RUTHFULLY YOURS

Europe continues its rousing election year on Sunday with a first round of the French presidential contest that will decide if the center can hold or a blood-and-soil nationalist will square off against a throwback socialist. What could go wrong?

For months the smart money thought the first round would set up a final match pitting Marine Le Pen of the right-wing National Front against a reform-minded centrist. That could still happen if the other leading finisher is François Fillon, the nominee of the center-right Republicans who touts a free-market platform; or center-left, independent Emmanuel Macron, who doesn’t go as far as Mr. Fillon but still promises to reform labor and tax laws. Either would be favored against Ms. Le Pen in a runoff.

But suddenly the two reformers might be surpassed by far-left independent Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who is telling the French they can grow richer by working less and spend more by earning less. He’d cut the work week to 32 hours from 35, cut the retirement age to 60 from 66, prevent companies that have laid off workers from paying dividends, and ignore European Union limits on fiscal deficits. On foreign policy he is anti-American, anti-NATO and pro-Vladimir Putin, and he has written a book subtitled “The German Poison,” which should make for pleasant summits in Berlin.

Ms. Le Pen is hoping to vindicate her long-running effort to transform her father’s National Front into a respectable party. Her views on Europe, America, Russia and the state role in the French economy are distinguishable from Mr. Mélenchon’s only by nuances.

The National Front’s toxic history of anti-Semitism and its hostility to minorities and immigrants has traditionally put a ceiling on Ms. Le Pen’s vote, especially on the left. But that might not hold if Mr. Mélenchon doesn’t make it to the final round and his supporters must choose between Ms. Le Pen and one of the centrists.

Mr. Fillon’s agenda comes closest to what France needs to revive its stagnant economy, notwithstanding his affinity for Mr. Putin’s Russia. He promises to balance the budget within five years, cut €100 billion ($106.72 billion) in spending, slash the corporate-tax rate to 25% from nearly 35%, end the 35-hour work week and liberalize labor laws to encourage hiring. All of this is a hard sell in France at any time, but Mr. Fillon’s credibility has been compromised by news that he put family members on the public payroll.

Mr. Macron’s reforms don’t go as far as Mr. Fillon’s, but he’d also cut the corporate-tax rate to 25%, reform the work week and reduce labor-related taxes for entrepreneurs. But the 39-year-old has never held elected office and failed to sell this program to the National Assembly when current Socialist President François Hollande made him economy minister.

All four major candidates are polling at around 20%, but Mr. Mélenchon has momentum and the highest personal favorability. A Le Pen-Mélenchon finale would be a political shock to markets and perhaps to the future of the EU and eurozone. The best result would be for one or both centrists to make it through, but the fact that both could lose to the radicals is an indictment of the main political parties.

By a razor-thin margin, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has won the referendum to expand exponentially the powers of his office. The results have been challenged for voting irregularities, but they’re unlikely to change the outcome. Given Erdoğan’s record-setting jailing of reporters, his mass arrests after an aborted coup, and his frankly expressed ambitions to Islamize Turkey, these changes will result in a much more authoritarian and Islamic government incompatible with the West.

No one should be surprised, as Erdoğan has always been up-front about his ambitions. At the beginning of his political career in the mid-nineties he said, “Thank God Almighty, I am a servant of the Sharia.” A decade later he said, “Democracy is like a streetcar. You ride it until you arrive at your destination and then you step off.” In 2007, Erdogan said of the term “moderate Islam,” “These descriptions are very ugly, it is offensive and an insult to our religion. There is no moderate or immoderate Islam. Islam is Islam and that’s it.” And last May, referring to democracy, freedom, and the rule of law, he proclaimed in a television address, “For us, these phrases have absolutely no value any longer.”

If Erdoğan prevails in the referendum, then, Turkey is likely to move closer to the model of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and farther from the Western-style secular democracy created by Kemal Atatürk, founder of modern Turkey. Such a development will be a blow for about half the Turks, but also for the widely held thesis that the endemic tyranny and violence within the Muslim Middle East has little to do with Islam, and more to do with the autocratic and illiberal governments that have dominated the region. If Turkey fails after nearly a century of effort to create a secular democracy, then there’s little hope that any other nation can succeed in being true to both liberal democracy and the precepts of Islam.

