RUTHFULLY YOURS

PYONGYANG, North Korea—North Korea’s nuclear ambitions are etched into the landscape of its showcase capital city.

A giant sculpture of the atom sits on top of a new apartment tower built for nuclear scientists. Atom designs adorn road overpasses, lampposts and building facades.

Bomb imagery colors daily life. At an orphanage, children play with plastic mobile rocket launchers instead of toy trucks. Shops sell commemorative intercontinental ballistic missile stamps, while a bakery sells cakes featuring an upright rocket, ready for launch.

During a recent visit, the first by The Wall Street Journal since 2008, the city’s atomic aesthetics reinforced the message government officials conveyed repeatedly to the Journal reporters: North Korea won’t part with its nuclear weapons under any circumstances and is resolved to suffer economic sanctions and risk war with the U.S. to keep them.

“It is too late, we have grown up,” said Ri Yong Pil, the vice president of the Institute for American Studies, a division of North Korea’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. “We are not interested in dialogue to undermine our newly built strategic status.”

The Journal reporters traveled to Pyongyang for a tightly controlled reporting trip between Sept. 14 and 19 amid rising tension between the U.S. and North Korea, one of the world’s most brutal and isolated dictatorships. North Korea launched a ballistic missile over Japan on the second day of the trip. Hours after the group departed, U.S. President Donald Trump vowed to “totally destroy North Korea” if the U.S. is required to defend itself or allies, saying leader Kim Jong Un —whom he called “Rocket Man”—was on a suicide path.

On the day the Journal group flew into Pyongyang, North Korea’s state news agency declared in a news release that all “Yankees” should be “beaten to death, as a stick is fit for a rabid dog,” for persuading the United Nations to enact economic sanctions against the country.

Two affable, English-speaking diplomats in dark suits who received the Journal at Pyongyang’s new glass-fronted international airport took a more measured tone.

Over the next few days, the supervised series of official interviews, visits to city landmarks and brief encounters with a handful of Pyongyang residents appeared to signal a rare outreach campaign by the government, which has included other U.S. news organizations, to describe what it sees as the logic of its nuclear-weapons program. The U.S. and North Korea don’t have diplomatic relations, and even informal contact between the two nations is limited.

Official reporting trips to North Korea only happen with the explicit sanction of the state, and visitors are kept under close watch. Authorities granted Journal requests to visit factories and stores, which were chosen by the government. Some requests, such as to meet two U.S. citizens detained while working at a Pyongyang university, were denied.

Handlers allowed the Journal to talk to residents encountered along the way, but translations were done by the North Koreans and it was unclear if people felt free to speak their minds. CONTINUE AT SITE

In a new escalation of hostility between Washington and Pyongyang, North Korea’s foreign minister warned in a United Nations speech Saturday that a rocket attack on the U.S. mainland was “inevitable,” while U.S. warplanes flew off the east coast of North Korea in an explicit show of force.

The eight U.S. aircraft flew close to the North Korean coastline while remaining in international airspace, the Pentagon said in a statement, adding it was the farthest north of the demilitarized zone between North Korea and South Korea that American warplanes have flown since Pyongyang started testing ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons in the 1990s.

“This mission is a demonstration of U.S. resolve and a clear message that the president has many military options to defeat any threat,” Pentagon spokeswoman Dana White said. “We are prepared to use the full range of military capabilities to defend the U.S. homeland and our allies.”

The moves on Saturday capped a week of hostility between the two countries and involving their top leaders. The rising animosity has spurred world leaders to call for restraint and diplomacy, but neither capital has shown an inclination to back down from the standoff.

President Donald Trump this week derided North Korean leader Kim Jong Un as “Rocket Man,” saying he was on a suicide mission and that the U.S. would annihilate North Korea if forced to defend itself or its allies. He drew a personal response from Mr. Kim, who called Mr. Trump “deranged” and warned of retaliation.

On Saturday, North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Yong Ho suggested at the annual General Assembly gathering that military strikes by his country are inevitable. North Korea has been steadily advancing in both its missile and nuclear-warhead programs and is considered close to possessing the capability of an intercontinental strike.

