RUTHFULLY YOURS

“It is best to wait outside. There are men in here… In this café, there is no diversity.” — Male customer in a café in Sevran, on France 2 television.

“In this café, there is no mixing. We are in Sevran, not Paris. Here there is a different mentality. It is like back home.” ­ — Another male customer in a café in Sevran, on France 2 television.

Women seem “to have been erased”, from the cafés and the streets. “So now to avoid threats, and being put under pressure, they censor themselves and keep quiet.” — Caroline Sinz, journalist, France 2 television.

This Islamization has been fueled and strengthened by Qatar’s heavy investments — particularly in mosques — in France, which currently stand at around $22 billion.

“There is a misplaced form of morality, often exercised by minority groups over a majority, which leads to the fact that the public space, supposedly belonging to both men and women, is restricted from women.” — Pascale Boistard, former French Minister for Women’s Rights

French ministers feign surprise and outrage that women in these suburbs have finally succumbed to the incessant terror against them and are disappearing from the streets.

Women have literally disappeared from cafés and bars in certain predominantly Muslim suburbs in France, according to recently aired undercover footage from the France 2 television channel. The footage featured two women activists, Nadia Remadna and Aziza Sayah, from the women’s rights campaign group, La Brigade des Mères (Brigade of Mothers), entering a café in the Paris suburb of Sevran, where they were met with surprise and hostility from the all-male customers. One told them: “It is best to wait outside. There are men in here… In this café, there is no diversity.”

Another customer told them: “In this café, there is no mixing. We are in Sevran, not Paris. Here there is a different mentality. It is like back home.”

Over the years we have often lamented the absence of grand-strategic thinking within the U.S. foreign-policy establishment. For the past quarter-century, successive administrations have displayed a chronic inability to deploy America’s political, military, economic, and moral resources in a balanced and proportionate manner, in order to protect and enhance the country’s rationally defined security and economic interests. Washington’s bipartisan, ideologically-driven obsession with global primacy (aka full-spectrum-dominance) has resulted in a series of diplomatic, military and moral disasters, costly in blood and treasure and detrimental to the American interest.

Donald Trump and his team have a historic opportunity to make a fresh start. The moment is somewhat comparable to the advent of Ronald Reagan’s first administration in January 1981: the global context is different, but the challenge of reestablishing a national-interest-based paradigm is not. Reagan used grandiloquent phrases at times (the Evil Empire), but in practice he was an instinctive foreign policy realist.

Likewise, Trump’s “America First” is not a triumphal slogan of exceptionalist grandomania jointly practiced by the Duopoly for the past quarter-century. It is a call for the return to realism based on the awareness that the United States needs to rediscover the value of transactional diplomacy aimed at promoting its security, prosperity, and cohesion in a Hobbesian world. In terms of any traditionally understood calculus of national security, America is the most invulnerable major power in the world: sheltered by oceans, and supremely capable to project her power to the distant shores. Unlike Russia, China, and India, America has no territorial disputes with her neighbors and her integrity is not threatened by ethnic or religious separatist forces. As I wrote in last month’s Chronicles,

Today’s America has the potential to be a satiated power, like Rome under the Five Good Emperors, Britain for many decades after Napoleon, or the German Kaiserreich until the 1890’s. That status did not imply those powers’ withdrawal from world affairs. Trajan, Castlereagh, and Bismarck were not isolationists; they were prudent fine-tuners of their external environment, always cognizant of proportionate costs in pursuit of limited objectives.

It’s been hard to keep track of all the acts of jihadist terror that have struck Western Europe in 2016, let alone the sundry smaller-scale atrocities – from gang rapes of children to stabbings of defenseless old women – that have been committed by Muslim men and boys. And then, of course, there’s the rise in dhimmitude that has accompanied all these developments – the public events scaled back or canceled, the churches that have removed crosses, and the other efforts on every imaginable front to appease the Prophet’s followers by gradually erasing Europe’s cultural traditions. From Bradford to Brussels, from Malmö to Marseilles, fear and anger have soared; in the face of a pusillanimous political establishment, more and more voters in a range of countries have been looking elsewhere for true leadership.

As 2016 ended, then, Western Europe’s current leaders had a lot to answer for. And because most of their countries have a tradition of broadcasting a brief year’s-end address by the head of state or government – which a remarkable number of Western Europeans are in the habit of watching – those leaders also had a golden opportunity to speak directly to their people about the events of the past year and about hopes and concerns for the year to come. So what did they have to say for themselves?

Speaking on New Year’s Eve, Angela Merkel got right down to business, stating at the outset that at present Germany’s #1 challenge is “undoubtedly Islamic terrorism.” Of all the leaders whose year-end speeches I read or watched, I’m pretty sure she was the only one who actually used the words “Islamic terrorism.” Full points for that. Alas, Angela was quick to proclaim that the way to oppose the terrorists’ hate was by turning the other cheek – and keeping the borders open. Echoing Hillary Clinton, she affirmed: “We’re stronger together.” François Hollande followed much the same formula, lamenting the year’s “terrible attacks” in Nice and elsewhere but saying that while the terrorists “wanted to divide” France, the French people had refused to engage in “stigmatization” and shown that they were (guess what?) “stronger together.” Hollande closed with a warning: if Marine Le Pen’s National Front wins this year’s election, France will “no longer be French.” Hey, look around you, M. Hollande: thanks to you and your crowd, France is becoming less and less French every day.

Then there were the European royals, whose speeches were likely written (or at least vetted) by their respective governments but who do have some personal leeway in deciding what to say. These are people whose job it is to serve as living symbols of their respective nations and of those nations’ histories, cultures, and values. And what did they have to say in this time of deepening anxiety?

Most admirable, perhaps, was Queen Elizabeth, who, speaking on Christmas Day, actually mentioned Jesus Christ and described herself unashamedly as a follower of Christ “because Christ’s example helps me see the value of doing small things with great love.” Of course the Queen is famously tight-lipped – and, in any case, no Prime Minister would ever let her openly express apprehension about the Religion of Peace – but she managed to communicate something important, I think, simply by referencing her personal religious belief and reminding viewers of her role as Head of the Church.