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Car rams police van on Champs-Elysees, armed suspect dead

Posted By on June 19th, 2017

A man previously known to French authorities for radicalism has rammed his car into a bus filled with police on the iconic Champs-Élysées in the heart of Paris this afternoon.

Paris (CNN)Tourists strolling along Paris’ famous Champs-Elysees on Monday afternoon watched in horror as a car rammed into a police van — and some witnessed the car burst into flames as police grabbed the man inside and put him on the ground.
The armed driver deliberately plowed into the police vehicle and later died, authorities said.

“We were waiting to cross the street and suddenly heard an explosion and the car was in flames,” said Eugenio Morcilla, who captured video after the collision. “The police acted very quickly.”
It’s the latest in a series of terror attacks this year against security forces in the French capital. The Paris prosecutor’s office has opened an anti-terror investigation.

“Once again, France’s security forces have been targeted in an attempted attack on the Champs-Elysées,” Interior Minister Gerard Collomb told reporters on Monday.
According to CNN affiliate BFMTV, the driver was under what is known as a “Fiche S” file, a French terror/radicalization watch list composed of thousands of names, of which some are under active surveillance. Active surveillance means that they are on law enforcement’s radar, not necessarily under rigorous surveillance.

The incident, which took place at 3:40 p.m. local time (9:40 a.m. ET), began when a police squadron drove down the Champs-Elysses and an individual hit the first vehicle of the squad.
“The car contained weapons, explosives, enough to allow him to blow up this car,” Collomb said.

The small white car caught on fire after the collision, but neither officers nor members of the public were hurt, an Interior Ministry spokesman said.
Morcilla, who was in Paris on vacation with his girlfriend, took video of the aftermath of the attack.

“They got out of a police truck and tried to break the glass and take the man out, they shot and threw tear gas and they took him out by force…” he said.
Security forces were working to identify the weapons in the vehicle, and they are investigating “the individual’s past and see what motives pushed him to take action,” Collomb said.
“This shows once again that the threat level in France is extremely high,” the interior minister said.

— In March, a man holding a gun on a French female soldier at Orly Airport shouted, “I am here to die in the name of Allah … There will be deaths,” before two of the soldier’s comrades shot the attacker dead.

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Scalise attack was ‘to some degree self-inflicted’ claims CBS’s Scott Pelley By Tom Blumer

Posted By on June 19th, 2017

Thursday evening, CBS’s Scott Pelley, who officially ended his tenure as the network’s Evening News anchor the following evening, told viewers that “It’s time to ask whether the attack on the United States Congress Wednesday was foreseeable, predictable and, to some degree, self-inflicted.”

It’s clear from Pelley’s subsequent commentary that his answers to all three elements are “Yes.” It’s equally clear from the examples he supplied as support that he sees (or wants viewers to see) the problem as predominantly about the conduct of those on the right.

Transcript below:

It’s time to ask whether the attack on the United States Congress, yesterday, was foreseeable, predictable and, to some degree, self-inflicted.

Too many leaders, and political commentators, who set an example for us to follow, have led us into an abyss of violent rhetoric which, it should be no surprise, has led to violence.

Yesterday was not the first time.

In December last year, a man with an assault rifle stormed into a Washington-area pizzeria to free child sex slaves whom Hillary Clinton was holding there — or at least that’s what political blog sites had said. He fired into a locked door to discover no children in chains.

Sen. Bernie Sanders has called the president the “most dangerous in history.” The shooter yesterday was a Sanders volunteer.

You might think that no sane person would act on political hate speech, and you’d be right. Trouble is, there are a lot of Americans who struggle with mental illness.

In February, the president tweeted that the news media were the “enemy of the American people”:

The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @NBCNews, @ABC, @CBS, @CNN) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 17, 2017

Later, at a lunch for reporters, President Trump was asked whether he worried that language would incite violence. His pause indicated it had never crossed his mind. Then he said, “No, that doesn’t worry me.”

