RUTHFULLY YOURS

BERLIN—German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Sunday she will run for a fourth term next year, launching her re-election campaign at one of the most challenging times the chancellor has seen in her 11 years in office.

Ms. Merkel seeks to lead the conservative ticket at the next general election in the fall of 2017, she told reporters after announcing her decision to leaders of her Christian Democratic Union in Berlin.

“I have thought about it endlessly,” Ms. Merkel said. “After 11 years, the decision about a fourth candidacy is anything but trivial for the country, the party and for me personally.”

The chancellor will also run for a new term as CDU chairman next month. Her nomination as candidate for chancellor still needs to be approved at a joint meeting of the CDU and its sister party, the Christian Social Union.

Ms. Merkel’s candidacy ends months of speculation within her own party, which widely expected her to run again as there is no clear alternative candidate who could fill her shoes.

“She has no choice now,” said Frank Decker, political scientist at the University of Bonn. “Changing horses so close to the election simply would have left her party in great distress.”
Germany in the Age of Populism

German approval for Chancellor Angela Merkel has eroded amid concern about her handling of the refugee crisis and general anxiety about the future, fueling support for an anti-immigrant political party.

The chancellor acknowledged that she would enter an election campaign that will be tougher than any of the three previous contests.

“We will face opposition from all sides,“ Ms. Merkel said, citing both populist and left-wing opponents at home and abroad who “threaten our values and way of life in Germany.” CONTINUE AT SITE

PARIS—Former President Nicolas Sarkozy was knocked out of the first round of the French conservatives’ primary, marking a significant upset in the race to become France’s next president.

Mr. Sarkozy, who centered his campaign on pledges for hard-line security measures and a clampdown on immigration, was hobbled by a late, surprise surge in support for his former prime minister, François Fillon, who ran on a pledge to deliver a shock to the French economy with deep spending cuts and labor overhauls.

Results from 8,890 of the 10,228 polling stations across the country showed Mr. Fillon won 44.1% of the votes, ahead of the 28.3% received by Bordeaux Mayor Alain Juppé, who recent polls showed had been the favorite to win the primary. Mr. Sarkozy, by contrast, won just 20.9% of votes.

The former French leader’s elimination in the first round upends a conservative primary that is set to have sweeping consequences in France. Polls show the winner next Sunday would be best placed to win the presidential election in May against the far-right National Front’s Marine Le Pen.

Mr. Fillon and Mr. Juppé will now advance to a runoff next Sunday. Mr. Sarkozy, who conceded defeat late Sunday, said he would throw his support behind Mr. Fillon. “It is time for me to attempt a life with more private passion and less public passion,” Mr. Sarkozy said.

Until last week, polls had shown Mr. Sarkozy would easily reach the second round and go head-to-head with Mr. Juppé in a second-round race centered on questions of French identity and security in the aftermath of a string of terror attacks in France.

Mr. Sarkozy shifted to the right in his campaign in a bid to reach out to Ms. Le Pen’s supporters. He advocated suspending the right of immigrants to bring their families to France and locking up people of watch lists deemed dangerous by intelligence services. Mr. Juppé, meanwhile, tacked in the other direction, centering his campaign on a pledge to reforge a “happy identity” that respects differences and overcomes tensions in French society.

Mr. Fillon’s progression to the second round significantly changes the dynamic of the campaign. CONTINUE AT SITE

THE HAGUE—If the European dream is to die, it may be the Netherlands that delivers the fatal blow. The Dutch general election in March is shaping up to be a defining moment for the European project.

The risk to the European Union doesn’t come from Geert Wilders, the leader of anti-EU, anti-immigration Party for Freedom. He is well ahead in the polls and looks destined to benefit from many of the social and economic factors that paved the way for the Brexit and Trump revolts.

But the vagaries of the Dutch political system make it highly unlikely that Mr. Wilders will find his way into government. As things stand, he is predicted to win just 29 out of the 150 seats in the new parliament, and mainstream parties seem certain to shun him as a coalition partner. In an increasingly fragmented Dutch political landscape, most observers agree that the likely outcome of the election is a coalition of four or five center-right and center-left parties.

