Europe has so much to be ashamed of—past, present and, regrettably, future– that it was an easy target for the J.D. Vance tongue lashing at, of all places, the Munich Security Conference. Let me get right to the point: that arrogant, ignorant, inappropriate scolding was designed to divert attention from the cowardly betrayal of Ukraine in particular, Europe in general, and democracy at home & abroad. This is the J.D. Vance that unashamedly admitted to peddling the fake news about Haitian immigrants making barbecue dinners out of household pets in Springfield Ohio. VP candidate Vance told CNN’s Dana Bash that he spread the lie in order to raise awareness of the terrible problem of uncontrolled immigration. This was in the heart of the presidential campaign that delivered the mandate interpreted today, by President Trump and his loyal servants, as permission to accomplish a MAGA Revolution.
Had the Vice President sincerely addressed the questions central to this year’s conference, instead of brushing them off with a rhetorical trick—the danger comes not from Russia or Iran—he would have outlined the foreign policy developments that did in fact unfold immediately after his speech. Dear friends and distinguished guests, the disengagement that you have been dreading, that you imagined as a gradual withdrawal on our part, activated in fits and starts that would give you time to adapt, is already a done deal. We don’t need you and we’re tired of being milked by a bunch of effete freeloaders. As for Ukraine, it’s all yours. President Trump promised to end wars. As far as we’re concerned, this one is long past its due date. In fact, that punk Zelensky should never have started it in the first place. Too many people are dying, the jerk was only good at one thing: playing Biden like a fiddle [sic]. President Trump has worked out a peace plan with President Putin, it will be wrapped up before the end of the month. We’re getting Zelensky to turn over 50% of the mineral rights of his war-torn country, to compensate for the billions shelled out by American taxpayers. If you want to keep on pouring your ill-gotten gains into that quagmire, help yourselves. We’ve got a border to patrol and a new world order to shape. Where better to begin than Germany? With Donald J. Trump at the top of this zillion dollar pyramid, like-minded parties will take over your snooty backward nations, and our five-star general real estate promoters will move in wherever and whenever we can make a buck getting rid of the rubble and tearing down those wedding cake buildings to make way for 100% American-made high-rises. There’s a new sheriff in town and he don’t like no back talk.
The Founding Fathers, liberated from European tyranny, used their European disciplined minds to craft an elegant democracy fitted with elaborate mechanisms of protection against tyranny. Today we see those mechanisms collapse like rotten planks pierced with rusty nails. It’s happening before our eyes in record time and it is up to Europe to rescue its wayward descendants. Contrary to the cheap tricks used by Vance to fool us about ugly American intentions, Europe can, could, might preserve the shared values that our former ally has abandoned.
It begins with seeing through cheap tricks like the speech that earned Vance a hero’s welcome at CPAC.
Bret Stephens was not fooled or intimidated:
“The vice president’s speech last week at the Munich Security Conference — in which the man who refuses to say that Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election lectured his audience about Europe’s retreat from democratic values — combined with his meeting with the leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, party, has caused a scandal because it is a scandal, a monument of arrogance based on a foundation of hypocrisy…”
The National Review’s Jim Geraghty did not applaud:
“Regarding the war, President Donald Trump says to the Ukrainians, ‘You should have never started it!’ Somewhere in Moscow, Vladimir Putin must be grinning from ear to ear. Meanwhile, in Saudi Arabia, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio pledges that the U.S. will cooperate with Russia on ‘matters of mutual geopolitical interest and historic economic and investment opportunities,’ despite the fact that those mutual geopolitical interests don’t exist…”
Ukraine Support Tracker | Kiel Institute reports at total of € 132.3 billion spent by Europe, €114.2 billion by the United States.
Yet, for the Washington Examiner, it’s Europe that can’t handle the truth.