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If The Left Wins Their Soft Coup, Everyone Loses – But Mostly Them by Kurt Schlichter

Posted By on June 19th, 2017

You have to wonder how liberals think this works. So, a manifestly conflicted special counsel leading a pack of maxed-out Democrat donors decides Donald Trump has to be kicked out of office for “obstructing justice” regarding a cynical lie about him cavorting with the Kremlin and…then what? President Pence, until they do the same thing to him? Or do we just skip right to President Felonia von Pantsuit, shrug our shoulders, and give up on our foolish dream of having a say in our own governance?

Straightforward from here is…chaos.

Because normal Americans are woke to the scam. No, the affidavits of a zillion DC/NY establishment types attesting to Robert Mueller’s impeccable integrity – ever notice how the guy trying to hose us always has the establishment’s “impeccable integrity” merit badge – are not going to make us unsee the fact that he’s carrying water for an establishment that thinks we need to just shut up and obey.

Now, pulling off the soft coup is going to be harder than they think. The establishment has not thought this out. They sort of assume that if they squelch Trump then everything somehow just goes back to them being in unchallenged control. Wrong.

Mueller can’t indict Trump – that stupid Constitution, always getting in the way! No, the goal is for Mueller and his crack team of committed liberal activist lawyers to generate some head-shaking, tsk-tsk, more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger, report claiming Trump “obstructed” the probe into Hillary’s Trump/Russia collusion lie that even the liberals reluctantly acknowledge never happened.

But their problem is that impeachment is a purely political act – this isn’t going to get tried before some leftist DC judge and a 96% Democrat DC jury. No, they have to convince the Republican members of the House of Representatives to impeach and, well, have you taken a look at a political map of the US lately? It’s as red as a baseball field full of conservatives after a Bernie Bro shows up with a rifle.

Now, in the circle of jerks that is DC, congressmen are bombarded with the Trump obstruction narrative. Many neutered professional conservatives, eager to return to the old status quo where they sort-of mattered, are helping our enemies. Some of these congressmen are themselves Fredocons, weak and stupid, and are listening. Some might be swayed – except in a couple weeks they have to go home and be around normal people, and they’re going to hear something completely different.

Normal people aren’t falling for it.

Has anyone out there actually met a Trump voter who said something like this?

I supported Trump, but now I don’t because his refusal to passively sit back and let a Washington insider with an obvious conflict of interest and his Democrat staff drive him out of office on the basis of a Hillary-driven lie far outweighs Neil Gorsuch, pulling out of the climate scam, beating ISIS, and repealing Obamacare.

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Tripping Up Trump #MAGA or #NeverTrump, nobody should be comfortable with how federal criminal investigations work. By Ken White

Posted By on June 19th, 2017

At six in the morning, a man is startled awake by an insistent pounding on his front door. He opens it to find armed government agents. One group of them begins to ransack the man’s home. Two others take him outside and put him into the back seat of a nondescript government vehicle. One of the armed government agents sits on either side of him, trapping him. As he sits, blinking and confused in his pajamas, they begin to bark questions at him. Was he at a particular meeting, on a particular date, with a political figure who is under suspicion of wrongdoing? The man, confused and afraid and thoroughly intimidated, makes a bad choice — he answers, and he lies. He says he was not at the meeting. The armed government agents smile. They already have witnesses placing the man at the meeting. They already have a recording of the man at the meeting. His lie does not deter, mislead, or even mildly inconvenience them. But now they have him, whether or not he’s done anything wrong before — now he’s lied to the government, a serious crime.

That scenario is not from some totalitarian foreign country or some fictional dystopia. It’s from America, here and now. It happened just like that to one of my clients, interrogated at dawn by the FBI. It represents the vast power of law enforcement — especially federal law enforcement — to turn investigations of crimes into schemes to produce new crimes.

