RUTHFULLY YOURS

Well, I was wrong in predicting that Viktor Orban’s victory in yesterday’s Hungarian elections would fall short of a landslide. For it was a landslide by the most exacting standards — which more or less destroys the arguments of his opponents and critics that his governing Fidesz party could win only through authoritarianism, gerrymandering, and the dominance of the media by Fidesz and its business allies. What made this landslide still more unexpected, even shocking, was that throughout yesterday the opposition parties had been growing more optimistic about their prospects of scoring an upset victory. The visiting media — to be on the safe side — were hesitating between the headlines “Opposition Wins” and “Democracy Dies.”

Yet when the smoke of battle was clearing last night, with 80 percent of the vote counted, Orban’s governing party had won 49 percent of the popular vote and 134 seats in the 199-seat parliament. It had an almost clean sweep of the single-member constituencies outside Budapest. And it seems likely to obtain a two-thirds parliamentary majority again and thus the continued right to amend the Hungarian constitution. (All the results cited here might change marginally when the final votes have been counted.) This is as clear an endorsement as any government has received from an electorate — and it was given in the teeth of disapproval from the dominant political and cultural elites in Europe.

That’s significant. It can no longer be plausibly argued that Orban is pushing through his “revolution” either by stealth or undemocratically. Voters knew exactly what both Orban and his opponents stood for, and they plumped strongly for him. Certain conclusions flow from that.

The first is that democracy is vital and active in Hungary. Turnout was the largest since 1998 (coincidentally the election that first brought Orban to power). There were long queues outside the polling booths, which in some cases stayed open to ensure that no one who joined the line by the official closing time was denied the chance to vote. And the result — one party winning half of the vote — was conclusive. It simply cannot be explained away as the result of gerrymandering, since a 49 percent share of the total vote would mean a landslide in seats under almost any multi-party electoral system.

The aggressive partition of Syrian territory by Russia, Iran, Turkey and ISIS, has security implications for the United States and our regional allies that cannot be ignored.

The U.S., its allies and its adversaries should understand that President Trump intends to push back on Syria’s criminal behavior, Iran’s regional threat posture, and Russia and Turkey’s delusions of empire.

The Syrian government’s chemical attack on civilians in the rebel-held suburb of Douma this weekend is the complete responsibility of the war criminal Bashar Assad, his Russian bedfellows, and his Iranian bankers. However, the fact that President Trump had announced that the U.S. is nearly finished its mission to defeat ISIS (which is questionable) and wants to leave Syria quickly may have encouraged the others to speed up their efforts to divide Syria’s corpse.

An independent country for only two years longer than the State of Israel, Syria has reverted to its prior status as space across which the competing interests of bigger empires and armies are played out. President Trump claims to be uninterested in who rules Damascus — which is wise of him — but the aggressive partition of Syrian territory by Russia, Iran, Turkey and ISIS has security implications for the United States and our regional allies that cannot be ignored.

Syria — as land — has had many masters:

Persia’s Cyrus the Great beginning in 539 BCE.
Macedonia’s Alexander the Great in 333-332 BCE.
Rome’s Pompey the Great captured it in 64 BCE.
The Byzantine Empire in 395 CE.
The Muslims arrived in the mid-7th century — the Umayyad and Abbasid Caliphates, the Ayyubid, Zingid and Hamdanid Dynasties.
Crusader states followed by Assassins, Mamluks, and Mongols until the Ottoman Empire conquered the space in 1516 CE.
The French after WWI.
The only ever independent Syria was established in 1946.

During the past week, Londoners have woken to the fact that for the first time in living memory the homicide rate in their capital city has overtaken that of New York. There were 15 homicides in London in February, compared with 14 in New York. In March, there were 22 in London, 21 in New York. In recent weeks in London there has been at least one gang-related stabbing almost every day: often fatal, sometimes not. At least 35 deaths since the start of this year have been gang-related. Doctors talk of the emergency wards in parts of London in the evenings resembling a warzone. Just one of the oddities is that most Londoners remain untouched by this. As Harry Mount wrote at The Spectator last month, it is perfectly possible for a killing to be going on near a smart north-London dinner party.

Nevertheless, given that, among Brits, New York still has a reputation for violence, the comparison has struck a nerve. Apart from focusing the national mind, it has also fired up one of the most subterranean and troubling calculations any political class has to make. How many lives are you willing to sacrifice in pursuit of a political position?

In recent years the subject of stop-and-search has been an exceptionally emotive one in the U.K., as it is in America. Because it was deemed to target young black men disproportionately, police and politicians alike found stop-and-search to be a useful tool — not for targeting those people who were thought most likely to be carrying weapons but for parading their own political virtues by objecting to the practice.

Recently, London’s murder rate caught up with New York City’s. Which is weird, because there shouldn’t be any murders in either city. After all, both NYC and the UK have very strict gun laws. As we’ve learned from our moral, ethical, and intellectual betters on the left, banning guns leads to fewer gun crimes. (That’s why the Secret Service doesn’t carry them!) So how is this happening? How can such a gun-free utopia be so dangerous? The answer will terrify you: scary, evil KNIVES.

