RUTHFULLY YOURS

German chancellor Angela Merkel has paid a steep price for her controversial 2015 decision to let in millions of people fleeing Middle Eastern and African countries.

Merkel’s party, the Christian Democratic Union, came in first in Sunday’s elections, but its 33 percent haul was its worst result since the party’s founding in 1945, at the end of WWII. (The opposition Social Democrats also turned in their worst post-war result.)

Merkel’s policies on refugees and, in particular, her poor record on assimilation of migrants led 1.1 million of her party’s 2013 voters to flee to the nationalist Alternative for Germany, which won a stunning 13 percent of the vote. Merkel’s failure to stand up for free-market policies caused an additional 1.3 million of her party’s previous voters to plump for the pro-market Free Democrats, who doubled their 2013 vote and reentered parliament.

The big news out of the election is that Merkel is now weakened and will probably have to take on the odd couple of the Free Democrats and the left-wing Greens to form a government. She has ruled out having any alliance with Alternative for Germany, which polite society in Germany brands as anti-democratic, racist, and xenophobic. Its political opponents tar it with even worse names. Katrin Göring-Eckardt and Cem Özdemir, co-leaders of the Green party, used their post-election speeches to tell supporters that there were “again Nazis in parliament.”

That sort of name-calling obscures the real reasons for the rise of the Alternative for Germany party. More than 80 percent of Germans are satisfied with their economic condition, but in the formerly Communist eastern states that reunited with Germany in 1990, life has been tough and employment prospects limited. In those areas, the Alternative party won 22 percent of the vote (it placed first with male voters at 27 percent). Similarly, many Germans believed that the “grand coalition” of Merkel’s Christian Democrats and the left-wing Social Democrats had suffocated political debate in Germany, closing out real discussion over the migrant problem, crime, bailouts of countries hurt by the faltering euro, and the loss of German sovereignty.

Everyone who voted for the Alternative knew they wouldn’t enter government, but many wanted them to have a voice. Groups that have felt behind by economic and cultural change were especially attracted by its promise to upset the cozy political culture of the capital in Berlin.

Consider that the Alternative party won support across the political spectrum. While 1,070,000 voters left Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union to vote for them, almost as many voters (970,000) abandoned the Social Democrats, the Greens, and the Left party (which has it roots in the old Communist regime of East Germany) to vote for a nationalist party that combines hostility to radical Islam with opposition to bigger government. After the votes were in, Left-party leader Katja Kipping mourned that “the progressive Left has fallen below 40 percent of the vote” for the first time in any modern German election.

The rise of Trump and the shock of Brexit have set the chattering classes to lamenting the rise of ‘populism’. What they decline to understand is that these upheavals happen when voters realise governments are not their servants but insufferable masters. Populism is what comes next.

Is there a spectre threatening Europe? That was the question put to a panel (on which I served) at Joao Espada’s twentieth annual Estoril Political Forum on the Portuguese coast in late June. The Forum is always an important event because its founder, Professor Joao Espada of the Catholic University of Portugal, takes great care to ensure that the speakers represent the full range of respectable political opinion in the Euro-Atlantic world and that an atmosphere of good-humoured tolerance suffuses the most contentious debates.

How different, how very, very different from the home life of our own dear university vice-chancellors.

As a result of Professor Espada’s stewardship, those who have attended earlier conferences—they include some of the brightest students from good universities on both sides of the Atlantic—are among the very few people not astonished by such events as the British vote for Brexit or the defeat of the National Front’s Marine Le Pen in France’s election. The freer and more open the debate, the better informed both the debaters and their audience will be.

On this occasion the speakers were quick to agree that a spectre was threatening Europe, if only because there is always a spectre threatening Europe (indeed usually several). On this occasion “populism” was the spectre they had in mind. But other spectres were on hand.

When Karl Marx coined the phrase in the Communist Manifesto, the spectre he saw threatening Europe was communism itself. Two or three years ago, we might have assumed that this spectre belonged strictly to the history books. Surely 1989 and memories of the ruin that communism had inflicted on Russia and Europe—not to mention China and Asia—would guard us effectively against returning to it. But if memories are short, the memories of people born after 1989 don’t exist at all.

