RUTHFULLY YOURS

Despite the fact that North Korea proclaimed that war with the United States is “imminent,” the world probably won’t explode next week. Then again, it might.

By all reports, Pacific Command commander Admiral Harry Harris is a cool-headed warrior, not someone given to shouting that the sky is falling. (A Japanese-American, his appointment as PACOM boss unsettled the Chinese.) A friend of mine who knew Harris very well during their days at the Naval Academy said he’s “as straight a shooter as you can get.”)

Testifying to Congress last week about North Korea’s ability to strike the United States with a nuclear-armed ballistic missile, Harris said, “The crisis on the Korean peninsula is real — the worst I’ve seen.… There is some doubt within the intelligence community whether Kim Jong Un has that capability today or whether he will soon, but I have to assume he has it, the capability is real, and that he’s moving towards it.” When a gent such as Harris says that it’s something we have to take seriously.

Harris went on to say that “Kim Jong Un is making progress and all nations need to take this seriously because their missiles point in all directions,” Harris said. “If left unchecked, they will match the capability of his hostile rhetoric.”

Military leaders have to measure an enemy by its intentions and capabilities. North Korea’s capabilities are being developed as fast as its scientists — and those from other nations — can propel it.

Remember A.Q. Khan? He is the Pakistani scientist who may be the world’s worst proliferator. He helped start the North Korean nuclear weapons program that has now come to fruition. The Norks’ sixth nuclear weapons test is expected any day. They may or may not be close to miniaturizing their warheads to fit in a missile’s fairings. They also may or may not be at the point where one of their warhead designs can survive the stresses of launch.

Whether they have reached those points or not, Adm. Harris assures us they probably will soon. That determines capability. What about intentions?

Anti-West, anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish diatribes were delivered to enthusiastic crowds of bearded men and veiled women. One hundred and fifty thousand people attended.

Emmanuel Macron promised to facilitate the construction of mosques in France. He declared that “French culture does not exist” and that he has “never seen” French art. The risk is high that Macron will disappoint the French even faster than Hollande did.

On the evening of the second round of elections, people will party in the chic neighborhoods of Paris and in ministries. In districts where poor people live, cars will be set on fire. For more than a decade, whenever there is a festive evening in France, cars are set on fire in districts where poor people live. Unassimilated migrants have their own traditions.

Paris, Champs Elysees, April 20, 8:50 pm. An Islamic terrorist shoots at a police van. One policeman is killed, another is seriously wounded.

The terrorist tries to escape and shoots again. The policemen kill him. One hour later, the French Ministry of Interior reveals his name and his past. His name is Karim Cheurfi. He is a French Muslim born in an Islamized suburb of France. In 2003, he was sentenced to twenty years in prison for the attempted murder of two policemen. He was released before the end of his sentence. In 2014, he targeted a policeman and was sentenced again. And released again. In March, the police were informed that he was trying to buy military-grade weapons and that he contacted a member of the Islamic State in Syria. An inspector discovered that he had posted messages on jihadist social media networks expressing his willingness to murder policemen. The police searched his home and found several weapons and a GoPro video camera similar to the one terrorists use to film their crimes. The police and members of the French justice system did not think they had sufficient evidence place him under surveillance.

The Champs Elysées attack clearly shows that the French justice system is lax regarding dangerous people and that the French police pay only limited attention to suspects who are communicate with terrorist organizations and who seem to be hatching terrorist projects.

This terrorist attack summarizes everything that is broken in terms of security in France today.

Men with a profile similar to that of Karim Cheurfi have, in recent years, been responsible for most of the terrorist attacks in France and Belgium: Mohamed Merah, who killed three Jewish children and the father of two of them in Toulouse in 2012; Mehdi Nemmouche, who attacked the Brussels Jewish Museum in 2014 ; the Kouachi brothers, who committed the Charlie Hebdo massacre in 2015; Amedy Coulibaly, who murdered four Jews in the Saint Mandé grocery Kosher store Hypercacher; Samy Amimour and others who maimed and murdered 130 innocent people in the Bataclan theater in November 2015; Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, who drove a truck into the crowd in Nice in July 2016, killed 86 people and wounded many others, and, among others, those who beheaded a priest in Normandy a few weeks after the attack in Nice.

The successive French governments under the presidency of François Hollande showed themselves to be appallingly weak and impotent.

“Be careful, be very careful. What has happened here will come to you.” — An elderly priest in Iraq, to Father Benedict Kiely.

Last year, more than 90,000 people chose to drop out of the Church of Sweden — almost twice as many as the year before. Meanwhile, in one year, 163,000 migrants, most of them Muslim, entered the country.

“Shouldn’t the issue of Middle Eastern Christians wake up European civilization to its core identity? Shouldn’t we in Europe and the West be telling ourselves that these attacks are also aimed at us?” — Mathieu Bock-Côté, in Le Figaro.