In résumé: Sometimes you need a friend to tell you the truth that hurts. At the Munich security Conference, J.D. Vance told our European friends that they don’t let their citizens speak freely on burning questions like abortion and mass immigration. They should respect the outcome of “free and fair elections.” The Europeans were shocked by this “vigorous defense of democracy.” The democracies will not survive if they dismiss the concerns of millions of voters and make them feel their pleas for relief are invalid. The Examiner concludes with this weighty thought: “Not a single Jew was killed during World War II by words. They were murdered by physical violence inflicted by a tyrannical regime that, like today’s German government, frequently prosecuted citizens for expressing disfavored opinions.”
America, we hear from all sides of the political spectrum, is the “greatest country on earth.” I am not the only European of American origin looking on in horror as the leader of the free world goes spinning out of control and congratulates itself as the debris comes crashing down on our heads. The few examples cited below are not anecdotes.
Several House Republicans have said they will be drafting articles of impeachment against judges who are blocking the Trump administration’s actions, particularly when it comes to the Department of Government Efficiency.
The Associated Press has been banned from the Oval Office, Air Force One press conferences, and other venues on land, sea and in the air, punished for stubbornly maintaining the “Gulf of Mexico” label on the Gulf of America. Axios Media Trends author Sara Fischer writes: “President Trump — in small and unprecedented ways — is punishing media companies more than any leader since America’s founding.”
Interviewed by Sean Hannity in tandem with President Trump, Elon Musk modestly explained that they are simply “trying to restore the will of the people.” If he himself is unelected, what’s to be said about the “vast unelected federal bureaucracy…implacably opposed to the president and the Cabinet?” 92% of voters in D.C. went for Kamala in November.
Free speech, says J.D. Vance, respect for opinions you might not agree with, don’t dismiss the concerns of millions of voters, the will of the people and all that…
The president of the NYU College Republicans had to resign after telling an apparently hard truth about Barron Trump: “He’s a bit of an oddity.” The comments were deemed out of line with the “values and principles” of the organization.
The consequences of speaking hard truths are far more grave for the embattled Ukrainian president. Snapping back at Zelenski’s claim that Donald Trump was living in a “Russian disinformation space,” J.D. Vance warned him, via the Daily Mail, that “badmouthing the president would backfire.” Trump had claimed that Zelensky, a dictator with a 4% approval rating, refuses to call elections, and doesn’t know what’s become of half the money he was given…
Other sources suggest that the real reason for the latest outburst of Trumpian ire against Zelensky is his refusal to sign over 50% of Ukraine’s mineral wealth to the United States. The Washington Examiner ironizes on this rejection of a “historic offer.”
Exasperation with the aggressive, intrusive, misguided woke ideology is shared beyond the contours of MAGAland and outside the frontiers of the United States. Nonetheless, the explosive demolition of every trace of DEI might be seen as disregard for the feelings of millions of citizens who, though we do not agree with them, believe they are defending a legitimate respect for alterity. It is understandable that the new Pentagon chief would give orders to withdraw from all military schools books advocating anything resembling DEI, such as Freckleface Strawberry, a book about redheads by Julianne Moore; the biography of Albert Cashier, a girl who joined the Union army as a man and fought at the siege of Vicksburg; along with a slew of transgender glorification fiction and non-fiction. Is it equally logic that Hegseth kicked off the mass dismissals by firing the [black] chairman of the Joint Chiefs of staff, Charles Q. Brown and the [female] Chief of Naval Operations, Adm. Lisa Franchetti ?
What if it’s good for Israel?
It’s like trying to pass a fine-tooth comb through dreadlocks. How can the mind reconcile lucidity about the MAGA Revolution at home and the betrayal of the West abroad with an ostensible defense of the Jewish State that reassures Zionists and inspires heartfelt gratitude from liberated hostages and their families? Here, precisely, stands and falls the myth of Trump the deal-maker, Trump who strikes fear in the hearts of the villains, Trump who brings peace through strength. In fact, Donald Trump the businessman was something less glorious than a deal-maker. His fabricated reputation, like so much in today’s devalued world, is sustained simply by dumb repetition. President Trump is certainly no deal-maker today. Slapdash and superficial, obsessed with fake results—stopping wars as if they were leaky faucets—he surrenders to heartless dictators, tips his hand and pours out all the goodies before even beginning to ask for something in return, loses interest in prolonged discussions and puts maximum energy in tapping himself on the back.
