RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Danish cartoon controversy prompted a spectacular failure of will and principle in the West, the commentator tells Quadrant. ‘First they come for the cartoonists, ultimately they move on to everybody else. The provocations … get lamer and lamer. We are losing our world.’

I’m cruising down New England country lanes that criss-cross towns that look like Norman Rockwell theme parks—on my way to find Mark Steyn—but I’m not allowed to tell you exactly where I am.

My destination is the equivalent of a military bunker—a hidden television studio where, later today, they’ll be installing the concert grand piano Steyn will be using when he launches his variety talk show. Even though I’m less than an hour from the Canadian border and ninety minutes from Montreal, and even though the last battle fought here was in 1777 (the Green Mountain Boys routed some Brits, Hessians and Iroquois under German command), tactical secrecy is the order of the day.

Mark Steyn is under a fatwa.

In a sane world I would be hoping to find Steyn in a good mood so I could ask him whether he really thinks Gypsy is the greatest musical ever staged, because many people believe that despite the stunning score by Jule Styne (“There’s No Business Like Show Business”, “Everything’s Coming Up Roses”, “All I Need Is the Girl”) and the delightful lyrics of Stephen Sondheim (before he became the mononymous bore Sondheim), the book by Arthur Laurents is, after all, a backstage story, which is the typical refuge of the journeyman Broadway playwright looking to establish excuses for downstage centre belting. I’m of the opinion that, since Laurents was also the director of the best Gypsy revival, the one in the early 1990s starring Tyne Daly as Mama Rose—who was, by the way, far superior to both Ethel Merman and Rosalind Russell—and since the Eleven O’Clock Number, “Rose’s Turn”, was spun entirely from the best scene in the book (“I thought you did it for me, mama”), it’s obvious that Laurents was constantly sacrificing his dialogue to the staging and choreography of the original director, Jerome Robbins.

But, alas, we don’t live in a sane world, so I can’t justify spending valuable interview time asking the author of America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It—the apocalyptic best-seller about how Muslims are taking over the world and destroying Western civilisation—whether the songs of Harry Warren would someday be recognised for their genius, despite the novelty lyrics of “Chattanooga Choo Choo”, “Shuffle Off to Buffalo” and “I’ve Got a Gal from Kalamazoo”. Steyn is indeed the author of Broadway Babies Say Goodnight—in my opinion one of the greatest works in the rarefied world of musical theatre journalism—but spending all our time on it would be, under the circumstances, equivalent to interviewing Ronald Reagan about the nuances of Knute Rockne, All American.

“But you do really think Gypsy is the greatest musical?” I manage to wedge in later. And, to my great satisfaction, he says, “Yes, I really do.”

But back to the Islamic apocalypse. Apparently Steyn was radicalised by the events of 9/11, because on that day he ceased being a nerdy theatre critic, crooner and exponent of the American songbook, and became instead the Cassandra of Western democracy, doling out an avalanche of columns, articles, books and radio programs telling us that we have given up our Anglo-Saxon Enlightenment souls while the vanguard of the Islamic menace has been advancing toward Kansas. That he’s managed to do so without sacrificing any of the acerbic humour he displayed while describing the libretto of Les Miz or the eccentricities of Andrew Lloyd Webber makes him, sui generis, our singing dancing Tiresias, or, perhaps more accurately, that guy who stands on the side of the road in every Friday the 13th movie, saying “Turn back! Turn back now! Before it’s tooooooo late!” but, in Steyn’s case, with a Catskills-comic rimshot to further confuse the heedless libertines on their way to perdition.

Mark, glad to meet you, you’ve written one of the happiest books I’ve ever read and one of the most depressing books I’ve ever read.

I did say something to this effect when Steyn at length showed up, ambling into a construction site full of exposed electrical wires and bare support beams where, in a few days, The Mark Steyn Show would go into tryouts on the CRTV network. (Be careful when you Google it: CRTV is also the acronym of the national television network of Cameroon.)

“But it’s all part of the same package!” says Steyn with enthusiasm. “The point of politics is to free up time for what really matters in life.”

Like Cole Porter?

“Like Cole Porter.”

Steyn is a large man—above six feet, burly, with a fuzzy red beard that makes him look as if he should be handing William Wallace a halberd at Falkirk, not tinkling piano keys while sipping a Tom Collins—but then that’s his whole point.

