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September 2017

Israel’s Lamentable Temple Mount Appeasement Ben Weingarten

Israel’s recent actions at the Temple Mount are a microcosm of what ails the West, reflecting a profound lack of confidence about moral legitimacy, sovereignty, and the right to defend against aggression. After jihadists used weapons stashed in a mosque to ambush and kill two Israeli security guards, Israel, one of the most “hawkish” Western nations, took measures to improve mosque security. Palestinian and Israeli Arabs responded with fury, refusing to enter the mosque and threatening more violence if the security measures were not immediately reversed. When Gulf States including Jordan and Saudi Arabia pressured Israel to capitulate, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu intimated that the Gulf States had a legitimate right to make these demands. Israel relented, removing metal detectors, and reportedly opting for installing a “less provocative” hi-tech security system.

Some will say that the site controversy means that Israel must walk on egg shells, lest security measures affecting the Temple Mount “status quo” incite Arab violence, similar to the second intifada after Ariel Sharon visited the site in September 2000. Yet the key to deterring Islamic supremacist violence is practical strength rooted in moral confidence. Israel’s conciliatory measures strengthen its opponents while weakening its viability. Israel’s land concessions have emboldened, not mollified, jihadists who call for “Palestine from the river to the sea,” i.e. Israel’s destruction.

The Temple Mount, which sits on Mount Moriah, is the holiest Jewish religious site. On it, Abraham offered to sacrifice Isaac, and the First and Second Temples were built. The al-Aqsa mosque was constructed only after Muslim conquest. Following Israel’s War of Independence, Transjordan (now Jordan) retained the Old City of Jerusalem and prevented Jews from entering the area.

All this changed in 1967’s Six Day War, in which Israel defeated the Arab aggressors who sought its destruction. This war saw Israel reclaim Temple Mount from Transjordan, as part and parcel of the liberation of Jerusalem, Israel’s historic and current capital.

As Israeli author Yossi Klein Halevi recounted on the anniversary of the Israelis’ victory in the Six Day War:

[Colonel Motta] Gur and [Major Arik] Achmon rushed up a flight of stairs leading to a large plaza—the golden Dome of the Rock and the silver-domed al-Aqsa. Gur radioed headquarters: “The Temple Mount is in our hands.” He wasn’t just making a military report, but staking a historic claim. The focus of centuries of Jewish longing, the place toward which Jews prayed no matter where they lived, was now in Israeli hands.

The brigade’s chief communications officer, Ezra Orni, retrieved an Israeli flag from his pouch and asked Gur whether he should hang it over the Dome of the Rock. “Yalla,” said Gur, go up. Achmon accompanied him into the Dome of the Rock. They climbed to the top of the building and victoriously fastened the Israeli flag onto a pole topped with an Islamic crescent.

Except then the flag was quickly and unceremoniously lowered. Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, watching the scene through binoculars from Mount Scopus, urgently radioed Gur and demanded: Do you want to set the Middle East on fire? Gur told Achmon to remove the flag.

An unplanned victory ended in a spontaneous concession…Dayan’s intention was to minimize bloodshed and prevent the Palestinian-Israeli conflict from becoming a holy war.

Despite its theological, historical, and legal claims to this site, Israel has consistently sought to placate the implacable. Israel finds itself in the absurd situation of willingly ceding sovereignty to hostile foreigners. Since Muslim authorities administer the site, Jews are discriminated against in their own land—they are not allowed to pray at the Temple Mount even though it is within Israeli control. As Klein notes:

[S]mall groups of religious Jews ascend the Mount, seeking to maintain a Jewish presence. As they walk about the stone plaza, they are accompanied by Wakf guards who watch their lips to ensure that no prayers are being recited. Jews attempting to pray on the Mount are escorted away.

Palestinian ‘Reconciliation’: Jihad is Calling! by Bassam Tawil

Leaders of Hamas maintain that under no circumstances will they agree to lay down their weapons. Hamas is, in fact, continuing full-speed-ahead digging tunnels under the border between the Gaza Strip and Israel. Hamas is planning to use the tunnels to smuggle armed terrorists into Israel.

The accord with Hamas requires Mahmoud Abbas to lift the sanctions he recently imposed on the Gaza Strip, such as refusing to pay Israel for the electricity it supplies to Gaza. It also requires Abbas to resume payment of salaries to thousands of Palestinians who served time in Israeli prison for terror-related offenses.

Above all, Hamas wants to use the agreement to be removed from the U.S. State Department List of Foreign Terror Organizations.

The Russians are closing their ears to what Hamas itself declares day after day: that its true goal is to eliminate Israel and that it has no intention of abandoning its murderous, genocidal agenda.

