RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

People have, it seems, often been arrested or detained on the basis of a rumor; then convicted without trial, counsel or often even the chance to mount a defense.

As Amnesty International points out, “In many countries where people were sentenced to death or executed, the proceedings did not meet international fair trial standards. In some cases, this included the extraction of ‘confessions’ through torture or other ill-treatment”.

The laws under which these people are sentenced to death are often not only vague and open to interpretation. Charges that warrant the death penalty, for instance, include being “corrupt on earth”, “enemies of Allah on Earth”, or alleged “crimes against chastity”. What exactly does “corrupt on earth” or “enemies of Allah on Earth” mean?

Just how strict and brutal it is to enforce Islamic law, sharia, has now been revealed by Amnesty International.

Amnesty’s study, which details the number of reported executions around the world, clearly maps out the most at-risk populations. Lands ruled predominantly by sharia are apparently the most vulnerable to multitudes of executions without fair trials. At the top of the list, with the most executions, are those nations that enforce Islamic sharia law. Despite many human rights violations, these nations, apparently undeterred, continue to execute their citizens.

Sharia makes those in authority infallible and untouchable. Therefore, whatever the government or those in power deem to be “just” can be carried out without question or consequence. Under sharia law and the Islamic penal code, executions can be carried out in sickening forms. Those convicted may be beheaded, hanged, stoned, or shot to death.

As disturbing as the numbers in the report may be, they do not represent the reality that the citizens in these nations across the world face every day. There is, evidently, a connection between radical Islamist governments and extremist groups. The report does not include the gruesome executions that are carried out on a regular basis by extremist Islamist groups and non-state fundamentalists, such as members of the Islamic State (ISIS) and their affiliated groups.

The outcome of yesterday’s French presidential election is easily explained. In the qualifying round two weeks ago, Emmanuel Macron defeated all the other non–Front National candidates in the competition to be least like Marine Le Pen. And because he was obviously much less like Marine Le Pen than Marine Le Pen herself in yesterday’s final round, he defeated her by roughly two to one.

Indeed, it is looking as if Le Pen underperformed even the low expectations of those who thought she would lose, getting only 34 percent when some observers expected her to break the 40 percent barrier. Michael Barone points out that she lost la France profonde as well as Paris to Macron, winning just two regions outright, and doing relatively well only in areas hit by recession or by high Muslim migration.

Though its size is remarkable, however, Le Pen’s defeat is the opposite of a surprise. It’s long been clear that most French voters would not support Le Pen or the National Front at any price. Earlier polls had shown that every other presidential candidate would defeat her in a run-off. The entire French establishment and all the other parties called for her to be crushed. And she suffered from the standard bias of the media and political elites that the most extravagant charges can be leveled against “right-wing” politicians with no need for evidence or penalty for error.

That said, there were surprises buried — and not far down — in the statistics. No fewer than 12 million voters cast “spoiled” ballots when confronted with these two candidates (some writing rude remarks on the ballot paper, I regret to tell you). If you count those abstentions as votes, they mean that though Macron won two-thirds of the Macron–Le Pen total, he won less than 50 percent of all who went to the polls either to vote or to protest. Other Macron supporters told pollsters they had voted against Le Pen rather than for Macron. And since turnout itself was slightly lower than usual in presidential elections, everything suggests a very high level of disaffection among French voters.

It contrasts oddly with the unqualified expressions of euphoria among European and national leaders welcoming a historic victory for France and Europe with “Ode to Joy” as their anthem. All that seems a little unreal. Indeed, before a single vote had been cast, observers such as Charlie Cooke and Christopher Caldwell pointed to the curious likelihood that a country moving right was about to elect a leftist president and that a nation angry with both the governing Socialists and the establishment was about to choose an énarque graduate of an establishment training ground who was in the Socialist government until yesterday to govern it.

Now it’s happened. So it inevitably seems less odd. But common sense suggests that some serious clashes are about to erupt between Macron’s ideas and political realities and between some of the different ideas wrestling inside for mastery of his mind. He is, for instance, a passionate Europhile who wants to relaunch the European Union. His commitment to the euro goes to the extent of wanting a fiscal government with a single finance minister for the eurozone that would then become a transfer union with “mutualization” of debts. Germany will like almost all of this because it promises to impose fiscal discipline upon otherwise unruly eurozone countries. But the Germans are determined to avert the threat of a transfer union with debt mutualization, which, as they see it, would amount to giving Greece and Italy the keys to the German treasury at the very moment that the U.K. will have opted out of subsidizing Europe in any way. Expect communiqués written in vanishing ink.

