RUTHFULLY YOURS

In 1995 Congress tried to force the United Nations to reform by refusing to pay America’s dues. The effort was worthy, but it failed. The U.N. made no real changes and quickly went back to its cynical and corrupt ways. Some in Congress have suggested a repeat in an effort to force the Security Council to revoke the anti-Israel resolution it approved last month.

Instead, the Trump administration could use a far more effective tactic: the veto. The U.N. charter gives the U.S. the ability to paralyze the international body. Why not use it? Since U.N. peacekeeping operations must be renewed periodically by Security Council vote, they would be a good place to start.

New York Post Columnist Benny Avni on Secretary General Antonio Guterres and Donald Trump’s call for U.N. reform. Photo credit: Getty Images.

In 1979 President Carter negotiated the Camp David agreement between Israel and Egypt. The U.N. refused to support a peacekeeping operation in Sinai, so America, Israel and Egypt established the Multinational Force and Observers, which still patrols the region. Its soldiers aren’t allowed to wear the blue berets associated with ordinary U.N. peacekeepers, so they are issued orange ones.

Mr. Trump could easily follow this precedent and instruct U.N. Ambassador-designate Nikki Haley to veto the renewal of all current peacekeeping operations. That would save the U.S. Treasury some of the roughly $2 billion a year it pays in assessed dues for the peacekeeping budget. Countries that support peacekeeping operations in places like Mali, South Sudan, Kashmir and the Central African Republic would either have to pay for them, as the U.S. has done in Sinai, or abandon them. CONTINUE AT SITE

BRUSSELS—Belgian police had numerous chances to unmask the Islamic State terror cell that later carried out the Paris and Brussels attacks, according to a confidential report prepared for Belgium’s Parliament. They muffed every one.

In early 2015, Brussels police stopped a car driven by Brahim Abdeslam, later one of the Paris attackers, and arrested him for drug possession. At the time, Brahim was on a terror watch list. He carried a booklet about “parental consent for the Jihad.” Police found a USB thumb drive hidden behind his car radio.

He was let go after brief questioning. Authorities failed to analyze the thumb drive or other electronics seized after the drug stop from an apartment Brahim shared with his younger brother, also involved in the attacks, Salah Abdeslam. Another unnoticed detail: The email address the suspect supplied, s_orry@hotmail.com, was a fake.

The incident, details of which haven’t been previously reported, is outlined in the parliamentary report prepared by Comité P, a watchdog agency of former police and judicial officials auditing the work of Belgian police in the wake of the twin attacks. The 82-page report, reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, was finalized in September and hasn’t been made public.

European police have foiled many would-be terrorists in recent years. In many of the major attacks that did occur, the terrorists’ radical leanings were well known to police, who failed to halt them in time.

In the wake of the attack in Nice, there should have been a fulsome public discussion over what if anything can be done to ensure that people who have been in France for many years — in some cases their entire lives — are not indoctrinated to hate the country so much that they drive a truck through a crowded sea-front on Bastille Day.

Or there could have been a wide public debate over whether, with so many radicalised Muslims already in France, it was a wise or foolish idea to continue to import large numbers of Muslims into this already simmering situation.

Merkel seems to hope that with this raising of a burka ban the German public will forgive or forget the fact that here is a political leader so devoid of foresight that she unilaterally chose to allow an extra 1-2% of the population to be added to her country in a single year, mainly Muslim, mainly male and mainly young.

The burka and burkini, like the headscarf, are only issues because millions of people have been allowed, unchecked, into Europe for years. The garment is merely the simplest issue at which to take aim. Far harder are the issues of immigration and integration. It is possible that Europe’s politicians cannot answer these questions, because any and all answers would point the finger at their own failings.

The European publics might get fed up with the distraction tactics of talking about garments and instead seek answers to the challenge we now face, as well as retribution at the polls for the politicians who brought us here.

2016 was a fine year for Islamist terrorism and an even finer year for Western political distraction. While Islamic terrorists repeatedly succeeded in carrying out mass-casualty terrorist attacks, as well as a constant run of smaller-scale strikes, the political leadership of the free world continued to try to divert their public.

The most striking example of the year came in the summer with the French debate over whether or not to ban the “burkini” from the beaches of France. The row erupted in the days after another 86 people were murdered in a jihadist terrorist assault — this time in Nice, France. With no one sure how to prevent access to vehicles or any idea how many French Muslims might want to follow suit, the French media and authorities chose to debate an item of beachwear. The carefully staged decision by an Australian Muslim woman to have herself filmed while wearing a burkini on a French beach ignited the row, which was eagerly seized upon by politicians.

At the local and national level, the decision to discuss the burkini allowed all the larger political issues behind Europe’s growing security problem to be ignored. In the wake of Nice, there should have been a fulsome public discussion over what if anything can be done to ensure that people who have been in France for many years — in some cases their entire lives — are not indoctrinated to hate the country so much that they drive a truck through a crowded sea-front on Bastille Day. Or there could have been a wide public debate over whether, with so many radicalised Muslims already in France, it was a wise or foolish idea to continue to import large numbers of Muslims into this already simmering situation.

As it was, neither of these debates did occur, and no meaningful political action was taken. Instead, the issue of the burkini sucked all the oxygen out of the debate, leaving no room to discuss anything more serious or longer term than beachwear.

Last July, for the first time during a Mass in Italy, a verse of the Koran was recited from the altar.

A priest in the south of Italy enraged parishioners by dressing the Virgin Mary in a Muslim burqa for his church’s Christmas Nativity scene. These interfaith initiatives are based on the gradual elimination of the Western-Christian heritage in favor of Islam.

The Catholic clergy is probably disoriented by Pope Francis himself; he was the first to allow the reading of Islamic prayers and Koran readings from the Vatican.

The Pope embraced religious relativism when it comes with Islam. He repeated that Islamist violence is the work of “a small group of fundamentalists” who, according to him, have nothing to do with Islam.

Church of England Bishop Harries suggested that Prince Charles’s coronation service should be opened with a Koran reading. In the US, more than 50 churches, including the Washington National Cathedral, hold Koran readings. Is there any reading of the Christian liturgy in mosques?

How is it that so few Christian leaders have raised their voices against this unprecedented attack on a Christian monument? Have they organized so many Koran readings in their own churches so that they now view it as normal to convert a church into a mosque?

Would it not be better for the Catholic Church to establish a real dialogue with the Islamic communities based on principles such as reciprocity (if you build mosques in Europe, we build churches in the Middle East), protection of Christian minorities in the Crescent and theological repudiation of jihad against “infidels”?

There is a disturbing and growing trend in Italy and Europe.