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WORLD NEWS

Europe’s Complex Political Landscape

https://www.wsj.com/graphics/polling-for-elections-in-europe-2017/
Netherlands

The March 15 general election is in 4 days.

Mark Rutte
16%
People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy
Center-right
Geert Wilders
15%
Party for Freedom
Far-right
Lodewijk Asscher
8%
Labor Party
Center-left
Indicates current prime minister
France

The April 23 first-round vote in the presidential election is in a month.
Marine Le Pen
26%
National Front
Far-right
Emmanuel Macron
26%
En Marche
Centrist
François Fillon
20%
Les Républicains
Center-right
Germany

The Sept. 24 general election is in 6 months.

Angela Merkel
32%
Christian Democratic Union
Center-right
Martin Schulz
31%
Social Democrats
Center-left
Frauke Petry*
11%
Alternative for Germany
Far-right
*Ms. Petry is her party’s most prominent politician, but the party hasn’t agreed a candidate for the election.
Indicates current chancellor

South Korea’s Next President The rule of law prevails in Seoul, even as strategic threats mount.

South Korea’s Constitutional Court unanimously decided Friday to remove President Park Geun-hye from office. Her successor, who must be elected in the next 60 days, will likely come from the left-of-center Democratic Party. That raises important policy questions for Seoul, both domestic and international, but it is also an important reminder of the strength of the South’s democratic institutions.

Ms. Park’s dramatic downfall began last October, following allegations of influence-peddling and corruption by her confidante Choi Soon-sil. By December Ms. Park had been impeached by the National Assembly, a decision the court’s ruling confirmed while Acting President Hwang Kyo-ahn governs in her place. Gerald Ford took over from Richard Nixon in 1974 by declaring “our Constitution works,” and South Koreans can now make the same boast.

The challenges for Ms. Park’s successor will be heavy. Pyongyang’s belligerent young dictator has accelerated his nuclear and ballistic missile programs even as he murders his political rivals overseas. One consolation is that the two leading Democrat candidates, Moon Jae-in and Ahn Hee-jung, have moderated their opposition to this week’s deployment of the U.S. Thaad missile defense system in recent months. This reflects the reality that South Korea can’t afford to alienate the Trump Administration when the U.S. remains the guarantor of its security.

The next South Korean administration will also have to act when it comes to its economic system. The scandal that brought down Ms. Park involved the country’s largest conglomerates, known as chaebol. On Monday prosecutors released a report that described how Samsung executives allegedly asked Ms. Park for government favors, and she asked officials to support a Samsung merger.

That merger of two subsidiaries in 2015 epitomizes the corruption at the heart of Korea Inc. Minority shareholders lost an estimated $7 billion in a deal that allowed Chairman Lee Kun-hee to pass control of the chaebol to his son Lee Jae-yong. Government regulators failed to protect shareholder rights, and the Park administration used the National Pension Service to help Samsung win a proxy vote.

The younger Mr. Lee is now on trial for bribery and embezzlement. Samsung will likely have to adopt a more transparent ownership structure, which will benefit shareholders.

That’s a promising outcome, but new laws are needed to extend shareholder capitalism across the economy. The scandal might never have come fully to light had it not been for the muscular shareholder activism of New York-based hedge fund Elliott Associates in opposing the Samsung merger—another example of how the forces of “globalism” can help make national politics more democratic and accountable, not less.

The cases against Ms. Park and Samsung are a reminder of the danger of economic nationalism and industrial policy giving officials discretionary power over business. The next President has an opportunity to create a more entrepreneurial and competitive economy, even while staring down the North Korean threat. In both cases, closer strategic and economic ties to the U.S. strengthen will help.

Warping the truth about Wilders It’s tough to be Moroccan in the Netherlands. Just ask the BBC. Bruce Bawer

Bruce Bawer is the author of “While Europe Slept,” “Surrender” and, most recently, “The Victims’ Revolution: The Rise of Identity Studies and the Closing of the Liberal Mind.”

