… Crooks, failures, plagiarizers, traitors – that’s who.

The European corruptocracy decides, after much wrangling, who of its in-crowd will get the next innings in the highly rewarded sinecures at the head of the so-called European Union.

Soeren Kern writes (in part) at Gatestone July 8 2019

European leaders on July 2 nominated four federalists to fill the top jobs of the European Union. The nominations  … send a clear signal that the pro-EU establishment has no intention of slowing its relentless march toward a European superstate, a “United States of Europe”, despite a surge of anti-EU sentiment across the continent.

Following are brief profiles of the nominees for the top four positions in the next European Commission …

1.Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission

German Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen, the daughter of a prominent EU official, has been nominated to replace Jean-Claude Juncker as the next president of the European Commission, the powerful bureaucratic arm of the European Union. …

Von der Leyen has called for the creation of a European superstate. …

 She has also called for the creation of a European Army.

At the same time, however, von der Leyen has been roundly criticized at home and abroad for her performance as German defense minister. During her tenure, Germany’s military has deteriorated due to budget cuts and poor management …

“The Bundeswehr’s condition is catastrophic,” wrote Rupert Scholz, who served as defense minister under Chancellor Helmut Kohl, days before von der Leyen was nominated to the EU’s top post. “The entire defense capability of the Federal Republic is suffering, which is totally irresponsible.”

Writing for the Munich-based newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, commentator Stefan Ulrich opined that von der Leyen is an “unsuitable” choice: “Von der Leyen is unsuitable because after six years as defense minister the Bundeswehr is still in such a deplorable state. She should have resigned a long time ago. As President of the European Commission, she will be overwhelmed.”

In March 2016, von der Leyen was cleared of allegations of plagiarism in her doctoral thesis. In September 2015, the newsmagazine Der Spiegel reported that plagiarized material had been found on 27 pages of her 62-page dissertation. The president of the Hanover Medical School, Christopher Baum, said that although von der Leyen’s thesis did contain plagiarized material, the school decided against revoking her title because there had been no intent to deceive. “It’s about mistake, not misconduct,” he said.

Von der Leyen is currently being investigated by the Berlin Public Prosecutor’s Office for nepotism in connection with the allocation of contracts worth hundreds of millions of euros to outside consultants. One such firm is McKinsey & Company, where her son David works as an associate.

Former European Parliament President Martin Schulz tweeted: “Von der Leyen is our weakest minister. That’s apparently enough to become Commission president.”

2. Charles Michel, President of the European Council

Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel, the son of a prominent EU official, has been nominated to succeed Poland’s Donald Tusk as President of the European Council. The European Council defines the EU’s overall political direction and priorities. The members of the European Council are the heads of state or government of the 28 EU member states, the European Council President and the President of the European Commission.

Michel became Belgium’s youngest prime minister in 2014 at the age of 38. In December 2018, he resigned after losing a no-confidence motion over his support for the UN Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration. It proclaimed basic rights for migrants, but critics said it would blur the line between legal and illegal immigration. He now heads a caretaker government after an inconclusive general election in May 2019. …

Michel is a strong proponent of the Iran nuclear deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). He has criticized the Trump administration for withdrawing from the agreement. …

Michel has also condemned the Trump administration’s recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. …

3. Josep Borrell, EU Foreign Policy Chief

Spanish Foreign Minister Josep Borrell has been nominated to replace Federica Mogherini as High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy. Like Mogherini, Borrell is a well-known supporter of the mullahs in Iran and is likely to clash with the United States and Israel over the nuclear deal with Tehran.

In a February 19 interview with Politico, Borrell, a Socialist, declared that Israel would have to live with the existential threat of an Iranian nuclear bomb …

On February 11, Borrell marked the 40th anniversary of the Iranian revolution by praising the achievements made by women in the country since Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini swept to power in 1979. The rights and status of Iranian women have, in fact, been severely restricted since the Islamic Revolution. …

In May 2019, Borrell accused the United States of acting “like a western cowboy” after the Trump administration recognized the president of Venezuela’s National Assembly, Juan Guaidó, as interim president of the country. Borrell said that Spain “will continue to reject pressures that border on military interventions” to remove from power Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. The Spanish Socialist Party has a long history of promoting the Marxist revolutionaries led by Maduro and his predecessor, Hugo Chávez. …

Borrell has said that “Europe needs a new leitmotiv” and that the fight against climate change “should be one of the great engines of Europe’s rebirth “. …

In April 2012, Borrell was forced to resign as president of the European University Institute (EUI) due to a conflict of interest after it emerged that he was simultaneously being paid €300,000 a year as a board member of the Spanish sustainable-energy company Abengoa. In October 2016, Borrell was fined €30,000 ($34,000) by the National Securities Market Commission (CNMV) for insider trading after selling 10,000 shares in Abengoa in November 2015.

