RUTHFULLY YOURS

In the twentieth century, targets were churches and synagogues; today, they are churches, synagogues, mosques, temples — wherever there is a faith, even a Muslim one, that these Islamic fundamentalists want to “purify”.

Radical Islam has declared war on the pillars of the West: modernity, science, rationalism, tolerance, equality under the law, freedom of expression and the dignity of the individual, to name only a few. Many of these ideas are currently under threat in Western Europe.

Many Europeans might sentimentally think of the hundreds of thousands of Muslims pouring into Europe as “the new Jews” – even though their culture is virtually opposite to the Jews’ — but perhaps the Europeans should be aware that they have now forced the Jews to flee twice in the modern era.

Islamists are erasing civilizations. Is Europe’s next?

The number of victims in the jihadist attack at a Sufi Mosque in Egypt has risen to 305 and is destined to rise even more. Inside this number there is another one, even more tragic: the 27 children murdered by Islamic terrorists. It has been not only one of the world’s most sickening terror attacks since 9/11. It was, in intent, a genocidal attack aimed to erase a religion and a community from the face of earth.

The murder of children is the most ruthless face of the war that radical Islam has declared: Palestinian children used as human shields by Hamas, Israeli children butchered in buses and cars, Iraqi children massacred by smiling terrorists with candy, French children brought as recruits to Raqqa, Iranian children sent by the Ayatollah Khomeini to Iranian camps, Christian children wiped out by the Taliban in Pakistan, Western children murdered in Barcelona, Manchester and Nice, and the children of Beslan forced to drink their own urine before being killed. How much longer will we have to update the ferocity of radical Islam?

Some Muslim writers have compared the savagery of extremist Muslims to that of the Nazis. In his novel “Le village de l’Allemande”, the Muslim Algerian writer Boualem Sansal compared the similarities: “Single party, militarization, propaganda, falsification of history, xenophobia, affirmation of a plot hatched by Israel and the United States, etc.” According to another Muslim dissident, Naser Khader, “the radical Muslims are the Nazis of Islam”.

What is genuinely troubling was the way in which Robert Levinson’s fate has been kept largely secret. The Iranian authorities have never revealed who captured him, who currently holds him, what charges have been laid against him, or even if he is still alive. And no effort has been made to negotiate his release, set a prison term, or work by the rules of international intelligence or diplomacy.

An Iranian revolutionary court charged Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, without the slightest evidence, of “plotting to topple the Iranian regime”. This was done in a trial without a defence lawyer, without any details of her “offence”, and ended in a sentence to five years in prison.

All of you will be familiar with articles on individuals who have been imprisoned, tortured, or even executed in several Muslim countries. Many such individuals are Iranians, imprisoned unjustly for their beliefs or actions that would be considered perfectly innocent or even praiseworthy in the West. Since the revolution of 1979, Iran has been not only the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism, but also one of the world’s most consistent human rights abusers. In Amnesty International’s most recent (2016-2017) report on rights issues in the country, it listed abuses under numerous headings:

Freedom of expression, association and assembly
Torture and other ill-treatment
Unfair trials
Freedom of religion and belief
Discrimination – ethnic minorities
Women’s rights
Death penalty

Iran has the sixth highest number of prisoners in the world, although it comes only nineteenth in the size of its population. In 2011, there were 250,000 prisoners overall, a figure that dropped by 2014 to 225,624 — still a very high figure. Even North Korea — which has a vast range of political prison camps, forced labour camps, and other facilities, albeit with a small overall population — has fewer: the U.S. State Department human rights report for 2016 says that estimates of the prison population total range between 80,000 and 120,000.

Iran is also notorious for the number of executions it carries out, often for drug-related crimes, but also on religious and political charges. In an article by Iran expert Majid Rafizadeh, president of the International American Council (IAC), Iran has overtaken China as the world’s worst offender in extreme use of execution as a punishment, often for offences that would not even carry penalties in any Western country, including the United States:

Since January 2016, Iran has executed at least 230 people, that is at least one person a day on average. The number of executions has recently increased and Iran ranks first in the world, followed by China, when it comes to executions per capita. Iran executed approximately 1000 people in 2015.