“I fear we are approaching a situation resembling the tragic fate of Christianity in Northern Africa in Islam’s early days”, a Lutheran bishop, Jobst Schoene, warned a few years ago.

In ancient times, Algeria and Tunisia, entirely Christian, gave us great thinkers such as Tertullian and Augustine. Two centuries later, Christianity has disappeared, replaced by Arab-Islamic civilization.

Is Europe now meeting the same fate?

In the Middle East, “Christianity is over in Iraq” due to Islamic extremism; in Europe, Christianity is committing suicide.

Within 20 years, more babies will be born to Muslim women than to Christian women world-wide; it is just the latest sign of the rapid growth that seems to be making Islam the world’s largest religion by the end of the century, according to a new study released by the Pew Research Center.

“Christianity is literally dying in Europe,” said Conrad Hackett, the head of the researchers who worked on the Pew report.

According to it, between 2010 and 2015, the Muslim population increased by more than 150 million people to 1.8 billion.

In Europe, how many Christians have been “lost”? Between 2010 and 2015, “deaths outnumbered births by nearly 6 million during this brief period”.

At this pace, Christianity will vanish in Europe.

In the same time frame, in most European countries — including Britain, Germany, Italy and Russia — Christian deaths outnumbered Christian births. “In Germany alone, for example, there were an estimated 1.4 million more Christian deaths than births between 2010 and 2015, a pattern that is expected to continue across much of Europe in the decades ahead”, Pew discovered. There are clear patterns of demographic trends, church attendance, closures of parishes and the declining number of priests.

These patterns are why Islamic leaders, such as Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, have been waging a demographic war against Europe. “Have not just three but five children”, Erdogan said to Muslims in the old continent. “You are the future of Europe”. This plan is called, in Islam, hijrah: expanding Islam by migration, based on Mohammad’s flight from Mecca to Medina in 622.

Christianity in Northern Europe has already been weakened by atheism, a trend possibly accelerated by modern gains in science and medicine. The American sociologist Phil Zuckerman, after spending more than a year in Scandinavia, published a book, Society Without God. Recently, after a nationwide advertising campaign by the Atheist Society thousands of people left the Church of Denmark. Norway’s state church lost more than 25,000 members in a month. Last year, more than 90,000 people chose to drop out of the Church of Sweden — almost twice as many as the year before. Meanwhile, in one year, 163,000 migrants, most of them Muslim, entered the country.

It wasn’t supposed to turn out this way. Venezuela was going to be a workers’ paradise. President Hugo Chávez said so and declared early into his first term, in 1999, that Venezuela and Cuba would sail toward the same “sea of happiness.” Not surprisingly, Venezuela is now a workers’ hell. Authoritarian and dysfunctional, the oil-rich yet impoverished South American nation of 31 million people suffers dire food shortages; soaring levels of violent crime (28,479 deaths reported last year); and epic levels of corruption and drug trafficking. Unemployment is soaring – not surprising given that large swaths of the economy have been nationalized. Venezuela’s court-ordered seizure of a General Motors plant is the latest such calamity.

Now Venezuelans are venting their anger like never before, and this includes protesters who were once the bedrock of Chávez’s political base – the poor. In recent weeks, tens of thousands of Venezuelans have staged massive anti-government protests that turned streets and highways into seas of humanity. Security forces and armed pro-government militias – Chavista enforcers riding motorcycles — have met the protesters with force: rubber bullets, tear gas, and deadly gunfire. More than 30 people have died and hundreds injured and arrested. Protesters are demanding fresh elections and the restoration of an independent parliament. Human rights watchdogs and neighboring countries are voicing concern over the unfolding crisis.

The protests are aimed at President Nicolás Maduro, the bus driver-turned politician who succeeded the late Hugo Chávez. Maduro has double downed on Chávez’s policies. Now he embodies all the traits of a dictator in an oil-producing country whose coffers hit rock bottom as oil prices tanked. Venezuela produces little for itself. It is dependent on oil. Petrodollars, however, can no longer pay for Venezuela’s traditional style of governance: statism and bread-and-circuses populism. Maduro, for his part, blames the chaos on an “economic war” being waged against him by Washington and Venezuelan elites.

Besides massive protests, a humanitarian crisis is unfolding as thousands of refugees from Venezuela flood into neighboring Brazil on a quest for food and medical care now unavailable to ordinary Venezuelans thanks to shortages created by Venezuela-style socialism. Yet amid the chaos, well-connected Venezuelans and officials are getting rich thanks to epic levels of corruption and drug trafficking. Tareck El Aissami, Venezuela’s vice president, is accused by U.S. authorities of being a drug “kingpin.”

Portents of the coming chaos were obvious (or should have been) months into Chávez’s first term 18 years ago, even if Washington turned a blind eye to it. First came Chávez’s words, his anti-Americanism and leftist rhetoric – words that some in the Clinton administration naively believed were mere bluster. They wanted to believe Chávez was a democratic reformer who would take on Venezuela’s endemic statism and corruption. But then came Chávez’s actions.