4. Christine Lagarde, President of the European Central Bank

Christine Lagarde, a former French finance minister the current managing director of the International Monetary Fund, has been nominated to succeed Mario Draghi as president of the European Central Bank (ECB). Lagarde’s nomination has received mixed reviews. As the head of the IMF, she brings strong credentials in leadership, management and communications. She is, however, a lawyer, not an economist, and she has no experience in monetary policy. …

In December 2016, France’s Court of Justice of the Republic found Lagarde guilty of negligence for not seeking to block a fraudulent 2008 arbitration award to a politically connected tycoon when she was finance minister. The court ruled that Lagarde’s negligence in her management of a long-running arbitration case … helped open the door for the fraudulent misappropriation of €403 million ($450 million) of public funds in a settlement given to Tapie in 2008 over the botched sale of sportswear giant Adidas in the 1990s.

Yes, the court found Christine Lagarde “guilty of charges over a massive [illegal] government payout”, which should have resulted in her being both fined and imprisoned, but decided she should not be punished at all.

Members of the Left elite are above the laws that they make for the putrescent European Union.

John Kerry has been a traitor all his adult life.

It seems he hates America. And loves foreign dictators.

This is what John Kerry alleged in his testimony before the US Senate in 1971 that American soldiers said they did in Vietnam:

They had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in the fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.

He made no mention of the atrocities committed by the enemy, the North Vietnamese.

Earlier in 1971 he had met with the enemy in Paris as part of his anti-Vietnam-war activism. In particular he parleyed with Madam Nguyen Thi Binh, then foreign minister of North Vietnam and a top negotiator at the talks.

Daniel Greenfield recalls more of Kerry’s disgraceful story at Front Page:

On January 19, 2017, John Forbes Kerry left his job at the State Department. Addressing Foggy Bottomers in the C Street lobby, he ended his speech by declaring, “This is not an end. This is a beginning. It’s a new beginning.” That’s just what departing politicos usually say, but he meant it.

Next January, a report appeared that Kerry had met with a top negotiator for the PLO in London.

The secret back-channel negotiator, Hussein Agha, was a close confidant of terrorist dictator Mahmoud Abbas, the racist PLO boss who around this same time had delivered a speech in which he cursed President Trump, shouting, “May your house be destroyed.” Agha was a frequent collaborator with Robert Malley, who allegedly ran Soros and Obama’s back channel to Hamas. Obama fired Malley during the campaign, but once in office brought him back in a variety of roles including as a lead negotiator on the Iran Deal scam and the National Security Council’s point man for the Middle East.

Malley now heads Soros’s International Crisis Group and continues undermining America and defending the Iran Deal.

Kerry urged Agha to tell the PLO boss to “be strong”, “play for time” and “not yield to President Trump’s demand”.

The former Secretary of State suggested that the PLO present its own peace plan that he would push through his contacts in the European Union and Muslim countries.

Kerry also advised the Islamic terror boss to attack Trump personally, instead of the country or administration. And Abbas appeared to have taken his advice. He also assured the Islamic terrorist leader that President Trump wouldn’t be in office a year from now. And that Kerry might run for the job.

All of this was a blatant violation of the Logan Act which bans Americans from conducting negotiations with foreign governments “with intent to influence the measures or conduct of any foreign government” or “agent there of” addressing its “disputes or controversies with the United States” or “to defeat the measures of the United States”. The law is clear. The punishment is three years in prison. …

But a few weeks ago, Kerry met with Iran’s Foreign Minister Zarif at the United Nations. According to the Boston Globe story, he not only met with Zarif, but also the presidents of France and Germany, and Federica Mogherini, the former Communist activist who is the top EU lobbyist for the Iran Deal.

Mogherini had called for a role for “political Islam” in Europe and has consistently undermined American foreign policy in Cuba, North Korea, Russia and Iran by stifling our efforts to isolate dictators and tyrants.

The Iran Deal echo chamber, which Kerry and Mogherini, not to mention Malley, are a part of, has tried to paint Foreign Minister Zarif as a moderate. But last fall, as Trump deployed new sanctions against the IRGC, Zarif had tweeted that, “Iranians – boys, girls, men, women – are ALL IRGC”.

IRGC stands for Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. It’s the central terror hub of Iran which has its greasy fingers deep in its nuclear program and is in charge of its terrorism networks around the world.

The IRGC’s support for Islamic terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan is estimated to have cost the lives of between 500 and 1,000 Americans. At one point, Iran was paying the Taliban $1,000 for each American soldier that they killed.

From his Viet Cong days to his IRGC days, Kerry colludes with the murderers of American soldiers.

… Kerry’s goal in these meetings is, “to apply pressure on the Trump administration from the outside.” That’s exactly the behavior the Logan Act was meant to sanction.

In both of his meetings with Islamic terror state officials and agents, Kerry has conveyed his opposition to the United States government while encouraging the terror states to subvert its policies. He has engaged in private negotiations with foreign governments on behalf of a shadow foreign policy opposition aligned with the non-profit groups that form the Iran Lobby and the Iran Deal echo chamber.

It’s not just a Logan Act violation. It’s treason.

This isn’t the first time that the radical activist turned senator and secretary of state has violated the Logan Act. The medal thrower had been reviled by Vietnam vets for his meeting with Madame Binh of Vietnam’s Marxist-Leninist PVR.

As senator, he traveled to Nicaragua to undermine President Reagan by conducting talks with Comandante Ortega and his murderous Marxist-Leninist regime. Its favorite song when Kerry was providing aid and comfort to it was, “Here or There, Yankees Will Die Everywhere.”

