RUTHFULLY YOURS

The latest European terrorist attack – by Barcelone wolves – hit a country that made a conscious choice thirteen years ago to opt for a quiet life. So much for that. One of the psychological changes that has happened since the Madrid bombings of 2004 is that Spaniards and other Europeans now accept, albeit mostly implicitly, that this is less to do with foreign policy, or foreign soldiering, than with domestic matters, such as immigration and multiculturalism.

I’ll have more to say on this subject with Tucker Carlson live on Fox News on Friday evening at 8pm Eastern/5pm Pacific. Meanwhile, here is what I had to say about the Madrid attacks in my bestseller America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It. I think most of it holds up. The mourners in the streets marched under placards bearing the single word “Basta” – “Enough”. They didn’t mean “enough” terrorism, but “enough” with Bush’s wars and being a fully participating member of the “coalition of the willing”. So the Spaniards caved, folded, walked away – and, as they learned today, for the Islamic supremacists it still wasn’t “enough”:

If the critical date for Americans in the new century is September 11th 2001, for Continentals it’s a day two-and-a-half years later, in March 2004. On the 11th of the month, just before Spain’s general election, a series of train bombings in Madrid killed over 200 people. That day, I received a ton of e-mails from American acquaintances along the lines of: “3/11 is Europe’s 9/11. Even the French will be in.” Friends told me: “The Europeans get it now.” Doughty warriors of the blogosphere posted the Spanish flag on their home pages in solidarity with America’s loyal allies in the war against terrorism. John Ellis, a Bush cousin and a savvy guy with a smart website, declared: “Every member-state of the EU understands that Madrid is Rome is Berlin is Amsterdam is Paris is London is New York.”

All wrong.

On Friday March 12th, hundreds of thousands of Spaniards filled Madrid’s streets and stood somberly in a bleak drizzle to mourn their dead. On Sunday, election day, the voters tossed out José María Aznar’s sadly misnamed Popular Party, and handed the government to the Socialist Workers’ Party. Aznar’s party were America’s principal Continental allies in Iraq; the Socialist Workers campaigned on a pledge to withdraw Spain’s troops from Iraq. Throughout the campaign, polls showed the Popular Party cruising to victory. Then came the bomb.

Having invited people to choose between a strong horse and a weak horse, even Osama bin Laden might have been surprised to see the Spanish opt to make their general election an exercise in mass self-gelding. Within 72 hours of the carnage, voters sent a tough message to the terrorists: “We apologize for catching your eye.” Whether or not Madrid is Rome and Berlin and Amsterdam and Paris, it certainly isn’t New York.

To be sure, there were all kinds of Kerryesque footnoted nuances to that stark election result. One sympathized with those voters reported to be angry at the government’s pathetic insistence, in the face of the emerging evidence, that the bomb attack was the work of Eta, the Basque nationalist terrorists, when it was so obviously the jihad boys. One’s sympathy, however, disappeared with their decision to vote for a party committed to disengaging from the war. And no one will remember the footnotes, the qualifications – just the final score: terrorists toppled a European government.

We hadn’t traveled together outside the country—the country, in our case, being Norway—all summer, so a few weeks ago we decided to plan a brief, cheap trip to somewhere else in Europe. We put together a list of our favorite cities, plus a few we haven’t yet gotten to. We checked out airfares and hotel prices. And we consulted a color-coded map of Europe that I’d run across online. The darker the color of the country, the greater the likelihood, according to experts, that it will be a terrorist target in the near future. We love Berlin and Munich, but Angela Merkel’s madness has made those cities unappealing destinations, so we crossed them off immediately. We also love Paris, but the recent terrorist attacks there, not to mention the ever-worsening immigrant crime situation and the pictures we’d seen of refugees camped out on the streets, led us to cross it off our list.

Mind you, it’s not just a matter of not wanting to be blown up. It’s about the fact that places like Paris and Berlin just don’t feel the same. It’s also about not wanting to make even a piddling contribution to the economy of a country that has pursued irresponsible immigration and integration policies. London? No. I don’t want to spend my vacation money in a country that lets in jihad-preaching imams while banning Robert Spencer.