Instead, the risk to the EU comes instead from a new generation of Dutch euroskeptics who are less divisive and concerned about immigration but more focused on questions of sovereignty—and utterly committed to the destruction of the EU. Its leading figures are Thierry Baudet and Jan Roos, who have close links to British euroskeptics. They have already scored one significant success: In 2015, they persuaded the Dutch parliament to adopt a law that requires the government to hold a referendum on any law if 300,000 citizens request it. They then took advantage of this law at the first opportunity to secure a vote that rejected the EU’s proposed trade and economic pact with Ukraine, which Brussels saw as a vital step in supporting a strategically important neighbor.

This referendum law is a potential bomb under the EU, as both Dutch politicians and Brussels officials are well aware. Mr. Baudet believes he now has the means to block any steps the EU might seek to take to deepen European integration or stabilize the eurozone if they require Dutch legislation. This could potentially include aid to troubled Southern European countries such as Greece and Italy, rendering the eurozone unworkable. CONTINUE AT SITE

“Allah, kill the despicable Christians. Allah, kill each and every last one of them….” — 16-year-old Muslim son of an Islamic cleric living in Belgium.

“ISIS is not the problem… They shaved my head, they put my head in freezing cold water and then into boiling hot water. They burned their cigarettes on me, they electrocuted me.” — Majed el-Shafie, imprisoned and tortured in Egypt for converting to Christianity.

A Christian girl faces death threats if she does not return to her Muslim abductor who forcibly converted her to Islam. The family of a Christian girl who was kidnapped, raped, forced to convert to Islam, and then forcibly married to a Muslim are now under threat if they refuse to hand back their daughter to her captors.

Islamic hate for Christians was on display throughout the month of August. Shortly after an 80-year-old Catholic priest in France was slaughtered by Muslims who stormed his church during mass, the 16-year-old Muslim son of an Islamic cleric living in Belgium made a video and posted it on social media. In the video, he appears walking along the main street of the Belgian city of Verviers during Ramadan while making prayers to Allah, which include: “Allah, kill the despicable Christians. Allah, kill each and every last one of them….” According to Immigration Minister Theo Francken:

“It’s obvious that his father, the imam, is promoting such ideas not just to fighters to join the battle in Syria, but also to his own children. The young man who appears in the video reflects the father’s views, and I understand and empathize with the great concern that city residents have over this.”

A deportation order was last reported as pending a court appeal.

Similarly, in the August edition of Dabiq, ISIS’s propaganda magazine, the jihadi organization urged Muslims to destroy the “arrogant Christian disbelievers” and urged them to “pray for Allah’s curse to be upon the liars.” ISIS also threatened Christians to “break the cross.” Those who do and convert to Islam will “enter the Gardens of Paradise,” and those who reject Islam and cling to the cross will die in a “futile” war against ISIS.

As if the Christians of Nigeria were not persecuted enough by Muslim groups, Boko Haram’s new leader, known for killing nonconformist Muslims as well, announced that Christians are now its number one and primary target, and that Boko Haram will continue to “bomb churches and kill Christians while ending attacks on mosques and markets used by ordinary Muslims.” Abu Musab al-Barnawi, the new leader, also spoke of “booby-trapping and blowing up every church that we are able to reach, and killing all of those who we find from the citizens of the Cross.”

“The better young people are integrated, the greater the chance is that they radicalize. This hypothesis is supported by a lot of evidence”. — From a report by researchers at Erasmus University in Rotterdam.

“The proportions of [Islamic State] administrators but also of suicide fighters increase with education,” according to a World Bank report. “Moreover, those offering to become suicide bombers ranked on average in the more educated group.”

Britain’s MI5 revealed that “two-thirds of the British suspects have a middle-class profile and those who want to become suicide bombers are often the most educated”.

Researchers have discovered that “the richer the countries are the more likely will provide foreign recruits to the terrorist group [ISIS].”

The West seems to have trouble accepting that terrorists are not driven by inequality, but by hatred for Western civilization and the Judeo-Christian values of the West.

For the Nazis, the “inferior race” (the Jews) did not deserve to exist; for the Stalinists, the “enemies of the people” were not entitled to continue living; for the Islamists, it is the West itself that does not deserve to exist.

