RUTHFULLY YOURS

LONDON—The death toll from a blaze in west London rose to at least 12 in a high-rise tower that residents had complained was a fire hazard, raising questions about maintenance and safety of low-income housing.

The fire started early Wednesday and spread rapidly through the 24-story public-housing block, which residents said lacked adequate emergency exits. Witnesses said they saw people jumping from the building to escape the flames. Dozens of residents were injured, and police said they expected the death toll to rise.

Firefighters were still battling pockets of fire Wednesday evening, but had searched most of the Grenfell Tower in the otherwise upscale North Kensington neighborhood, clambering through the ruins and also using drones, authorities said. It was too early to pinpoint the cause of the blaze, police said.

The London Fire Brigade said 65 people were rescued from the building, which a structural engineer said isn’t in danger of collapsing.

Residents said they heard few, if any, alarms. One man who got out described a chaotic race through a central staircase that was the only escape route.

London Fire Commissioner Dany Cotton called the blaze unprecedented, saying she hadn’t seen anything like it in her 29-year career.

Michael Paramasivan, who lived on the seventh floor, said he woke to the smell of burning plastic and heard people shouting. He, his girlfriend and their children fled down a crowded central staircase. He said he wasn’t sure if there were sprinklers, but said none had activated.

“I saw three kids near the top floor, and next thing we knew, bang, it went up in flames,” he said. “They must have perished. It was horrific.”

“It was the towering inferno, like lighting a bonfire,” said Piers Thompson, who lives in a neighboring building and said he was awakened by shouts at about 1:15 a.m. and watched fast-moving flames spread.

“I couldn’t believe it. You could see people flashing” lights in an effort to attract rescuers attention, especially on high floors, he said. “Someone was waving a blanket.”

People-smugglers bring the migrants to the NGOs’ ships, which then reach Italian seaports. Another legal enquiry has been opened about the mafia’s economic interests in managing the migrants after their arrival.

One cannot compare the migrants to the Jews fleeing Nazism. Pope Francis, for example, recently compared the migrants’ centers to Nazi “concentration camps”. Where are the gas chambers, medical “experiments,” crematoria, slave labor, forced marches and firing squads? These comparisons are spread by the media for a precise reason: shutting down the debate.

By 2065, it is expected that 14.4 million migrants will arrive. Added to the more than five million immigrants currently in Italy, 37% of the population is expected to be foreigners: more than one out of every three inhabitants.

First, it was the Hungarian route. Then it was the Balkan route. Now Italy is the epicenter of this demographic earthquake, and it has become Europe’s soft underbelly as hundreds of thousands of migrants arrive.

With nearly 10,000 arrivals in one recent three-day period, the number of migrants in 2017 exceeded 60,000 — 48% more than the same period last year, when they were 40,000. Over Easter weekend a record 8,000 migrants were rescued in the Mediterranean and brought to Italy. And that is just the tip of the iceberg: during the summer, the number of arrivals from Libya will only increase.

A wooden boat carrying migrants waits to be escorted to the Topaz Responder vessel, as members of the Migrant Offshore Aid Station make a rescue at sea on November 21, 2016 in Pozzollo, Italy. (Photo by Dan Kitwood/Getty Images)

A replacement of population is under way in Italy. But if you open the mainstream newspapers, you barely find these figures. No television station has dedicated any time to what is happening. No criticism is allowed. The invasion is considered a done deal.

In 2016, 176,554 migrants landed in Italy — an eight-fold increase since 2014. In 2015, there were 103,792. In 2014, there were 66,066. In 2013, there were just 22,118. In the last four years, 427,000 migrants reached Italy. In only the first five months of this year, 2017, Italy received 10% of the total number of migrants of the last four years.

There are days when the Italian navy and coast guard rescue 1,700 migrants in 24 hours. The country is exhausted. There are Italian villages where one-tenth of the population is already made up of new migrants. We are talking about small towns of 220 residents and 40 migrants.