From the moment it became clear that the ongoing Islamization of the Western world was a potential disaster of historic proportions, the mainstream media – in their perverse effort to defend the indefensible and keep the cart careening downhill – have been making use of shameless sentiment to overcome the plain facts. One of the first examples of this practice that I can recall was way back in 2003, when the big, bad Norwegian government put resident terrorist Mullah Krekar through the first of what would turn out to be many deportation scares. Since Krekar, back in his homeland of Iraq, had been responsible for the violent deaths of innumerable innocents – children included – it wasn’t an easy proposition to try to whip up sympathy for him (although, heaven knows, some media tried).

Instead, many reporters chose the family angle: Krekar might be a bad guy, but what about his poor wife and kids? Repeatedly, the papers ran tearful close-ups of Krekar’s wife and pictures of her and Krekar embracing. VG ran a whole story about the intelligence services’ confiscation of her beloved cookbook, which had been in the family for generations and which contained the recipes of all of Krekar’s favorite foods. Dagbladet, for its part, ran a report whose headline told us that when Krekar’s kids heard on TV that Daddy had been released from custody and was headed home, they kissed the TV screen. It was Dagbladet, too, that published one of the great sob stories of all time. The headline: “My children are waiting every single day to hear from Papa.” The first sentences: “Mullah Krekar’s wife (39) is scared. For her four children, and for the future.”

And so on. You get the idea. If you’re trying to obscure the truth, defend the indefensible, and smear the good guys, go for sheer, unadulterated bathos. So it is that as the clock ticks down to the March 15 parliamentary elections in the Netherlands (which, as it happens, I write about in this week’s National Review), Anna Holligan of the BBC – in an effort to paint Geert Wilders, head of the Freedom Party (PVV), as a racist hatemonger – kicked off a March 7 article from The Hague by focusing on one of the Dutch Moroccans whom Wilders, as she put it, had “accused…of making the streets unsafe.” Needless to say, Holligan didn’t talk to one of the majority of Dutch Moroccan males who have dropped out of school and are living on social welfare benefits; nor did she buttonhole one of the nearly 50% of young Dutch Moroccan males who have rap sheets.

Cuba: 60 Years Later by Alan M. Dershowitz see note please

Really? Did he visit the jails where dissidents are “housed” under appalling conditions? Raul Castro has a “soft spot” for Jews? He and his bro were great pals with Arafat also. Did Dersh, smart litigator that he is, not realize he was being propagandized? Yes another group of the Buena Vista Suckers Club. rsk

I finally made it to Cuba — nearly 60 years after first trying. It was Christmas Vacation during my senior year at Brooklyn College. Five members of Knight House – the poor folks version of a live at home fraternity at my commuter college –decided to visit Havana. Our motives were not entirely pure. Yes, we wanted to see the old City of Havana and its cultural gems. But we had also wanted to participate in its notorious nightlife. We were 20 years old and seeking post-adolescent adventures of the sort we couldn’t experience back in Brooklyn.

We never made it. When we got to the Miami airport for the half-hour, $50 flight, we were greeted by a State Department Travel advisory. It seems like another young man – just a dozen years older than we were – was also trying to get to Havana. He had been trying for several years and finally – on the very day we were departing Miami for Havana — Fidel Castro and his revolutionary army were at the outskirts of the city

Disappointed, we returned to Miami Beach where we had to be satisfied with Jai Alai and crowded beaches. Years later I learned that members of a rival house plan, undeterred by a mere “advisory,” had taken the flight to Havana and partaken of its vices – vices which were soon to end, or be driven underground by Castro’s revolution.

The disappointed young man who didn’t make it to Cuba in 1958 is now an old man, with different tastes and tamer vices, such as an occasional cigar and a Cuba Libra drink. Among my passions now are art and music, and Cuba excels at both. So my wife and I, with three other couples, set out on an age-appropriate adventure as part of a “people-to-people” cultural group. Travelers still need an acceptable “justification” to visit the long-boycotted destination. Mere tourism or the love of beaches won’t do. It has to be cultural, religious, educational or some other broad category of virtuous pursuit. You still can’t go there for the reasons we had in mind back when Castro had kept us involuntarily virtuous.