Federal criminal investigative power is in the news as President Trump and his associates face an investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Reports — and some ill-considered tweets by the president — suggest that Mueller’s focus may be not just Russian shenanigans but obstruction of the investigation into the same. Trump supporters are enraged; some Trump detractors are delighted. Nobody should be comfortable, unless they are at ease with vast and flexible law-enforcement power over citizens, especially controversial ones. Our system gives federal prosecutors and investigators — from locals across the country to the rare and elite like Mueller — extraordinary power to turn Americans’ lives upside down and prosecute not just prior crimes but any very common and human missteps their frightened targets make in reaction to the investigation.

Commentators are expressing shock — and in many cases pleasure — that President Trump and his associates could face criminal exposure not for original wrongdoing but for their reaction to accusations of wrongdoing. Nobody who has paid attention to American criminal justice for the last generation should be shocked. It is routine — mundane, even — for federal investigators to convict people not for the subject of the investigation but for how they reacted to it.

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The London Mosque Attack: Anti-Muslim Hatred, Not ‘Islamophobia’

Posted By on June 19th, 2017

British police have now identified the man who plowed a van into a crowd of British Muslims exiting the Finsbury mosque in London at midnight as 47-year-old Darren Osborne. Osborne, a Welsh father of four, killed one person and injured at least ten. Media coverage of the atrocity is refreshingly — if calculatedly — free of the usual temporizing about motive: Osborne was out to mass-murder Muslims. He saw himself as a one-man retaliation squad for attacks on British crowds by radical Muslims using the same car-ramming tactic.

The good news, at least for now, is that he really does appear to have been a lone wolf. As with any of these situations, we should hesitate to draw conclusions about the perpetrator’s background and associates at this early stage of the investigation. What we can say confidently is that the leaders of the mosque appear to have performed heroically: detaining but shielding Osborne from potential retaliatory violence until the police could arrive; tending quickly to the victims.

A couple of observations.

First, this attack is being unanimously condemned, across British society and beyond. The notion that street violence is the answer to street violence is rejected, and there will be no attempt to rationalize the savagery as an excess in a righteous cause. Osborne will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. The story tomorrow, just as today, will be his attempt to carry out mass-murder, not anxiety over potential “blowback” attacks against non-Muslims. Would that all terrorist attacks were regarded this way.

Second, too many people are falling into the error of echoing the claim that attack was “motivated by Islamophobia.” Not surprisingly, this allegation was instantly made by Harun Khan, general secretary of the Muslim Council of Britain. The MCB purports to be the face of “moderate Islam” in the U.K., notwithstanding its close ties to such sharia supremacist organizations as Jamaat-i-Islami and the Muslim Brotherhood. As we’ve discussed many times, “Islamophobia” is a smear label dreamed up by the Muslim Brotherhood, designed to demagogue any legitimate concern about Islamic doctrine as irrational fear and, of course, as racism.

The man who carried out the mosque attack is not an “Islamophobe.” He is a vile specimen of anti-Muslim hatred. His hatred does not render Islamophobia real. It does not convert into hysteria our worries that a sizable percentage of Muslims — for reasons that are easily knowable if one simply reads scripture and listens to renowned sharia jurists — construes Islam to endorse violence against non-Muslims and to command the imposition of oppressive sharia.

We must be of one voice in condemning Osborne’s attack, and urging that he be swiftly tried and severely punished. But we must not allow righteous outrage over the attack to dupe us into adopting the Muslim Brotherhood’s false “Islamophobia” narrative.

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A Tweet Is Just a Tweet: It Tells Us Nothing about Whether Trump Is Under Investigation By Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted By on June 19th, 2017

Can we all stipulate that no one ever wants to be the subject of an investigation? If you are innocent of wrongdoing, the fact that there is no meritorious criminal case is often beside the point.