One of the major aspects of this demographic revolution is that it is taking place in a country which is dramatically aging. According with a new report from the Italian Office of Statistics, Italy’s population will fall to 53.7 million in half a century — a loss of seven million people. Italy, which has one of the world’s lowest fertility rates, will lose between 600,000 to 800,000 citizens every year. Immigrants will number more than 14 million, about one-fourth of the total population. But in the most pessimistic scenario, the Italian population could drop to 46 million, a loss of 14 million people.

“Today, Muslim public opinion is shaped by schools, mosques and the media. Everywhere in the Islamic world, these three channels are state-controlled. This triad is how terrorism is bred.” — Ayad Jamal Aldin, Iraqi Shiite cleric and former parliamentarian.

The Muslim Brotherhood, too, is linked to the House of Saud, which, Aldin said, “offers every kind of required support to the White House. In exchange, they enjoy the U.S.’s cover, which they use to spread Wahhabism even farther. From Minnesota, to Canada, to Latin American, to Asia, Africa, and Europe — they claim they only build mosques. Through their literature, they constitute a more lethal danger than that posed by nuclear technology proliferation.”

“Let the U.S. and others pressure the Iranians and Saudis to stop their support for extremist movements. You will be surprised how soon people will start to think and act differently.” — Ayad Jamal Aldin.

In the wake of the ISIS’s Palm Sunday bombings of Coptic churches in Egypt, Cairo’s Al-Azhar University, Sunni Islam’s most revered institution, not only refused to denounce the terrorist organization as “un-Islamic,” but repeated its implausible boast of being a bulwark against extremism in the Muslim-Arab world, and accused those calling for religious reform of treason.

One such “traitor” was Egyptian TV presenter Islam Behery, a British-educated writer and Sunni Muslim who had been exposing the roots of violence within Islamic tradition itself, until he was forced off the air after protests by Al-Azhar in 2015.

According to Behery, who was later convicted of blasphemy and sentenced to a year in prison, the tradition in question

“has very little good amid a multitude of evil, least of which is the insistence by all the four schools of Sunni Islam that Christians can be killed with impunity [as] a Muslim life is ‘superior’ to that of a non-Muslim.” (Kol Youm show, ON TV with Amr Adib, 25 April).

Across the West, restless voters and mainstream parties are reinforcing one another in a mutual race to the fringes, hollowing out the political center and threatening the basic canons of our post-war liberal order – the human values, diplomatic alliances and economic relationships that have generally served us well.

The middle-class struggles economically, fears the next terrorist attack and feels abandoned by political and economic elites who decide their futures in stately rooms, often behind closed doors. Frustrated and angry, voters are increasingly disgusted by traditional candidates and tempted by outlandish alternatives.

The parties, meanwhile, are driven to the fringes by their most activist elements who provide the enthusiasm, resources and voluntarism that helps to elevate those outlandish candidates to the role of party standard-bearers.

To push back, we need mainstream leaders with the credibility and courage to educate Western voters about what’s at stake if we loosen our alliances, leave a global vacuum for China, Russia and other authoritarian powers to fill, and wall ourselves off economically. At the same time, we need such leaders to craft policies that help address the legitimate anxieties that many voters express.

The latest dagger to the heart of the liberal order comes via Britain. Though his Labour Party fell short of victory, Jeremy Corbyn’s rise in Britain’s elections inserts anti-Zionism (and tolerance for anti-Semitism), anti-Westernism, far-left collectivism and mindless pacifism more forcefully into the mainstream of a nation that was once led by the likes of Churchill, Thatcher and Disraeli.

Corbyn is morally challenged and ideologically misguided – all of which helps elevate him in the eyes of middle-class voters who want to lash out at traditional politics, and of young voters who lack the historical perspective to fully understand the benefits and fragility of freedom and democracy.

Asked once whether he could envision any circumstance for deploying British military force, Corbyn replied, “I’m sure there are some but I can’t think of them at the moment.” He can’t because, when it comes to the West, he aligns himself much more closely with its enemies than its defenders.