More important, an Islamized Turkey will confirm what Erdoğan said about “no moderate or immoderate Islam.” For decades the West has indulged a pernicious fantasy that vaguely defined “extremists” unrelated to true Islam are responsible for the carnage afflicting the world. These “extremists” are products of tyrannical governments, poverty, Western historical crimes, the neo-imperialist “Zionist entity,” Israeli “settlements” in the “occupied West Bank,” Western disrespect for the “religion of peace,” and numerous other specious pretexts. Fourteen centuries of jihadist doctrine and action are ignored or rationalized, with a myopia that would have astonished our Western ancestors who fought for centuries against Muslim invaders, colonizers, occupiers, and slavers.

Examples of this delusion are legion. One of the most consequential jihadist organizations has been the Muslim Brotherhood, from which descended al Qaeda. Hassan al Bana, the Egyptian founder of the Brotherhood in 1928, expressed its clearly classic Islamic supremacist ambitions: “It is the nature of Islam to dominate, not to be dominated, to impose its laws on all nations, and extend its power to the entire planet.” For al Banna, jihad remained the time-honored means of achieving this end: “Fighting unbelievers involves all possible efforts that are necessary to dismantle the power of the enemies of Islam including beating them, plundering their wealth, destroying their places of worship, and smashing their idols” ––precisely what ISIS is doing with its genocidal attacks on Christians.

On Friday, the news media were so sure North Korea would conduct a nuclear test over the weekend to celebrate the 105th birthday of Kim Il-Sung that they almost started a countdown clock. The test never happened. Some experts said this was because President Trump caused North Korean leader Kim Jong-un to “blink.”

On Saturday, North Korea did attempt a celebratory ballistic-missile test, which failed seconds after launch. There has been speculation in the media that this failure was due to U.S. sabotage, possibly a cyberattack.

While I believe the above explanations of both events are unlikely, North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs still pose serious and growing threats because they represent an unstable regime developing and testing increasingly advanced WMDs based on poor engineering and badly inadequate R&D. This is why a new U.S. approach to the threat from North Korea is long overdue.

I did not believe a nuclear test would occur as part of North Korea’s weekend celebration. I was not convinced by commercial-satellite imagery cited by some experts as evidence of an imminent nuclear test, since there is constant activity at North Korea’s nuclear test site that often leads to predictions of nuclear tests that do not occur. On the other hand, when North Korea actually conducts nuclear tests, these same experts are usually caught off guard.

Predicting North Korean nuclear tests is difficult, because Pyongyang is aware it is being watched by U.S. spy satellites. North Korea probably engages in subterfuge at its test site to make the world think nuclear tests are imminent when they are not, and to conceal preparations for actual tests.

North Korean nuclear tests during major celebrations like the 105th birthday of Kim Il-Sung are unlikely because, as North Korea’s nuclear program becomes more sophisticated, the chances of failed tests increase. North Korean leaders probably wanted to avoid the humiliation of a failed nuclear test on an important holiday when the eyes of the world were fixed on the Hermit Kingdom.

There also is a more likely and simpler explanation for North Korea’s April 15 missile test and its subsequent failure. North Korean officials probably decided to conduct a missile test as a demonstration of their nation’s military might that had a higher likelihood of success than a nuclear test.

While some experts are speculating the missile test failed because of U.S. sabotage or cyber warfare, the more likely explanation is that the failure was due to the poor state of North Korean science and engineering. Arms-control expert Jeffrey Lewis is “deeply skeptical” that the U.S. was responsible for the failed missile test, and he said in a recent Axios.com interview, “The failures we’ve seen are better explained by the pains of the R&D process. There is a reason that ‘rocket science’ is a metaphor for something that is hard to do.”

About 50 percent of North Korean missile tests — and 88 percent of its intermediate Musudan missile tests — have failed. This is what happens when a brutal totalitarian regime tries to pursue a complex weapons program using borrowed and stolen technology and relies on third-rate scientists.

It goes without saying that the world’s leading experts in rocketry and physics are not flocking to North Korea to work on the WMD programs of an evil totalitarian regime with a serious job-security problem — Leader Kim may have you executed if your project encounters failures or setbacks.

