Britain’s Intersectional Inn to Syrian Muslims, hate preachers, returning jihadis and gays hounded for being homosexual. But the door of May’s Intersectional Inn remains shut to a Pakistani Christian who has spent eight years on death row for the crime of blasphemy.

Intersectionality is the West’s new religion. Your value depends on how many victim groups you belong to. A one-eyed, black, lesbian, Palestinian, Muslim woman gets the gold medal. A heterosexual, black, woman, is awarded silver. A white, gay, American male is at the bottom with a bronze medal.

The religion of identity politics has a great commandment—love your neighbor depending on their position on the totem pole of intersectionality.

The high priests of this religion are innkeepers holding the keys to the doors to the Intersectional Inn. On merit alone, Asia Bibi should be accorded a red carpet welcome in the Intersectional Inn. Bibi is a colored (20 points) woman (20 points), who has been brutalized by Pakistan’s patriarchy (25 points). She is a low-class (10 points) and low-caste (20 points) farm laborer (15 points). She has rotted on death row facing the death penalty (30 points) for eight years for a crime she did not commit (15 points).

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2018/12/left-brain-right-brain-no-brain/

By their own estimation, so-called progressives are kind, caring and awash with empathy for all mankind. Meanjin scribbler Patrick Marlborough must have missed that memo, given his aren’t-I-smart slagging of the late Bill Leak.

It was famously said of the British and Americans, most likely by George Bernard Shaw, that they are divided by a common language.

To a lesser extent, possibly because we don’t have Britain’s regional accent distinctions, the same is true of Americans and Australians. When an American friend dropped by a few years ago, for example, he was utterly puzzled by frequent references in the press of people claiming to be “chuffed”.

One morning he found about three such references in the one newspaper. “What the hell does this word mean?” he asked, so I invited him to figure it out by considering the context.

He studied each sentence with scholarly concentration: “I was completely chuffed”, “I am absolutely chuffed”, and so on. Finally, my friend delivered his definition verdict.

“It means ‘drunk’,” he said.

Well, no. But it did for the rest of his trip.

The right and left sides of politics have lately arrived at a similar language gulf. Or maybe it isn’t so lately. Back in 2001, newly-elected US president George W. Bush vetoed a last-minute regulation on maximum arsenic particulate levels in water supplies that had been signed by his predecessor, Bill Clinton.

This move caused outrage among leftists, who raged that Bush’s veto exposed the nation’s children to risk of horrible death and furthermore proved that Republicans care not at all for innocent, water-craving families.

There was a logical flaw to those arguments, and they were quickly identified by Minnesota columnist James Lileks. “For all these accusations to work, you have to believe that Republicans want poisoned water,” he wrote. “You have to believe they drink different water than everyone else.”

“And, of course, they do,” Lileks continued, warming to this absurdity. “Doubt it? Switch parties. Join the GOP, and see what happens: cheerful clean-cut uniformed men show up the next day, and take you off the city water lines. They’ll connect you to the special Republican water system that crosses the nation, supplying pure clean perfect water to GOP households.”