I’d go to any of these places for work reasons, but not for a vacation. Even a war correspondent doesn’t vacation in a war zone.

A sensible choice would have been Prague or Budapest: on the color-coded map, the nations of Eastern Europe, owing to their sensible border policies, are white or pale yellow, meaning very safe. But we just didn’t feel like Eastern Europe this time around.

So we decided on Barcelona. We’d been to Spain multiple times, but never its second most-populous city. It seemed a sensible choice: it didn’t come up often in discussions of possible terrorist targets.

We were planning to go sometime around now. We’d picked out a hotel and found a decent airfare. But at the last minute, we decided that we didn’t feel sufficiently adventurous. It would have involved long days of walking and visits to several must-see places, from the Sagrada Familia to the Picasso Museum. So we opted for Copenhagen, a more familiar, closer destination, where we could drop in to our favorite bars, wander around Tivoli, and have some nice dinners.

There’s an old Cole Porter tune called “Let’s Not Talk about Love.” It’s not one of his most delightful works, but it does fall into the ample category of Porter “list” songs. Here’s an excerpt:

Let’s talk about frogs, let’s talk about toads,

Let’s try to solve the riddle why chickens cross roads,

Let’s talk about games, let’s talk about sports,

Let’s have a big debate about ladies in shorts.

And so on. And on. And on. The point soon becomes clear: let’s discuss absolutely everything. Everything! With one single, solitary exception:

But let’s not talk about love.

I’ve been thinking about Porter’s song today while watching the TV coverage of the Barcelona terrorist attack. On the BBC, on Sky News, and on CNN (I live in Norway, and therefore was unable to watch the U.S. broadcast networks), reporters and newsreaders talked about the specifics of the carnage, caused by a truck whose jihadist driver deliberately steered it off the road and onto the pavement, killing at least thirteen pedestrians. The newsfolk displayed maps of Barcelona and explained in detail where La Rambla (also known as Las Ramblas), the location of the terrorist attack, is located in relation to other major spots in the city. They showed pictures of the body-strewn avenue itself, with the corpses themselves blurred out of respect for the dead.

They discussed the popularity of La Rambla as a tourist destination, and went into some detail about the nationalities of vacationers currently thronging the city. They noted that La Rambla is Barcelona’s chief tourist street, essentially its counterpart to the Champs-Elysées in Paris, the Kufürstendamm in Berlin, Fifth Avenue in New York – and, perhaps most significantly, La Promenade des Anglais in Nice, France, where, in July of last year, eighty-six people were killed in a similar jihadist atrocity.

They pondered the apparent lack of sophistication of this particular crime, the biographical background of the truck driver, the timeline of the atrocity, the apparent speed and weight of the truck itself, and so on. They talked about the wounded, about the degree to which they had been wounded, about how many had been sent to hospitals.

But they didn’t talk about Islam. They didn’t talk about jihad. CONTINUE AT SITE

Emmanuel Macron’s victory in France’s presidential election this year marked the triumph of a steady, centrist hand over the far-right nationalism of Marine Le Pen. His presidency, moreover, was supposed to be “Jupiterian,” characterized by an aloof, dignified posture designed to exalt his office in the eyes of legislators and the public. Yet the storms and harsh realities intrinsic to governing have damaged Macron’s image.

The young president’s popularity has dropped rapidly in opinion polls. One recent survey revealed only 36 percent of French citizens were satisfied with his performance. Macron is now “more unpopular than his predecessor Francois Hollande — himself very unpopular — was after the same length of time in office,” reports The Independent. His popularity has declined about 30 points since June. A separate poll, conducted by YouGov, also found his approval rating had fallen to 36 percent.

The Jupiterian president is learning that he can’t distance himself from the consequences of trying to enact reforms. On the contrary, Macron’s ambitious agenda is forcing him down from his throne.