There is a stigma attached to being an investigative subject. Many people who do not appreciate how politicized the legal system has become will conclude that if you are under investigation, you must have done something wrong. Some other people who know precisely how politicized the legal system has become, and like it that way, will exploit the fact that you are under investigation to stigmatize you. Public perception aside, being the subject of an investigation is also debilitating because of the time it takes to defend oneself, the financial burden of retaining lawyers (and, for a public official, retaining press agents who can deal with the media frenzy), and the anxiety that makes it difficult to focus on one’s job and other responsibilities.

President Trump is now in the grip of this situation. This weekend, it produced some of the more excruciating news coverage in recent memory as one of his lawyers, Jay Sekulow, was tendentiously grilled on the question of whether the president has conceded that he is under investigation.

Like many Trump problems, this one was caused by a Trump tweet. Foolishly allowing himself to be baited by a Washington Post report that special counsel Robert Mueller is now weighing whether the president committed an obstruction crime, Trump tweeted: “I am being investigated for firing the FBI Director by the man who told me to fire the FBI Director! Witch Hunt[.]”

Clearly, Trump is exasperated over what he sees as much ado about nothing. Constitutionally, the president does not need a reason to fire the FBI director, who — like every unelected subordinate official in the executive branch — serves at the president’s pleasure. Before Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, Rod Rosenstein, the Trump-appointed deputy attorney general, wrote a memorandum recommending that Comey be dismissed. In the subsequent furor over Comey’s dismissal — largely stoked by Trump’s conflicting reasons for firing the director, which first adopted but then parted company with Rosenstein’s memo — Rosenstein appointed Mueller as special counsel. In that role, Mueller is not independent — he answers to Rosenstein (because Jeff Sessions, the attorney general, is recused). So technically, Trump is correct: The man who wrote the memo endorsing Comey’s removal has authorized an investigation that is reportedly probing whether that removal somehow constituted a felony.

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Straight talk and Palestinian ‘intent’ By Shoshana Bryen

Posted By on June 19th, 2017

President Donald Trump’s straight talk about veneration of violence in Palestinian society has had important consequences. It was the catalyst for Norway and Denmark to disassociate from the Palestinian Authority (P.A.) habit of naming public spaces for terrorists. UNRWA, the Red Crescent (UAE), and the U.N. secretary general have all denounced various terrorist behaviors of both Hamas and the P.A. Whether they did it from conviction or are just moving in the direction they believe the president of the United States wants them to go is almost irrelevant – they’re going there.

However, when it comes to what the P.A. itself says, caution and a heaping tablespoon of salt are required. The P.A. fears that a key source of foreign aid – the U.S. government – is finally fed up with Palestinian behavior, both incitement and payments, and may pull the plug. The House and Senate are considering the Taylor Force Act – which would require certification that the P.A.:

Is taking steps to end acts of violence against U.S. and Israeli citizens perpetrated by individuals under its jurisdictional control, such as the March 2016 attack that killed former Army officer Taylor Force;
Is publicly condemning such acts of violence and is investigating, or cooperating in investigations of, such acts; and
Has terminated payments for acts of terrorism against U.S. and Israeli citizens to any individual who has been convicted and imprisoned for such acts, to any individual who died committing such acts, and to family members of such an individual.

That’s good reason for them to worry, but the salt of skepticism was missing when U.S. secretary of state Rex Tillerson announced in a Senate hearing, “They [the P.A.] have changed that policy and their intent is to cease the payments to the families of those who have committed murder or violence against others. We have been very clear with them that this is simply not acceptable to us.”

He may have been clear, but Palestinian “intent” is a twisty, bendy thing, especially since the P.A. claimed that it had already stopped paying in 2014. If it stopped then, why does it have to “intend” to stop now?

