RUTHFULLY YOURS

Iranian voters head to the polls later this month to elect their next president, without much of a choice. The contest is shaping up as a race between several Islamic hard-liners and one hard-liner whom the Western media prefer to cast as a moderate.

The unelected Guardian Council eliminated more than 1,600 candidates, including 137 women, who are constitutionally prohibited from holding that office. The Council deemed only six candidates morally sound, which in Iran means thoroughly committed to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the nuclear program and the destruction of Israel.

Among the challengers, Ebrahim Raisi has garnered the greatest attention. The 56-year-old cleric is a protege of Mr. Khamenei, and our sources say he enjoys the support of elements of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the security apparatus.

Rumors out of Tehran suggest he could succeed the ailing Mr. Khamenei, and he certainly sounds like he has emerged from central theocratic casting. Shortly after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, he was appointed a revolutionary prosecutor—at age 19. A decade later he was one of the prosecutors who oversaw the summary execution of thousands of opponents of the regime.

His rhetoric has invited comparisons with former President and Holocaust-denier Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. “The ominous triangle of the United States, Britain and the Zionist regime is the most hated phenomenon among peoples the world over,” Mr. Raisi has said. He has also predicted that “one day soon the filthy stain of arrogance will be wiped not only from Jerusalem but also from the Noble Sanctuaries”—the latter a reference to the Saudis, who administer some of the holiest sites in Islam.

Mr. Raisi also believes the Iranian regime’s borders extend across Syria, “which we consider our frontier for defending the Islamic Republic’s security and identity.”

Mr. Raisi and others will try to oust incumbent President Hassan Rouhani, who is often styled as a moderate despite his record in and out of office. Mr. Rouhani spearheaded the bloody crackdown against the 1999 student uprising and helped oversee a campaign of assassinations targeting dissidents abroad in the 1990s.

As for Mr. Rouhani’s presidential record, domestic repression has intensified. The leaders of the pro-democracy Green Movement remain under house arrest despite campaign promises to free them. Religious minorities continue to face systematic harassment and discrimination, and at least half a dozen American and British dual citizens remain under arrest as hostages.

Beyond Iran’s borders, the regime has continued to promote instability, underwriting Bashar Assad’s Syrian slaughter, deepening military cooperation with Vladimir Putin and funding Shiite terror proxies from Yemen to Lebanon. In all these cases, Mr. Rouhani has been powerless or unwilling to change course.

As for relations with the U.S., Messrs. Rouhani and Raisi both support President Obama’s nuclear deal. That accord has granted Tehran a much-needed financial reprieve even as it will leave the regime a threshold nuclear power by the time it sunsets. Hope for averting that outcome will not come through the artifice of Iran’s presidential election.

Protocol has its uses, not least at the United Nations. But when it comes to lavishing on murderous tyrants the same pro forma felicitations accorded to the elected leaders of free nations, it’s time for Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to clean up the act of the UN Protocol and Liaison Service — which reports to him.

What’s the problem? There are many problems, actually, and they stem from the UN’s morally incontinent practice of doling out to all member states — whether totalitarian or democratic; North Korea or Costa Rica — the same perquisites, including a lot of diplomatic swag for the most monstrous dictators on the planet.

Lest that sound too abstract, let’s turn to one of the latest outrages. This cameo starts with a UN communique to war-wracked Syria, where last month the state news agency, SANA, reported that President Bashar al-Assad had just received “a cable of congratulations from United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on the occasion of Syria’s independence day.” According to the SANA dispatch, (boldface mine) Guterres in this cable “expressed his warmest congratulations to the Syrian people and government on this occasion.”

For anyone even remotely familiar with the doings of Assad and the condition of Syria, that message sounds more than a tad out of touch. Assad is a despot who inherited power upon the death of his despotic father 17 years ago. During the first decade of his rule, operating as Iran’s chief mascot in the Middle East, Bashar Assad presided over a terror-sponsoring state (a patron of the terrorist groups Hezbollah and Hamas), employed the help of North Korea in building a clandestine nuclear reactor with no evident purpose except to produce nuclear bomb fuel (the Al Kibar reactor, destroyed by an Israeli air strike in 2007) and — with his secret police, torture chambers, dungeons and related atrocities — oppressed his own countrymen so thoroughly and brutally that in 2011 they rebelled.