“What I’ve learned since 9/11 is that the small pleasures—music, theatre, film—have to be earned. In the Muslim world, there is no music. In Libya they destroyed all the musical instruments—music was considered an abomination. When the demography changes, there will be no concert halls. Artists who take a multicultural view should be aware of this. Count the number of covered women in London’s West End. In Birmingham, where I went to high school, you have a provincial symphony orchestra in a Muslim city—I’m not sure it will survive. All art, all popular culture, is endangered by Islam, because there’s no room for it. It’s considered libertinism. And I’m not even talking about Miley Cyrus twerking at the music awards. What turned Sayyid Qutb against the morality of the West is that he attended a church dance in Greeley, Colorado, which was a dry town in 1948, and he heard the song ‘Baby, It’s Cold Outside’. He thought it was evil. And now things are getting a lot worse. Ugly things are happening.”

This is what’s simultaneously frustrating and fascinating about talking to Mark Steyn—he understands the connection between Frank Loesser, the creator of Guys and Dolls, and Sayyid Qutb, the Muslim Brotherhood leader executed for plotting the assassination of Nasser. If the Islamic extremists weren’t out there meddling with the canon, we could have spent the next hour discussing the various versions of “Baby, It’s Cold Outside”, which Loesser wrote for the Esther Williams movie Neptune’s Daughter. What Steyn failed to mention is that, after six decades as a Christmas standard played over department-store public address systems, the song suddenly became ostracised two years ago because certain moral police officers in various social media fora decided it’s an anthem for date rape. (Apparently the National Organization for Women has more in common with the Muslim Brotherhood than either party would like to admit.) The idea is ludicrous, not only because the song is light-hearted and romantic, but also because it’s been consistently interpreted and reinterpreted to make either sex and both sexes desperate for nookie. Even the original movie uses the song twice—once when Ricardo Montalban is trying to seduce Esther Williams, but again when the man-crazy Betty Garrett is trying to seduce Red Skelton! Not to mention that Idina Menzel and Michael Bublé recorded a video version lip-synched by pre-pubescent actors dressed up as 1920s swells—should they be prosecuted for child abuse?—and, in the Lady Gaga version with Joseph Gordon-Levitt, she is aggressively trying to have sex with him.

But then sometimes Mark Steyn seems like the only conservative you can discuss these issues with, because most Republicans think popular culture is beside the point, if not downright dangerous. Steyn, on the other hand, has performed “Kung Fu Fighting” before thousands of people in civic auditoria more accustomed to Mary Kay Cosmetics conventions, so he gets it.

The progressive global elite is breathing a sigh of relief after “centrist” newcomer to electoral politics, Emmanuel Macron, defeated Marine Le Pen to become the next president of France. After the shocks of last year’s Brexit and the election of populist Donald Trump as president, the rejection of populist, nationalist, and anti-EU parties in Austria, the Netherlands, and now the second most important EU country suggests the tide has turned. But the Eurocrats and Europhiles shouldn’t start popping champagne corks yet. Like all of Europe, France’s problems run deep.

Macron is the consummate establishment insider, with the youth, pleasing personality, and “hope and change” rhetoric of Barack Obama, who endorsed him because he represents, as Obama said, “the values that we care so much about.” He is the opposite of the fiery, true political outsider Le Pen, who is nearing 50 and focuses on the gloomy problems of immigration and terrorism, and has hard things to say about the EU and the Euro.

Macron also got lucky when his first-round opponent in the voting, center-conservative François Fillon, was weakened by a nepotism scandal. Macron’s other opponent, radical socialist Jean-Luc Mélenchon, is too unhinged even for a basically socialist electorate. And the long demonization of Le Pen as an anti-Semitic Petainist throwback and an Islamophobic, racist fascist has made her a political pariah despite her basically socialist and redistributionist policies, and her promise to do something about the immigration and terrorism that so many French people find threatening.

