RUTHFULLY YOURS

In his introduction to Democracy and America (1835), Alexis de Tocqueville explained that Europeans could learn much about their future from the United States: the place where equality of social relations—the defining feature of the democratic age into which both Europeans and Americans had entered—had reached its most advanced form. The young nation’s experience, Tocqueville wrote, shed light on certain tendencies inherent in democracy that could actually weaken the passion for freedom and the institutions that protect it. Understanding this potentially destructive drift would, he hoped, assist lovers of liberty in both Europe and America in fashioning measures to safeguard freedom and thereby fortify democracy.

One-hundred-eighty years later, today’s Americans can, in turn, learn much about their own future from Europe’s confrontation with well-developed dangers to freedom that, while peculiar to our historical moment, are also typical of mature liberal democracies. As Daniel Johnson warns in his concise, dense, and sweeping essay, “Does Europe Have a Future?,” the continent’s failure so far to grasp the magnitude of the clash of civilizations in which it is embroiled stems from a crippling loss of self-knowledge. That his forceful alarm is unlikely to affect those most urgently in need of heeding it testifies to the precariousness of the European condition.

Evidence of the clash abounds: the state system in the Arab Middle East has fractured; religious war, pitting Sunni Islamists and Shia Islamists against secular authorities (and each other), consumes greats swaths of an area extending from North Africa to the Persian Gulf; in a little more than a year and a half, jihadists have perpetrated brazen terrorist attacks in Brussels, Paris, Copenhagen, Paris again, and California; large numbers of Muslims resist assimilation in the European nation-states to which they have immigrated; and Europe has largely acquiesced in the this tendency of Muslim immigrants to remain in communities apart or, worse still, has encouraged Islamic separatism on the basis of an incoherent multiculturalism that denigrates identification with the nation-state while celebrating every other kind of partial identity.

The year 2015 closed with the BDS movement in South Africa releasing a triumphalist video.They’re not alone in that: a number of Israel-hating activists around the world have been doing likewise. But unlike the BDS movement in most countries, their efforts to isolate, undermine, and destroy Israel as we know it are supported by their country’s head of state.

“We reiterate that we discourage travel to Israel for ANC leaders, members, and representatives, for business and leisure purposes. The ANC encourages our government to continue its programme of talking to all parties in the Palestinian territory and calls on the people of Palestine to work together to bring about self-determination.”

Thus declared South Africa’s President Jacob Zuma on 8th January, during the ANC’s 104th anniversary celebrations.

President Zuma went on:

“The ANC is very concerned about the deteriorating situation in the Middle East as this has the potential to trigger a global conflagration. We urge parties to co-operate in line with principles of international law and resolutions of the United Nations.”

Now, President Zuma, it’s a sad and well-known fact that more people in your country are suffering from the AIDs virus than are any other people in the world.

Right or wrong in its economic specifics, the Pontiff’s Laudato Si encyclical draws attention to the wide material gap between rich and poor and to the insuperable problem of bridging it. The Pope surely has a point, even if his nostrums are not wholly of this world.
We fight for and against not men and things as they are, but for and against caricatures we make of them.

—Joseph Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis, 1954

Reading can be a pleasure and sometimes, as we all know, a chore. I confess as a Christian—albeit not of the Roman Catholic persuasion—to having not read a papal encyclical before the latest, issued on May 24. On my rough count, Laudato Si’ (On care for our common home) ran to a daunting 40,000 words or so. The flesh is weak. I was deterred. However, my interest was piqued by media commentary on the Pope’s condemnatory views, or so they were portrayed, on the role of free market forces in guiding economic affairs. It turned out to be a rewarding read.

A first thing to say is that when Pope Francis is on his “home turf”, discussing spiritual matters, he is inspirational. I had to put his words down at times because they were so powerful and moving. On the other hand, his wide-ranging comments on the environment, to which the encyclical was primarily directed, were unremittingly one-sided. The way he begins sets his unchanging compass: “This sister [Mother Earth] cries out to us because of the harm we have inflicted on her by our irresponsible use and abuse of the goods which God has endowed her.”