Consider a structural reform that Macron is proposing for the French government: He wants to streamline the law-making process by cutting the number of delegates in both houses of parliament by one-third. “We need long-term perspective,” Macron said, “but we must also act quickly and swiftly, therefore the shuffle between the two houses of parliament must be simplified.” If necessary, Macron will put the reform up for a vote by the French people. Some see this as a sign of authoritarian tendencies.

Spending and tax cuts have proven just as controversial for Macron. While Macron had hoped to institute tax cuts soon after the election in order to boost the moribund French economy, financial realities have stood in the way. Macron also wants to reduce France’s budget deficit, but to do that and cut taxes requires spending cuts. He decided to cut defense spending, a move that has been met with the disapproval of many French citizens. France’s top general resigned, and another criticized Macron’s “juvenile authoritarianism.” As it stands, Macron’s tax cuts have been delayed, his spending cuts have met much consternation, and his relationship with the military has frayed.

Other reforms in Macron’s agenda have met concerted resistance. A proposal to cut a housing benefit, which would affect hundreds of thousands of French students, met vigorous opposition from students’ unions. “Disgruntlement among students is a thorny issue,” reports the Guardian, “because the government is seeking to avoid students joining potential protests against Macron’s proposed changes to labour laws this autumn.” Macron’s labor reforms are intended to make it easier to hire and fire employees by revising a complex set of regulations.

HONG KONG—A student icon of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement was effectively disqualified from running for political office for five years after being jailed over protests in 2014 that drew world-wide attention.

The imprisonment of Joshua Wong, who became the skinny, bespectacled teenage face of the 79-day demonstrations demanding freer elections, is the latest move by authorities here to sweep away opponents of Beijing’s tightening control over the city. Since the protests, Mr. Wong has co-founded a new political party and has become a focal point for democracy campaigners, especially among the city’s youth.

The Court of Appeal sentenced Mr. Wong to six months in prison for taking part in an unlawful assembly in 2014, when protesters scaled security gates to access a square outside government headquarters, sparking what became known as the Occupy protests. Mr. Wong was originally sentenced to community service, which he completed, before the city’s Department of Justice filed a rare appeal, arguing that the sentence was too lenient. The harsher sentence means Mr. Wong is barred from running in local government elections until at least 2022.

Two other student leaders, Nathan Law and Alex Chow, were sentenced to eight months and seven months in prison, respectively.

Hong Kong authorities are increasingly using the legal system to silence dissent, having successfully disqualified six other pro-democracy legislators in a separate case over oath-taking, damaging the bloc’s ability to veto legislation.

The moves pave the way for controversial laws to be enacted on national security, compulsory patriotic education for schoolchildren, and, for the first time, allowing mainland Chinese laws to be enforced in a new train station for a high-speed rail line connecting Hong Kong to the mainland.

“Beijing and the Hong Kong Secretary for Justice are licking their chops at the moment,’’ said Jerome A. Cohen, director of the U.S.-Asia Law Institute at New York University. “Of course they will be “political prisoners … Their actions were political, and so was the government’s prosecution.’’

Mr. Wong and his two fellow student protest leaders “were convicted not because they exercised their civil liberties but because their relevant conduct in the protest broke the law,’’ a spokeswoman for the Department of Justice said in an email. “There is absolutely no basis to imply any political motive on the part of the Department of Justice in this case.’’

Mr. Wong, who turns 21 in October, rocketed to fame in his teens by organizing a 2012 rally that led the government to shelve plans to introduce a pro-China curriculum in Hong Kong schools.

During protests that paralyzed city streets in 2014, Mr. Wong was one of the first to camp out on highways and was a fiery voice at nightly rallies. That year, he was also on the cover of Time Magazine—the week he turned 18—as “The Face of Protest.”

Turkey has now become the first and only NATO member state that teaches “jihad” in its schools. Although the Turkish government claims that “jihad” means a “spiritual inner struggle for salvation,” the official Turkish dictionary defines it as a “war fought in the name of religion.”