Jason Douglas, WSJ:

A series of stabbings has put the number of murders in London this year on a par with New York, with police and lawmakers blaming the surge on drugs and gang-related violence…

Police said Friday there have been 53 murders in the British capital in the year through April 5, 16 more than the number recorded during the first four months of 2017…

A spokeswoman for the U.K. Home Office said the government is taking action to restrict young people’s access to knives and other offensive weapons, such as banning online stores from delivering knives to homes.

This is serious, people. Common-sense gun control has been such a huge success that now it’s time for the next step: common-sense knife control.

This is bad news for Jack the Ripper.

London Mayor Sadiq Khan’s knife-confiscation effort even has its own website, with a corresponding hashtag:

#Knifefree, eh? Let’s hope Londoners don’t think this means they’re getting bladed weapons without charge.

No offense to Mayor Khan, but I can think of a few good reasons to have a knife. It can come in handy when you need to:

Cut up a piece of food
Open a box
Perform an emergency tracheotomy
Spread some nice cream cheese on a bagel
Live in a crime-infested $#!+hole like London

If knives are outlawed, only outlaws will have knives.

Banning weapons has never made people safer, and it never will. Criminals don’t follow laws in the first place — that’s why they’re called criminals! — and law-abiding people are just rendered defenseless against attackers. If you ban guns, people will use knives. Or clubs. Or jars of acid. Or whatever else they can get their hands on. Hell, now we know that terrorists and white supremacists will even drive cars and trucks into crowds of people, if that’s what it takes. Bad people are always going to find ways to hurt and kill others. And they’re always going to prey on those they believe to be defenseless. CONTINUE AT SITE

Islam is filling the cultural vacuum of a society with no children and which believes — wrongly — it has no enemies.

In Sweden, by 2050, almost one in three people will be Muslim.

The European mainstream mindset now seems to believe that “evil” comes only from our own sins: racism, sexism, elitism, xenophobia, homophobia, the guilt of the heterosexual white Western male — and never from non-European cultures. Europe now postulates an infinite idealization of the “other”, above all the migrant.

A tiredness seems to be why these countries do not take meaningful measures to defeat jihadism, such as closing Salafist mosques or expelling radical imams.

Muslim extremists understand this advantage: so long as they avoid another enormous massacre like 9/11, they will be able to continue taking away human lives and undermining the West without awakening it from its inertia.

In a prophetic conference held in Vienna on May 7, 1935, the philosopher Edmund Husserl said, “The greatest danger to Europe is tiredness”. Eighty years later, the same fatigue and passivity still dominate Western European societies.

It is the sort of exhaustion that we see in Europeans’ falling birth rates, the mushrooming public debt, chaos in the streets, and Europe’s refusal to invest resources in its security and military might. Last month, in a Paris suburb, the Basilica of Saint Denis, where France’s Christian kings are buried, was occupied by 80 migrants and pro-illegal-immigration activists. The police had to intervene to free the site.

Stephen Bullivant, a professor of theology and the sociology of religion at St Mary’s University in London, recently published a report, “Europe’s Young Adults and Religion”:

“Christianity as a default, as a norm, is gone, and probably gone for good – or at least for the next 100 years,” Bullivant said.

According to Bullivant, many young Europeans “will have been baptised and then never darken the door of a church again. Cultural religious identities just aren’t being passed on from parents to children. It just washes straight off them… “And we know the Muslim birthrate is higher than the general population, and they have much higher [religious] retention rates.”

Richard Dawkins, an atheist and the author of The God Delusion, responded to the study’s release by tweeting to his millions of Twitter followers:

Before we rejoice at the death throes of the relatively benign Christian religion, let’s not forget Hilaire Belloc’s menacing rhyme:
“Always keep a-hold of nurse
For fear of finding something worse.”

Dawkins is apparently concerned that that after the demise of Christianity in Europe, there will not be an atheistic utopia, but a rising Islam.

To read Robert Spencer’s Jihad Watch website regularly is to get an unsettling daily dose of real-life Islam-related horrors. But on April 4, Robert posted a half-hour audio that was even more disturbing than the bulk of his usual offerings. The audio records the visit by a couple of British police officers to the home of a British subject who had apparently been reported to the authorities for posting anti-Islam comments on social media. The householder in question greeted the cops with surprising – perhaps nervous? – cheeriness, and for a half hour he earnestly, willingly, and good-humoredly answered their indefensibly intrusive and insulting questions about his opinions. Among them: What were his political beliefs? What did he think of Islam? Did he hate Muslims? Was he a racist? Was he a Nazi?

It quickly became clear that this man – whose name we never learn, unless I missed something – is anything but a racist or Nazi or hater of any kind. On the contrary, he is a thoughtful citizen who, after considerable study, has come to some sensible conclusions about Islam. He made it clear that, unlike his visitors, he had read the Koran, had acquainted himself with the major specifics of the life of Muhammed, and knew the basics of Islamic theology. He was, it emerged, a strong opponent of Islam for precisely the right reasons, including (as he mentioned) the fact that it commands believers to do harm to infidels, Jews, and gays.