When Republican senators sent a warning letter to Iran that a deal without congressional approval would be non-binding, the Iran Lobby and its media allies accused them of violating the Logan Act. Typical media hit pieces from the period included CNN’s “Did 47 Republican senators break the law in plain sight?” and ABC News’ “165,000+ Sign Petition to Prosecute GOP Senators for Treason”. That’s nothing like the media’s response to Kerry’s treasonous efforts to undermine the United States.

But the Logan Act specifically mentions a citizen who lacks the “authority of the United States”. When George Logan, after whom the act was named, conducted his illegal negotiations, he had not yet become a member of the Senate. Senators do have a constitutional role in foreign policy. …

Democrats and their media allies have turned the country upside down investigating claims of collusion by the administration. Obama and Clinton allies in the DOJ have eavesdropped on Americans, raided their homes in the middle of the night, and denied the President of the United States the elementary protection of attorney-client privilege based on the opposition research of the Clinton campaign.

Collusion is not a Federal crime. Violating the Logan Act is.

The double standard on Trump and Kerry would have us believe that the President-elect has no right to back channels to foreign governments, but that a former Secretary of State is entitled to have them.

That’s not a legal norm. It’s another case of Democrats criminalizing anything Republicans do while legalizing their own blatant violations of the law. The President-elect has legitimate reasons for reaching out to foreign governments. A former secretary of state from the opposition party has no such reasons. And when his outreach undermines the foreign policy of his successor by urging foreign governments to sabotage it and attack the President of the United States, his only reason appears to be treason. …

The Democrats, the media and their Mueller spearhead have sought to retroactively criminalize contacts with Russia (carefully postdating their own Russian outreach of the Bush and Obama era) because it’s an enemy country. But what exactly is Iran: a terror state whose motto is, “Death to America”?

These groups have crafted a narrative in which meetings with certain countries are inherently suspect, Russia, the UAE and Israel, while collaboration with Iran and Qatar is legit diplomacy. There’s no legal or national interest basis for such a classification, but there is an ideological one. Qatar is a key backer of the Muslim Brotherhood and Islamic terror groups. As is Iran. The UAE and Israel oppose them.

And that’s at the heart of the problem.

Kerry and the rest of the Iran Deal lobby aren’t meeting with Iran, the PLO and the EU as representatives of the United States, but of a political faction whose allegiances are ideological, not national. They aren’t working on behalf of the United States, but are there representing a leftist shadow government.

Or as Kerry reportedly told the PLO, the many “dissatisfied” people in the American establishment.

Unlike Carter and other rogue leftists, Kerry isn’t acting alone. He’s the most visible figure in a powerful and influential international movement. And its footholds in this country include billionaires, major think tanks, media echo chamber and smear groups that are constantly handfeeding hit pieces to the press.

Kerry’s shadow government diplomacy represents a vertical ideological integration with European governments that share his ideology, and their allies in “political Islam” in Iran and Qatar. The political left hopes to use the rising power of political Islam, from Iran’s nuclear program to Muslim migration to the Islamic coups of the Muslim Brotherhood to check the national and international power of the West.

The left and its rogue Never Trumper allies ceaselessly lecture us about the “Rule of Law”.

Let’s have their version of the rule of law. And let’s apply it to Kerry, Rhodes, Malley and all the rest.

If we have an actual rule of law, then there will be a special prosecutor appointed to investigate Kerry’s collusion with Iran. Any meetings between members of the Iran Lobby, both official and unofficial, will be eavesdropped on by the NSA and their names unmasked at the request of Trump officials.

The homes of Iran Lobby members will be raided in the middle of the night. The Iran echo chamber figures now ensconced in top think tanks, including one funded by Qatar, will lose their homes, be interviewed by the FBI and be forced to plead guilty to lying to the feds if they misstate anything.

When Kerry wakes up to FBI men ransacking his seven bedroom waterfront Martha’s Vineyard estate at gunpoint and patting down his wife in their bedroom for weapons, then we’ll have the rule of law.

John Kerry colludes with officials of an enemy state

Federica Mogherini, the “High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy”, recently went to Iran to attend the inauguration of the regime’s president, Hassan Rouhani.

Majid Rafizadeh, an Iranian expatriot living in Europe, writes at Gatestone:

Others who accepted Iran’s invitation were North Koreans, members of Hezbollah, and leaders of Hamas. All three of these groups are known for cruelty, especially against women, and crimes against humanity. …

Federica Mogherini is a Communist, feminist, typical Eurocrat.

The writer does not call her a Communist. He calls her a “social democrat”. She is, however, a lifelong Communist. The Italian Communist Party, of which she became a member in her mid-teens, was founded by Gramsci, the planner behind “the long march [of the Left] through the institutions [of the Western world]”. His plan has been executed with astonishing success, consummated by the election of Barack Obama to the presidency of the United States (and now frustrated at last to the unappeasably fury of the Left by the election of President Donald Trump).

From Mogherini’s Wikipedia entry:

Federica Mogherini was born on 16 June 1973 in Rome, Italy … [She] attended the Sapienza University of Rome where she studied Political Science graduating with a specialization in Political Philosophy with a final dissertation entitled Relationship between religion and politics in Islam.