Macron had another advantage: he put forth a seemingly reasonable program for curing France’s economic ills, which are critical: government spending at 57% of GDP, the highest in Europe; a retirement age of 62 and a 35-hour workweek; 3,500 pages of employment regulations; an unemployment rate of nearly 10% (double that for those under 25); a GDP growth rate barely over 1%; public debt at nearly 90% of GDP; an income tax rate topping out at 45%; nine million people living below the poverty line; and welfare spending at nearly 32% of GDP. Macron promises to tackle the job and growth-killing policies that have created these dismal numbers, but he’s unlikely to have a parliamentary coalition big enough to get such reforms through. Don’t forget, about a third of the French voters cast a “pox on both your houses” vote, either abstaining or casting a blank or spoiled “white ballot.” This suggests a fragile foundation for Macron’s future government.

And if he tries to follow through on his campaign promises, he will likely meet stiff resistance from critics of “neoliberalism,” the epithet in Europe for free-market capitalism. In March 2006, 2.7 million mostly young French people protested against a minor reform of employment law that would allow entry-level workers to be more easily let go. And that was when the president was Jacques Chirac, a socialist who decried “Anglo-Saxon ultraliberalism,” Euro-speak for laissez-faire capitalism. Ten years later, socialist prime minister Manuel Valls faced nationwide riots and protests, some broken up with tear gas, over other employment reforms, which he had to get passed by invoking special powers and bypassing parliament. President Macron and his “neoliberal” reforms are unlikely to be any more successful, given the strength of Mélanchon’s support, the disaffection with Macron of a third of French voters, and the French people’s enduring love for their short work-week and generous subsidies.

Dr. Susan Carland is an Australian academic who, like Women’s March leader Linda Sarsour, is supposedly a feminist Muslim.

Recently, Carland continued to spread false information about Islam and women while speaking about how Sharia law isn’t actually contrary to feminism, as it’s just being misinterpreted:

“For those of you that don’t know, if a woman is raped she can be punished for adultery,” Dr Carland told her audience at Gleebooks, promoting her new book ‘Fighting Hislam: Women, Faith and Sexism’.

Despite concerns that Sharia law gives rape victims no rights, Dr Carland explained a US lawyer’s campaign to challenge adultery laws in Pakistan arguing “there is no justification under Sharia for a woman who is raped to be punished”.

“You can have secular feminism, you can have Islamic feminism, you can have all different types of feminism.

“I could go to them with these human rights justifications for why it’s wrong,” Dr Carland recalled the lawyer telling her.

“But I know that if I do that, they will double down on this law because they will feel it’s an insult to their culture and their tradition and their religion’, why would I just not use the Sharia to make the argument this is wrong?’”

Carland is simply twisting the truth into a revolting, immoral argument.

Under Sharia Law, either the rapist must confess to the crime, or four male witnesses must testify that the victim was raped.

Mike Konrad is the pen name of an American who wishes he had availed himself more fully of the opportunity to learn Spanish in high school, lo those many decades ago. He writes on the Arabs of South America at http://latinarabia.com.

Chile is becoming instructive on what happens when a well coordinated minority can turn a decent republic to its own ends. That minority is the Palestinian community in Chile, and it has completely distorted Chile’s foreign policy.

In Chile, they have a saying: “Three things one would definitely find in every city and village: a priest, a policeman and a Palestinian.”

Chile’s Palestinians go way back, some even to the 19th century. Many are now third- and fourth-generation Chilean, often intermarried with Chile’s other ethnic stock: the Spanish, the Basque, the Italians, the Germans, et al. Though small in number, about 3%, they are highly overrepresented in all the professions, as well as in banking, manufacturing, and real estate.

If this sounds like a similar ethnic group in America, it is. Gabriel Zaliasnik, the 2010 head of Chile’s Jewish community, said, “The Palestinian community is to Chile what the Jewish community is to the US.”

These Palestinians are continuing to wield power in Chile. Now they seem to be paralyzing the government.

Recently, a Palestinian-Chilean BDS activist and former director of the Palestinian Federation of Chile, named Anwar Makhlouf, was denied entrance attempting to visit the Palestinian areas by Israel authorities at the border.

Chilean anti-Israel activist turned away at West Bank border crossing

Head of the Palestinian Federation in Chile barred over alleged efforts to promote boycott of Jewish state

The turning away of Palestinian activists at the border, even at the Allenby Crossing, is rather common. The U.S. government does all but nothing about it when it concerns American citizens. Nor do many other Western governments. What can they do?

Several months after the New York Times published its hagiography of Shashaa, he was arrested for physically assaulting his third wife, who was hospitalized with a broken nose and shoulder. “The attack was obviously very brutal,” a hospital spokesperson said at the time. “What a man does with his wife does not concern the authorities,” Shashaa said.

