RUTHFULLY YOURS

Not that long ago, Austria’s Nazi collaborationist party was accusing Hungary of being Nazis for the whole border security thing. Now Austria appears to have had enough and has caught fence fever.

Austria on Wednesday said it plans to build a fence at its main crossing with Slovenia, the first such barrier between two members of Europe’s document-free travel area, in one of the clearest signs to date of how Europe’s migrant crisis is undermining Europe’s institutions and sowing discord across the bloc.

News of the plan, aimed to slow the stream of migrants headed toward Germany via Austria, drew sharp criticism from Berlin. German Chancellor Angela Merkel has sought to preserve freedom of travel across the continent, even as she struggles to maintain her own open-door refugee policy in the face of mounting opposition at home and growing impatience in other European countries on the migrants’ route.

“The federal government and the chancellor repeatedly have stressed that we believe that the refugee crisis can’t be solved with the building of fences,” Ms. Merkel’s spokesman Steffen Seibert said Wednesday.

Re the accelerating Islamization of Europe, Bob Belvedere over at the Camp of the Saints has an interesting aside:

People like the Koch Brothers should really be forming paramilitary units for the purposes of rescuing what European Treasures they can, such as the aforementioned Throne [of Charlemagne], the Mona Lisa, Michelangelo’s David and Pieta, Magna Carta, etc.

Put Magna Carta to one side for the moment, since the document is a mere souvenir of the idea, and it’s the idea that matters, which is why some of us are still writing books on the subject (personally autographed copies exclusively available from the SteynOnline bookstore).

But the notion of commando teams rescuing what’s left of western art from the Eurabian night struck me a year or so back as I was watching a rather undernourished George Clooney flick, The Monuments Men, about art experts rescuing great paintings marooned behind enemy lines during World War Two. In the first chapter of his very prescient book The West’s Last Chance, written before the Mohammed cartoon eruptions, the late Tony Blankley contemplates a European future in which firebreathing imams incite art wars on whatever’s to hand – Michelangelo’s “Little David” gets blown up in Florence, Albrecht Dürer’s Adam and Eve are attacked with acid, a car bomb explodes outside the Rodin museum… More and more of the surviving works are carted off to “secure” storage facilities, never to be seen in public again.

Do students in any British or American university have to be held responsible for the actions of the British or American armed forces in Northern Ireland or Iraq? Would we not think it the grossest ignorance, not to mention bad manners, to think they should be?

It is that time of year again. News arrives of 343 “university teachers” who signed a letter pledging that henceforth they will not cooperate with Israeli academic institutions. Their joint letter took up a full page today in Britain’s left-wing Guardian newspaper (where else?) and has caused almost no stir in Britain. It comes days after a letter signed by 150 leading British writers, musicians and others — including JK Rowling, Simon Schama and Hilary Mantel — opposed any and all such boycotts against Israel, and pointed out that in the eyes of most people, intellectual and cultural exchange is a good thing.

The anti-boycott letter was signed by some of Britain’s leading intellectuals. The main response to the pro-boycott letter, however, may well be, “Who?” Who knew, for instance, that Israel — or any state — would be diminished if it could not gain from the wisdom of Professor Alex Callinicos, one of Britain’s most obscure Marxist academics? He is the author of numerous interminable tracts; his efforts to bring his thoughts into mainstream politics reached their summit during his involvement with the Socialist Worker’s Party, an entity too extreme even for Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party. As almost nobody in Britain wants Prof. Callinicos’s thoughts, why would anybody in Israel be begging for them?

Germany’s political stability and economic sway have until recently earned Chancellor Angela Merkel unprecedented global influence and power.

Postwar Germany has become the financial powerhouse of Europe and a model nation. Give credit to German hard work and competency for the country’s continuing economic miracle.

Less appreciated is how Germany also brilliantly exploited the lucrative in-house trade framework of the European Union market — along with nearly seven decades of subsidized defense from an American-led NATO.

The result is that Germany alone now determines the fiscal future of the nearly insolvent southern European Union nations on the Mediterranean.