Instructively, as you read on, it becomes increasingly clear that the Pope’s perspective on the environment stems from, and is caught up with, his perspective on economics and capitalism. But stop here. Economics and capitalism take us down the road apiece from where the Pope starts. I think it is safe to say that the Pope starts with God. As you might expect, a number of conservative writers and broadcasters, in passing comment on the encyclical, started further down the road. And this, I believe, and as I will later explain, has led them into being more sharply critical of its economic content than is justified.

At one point John Maynard Keynes broke off debate with some of his contemporaries after the publication of The General Theory in 1936 because he did not believe that they were engaging his arguments with an open mind. Those who write with good will, hoping to persuade, are entitled to an open-minded reception. The Pope is no exception.

How can you explain why Germany, which in the 20th century had such a gigantic anti-Semitism problem, would import so many people from those areas of the world which now have the same gigantic anti-Semitism problem?

The police water cannons were not in evidence on New Year’s Eve to break up the migrant gangs committing violent crimes against women. Instead they were used to break up a lawful demonstration of people opposed to such violent attacks on women.

The late Robert Conquest once laid out a set of three political rules, the last of which read, “The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.” This rule comes in handy when trying to understand the otherwise clearly insane and suicidal policies of Chancellor Merkel’s government in Germany. These policies only make sense if the German government has in fact been taken over by a cabal of people intent not on holding Germany together but on pulling it entirely apart. Consider the evidence.

Muslims had the habit of slaughtering “infidel” Muslims for centuries when there was not a country called Syria or any “Islamophobia.”

The main lack of logic seems to be that innocent people are attacked repeatedly by Muslims, so they become suspicious of Muslims; this suspicion is then called Islamophobia — but it does not come out of thin air.

President Erdogan is explicitly saying that even non-terrorist Muslims have the potential to become terrorists if they happen to feel offended. So easily?

Pro-Sunni supremacists, such as the Turkish president and his top cleric, do not understand that cartoons do not kill people. But some of their friends do kill people.

There is hardly anything surprising in the way Turkey’s Islamist leaders and their officials in the clergy diagnose jihadist terror: Blame it on everyone except the terrorists. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the inventor of the theory that “there is no Islamic terror,” recently warned that “rising racism and enmity against Islam in Europe[an] and other countries” will cause great tragedies — like the Paris attacks.

TransCanada took Uncle Sam to court last week to reclaim some of the damage done by the Obama Administration’s multiyear, drawn-out rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline. It may not come up in the litigation, but someone should point out that the same Obama Administration that rejected Keystone seems to have no problem supporting a new oil pipeline project in Africa.

That was the story last week out of Kenya, where U.S. Ambassador Robert Godec told Kenya’s energy minister that Washington would help Nairobi raise $18 billion to finance its PowerAfrika project. The pipeline would stretch from Kenya’s Rift Valley to Lamu on the coast. “Kenya needs $18 billion worth of financing,” Mr. Godec said, according to a dispatch in Oilprice.com, “so one of the questions we are discussing is how we can work together with the private sector and governments to raise that sum, to find ways to make certain that this financing becomes available.”

Has Mr. Godec checked with Secretary of State John Kerry, or, perhaps more important, anti-oil Democratic financier Tom Steyer? Kenya and Northeast Africa could certainly use the investment and jobs that would come from the oil project. Then again, so could the United States. What’s with the double standard on pipelines?

PARIS—Europe needs to beef up its border controls to prevent Islamic State from using authentic-looking Syrian and Iraqi passports to smuggle its operatives into the region amid the mass of refugees fleeing conflict in the Middle East, French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said Sunday.

Mr. Cazeneuve said he plans to discuss the issue with officials in Brussels before European interior ministers meet in Amsterdam later this month.

Mr. Cazeneuve’s remarks are part of a rush by European security authorities to respond to the threat that Islamic State can make Syrian and Iraqi passports that are indistinguishable from the real thing. Officials believe the group has obtained thousands of blank Syrian and Iraqi passports, plus equipment used by those governments to print the documents. Mr. Cazeneuve said several of the Islamic State operatives who killed 130 in the Paris attacks on Nov. 13 used false passports to slip into Europe undetected.