Editor’s Note: The following piece is adapted from “Preserving the Values of the West,” the remarks delivered by Ayaan Hirsi Ali upon accepting the 2016 Philip Merrill Award for Outstanding Contributions to Liberal Arts Education alongside her husband, Niall Ferguson. It is reprinted here with permission.

The specific example I would like to address today is the relationship between men and women. All cultures have strong views on marriage, family, divorce, promiscuity, and parenting. Not all cultures are similar or interchangeable, however.

Within Islam today, I believe that we can distinguish three different groups of Muslims in the world based on how they envision and practice their faith, with important consequences for women.

The first group is the most problematic — the fundamentalists who envision a regime based on Shariah, Islamic religious law. They argue for an Islam largely or completely unchanged from its original seventh-century version and take it as a requirement of their faith that they impose it on everyone else.

I call them Medina Muslims, in that they see the forcible imposition of Shariah as their religious duty, following the example of the Prophet Muhammad when he was based in Medina. They exploit their fellow Muslims’ respect for Shariah law as a divine code that takes precedence over civil laws. It is only after they have laid this foundation that they are able to persuade their recruits to engage in jihad. There is no equality between men and women in their eyes, either legally or in daily practice.

The second group — and the clear majority throughout the Muslim world — consists of Muslims who are loyal to the core creed and worship devoutly but are not inclined to practice violence or even intolerance toward non-Muslims.

I call this group “Mecca Muslims,” after the first phase of Islam and the peaceful Qur’anic verses that were revealed in Mecca. In this group, the position of women is contested.

More recently, and partly in response to the rise of Islamic terrorism, a third group is emerging within Islam: Muslim reformers — or, as I call them, “modifying Muslims” — who promote the separation of religion from politics and other reforms. Although some are apostates, the majority of dissidents are believers, among them clerics who have come to realize that their religion must change if its followers are not to be condemned to an interminable cycle of political violence. Reformers generally favor equality between men and women.

The future of Islam and the world’s relationship with Muslims will be decided by which of the two minority groups — the Medina Muslims or the reformers — can win the support of the rather passive Meccan majority.

It is interesting to consider what would happen were anyone to demand the same standards of these campaigners against free speech as they demand of others. The people who make such claims rarely if ever exercise the same civic hygiene they demand of everybody else.

If it furthered their political and other goals then Malia Bouattia and the National Union of Students (NUS) would most likely be currently calling for arrests and prosecutions for incitement, “hate speech” and more. Of course, nobody could be so ill-mannered as to play this political game back at them. But if they were to, they would certainly find far greater evidence of cause and effect than Bouattia and her colleagues have produced to date in their war on free speech.

It could be said that Bouattia engaged in “hate speech” as well as “racist speech” when she said the words she did. It could further be claimed that what Bouattia said in fact constituted “incitement” and an “open invitation to violence”. It could be argued that the words which came out of her lips led directly to a Palestinian man thinking that a British student could be killed on a tram in Jerusalem in a legitimate act of “resistance” against a representative of a “Zionist outpost.”

The great effort of the present-day censors on campuses across the West is to make speech synonymous with action. Campaigners against free expression claim that words not only “wound” people but actually “kill”. They claim that people associated with any group being criticised are not only suffering a verbal “assault” but an actual “physical” assault. Those who campaign against any and all criticism of Islamists, for instance, not only claim that the attacks are “Islamophobic” and target “all Muslims”. They also claim that such words cause violence — including violence against any and all Muslims.

One of the notable things about their objection is that the people who make such claims rarely if ever exercise the same civic hygiene they demand of everybody else. It is interesting to consider what would happen were anyone to demand the same standards of these campaigners as they demand of others.

Consider the case of one Malia Bouattia. This is the young woman who is currently president of the National Union of Students (NUS) in Britain. The NUS has long been a campaigning organisation less interested in standing up for the rights and welfare of students as a whole than campaigning for the sort of issues that preoccupy a portion of the hard-left in Britain, at the forefront of which is anti-Zionism. Since her election as NUS president last year, a number of British universities have sought to disaffiliate from the organization in apparent recognition that it has taken an especially virulent turn.

Two horrific suicide bombings, in two different cities, two hours apart—this is how Egyptian Christians began Holy Week.

