RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

Macron 65.5%

Le Pen 34.5%

2:30 PM: in less than six hours the name of the next French president will be announced. I don’t need to go far out on a limb to predict it will be Emmanuel Macron. Though Marine Le Pen briefly enjoyed an outside chance to overcome the odds and squeak into victory, she destroyed it on the night of the debate. By the way, the official audience figure is 16.5 million, well under the predicted 20 to 22 million that I cited in Part 6. Why do I argue that she has no one to blame but herself for her display of incompetence, confusion, bad faith and bad taste? Because she herself proudly boasted that she had deliberately chosen a totally appropriate and, what’s more, a winning strategy. Her running mate Nicolas Dupont-Aignan publicly and proudly agreed, and many of her supporting commentators concurred. She was expressing the anger of the people. Some are even suggesting at this late hour that her audacious performance will prove to be stronger than all the forces allied against her. They are confident that she will win on an upset!

I can’t understand this uncritical support for someone that has never displayed the qualities of a viable leader of the résistance against jihad. Is vociferous denunciation of Islamization all it takes to fit the bill? If that were so, there would be no difference between writing a blog and leading a nation or even leading the opposition to a jihad-friendly government. In a democracy, you have to convince a majority of voters, you have to get elected. And then you need all the qualities of a brilliant, exceptional, strong, upstanding, competent political leader capable of prevailing over tremendous domestic and international odds.

This explains my dismay at the constant flow of messages from friends and allies in the United States telling me that Marine Le Pen will win, should win, or would be the best choice. The odds when the official campaign ended at midnight Friday were 62% to 38%. Where in the world have we ever seen an upset of that dimension? I will not repeat here all the verified evidence I have reported over the past five years to show the ambiguity of Marine Le Pen’s position on Islam. Can you set aside the coziness with Assad and Hezbollah, the antizionism of her pre-chosen prime minister, her tactical pressure on French Jews to accept sacrifices so the limits she will impose on Muslims won’t seem discriminatory? Do you understand what it means to dual French-Israeli citizens to be told they will have to choose one or the other? Is Frexit the French version of Brexit? Aside from the fact that Marine has surreptitiously dropped it from her platform, there is no comparison. Great Britain was never in the Eurozone, has a vibrant economy and, by its historical and geographical separation from the Continent and Churchillian tradition, has the guts to negotiate a tough divorce from a stubborn EU.

Seen from the USA, the free enterprise capital of the world, Marine Le Pen’s economic platform that fits hand in glove with Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s Bolivarian dreams-anticapitalist, antiglobalist, anti-American, and naïvely protectionist-might seem too vague to matter. Here on the ground, it would be disastrous. And the double-decker monetary system? The way she described it during the debate, multinationals would use the euro for their unspeakable foreign intercourse and the good French salt of the earth folks will have their francs as delicious as the baguettes they’ll purchase with them. A candidate that can float such preposterous notions is trustworthy on all things Islamic? It’s not logical.

Besides, she’s going to lose. And we’ll be stuck with Emmanuel Macron. In a democracy, you have to win elections if you want to implement your policies. However brilliant, if you can’t convince voters, you’re back in the shadows with the unsung poets.

The Dump

May surprise, Wikileaks ex machina, the eleventh hour dump, the world-shaking upset. Gigantic hack of Emmanuel Macron’s computers. And wild hopes are blooming. Of course no one’s interested in messages about the candidate’s appointment with his barber, who’s going to pick up his suit at the cleaner’s, how many wreaths to order for the memorial ops. All eyes are focused on the explosive offshore account documents. Macron stashed the millions he made as investment banker chez Rothschild (the name that always gets a wink) in a phony offshore company on one of those islands. Wikileaks leaked the supposedly Russian-hacked documents. French media will be released from the election weekend gag order at 8 o’clock tonight. Instead of popping champagne corks with Emmanuel and Brigitte, they’ll be picking through the dump looking for gold. Or maybe the miracle is already happening and thanks to Vladimir Putin and Julian Assange, Marine will be présidente!

Thursday’s local elections in Britain look somewhat less dramatic than people were expecting in the light of national opinion polls showing Theresa May’s Tories literally twice as popular as the Labour Opposition. The BBC summary was : Tories gain eleven councils and 563 seats; Labour lose seven councils and 382 seats; and UKIP retains just one seat nationally.

That looks pretty good for the Tories, very bad for Labour; disappointing for the Liberal Democrats; and terminally bad for UKIP.

