RUTHFULLY YOURS

An estimated 40,000 cars are burned in France every year — a destruction often attributed to rival Muslim gangs. Every day, more than 80 cars are burned.

The rector of the Grand Mosque of Paris, Dalil Boubakeur, called for the number of mosques in France to be doubled over the next two years. Boubakeur said that 2,200 mosques are “not enough” for the “seven million Muslims living in France.” He demanded that unused churches be converted into mosques.

Prime Minister Manuel Valls revealed in April that more than 1,550 French citizens or residents are involved in terrorist networks in Syria and Iraq.

“Can we not talk about subjects that split opinion? If you talk about immigration, you are a xenophobe. If you talk about security, you are a fascist. If you talk about Islam, you are an Islamophobe.” – Henri Guaino, MP.

“Those who denounce the illegal behavior of fundamentalists are more likely to be sued than the fundamentalists who behave illegally.” – Marine Le Pen, leader of the National Front party.

The Muslim population of France reached 6.5 million in 2015, or around 10% of the overall population of 66 million. In real terms, France has the largest Muslim population in the European Union, just above Germany.

Although French law prohibits the collection of official statistics about the race or religion of its citizens, this estimate is based on several studies that attempted to calculate the number of people in France whose origins are from Muslim-majority countries.

Canadians are dead, and so is satire. Six Quebeckers get slaughtered by Islamic terrorists in Burkina Faso, and to honor their memory Prime Minister Justin Trudeau leads a moment of silence …at a mosque.

Speaking of prime ministers, having spent his entire premiership assuring us that whatever happens in the news headlines is nothing to do with Islam, David Cameron has suddenly discovered a few things that are to do with Islam. The opening paragraph from Mr Cameron’s column in the London Times:

Where in the world do you think the following things are happening? School governors’ meetings where male governors sit in the meeting room and the women have to sit out of sight in the corridor. Young women only allowed to leave their house in the company of a male relative. Religious councils that openly discriminate against women and prevent them from leaving abusive marriages.

The answer, I’m sorry to say, is Britain.

Ah, right. And who in Britain bears responsibility for letting a parallel self-segregating society incubate and grow these last 20 years?

Mr Cameron has just noticed that 22 per cent of Muslim women in the United Kingdom speak little or no English, despite having lived there for decades. If you’re a Muslim female, the moment of silence can last for decades.

So what’s Cameron proposing to do about it? Well, that’s all a bit more iffy:

Forcing all migrants to learn English and ending gender segregation will show we’re serious about creating One Nation.

—The trial of four men from west London who were allegedly poised to carry out an Islamic State-inspired gun attack in the U.K. capital opened on Monday.

Prosecutors say British Muslims Tarik Hassane, 22, Suhaib Majeed, 21, Nyall Hamlett, 25, and Nathan Cuffy, 26, were planning to murder a police officer or soldier with a silencer-equipped pistol, but the plan was foiled when authorities arrested them in 2014.

The case underscores the growing number of Islamic extremist plots in Europe targeted at police or military personnel.

Potential targets may have included the Shepherd’s Bush police station in West London and the nearby Parachute Regiment barracks, prosecutors alleged, after a forensic examination of Mr. Hassane’s electronic device found he had used Google Street View to case their locations.

“If the plot had been allowed to run its course, it would have resulted in a terrorist murder or murders on the streets of London, according to the warped ideology of the defendants, in the cause, and for the sake, of Allah,” lead prosecutor Brian Altman said

Islamic State fighters launched a naval assault in northern Libya last week, dispatching three boats that fired on an oil terminal at Zueitina. Local guards repelled that attack, but it was a reminder of Islamic State’s growing capabilities and reach beyond its heartland in Syria and Iraq. Too bad Western capitals seem unprepared to stop it.

The Zueitina episode was the latest in a string of Islamic State attacks in Libya since the new year. On Jan. 8 an Islamic State truck bomb hit a police academy in Zliten, western Libya, killing 65 people. The same week Islamic State arson attacks ignited two other Libyan oil terminals. Islamic State draws much of its revenue by marketing oil from captured fields in Iraq and Syria.

Following the Zletin truck bombing, the European Union—300 miles across the Mediterranean—offered $108 million in security assistance to Libya. The aid is supposed to take the form of technical and logistical support to the newly formed Libyan unity government, currently based in neighboring Tunisia.

In Syria, Bashar Assad is trying to bring his enemies to heel by blocking humanitarian convoys to desperate civilians living in besieged towns. The policy is called “starve or kneel,” and it is openly supported by Hezbollah and tacitly by Iran, which has deployed its elite Quds Force to aid Mr. Assad’s war effort.

So what better time for right-thinking liberals to ask: “Is Iran really so evil?”

That’s the title of a revealing essay in Politico by Stephen Kinzer, a former New York Times reporter now at Brown University. “The demonization of Iran is arguably the most bizarre and self-defeating of all U.S. foreign policies,” Mr. Kinzer begins. “Americans view Iran not simply as a country with interests that sometimes conflict with ours but as a relentless font of evil.”