In the cities of Tawra and Alexandria, Muslim terrorists stormed Coptic churches where they proceeded to blow themselves to a fine pink mist while taking 44 worshippers with them. These two attacks followed last December’s horrific suicide bombing at St. Peter’s Cathedral in Cairo that killed 29.

Does Egypt have a problem with Islamic violence? Not according to Egypt’s most prominent clergyman, Dr. Ahmed al-Tayeb, who holds the prestigious title of Grand Imam of al-Azhar. At a conference in Cairo last month, al-Tayeb said that the incidence of Muslim violence around the world is rather unremarkable: “There is an obvious double standard in the world’s judgment of Islam on the one hand, and [its judgment of] Christianity and Judaism on the other, despite the fact that all are guilty of one and the same thing, that is, religious violence and terrorism.”

The point al-Tayeb is trying to make is pretty straightforward: that people are quick to chide Muslims for terrorism when in fact the terror problem cuts across religious lines. Clearly all of this talk about terrorism must be a cloak for bigotry. If people were truly concerned with eradicating terrorism they would condemn it wherever it’s found. The fact that they don’t exposes their hypocrisy.

He continued: “Christian and Jewish violence is a cool and casual matter for the West, which never besmirches the image of these two religions. Only their third brother [Islam] stands trial alone on the dock, where his image is constantly marred.”

Here the imam skillfully employs the language of familial ties, comparing the Abrahamic religions to three brothers. One of these brothers is singled out for scorn although he is no more guilty than the others. Clearly, that brother has been unjustly maligned.

Unfortunately, al-Tayeb is not easily dismissed as a crank. As the Grand Imam of al-Azhar he commands respect in Egypt and throughout the Muslim world. When he speaks, people listen.

In order to bolster his claim that all religions are equally guilty of terrorism he cited a few examples—the 1980s abortion clinic bomber Michael Bray, cult leader David Koresh, and the Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. Besides the fact that abortion clinic bombings are very, very rare (al-Tayeb reached back a full 32 years to find one), that Koresh was not actually a terrorist, and that McVeigh was a political terrorist and a very lapsed Catholic, his comparison is on solid footing. Okay, not really.

The “double standard” accusation is a serious one that was likely intended to disarm Westerners who are notoriously sensitive about treating others with bias. But is there really a double standard in the way we perceive Muslim violence compared to other kinds? Yes, there is—just not in the way that the Grand Imam suggests. Each time a Muslim terror attack occurs, journalists attempt to lead the public through what can only be called a coping ritual. The ritual has four stages.

The first of these is the “let’s not jump to conclusions” stage in which reporters take great pains not to assume that the attacker is a Muslim just because his name happens to be Abdul or Muhammad or even because he yelled “Allahu Akbar” moments before his killing spree began. Then, when it turns out that he is a Muslim, reporters wonder if his religious affiliation might have been incidental to the attack—which it rarely ever is. In the second stage, the shortest of the four, reporters actually acknowledge the attack and its motive before quickly moving on to the third stage. I’ll call this the “Muslims fear backlash” stage, and it’s characterized by stories about hijab-snatchings (that usually turn out to be hoaxes) or Muslims getting dirty looks in the street. It isn’t even necessary to find any actual incidents of backlash after an attack because the fear of a backlash, not the backlash itself, is the real story. The fourth and final stage is when reporters begin to ask how the right-wing might “exploit” the story. This serves as a warning that taking action to stave off civilizational demise is somehow letting the terrorists win.

So yes, there’s a double standard. No other kind of terrorist attack is reported this way.

But that’s not what Ahmed al-Tayeb meant by a “double standard.” What he meant was that Muslims, Christians, and Jews commit proportional amounts of terrorism but Westerners seem only to notice or care about the Muslim variety. This is a truly extraordinary theory and one that I have often tried to test. Every time there is a Muslim terrorist attack anywhere in the world—and they’re happening now at a rate of several per month—I ask myself if there were other attacks committed in the name of other faiths that the media failed to report or I failed to notice.