Macron is also talking up his intention to reform the over-regulated French economy and dash for prosperity. We’ve heard these plans before — in particular from Jacques Chirac (in his first presidency) and Nicolas Sarkozy. But they were very soon abandoned. They inevitably bump into obstacles such as the labor unions, the entrenched belief in the “French social model,” and not least the chains of an overvalued exchange rate, today’s euro, that makes French industry uncompetitive (and German industry highly competitive).

A restructuring of the euro (probably into a northern and southern one) would seem to be the practical solution to France’s and Europe’s problems here. But Macron is viscerally opposed to that particular reform, and so is Germany. Worse, if the euro were divided, France would probably be compelled by its sense of prestige to remain in the northern euro when its economic interests plainly indicate that it seek the relief and greater competitiveness of a southern euro. All in all, the prospects for Macron’s “pro-market” reforms — which explain why some conservatives and classical liberals support him — look distinctly gloomy. But it was Europhiliac French bureaucrats who designed the euro to be a house with no exits.

Macron must be considered an apprentice Man of Destiny—one facing difficulties as harsh and complex as those facing more experienced such figures as de Gaulle and Napoleon.

That brings us to perhaps the most fateful of Macron’s instincts on policy: his passionate multiculturalism, his post-nationalism, his hostility to “Islamophobia,” and his belief in a liberal migration policy or, in the jargon, “an open society.” He seems to believe in the limitless capacity of France to absorb more migrants and more cultures in a common multiculturalism even to the extreme of saying, “There is no such thing as French culture.” Yet France is at present divided bitterly between the native-born and migrants, facing another surge of lawless migration from the Mediterranean, and disturbed by near-constant acts of murder and terrorism. It is not yet in a state of civil war, but scores of automobiles are burned every night in the major cities, the spread of “no-go areas” continues steadily, and the imposition of Muslim rules on both Muslims and others living in these areas becomes increasingly oppressive. It is hard to see how all this can go right, especially if Macron’s economic reforms don’t produce the prosperity on which any social easement will depend.

“Nothing is creepier than Islam. Challenge Islamic racism, misogyny genocide, and so on.” I thought it would be just desserts to begin by paraphrasing Linda Sarsour and just turn back on her her statement that “Nothing is creepier than Zionism,” which has made the rounds on Twitter and national news. This groomed, but bag-headed, glib, taqiyya-fluent, BDS-champion, and stealth jihadist, has a loud mouth and is a publicity hound and resolutely anti-Trump. She was one of the organizers of the Women’s March in Washington. She has pulled lots of wool over the eyes of the liberal clueless.

But one prominent blogger and spokesman for the West, Bruce Bower, scratched his head and asked, following the dismally concluded French election of May 7th, in his PJMedia article, “What Happened in France?”:

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?

… 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?

Bawer reviews the common rationale is that Europeans are still feeling guilty:

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.

Is it a matter of self-flagellation in the spirit of atonement? “Bible (Exodus 20:5-6; 34:6-7; Numbers 14:18) portray God as “visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children.” Still another part of the Bible (Jeremiah 31:29; Ezekiel 18:2; Job 21:19) rejects this and teach that “sons [shall not] be put to death for their fathers.” The Bible is rich in such bipolar maxims.

I do not subscribe to the moral philosophy of inherited guilt or generational responsibility. Most imperial history should not be apologized for, especially where and when it concerns “the descendants of subject peoples” not to mention the descendants of people who also weren’t even alive during imperial depredations. Some of that history if awful, particularly the Belgian experience in the Congo.

However, were it not for imperial colonial policies, much of the known world would still be in the very Dark Ages, “brutish, nasty, and short.” In fact, where the West retreated and left indigenous populations at the mercy of their murderous tribalist leaders and masters, those people have largely reverted to that condition. (Look at Zimbabwe, formerly Rhodesia.)The West introduced technology, medicine, literacy, law, longer longevity, higher standards of living, and even the concept of freedom. Much of that is now disappearing. Pick any country on the African continent and it’s the same story, with remaining Westerners under attack, their property confiscated, and explicitly threatened with mass murder and genocidal extinction.

Every time I read some Third World complaint about Western colonialism, I can’t help but hark back to that gem of a Monty Python scene in The Life of Brian, and think, “What has the West given the complainers?”

“While the NCCM’s open letter does not directly call for Sharia law or the criminalization of criticism of Islam, it does advance the notion that the famously tolerant nation of Canada must set up anti-racism directorates in each province to track instances of Islamophobia, institute a mandatory course on systemic racism for Canadian high school students, and train its police officers to use bias-neutral policing.” — Josh Lieblein, The Daily Caller.