“Trump might not have been aware what is uttered from his mouth, but we will make sure that he bears consequences far beyond his words, far beyond the scope of what he can handle, even if he is ready to do so,” Mr. Ri said.

“He committed an irreversible mistake of making our rockets’ visit to the entire U.S. mainland inevitable all the more,” he said. CONTINUE AT SITE

It will take only 30 to 40 years for the Muslim population to become the majority in Europe. — Charles Gave, French financier, website of the Institut des Libertés.

What is of concern, is that there is a sub-group of the European population which is in the process of very efficiently wiping itself out of existence.

That uttering this truth causes such mayhem and furious condemnations in the media reveals that in Europe, not only is the “native” population dying, but free speech as well.

A riveting — thanks to its subject — paper was posted the September 4, 2017 on the website of “Institut des Libertés,” the think tank of the great French financier Charles Gave. In it, he asks: Does the native population — by which he means the white population — of Europe face extinction?

His answer is “yes”: “It is not good or bad. IT IS”, Gave writes. His basic argument is that with a “native” rate of fertility of 1.4, a “migrant” — by which he means Muslim — rate of 3.4 to 4 children per woman, and taking the initial Muslim population to be 10% of the total, it will take only 30 to 40 years for the Muslim population to become the majority. Indeed, writes Gave, with a “native” rate of 1.4 for a population of 100, after only two generations you merely see 42 “native” children born.

As expected, Gave was almost immediately scorned as a far-right lunatic for having adopted the theory known in France as “le grand remplacement” (“the great replacement”) — of the native population by a new, migrant population. The theory was earlier disseminated by the writer Renaud Camus, who was close to the Front National political party of Marine Le Pen.

In a furious and venomous article about the “foolish calculations” of Gave, the newspaper Libération — compared to which the New York Times or the Washington Post look honest and balanced — wrote that the Muslim population is not 10% of the French population, but less; that the fertility rate of the native population is 1.8, not 1.4; that the fertility rate of the migrants from the Maghreb is 3.53, not 4 and that the concept of “Muslim origin” is nonsensical.

Who then is right, Gave or his critics?

Let us begin by noting that the observation from Libération is fundamentally weak. Gave writes that the fertility rate of the Muslim migrants is between 3.4 and 4 — not 4, as Libération falsely claims (Gave: between 3.4 and 4, Libération: 3.53, exactly the same). Moreover, nobody knows the exact proportion of Muslims in France — the French State explicitly forbids any kind of religious or racial census — but 10% seems a reasonable and moderate estimate. In addition, Libération misses the only real mistake in Gave’s calculation: with a fertility rate of 1.4 and considering an initial population of 100, no other factors being taken into account, after two generations you do not have 42 children (Gave), but 49 (100 x 0.7= 70 x 0.7= 49, not 42).[1]

That being said, Gave’s paper made a few assumptions with which I would disagree, for instance:

“Those who are born today will be there in thirty years and those who are not born will not be there. This is CERTAIN”, writes Gave. One imagines that the same certainty was just as true in 1913, 1937 or just before the Black Death;

“Thinking that real estate will go up when there are only 42 buyers for 100 sellers is an interesting idea but I have a hard time understanding the logic”, writes Gave; but he had just mentioned that the migrant population was replacing the native one — in fact, France has never been as populous as it is today;

Gave concludes that the European native population is going to disappear in 40 years: “The immense news of the next thirty or forty years will thus be the disappearance of the European populations, whose ancestors created the modern world.” Bearing in mind a fertility rate of 1.4 for the “natives”, it would take more than 40 years for them to vanish from the surface of Earth; to say nothing of “mixed” marriages, and so on.

Most importantly, Islam is not a race. Islam is a religion and, in fact, much more than that; it is a doctrine, a political movement, an ideology, and a complete set of norms (Islamic jurisprudence in the form of Quran, Sunnah, Fiqh) intended to rule each and every aspect of human activity. Being a doctrine, one can join it and convert to Islam. One can also leave Islam; however, the punishment for leaving, called “apostasy,” is death.

There are, nevertheless, people who define themselves as “former Muslims”, even if they may not be a majority. It does not make much sense, however, to pretend to know 40 years in advance what will be the future of a belief, creed, ideology or cult, especially in Europe and the Western world. As the saying goes, “It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.”