For various reasons, however — mainly low turnout — this overall picture is misleading. Though chickens shouldn’t be counted before being hatched, the Tory prospects for June’s general election are even better than they look terrific, which is terrific; Labour’s, very bad but short of terminal; the Lib-Dems’, purgatorial; and UKIP’s, terminal but with an escape clause. Unless all the pundits are wildly wrong — not an impossibility, as we know, but not likely either — the Tories will win a landslide with a three-figure parliamentary majority over all opposition parties. They are on course to be the natural governing party of Britain for the next three elections and two decades.

That’s a massive turnaround from the results of the 2010 election, when the Tories fell short of a majority, and the 2015 election, when they had a small and vulnerable majority. What happened in the meanwhile?

The answer, of course, is Brexit.

According to all the wise men (and wise women too, of course), what Brexit was supposed to do was to divide the Tory party at all levels and render it incapable of government. What Brexit actually did was to repair a deep and bitter gulf on “Europe” that had divided the Tories at all levels since the Macmillan and Heath governments committed their party to Europeanism. And within a few months of the June referendum, the Tories had both reunited with surprising ease around a clear Brexit agenda and leapt from levels of support in the high 30s to stable figures of 44 to 48 per cent in polls. Large seismic shifts in the UK’s traditional voting blocs are therefore following.

To grasp why and how that’s happening, we should first consider the nature of the Tory party.

Toryism has three overlapping identities. It is the party of economic freedom and enterprise — Mrs. Thatcher is the purest symbol of that identity. It is the party of British nationalism — Churchill and Disraeli are the greatest figures in that tradition. Its third strand, however, is a more complicated one: It’s the party that always seeks to interpret, defend, and advance the interests of the British state in a skeptical and non-partisan way — Lord Salisbury and Sir Robert Peel are the most distinguished exemplars of that view.

Once Latin America’s richest country, Venezuela can no longer feed its people, hobbled by the nationalization of farms as well as price and currency controls.

ARE, Venezuela— Jean Pierre Planchart, a year old, has the drawn face of an old man and a cry that is little more than a whimper. His ribs show through his skin. He weighs just 11 pounds.

His mother, Maria Planchart, tried to feed him what she could find combing through the trash—scraps of chicken or potato. She finally took him to a hospital in Caracas, where she prays a rice-milk concoction keeps her son alive.

“I watched him sleep and sleep, getting weaker, all the time losing weight,” said Ms. Planchart, 34 years old. “I never thought I’d see Venezuela like this.”

Her country was once Latin America’s richest, producing food for export. Venezuela now can’t grow enough to feed its own people in an economy hobbled by the nationalization of private farms, and price and currency controls.

Maria Planchart has had to go through trash to find food for her one-year-old son, Jean Pierre. She is among a growing number of Venezuelans suffering from hunger and malnutrition. Photo: Miguel Gutiérrez for The Wall Street Journal

Venezuela has the world’s highest inflation—estimated by the International Monetary Fund to reach 720% this year—making it nearly impossible for families to make ends meet. Since 2013, the economy has shrunk 27%, according to local investment bank Torino Capital; imports of food have plunged 70%.

Hordes of people, many with children in tow, rummage through garbage, an uncommon sight a year ago. People in the countryside pick farms clean at night, stealing everything from fruits hanging on trees to pumpkins on the ground, adding to the misery of farmers hurt by shortages of seed and fertilizer. Looters target food stores. Families padlock their refrigerators.

Three in four Venezuelans said they had lost weight last year, an average of 19 pounds, according to the National Poll of Living Conditions, an annual study by social scientists. People here, in a mix of rage and humor, call it the Maduro diet after President Nicolás Maduro.

For more than a month, Venezuelans have protested against the increasingly authoritarian government of Mr. Maduro; by Friday, more than 35 people had been reported killed in the unrest. The country’s Food Ministry, the president’s office, the Communications Ministry and the Foreign Ministry didn’t return calls or emails requesting comment for this article.

“Here, for the government, there are no malnourished children,” said Livia Machado, a physician and child malnutrition expert. “The reality is this is an epidemic, and everyone should be paying attention to this.”

Dr. Machado and her team of doctors are seeing a dramatic increase in emaciated infants brought to the Domingo Luciani Hospital in Caracas, where they work.

The problem is no better in towns like Yare, south of Caracas, where the government’s leftist movement was long popular. “To eat,” said Sergio Jesus Sorjas, 11 years old, “I sometimes go to the butcher and I say, ‘Sir, do you have any bones you can give me?’ ”

The boy receives nutritional formula or a traditional Venezuelan corncake from the parish priest. Sergio said he hasn’t tasted meat in months: “Sometimes, I don’t eat at all.” CONTINUE AT SITE