Spanish High Court Judge Eloy Velasco ordered Shashaa — who lives in a 10,000 square meter (108,000 square foot) mansion in Teulada-Moraira, a small coastal town on Spain’s Mediterranean coast, with his four wives and 18 children — to be held in prison without bail.

Spanish authorities are now investigating the source of Shashaa’s wealth. His mosque in Munich was shuttered in October 2015 due to financial difficulties, while the mansion he purchased in Spain in February 2015 is said to be worth more than half a million euros.

More than two weeks after Shashaa was arrested, the New York Times still has not reported on the fate of its poster boy for Salafist pacifism.

Spanish authorities have arrested a Muslim cleric — whom the New York Times once praised for his efforts to fight radicalization within Germany’s Islamic community — for alleged ties to the Islamic State.

Hesham Shashaa (aka Abu Adam), a 46-year-old Egyptian-Palestinian, was detained near Alicante in southeastern Spain on April 26 on charges of aiding the Islamic State, extolling terrorism and promoting Salafi-jihadism.

The Spanish Interior Ministry said that Shashaa had facilitated the travel to Spain of Islamic State jihadists from Syria and Iraq by providing them with money, refuge and fake documents.

Most recently, Shashaa had made arrangements for two jihadists — who are the subjects of international arrest warrants for their membership of the Islamic State — to travel from Turkey to Spain by providing them with false passports.

“But, as regards the reward and blessing, there is one deed which is very great in comparison to all the acts of worship and all the good deed­[s] — and that is Jihad!” — Saudi publisher’s prefatory note, Jihad in the Qu’ran and Sunnah by Sheikh ‘Abdullah bin Muhammad bin Humaid.

The rewards of Paradise are also promised to the observant Muslim, but the highest grades of Paradise, of which there are 100, are reserved only for those who perform jihad.

Jihad is, by all appearances, first and foremost an act of religious devotion and only secondarily an act of economic and political rebellion.

About four decades have passed since Sheikh ‘Abdullah bin Muhammad bin Humaid (1908-1981), ex-Chief Justice of Saudi Arabia, published his lengthy, impassioned, essay on jihad.[1] This essay, still available on the Internet, is the only one that Saudi religious scholars chose to include with the Noble Quran — a modern, nine volume, English translation of the Quran, which includes ancient commentary.[2]

A cursory reading of Sheikh bin Humaid’s essay should forever silence any fantasies regarding traditional Islam’s peaceful disposition toward the non-Muslim world.[3] As the Saudi publisher says in his prefatory note:

“But, as regards the reward and blessing, there is one deed which is very great in comparison to all the acts of worship and all the good deed­[s] — and that is Jihad!”

The publisher continues:

“Never before such an article was seen, describing Jihad in its true colours­ — so heart evoking and encouraging!… We are publishing this article and recommend every Muslim not only to read it himself but to offer every other Muslim brother within his read.”

Ever since the British electorate voted to bow out of the European Union, the hacks and mediocrities who run that power-obsessed, democracy-despising organization have been taking every opportunity, big and small, to diss the U.K. The latest insult came from Jean-Claude Juncker, president of the European Commission, who in a speech to “diplomats and experts” in Florence proffered the snotty assertion that, thanks to Brexit, “English is losing importance in Europe.” He made that statement in English, but then, to underscore his point and enhance the snottiness quotient, switched into French.

Juncker called Brexit a tragedy. Yes, it’s a tragedy for Juncker and other stuffed shirts whose collect a hefty paycheck, at the expense of European taxpayers, for doing little more than flying around the continent giving speeches to “diplomats and experts.” Of course, that’s not all the EU does. At the lower levels of its EU hierarchy, sitting behind big desks in handsome offices in shiny, impressive buildings all over Brussels (and elsewhere), are innumerable unelected technocrats who earn huge sums to hold unnecessary meetings, write unnecessary reports, and impose restrictions on Europeans that are not only unnecessary but positively destructive of individual liberty, entrepreneurship, and economic prosperity. Brexit is a tragedy for all of these EU apparatchiks because it’s the first step in a process that will almost certainly end with them having to look for a real job.