“Why would a young man, indeed a young woman, would want to return to a country where there are 50,000 people in prison, including 200 journalists, opposition media is gagged, women are second class citizens, and where Darwin’s theory of evolution has been taken off academic curriculum because it contradicts teachings of Islam? To these bright young kids, returning to Turkey must appear like hopping on H. G. Wells’s ‘Time Machine’ and travelling back a few centuries.” — Fuad Kavur, London-based Turkish-British film producer.

Turkey’s Islamist strongman, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, draws such a rosy picture of his war-torn country that his audiences might think the world’s youth, in envy, should be flocking to Turkey to breathe an air of academic excellence and freedoms. On the other hand, however, he complains of a massive brain drain in the Muslim world, including Turkey, heading to the Western countries, which he explicitly despises. A gross contradiction? Just an Islamist’s usual ideological impasse.

In a recent speech, Erdogan said that the Muslim world has been losing students to the West in a brain drain, and that this intellectual emigration must be prevented:

“On top of that, we are transferring very serious amounts of money to Western countries for this. After these students complete their academic studies, we naturally expect them to return to their countries and serve their own people. But most of the time, those finishing their schools do not return to their homelands, but stay where they received education”.

Erdogan’s diagnosis is correct. According to Cumhuriyet, an independent Turkish daily newspaper, the number of Turkish students seeking study abroad has doubled every year since 2009. At Robert College in Istanbul, a private high school, 151 of 196 seniors recently applied to study abroad. And according to the state-run news agency Anadolu, some 90,000 Turkish students go abroad annually, and spend about $1.5 billion for education. Turkey ranks 11th among countries with students getting an education abroad, according to the World Bank. Top preferred education destinations include Britain, the United States, Malta, Canada, Australia and Germany — ironically, all of them non-Muslim countries. Turkey sends more students to the United States than any other European country.

At Robert College in Istanbul, a private high school, 151 of 196 seniors recently applied to study abroad. (Image source: Wikipedia)

That is hardly surprising in a country where average schooling is a mere 6.5 years. Qualitatively, too, education standards are extremely poor in Turkey. The results of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) education test have revealed some of the most pressing problems in Turkish education. According to the PISA findings in 2016, Turkey dropped from 44th place to 49th (out of 72 countries surveyed), compared to the last test in 2012.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) found that the number of Turkish 15-year-olds who scored below average on the triennial PISA test is three times higher than the number of students who scored below average in more successful countries. Some 31.2% of Turkish students below 15 years of age underperformed in mathematics, sciences and reading. In contrast, only 10% of students in countries that neared the top of the list underperformed on math, sciences and reading. Between 2012 and 2016, Turkey’s ranking dropped from 43rd in science to 52nd, and from 41st in reading to 50th.

For Erdogan, however, education has hardly anything to do with science. In a 2015 speech, he boasted that since his government came to power in 2002, the number of “imam school” students had risen sharply from a mere 60,000 to 1.2 million.

JAKARTA—Indonesian police are investigating an alleged terror plot by Islamic State supporters suspected of attempting to build chemical bombs for attacks at the presidential palace and other targets.

Five people have been arrested, police said, just ahead of Thursday’s planned celebrations for the anniversary of Indonesia’s independence. Police said the attacks were to be carried out by the end of this month, but didn’t say whether they were planned to disrupt the events specifically.

The use of chemicals as a terror agent would mark an escalation in the capacity of Indonesia’s militants, who have been unable to build sophisticated explosive devices in recent years. Police said the type of device planned was more complex than the pressure-cooker bombs typically used.

“We found chemicals and written documents detailing instructions on how to create chemical bombs,” said Yusri Yunus, spokesman for the police in West Java. The arrests were made Tuesday in Bandung, about 90 miles southeast of Jakarta.

Police didn’t say how close the suspects were to completing a device to disperse chemicals, nor did they identify the type of chemicals found. Mr. Yunus said the smoke from one substance “could burn the skin.”

Among those arrested were a husband and wife, police said, but the identities of the suspects haven’t been disclosed and it is not known if they have legal representation.