It is anti-Semitism, not poverty, that led the Palestinian Authority to name a school after Abu Daoud, mastermind of the massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics.

“There is a stereotype that young people from Europe who leave for Syria are victims of a society that does not accept them and does not offer them sufficient opportunities… Another common stereotype in the debate in Belgium is that, despite research which refutes this, radicalization is still far too often misunderstood as a process resulting from failed integration… I therefore dare say that the better young people are integrated, the greater the chance is that they radicalize. This hypothesis is supported by a lot of evidence.”

Given American policymakers’ ignorance of Islam, “I am just worried about people like me running around with big theories trying to set foreign policy,” stated famed intellectual historian Francis Fukuyama in Washington, D.C. His confession occurred at “Democracy in the Arab World: The Obama Legacy and Beyond,” a recent conference that did little to alleviate the knowledge deficit among hackneyed Islamism apologists.

Fukuyama’s luncheon address at the downtown JW Marriot luxury hotel focused on the cultural factors that aided the development of modern societies. While China benefited from the appearance 2,300 years ago of the “first modern, relatively impersonal state,” Fukuyama said, the “Arab world [is] where I think the fundamental problem is” for human progress today. Although he worried that the U.S. had not made an effort to understand Muslim societies comparable to its Cold War study of Russia, Fukuyama’s own knowledge of Islam was spotty. He described an often repressive and all-encompassing sharia law as a mere “balance to political power.”

Referencing the late scholar Ernest Gellner, Fukuyama maintained that “contemporary Islamism is basically just a different version of European nationalism in the nineteenth century.” Just as Europeans transitioning from intimate rural communities to urban anonymity during industrialization sought a new identity, Islamists invoke a “universal umma that extends all the way from Morocco to Jakarta.” Similarly, this Islamism appeals to alienated second-generation European Muslim immigrants. Left unexamined was whether the cosmic worldview of a faith like Islam has considerably more ideological content, and can incite far more zeal, than nationalist allegiances, particularly in an increasingly globalized world.

At least Fukuyama didn’t minimize jihadist terrorism, unlike the preceding panelist, anti-Israel commentator Peter Beinart. He decried the “rise of ISIS and a massive increase fueled by cable news [coverage] of the threat of terror that emerged in 2014” and reflected upon President Barack Obama’s shared view that the “threat of terrorism had been exaggerated.” Obama rejected former President George W. Bush’s “war on terrorism” as the “new Cold War, the new World War II; there was fascism and communism, and now there was jihadism.”

In contrast to totalitarianism’s past appeal to, and rule over, millions, few “believed that you could build a new prosperous world based on the ideas of Osama bin Laden,” Beinart declared. His sanguine analysis ignored that faith-based jihadists have eternal timeframes capable of minimizing material setbacks. Contrary to the Third Reich’s twelve-year nightmare and the Cold War’s long twilight victory, Pope Francis’s warning of a “third [world] war … fought piecemeal” with jihadist movements and regimes worldwide has no end in sight.

This is the moment where hate speech laws become a greater threat to democracy and freedom of speech than hate speech itself.

In France, Muslim terrorists are never Muslim terrorists, but “lunatics,” “maniacs” and “youths”.

To attack freedom of the press and freedom of speech is not anti-hate speech; it is submission.

By following these recommendations, the British government would place Muslim organizations in a kind of monopoly position: they would become the only source of information about themselves. It is the perfect totalitarian information order.

Created to guard against the kind of xenophobic and anti-Semitic propaganda that gave rise to the Holocaust, national hate speech laws have increasingly been invoked to criminalize speech that is merely deemed insulting to one’s race, ethnicity, religion, or nationality.

It is disturbing to wonder how long the EU will strongly engage its experts and influence to cut through existing legal obstacles, in a quest to criminalize any type of criticism of Islam, and to submit to the values of jihad.

According the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI) — part of the Council of Europe — the British press is to blame for increasing hate speech and racist violence. On October 4, 2016, the ECRI released a report dedicated only to Britain. The report said:

some traditional media, particularly tabloids… are responsible for most of the offensive, discriminatory and provocative terminology. The Sun, for instance, published an article in April 2015 entitled “Rescue boats? I’d use gunships to stop migrants”, in which the columnist likened migrants to “cockroaches”…