In the Amnesty International report on Iran, there appears one paragraph of considerable concern for foreign citizens and Iranians with dual nationality, notably US and British citizenship:

Several foreign nationals and Iranians with dual nationality were detained in Tehran’s Evin Prison with little or no access to their families, lawyers and consular officials. These prisoners were sentenced to long prison terms on vague charges such as “collaborating with a hostile government” after grossly unfair trials before Revolutionary Courts. The authorities accused the prisoners of being involved in a foreign-orchestrated “infiltration project” pursuing the “soft overthrow” of Iran. In reality, the convictions appeared to stem from their peaceful exercise of the rights to freedom of expression and association.

WASHINGTON – Speaking before Congress today, two North Korean defectors offered a glimpse into the brainwashing tactics conducted by Supreme Leader Kim Jong-Un’s regime.

Han Ga Hee, who escaped to China in 2002, described propaganda films that North Korea has been circulating. One of those videos falsely shows how South Korean officials “lure” North Korean defectors into the country. The film claims that the defectors are then harvested for intelligence information concerning the DPRK and then executed.

Han, who spoke through an interpreter, told lawmakers on the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Global Human Rights that she fully believed this to be true while growing up in North Korea and that many of her peers thought the same.

That was before Han’s father was effectively put to death by North Korean authorities when he was caught sneaking into China in attempt to find food. He was sent to North Korean prison and beaten with leather belts while standing outside naked in -30 degrees Celsius temperature. He was then forced to kneel before the Tumen River for an entire night, according to Han, and got severe frostbite on his legs, which had to be amputated. He died shortly after the beating. Han told lawmakers that the Kim regime’s declarations on human rights are “laughable.”

Han, who was born in 1980, was inspired to cross the Chinese border in 2002 after listening to broadcasts from Free North Korea Radio. After six years in China, she saved enough money to hire a broker to get her to South Korea. He dropped her off at the Mongolia border with a compass and told her to head north. She walked for several days alone through the desert and was eventually picked up by the Mongolian police. When she reached South Korea in 2008, she met the producers of Free North Korea Radio, who were all fellow defectors. She now works as a news announcer and sound engineer for the radio station.

Hyeona Ji, another defector, told Congress about her four separate escapes from North Korea and various sentences in hard-labor prison camps after being repatriated by Chinese authorities. She detailed numerous atrocities, beatings and deaths inside these “re-education centers,” and how many of the dead were fed to guard dogs. Her ribs were broken in one beating, an injury that still plagues her today because it never healed properly, and she periodically suffers from epileptic seizures.

“North Korea is one terrifying prison, and the Kim regime is carrying out crimes against humanity in North Korea, and it is only a miracle that people – and I, myself – survive the hellish experience of prison camp,” Hyeona said. CONTINUE AT SITE

In the wake of President Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital last week (12/06), the “experts” crowding the media predicted strategic calamity: Vast, violent protests and a wave of terror would sweep the Muslim world in the coming days.

Instead, the largest demonstration anywhere this weekend was the funeral procession for Johnny Hallyday, the “French Elvis.” Nothing in the Middle East came close.

We have witnessed, yet again, the carefully phrased anti-Semitism of the pristinely educated; the global left’s fanatical pro-Palestinian bias; and the media’s yearning for career-making disasters.

But rather than waves of protest, the waiting world got tepid statements of disapproval from otherwise-occupied Arab government; demonstrations in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip that, combined, barely put a thousand activists in the streets; and yes, four deaths: two demonstrators and two Hamas terrorists hit by an Israeli airstrike.

Sunday (12/10) did see a smallish protest outside the US Embassy in Lebanon, but it was hardly Benghazi under Barack Obama.