“It’s a central question,” he said in an interview with French media. “It’s a phenomenon that will continue if we are not able to halt it.”

Officials say Islamic State likely obtained those materials when it overran the cities of Raqqa and Deir Ezzour in Syria and Mosul in Iraq. Without reliable lines of communication open, particularly to the Syrian government, Western officials have little clarity on what passport numbers are linked to stolen passport books containing fraudulent identities.

You’d think that North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un wouldn’t have a friend in the world these days. His relentless pursuit of weapons of mass destruction and willingness to starve his own people is evil madness. Last week even communist China condemned the supreme leader’s fourth nuclear test, which the chubby little psychopath called “the thrilling sound of our first hydrogen bomb explosion.”

But Mr. Kim is not all alone. He still has the Caribbean’s Cosa Nostra—aka the Castro family—as a friend and ally. The Cold War may be long over, but Cuba is sticking by the North Korean pariah.

This bond exposes Americans to grave risk. Analysts fret that Pyongyang is developing missiles and miniaturized warheads that will allow it to lob a bomb into the continental U.S. But having a desperate ideological pal 90 miles from U.S. shores magnifies the danger. In the past 21/2 years Cuba has tried to smuggle weapons to Pyongyang, engaged in high-level meetings with North Korean officials, and secured U.S. military technology. Anybody want to connect the dots?

Introduction: As the disturbing reports pour in about the New Year’s Eve Muslim sex assaults in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Finland and other European countries, it has become clear that the new Utopian Multicultural Europe that the Left has worked so hard to build is now here. Cologne Mayor Henriette Reker’s response to the assaults under her watch has been to reprimand the victims, suggesting that they had asked for it. She has vowed to make sure that women will change their behavior, so that they don’t provoke Muslims to sexually assault them again. There will now be published “online guidelines” for women to read so they can prepare themselves. One wonders if it will be the burqa or the niqab that will be the solution of choice.

These eerie developments are, of course, completely in line with why Naomi Wolf finds the hijab “sexy” and why Oslo Professor of Anthropology Dr. Unni Wikan’s solution for the high incidence of Muslims raping Norwegian women is not for the rapists to be punished, but for Norwegian women to “take their share of responsibility” for the rapes because Muslim men found their manner of dress provocative. Norwegian women, she has counseled, “must realize that we live in a Multicultural society and adapt themselves to it.”

A mob of a thousand men of “Arab or North African” origin sexually assaulted more than 100 German women in downtown Cologne on New Year’s Eve. Similar attacks also occurred in Hamburg and Stuttgart. Cologne’s Mayor Henriette Reker, said that “under no circumstances” should the crimes be attributed to asylum seekers. Instead, she blamed the victims for the assaults.

“There is nothing wrong with being proud German patriots. There is nothing wrong with wanting Germany to remain free and democratic. There is nothing wrong with preserving our own Judeo-Christian civilization. That is our duty.” — Geert Wilders, Dutch politician, addressing a rally in Dresden.

“We are importing Islamic extremism, Arab anti-Semitism, national and ethnic conflicts of other peoples, as well as a different understanding of society and law. German security agencies are unable to deal with these imported security problems, and the resulting reactions from the German population.” — From a leaked government document, published by Die Welt.

Germany will spend at least €17 billion ($18.3 billion) on asylum seekers in 2016 — Die Welt.

Saudi Arabia is preparing to finance the construction of 200 new mosques in Germany to accommodate asylum seekers. — Frankfurter Allgemeine.

Germany’s Muslim population skyrocketed by more than 850,000 in 2015, for the first time pushing the total number of Muslims in the country to nearly six million.

Of the one million migrants and refugees who arrived in Germany in 2015, at least 80% (or 800,000) were believed to be Muslim, according to estimates by the Central Council of Muslims in Germany (Zentralrat der Muslime in Deutschland, ZMD), a Muslim umbrella group based in Cologne.