So she has more than a superficial knowledge of the ideology of Islam.

A member of the Italian Communist Youth Federation from 1988, in 1996 Mogherini joined the Youth Left after the dissolution of the Italian Communist Party and its transformation into a social democratic party. In 2001 she became a member of the National Council of the Democrats of the Left (DS), later serving on its National Executive Board and Political Committee. In 2003 she started working at the DS’s Foreign Affairs Section, where she was given responsibility for relations with international movements and parties, later becoming the team’s coordinator; after that she was given responsibility for Foreign Affairs and International Relations …  In this role, she oversaw the policies on Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as the Middle East [ie. Israeli-Palestinian, pointless, ritualistic, so-called] peace process. Mogherini was in charge of maintaining relations with the Party of European Socialists, the [essentially Communist] Socialist International and other left-wing parties, including with the US Democratic Party.

Majid Rafizadeh proceeds:

By attending these kinds of events, social democrats such as her repeatedly endorse and give legitimacy to repressive states that implement Islamic law, Sharia. As Mogherini rubs elbows with men who have ordered the deaths of thousands of women (and men), she toes the line of their expectations. Instead of evolving their mindset, she allowed all of the women she claims to represent, to remain oppressed, as they have been for so very long.

Mogherini took the problem even a step farther. Instead of attempting to appear as if she were working toward progressive thinking among these violent Islamist leaders, she acted as if they were friends. She appeared proud to snap selfies with the representatives of this repressive regime. The story came under the international spotlight. Some of the deputies used their selfies with Mogherini to project their legitimacy to the international community while others created self-promotional posters of themselves with Mogherini wearing the mandatory hijab. …

This act of compliance [wearing a hijab] sends a brutal and unshakeable message. Women in these Islamist societies are controlled by laws which proclaim they must be hidden, or treated as their husband’s property. The hijab has become a symbol of this. Conversely, when Iranian leaders visit Mogherini’s country, they do not follow Italy’s rules. Instead, Italy follows the regime’s Islamist rules by offering appeasements such as covering up nude statues and not serving wine.

Mogherini – who years ago also agreed to be in a controversial picture taken with the late Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat – also played a crucial role in sealing the nuclear agreement for the Iranian regime and lifting the sanctions for those dictators. Instead of seeing these oppressors punished, she enabled them to have fewer limitations, as they still hold their own people beneath their thumbs and continue to be the cause of their suffering.

Mogherini then tweeted about her blog post, which states “It was an opportunity to talk again to Rouhani, to Foreign Minister Javad Zarif and to the Supreme Leader’s foreign policy advisor, Ali Akbar Velayati”.

Is this really an opportunity to be proud of and boast about? And what did she talk to them about?

While Mogherini is joyfully attending events with these Islamist leaders and rejoicing in having taking pictures beside them, does she ever think about the millions of women who are brutally oppressed under these Islamist regimes? Does she consider those women balled up and crying on the floor after being beaten by their husbands? Does she ever think about hundreds of people – men and women – being executed, often after sham trials, every year, and based on the Islamist laws in this country? While she shakes the hands of these men, does think of the nine-year-old girls who are “legally” being forced into marriage with the government’s approval?

Where are all the women’s rights, liberal moral values that she and her party stand for? They were not at the celebration, and they were certainly not represented by those selfies.

Women are dehumanized, subjugated and treated as inferior on a daily basis in Islamist state of Iran as well as other Muslim states. Many people in there are struggling every day despite all the dangers they face to obtain the few rights they can. In general, a woman’s testimony in court is worth half of a man’s testimony. Women need approval from their male guardian to leave the country, and in Saudi Arabia, to leave their home. Women cannot obtain a passport without a guardian’s consent. In Iran, a man can marry any woman he desires. Men are allowed to have four wives and an unlimited number of temporary marriages (mut’a), but women can only marry a Muslim man. Honor killings continue while the regime turns a blind eye to them.

Based on the law of tamkin (obedience), women must provide full accessibility and unhampered sexual availability to her husband. Article 1105 of Iran’s Islamist Civil Code states, “In relations between husband and wife, the position of the head of the family exclusively belongs to the husband.”

Article 1117 of the Iran’s Islamist Civil Code states states :

The husband can prevent his wife from an occupation or technical profession which is incompatible with the family’s interests or the dignity of him or his wife.

Men can initiate a unilateral divorce. Women receive only half of what men get in inheritance. A wife gets to receive only one-sixth of an inheritance if she has a son when her husband dies. If she has only a daughter, the inheritance would not automatically go to them. The deceased husband’s family – brothers, sibling and parents – would have a call on it as well. Women cannot become judges… and the list goes on.

Of course, people such as Mogherini are fully cognizant of these atrocities and the discrimination which are repeatedly reported by human rights organizations. … Not one of these European leaders can plead ignorance of the acts that those men commit.

Yet, there we see people like Mogherini shaking the hands that rob women of their freedom and their voices.

The fact is that these supposed feminists not only turn a blind eye to those atrocities, but their presence at these events actively endorses and legitimizes the rule of these dictators. …

Why, if they claim that they are champions and front-runners of women all around the world, do they contribute to, and facilitate the rule of ruthless dictators against their own people?