Only two or three generations ago, tens of millions of Europeans knelt several times a week in churches to show their adoration of Jesus Christ. Forty years after this religious fervor, almost nothing remains. What we have instead is the well-known phenomenon of “dechristianization”, which has engulfed the whole of Europe.

Yet, despite a few differences, there is truth in Gave’s paper. Bluntly put, Europeans are not making babies anymore. And this has nothing whatsoever to do with Islam; this “malady” is entirely self-inflicted.

In his book, The Population Bomb, published in 1968, the American biologist Paul Ehrlich wrote that the best method to reduce population is the legalization of abortion. And that was without even considering the effect of birth control.

What is the first thing you should do when you have dug yourself into a hole? The obvious answer is: stop digging. This is the advice that those involved in the imbroglio over the so-called independence referendum in Iraqi Kurdistan, due to be held on September 25. But still in the suspense of writing this column, would do well to heed.

The idea of holding a referendum on so contentious an issue at this time is bizarre, to say the least. There was no popular demand for it. Nor could those who proposed it show which one of Iraq’s problems such a move might solve at this moment. In other words, the move was unnecessary, in the sense that Talleyrand meant when he said that, in politics, doing what is not necessary is worse than making a mistake.

If by independence one means the paraphernalia of statehood, the three provinces that form Iraqi Kurdistan lack nothing: They have their president, prime minister, cabinet, parliament, army, police, and, even, virtual embassies in key foreign capitals. They are also well-furnished with symbols of statehood, including a flag and national anthem.

Having said all that, one could hardly deny the Kurds a desire for independence.

In a sense, some Kurds have dreamt of an independent state since over 2000 years ago, when the Greek historian Xenophon ran into them in the mountains of Western Asia. (See his account in his masterpiece Anabasis).

Right now, however, all indications are that any attempt at a unilateral declaration of independence by the Kurds could trigger a tsunami of conflicts that the region, already mired in crisis, might not be able to handle. In other words, the hole dug by Erbil may become an ever-deepening black hole, sucking a bigger chunk of the Middle East into the unknown; hence the need to stop digging.

Yet, almost everyone is doing the opposite.

Massoud Barzani, the president of the autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government, has lashed out against Turkey and Iran while threatening military action to seize disputed areas in Iraq. Barzani’s tough talk may please his base but could strengthen chauvinist elements in Baghdad, Ankara and Tehran who have always regarded Kurds as the enemy.

Seven years ago, Shadrach Mugoya Levi drove three hours from his rural village of Magada in the Namutumba District of Uganda to find a woman named Naomi. His friends had insisted he meet her. When he arrived at her house, her mother answered the door and said: “No, my daughter is too young.”

“At first I feared him,” said Naomi Namusoosa of that introduction. She was 16 at the time, and he was 21.

Mr. Levi, an orphan who helped raise himself and two of his younger siblings up from poverty, was looking for a wife. “A good woman, someone who will be so nice to me, a good listener, and a cook who will not give me a hard time,” he said.

“He was beautiful,” Ms. Namusoosa said. “By the time I really met him, I saw the way he was talking to me. He was kind.”

Mr. Levi waited for her for three years. Then, in 2013, he returned to formally ask permission to marry Ms. Namusoosa.

Mr. Levi, now 28, is the spiritual leader of the Namutumba Abayudaya, one of nine Jewish communities in Uganda that stem from the conversion roughly 100 years ago of a local leader called Semei Kakungulu, who then created a sect.

On Aug. 8, Gershom Sizomu, a rabbi from the nearby Jewish community at Nabugoye Hill in Mbale, and Yafa Chase, a rabbi from Granby, Mass., married the couple and four other Jewish couples before about 1,500 witnesses, including Abayudaya (the Ugandan term for Jewish people) from the nine communities. The event gathered politicians from the local council, government officials and family and friends of all five couples from throughout the country.

After meeting Ms. Namusoosa, Mr. Levi went to the United States for two years to earn money to pay the dowry promised to his future wife’s family by Ugandan social law. In 2015, he returned with enough that her parents approved.

“O.K.,” Ms. Namusoosa recalled. “I thought, ‘I will go. I love him.’” Because, she said, “He is caring.”