Juncker’s focus on the so-called decline in the importance of English was typical EU rhetoric – implicitly equating the continent and its people with himself and his fellow EU drudges. Will Brexit make English somewhat less important in this silly, solemn, self-regarding body? Who cares? Look at it this way: the UN, itself a nonsensical enough sodality, has 193 members but only six official languages – English, French, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, and Arabic. The EU, with 28 members, boasts no fewer than 24 official languages, plus five that are designated as “semi-official.” (Hence, one of the big upsides of EU is that it provides a staggering amount of employment for translators.)

When contemplating the EU, one should never lose sight of the fact that in some sense, the whole sprawling operation exists primarily to do what all bureaucracies exist to do – namely, to churn out documents. In the case of the EU, these documents number in the tens of thousands. Most of them are effectively meaningless. Some of them, however, turn yet another screw in the ever-intensifying control of Brussels over ordinary Europeans’ lives. In any event, every one of those documents needs to be translated into every one of those 24 languages. The mind boggles: how many trees are cut down every year to produce documents for an organization that piously pretends to be obsessed with preserving the environment? (I found it interesting to read the other day that at least one of the EU’s 24 official languages, Irish, has sort of been put on hold as an official language because so few Irish people actually know it – 99% speak English – that it’s hard to find people capable of translating to or from it.)

To be sure, the European Commission (the part of the EU that Juncker runs) has three “procedural” languages – English, French, and German – and Brexit may change that. Or perhaps not. After all, two other EU countries besides the U.K. – Ireland (as noted) and Malta (where 88% speak English) – have English as a native tongue. More important, in virtually all of the countries of the EU, English is, practically speaking, the only real second language. Yes, in the Netherlands, most people also speak French and German – but rarely as well as they do English. German is also pretty big in some central European countries – but more with old folks than younger ones. The fact is that when you come right down to it, the only truly universally shared language in Europe is English, period, and Brexit’s not going to change that.

The UN report and Erdogan’s rhetoric both evidently expresses the Muslim world’s thoughts about what it apparently thinks should be the fate of Israel and Europe. So far, not a single Muslim state has condemned or opposed Erdogan’s aggression against Judeo-Christian civilization.

The enemy is already inside the gates; many European regimes seem unaware that there is even a threat.

The logic of much of Europe’s religious and political community seems to be that if the elephant in the room is spoken to nicely and made to look cute and adorable, people will not think of it as a threat to their safety.

The Western world can no longer ignore the problem of the latest the elephant in the room: Islamic imperialism. Europe has come to such a state of free speech trials, threats of censorship or, out of fear, self-censorship, that it seems to prefer putting the safety of its citizens at risk than admit that this elephant exists.

Meanwhile, Muslim countries make not the slightest effort to hide their intentions, as recent actions of 18 such states at the United Nations illustrate. They cooperated in the preparation of the report released in March by the U.N. Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (UNESCWA), which accused Israel of “the crime of apartheid,” despite knowing full well that such a baseless claim would be rejected by the world body now that Donald Trump is at the helm of the free world. The reason they went ahead with it anyway was to convey to the West that delegitimizing the Jewish state was merely the first step in a master plan to unravel all of Judeo-Christian civilization and values.

For a body such as UNESCWA to declare the State of Israel in an official Institute’s report, as being guilty of “the crime of apartheid” according to international law, shows that Islamic expansionism is a real and an active political problem.

UNESCWA must have had some idea, before publishing the report, that such a loopy conclusion could not be adopted, even by the UN, which has been doing its utmost to rewrite historical facts. In the last few years, UNESCO has repeatedly declared pre-Islamic historical sites Islamic.

Nevertheless, UNESCWA proceeded to pass this surreal political concoction, probably to declare to the Western world again its attempts to delegitimize the State of Israel and all the freedoms it represents in the Judeo-Christian world that might threaten the expansion of Islam.

In challenging my article about Marine Le Pen’s election loss, Michael van der Galien accuses me of “overlooking one rather important detail: the Front National is simply a horrendous party” with a dark past. Yes, it is; the media haven’t been shy about reporting on this subject; everybody who cared about this election has already heard every last particular, and I didn’t see any need to go through it all one more time.