When the subject turns to the specific cases of millions of oppressed women around the world – such as Asia Bibi [“Asia Woman”, real name Aasiya Noreen], a Christian mother on death row in Pakistan for seven years for taking a drink of water [from the same cup as her Muslim workmates]; or the 19-year-old who, this year, was raped by her cousin at gunpoint and then sentenced to death by stoning for “adultery”; or who were forced to marry their rapists; or child marriages at 12,000 a day; or women who are beaten by their husbands or who have acid thrown in their faces; or women used as suicide bombers – they become totally silent. They disregard these women’s rights.

By demonstrating their support for these regimes and the men that enforce them, people such as Mogherini significantly weaken and undermine the indigenous movements that attempt to advance precisely the human rights that people such as Mogherini claim to advocate.

When Mogherini smiles in her hijab in Iran, she is delivering a strong blow to women rights movements that attempt to remove the compulsion of the obligatory hijab and grant women equal autonomy, education and freedom. She is empowering suppression.

A true advocate of individual rights and democracy might instead have set a brave example.

It needs to be reiterated often that the Left is not for individual rights and democracy.

Women such as Mogherini are feeding into the system, not destroying it. Those who continue to give legitimacy to oppressors and Islamists need to be held accountable.

Finally, my message to people such as Mogherini and others like her is simple: Do you have any conscience or sense of decency? Or is it simply all about power, money, narcissism, and manipulations at the cost of the oppressed, including women? Can you hear that little girl’s cry, or are your ears as deaf to it as the men who cause it?

Mogherini will not answer, but we will. No, such as she has no conscience or sense of decency. Yes, it is “all about power, money, narcissism, and manipulations at the cost of the oppressed”.

During her visit to Iran this month, Federica Mogherini (left), the current High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, rubbed elbows with men who have ordered the deaths of thousands of women (and men). Does she ever think about hundreds of people being executed, often after sham trials, every year, and based on the Islamist laws in this country?

Does she ever think?

What are European leaders thinking when they fanatically destroy European civilization by importing millions of devotees of that supremacist totalitarian ideology, Islam?

We are afforded a revelation of the thoughts of Federica Mogherini, a Red from her youth who bears the grandiose title of “High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy”, in a speech she made at the “Call to Europe V: Islam in Europe” conference, June 24th, 2015.

The idea of a clash between Islam and “the West” – a word in which everything is put together and confused – has misled our policies and our narratives. Islam holds a place in our Western societies. Islam belongs in Europe. It holds a place in Europe’s history, in our culture, in our food and – what matters most – in Europe’s present and future. Like it or not, this is the reality.

Her vocabulary constantly reveals her Leftism. “Narrative” is one of the buzzwords of the Left. We’ll come upon more of them. “Narrative” means their spin; their attempt to substitute a preferred account of events for what actually happened. It does not work, of course. But failure does not deter the Left. They ignore it.

Islam has a long history of invading Europe and sometimes succeeding in conquering parts of it. It is a history of fierce onslaughts, cruel subjugation, and desperate counter-attacks – because Islam most definitely did not belong in Europe. (Remember Lepanto, Poitiers, the Gates of Vienna …) Only in that sense, “Islam holds a place in Europe’s history”. But it is not a place to celebrate. Europe learnt bitter lessons from Muslim invasions, but some Europeans are choosing to forget them. Either the High Representative does not know the history – which seems unlikely – or she is deliberately distorting the nature of the Islamic effect on Europe, making it sound nicely integrated and enriching and delicious by putting it into the context of “our culture” and even “our food”. Why? Because she and her elite comrades want to destroy the existing order and build their fantasy world, their utopia, their paradise-on-earth in its stead. And they have some confused ideas of how to go about it, including the flooding of Europe with Muslims from the Third World.

Certainly Islam has a place in Europe’s present – but as a threat, a terror, a horror, a dread; of which the High Representative and her like-minded colleagues are pertinaciously doing all they can to ensure a continuance well into the future.

As Europeans, we should be proud of our diversity. The fear of diversity comes from weakness, not from a strong culture.

“Diversity” is the top favorite buzzword.

I shall be even more clear on that: the very idea of a clash of civilizations is at odds with the most basic values of our European Union – let alone with reality.

She means that the European Union was supposed to prevent war between European states. The original concept did not involve Muslim immigrants.

Throughout our European history, many have tried to unify our continent by imposing their own power, their own ideology, their own identity against the identity of someone else. With the European project, after World War II, not only we accepted diversity: we expressed a desire for diversity to be a core feature of our Union. We defined our civilization through openness and plurality: a mind-set based on blocs does not belong to us.

“Blocs”? The European Union is a “bloc”. Nation-states are what the Left hates. They like forming blocs  such as the European Union – with a view to eventual world (socialist) government.

Some people are now trying to convince us that a Muslim cannot be a good European citizen, that more Muslims in Europe will be the end of Europe. These people are not just mistaken about Muslims: these people are mistaken about Europe – that is my core message – they have no clue what Europe and the European identity are.