So we went to visit the studios and houses of Cuban artists — some established, others young and on the way to achieving international recognition. The visits were fascinating, as the artist regaled us with stories of their own experiences with increasing artistic freedom, as Cuban Artists became part of the international art market. This made some of them quite rich, at least as compared with average wages for other occupations including lawyers and doctors.

Jihadis Living on Support Payments from the Europe They Vowed to Destroy by Giulio Meotti

Al Harith’s story reveals the depth of one of biggest Europe’s scandals: the jihadis’ use of European cradle-to-grave entitlements to fund their “holy war”.

Europe gave them everything: jobs, homes, public assistance, unemployment benefits, relief payments, child benefits, disability payments, cash support. These Muslim extremists, however, do not see this “Dependistan”, as Mark Steyn called the welfare state, as a sign of generosity, but of weakness. They understand that Europe is ready to be destroyed.

Filled with religious certainty and ideological hatred for the West, not required to assimilate to Europe’s values and norms, many of European Muslims seem to feel as if they are destined to devour an exhausted civilization.

Public policy goals instead need to be to move people off welfare — shown to be basically a disincentive to looking for work — and toward personal responsibility. There need to be legal limits on the uses to which welfare funds can be put — for example, welfare funds should not to be used for purchasing illegal drugs, gambling, terrorism or, as there is no free speech in Europe anyway, for promoting terrorism. One could create and fine-tune such a list. Disregarding the limitations could result in losing benefits. This would help fight the ghettoization and Islamization of Europe’s Muslims. The cycle of welfare and jihad needs to be stopped.

Four years ago, the British liberal newspaper, The Guardian, ran a story about the “survivors of Guantanamo”, the “victims of America’s ‘icon of lawlessness'”, “Britain’s survivors of the detention centre that has been called the ‘gulag of our times'”. The article featured a photograph of Jamal al Harith.

Al Harith, born Ronald Fiddler, a Christian convert to Islam, returned to Manchester from detention at Guantanamo Bay thanks to activism of David Blunkett, Home Secretary of then-Prime Minister Tony Blair. Al Harith was immediately welcomed in England as a hero, the innocent victim of the unjust “war on terror” after September 11. The Mirror and ITV gave him £60,000 ($73,000) for an exclusive interview about his experience at Guantanamo. Al Harith was also compensated with one million pounds by the British authorities. The victim of the “gulag of our times” bought a very nice house with the taxpayers’ cash.

A few weeks ago, al Harith made his last “journey”: he was blown up in Mosul, Iraq, on behalf of the Islamic State. Al Harith had also been recruited by the non-governmental organization “CAGE” (formerly known as “Cageprisoners”) as part of its testimony advocating the closure of the Guantanamo Bay detention facility.

Memo to U.S. Mission in Vienna: Obama No Longer President By Claudia Rosett

Quite likely you don’t spend a lot of time following the doings of Andrew J. Schofer, a career State Department officer who is currently the Charge d’Affaires at the U.S. Mission to International Organizations in Vienna (UNVIE). Nor was Schofer anywhere high on my radar until this week, when he delivered a statement on North Korea that seemed to me slightly at odds with what Ambassador Nikki Haley was saying at the United Nations in New York. Which sent me to the web site for his legation in Vienna … but before I get ahead of myself on that, here’s a bit more background.

Haley, at a UN press stakeout in New York, following a Security Council meeting this Wednesday on North Korea, said that while the U.S. reevaluates how to handle North Korea, “all options are on the table.” But Haley also went out of her way to imply that the Trump administration is far from eager to accede to pressures, such as those from China, to default to talks or deals with North Korea. Referring to North Korea’s tyrant, Kim Jong Un, Haley told reporters:

I appreciate all of my counterparts wanting to talk about talks and negotiations. We are not dealing with a rational person.

To my mind, Haley may be wrong in her assessment of Kim Jong Un as irrational. We can debate whether Kim is actually a madman incapable of rational calculation, or a wily thug, who in the interest of maintaining his hereditary totalitarian throne has been proving adept, like his forebears, at calibrating what he can get away with in the way of threats, hostage-taking, assassinations, executions, extortion rackets, and nuclear missile projects — all in the interest of consolidating his grip on power and expanding his reach.

