RUTHFULLY YOURS

The image of a “French republican idyll” masks a history of repeated anti-Jewish prejudice, and worse.

At the outset of his very interesting and provocative essay, Alain El-Mouchan quotes French Prime Minister Manuel Valls: “If 100,000 [French] Jews leave [for Israel], France will no longer be France. The French Republic will be judged a failure.”

Will France’s Jews depart en masse for Israel? Should they? If they do, will France still be France? These are disturbing questions to which I do not have the answers, and which may be unanswerable. But I would like to offer a number of thoughts and reactions, mainly of a historical nature, and some in the form of further questions.

Let us recall that in the first half of the 20th century, one-quarter of the Jews living in France were murdered in the Holocaust, with French connivance. Was France still France after that? If so, then it is hard for me to see how the departure of one-quarter of today’s Jewish population—not for Auschwitz but for Israel—would constitute the end of France.

But El-Mouchan, like Prime Minister Valls, has something more specific in mind. For both of them, that something, in El-Mouchan’s words, is “the French republican idyll, one of the most attractive and promising chapters in the history of mankind,” and one hallmark of this idyll was France’s “exceptionally open and welcoming” posture toward the Jews. That idyll, says El-Mouchan, has now “reached the beginning of the end.”

The meeting today between Pakistan Prime Minister Sharif and President Obama at the White House is a continuation of a dangerous charade engaged in for decades by the United States. By perceiving Pakistan, a failed Islamic terrorist state, as a valuable strategic ally when it, in fact, has a blatant history of actions and circumstances to the contrary, the United States is pursuing a delusional foreign policy that further endangers American national security.
The meeting with Pakistan occurs at a time when the ink is barely dry on the dubious Iran bomb deal. Now, President Obama stands poised to sign a second nuclear agreement that will threaten U.S. ally, India, and likely destabilize the region. The first agreement, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), was led by the United States and finalized in July.

Sunday, October 18, isn’t just a day of baseball playoffs and pro football games. It’s “Adoption Day,” when all parties to the Iran nuclear deal must begin preparing to implement its terms. And while the Obama administration takes another opportunity to pat itself on the back for its achievement, Iran has offered the international community a clear signal of what it thinks about its obligations under the deal, as well as its strategic intentions. Just a week before Adoption Day, Iran test-fired a new precision-guided ballistic missile capable of delivering a 1,600-pound warhead to Israel or even southeastern Europe and designed to evade missile defense systems.

Legally, this launch was an indisputable violation of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1929, passed in 2010, which dictates “Iran shall not undertake any activity related to ballistic missiles capable of delivering nuclear weapons, including launches using ballistic missile technology.”

European leaders talk about two things these days; preserving European values by taking in Muslim migrants and integrating Muslim migrants into Europe by getting them to adopt European values.

It does not occur to them that their plan to save European values depends on killing European values.

The same European values that require Sweden, a country of less than 10 million, to take in 180,000 Muslim migrants in one year also expects the new “Swedes” to celebrate tolerance, feminism and gay marriage. Instead European values have filled the cities of Europe with Shariah patrols, unemployed angry men waving ISIS flags and the occasional public act of terror.

European countries that refuse to invest money in border security instead find themselves forced to invest money into counterterrorism forces. And those are bad for European values too.

But, as Central European countries are discovering, European values don’t have much to do with the preservation of viable functioning European states. Instead they are about the sort of static Socialism that Bernie Sanders admires from abroad. But even a Socialist welfare state requires people to work for a living. Maine’s generous welfare policies began collapsing once Somali Muslims swarmed in to take advantage of them. Denmark and the Dutch, among other of Bernie Sanders’ role models, have been sounding more like Reagan and less like Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren.

Two years ago, the Dutch King declared that, “The classic welfare state of the second half of the 20th century in these areas in particular brought forth arrangements that are unsustainable in their current form.” That same year, the Danish Finance Minister called for the “modernization of the welfare state.”

For years, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper has served as a welcome counterpoint to Barack Obama, and the object of wistful musings about what a fine President of the United States he would have been, if only he had been born south of the border: generally realistic about the jihad threat, determined to do what was necessary to meet that threat, and a strong supporter of Israel.

But now Canada at last has its own Obama: Justin Trudeau. And that means that Canada, like the United States, faces deep trouble ahead.

The new Prime Minister of Canada, like Obama, has consistently downplayed the nature and magnitude of the jihad threat and ascribed it to other causes. Christine Williams, a Canadian journalist and a Federally appointed Director with the Canadian Race Relations Foundation, has noted that in the wake of the Boston Marathon jihad bombing, Trudeau issued a bizarre statement: “There is no question that this happened because of someone who feels completely excluded, someone who feels completely at war with innocence, at war with society.”