The Palestinian terror group Hamas has once again made clear that its true intention is to pursue the fight against Israel until the “liberation of Palestine, from the (Jordan) river to the (Mediterranean) sea.” Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip, says that despite the latest “reconciliation” agreement reached with the Palestinian Authority (PA) under the auspices of the Egyptian government, it will continue to prepare for war with Israel.

While some Western analysts have misinterpreted the agreement as a sign that Hamas is moving towards moderation and pragmatism, leaders of the Islamist movement maintain that under no circumstances will they agree to lay down their weapons. Hamas is, in fact, continuing full-speed-ahead digging tunnels under the border between the Gaza Strip and Israel. Hamas is planning to use the tunnels to smuggle armed terrorists into Israel.

Just last week, two Hamas terrorists were killed when the tunnels in which they were working collapsed, in separate incidents in the Gaza Strip. The terrorists were identified as Khalil Al-Dumyati and Yusef Abu Abed.

The news about the collapse of the tunnels coincided with the reports of the new “reconciliation” agreement reached in Cairo between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority (PA). This means that while the Egyptians and Abbas’s representatives were discussing with Hamas leaders ways of ending their 10-year-long dispute and achieving “national unity,” Hamas terrorists were busy tunneling under the Gaza Strip to prepare for attacks on Israel.

Looming Obamagate will make Watergate look like a misdemeanor By Wayne Allyn Root

An ancient Chinese philosopher once said, “May you live in interesting times.” Congratulations, we’ve hit the jackpot.

We are in the beginning phase of Obamagate. This is our generation’s Watergate. Except far worse.

Here’s a refresher course for those too young to remember. Watergate was the biggest scandal in modern political history. Republican President Richard Nixon desperately wanted to know what Democrats were planning for their 1972 presidential campaign against him. He ordered a team of trusted aides to spy on them. They literally broke into the offices of the Democrat National Committee inside the Watergate Building. That was the beginning of the end for Nixon.

But today no one needs to physically break into an office to spy on a political rival. All you have to do is use the high-tech electronic power of government. A corrupt president can use the government to listen in on anyone, anytime.

The media and liberal critics went ballistic when Donald Trump tweeted in March that Barack Obama spied on him. CNN tweeted, “Trump’s baseless wiretap claim” and, “Trump just flat-out lied about wiretapping.” Well guess who was right? Trump — again.

According to multiple media reports out last week, officials in the Obama administration spied on the Trump campaign. They wiretapped Trump’s campaign manager Paul Manafort both before and after the election. It appears other top Trump aides were also wiretapped, as was Trump Tower.

If these media reports are proven true, then the Obama administration was spying on the entire Trump campaign staff. Even if they were listening in on only Manafort, to whom do you think he was speaking? Trump and every high-ranking member of Trump’s campaign staff.

Which means while government agents were supposedly listening for “criminal activity,” they just happened to hear every plan of the Trump campaign … they just happened to know what would be in Trump’s speeches … they knew his line of attack versus Hillary … they knew his debate prep … they knew everything Trump was planning before he did it. That’s some valuable inside information.

Obama just happened to pick the perfect guy to spy on — if he wanted to fix the election for Hillary.

Time to Base Nutrition Policy on Science By Richard Williams

A recent article in the Washington Post details five nutrition “facts” we used to be believe. It ends by saying something that you rarely read but is entirely accurate: “In fact, we don’t have a lot of answers about nutrition, which is considered a relatively new science.” But to listen to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and popular food activists, you would think the only issue is that Americans just aren’t listening.

The real problems don’t start with consumers, they start with scientific and economic shortcuts. The consequences of bad policies are dire: poor nutrition is linked to chronic diseases such as diabetes, cancer, and heart disease. Unfortunately, one out of every two adults suffer from one or more preventable chronic diseases.

But the federal officials who are charged with making nutrition policies continue to make poorly informed decisions. In 2009, the USDA instituted a program that excluded white potatoes from the Special Supplemental Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC), presumably to address obesity. They did this despite the fact that many Americans have shortfalls in potassium and potatoes are a great source of this nutrient. Five years later, they finally asked the Institute of Medicine whether this was a good move.

Predictably, one of the Institute’s findings was that “Intakes of … potassium … among low-income women, fall short of current nutrient intake recommendations.” The program may have slightly affected obesity in children, although it is not clear that it has anything to do with potatoes.

The FDA, meanwhile, just finalized its regulations to put calorie labeling in restaurants, theaters, and grocery stores. The rule was initially finalized in 2014 but put on hold by the current administration. Studies are mixed as to whether or not posting calories will do just a little bit or no good whatsoever. But science is not the reason this rule is going forward.