Predictably, Turkish President and Self-Appointed Sultan Recep Tayyip Erdogan (officially our NATO ally) didn’t miss the chance to spew venom toward Israel, the US and Europe. But even in Turkey, things were all quiet on the Bosporus front.

The world’s most potent bad actors—because they are widely admired and treated as moral arbiters—are the NGOs that fly under a false flag, claiming to be champions of human rights.

Human rights NGOs bear a major responsibility for the demonizing of Israel in the West. In Catch the Jew Tuvia Tenenbom, masquerading as Tobi the German, focuses on the hundreds of so-called human rights NGOs, heavily funded by European governments (including that of Germany), that infest Israel and the Palestinian-controlled territories and are hunting for Israeli misdeeds—and fabricating them (sometimes staging them) as they come up short. Robert Bernstein, the publisher who founded Human Rights Watch and served as its chairman for 20 years, publicly disassociated himself from the organization in a 2009 op-ed in the New York Times. Although Bernstein’s focus is on Human Rights Watch, no one has put the problem with these outfits better than he:

At Human Rights Watch, we always recognized that open, democratic societies have faults and commit abuses. But we saw that they have the ability to correct them—through vigorous public debate, an adversarial press and many other mechanisms that encourage reform. That is why we sought to draw a sharp line between the democratic and nondemocratic world.…Now the organization, with increasing frequency, casts aside its important distinction between open and closed societies. Nowhere is this more evident than in its work in the Middle East. The region is populated by authoritarian regimes with appalling human rights records…The plight of their citizens who would most benefit from the kind of attention a large and well-financed international human rights organization can provide is being ignored as Human Rights Watch’s Middle East division prepared report after report on Israel.

Since then the assaults on Israel have only grown more blatant, with Human Rights Watch accusing Israel of war crimes. Recently its executive director Kenneth Roth tweeted a link to an article by Nadia Ellia, a Palestinian activist in the BDS movement, which declared that “white supremacy and Zionism are two of a kind.” Israeli Foreign Affairs spokesman Emmanuel Nahshon has called Human Rights Watch a “blatantly hostile anti-Israeli organization whose reports have the sole purpose of harming Israel with no consideration whatsoever for the truth or reality.” Human Rights Watch’s most recent initiative (with financial support from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund) is to encourage punitive measures against banks that provide services to Israelis living in communities beyond the Green Line (the armistice lines of 1949).

Amnesty International, the other big fish in the human rights pond, assails Israel year after year, waxing especially indignant when Israel finally had enough of incessant rocket attacks and took on Hamas. Its one-sided reports ignore the years of unprovoked attacks on Israeli civilians by Hamas, the use by Hamas of human shields and Israeli efforts to spare civilian casualties to blithely accuse Israel for breaching the laws of war “by carrying out direct attacks on civilians.” Gerald Steinberg of NGO Monitor in an interview with Voice of Israel radio said of Amnesty: “Almost all of the reports are hearsay from Palestinian sources. All of this is a game. There is no ethical basis to their research.” Not to be outdone by Human Rights Watch’s most recent initiative on banks, Amnesty has now declared “we’ll consider whether the situation in Israel and the occupied Palestinian Territories meets the international definition of apartheid” a process that “will require thorough research and a rigorous legal review of the evidence.” Given what passes for research at Amnesty and the ability to use as “evidence” the wildly distorted reports that pour from UN agencies, it’s not difficult to predict Amnesty’s conclusion. And given that “practices of apartheid” are listed as grave breaches of international humanitarian law, Amnesty will feel free to demand the most punitive international measures against Israel.

Critics of one or another policy position of human rights NGOs almost invariably stipulate that their “intentions are good.” No, they are not. Their attempts to destroy the legitimacy of the Jewish state (and ultimately the state itself) bear witness to the fact that most are malign actors.