About 5,000 police and military personnel will be deployed at sensitive locations in Jakarta during Thursday’s celebrations, police said. Such holiday deployments are customary in Indonesia. In May, a pair of terror-related blasts killed three police officers who were stationed at a bus terminal ahead of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

“We stay alert during the National Day celebrations,” said Prabowo Argo Yuwono, spokesman for the Jakarta police. CONTINUE AT SITE

Saint-Bernard-de-Lacolle. 1,477 people live in this little corner of Quebec with its apple orchards, elderberry fields and small wineries. But now 400 migrants can cross the border in a single day.

On the other side of the border is New York. There the language is English. In Saint-Bernard-de-Lacolle, the language of choice is French. But these days you’re a more likely to hear Arabic, Urdu or Haitian French being spoken here as Roxham Road fills with clots of migrants scampering out of America.

They’re not the leftist American celebs who threaten to leave for Canada if their side doesn’t win the election. Instead they’re the illegal and dubiously legal who got the message from President Trump.

The overloaded Mounties at the border crossing are being forced to cope with the jabbering illegals, grifters and fake refugees of Trump’s migrant surge. But where Obama’s migrant surge swelled America’s southern border with incoming migrants, Trump’s migrant surge is expelling them north.

The Syrians, or anyone claiming to be, are coming. So are the Sudanese, Somalis and Haitians. This is an informal border crossing and so the rules that might protect Canada from this horde don’t apply. Quebec has become the weakest link in the Canadian border with the vast majority of border migrants invading the “True North” through vulnerable points like the dead end of Roxham Road.

The same thing is happening in Emerson, a town of 689 people named after Ralph Waldo Emerson, near Minnesota whose Somali settler population is invading and victimizing this peaceful community. At night Somalis can be seen walking up to Emerson to take advantage of a new country and her people.

In a town where once no one locked their doors, locals now check their bolts and turn out the lights. And then they wake up to the nightmare of migrant mobs pounding on their doors and peering through their windows in the middle of the night.

“They banged pretty hard, then ‘ring ring ring’ the doorbell,” a mother of two young girls said. “It was scary.”

“The biggest migration movements are still ahead: Africa’s population will double in the next decades. A country like Egypt will grow to 100 million people, Nigeria to 400 million. In our digital age with the internet and mobile phones, everyone knows about our prosperity and lifestyle.” — German Development Minister Gerd Müller.

“Young people all have cellphones and they can see what’s happening in other parts of the world, and that acts as a magnet.” — Michael Møller, Director of the United Nations office in Geneva.

“If we do not manage to solve the central problems in African countries, ten, 20 or even 30 million immigrants will arrive in the European Union within the next ten years.” — Antonio Tajani, President of the European Parliament.

Spain is on track to overtake Greece as the second-biggest gateway for migrants entering Europe by sea. The sudden surge in migration to Spain comes amid a crackdown on human smuggling along the Libya-Italy sea route, currently the main migrant point of entry to Europe.

The westward shift in migration routes from Greece and Italy implies that Spain, situated only ten miles from Africa by sea, may soon find itself at the center of Europe’s migration crisis.

More than 8,300 illegal migrants have reached Spanish shores during the first seven months of 2017 — three times as many as in all of 2016, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM).

Thousands more migrants have entered Spain by land, primarily at the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla on the north coast of Morocco, the European Union’s only land borders with Africa. Once there, migrants are housed in temporary shelters and then moved to the Spanish mainland, from where many continue on to other parts of Europe.

In all, some 12,000 migrants have arrived in Spain so far this year, compared to 13,246 for all of 2016. By comparison, 14,156 migrants have arrived in Greece so far in 2017.

Italy remains the main migrant gateway to Europe, with around 97,000 arrivals so far this year, compared to 181,436 for all of 2016. Italy has been the main point of entry to Europe since the EU-Turkey migrant deal, signed in March 2016, shut off the route from Turkey to Greece, at one time the preferred point of entry to Europe for migrants from Asia and the Middle East. Almost 600,000 migrants have arrived in Italy during the past four years.