“They” have no clue what Europe and the European identity are? It is typical of the Left to accuse their opponents of the very thing they are guilty of themselves. Again the High Representative, with her false account of European history, chooses to overlook the fact that the indigenous European populations are dying out; that the immigrant Muslim populations are increasing rapidly; that the inevitable result must be Muslim majorities throughout Europe. And above all she chooses not to notice that however much the Europeans want to mingle the Muslims in with them in an enriched and delicious new European culture, the Muslims themselves desire no such thing. Their aim is to impose their law, their culture (and their halal food) on Europe. That means the enslavement of women, the execution of homosexuals, the abolition of the wine industry, the tearing down of paintings from the walls of the art galleries, the end of freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom of the press – to name but a few of the effects of Islamic rule.

The High Representative, who joined the Communist Youth early in life and has remained steadily on the Left, is of course a feminist, and is all for gay marriage. She cannot admit even to herself that there is a contradiction between those ideals and the doctrines of Islam. It is to be doubted that she would ever bring herself to read the Koran and the hadith. The Islam she wants to welcome into Europe is simply colorful, cooks exotic meals, worships quietly in its mosques – and why should not Europe tolerate that, enjoy the meals, admire the turbans, the fezzes, the burkhas? It’s a travel-brochure picture of Islam that sits in her pretty little head. And the less pretty heads of almost all the leaders of Europe.

This is our common fight: to make this concept accepted both in Europe and beyond Europe.

Make it accepted “beyond Europe”. Where can she mean? Could she be intending to exert her efforts at imposing huge quantities of colorful and delicious Islam on  – America?

For Europe and Islam face some common challenges in today’s world. The so-called Islamic State is putting forward an unprecedented attempt to pervert Islam for justifying a wicked political and strategic project.

Ah! She has noticed that the Islamic State is not colorful and delicious. Therefore, in her perfect logic, it cannot be Islam. Real Islam faces the Islamic State as a “challenge”, just as the non-islamic world does. She says nothing about the age-old conflict between Sunni and Shia. She pays no attention to the diversity within Islam – accompanied by passionate hatred, total intolerance.

Now she switches to the Arabic word for the Islamic State, the word its Muslim opponents use for it: “Da’esh” – in hope of reinforcing her claim that it is not truly Islamic.

Talking about Da’esh, the king of Jordan told the European Parliament a few months ago: “The motive is not faith, it is power; power pursued by ripping countries and communities apart in sectarian conflicts, and inflicting suffering across the world”

Western media like to refer to Daʼesh with the word “medieval”. This does not help much to understand the real nature of the threat we are facing. Daʼesh is something completely new. This is a modern movement, reinterpreting religion in an innovative and radical way. It is a movement that, rather than preserving Islam, wants us to trash centuries of Islamic culture in the name of their atrocities.

Islam does not derive from medieval times. Worse – it arose in the Dark Ages.

There is nothing new about it. It is not “interpreting religion” – by which she means “interpreting Islam”  – in “an innovative and radical way”. It is doing what Muhammad commanded Muslims to do.

Da’esh is not a State, and it is not a State for Islam. The Grand Imam of al Azhar, Ahmed el Tayeb, argued: “There is no Islamic State, but a number of Islamic countries that the terrorists are trying to destroy.” This is the reality we face and we don’t say this often, but we should do so to dismantle their narrative. Sometimes, by describing the atrocities of Da’esh, we do them a favor: atrocities are part of their propaganda. The more we describe them as evil, the happier they are. Daʼesh is Islam’s worst enemy in today’s world. Its victims are first and foremost Muslim people. Islam is a victim itself.

This is not to say that we should overlook the ideology of Daʼesh. If we want to fight it, we need first of all to know it and to understand it. We need to know where it comes from, and how it got to be what it is.

Really? Know and understand it? No. She doesn’t mean that. She already KNOWS what it is all about. It is about Muslims being poor and jobless and not getting enough help and understanding and welfare and love from us Europeans. If they don’t get enough of all that, they might rape hundreds of German women, run a truck over crowds celebrating Bastille Day in Nice, disembowel and castrate people watching a show in Paris, and gouge their eyes out. And it would all be our fault.

See? They went and did all those things, didn’t they? All because we weren’t nice enough to them.

First of all, I believe the Daʼesh propaganda fills a void, a vacuum. The terrorists are recruiting people who feel they do not hold a place in their own communities, that they do not belong in their own societies.

I was very much impressed, when I was visiting Tunis … Tunisia is a modern country and still is one of the countries with the highest number of foreign fighters in Da’esh. I asked a young girl, very engaged with civil society, why she believed so many people her age were joining Daʼesh. She told me something I will never forget: “You know, people my age in Tunisia feel they have no place in the organigram.

She said that? “The organigram”? According to our dashboard dictionary, an “organigram” is an organizational chart. So what organizational chart do young people in Tunisia feel they have no place in? Who drew the chart? Why? What the hell was she – what the hell is the “High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy” – talking about?

They are looking for their own box, for a role, for defining who they are. They ask: where is my place? What is my role? This is the real challenge not only in the Arab world, but here in Europe.

Later she deplores the idea of people being in”boxes”. But consistency is the last thing to look for here.

That is why I believe the best way to prevent radicalization in Europe and in our region is not only education, but also employment. We have so many well educated and frustrated young people, with a lot of energy, a lot of willingness to find their place in their society and their community. And they have lost hope that they will be able to do so.