But Israel is a small country and in the last few years the human rights NGOs, while by no means neglecting Israel, have embraced a much larger target—the European Union. In this case they are not flirting with genocide, but are using human rights—in this case the rights of refugees, as they define them—to deny Europeans the right to borders. The same romanticism of third world peoples and hostility toward the supposedly forever-guilty colonialist West that partly informs the animus against Israel pervades the effort to throw open the borders of Europe to all who would come there, whether in flight from civil unrest or in search of economic opportunity. Human rights NGOs not only seize the moral high ground to shame Europe’s political elites into accepting huge numbers of migrants who come uninvited to their shores, but box in EU member countries through legal challenges and by deploying their own ships at sea.

The extent to which human rights NGOs have mobilized to physically transfer migrants to Europe’s shores is not widely appreciated. In 2014, according to the Italian coastguard, rescue boats operated by NGOs brought in less than one percent of all migrants. Thus far, in 2017, the Italian coastguard reports NGOs have picked up more than a third of all migrants. (Frontex, the EU border protection agency, provides an even larger estimate of 40%.) The NGOs are aided by a legal ruling in 2012 by the European Commission on Human Rights (ECHR) in Hirsi Jamaa and Others v. Italy, known familiarly as the Hirsi ruling (in which Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and two other NGOs were given the right to participate as “third parties” and were liberally quoted in the ruling). The suit was on behalf of 24 migrants from Somalia and Eritrea, part of a group of 200 who had been rescued from drowning at sea by ships of the Italian Revenue Police which transferred them to an Italian military ship.

The lawsuit challenged the Italian policy that had sent the migrants back to their point of departure in Libya with the cooperation of the Libyan government (then headed by Moammar Gaddafi). The 17-man ECHR court ruled unanimously that once on an Italian ship migrants were on Italian soil and each individual had the right to “independent and rigorous scrutiny” of his asylum claims plus a right to appeal the initial decision. The court awarded 15,000 euros (plus legal costs) to each of the migrants, a princely sum in their countries of origin. Not surprisingly Amnesty hailed the ruling as “historic.” As Belgian author Drieu Godefridi has pointed out, in Africa everyone understood that if they could reach the Mediterranean Europe’s navies would be obliged to ferry them directly to Europe. The objective was no longer to reach Europe but to be intercepted.

Traffickers no longer bothered to fill the tanks on the unseaworthy boats and rafts they crammed with humanity—they just had to make it beyond territorial waters. In the last four years, more than 600,000 migrants, mainly from sub-Saharan Africa (Nigeria is the largest single source), have reached Italy. In the first six months of 2017 85,000 arrived, 9% above the number in 2016, with 10,000 in the last week of June alone. In July an increasingly desperate Italy –as the rest of Europe blocked the path of the migrants northward– pushed back, demanding the human rights NGOs operating in the Mediterranean (among them Doctors without Borders, Jugend Rettet, Save the Children, SOS Mediterraneee and Sea Watch) agree to a code of conduct. The code is designed to stop the NGOs from in effect partnering with human smuggling rings.

Thus, to take a few items, the code prohibits the NGOs’ ships from turning off their tracking devices (with the devices turned off they can go undetected into Libyan territorial waters), bans light-signal communications used to signal traffickers a good moment to launch their boats, requires NGO boats that pick up refugees to take them to ports in Italy (not unload them onto larger ships and immediately engage in further close-to-Libya “rescues”), and requires NGOs to allow Italian police on board their vessels (ostensibly to check for the presence of smugglers aboard the refugee boats but whose effect would also be to impede violations of the code). Predictably Amnesty and Human Rights Watch mounted their virtuous high horse, declaring that “attempts to restrict NGO search and rescue operations risk endangering thousands of lives.” Four of the eight NGOs active in the Mediterranean refused to sign on to the code. But Italy showed it meant business by impounding the ship Iuventa, operated by one of the refusers, the German Jugend Rettet (Rescue the Youth), on the grounds, according to public prosecutor Ambrogio Cartosio, that “there were contacts, meetings, understandings” between the boat and the traffickers, and migrants were “handed over” to the Iuventa by smugglers rather than being “rescued.”