Mr. Kinzer’s essay was published Sunday, as sanctions were lifted on Tehran and four of America’s hostages came home after lengthy imprisonments. The Obama administration publicly insists that the nuclear deal does not mean the U.S. should take a benign view of Iran, but the more enthusiastic backers of the agreement think otherwise. “Our perception of Iran as a threat to vital American interests is increasingly disconnected from reality,” Mr. Kinzer writes. “Events of the past week may slowly begin to erode the impulse that leads Americans to believe patriotism requires us to hate Iran.”

I share Daniel Johnson’s concern about Europe’s future—although not always for the reasons he cites. In general, I believe he conflates Europe’s domestic pathologies with the effects on Europe of global events, not all of which are of Europe’s making and not all of which are as grave as he stipulates. He writes, for instance, that the November 13 terrorist attacks in Paris mark a culmination so far in “a concerted campaign directed mainly at Europeans.” Those attacks are certainly the ones Europeans noticed, because they were the victims, but they are largely irrelevant to the main “campaign”: a vicious Islamic civil war and a superpower conflict by proxy. In that war’s real theaters, the death toll dwarfs, to say the least, anything directed mainly at Europeans.

As for the other reasons why Europe’s future could well be bleak, I would list several. The United States is now the Sick Man of the Globe, and when a hegemonic power falls into desuetude, disorder is inevitable. The Eurozone crisis and Europe’s moribund economies have exacted a steep price in public trust of Europe’s institutions. The world has not naturally adopted liberal democracy as a form of government (as many had hoped at the end of the cold war), and the rise of illiberal democracies, particularly in Russia and Turkey, is a great danger—both directly in that Russian forces now openly threaten European countries and indirectly in that the authoritarian contagion has spread to Europe’s own southern and eastern flanks.

This is hardly to deny that the catastrophic breakdown of states and social order in much of the Islamic world—leaving a quarter-million dead in Syria alone — is a threat to Europe. But 800,000 asylum-seekers provoking a clash of civilizations on Europe’s soil, plunging it into chaos on the scale of the Middle East? Not so fast.

Muslim governmental officials — not “ISIS” — in nations such as Brunei, Somalia, and Tajikistan continue openly and formally to express their hostility for Christmas and Christianity. And extremist Muslims — not “ISIS” — continue to terrorize and slaughter Christians on Christmas in nations as diverse as Bangladesh, Belgium, the Congo, Germany, Indonesia, Iran, Nigeria, Philippines, Syria, the West Bank, and even the United States.

On Christmas Day in the West Bank, two Muslims were arrested for setting a Christmas tree on fire in a Christian-majority village near Jenin. On the same day in Bethlehem, Muslim rioters greeted the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem with a hail of stones. Authorities subsequently arrested 16 “Salafi radicals” who were planning to carry out terror attacks against tourists celebrating Christmas.

If this was Christmas in Bethlehem — Christ’s birthplace and scene of the Nativity — Christmas in other parts of the world experienced similar abuse.

In the United States, a 46-year-old Christian mother of three was among the 14 people killed in the San Bernardino terrorist attack targeting a Christmas party. Ironically, Bennetta Bet-Badal had fled Iran for the U.S. when she was 18 to escape the persecution of Christians after the 1979 Islamic revolution. After graduating from college with a degree in chemistry and marrying and raising three children, the jihad caught up with her. She was attending a Christmas luncheon and bringing gifts to her co-workers when Muslim terrorists burst in and massacred them.

Belgium resembled Bethlehem: A video appeared showing a number of youths lighting a firebomb under a Christmas tree in Brussels. Seconds later, there is an explosion, and the tree is engulfed in flames. Young men shouting “Allahu Akbar,” [“Allah is Greater”] run away. The person who originally uploaded the video, Mohamed Amine, has since taken his Facebook page down.

Dying Germany has only one item on its bucket list, and that is redemption. The Germans cannot seek redemption from the crimes of their grandparents because they do not understand what motivated them to do such terrible things.

For Merkel and most of Germany’s elite, the appearance on Germany’s threshold of millions of Muslim refugees is a final chance at redemption, an opportunity for Germany to redeem itself from the crimes of its past through a transcendent act of selflessness.

Denke ich an Deutschland in der Nacht
Dann bin ich um den Schlaf gebracht

If I think of Germany in the night
It kills my sleep.

– Heinrich Heine.

Once there was an old man who in his youth committed a terrible crime, the murder of many innocents. He no longer could remember what drove him to do this; he tried not to think about it, and his memories came to mind unwillingly and infrequently. Rage and guilt had faded long ago into a vague residue of disgust. He worked hard and found some distraction in the monotony of daily tasks. He sought diversion in tasteless entertainment; he followed football, looked at pornography, watched the dubbed version of American comedies, and took vacations at the beach.

He had a child but no grandchildren; his child knew that he once did unforgivable things, but did not want to know what they were, and the old man did not want to tell him. The old crime hung like a black curtain between them.

The old man could feel that he did not have long to live. Ahead of him he saw only days clouded with boredom, illuminated only by the occasional flash of regret. He let the days come and go one at a time until their count might come to an end, for he did not know any other way to live. Because he had no ties to life, he had no way to prepare for death.

One day the old man met a street urchin and on an impulse invited him back to his apartment. He fed the strange boy and gave him a place to sleep. The next morning the old man bought the urchin new clothes, and gave him things — a smartphone, a video-game system, a football jersey. The street kid made himself at home and said little.