This does not justify the choice to turn to terrorism. People are responsible for their own actions and their own crimes. Still, if we look at ways to prevent radicalization we need jobs and good jobs. Not just a place in the “organigram”, but a good place.

Da’esh longs for people who have lost their place in society, their role, their sense of belonging and hope. We need inclusive societies. So many times we have heard a narrative opposing security and open societies. It is a false dilemma. We should start saying more clearly that a society can be stable and safe only when it is democratic.

Of course I know each country has a specific history, and needs to follow its own path towards democracy. Not so long ago, and still today, there are people in “the West” arguing democracy can be exported militarily. We have all realized – in this room for sure – how bad this idea was. This does not mean we are not ready to support democracy and democratic processes: quite the contrary. But we need to consider the specificity of each process.

While she would like to “make Islam accepted beyond Europe”, she would only export democracy to Islam by extremely sensitive means – sensitive to the point of inaction. In fact, if other countries are not democratic, we must “humbly respect” whatever they are for the sake of diversity.

We need to show some humble respect for diversity. Diversity is the core feature of our European history, and it is our strength.

It is so manifestly a disaster imposed on Europe by weak thinking, that this claim of hers is simply ludicrous. If she said that European culture was eclectic – that it traditionally chooses the best of everything from everywhere and absorbs it and uses it for its own purposes – she would be right. But she is referring to multiculturalism, which in effect is Islamization, terrorism, bloodshed and suffering.

She proceeds to get into an awful muddle of self-contradiction. Read the following quickly, don’t try to make sense of it. A quick read gives you the right impression. It is confused nonsense. And so typical of EU speeches that to anyone who has heard or read a few, it comes across as self-satirizing: 

But we should also show respect for diversity when we look outside our borders. We need to understand diversity, understand complexity. This is difficult, but maybe a bit less difficult for us Europeans. We know diversity and complexity – especially here in Brussels – from our own experience. For this reason I am not afraid to say that political Islam should be part of the picture. Religion plays a role in politics – not always for good, not always for bad. Religion can be part of the process. What makes the difference is whether the process is democratic or not. That is what matters to us, the key point. We need to work for regional frameworks, in the Middle East and the Arab world, in which every one has a responsibility and a chance to contribute – Muslim, Christian, Jew or non-believer, Sunni or Shia, Arab, Kurd, whatever. One of the weaknesses of our policies so far has been to focus on dividing lines, as if everyone can fit in a box. People do not live in boxes. People live in communities and societies. The more open the communities and the societies are, the better it is for the democratic process. All communities should be granted with their own rights and their own responsibilities, with an opportunity to do their part for the stability and the security of their own country. This is the path we are finally trying to follow in some key Arab countries, like Iraq: we are finally understanding we need to put people together, not to tear them apart. Inclusiveness can be the key to our success – both when we talk foreign policy and when we deal with our home affairs. Sometimes we go out of our borders and preach, but then we look at ourselves and we falter. Enlargement processes involve us and our partners for years, but maybe we should also take time to brush up on the “acquis” with some Member States. We have a problem of internal coherence – when it comes to rights, to democracy, to the respect of diversity, when it comes to some of the difficult choices we make, including on migration policies. The battle for hearts and minds is not only a battle we need to fight in the Middle East, but also here inside our European Union. It is a difficult battle: this is not a popular argument, not an easy issue. After years of economic and political weakness, our societies are naturally afraid. When you are weak, the reaction is closing the door and pretending to solve issues with isolation. On the contrary, the only chance we have as Europeans is to be proud and strong of our basics: and our basics are respect and diversity. Let me say something more about migration. We have supported the “bring back our girls” campaign for Nigerian girls kidnapped by Boko Haram. There is such a contradiction between our solidarity when these girls are far away, and our lack of solidarity when they are at our door. This is impossible to sustain. In the coming days and months we need to find solutions not only for the girls in Nigeria, but for their sisters and mothers and daughters who are forced to flee by the very same radicalized movements. If we do not realize this, our whole message risks to sound empty. We need to pass a cultural message, to lay the basis for our political message: any attempt to divide the peoples of Europe into “us” and “them” brings us in the wrong direction. The migrants and us. The Muslims and us. The Jews and us, as anti-Semitism has not been defeated at all. The “other” and us. We learnt from our history that we all are someone else’s “other”. The fear of the other can only lead us to new conflicts.

The “other” is another of their buzzwords. Professor Edward Said, who found excuses for Palestinian terrorism, accused Westerners of seeing Muslims as the “other”. He did not notice that Muslims see Westerners as the “other”. Or recognize the plain fact of otherness inherent in all classification.

I hope we can work together to increase our self confidence. When we say we are European, we should also remember what is the root of our European culture: our diversity. That is our strength, and we should learn to be proud of it.

Such is the intellectual prowess of the elite who govern our lives. Their speeches are shallow, vague, inconsistent, self-contradictory, platitudinous, doctrinaire, under-informed and deceitful. Worse than dangerous, such thinking is a cause of the atrocities that Muslims are inflicting on Europeans – most recently in Paris, Brussels, and Nice.  