Let’s start with the Palm Sunday attacks in Egypt. Have there been any comparable attacks carried out by Christians against mosques? Nope. The only one that I could find occurred this January not in Egypt but in Canada. The alleged perpetrator, Alexandre Bissonnette, appears to be an anti-immigrant nationalist and a fan of Donald Trump and Marine Le Pen but not particularly religious.

To be sure, the Canadian mosque attack was terrorism but it was also anomalous and not religiously inspired. There is no equivalence between Bissonnette and the suicide bombers who attacked two churches on Palm Sunday, and even if there were it wouldn’t begin to balance out the countless other terror attacks that have occurred in recent weeks. In the past thirty days a Muslim attacked the Palace of Westminster in London with his car and a knife, killing four and wounding 50. A Muslim blew himself up in the St. Petersburg metro, killing himself and 14 others. A Muslim stole a beer truck in Stockholm and plowed through the downtown area, killing four. Finally, two suspected Muslims planted roadside bombs in Dortmund, Germany in an attempt to murder members of a Borussia Dortmund soccer team. Thankfully, no one was killed.

Presumably all of these attacks have proportional counterparts committed in the name of other faiths, right? No, they don’t. Though Lutherans represent the largest religious group in Sweden, there has never to my knowledge been a Lutheran terrorist attack in that country or any other. Likewise there are no Russian Orthodox suicide bombers. There is no Anglican approximation of ISIS. If the Muslims don’t have a complete monopoly on religious terror, they’re pretty darned close.

Yet terror-deniers never tire of trying to draw some kind of false equivalence between Muslim terrorism and other kinds, no matter how much of a stretch it is. They often deny or downplay Muslim terrorism, or they assume that every white terrorist is both Christian and religiously motivated, or they blame Christians for Muslim terrorism.

This strategy of drawing equivalence where none exists seems to be having some success. A recent CBS News poll found that a full 66% of registered Democrats believed that Islam was no more prone to violence than other religions. Nine percent believed it was actually less prone to violence! These people must believe that every incident of Muslim violence has an equivalent counterpart out there somewhere. The media (which they control, by the way) must be creating misperceptions in the public’s mind by covering up all the violence committed by non-Muslims.

Four years ago, when the perpetrators of the Boston bombing were identified as two brothers from Chechnya, the American media, as Daniel Greenfield wrote at the time, went “into ‘Palestinian’ mode insisting that we need to talk about the conflict in Chechnya.”

Yes, Greenfield agreed, we could talk about that conflict. But he added:

There is a conflict in Chechnya and Iraq and Pakistan and Afghanistan and Thailand and Nigeria and the Philippines and India and Israel and France and a hundred other countries.

Where there is a sizable Muslim majority or even sizable minority, there is conflict.

Indeed. And Chechnya, which is a “semi-autonomous republic” within Russia, happens to be 95% Muslim. Its president, Ramnaz Kadyrov, has defended honor killings on the grounds that wives are their husbands’ property. He’s told Chechen women that their primary reason for existing is to bear children. He’s encouraged Chechen men to practice polygamy, even though it’s against Russian law. He’s required all females in Chechnya to wear headscarves in schools and other public buildings. And he’s left no doubt that his fanatical support for all of these positions is rooted in his faith. “No one can tell us not to be Muslims,” he has said. “If anyone says I cannot be a Muslim, he is my enemy.”

It was Chechen Muslims who committed two of the most appalling terrorist acts since 9/11. The first, in 2002, was the gruesome armed seizure of that Moscow movie theater, in which about 130 hostages died. Remember? It’s hardly ever mentioned anymore, and rarely cited when people are making lists of major acts of jihadist terrorism.

The second, and even worse, atrocity was the 2004 school siege in Beslan, in which 330 hostages, including no fewer than 186 children, were murdered. For all the horror of that incident, you don’t hear much about it these days, either.

As with the Boston Marathon bombings, the American media were quick to link both of these actions to the cause of Chechen separatism. But the Moscow atrocity was, in fact, committed by three groups of Chechen jihadists: the Riyad-us Saliheen Brigade of Martyrs (formerly known as the Islamic Brigade of Shaheeds), the Islamic International Brigade, and the Special Purpose Islamic Regiment. The Beslan massacre was committed solely by the first-named of these organizations.