Accordingly, communist ideas—generally deriving from softer forms of communism such as Trotskyism rather than Leninism—have revived in Greece, in Spain, in Italy, and most recently in Britain where Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn emerged as the surprise celebrity-hero of the recent election by coming second. These new Left movements have been rendered less threatening culturally, moreover, by the success of playwrights and screenwriters such as Dario Fo, author of Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay, whose fun-anarchism is the main ideological inspiration of the Five Star movement. The modern social democratic state has played its part too by accustoming people to following bureaucratic instructions to obtain free goods. To borrow what Marx said of history: communism repeats itself—the first time as genocide, the second time as therapy.

All this has meant that Corbyn is regarded by the young left-wingers who cheered him at the Glastonbury pop festival as Gandalf—a gentle white-bearded leader of humble country folk against the dark satanic mills of corporate Toryism and into a promised land. That’s to be expected at a pop festival perhaps. But his name is winning cheers and debates at the literary festivals where older, centrist and moderately Tory audiences generally fill the hall. And then most ordinary voters simply tune out Tory themes that despite his grandfatherly looks, Corbyn is a dangerous radical leftist.

Consider the positions he has taken both now and over the years. Today, he wants an end to “austerity” and greatly increased public spending at a time when Britain has very high levels of public debt. Such policies would risk the kind of stagflation that in the 1970s compelled the then-Labour government to call in the IMF for help. They would also require massive tax increases on people at all levels of income.

Second, he is soft not on communism only but on almost all the enemies of Britain and, more broadly, the West, including radical Islamists. He will almost never issue an unqualified condemnation of a terrorist atrocity, instead preferring to condemn the violence “on both sides”. On such grounds he maintained a friendly relationship with the Provisional IRA when it was bombing London and Manchester and murdering the ordinary citizens of Northern Ireland. He has since refused to retreat from that support.

Third, following the recent election and the Grenfell Tower fire, which made a febrile political atmosphere even more unstable, Corbyn talked loosely about “requisitioning” the houses of the absent rich for rehousing people made homeless by the fire. He urged people to hold protest marches against the government. He predicted that he would be in power within six months.

Given that Theresa May is unlikely to hold an election in the next six months, how is this going to be brought about? Almost certainly it’s little more than loose talk in an over-excited post-election atmosphere. But it increases the sense that Corbynite socialism is an unsettling force in an already unsettled politics.

Finally, Corbyn has followed the venerable leftist tradition of giving moral support to socialist dictatorships in the developing world, in his case Venezuela. And that may have doomed him.

Venezuela’s collapse into both extreme poverty, including shortages of basic foods and medicine, and violent mass repression has led to calls for Corbyn to disavow his backing of President Maduro. He followed his usual practice of blaming both Maduro and the opposition, both perpetrator and victim—and in addition the fall in oil prices. He is losing his halo in consequence, and will probably enter into a gradual decline as a political leader.

YANGON, Myanmar—Myanmar police said two mass graves holding the bodies of 28 slain Hindu women and boys have been found in conflict-torn northern Rakhine state.

The government blames Muslim insurgents for the killings.

Myanmar Border Guard Police Maj. Zayar Nyein in Rakhine said Monday that the graves had been discovered Sunday and contain the bodies of 20 females and eight males. He said more bodies are believed to be buried.

The government’s Information Committee said on its Facebook page that the eight males were children, including six under 10 years old.

Police blame the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army insurgent group, known as ARSA. Security forces say the dead are among about 100 Hindus missing since the group attacked at least 30 police outposts Aug. 25.

There was no immediate way to independently verify the government’s assertions.

A government crackdown that followed the attacks has left more than 200 Rohingya Muslim villages burned and sent at least 420,000 Rohingya fleeing into Bangladesh. The government has said most of the hundreds of people killed in the crackdown were insurgents.