The number of migrants trafficked out of Libya has fallen dramatically, presumably in good part because of Italy’s action. Indeed the Italian coast guard threatened to attack boats operated by NGOs, prompting several to suspend their operations. But few believe this is anything but a temporary respite, given the huge profits made by traffickers and the enormous demand for their services. Gatestone Institute Fellow Soeren Kern reports that according to a (leaked) classified German government report more than six million migrants are waiting in countries around the Mediterranean to cross into Europe. The report says one million are waiting in Libya, another million in Egypt, 720,000 in Jordan, 430,000 in Algeria, 160,000 in Tunisia and 50,000 in Morocco. More than three million waiting in Turkey are currently prevented from crossing over to Europe by Erdogan in accordance with the deal he struck with the EU. An African Union-European Union summit that brought 55 African and 28 European leaders to the Ivory Coast on Nov. 29-30 to come up with longer-term measures to stem the refugee flow came up empty, the only concrete decision to evacuate 3,800 migrants stranded in Libya.

There have been thoughtful proposals to control the refugee flow, as for example in Douglas Murray’s The Strange Suicide of Europe. But little will be achieved unless Europe’s decision makers and opinion shapers wake up from their delusion that human rights NGOs offer the moral touchstone by which to evaluate their actions. (At present European countries in fact provide a substantial portion of their funds.) The first essential step is for European leaders to recognize that far from holy humanitarians, these NGOs are destructive ideologues who would deprive the citizens of European countries of their rights to all that is most important to them–their legal and political systems, their cultures and traditions. In the perspective of the human rights NGOs, citizens have no better claim to their country than foreigners who demand to enter, whether genuine refugees (although major NGOs have shown little concern for Yazidis and Christians, truly in need of refuge) or people fleeing conflict zones or escaping poverty. Add them all up and virtually all the peoples of Africa and the Middle East have claims to a life in Europe. There are layers of irony here. The NGOs draw upon Europe’s feelings of guilt for its colonial past and above all for the Holocaust. Indeed the laws and rulings invoked by the various EU courts on behalf of the refugees are for the most part based on rulings made to assure that Europe would not again close its doors to those fleeing for their lives, as it closed them to the Jews. Germany, as the perpetrator of mass murder, obviously bears the chief guilt and as a result Angela Merkel has been in the forefront in welcoming the newcomers—“we can do this.” Yet it is precisely the huge wave of Moslems, the vast majority of migrants, with their entrenched anti-Semitism, that will ensure that Jews are forced to flee a hostile Europe.

The human rights NGOs fail to recognize that citizens have responsibilities as well as rights, responsibilities that it is especially incumbent upon their political leaders to understand and fulfill. Journalist Peter Hutchens put it very well in 2015. He was writing about England but what he says applies equally to the rest of Europe:

Actually we can’t do what we like [with Britain]. We inherited it from our parents and grandparents and we have a duty to hand it on to our children and grandchildren, preferably improved and certainly undamaged. It is one of the heaviest responsibilities we will ever have. We cannot just give it away to complete strangers on an impulse because it makes us feel good about ourselves.

Rael Jean Isaac is author of several books, including The Coercive Utopians, Madness in the Streets and Roosters of the Apocalypse.

Every German knows that hardly any asylum seekers whose applications are rejected are forced to leave Germany. But if their application is rejected and they do decide to return to their home country, they are rewarded with an allowance of between €1000 ($1,200) and €3000 ($3,600).

This information campaign, however, must have been carefully hidden from the German public — no major newspaper reported it at the time.

“The only authentic and honest thing about this movie were the closing credits….” — Henryk Broder, columnist, Die Welt.