“Now that Islamophobia has been condemned, this is not the end, but rather the beginning… so that condemnation is followed by comprehensive policies,” wrote Samer Majzoub, a Muslim Brotherhood affiliate of the Canadian Muslim Forum — presumably meaning that the next steps are to make it binding.

“The objective of Jihad… warrants that one must struggle against Kufr (disbelief) and Shirk (polytheism) and the worship of falsehood in all its forms. Jihad has to continue until this objective is achieved.” — ICNA Canada website.

Growing concern in Canada over liberal policies benefitting Muslim extremists sheds light on why an “anti-Islamophobia” bill — proposed in the wake of the deadly January 17 Quebec City mosque attack and approved by parliament on March 23 — spurred such heated controversy there.

Motion 103, tabled by Liberal Party MP Iqra Khalid, a Muslim representing Mississauga-Erin Mills, calls on the Canadian government to “develop a whole-of-government approach to reducing or eliminating systemic racism and religious discrimination including Islamophobia.” Because the bill makes no mention of any other religious group targeted by bigots, it was opposed by most Conservative Party politicians and a majority of the public.

Ahead of what would turn out to be a 201-91 vote in favor of the motion, a petition was circulated asking MPs not to support it. According to the petition, Motion 103 would “lay the groundwork for imposing what is essentially a Sharia anti-blasphemy law on all of Canada.”

The petition further stated:

“…criticism of Islam would constitute a speech crime in Canada.

“This motion uses the term ‘islamophobia’ without defining it, and without substantiating that there is in fact any such widespread problem in Canada.

“This will lead to ideologically-driven overreach and enforcement against alternative points of view—including mature, reasoned criticisms of Islam.

“Criticism of the treatment of women in Islamic-majority Middle Eastern countries could be criminalized;
“It could be a punishable offense to speak out against the Mustlim Brotherhood, or to denounce radical Imams who want to enact Sharia law in Canada;
“Criticism or depiction of Muhammad could be punishable by law;
“Schools that teach the history of Islam’s violent conquests could be fined—or worse.

“That kind of content-based, viewpoint-discriminatory censorship is unacceptable in a Western liberal democracy.”

While Yazidis are still suffering from these atrocities, Turkey, evidently still no friend of non-Muslims, has attacked them yet again.

Turkish officials say they consider these groups “terrorists.” The general staff of the Turkish armed forces issued a statement concerning the airstrikes, saying that “operations will continue until the terrorists have completely been eliminated.”

“Denying the genocide is not only saying ‘we didn’t do it.’ It’s much, much worse…. It is declaring murderers as heroes. It is honoring the genocide’s perpetrators… [and] saying to the grandchildren of genocide victims, ‘Murderers of your grandfathers and grandmothers are our heroes; they did it well, God bless them. If necessary, we would do it again.'” — Istanbul Branch of the Human Rights Association, Commemoration of the 102nd Anniversary of the Armenian Genocide, April 24, 2017.

Just a few hours after the commemoration of the 102nd anniversary of the Armenian Genocide on April 24, 2017, Turkish warplanes dropped bombs on the Yazidi homeland of Sinjar (Shingal) on April 25, at around 2 AM local time, according to reports from the region.

The strikes reportedly killed at least 70 people in the area, with one bomb hitting a Kurdish peshmerga post in Sinjar, killing at least five and severely wounding several more.

Yazidis say they have been subjected to 72 genocidal massacres. The latest genocide, committed by ISIS, is the 73rd and is still going on. Tens of thousands of Yazidis have been displaced and are refugees in several countries. Hundreds of Yazidi girls and women are still bought, sold and raped by ISIS terrorists — the same men who murdered their husbands and fathers.

While Yazidis are still suffering from these atrocities, Turkey, evidently still no friend of non-Muslims, has attacked them yet again.

On August 3, 2014, Islamic State terrorists invaded Sinjar, the homeland of the Yazidis in Iraq, and started slaughtering the Yazidis; many survivors fled up Mount Sinjar.

In his speech to the U.S. Congress, Mirza Ismail, founder and chairman of the Yezidi Human Rights Organization-International, described the genocide in Sinjar and pled for help:

“The entire Yezidi population was displaced in less than one day on August 3, 2014! The Yezidis and Chaldo-Assyrian Christians face this genocide together. Why? Because we are not Muslims, and because our path is the path of peace. For this, we are being burned alive. For living as men and women of peace.”