The 28 bodies were found in Yebawkya village of Maungdaw township, the Information Committee. It said a Hindu man who lived there and has since fled to Bangladesh told a local leader that ARSA insurgents took about 100 Hindus from the village and killed all of them except for eight women, who were forced to convert to Islam and taken to Bangladesh.

The committee said nearby residents searched and found two pits holding the bodies in the northwest part of the village.

BERLIN—Germany’s election result confirms the overriding trend of European politics in the past year: the crumbling of the Continent’s established parties in the face of voter anxiety over economics and identity.

Angela Merkel’s center-right Christian Democrats were projected to come in first Sunday with around 33% of the vote, their lowest share of the post-World War II era. The center-left Social Democrats were projected to win just under 21%, their worst result since the prewar era. Germany’s two long-dominant parties, which have governed together in a “grand coalition” since 2013, lost support to an array of opposition groups including the anti-immigration Alternative for Germany.

The fragmented vote mirrors this year’s elections in other Continental European countries including France and the Netherlands. Established parties have suffered steep losses, especially on the center left, and voters have turned to upstarts on the nationalist right, the anticapitalist left or the liberal center.

The upheavals partly reflect the fallout of a decade marked by economic, security and immigration crises that have tested the cohesion of the European Union. The future direction of the EU and its major nations is now up for grabs in a fluid contest between internationalists and nationalists, incumbents and insurgents.

The outcome makes it likely that Germany, Europe’s economic powerhouse, will become more difficult to govern. Long and difficult negotiations are now expected between Ms. Merkel, the left-leaning Greens, and the pro-business Free Democrats. An unwieldy coalition may struggle to agree on the major challenges facing the European Union’s most populous nation, from immigration to its scandal-hit auto industry to how to stabilize the euro currency zone.Ms. Merkel has governed for 12 years as a pragmatic centrist. She is likely to come under pressure from many in her conservative party to shift to the right, to address concerns about immigration and security that helped drive support for the Alternative for Germany, known by its German initials AfD. CONTINUE AT SITE

Mohshin Habib, a Bangladeshi author, columnist and journalist, is Executive Editor of The Daily Asian Age.

The current crisis is being depicted — wrongly — as the “ethnic cleansing” of an innocent Muslim minority by Burma’s security forces, and the “apathy” to the plight of the Rohingyas by Aung San Suu Kyi, Burma’s foreign minister and its de facto head of state.

“Their [the Rohingyas’] tactics are terrorism. There’s no question about it. [Kyi is] not calling the entire Rohingya population terrorists, she is referring to a group of people who are going around with guns, machetes, and IEDs and killing their own people in addition to Buddhists, Hindus, and others that get in their way. They have killed a lot of security forces, and they are wreaking havoc in the region. The people who are running and fleeing out to Bangladesh… are fleeing their own radical groups…. [T]he international community has to sort out the facts before making accusations.” — Patricia Clapp, Chief of the U.S. Mission to Myanmar from 1999 to 2002.

The origins of the Bengali Muslim jihad in Western Myanmar in the late 19th century through the World War II era, illustrates that it is “rooted in Islam’s same timeless institution of expansionist jihad which eliminated Buddhist civilization in northern India.” — Dr. Andrew Bostom, author and scholar of Islam.

A surge in clashes between Islamist terrorists and the government of Burma (Myanmar) is at the root of a refugee crisis in Southeast Asia that has caused the United Nations and international media to focus attention on the Rohingyas in the northern Rakhine, an isolated province in the west of the Buddhist-majority country.

In late August 2017, a terrorist group calling itself the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) launched a series of coordinated attacks on Burmese security forces in northern Rakhine. When the Burmese Army announced that it had responded by killing 370 assailants, Rohingya activists claimed that many of the dead were innocent people who had not been involved in the attacks. They also accused the authorities of demolishing Rohingya villages — devastation that was shown in satellite images released by Human Rights Watch — but the Burmese government said that it was carried out by ARSA, which had committed similar attacks on Burmese police in October 2016.