The president sent his golfing partner, Steve Witkoff, to impose a ceasefire agreement in Gaza before the 20th of January inauguration. Playing then and ever since on the ambiguity between “the hostages” and “all the hostages” he has exerted no influence on Hamas or on the intermediaries—Egypt and Qatar—to obtain humane conditions for the remaining hostages, an end to the macabre ceremonies at each liberation, the accelerated liberation of the remaining captives or any serious measures to eliminate Hamas’ control of Gaza. As worse goes to worst—preening Hamas gunmen and cheering Gazan crowds, emaciated hostages, the murdered Bibas children separated from their mother in the coffin “mix-up” –Trump falls back into his preferred role as commentator-in-chief. “It’s really terrible what’s going on there.”
The face of genocidal hatred
The horror of Shiri Bibas, clutching her two little boys and looking into the black heart of murderous Jew-hatred, will remain engraved forever in our minds. A male arm around her shoulder could be mistaken for a protective gesture but it is the opposite. Mother and child are culled for abduction. Torture. Extermination. The flaming red hair of the boys rings out an SOS. No one comes to the rescue.
I must not follow them to the new depths of Inferno created for the crimes of simchat torah/ 7 October. I know, but I will not dwell on the unspeakable, I must not succumb.
The Bibas family in all their living beauty. Photos and videos of a loving young couple. Pleasures, joy, celebrations, babies. The dawn of the universe in their small warm bodies, their bright eyes of discovery, the crystal jewel of their laughter, multiplication of fraternal tenderness, miracles of learning, skills and awareness, language, a sense of being, the world made new as they give birth to profound conceptions.
How do we survive? How do we stand our ground? Resist the evil force that would draw us into the lowest depths of destruction? Weep and mourn, denounce and avenge, but not succumb to the unspeakable images, the convulsive nausea.
Clutching the blue sky of the kibbutz, taking deep breaths of the tenderness of those heartwarming redheads, living and reliving the joys of their short lives, I must steel myself to horror and never give up hope.
It is our only choice.
Hope. And integrity.
© Nidra Poller
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Nidra Poller is an American-born writer who has lived in Paris since 1972. She is author of works of fiction in English and in French, and has published in many venues, including the Wall Street Journal Europe, Family Security Matters, New English Review, Times of Israel (French), Commentary, Midah, Tribune Juive. She is the author of literary-political books testifying to the Troubled Dawn of the 21st Century and novels: madonna madonna (français) and So Courage & Gypsy Motion.
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Source: TOI
https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/the-ugly-am
Honnêtement, bien que comprenant parfaitement l’anglais, je n’ai pas pu tout lire jusqu’au bout. C’est affligeant. Je ne vois pas comment on peut à la fois défendre Israël et relayer le discours propagandiste du régime de Kiev. Ce dernier se situe du mauvais côté de l’Histoire tout comme ceux qui le défendent. Je ne dis pas que Poutine est incriticable puisqu’il a des alliés infréquentables comme l’Iran. Mais le parti démocrate américain et les Europeistes soutiennent également des dictatures islamistes…dont ils importent l’idéologie dans leurs propres pays ! Pour le reste, le régime de Kiev est bel et bien une dictature et a factuellement déclenché le conflit en 2014. Hollande et Merkel ont en outre reconnu leur volonté de ne pas respecter les accords de Minsk. Par la suite Zelensky a bien souhaité négocier la paix, mais les Anglais et les Européistes l’ en ont interdit. En parcourant les différents forums anglophones et francophones, je suis frappé par l’absolute médiocrité intellectuelle du camp anti Trump qui n’a presque aucun argument valide à avancer et ne fait que prouver son propre extrémisme.
You’re fired !
Cher TJ , j admire votre ouverture d esprit et je vous felicite de publier les proses indigestes frisant le ridicule de Mme Poller .
Malheureusement je ne prend plus le temps de m asphixier a les lire car j ai pisçine a cette heure .
Publication de mon commentaire ?