Nor am I unaware of the party’s essentially socialist platform, its unfortunate support for what Galien quite rightly calls “France’s untenable and unaffordable welfare state.” Presumably by way of summing up my thesis, Galien writes:

Yes, yes, I’m aware that we all have to celebrate the rise of populism, and yes, to some degree those parties certainly have an important role to play in modern Europe. Even if you disagree with Le Pen’s policy ideas, you can at least respect her role as a battering ram against political correctness.

No, my concern isn’t with supporting populism per se. I am no fan either of the National Front (FN) or of Ms. Le Pen. My overwhelming interest is, quite simply, in standing up against the Islamization of Europe.

Yes, I wish Le Pen had more sensible views on the French welfare state; I wish her party didn’t have such an ugly history. But there were two choices in this run-off election, and only one of them was promising to strive to keep France from becoming overwhelmed by Islam.

Le Pen’s opponent, Macron, has said nothing to indicate that he considers France’s Islamization a problem. On the contrary, if anything he’s an outspoken enthusiast for the Religion of Peace. According to former Le Monde journalist Yves Mamou, “Macron’s political movement has largely been infiltrated by Muslim Brotherhood militants.” Like the politicians in Stockholm who have done so much to drag Sweden down the drain, Macron has denied that his own country has a culture of its own that is worth defending: “French culture does not exist, there is a culture in France and it is diverse.”

Last October, after terrorist attacks in Paris and Nice, Macron, according to Reuters, “said…that France had sometimes made mistakes in unfairly targeting Muslims, suggesting the country could be less stringent in applying its rules on secularism.” Reuters quoted Macron verbatim: “No religion is a problem in France today.”

Six months later, after a jihadist murdered a policeman on the Champs Élyssés, Macron gave a TV interview in which, as Gavin Mortimer noted in the Spectator, he “couldn’t bring himself to utter the word ‘Islamic’ until the 14th minute of his interview, and then it was in the context of what has been happening in Syria.” After briefly “offering his condolences to the dead policeman,” Macron “spent most of his time discussing education, tax and whether there is such a thing as French culture. Not really, concluded Macron, who said the richness of France lies in its diversity.”

Intimately connected with this refusal to criticize either Islam or Islamization is Macron’s strong loyalty to the European Union – which has steadily drained power from the people of Europe while encouraging disastrous immigration policies that have never been put to a public vote. So high is Macron on the EU that when he stepped out at his campaign headquarters to celebrate his election victory, the music playing was not La Marseillaise but the EU anthem, Beethoven’s Ode to Joy.

Galien writes: “It must give American ‘nationalists’ a great feeling of superiority to simply declare that Europeans have surrendered to political correctness and have forgotten who they are.” Since Galien is replying to my article, I assume he is suggesting here that I, personally, take some kind of pleasure in the political correctness of too many European voters and their failure to protect their countries from being overwhelmed by an alien and hostile culture. CONTINUE AT SITE

South Korean voters turned out in record numbers Tuesday, and early returns showed leftist Moon Jae-in leading with a comfortable plurality to become the next President. The left turn is understandable after the impeachment of Park Geun-hye for corruption, but it will complicate U.S. efforts to eliminate North Korea’s nuclear-missile threat.

Mr. Moon was leading as we went to press with about 40% of the popular vote, as he took advantage of a divided center-right majority. Ms. Park’s downfall split the conservative Saenuri Party, and her former supporters were divided between two candidates who each received more than 20% support.

Ms. Park was wise regarding North Korea but her domestic failures opened the door to Mr. Moon, a human-rights lawyer. Prosecutors have indicted her on 18 counts of bribery and abuse of power, and the revelations have sparked a backlash against the country’s largest companies, the chaebol. Mr. Moon has promised long-overdue reforms to create a level playing field for smaller companies.

But instead of cutting the government’s role in the economy, the true source of corruption, Mr. Moon has pledged fresh intervention. He wants to raise taxes on the wealthy and large companies, increase the minimum wage, and force companies to give temporary workers permanent status and reduce working hours. The French Socialists would approve.

Mr. Moon’s desire to appease North Korea marks a return to the Sunshine Policy that failed in the mid-2000s when he was an aide to center-left President Roh Moo-hyun. Mr. Moon wants to pursue reunification based on economic integration, offering a formal peace process if the North will give up its nuclear weapons. He also wants to reopen the Kaesong Industrial Zone, which provided the North with $100 million a year in hard currency until its closure in 2016.