Since those events, hundreds of thousands of Rohingyas — Muslims who settled in Burma prior to its independence in 1948 — have been fleeing for the last two years, primarily to neighboring India and Bangladesh, in an attempt to escape violence and poverty. Fearing for its national security, on the grounds that among the refugees are ARSA terrorists and sympathizers with ties to ISIS and other Islamist organizations, India issued a deportation order for the Rohingyas who had crossed the border illegally. This move, however, was met with resistance by the Indian Supreme Court. Bangladesh has addressed the problem by severely restricting the movement of the Rohingya refugees.

The outcry on behalf of the innocent men, women and children who are caught in the crossfire of the radicals — who claim to represent their interests — is completely justified. No humanitarian solution to their plight can be found or implemented, nevertheless, without understanding the conflict — and the true culprits behind it.

The current crisis is being depicted — wrongly — as the “ethnic cleansing” of an innocent Muslim minority by Burma’s security forces, and the “apathy” to the plight of the Rohingyas by Aung San Suu Kyi, Burma’s foreign minister and its de facto head of state. As PJ Media reported, many critics in the media and among human rights groups are calling for Kyi to be stripped of the Nobel Peace Prize she was awarded in 1991 for her campaign on behalf of democratization and against the country’s military junta rulers.

I fled communist tyranny to breathe and speak freely, to live without the fear and obligatory debasement of paying lip service to evil. Don’t think me dramatic when I say the the Left in general and same-sex marriage bullies in particular have inspired a deeply unsettling sense of deja vu.

There are times in life when at last you can fully recognise a deadly, half-hidden danger. Reading an intensely perceptive analysis helps, and there is a relatively recent one by the Polish philosopher Ryszard Legutko, published in English as The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies (brief excerpts featured in Quadrant‘s April 2015 edition). Professor Legutko and I grew up in the same epoch and political environment in the communist tyrannies of Eastern Europe. I escaped and came to Australia as a refugee in 1981, while he became involved with Solidarity in Poland. Now he is a leading member of the European Parliament.

My point of view differs in part from his in that I have more sympathy for today’s voters, who must swim and struggle in the filthy oceans of propaganda the Left elite churns out. But I find his main thesis strikingly true:

“There are increasingly ominous parallels between the communist tyranny we have known and currently developing versions of ‘liberal democracy’ ”.

Totalitarian tendencies in those who increasingly dominate public life in the West – let’s call them the progressive elitists; Legutko hyphenates them, somewhat ambiguously, as “liberal-democrats” – have been pointed out before. It is the way these forces have behaved in Australia during the same-sex marriage and Safe Schools debates that awakened me so sharply. Don’t think me overly dramatic when I say you can smell the totalitarian threat in the air. Yes, right here in Australia.

Decisively, it is the progressive elitists – on the Left and elsewhere – who control the marriage-fakery and gender-confusion pushes, and who, in effect, are exploiting same-sex attracted people for their own purposes. Powerful enablers do far more harm than noisy activists. Of course, not all advocates of false marriage belong to this camp. Some are honestly misguided. There are puppets and there are puppet masters.

Marriage fakery and gender confusion should be seen as parts of the elitist push. There are other parts, too, in other fields. Going by recent experience, we can expect new forms of inhumanity threatening us year by year, with the aim of destroying traditional foundations and herding us towards the prison camp of progressivist utopia. And we are not talking about “fringe elements”, not at all. The tell-tale is their deviousness as they deny obvious interconnections, all the while crying “Red herring!” and “scare campaign!” even as the consequences of legislating for gay marriage are manifest in other countries. Take the Ontario experience, for example, where grade-one children are taught there are six “genders”, as even the program’s defenders concede.

Let me illustrate a couple of the parallels between the elitist social engineers and the commissars of the country and system I thought I had left behind.

