RUTHFULLY YOURS

“Human traffickers and the media in their home countries are making promises that do not correspond to reality.” — Hans-Joachim Ulrich, regional refugee coordinator.

The migrants said they were angry they were being asked to sleep in a huge warehouse rather than in private apartments. Hamburg officials say there are no more vacant apartments in the city. “The city lied to us. We were shocked when we arrived here,” said Syrian refugee Awad Arbaakeat.

“One of the men, who spoke broken German, said they [a family of asylum seekers from Syria] were not interested in viewing the property because I am a woman… I was taken aback. You want to help and then are sent away, unwanted in your own country.” — Aline Kern, real estate agent.

“A constitutional state cannot allow itself to be blackmailed.” — Marcel Huber, Bavarian politician.

“I man. You woman. I go first.” — Muslim male with a full shopping cart at the supermarket.

The ayatollah has already vowed to break the terms of agreement.

On Oct. 18 President Obama signed his nuclear agreement with Iran and thus began his administration’s implementation of it. His action followed the many international headlines proclaiming that Iran’s parliament — the “Majlis” — has ratified the nuclear weapons deal agreed to by Obama and endorsed by the United Nations Security Council.

Mr. Obama’s actions are premature and those headlines are comprehensively false for one compelling reason: The Majlis’ “ratification” never happened. To understand why requires some dissection of Iran’s internal politics.

They’re not willing to sacrifice their Jewish identity in exchange for their security as individuals.

By coincidence, on the same day “The Twilight of French Jewry, the Twilight of France” was published in Mosaic, I came upon some highly pertinent remarks by Christine Angot in Le Monde’s weekly literary supplement. Angot, a staunch liberal now in her mid-fifties, is a prize-winning playwright and novelist whose plotlines are largely drawn from her own life as the product of a dysfunctional family. (The French term for this is autofiction.) The subject of her remarks was a television program in which she had participated for Arte, the quality French-German channel, about Chateauroux, the town in central France where she was brought up.

Some Americans may remember Chateauroux as the locale of a U.S. army base in the 1950s and early 60s. Until recently, it could be described as quintessentially “deep France”: a sleepy local capital, surrounded by dark woods and rivers. Things are changing, however, as Angot realized with a start on her filmed visit there. Muslim immigrants are taking over many parts of the town, including her former neighborhood of public housing, and turning them into semi-independent enclaves, what the French police refer to as “no-go zones.” As she put it in Le Monde:

When we arrived—all of us, the TV crew complete with their cameras and sound booms, and the writer who grew up there—we had to account for ourselves, to show our identity cards, to prove who we were, to state exactly where I had lived. . . . And then, the director’s first name—David, his full name being David Teboul—supplied material for unsavory jokes…. Some of the locals tried to intimidate us, saying that television was a cartel of the Jews… All this was uttered in a very menacing tone.… We shot a few scenes under a running fire of jibes and jeering, and as we left we were told to pay our compliments to the Talmud…. I swear we felt most uncomfortable.

One of America’s allies in the fight against ISIS is dropping out. On Monday Canada elected the left-wing Liberal Party after ten years of Conservative rule. On Tuesday, Prime Minister Designate Justin Trudeau announced that he had spoken to President Barack Obama about his commitment to pull Canada’s fighter jets and ground troops home.

“Canada has a role to play in the fight against ISIL but he understands the commitments I’ve made around ending the combat mission,” Trudeau told reporters of his phone call with Obama.

Canada’s air commitment is small, just six CF-18 fighter jets, but those jets have been involved in thousands of bombing missions.

In addition to the fighter jets Canada has sent special forces troops to help train Kurdish fighters and “paint targets” for incoming air strikes.

Trudeau has said Canada will engage in other ways such providing increased humanitarian assistance. During the election campaign Trudeau pledged to quickly bring in 25,000 Syrian refugees.