The German foreign ministry has launched a website to discourage would-be migrants from making their journey to Germany: “Rumours about Germany: Facts for Migrants”. It aims — In English, French and Arabic — to debunk “some of the most common false promises made by traffickers”, such as:

“Every refugee receives a welcome payment of 2,000 euros”,
“Germany grants a house to every refugee” or,
“The ship for the crossing is very big, it even has a pool and a cinema.”

The new website comes in the wake of “AWARE MIGRANTS”, a similar project jointly developed by the Italian Ministry of the Interior and the International Office for Migration(IOM) in July 2016. Whereas the goal of “AWARE MIGRANTS” was to raise awareness about the dangerous journey across the African desert and the Mediterranean, “Rumours about Germany” focuses mostly on the economic aspects of asylum seekers’ lives in Germany — which the website paints as one of hardships and dismal prospects:

“Those entering Germany illegally will not be able to get a job. Also note that the German government does not provide refugees with jobs. … Contrary to rumours and misinformation deliberately spread by human traffickers, Germany does not provide a welcome payment. Nobody will be given his own house. In fact, finding a place to live has become more and more difficult in Germany, especially in the big cities. Also note that you cannot choose freely where to live while you seek asylum and may have to stay in remote places where no one understands your language.”

“With the website www.rumoursaboutgermany.info,” the foreign ministry explained in a press release, “the foreign ministry continues an information campaign of the same name which it started abroad in the fall 2015”.

This information campaign, however, must have been carefully hidden from the German public – no major newspaper reported it at the time. To find information about it, one has to go to the foreign ministry’s website and find a press release from January 2016 in which the ministry describes its anti-migration campaign in Afghanistan:

“During the first phase at the end of 2015, large billboards were placed in in Kabul, Masar-e Scharif and Herat on locations with a particularly high volume of traffic. They contain questions in the local languages Dari and Pashtu: ‘Leaving Afghanistan? Are you sure?’ and ‘Leaving Afghanistan? Have you thought this through?'”

Obviously, the billboard advertisement did not have the effect the German government was looking for — probably why it had to launch the new website. The foreign ministry’s press release quotes Andreas Kindl, the ministry’s “Agent for Strategic Communication”, as saying:

“The website is optimized for smartphones and speaks in simple, clear language to people who are thinking about coming to Germany, who are on their way or who already are here.”

Kindl, a graduate in Islamic Studies was, until September 2017, Germany’s ambassador to Yemen. The German government might think that the job requires a certain kind of cultural expertise, but there is a problem: even if a would-be migrant happens to go to the “Rumours about Germany” website — which seems unlikely — why would he be convinced by claims such as this:

“Many asylum seekers do not qualify for protection and their applications are rejected — they are not allowed to stay and have to leave Germany. Then they return [home] with no money and have to start from scratch.”

Every German knows that hardly any asylum seekers whose applications are rejected are forced to leave Germany. If their application is rejected and they decide to return to their home country, they are rewarded with an with an allowance of between €1000 ($1,200) and €3000 ($3,600). Thus, contrary to what “Rumours about Germany” claims, making the journey to Germany still appears as a win-win proposition.

To the German reader, the whole campaign and its central messages must seem disturbing. Since 2015, when Chancellor Angela Merkel opened Germany’s borders to more than a million migrants from Africa, Asia and the Middle East, the German public has been kept under the impression that every single migrant entering Germany was a refugee who had fled a war zone such as Syria or Iraq. To keep up this fiction, politicians and journalists never speak of migrants, immigrants or illegal aliens, but only of “refugees” (Flüchtlinge) or “protection seekers” (Schutzsuchende).

As soon as someone without legitimate papers sets foot on German soil, he becomes, by definition, a “protection seeker”. According to the German statistics agency (Statistisches Bundesamt), for instance, there are 1.6 million asylum seekers currently in Germany. So far, so good. But the foreign ministry’s new campaign now raises a puzzling question: How can the idea that every newly-arriving migrant is an asylum seeker be made consistent with the new finding, according to which many are actually seeking jobs, housing or money?