The word forgers

Confusing, distorting, reversing and destroying the meanings of words was a major characteristic of communism, as much as the constant threat of state terror. The elitists in Australia also depend on word forgeries. “Homophobe” has become a term for the hysterical condemnation of ordinary people, and it is as manipulative as any communist cant. You may be democratically tolerant and compassionate; as a Christian, for instance, you will try to love all people “as yourself” and accept that all share in the highest possible inherent dignity as children of God. Nothing can more dramatically demonstrate the polar opposite of hating people than the Sermon on the Mount, but today stating as much is of no use. If you still dare to recognize the natural complementarity of man and woman as a fact and a norm, then you are a homophobe and, of course, “a hater“. This from the the very same people who so loudly and often say they wish only to promote “respect”!

That abuse might well have ben directed at people like my mother, who survived the Nazis and the Communists with her kindness and humanity tested but intact. Her generosity, open mind, unselfishness and self-sacrifice, her deep concern for the true needs of children, would count for nothing. Had she dared to disagree, she would have condemned herself to being vilified with the homophobe label. There are others of similar perspective who come readily to mind: a staunch old friend, an Anzac hero, wonderfully welcoming; Chinese migrant friends with traditions deep and fresh; a generous colleague, living in a joyful African Christian family culture. These are good people with valid objections and reservations about same-sex marriage and Safe Schools-style indoctrination, but they are automatically cast as “enemies” for all their goodness and the charity of their characters. They disagree and that is enough to be declared pariahs by those with the loudest megaphones.

PYONGYANG, North Korea—North Korea’s nuclear ambitions are etched into the landscape of its showcase capital city.

A giant sculpture of the atom sits on top of a new apartment tower built for nuclear scientists. Atom designs adorn road overpasses, lampposts and building facades.

Bomb imagery colors daily life. At an orphanage, children play with plastic mobile rocket launchers instead of toy trucks. Shops sell commemorative intercontinental ballistic missile stamps, while a bakery sells cakes featuring an upright rocket, ready for launch.

During a recent visit, the first by The Wall Street Journal since 2008, the city’s atomic aesthetics reinforced the message government officials conveyed repeatedly to the Journal reporters: North Korea won’t part with its nuclear weapons under any circumstances and is resolved to suffer economic sanctions and risk war with the U.S. to keep them.

“It is too late, we have grown up,” said Ri Yong Pil, the vice president of the Institute for American Studies, a division of North Korea’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. “We are not interested in dialogue to undermine our newly built strategic status.”

The Journal reporters traveled to Pyongyang for a tightly controlled reporting trip between Sept. 14 and 19 amid rising tension between the U.S. and North Korea, one of the world’s most brutal and isolated dictatorships. North Korea launched a ballistic missile over Japan on the second day of the trip. Hours after the group departed, U.S. President Donald Trump vowed to “totally destroy North Korea” if the U.S. is required to defend itself or allies, saying leader Kim Jong Un —whom he called “Rocket Man”—was on a suicide path.

On the day the Journal group flew into Pyongyang, North Korea’s state news agency declared in a news release that all “Yankees” should be “beaten to death, as a stick is fit for a rabid dog,” for persuading the United Nations to enact economic sanctions against the country.

Two affable, English-speaking diplomats in dark suits who received the Journal at Pyongyang’s new glass-fronted international airport took a more measured tone.

Over the next few days, the supervised series of official interviews, visits to city landmarks and brief encounters with a handful of Pyongyang residents appeared to signal a rare outreach campaign by the government, which has included other U.S. news organizations, to describe what it sees as the logic of its nuclear-weapons program. The U.S. and North Korea don’t have diplomatic relations, and even informal contact between the two nations is limited.

Official reporting trips to North Korea only happen with the explicit sanction of the state, and visitors are kept under close watch. Authorities granted Journal requests to visit factories and stores, which were chosen by the government. Some requests, such as to meet two U.S. citizens detained while working at a Pyongyang university, were denied.

Handlers allowed the Journal to talk to residents encountered along the way, but translations were done by the North Koreans and it was unclear if people felt free to speak their minds. CONTINUE AT SITE

In a new escalation of hostility between Washington and Pyongyang, North Korea’s foreign minister warned in a United Nations speech Saturday that a rocket attack on the U.S. mainland was “inevitable,” while U.S. warplanes flew off the east coast of North Korea in an explicit show of force.