Yet even as he spelled out these indisputable truths about Islam, the police officers responded as if he was imagining it all. They suggested that he might want to sit down for a conversation with an Islamic scholar, who could clear up what they seemed determined to view as his misunderstandings. They insisted, moreover, that they were not the Thought Police – even though there is no other word for police officers who show up at the home of an innocent citizen to interrogate him about his personal opinions.

A couple of reader comments on the Jihad Watch audio suggested it was fake, on the grounds that police officers in a free country would surely never do such a thing. Wrong. For me, the audio brought back vivid memories – for I’ve had my own very similar encounter with European policemen. My experience was slightly different in that instead of being visited at home, I was summoned to a local police station in Norway, where I live. But the encounter itself, which took place in January 2014, was strikingly similar to the one recorded on the Jihad Watch audio. My interrogators even assured me, as their British colleagues assured the fellow in the audio, that they were not the Thought Police. When I heard that statement on the audio, I couldn’t help wondering: are cops around Europe, even in different countries, working off of the same script?

Immediately after returning home from my visit to the police station back in January 2014, I sat down and typed up everything I could remember about the exchange I’d had with my new uniformed friends. The conversation had been in Norwegian, and I wrote it out in Norwegian. I sent copies to a few friends of mine, including Hans Rustad, editor of the vitally important Norwegian website document.no, who, in response, told me that he had heard similar, and equally disturbing, accounts from other people living in Norway. He actually took a copy of my testimony with him to a meeting at the Norwegian Ministry of Justice, where he confronted officials with this example of thoroughly inappropriate police conduct.

My bet: Orban and his party will not manage a landslide but will hang on.

Today, Sunday, April 8, sees Viktor Orban’s attempt to win a third successive term for his party, Fidesz, and for himself as prime minister, put to the test by the country’s eighth election since the end of Communism. Hungarians have become used to elections since 1989 and to power changing hands as a result. Governing parties lost elections in 1994, 1998, 2002, and 2010.

Usually an election in a small Central European country with this democratic record would struggle to get into the news at all, let alone into the headlines. Yet the restless caravan of the world’s media has for the last week been bidding up the prices of Budapest’s best restaurants and hotels (which, incidentally, are very good indeed — as a glimpse at the travel pages of the same media would disclose) to cover the result.

And this level of interest is itself a story — and a changing one.

Until a month ago, the international media consensus was that the election was a formality, or at best a foregone conclusion, because Orban was the authoritarian strongman of a nation that had ceased to be a real democracy. Fidesz had ensured its victory by gerrymandering the election system, suppressing opposition media, buying votes with EU money, and swamping the country with posters appealing to the nationalist and ethnic prejudices of the electorate. The conditions for genuine democratic elections were therefore no longer in place, and Orban’s victory would confirm the fact. To be sure, the media would still turn up in large contingents for the burial, but the story they wrote would be the end of democracy.

And then in Hodmezovasarehely, a town in the southeast of Hungary (pop., 47,019, local attractions: thermal bathing), there was a small political earthquake. An independent candidate for the local mayoralty, but one supported by all the opposition parties, easily defeated the front-runner Fidesz candidate by a healthy margin of 16 points.

That was genuinely a big surprise since the town had been a Fidesz stronghold. At once there was an outburst of optimism among the opposition parties along the lines of . . . a Fidesz election triumph wasn’t a foregone conclusion . . . if only the opposition parties united as they had done in Hodmezovasarehely . . . the mathematics for an opposition victory were there in the result . . . And so on and so forth. That response may have overinterpreted one small-town election result — we’ll know later tonight — but it made the result look less certain and gave the opposition a real fillip.

“Erdoğan has cynically referred to these students as ‘terrorists,’ vowed to expel them from Boğaziçi University, and to deny them the right to study at any other university. We have heard this kind of verbal attack from Erdoğan before and it was followed by the detention of thousands of academics, journalists, artists, and human rights advocates.” — Open Letter signed by over 1,800 renowned academics from around the world, including Nobel and Pulitzer Prize laureates.

Ankara does nothing to prevent ISIS from selling Yazidi women and children in Turkey; allows unspecified numbers of people to use Turkish territory as a point of entrance into Syria and Iraq to join ISIS or other jihadist groups; hosts and aids Hamas, a terrorist organization that proudly targets civilians and vows to obliterate Israel; and enables jihadi terrorism through the oil trade.

Turkey, a NATO ally that considers itself a worthy candidate for EU membership, warmly welcomes and assists terrorists who commit genocidal crimes against humanity, yet persecutes non-violent academics and journalists whose opinions differ from those propagated by the regime.

On March 19, a group of students at Istanbul’s Boğaziçi University, Turkey’s leading institute of higher education, demonstrated against an event on campus. The event against which they were demonstrating, organized by the Society for Islamic Research, was to champion the Turkish soldiers who had participated in the Afrin invasion. While the pro-government students distributed Turkish delight sweets, the counter-demonstrators unfolded a banner reading: “Invasions and massacres are not [to be celebrated] with delights.”

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan responded by having the anti-war students arrested for spreading “terrorist” propaganda. On April 3, a Turkish court jailed nine of them and freed the other six, pending their trial.