Germany was also the self-appointed broker between Vladimir Putin and the apprehensive EU. Merkel supposedly has watered down Putin’s military ambitions by seducing Russia with lucrative German trade.

In addition, Germany positioned itself as the moral voice of Europe. In penance for an aggressive past that had nearly wrecked Europe on three occasions, it became the loudest critic of supposed U.S. imperialism.

The results of the Canadian general election are now graven in stone and Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party has been given a decisive majority. Canadians have opted for change without stopping to consider that change is by no means an unalloyed good. The “hope and change” that Obama promised the American people has led the country into an abyss of debt, racial conflict, open-border chaos, destructive initiatives like global warming legislation, alliances with genocidal enemies, alienation of political friends, and a state of international weakness that would be risible were it not so devastating. America allowed itself to be seduced by a charismatic interloper with spotty credentials, a pro-Muslim bias, hard-left sympathies, and no accomplishments worth mentioning.

It appears that Canada has followed suit, electing an aureate nonentity whose CV would in any sane society have generated howls of laughter or stunned disbelief. “Spectacularly unqualified,” as a PJM commenter posted, Trudeau studied environmental geography at McGill University and engineering at the Université de Montréal—but failed to complete degrees in either discipline. Among his other triumphs, which apparently earned the confidence of the electorate, Trudeau was a snow board instructor, a camp counselor, a white water rafting instructor, and a substitute drama teacher. Even a farcical billet like community organizing would have been more impressive.

The pro-government newspaper Sabah claimed that dragging dead bodies in the streets was “routine practice” around the world, a security measure to check if the body was booby-trapped.

“If we wanted to, we could round up all of them, kill them and say they committed suicide.” — Ismet Sezgin, former Minister of the Interior, 1993.

What Turkey is engaging in appears an attempt at historicide, just as al-Qaeda and ISIS have done in Bamiyan and Palmyra and throughout Iraq – and as the Palestinian Authority did last week with the help of a duplicitous UNESCO by labeling the Jewish holy sites of Rachel’s Tomb and the Cave of the Patriarchs Muslim sites.

How are Kurds supposed to trust such a government and its army when even their dead are exposed to attacks, torture and attempts at obliteration?

In Turkey’s election on June 7, the pro-Kurdish party came in third, evidently thwarting the plans of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to attaining the supermajority of 367 seats to be President-for-Life — or Sultan. In an apparent attempt to rectify this supposed miscarriage of the democratic process, Erdogan called for another, snap election on November 1, seemingly to try once again to get his permanent Sultanate.

A German political expert has warned that a successful Islamic political party is not a far off thought given Germany’s rapidly changing demographics. In an interview with the Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung newspaper, Professor Jürgen W. Falter, who specialises in political extremism, noted that Chancellor Angela Merkel’s position on immigration may soon change, claiming “Pandora’s box is opened too far”.

Professor Falter said: “I do not think that the position of Mrs. Merkel, with time, will be held. Her words are rowing forward, but below the surface, back already… certainly this has something to do with the fact she sees that she has to get the genie back in the bottle… a Pandora’s box is opened too far.”

“[Her migration policy] was probably not meant the way it has arrived. But it sounded like an invitation to the entire world, unlimited refugees are welcome.”

His views on the rise of the Alternative fur Deutschland are also worthy of note, claiming that it was destined to become a small, regional party before the migrant crisis, but that now it can flourish without really doing much at all.

The Iranians are also believed to have supplied their new terrorist group in the Gaza Strip with Grad and Fajr missiles that are capable of reaching Tel Aviv.

The leader of Al-Sabireen, Hisham Salem, is a former commander of Palestinian Islamic Jihad in the Gaza Strip. His activities and rhetoric have worried many in Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, who fear that his group is beginning to attract many of their followers.

Salem has been accused by many Palestinians of helping Iran spread Shia Islam inside the Gaza Strip, where all Muslims belong to the rival Sunni denomination.