The eight U.S. aircraft flew close to the North Korean coastline while remaining in international airspace, the Pentagon said in a statement, adding it was the farthest north of the demilitarized zone between North Korea and South Korea that American warplanes have flown since Pyongyang started testing ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons in the 1990s.

“This mission is a demonstration of U.S. resolve and a clear message that the president has many military options to defeat any threat,” Pentagon spokeswoman Dana White said. “We are prepared to use the full range of military capabilities to defend the U.S. homeland and our allies.”

The moves on Saturday capped a week of hostility between the two countries and involving their top leaders. The rising animosity has spurred world leaders to call for restraint and diplomacy, but neither capital has shown an inclination to back down from the standoff.

President Donald Trump this week derided North Korean leader Kim Jong Un as “Rocket Man,” saying he was on a suicide mission and that the U.S. would annihilate North Korea if forced to defend itself or its allies. He drew a personal response from Mr. Kim, who called Mr. Trump “deranged” and warned of retaliation.

On Saturday, North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Yong Ho suggested at the annual General Assembly gathering that military strikes by his country are inevitable. North Korea has been steadily advancing in both its missile and nuclear-warhead programs and is considered close to possessing the capability of an intercontinental strike.

“Trump might not have been aware what is uttered from his mouth, but we will make sure that he bears consequences far beyond his words, far beyond the scope of what he can handle, even if he is ready to do so,” Mr. Ri said.

“He committed an irreversible mistake of making our rockets’ visit to the entire U.S. mainland inevitable all the more,” he said. CONTINUE AT SITE

It will take only 30 to 40 years for the Muslim population to become the majority in Europe. — Charles Gave, French financier, website of the Institut des Libertés.

What is of concern, is that there is a sub-group of the European population which is in the process of very efficiently wiping itself out of existence.

That uttering this truth causes such mayhem and furious condemnations in the media reveals that in Europe, not only is the “native” population dying, but free speech as well.

A riveting — thanks to its subject — paper was posted the September 4, 2017 on the website of “Institut des Libertés,” the think tank of the great French financier Charles Gave. In it, he asks: Does the native population — by which he means the white population — of Europe face extinction?

His answer is “yes”: “It is not good or bad. IT IS”, Gave writes. His basic argument is that with a “native” rate of fertility of 1.4, a “migrant” — by which he means Muslim — rate of 3.4 to 4 children per woman, and taking the initial Muslim population to be 10% of the total, it will take only 30 to 40 years for the Muslim population to become the majority. Indeed, writes Gave, with a “native” rate of 1.4 for a population of 100, after only two generations you merely see 42 “native” children born.

As expected, Gave was almost immediately scorned as a far-right lunatic for having adopted the theory known in France as “le grand remplacement” (“the great replacement”) — of the native population by a new, migrant population. The theory was earlier disseminated by the writer Renaud Camus, who was close to the Front National political party of Marine Le Pen.

In a furious and venomous article about the “foolish calculations” of Gave, the newspaper Libération — compared to which the New York Times or the Washington Post look honest and balanced — wrote that the Muslim population is not 10% of the French population, but less; that the fertility rate of the native population is 1.8, not 1.4; that the fertility rate of the migrants from the Maghreb is 3.53, not 4 and that the concept of “Muslim origin” is nonsensical.

Who then is right, Gave or his critics?