Two months ago, I wrote for The Gatestone Institute:

Largely through the work of Palestinian Media Watch (PMW), the question of payments to terrorists and their families has come to the fore. Worried about foreign aid payments from the U.S. and the EU, in 2014 the Palestinian Authority claimed it stopped paying salaries and that future money would come from a new PLO Commission of Prisoner Affairs. However, PMW reported from Palestinian sources:

“The PLO Commission was new only in name. The PLO body would have the ‎same responsibilities and pay the exact same amounts of salaries to prisoners; the former P.A. Minister of Prisoners’ Affairs, Issa Karake, became the Director of the new ‎PLO Commission and P.A. Chairman Mahmoud Abbas retained overall supervision of ‎the PLO Commission.”

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Otto Warmbier, American student who was detained by North Korea, has died

Posted By on June 19th, 2017

June 19 (Reuters) – U.S. student Otto Warmbier, who was imprisoned in North Korea for 17 months before being returned home in a coma less than a week ago, has died in a Cincinnati hospital, his family said in a statement on Monday.

“Unfortunately, the awful torturous mistreatment our son received at the hands of the North Koreans ensured that no other outcome was possible beyond the sad one we experienced today,” the family said in a statement following Warmbier’s death at 2:20 p.m. EDT (1820 GMT) at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center.

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The 2016 Election and the Demise of Journalistic Standards Michael Goodwin *****

Posted By on June 19th, 2017

“Which brings me to the third necessary ingredient in determining where we go from here. It’s you. I urge you to support the media you like. As the great writer and thinker Midge Decter once put it, “You have to join the side you’re on.” It’s no secret that newspapers and magazines are losing readers and money and shedding staff. Some of them are good newspapers. Some of them are good magazines. There are also many wonderful, thoughtful, small publications and websites that exist on a shoestring. Don’t let them die. Subscribe or contribute to those you enjoy. Give subscriptions to friends. Put your money where your heart and mind are. An expanded media landscape that better reflects the diversity of public preferences would, in time, help create a more level political and cultural arena. That would be a great thing. So again I urge you: join the side you’re on.”

…..Ronald Reagan’s optimism is often expressed in a story that is surely apocryphal, but irresistible. He is said to have come across a barn full of horse manure and remarked cheerfully that there must be a pony in it somewhere. I suggest we look at the media landscape in a similar fashion. The mismatch between the mainstream media and the public’s sensibilities means there is a vast untapped market for news and views that are not now represented. To realize that potential, we only need three ingredients, and we already have them: first, free speech; second, capitalism and free markets; and the third ingredient is you, the consumers of news.

Free speech is under assault, most obviously on many college campuses, but also in the news media, which presents a conformist view to its audience and gets a politically segregated audience in return. Look at the letters section in The New York Times—virtually every reader who writes in agrees with the opinions of the paper. This isn’t a miracle; it’s a bubble. Liberals used to love to say, “I don’t agree with your opinion, but I would fight to the death for your right to express it.” You don’t hear that anymore from the Left. Now they want to shut you up if you don’t agree. And they are having some success.

But there is a countervailing force. Look at what happened this winter when the Left organized boycotts of department stores that carried Ivanka Trump’s clothing and jewelry. Nordstrom folded like a cheap suit, but Trump’s supporters rallied on social media and Ivanka’s company had its best month ever. This is the model I have in mind for the media. It is similar to how FOX News got started. Rupert Murdoch thought there was an untapped market for a more fair and balanced news channel, and he recruited Roger Ailes to start it more than 20 years ago. Ailes found a niche market alright—half the country!

Incredible advances in technology are also on the side of free speech. The explosion of choices makes it almost impossible to silence all dissent and gain a monopoly, though certainly Facebook and Google are trying.

As for the necessity of preserving capitalism, look around the world. Nations without economic liberty usually have little or no dissent. That’s not a coincidence. In this, I’m reminded of an enduring image from the Occupy Wall Street movement. That movement was a pestilence, egged on by President Obama and others who view other people’s wealth as a crime against the common good. This attitude was on vivid display as the protesters held up their iPhones to demand the end of capitalism. As I wrote at the time, did they believe Steve Jobs made each and every Apple product one at a time in his garage? Did they not have a clue about how capital markets make life better for more people than any other system known to man? They had no clue. And neither do many government officials, who think they can kill the golden goose and still get golden eggs.