Moreover, critics were quick to point out another contradiction. In 2014, the government’s own Agency for Migration and Refugees (Bundesamt für Migration und Flüchtlinge, BAMF) produced a 17-minute-long promotional video supposedly describing the arrival of a fictional refugee from Iraq: how he files an asylum request and is admitted to an refugee shelter. In the entire film, there was no mention of any obstacles or unpleasant situations. Instead, the fictional refugee encounters smiling officials who have seemingly have been waiting just for him — their only client — to show up. One of them even speaks Arabic. Also, the refugee shelter in the film is not an overcrowded hot-spot of violent crime, but a cozy place with just two other residents who happen to be friendly and smiling: “One of them also speaks my language. Arsalan has already been here for a few weeks and offers me his help.”

Even if all current 28 EU members, plus Norway and Switzerland, closed their borders to migrants, the Islamic population will continue to exponentiate…. Today, it is an increase of six million in seven years. And tomorrow?

What will happen in major European cities, where the Muslim communities are currently based? Will London, Marseille, Stockholm, Brussels, Amsterdam, Antwerp and Birmingham all have Muslim majorities?

Under the “medium” and “high” projections in Pew’s scenarios, how can Europe preserve all its most precious gifts — freedom of expression, separation of church and state, freedom of conscience, rule of law and equality between men and women?

One of the most debated arguments about Muslims in Europe is the “Eurabia” claim: that high birth rates and immigration will make Muslims the majority on the continent within a few decades. For years, most of the media and analysts dismissed the claim as alarmist and racist. “Dispelling the myth of Eurabia”, sniffed a major Newsweek cover.

Not many had the courage to sound an alarm. The great Arabist scholar, Bernard Lewis, sent out a warning more than a decade ago that Europe would turn Muslim by the end of this century, and dissolve into “part of the Arab West, the Maghreb”. The late scholar Fouad Ajami also cautioned that “Europe is host to a war between order and its enemies, fueled by demography”; and the Italian writer Oriana Fallaci imagined a continent with “the minarets in place of the bell-towers, with the burka in place of the mini-skirt”. Mark Steyn explained that “the future belongs to Islam” with an “enfeebled” West in a “semi Islamified Europe”.

Ten years later, since Europe opened its borders to a massive wave of migrants from North Africa and the Middle East, the demographers reviewed their assessments.

Whatever you think of President Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, it points to the most important strategic reality in the Middle East: Arab power has collapsed in the face of low oil prices and competition from American frackers.

The devastating oil-price shocks of the 1970s, orchestrated by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, nearly wrecked the world economy. Ever since, the U.S. has looked for ways to break OPEC’s parasitic and rent-seeking grip on the oil market—and thereby to reduce America’s geopolitical vulnerability to events in the Middle East.

Victory did not come easily. Intense conservation efforts made the U.S. much more energy-efficient. New oil discoveries in Africa and elsewhere significantly broadened the available supply. Renewable energy sources added to the diversification. But the most decisive development was that decades of public and private research and investment unleashed an American oil-and-gas boom, leading to a revolution in energy markets that has sent geopolitical shocks through world affairs. The consequences reverberate in the Middle East and beyond. Future oil revenues to countries like Saudi Arabia, Iran, Venezuela, Russia and Iraq will fall trillions of dollars short of what once might have been expected. The shift in energy markets will benefit consumer economies like Japan, China, India and the nations of the European Union. The U.S. and similarly situated nations, like Australia and Canada, can look forward to faster growth and greater foreign investment, since they will capture much of the oil revenue that Russia and OPEC lose.

Low energy prices already have given the EU’s struggling southern countries a chance to return to growth. They have limited Russia’s prospects and forced Vladimir Putin onto a tight budget. They have largely offset the gains Iran had hoped to make from signing the nuclear deal and escaping Western sanctions.CONTINUE AT SITE