One must bear in mind that none of the EU bureaucrats and representatives have been elected to foist their insane policies on the peoples of Europe. The members of the elite choose them – not for intelligence, plainly, but for conformity with their own “politically correct” Leftist opinions.

The sooner the European Union disintegrates, the better for Europe. The sooner the proud-to-be-humble High Representatives shut-up and go home, the better for the world.

 

(Hat-tip to Chauncey Tinker for the link to the speech))

US Secretary of State John Kerry negotiated FOR Iran to get the “deal” most favorable to Iranian interests and least favorable to the interests of America and Europe.

The talks took so long not because there was disagreement on key issues. Once the US had agreed to let Iran keep its nuclear capacity, the other issues were easy to deal with. The talks took so long because Kerry and Zarif, often working together, were trying to find language that could hide the real issues and highlight peripheral ones. Kerry wanted to hoodwink the US Congress; Zarif wanted to take the Islamic Majlis in Tehran for a ride.

We quote from an important article by Amir Taheri at Asharq Al-Awsat (self-declared to be “the world’s leading pan-Arab daily newspaper”), published in London:

In a fascinating interview last week, Iran’s former Foreign Minister Ali-Akbar Salehi revealed that during Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s presidency, through Omani mediation, Tehran put five preconditions for the start of secret talks with the US. “We were surprised when Obama accepted all of them,” Salehi recalls.

And that was before John Kerry, who had a long history of contacts with Tehran including meetings with former President Muhammad Khatami at Davos, had become Secretary of State.

Salehi recalls that when he briefed newly elected President Rouhani on the secret talks, the latter was “astonished” at Obama’s readiness to bend backwards to appease Tehran. For Tehran, Obama and Kerry made an ideal team.

During lengthy negotiations in Geneva, Lausanne and finally Vienna, the Iranian and US teams were often on the same side, fighting to persuade other members of the P5+1 to soften their positions vis-a-vis Iran.

In an off-the-record briefing in Tehran which was nevertheless partly leaked, Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi cited a number of occasions when Kerry fought hard to win others to Iran’s position.

One occasion was when the French and the British insisted that Iran formally undertake not to finance and arm the Lebanese branch of Hezbollah. “Naturally, we refused,” Araqchi said. “And it was [John] Kerry who persuaded others to drop the issue.”

On another occasion, Russia was pressing for the ban on sale of arms to Iran to be lifted immediately. Iran did not want this, presumably because it felt it would face pressure to buy Russian arms.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov later expressed surprise when Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif and Kerry joined forces to keep the ban in place, albeit with minor modifications.

On another occasion, recalled by Iranian Foreign Ministry’s Political Director General Hamid Baeedi-Nezhad who was part of the negotiating team, Kerry sided with Iran to defeat the British and the French who insisted that the ban on sale of aircraft to Tehran remain in force for five more years.

“The whole thing was settled when Kerry gave his word on our behalf,” Baeedi-Nezhad said.

On another occasion, according to Araqchi, Kerry sided with Iran in rejecting a demand by the European Union foreign policy “tsarina” Federica Mogherini to commit Iran not to help Bashar Al-Assad kill more Syrians. Kerry remained “steadfast” that talks should only focus on the nuclear issue.

Kerry also backed Iran’s demand that the travel ban on several civilian and military officials, and some Arab terrorists linked to Iran be lifted. The French, British and Germans were opposed, partly because among the names mentioned were convicted terrorists who had served time in their prisons.

Kerry showed his keenness to please Iran more specifically when he fought to lift the ban on Anis Naccache, a Lebanese “militant” who had been close to Imad Mugniyah, once Hezbollah’s security chief, and allegedly involved in plotting the suicide attack that killed 241 US Marines in Beirut in1983.

Faced with European protests, Kerry came out with his famous: “We are looking to the future, not to the past.”  …

Then comes the paragraph that (yet further) exposes the deep villainy of Kerry and his master, Obama. We quoted it at the top of this post. It bears repeating.

The talks took so long not because there was disagreement on key issues. Once the US had agreed to let Iran keep its nuclear capacity, the other issues were easy to deal with. The talks took so long because Kerry and Zarif, often working together, were trying to find language that could hide the real issues and highlight peripheral ones. Kerry wanted to hoodwink the US Congress; Zarif wanted to take the Islamic Majlis in Tehran for a ride.

By rejecting the proposed “deal” the US Congress would tell the world that the arrangement is one between Obama and an Iranian faction. As a power, the US is not committed to a deal running into decades.

In his keenness to get a “deal”, any deal, Obama reversed the constitutional provision under which a treaty needs a two-third majority in the Congress to become effective. He invented a new method under which the Congress could undo something that is, and at the same time is not, a treaty, after the president has approved it.

The “deal” suffers from a crisis of constitutional identity. A negative Congressional vote could delay its implementation until the president has exercised his veto.

On the Iranian side the Rafsanjani faction has done even better. It has not provided an official Persian version of the “deal” and seems determined to ignore Article 72 of the Islamic Republic’s Constitution and simply pretend that the “deal” is approved without publicly saying so.

At the time of this writing Tehran has not even accepted the new UN resolution and is thus one step behind Obama in their pasodoble.

Was this not treason? 

The United States’ definition of treason is:

“Treason against the United States, shall consist in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.”