Which brings me to the third necessary ingredient in determining where we go from here. It’s you. I urge you to support the media you like. As the great writer and thinker Midge Decter once put it, “You have to join the side you’re on.” It’s no secret that newspapers and magazines are losing readers and money and shedding staff. Some of them are good newspapers. Some of them are good magazines. There are also many wonderful, thoughtful, small publications and websites that exist on a shoestring. Don’t let them die. Subscribe or contribute to those you enjoy. Give subscriptions to friends. Put your money where your heart and mind are. An expanded media landscape that better reflects the diversity of public preferences would, in time, help create a more level political and cultural arena. That would be a great thing. So again I urge you: join the side you’re on.

As his rallies grew, the coverage grew, which made for an odd dynamic. The candidate nobody in the media took seriously was attracting the most people to his events and getting the most news coverage. Newspapers got in on the game too. Trump, unlike most of his opponents, was always available to the press, and could be counted on to say something outrageous or controversial that made a headline. He made news by being a spectacle.

Despite the mockery of journalists and late-night comics, something extraordinary was happening. Trump was dominating a campaign none of the smart money thought he could win. And then, suddenly, he was winning. Only when the crowded Republican field began to thin and Trump kept racking up primary and caucus victories did the media’s tone grow more serious.

One study estimated that Trump had received so much free airtime that if he had had to buy it, the price would have been $2 billion. The realization that they had helped Trump’s rise seemed to make many executives, producers, and journalists furious. By the time he secured the nomination and the general election rolled around, they were gunning for him. Only two people now had a chance to be president, and the overwhelming media consensus was that it could not be Donald Trump. They would make sure of that. The coverage of him grew so vicious and one-sided that last August I wrote a column on the unprecedented bias. Under the headline “American Journalism Is Collapsing Before Our Eyes,” I wrote that the so-called cream of the media crop was “engaged in a naked display of partisanship” designed to bury Trump and elect Hillary Clinton.

The evidence was on the front page, the back page, the culture pages, even the sports pages. It was at the top of the broadcast and at the bottom of the broadcast. Day in, day out, in every media market in America, Trump was savaged like no other candidate in memory. We were watching the total collapse of standards, with fairness and balance tossed overboard. Every story was an opinion masquerading as news, and every opinion ran in the same direction—toward Clinton and away from Trump.

For the most part, I blame The New York Times and The Washington Post for causing this breakdown. The two leading liberal newspapers were trying to top each other in their demonization of Trump and his supporters. They set the tone, and most of the rest of the media followed like lemmings.

On one level, tougher scrutiny of Trump was clearly defensible. He had a controversial career and lifestyle, and he was seeking the presidency as his first job in government. He also provided lots of fuel with some of his outrageous words and deeds during the campaign. But from the beginning there was also a second element to the lopsided coverage. The New York Times has not endorsed a Republican for president since Dwight Eisenhower in 1956, meaning it would back a dead raccoon if it had a “D” after its name. Think of it—George McGovern over Richard Nixon? Jimmy Carter over Ronald Reagan? Walter Mondale over Reagan? Any Democrat would do. And The Washington Post, which only started making editorial endorsements in the 1970s, has never once endorsed a Republican for president.

But again, I want to emphasize that 2016 had those predictable elements plus a whole new dimension. This time, the papers dropped the pretense of fairness and jumped headlong into the tank for one candidate over the other. The Times media reporter began a story this way:

If you’re a working journalist and you believe that Donald J. Trump is a demagogue playing to the nation’s worst racist and nationalist tendencies, that he cozies up to anti-American dictators and that he would be dangerous with control of the United States nuclear codes, how the heck are you supposed to cover him?