But wherever one comes down on the crazy-Kim question, Haley deserves applause for deflecting the pressures to start bargaining with Kim. Deals with North Korea do not work, and will not work while Kim remains in power. The long record of U.S. talks, deals and attempted talks with North Korea is one of humiliation and failure for the U.S., as North Korea’s dynastic Kim regime has repeatedly pocketed any gains, milked every concession, cheated on every agreement, and carried on with its atrocities and its nuclear missile projects.

Several Injured in Ax Attack at German Train Station Suspect described as having ‘apparent psychological problems’ detained while trying to flee; police say incident not considered terrorist attack By Anton Troianovski

BERLIN—A 36-year-old man who police said had “apparent psychological problems” injured seven people with an ax Thursday evening at the main train station in the German city of Düsseldorf.

Three of the people were seriously injured, the police said. Police described the suspect, who was detained after he was injured while trying to flee the scene, as a man from the former Yugoslavia who lived in the nearby city of Wuppertal.

A police spokeswoman said the incident wasn’t being considered a terrorist or otherwise ideologically motivated attack. The suspect first attacked at least one passenger aboard a local train at the station and then injured others on the platform and in the station hall, the police said.

“This was someone who didn’t have all his wits about him who ran through the area and indiscriminately injured people,” the spokeswoman said.

She said the man was believed to have originated from Kosovo and that it wasn’t clear how long he had lived in Germany or what his residency status was.

BLASPHEMY CHARGES IN DENMARK by Mark Movsesian

The New York Times reports that a local prosecutor in Denmark has brought a blasphemy charge against a forty-two-year-old man who burned a copy of the Quran in his backyard and posted a video of the act on his Facebook page. The Danish penal code makes blasphemy, defined as “publicly insulting the tenets of faith or worship” of a recognized religious community, a crime punishable by a fine or up to four months’ imprisonment. This prosecution, which the country’s attorney general had to approve, is the first of its kind in decades. The last successful blasphemy prosecution in Denmark occurred in 1946.

This is a truly singular occurrence. Many European countries, including Denmark, have hate-speech laws that prohibit speech that denigrates or threatens persons on the basis of certain characteristics, including religion. (Here in the U.S., courts consistently have ruled hate-speech laws unconstitutional.) But this is not a hate-speech prosecution. The defendant in this case evidently did not insult or threaten Muslims as people. Instead, he publicly insulted Muslim belief, especially Muslim belief in the sanctity of the Quran. And that, according to the prosecutor, merits punishment under Danish law.

The ironies abound. Blasphemy prosecutions are not so unusual in Muslim-majority countries, where they often serve as pretexts for the persecution of Christians and other religious minorities. In fact, this month marks the sixth anniversary of the murder of Shahbaz Bhatti, a Christian Pakistani politician who had criticized that country’s blasphemy laws; his murderers called Bhatti “a known blasphemer.” But blasphemy prosecutions are vanishingly rare in the West. In America, the Supreme Court ruled blasphemy laws unconstitutional in 1952. Most European countries have abolished their blasphemy laws; where such laws continue to exist, they are dead letters.

Moreover, Western countries have made opposing blasphemy laws a major international human rights cause. At the U.N. Human Rights Council, America and its European allies have objected strenuously to so-called “Defamation of Religion” resolutions introduced in recent years by Muslim-majority countries, on the ground that such resolutions encourage local blasphemy laws and stifle free expression. Since 2011, American and European diplomats have convinced proponents to accept a compromise resolution, one that condemns discrimination and the incitement of violence against persons on the basis of religion—a resolution protecting believers, rather than beliefs as such.

Robert Murray: An Age of Decrepitude

Melbourne’s former broadsheet, once a splendid newspaper, now delivers interminable, paint-by-number epistles about racism, refugees, multiculturalism, climate change, victmised Aborigines, male chauvinism and, of course. the loathsomeness of conservatives. Trees die for this. How sad.
After almost a lifetime of reading the Age, Melbourne’s 162-year-old morning news­paper, I am debating whether to cancel my subscription. This is not so much about digital technology as, in the words of a veteran ex-subscriber friend, because the paper is “biased and boring”.

