RUTHFULLY YOURS

How can you explain why Germany, which in the 20th century had such a gigantic anti-Semitism problem, would import so many people from those areas of the world which now have the same gigantic anti-Semitism problem?

The police water cannons were not in evidence on New Year’s Eve to break up the migrant gangs committing violent crimes against women. Instead they were used to break up a lawful demonstration of people opposed to such violent attacks on women.

The late Robert Conquest once laid out a set of three political rules, the last of which read, “The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.” This rule comes in handy when trying to understand the otherwise clearly insane and suicidal policies of Chancellor Merkel’s government in Germany. These policies only make sense if the German government has in fact been taken over by a cabal of people intent not on holding Germany together but on pulling it entirely apart. Consider the evidence.

Muslims had the habit of slaughtering “infidel” Muslims for centuries when there was not a country called Syria or any “Islamophobia.”

The main lack of logic seems to be that innocent people are attacked repeatedly by Muslims, so they become suspicious of Muslims; this suspicion is then called Islamophobia — but it does not come out of thin air.

President Erdogan is explicitly saying that even non-terrorist Muslims have the potential to become terrorists if they happen to feel offended. So easily?

Pro-Sunni supremacists, such as the Turkish president and his top cleric, do not understand that cartoons do not kill people. But some of their friends do kill people.

There is hardly anything surprising in the way Turkey’s Islamist leaders and their officials in the clergy diagnose jihadist terror: Blame it on everyone except the terrorists. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the inventor of the theory that “there is no Islamic terror,” recently warned that “rising racism and enmity against Islam in Europe[an] and other countries” will cause great tragedies — like the Paris attacks.

TransCanada took Uncle Sam to court last week to reclaim some of the damage done by the Obama Administration’s multiyear, drawn-out rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline. It may not come up in the litigation, but someone should point out that the same Obama Administration that rejected Keystone seems to have no problem supporting a new oil pipeline project in Africa.

That was the story last week out of Kenya, where U.S. Ambassador Robert Godec told Kenya’s energy minister that Washington would help Nairobi raise $18 billion to finance its PowerAfrika project. The pipeline would stretch from Kenya’s Rift Valley to Lamu on the coast. “Kenya needs $18 billion worth of financing,” Mr. Godec said, according to a dispatch in Oilprice.com, “so one of the questions we are discussing is how we can work together with the private sector and governments to raise that sum, to find ways to make certain that this financing becomes available.”

Has Mr. Godec checked with Secretary of State John Kerry, or, perhaps more important, anti-oil Democratic financier Tom Steyer? Kenya and Northeast Africa could certainly use the investment and jobs that would come from the oil project. Then again, so could the United States. What’s with the double standard on pipelines?

PARIS—Europe needs to beef up its border controls to prevent Islamic State from using authentic-looking Syrian and Iraqi passports to smuggle its operatives into the region amid the mass of refugees fleeing conflict in the Middle East, French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said Sunday.

Mr. Cazeneuve said he plans to discuss the issue with officials in Brussels before European interior ministers meet in Amsterdam later this month.

Mr. Cazeneuve’s remarks are part of a rush by European security authorities to respond to the threat that Islamic State can make Syrian and Iraqi passports that are indistinguishable from the real thing. Officials believe the group has obtained thousands of blank Syrian and Iraqi passports, plus equipment used by those governments to print the documents. Mr. Cazeneuve said several of the Islamic State operatives who killed 130 in the Paris attacks on Nov. 13 used false passports to slip into Europe undetected.

“It’s a central question,” he said in an interview with French media. “It’s a phenomenon that will continue if we are not able to halt it.”

Officials say Islamic State likely obtained those materials when it overran the cities of Raqqa and Deir Ezzour in Syria and Mosul in Iraq. Without reliable lines of communication open, particularly to the Syrian government, Western officials have little clarity on what passport numbers are linked to stolen passport books containing fraudulent identities.

You’d think that North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un wouldn’t have a friend in the world these days. His relentless pursuit of weapons of mass destruction and willingness to starve his own people is evil madness. Last week even communist China condemned the supreme leader’s fourth nuclear test, which the chubby little psychopath called “the thrilling sound of our first hydrogen bomb explosion.”

But Mr. Kim is not all alone. He still has the Caribbean’s Cosa Nostra—aka the Castro family—as a friend and ally. The Cold War may be long over, but Cuba is sticking by the North Korean pariah.

This bond exposes Americans to grave risk. Analysts fret that Pyongyang is developing missiles and miniaturized warheads that will allow it to lob a bomb into the continental U.S. But having a desperate ideological pal 90 miles from U.S. shores magnifies the danger. In the past 21/2 years Cuba has tried to smuggle weapons to Pyongyang, engaged in high-level meetings with North Korean officials, and secured U.S. military technology. Anybody want to connect the dots?