I read that paragraph and I thought to myself, well, that’s actually an easy question. If you feel that way about Trump, normal journalistic ethics would dictate that you shouldn’t cover him. You cannot be fair. And you shouldn’t be covering Hillary Clinton either, because you’ve already decided who should be president. Go cover sports or entertainment. Yet the Times media reporter rationalized the obvious bias he had just acknowledged, citing the view that Clinton was “normal” and Trump was not.

I found the whole concept appalling. What happened to fairness? What happened to standards? I’ll tell you what happened to them. The Times top editor, Dean Baquet, eliminated them. In an interview last October with the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, Baquet admitted that the piece by his media reporter had nailed his own thinking. Trump “challenged our language,” he said, and Trump “will have changed journalism.” Of the daily struggle for fairness, Baquet had this to say: “I think that Trump has ended that struggle. . . . We now say stuff. We fact check him. We write it more powerfully that [what he says is] false.”

Baquet was being too modest. Trump was challenging, sure, but it was Baquet who changed journalism. He’s the one who decided that the standards of fairness and nonpartisanship could be abandoned without consequence.

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Listen to Eastern Europe EU bureaucrats should hear the message loud and clear: Muslim migration waves are a pressing problem, and the public is fed up. By Michael Brendan Dougherty

Posted By on June 19th, 2017

The European Union announced this week that it would begin proceedings to punish Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic for their refusal to accept refugees and migrants under a 2015 scheme the E.U. commission created. The mission’s aim was to relieve Greece and Italy of the burden from migrant waves arriving from the Middle East and Africa, largely facilitated by European rescues of migrants in the Mediterranean.

The conflict between the EU and these three nations of the Visegrád Group is not just about the authority the EU can arrogate to itself when facing an emergency (one largely of its own making), but about the character of European government and society in the future. It is hard not to conclude that the dissenting countries are correct to dissent. Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia had voted against the 2015 agreement. Poland’s government had supported it then, but a subsequent election saw a new party come into power that rejected the scheme.

There is no doubt that Italy and Greece are under strain. This week the mayor of Rome, Virginia Raggi, pleaded with the Italian government to stop the inflow of people to her city. Raggi is a member of the Five Star Movement a Euroskeptic and anti-mass-migration association. Her election was a distress signal in itself, sent by the electorate. And Raggi has sent another such signal to Italy’s government, saying that it is “impossible, as well as risky to think up further accommodation structures.”

But the EU’s plan to impose sanctions on Eastern Europe has been met by unusually frank talk from dissenters there. Mariusz Błaszczak, the interior minister of Poland, said in an interview that taking in migrants would be worse than facing EU sanctions. “The security of Poland and the Poles is at risk” by taking in migrants, he said, “We mustn’t forget the terror attacks that have taken place in Western Europe, and how — in the bigger EU countries — these are unfortunately now a fact of life.”

The Polish government certainly has the wind of democratic support at its back. The truth is that the majority in nearly every European country says that migration from Muslim countries into Europe should be slowed down or stopped entirely. In Poland, less than 10 percent of respondents disagree with the statement that “all immigration from majority Muslim nations should be stopped.”

When public sentiment runs so strongly this way, and the sentiment of the political class runs the other way, coercive measures such as sanctions become inevitable. But that coercion may be dangerous to the continuation of the European project.

This week, former Czech Republic president Vaclav Klaus issued a fiery denunciation of the EU’s scheme: “We are protesting the attempt to punish us and force us into obedience.” He said that his nation should prepare itself to exit the European Union altogether. But he also took all the subtext hiding behind refugee politics and made it explicit. “We refuse to permit the transformation of our country into a multicultural society . . . as we currently see in France and in Great Britain.”

In the past year, Western European politicians often scolded Eastern European governments for retreating from European values, “the open society,” and democracy. And Eastern Europeans on social media just as often threw that rhetoric back in their face. Which looked more like an open democratic society, Paris with its landmarks patrolled by the military — or Krawkow, with its Christmas market unspoiled by the need for automatic weapons?