As we all know, Assad refused to give up power. He talked about elections, and offered a complete sham. He fought back, as head of a merciless tyranny. He has by now used everything from barrel bombs to chemical weapons against his fellow Syrians. In the UN’s official protocol list, Assad has kept his place as Syria’s official head of state — a position he has retained at the cost of a war that has brought the deaths of more than 400,000 people, misery for millions of refugees, the rise of ISIS and the return of Russia to the Middle East as the weapons-bearing godfather of Damascus.

In this context, it was hard to believe that Guterres would send a message of “warmest congratulations” to Assad, whatever the topic. Surely this report from SANA was just another piece of propaganda from the Syrian regime? CONTINUE AT SITE

How could Marine Le Pen have lost in a landslide?

Why, after the Brits chose Brexit, and Americans chose Trump, did the Dutch fail Wilders, and the French fail Le Pen?

How could a country that has been hit by several major terrorist attacks in recent years, and that has undergone a more profound social transformation owing to Islamic immigration, vote for business as usual?

Wilders, buoyed by the Brexit and Trump victories, said that 2017 would be a “Year of the Populist.” So far, alas, it’s not turning out that way.

Yes, there are positive signs. The Sweden Democrats are on the upswing. And Wilders did gain seats in the Dutch Parliament.

But if you’ve witnessed the reality of Islamization in cities like Rotterdam and Paris and Stockholm, you may well wonder: what, in heaven’s name, will it take for these people to save their own societies, their own freedoms, for their own children and grandchildren?

I’m not the only one who’s been obsessing for years over this question. I’ve yet to see a totally convincing answer to it.

One way of trying to answer it is to look at countries one by one. For example, the Brits and French feel guilty about their imperial histories, and hence find it difficult to rein in the descendants of subject peoples. The Germans feel guilty about their Nazi past – and the Swedes feel guilty about cozying up to Nazis – and thus feel compelled to lay out the welcome mat for, well, just about anybody. The Dutch, similarly, are intensely aware that during the Nazi occupation they helped ship off a larger percentage of their Jews to the death camps than any other Western European country, and feel a deep need to atone.

Postmodernism, of course, is a factor. According to postmodern thinking, no culture is better than any other – and it’s racist to say otherwise. No, scratch that – other cultures are, in fact, better than Western culture. Whites, by definition, are oppressors, imperialists, and colonialists, while “people of color” are victims.

And Muslims are the biggest victims of all.

Not that that makes any sense. Over the centuries since the religion was founded, Muslim armies have gained control over much of north Africa, the Middle East, and large parts of Europe. Islam itself, by definition, is imperialistic. And whenever Islam has conquered non-Islamic territories, it has proven itself to be profoundly oppressive, offering infidels exactly three options: death, subordination, or conversion. But to say these things has become verboten.

Living in a Muslim neighborhood of Amsterdam in early 1999, I read up on Islam and realized very quickly what Europe was up against. Two and a half years later, when the terrorist attacks of 9/11 occurred, I assumed pretty much everyone else would get it, too.

But it didn’t work that way. Yes, some people did get it almost instantaneously, in both America and Europe. They caught up on a lot of reading, did a great deal of soul-searching, and underwent a major philosophical metamorphosis.

But even after other horrific attacks occurred – in Madrid, London, and elsewhere – a lot of people refused to accept the plain truth. The plainer the truth got, in fact, the more fiercely they resisted it. And as skilled propagandists began to represent Muslims as the mother of all victim groups, many Westerners were quick to buy into it all.

How, again, to make sense of this?

Yes, the mainstream media have played a role, routinely whitewashing Islam, soft-pedaling the Islamic roots of jihadist terror, and staying silent about the dire reality of everyday Islamization. But no one who actually lives in western Europe has any excuse for ignorance about these matters. The truth is all around them. Even in the remotest places, however dishonest the mainstream media, the truth can be found on the Internet.