This, of course, is bad news for [Palestinian President Mahmoud] Abbas, who is now watching as many of his former loyalists have become on Iran’s payroll and are sharing its radical ideology.

Many Palestinians and Arabs in the region are already voicing concern. The last thing Abbas, Egypt’s President Sisi and Jordan’s King Abdullah need is another Iranian terror group such as Hezbollah in the Middle East.

It now remains to be seen whether the Obama Administration and other Western powers will wake up and realize that the Iranians are continuing to fool them, not only regarding Tehran’s nuclear program, but also concerning its territorial ambitions in the Middle East.

Unless the U.S. and Western powers realize that Iran remains a major threat to world peace, Al-Sabireen and other terrorist groups will one day manage to establish a UN-recognized Palestinian state that would pose an existential threat to Israel and destabilize the entire Middle East.

On Oct. 20, months after the “immigration invasion” of Europe began — whose long-term impact goes far beyond temporary obsessions like email servers and Benghazi — one of the Wall Street Journal’s chief pundits finally addressed the subject. Bret Stephens wrote an op-ed, “In Defense of Christendom.” The reason for the long silence is not hard to guess. The Wall Street Journal has long been wedded to the notion of open borders. Never mind that Nobel Prize winning economist Milton Friedman admonished the paper almost twenty years ago “It’s just obvious you can’t have free immigration and a welfare state.” The Journal has remained deaf to Friedman’s irrefutable argument that in a redistributionist state, unlimited immigration, with its unlimited demands on the public purse, at minimum will destroy limited government.

So how should the socially conservative editorial page react to open borders in action? In theory this was fine. Yet there was something deeply troubling about millions of Muslims invading Europe’s richest welfare states, with no end in sight. As the King of Siam would say, it was a puzzlement.

Stephens finally ended the embarrassing silence. He ignored the economic impact and focused on what is in truth the most important danger to which this migration contributes: the destruction of European civilization. Stephens treats the immigrant invasion as what he calls “a stiff breeze” in a civilization that has already lost its moral compass. No longer believing in the sources from which their comfortable beliefs in human rights, peace, progress, spring — Judaism, Christianity, the Enlightenment, capitalism, etc. — they have lost the capacity for what Pope Benedict called “self-love.” Stephens is by no means the first to make this point. Nobel Prize for Literature winner Imre Kertesz more than a decade ago identified “suicidal liberalism” as Europe’s dominant set of values, leaving it “wide open to Islam.”

French Minister of Defense Jean-Yves Le Drian recently made an essential statement about the war against terror and the difficulties it involves for Western countries.

In an interview with Europe 1 [1] focusing on the French air strikes against the Islamic State [1], he remarked:

Daesh [ISIS] is organized in such a way that children, women, civilians are being put on front lines. Its leadership is hiding in schools, mosques, hospitals, making the action of the coalition in Iraq and the action of France and other partners in Syria difficult, because we don’t want civilian casualties. We pay as much attention to the targets we select as to the need to combat Daesh.

This is a frank admission of the “human shield” tactic practiced by Islamists, and their crippling effect on Western fighting.

Undoubtedly, Le Drian is aware that the United States and other Western partners in the coalition against ISIS are facing the same challenge, and that Israel faces similar difficulties when counter-attacking organizations like Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, and Fatah-affiliated terror groups.

What remains to be seen is whether he and the French government, now having this experience with human shields, will reconsider their foreign policy regarding Israel.

We asked Colonel Richard Kemp, the former British commander in Afghanistan and an expert about war ethics, to comment on Le Drian’s no-nonsense statement.

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PJM: Do LeDrian’s remarks come as a surprise to you?

Kemp: Not in the least. The Islamic State (ISIS) are adept at using human shields and locations protected under the Geneva Conventions. They are war criminals. The comments by Jean-Yves Le Drian are understandable and it is right that so-called collateral casualties are avoided as far as possible; but his comments also indicate the danger of the Western response to Islamist terrorist use of human shields, which often serves to encourage greater use of this tactic and leads to more and more civilian deaths.