Let us begin by noting that the observation from Libération is fundamentally weak. Gave writes that the fertility rate of the Muslim migrants is between 3.4 and 4 — not 4, as Libération falsely claims (Gave: between 3.4 and 4, Libération: 3.53, exactly the same). Moreover, nobody knows the exact proportion of Muslims in France — the French State explicitly forbids any kind of religious or racial census — but 10% seems a reasonable and moderate estimate. In addition, Libération misses the only real mistake in Gave’s calculation: with a fertility rate of 1.4 and considering an initial population of 100, no other factors being taken into account, after two generations you do not have 42 children (Gave), but 49 (100 x 0.7= 70 x 0.7= 49, not 42).[1]

That being said, Gave’s paper made a few assumptions with which I would disagree, for instance:

“Those who are born today will be there in thirty years and those who are not born will not be there. This is CERTAIN”, writes Gave. One imagines that the same certainty was just as true in 1913, 1937 or just before the Black Death;

“Thinking that real estate will go up when there are only 42 buyers for 100 sellers is an interesting idea but I have a hard time understanding the logic”, writes Gave; but he had just mentioned that the migrant population was replacing the native one — in fact, France has never been as populous as it is today;

Gave concludes that the European native population is going to disappear in 40 years: “The immense news of the next thirty or forty years will thus be the disappearance of the European populations, whose ancestors created the modern world.” Bearing in mind a fertility rate of 1.4 for the “natives”, it would take more than 40 years for them to vanish from the surface of Earth; to say nothing of “mixed” marriages, and so on.

Most importantly, Islam is not a race. Islam is a religion and, in fact, much more than that; it is a doctrine, a political movement, an ideology, and a complete set of norms (Islamic jurisprudence in the form of Quran, Sunnah, Fiqh) intended to rule each and every aspect of human activity. Being a doctrine, one can join it and convert to Islam. One can also leave Islam; however, the punishment for leaving, called “apostasy,” is death.

There are, nevertheless, people who define themselves as “former Muslims”, even if they may not be a majority. It does not make much sense, however, to pretend to know 40 years in advance what will be the future of a belief, creed, ideology or cult, especially in Europe and the Western world. As the saying goes, “It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.”

Only two or three generations ago, tens of millions of Europeans knelt several times a week in churches to show their adoration of Jesus Christ. Forty years after this religious fervor, almost nothing remains. What we have instead is the well-known phenomenon of “dechristianization”, which has engulfed the whole of Europe.

Yet, despite a few differences, there is truth in Gave’s paper. Bluntly put, Europeans are not making babies anymore. And this has nothing whatsoever to do with Islam; this “malady” is entirely self-inflicted.

In his book, The Population Bomb, published in 1968, the American biologist Paul Ehrlich wrote that the best method to reduce population is the legalization of abortion. And that was without even considering the effect of birth control.

What is the first thing you should do when you have dug yourself into a hole? The obvious answer is: stop digging. This is the advice that those involved in the imbroglio over the so-called independence referendum in Iraqi Kurdistan, due to be held on September 25. But still in the suspense of writing this column, would do well to heed.

The idea of holding a referendum on so contentious an issue at this time is bizarre, to say the least. There was no popular demand for it. Nor could those who proposed it show which one of Iraq’s problems such a move might solve at this moment. In other words, the move was unnecessary, in the sense that Talleyrand meant when he said that, in politics, doing what is not necessary is worse than making a mistake.

If by independence one means the paraphernalia of statehood, the three provinces that form Iraqi Kurdistan lack nothing: They have their president, prime minister, cabinet, parliament, army, police, and, even, virtual embassies in key foreign capitals. They are also well-furnished with symbols of statehood, including a flag and national anthem.

Having said all that, one could hardly deny the Kurds a desire for independence.

In a sense, some Kurds have dreamt of an independent state since over 2000 years ago, when the Greek historian Xenophon ran into them in the mountains of Western Asia. (See his account in his masterpiece Anabasis).

Right now, however, all indications are that any attempt at a unilateral declaration of independence by the Kurds could trigger a tsunami of conflicts that the region, already mired in crisis, might not be able to handle. In other words, the hole dug by Erbil may become an ever-deepening black hole, sucking a bigger chunk of the Middle East into the unknown; hence the need to stop digging.

Yet, almost everyone is doing the opposite.

Massoud Barzani, the president of the autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government, has lashed out against Turkey and Iran while threatening military action to seize disputed areas in Iraq. Barzani’s tough talk may please his base but could strengthen chauvinist elements in Baghdad, Ankara and Tehran who have always regarded Kurds as the enemy.