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BELGRADE, Serbia—Serbs voted Sunday in a presidential election that was a test of their prime minister’s authoritarian rule amid growing Russian influence in the Balkan region.

Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic, a former ultranationalist now a declared pro-European Union politician, is slated to win the presidency by a high margin against 10 opposition candidates, including a parody candidate who is mocking the country’s political establishment.

Mr. Vucic’s political clout could face a blow, however, if he doesn’t sweep his opponents in the first round of voting.

Mr. Vucic needs to win by more than 50% of the vote Sunday to avoid a runoff election on April 16 that would put him in a much trickier position against a single opposition candidate.

His main challengers in the vote include human-rights lawyer and former ombudsman Sasa Jankovic, former Foreign Minister Vuk Jeremic and firebrand nationalist and Mr. Vucic’s former mentor, Vojislav Seselj, who has been tried for war crimes.

The opposition has accused Mr. Vucic of muzzling the media and intimidating voters ahead of the election. Mr. Vucic denies such accusations, saying only he can bring stability to a region scarred by the wars of the 1990s, which Mr. Vucic had supported at the time.

“I really hope that with these elections, Serbia will carry on toward its further stability with full support of its government,” Mr. Vucic said as he cast his ballot. “I don’t know if I’ll win, but I truly hope that those who want to destabilize Serbia will not succeed.” CONTINUE AT SITE

One year ago today, Turkish President Recep Erdogan was in the Washington, D.C. area to open a new $100 million mosque complex funded by the Turkish government and operated by the Diyanet, Turkey’s religious affairs ministry.

Needless to say, the opening of the Diyanet complex received national and international media attention:But on the one-year anniversary of the opening of the Diyanet Center of America, questions about its true purpose are being raised. There are ongoing investigations by European officials into widespread spying allegations implicating Turkish government-funded Diyanet mosques across the continent — just like the one opened outside of Washington, D.C. The investigations center on whether the mosques are spying on behalf of the the Turkish intelligence service, the Milli Istihbarat Teskilati (MIT).

Yesterday I reported here at PJ Media on the investigations in Germany, where authorities have conducted raids targeting Diyanet imams and high-ranking officers of the Turkish-Islamic Union for Religious Affairs (DITIB), the official arm of the Diyanet in Germany.

In Germany there are 900 Diyanet mosques and 970 employees serving the three million German nationals of Turkish origin or Turkish citizens living there, representing 70 percent of the German Muslim community.

There, DITIB officials have recently admitted spying on behalf of Turkish intelligence.And it was reported yesterday that a German government probe of senior DITIB officials had been launched into the spying affair.

That is just the tip of the iceberg, however.

Spying affair investigations into Diyanet mosques and imams are reportedly ongoing in Belgium, Holland, Austria, France and Switzerland, and some Diyanet officials have returned to Turkey as the government probes in these countries continue.

In his 1941 review titled “No, Not One” of Alex Comfort’s novel No Such Liberty, George Orwell explains that the protagonist of the story is put before a tribunal because he has “declared that he will not fight against the Nazis, thinking it better to ‘overcome Hitler by love.'”

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. Notwithstanding the bestial attacks in Germany, the carnage against Christians throughout the world, the brutal rapes and assaults being propagated by jihadist “refugees,” the institution of child marriage throughout the Islamic world, the frightening increase in global anti-Semitism, and the censoring of free speech, it is clear that Orwell’s prescient essay needs to be reiterated as he asks that we “consider … facts which underlie the structure of modern society and which it is necessary to ignore if the pacifist ‘message’ is to be accepted uncritically.”

Orwell asserts that “civilisation rests ultimately on coercion. What holds society is not the policeman but the good will of common men, and yet that good will is powerless unless the policeman is there to back it up. Any government which refuse[s] to use violence in its own defence would cease almost immediately to exist[.]”

Yet we see Germany, France, and Sweden unraveling because the police have lost control as Muslim communities become no-go zones and law and order are abandoned. Soeren Kern describes the more “than 40 problem areas” (Problemviertel) across Germany. These are areas where “large concentrations of migrants, high levels of unemployment, and chronic welfare dependency, combined with urban decay, have become incubators for anarchy.” In fact, “the problem of no-go zones is especially acute in North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW), Germany’s most populous state.”

Speaking of the Nazi scourge, Orwell maintains that “since pacifists have more freedom of action in countries where traces of democracy survive, pacifism can act more effectively against democracy than for it.”

Fast-forward to the jihadist scourge that besets the world today. Does not pacifism, by default, become pro-jihadist? Shall we call it pacifism of the soul that the Netherlands finds a courageous man like Geert Wilders guilty of free speech for pointing out the dangers of the Muslim immigration?

Orwell also takes great issue with the “calculated campaign of deception” of news media and asserts that “no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper.” He emphasizes that it gives him “the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. After all, the chances are that those lies, or at any rate similar lies, will pass into history.” Echoes of fake news, indeed!

Trudging around the ruined Church of St. Addai, in the empty Christian town of Karemlash, I saw clearly where radical Islamic extremism leads. This was only days before the attack on Westminster in London on March 22. With broken glass underfoot and the walls of the Church blackened after ISIS firebombed it, perhaps the most powerful symbol I came across in Karemlash was the defaced Cross. Everywhere, in all the churches and monasteries I visited, the Cross was defaced, scratched out, broken, or pierced with bullet holes.

ISIS had spray-painted the message “the Cross will be broken” on the walls of the rectory, and the pastor’s office door was booby-trapped, to kill him when he returned. As I walked around the Christian cemetery, it was clear to me that the followers of the Prophet had dug up the Christian graves. In one instance, I was told, they had beheaded one of the corpses. In the sacristy of the church, they had dug up the grave of one of the priests and thrown his body away. Even in death, the persecuted Christians of Iraq were not safe.

Surveying the horror and the eerily silent town, punctuated only by the distant thump of explosions in Mosul, nine miles away, I asked Father Thabet, the Chaldean Catholic priest who serves as pastor of St. Addai, whether all this destruction represented real Islam. “Yes,” he answered strongly, without a moment’s hesitation. “You wouldn’t be allowed to say that it the West,” I said smiling. He didn’t smile back.

Karemlash, a town of nearly 10,000 people, had been almost 100 percent Christian for centuries. The Iraqi Christian Church, both Catholic and Orthodox, traces its roots back to disciples of Jesus, sent out under the direction of the Apostles. For ill-educated Westerners, who imagine missionaries brought the Christian faith to the Middle East sometime last century, it can come as a bit of a shock to discover that the very opposite is the case. During the awful days of August 2014, as the Islamic State surged across the Nineveh Plain, the ancient Christian heartland of Iraq, the citizens of Karemlash fled, with only the clothes they were wearing.

Now, nearly three years later, the towns are “liberated,” but the houses that were not blown up are burned out and filled with booby traps. A few citizens have been returning, briefly, to check the condition of their houses — very few at the moment, as it is necessary to negotiate multiple checkpoints manned by local militias as well as by the Iraqi army and Kurdish peshmerga. Unfortunately, some of these people are likely to be killed or maimed, because so far no one has removed the multiple booby traps. ISIS has been wickedly ingenious, putting devices even in television remote controls and vacuum cleaners.