A lot of people around Melbourne are saying the same thing and, in a way they would not have a few years ago, dismiss the Age with disdain. They agree with the description of the late Peter Ryan, in one of his last Quadrant columns, that it has become a “feeble and foolish newspaper”.

How could a once very good newspaper fall so low? The financial squeeze of recent years has affected it severely, but there is much more at work. In a few words, it is over-managed and under-edited, puts process before product—a common complaint about management everywhere—and, worst of all, it is bizarrely politically correct. Politically correct in this context means censoring the news at the expense of reader interest and thus circulation and accurate public debate.

Similar complaints are made about its 185-year-old Fairfax Media stable-mate the Sydney Morning Herald, but this is more specifically about the Age newspaper version and excludes specialist pages such as sport and finance.

The circulation of both has been falling at 7 to 8 per cent a year, twice the rate of their tabloid competitors and is now, at 96,000 for the Age and 102,000 for the SMH, around half that of earlier in the century. The rival tabloid circulations have declined only about half as much. Digital versions partly explain the falls but in my observation widespread reader dissatisfaction is also part.

It goes back a long way. The weaknesses have been seeping in over more than forty years, but have become marked in the past decade. Questions arise about how suited a conventional public company with no dominant shareholder is to owning a newspaper.

Until about 1970 family dynasties, going back to the mid-nineteenth century, controlled both organisations: Fairfax in the case of the SMH and the David Syme family company for the Age. Neither was ideal, but they offered commitment and collective memories of how to do things going back generations. The management bureaucracies were small, close, fairly decentralised among the operating units, and administrators often had spent their entire careers there. Management usually tried to bring up future administration and editorial executives from within.

The SMH was the most respected newspaper in the country, and while the Age had been rather stolid it was a substantial and readable paper of record. When Graham Perkin, with his flair, energy and drive, became editor in 1965, with Syme support he soon turned it into a very good newspaper.

By around 1970, however, financial pressure and family changes pushed David Syme & Co into merging with Sydney’s stronger John Fairfax & Sons. The old intimate simplicity of both was weakened in a much bigger public company, while 1970s radicalism began asserting itself among journalists, bringing a certain lofty preciousness. The notion of journalism being about opinion and questioning rather than plain reporting was creeping into society generally.

UNFRIENDLY SKIES: AIRLINES OMIT ISRAEL FROM THEIR MAPS

Academic Study: Middle Eastern Airlines That Omit Israel From Route Maps Appear to Be Playing to Antisemitic Prejudices of Customer Bases by Barney Breen-Portnoy

Airlines that omit Israel from their route maps — as well as those that don’t offer kosher meal options — appear to do so to play to the prejudices of their customer bases, a new academic research paper reported on by The Economistthis week found.

According to the study, authored by Joel Waldfogel and Paul Vaaler of the University of Minnesota, carriers that leave solely Israel off their maps — making clear it was an intentional move — include Flydubai, Kuwait Airways, Middle East Airlines, Qatar Airways and Saudia.

Israel is also not found on the maps of Emirates and Ethiad Airways, but they also do not include several other countries they do not serve, making these carriers what the authors called “plausible deniers.”

“Israel map denial is more likely for airlines with likely customers from countries exhibiting greater anti-Semitism,” the paper’s opening abstract says. “Likely owner tastes also matter: denial is more likely for state-owned airlines in countries that do not recognize Israel. Kosher meal options on online menus follow similar patterns, suggesting anti-Semitic rather than anti-Zionist motivations.”

Furthermore, according to the study, such discrimination by these companies does not deter other major international carriers from entering into codesharing alliances with them. This is because, the paper said, there are “few airline alternatives to choose from in the Middle East.”

In 2015, Kuwait Airways shut down its New York-London route following a US Transportation Department demand that the airline stop illegally discriminating against Israelis through its policy of refusing to sell them tickets.