But – and this is a fact that some of us are thoroughly incapable of identifying with, and thus almost thoroughly incapable of grasping – some people don’t want to know the truth. And if they do know the truth, they want to un-know it. CONTINUE AT SITE

Four U.S. citizens are currently detained in North Korea and a number of others have been held and released there since 2009.

SEOUL—North Korea’s state media said officials detained a U.S. citizen tied to a Christian-backed university in North Korea, two weeks after arresting one of his colleagues.

Saturday’s arrest of Kim Hak-song for committing “hostile acts” brings the number of known U.S. citizens detained in North Korea to four, adding another twist to troubled relations between Washington and Pyongyang as the U.S. seeks to slow the North’s nuclear and missile program.

According to Sunday’s report by North Korea’s official Korean Central News Agency, Mr. Kim works for the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology, a university founded in 2010 by James Kim, a Korean-American Christian businessman.

Two weeks ago, North Korea detained Tony Kim, a Korean-American accounting professor at PUST, as he was preparing to depart North Korea at Pyongyang’s main international airport, citing “hostile acts.”

PUST, while not officially Christian, hires largely Christian faculty, and says on its website that “churches can support PUST through prayer and through spreading the news about this project among congregation members.”

North Korea has arrested a number of U.S. citizens doing Christian-related work in the isolated country. Kenneth Bae, a Korean-American missionary, was sentenced to 12 years’ hard labor for hostile acts, and was freed after two years in November 2014.

In 2014, American Jeffery Fowle was detained and held for six months after leaving a Bible in a nightclub bathroom.

A spokesman for PUST’s leadership confirmed Kim Hak-song’s arrest on Saturday, just as he was about to leave North Korea after a visit of several weeks. The spokesman said Mr. Kim was at PUST to do agricultural work at an experimental farm operated by the university. CONTINUE AT SITE

French voters chose a centrist reformer over the nationalist right on Sunday by electing Emmanuel Macron as their next President. The question now is whether Mr. Macron can deliver on his promise to reform France’s sclerotic economy and diminish the Islamist terror threat.

Mr. Macron’s decisive victory is as much a rejection of the far-right National Front as an endorsement of his platform. Despite Marine Le Pen’s yearslong effort to whitewash her party’s reputation for anti-Semitism and Vichy nostalgia, the keys to the Élysée Palace proved as elusive to her as they did to her father, Jean-Marie, in 2002’s presidential runoff against Jacques Chirac.

Mr. Macron deserves credit for his initiative. The 39-year-old former investment banker quit the incumbent Socialists to launch his independent centrist movement, En Marche! His outsider status and optimistic vision proved attractive to voters fed up with traditional political parties. He offered a clear if modest reform alternative, with proposals to shrink the bureaucracy, cut corporate taxes and modify the job-killing 35-hour workweek.
He was also lucky. The center-right Republican nominee François Fillon, a self-proclaimed Thatcherite, was felled by allegations of nepotism. Independent, hard-left firebrand Jean-Luc Mélenchon divided the socialist vote. In the runoff Mr. Macron was the default choice of voters who wanted to block the National Front.

This means President Macron will have a fragile mandate and a narrow window to press his agenda. France needs radical reform of a government that in 2015 took 57% of national GDP and an economy with a jobless rate that is 10% eight years after the financial crisis.

Yet political failure is the recent French norm. Successive Presidents have failed to undo the 1999 35-hour-workweek law amid militant union protests. Mr. Mélenchon and his “Unbowed France” movement are promising chaos if Mr. Macron dares to advance what the socialist calls “neoliberalism.” Mr. Macron’s best bet is to go big and abolish the 35-hour workweek as Mr. Fillon promised, rather than seek marginal fixes and pay the political price anyway. The same goes for cutting the corporate tax rate to 25% from 33.3%, especially as the U.S. heads toward a 20% rate.