The face of Islam is two Muslim women in Australia openly excusing wife beating. It is Sheikh Farrokh Sekaleshfar openly proclaiming at an Orlando mosque, not long before the slaughter at a gay night club in the same city, that “death is the sentence” for homosexuals.
What’s all this rubbish about Muslim men not being allowed to beat their wives? All that brouhaha about those two pleasant-looking Muslim ladies explaining sweetly that husbands indeed had a right to deal out a bit of marital biff when warranted. Hear! Hear! Or, if you like, Allahu Akbar!

I note that Muslim Labor federal member Ed Husic unaccountably eschews the beating option “It’s not acceptable in any form to strike anyone, either between husband and wife or anywhere,” he reportedly said. Bad syntax apart, the sentiment is both clear and terribly heretical in my view. Isn’t he the same chap who used the Koran when sworn in as a minister in 2013? What is he thinking about? That’s the question that springs to my mind.

Allah is clear in verse 4:34, unless Mr Husic thinks that Mohammed got that bit wrong from the Archangel Gabriel, or perhaps Gabriel misunderstood Allah, or maybe the mistake is as prosaic as the equivalent of a typing error back in the 600s. Who knows, but I can only assume that Husic takes a selective view of the Koran. Or maybe he is a ninny with no stomach for smiting necks and finger tips as Allah instructed in 8:12.

Allah forbid, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Husic also takes friends from among unbelievers, a direct violation of 4:89.

Mark Durie (The Third Choice) lists sixteen verses of the Koran which set Mohammed on a pedestal as a model to follow. Very convenient, you might think cynically, if you are a mere amanuensis to have the guy in the sky repeatedly anoint you as a positive pillar of virtue. And virtue it seems is in the eye of the holy beholder.

Among other things, the very model of a man to emulate led raids, killed, enslaved, married a six-year old, acquiesced to the killing of those who didn’t like him, and rejoiced in Allah condemning his poor old Uncle Lahab (and his wife) to grisly everlasting fates (111:1-5) for rejecting his message in Mecca. Mahatma Ghandi-like he wasn’t.

Alarmingly, Turkey’s proposed system lacks the safety mechanisms of checks and balances that exist in other countries such as the United States.

It would transfer powers traditionally held by parliament to the presidency, thereby rendering the parliament merely a ceremonial, advisory body.

“The conditions for a free and fair plebiscite on proposed constitutional reforms simply do not hold,” said a report released by the EU Turkey Civic Commission.

In a bitter irony, nearly 55 million Turks went to the ballot box on April 16 to exercise their basic democratic right to vote. But they voted in favor of giving away their democracy. The system for which they voted looks more like a Middle Eastern sultanate than democracy in the West.

According to unofficial results of the referendum, 51.4% of the Turks voted in favor of constitutional amendments that will give their authoritarian Islamist president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, excessive powers to augment his one-man rule in comfort.

The changes make Erdogan head of government, head of state and head of the ruling party — all at the same time. He now has the power to appoint cabinet ministers without requiring a confidence vote from parliament, propose budgets and appoint more than half the members of the nation’s highest judicial body. In addition, he has the power to dissolve parliament, impose states of emergency and issue decrees. Alarmingly, the proposed system lacks the safety mechanisms of checks and balances that exist in other countries such as the United States. It would transfer powers traditionally held by parliament to the presidency, thereby rendering the parliament merely a ceremonial, advisory body.

Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan claims victory in the April 16 referendum, at a rally the night of the vote. (Image source: VOA video screenshot)

Why did the Turks choose democratic suicide?

1. Erdogan’s confrontational Islamist-nationalist rhetoric keeps appealing to masses who adore him for his claims of being in the process of restoring the country’s historical Ottoman influence as a leader of the Islamic world. His rhetoric — and practices — would often echo an authoritarian rule in the form of a sultan. It was not a coincidence that the thousands of Erdogan fans who gathered to salute their leader after his referendum victory were passionately waving Turkish and Ottoman flags and chanting “Allah-u aqbar” [“Allah is the greatest”, in Arabic]. For most of Erdogan’s conservative fans, “God comes first… then comes Erdogan”. That sentiment explains why the vote on April 16 was not just a boring constitutional matter for many Turks: It was about endorsing an ambitious man who promises to revive a glorious past.