The National Restaurant Association supported the rule, originally as part of the Affordable Care Act, because there was a growing “patchwork” of local and state laws requiring it. This is a perfect example of how not to make scientifically based health policies. In letting the rule go, the Commissioner announced that the rule would institute “predictable, uniform federal standards,” precisely what industry needed. Again, the real problem was with that we did not pay attention to the first adopters, who demonstrated that the information wouldn’t help with obesity.

At least the five nutrition facts cited earlier were originally based on some science. One myth in the article was that “All fat is bad.” But it was only in 2010 when the Dietary Guidelines committee stopped recommending limits on total fats, although they still recommended reducing saturated fat. The original myth was about total fat, but recently multiple studies have found that polyunsaturated fats (and possibly monounsaturated fats) found in foods such as walnuts, salmon, and soybean oil are now considered good for you.

Even more recently, a 2014 study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine was unable to conclude that even saturated fats caused heart disease. Moreover, it remains unclear whether unsaturated fats are good for you. These are still controversial findings, and, without clear scientific backing, policymakers should proceed with caution.

More specifically, public health policy must always be preceded by both sound science and cost-benefit analysis.

Sound scientific evidence must be present for a positive public health benefit to be amply demonstrated. Had there been more research to indicate what manufacturers might do to replace animal fats in the 1980s, activists might not have campaigned so hard against trans fats. As for cost-benefit analysis: “Trying” out public policies, such as nutrition labeling, without credible analysis showing that benefits exceed costs, removes public resources that can be better spent addressing public policies that do pass such a test.

These problems are exacerbated in the case of the new science of nutrition. For diet and disease relationships, dietary guidance and nutrition policy based on memory-based recall data have been shown by professor Edward Archer to be “pseudoscience and inadmissible.” These data, which underpin most of the advice from the Dietary Guidelines, ask consumers to remember what and how much they ate in the last 24 hours. Unfortunately, well over half of consumers do not report eating enough to stay alive. If the data that go into diet-disease relationships are flawed, then the correlations between dietary choices and disease may be wrong. This means that much of the current advice and policies may be wrong.

The NFL Can’t Afford to Become a Battleground And the nation can’t afford to pit tribal loyalties against shared national identity. by Megan McArdle

If you want a perfect metaphor for our national moment, it’s Steelers offensive tackle Alejandro Villanueva coming out onto the field for the national anthem while the rest of his team stayed in the locker room.
Asked about it after the game, coach Mike Tomlin simply referred to an earlier statement on the reasoning for keeping the team in the locker room while the Star Spangled Banner played: he wanted the team to be unified in whatever it chose to do. “People shouldn’t have to choose,” Tomlin said. “If a guy wants to go about his normal business and participate in the anthem, he shouldn’t be forced to choose sides. If a guy feels the need to do something, he shouldn’t be separated from his teammate who chooses not to.” But as Villanueva seems to have recognized, staying in the locker room is not simply a neutral act; it is also a choice, of tribal loyalties over national ones.

Team unity is an admirable goal for a coach. But to secure that unity, he asked Villanueva, a West Pointer who served in Afghanistan, to refrain from publicly honoring a symbol of the larger team we’re all supposed to be a part of: the United States. The coach asked him to choose tribal unity over the national kind. It’s a false choice, but one that a lot of people are nonetheless being forced to make. And no matter what they choose, a lot of people end up angry.

Tomlin himself, of course, was clearly in a bad position. And I have sympathy for the players who put him there. I understand why people with a platform would want to use it to publicly express the feeling that a lot of black Americans have: that their country does not treat them as completely equal citizens, but as a caste apart.

Feeling like a citizen is more than being entitled to carry the passport abroad. If you are regularly stopped by police, demanding to know who you are and what you’re doing here, you are apt to feel like exiles in your own country. People who feel this way could view the country’s anthem as something less than a sacred expression of an inviolable national unity. Or perhaps they see it as embodying that ideal, of which our nation is falling short.

A lot of people don’t see it that way, however. Players refusing to offer a small symbolic honor to the country that has made them among the richest and most revered people in the history of humanity … well, to many ordinary fans who cannot dream of such status or wealth, it seems frankly ungrateful, and disrespectful to the legions of less exalted Americans who ultimately pay their salaries.

President Donald Trump was happy to capitalize on this also-understandable sentiment. In a series of tweets this weekend, he called for the players who won’t honor the anthem to be suspended or fired. Given what the players were protesting, such an attack inevitably has its own tribal overtones.

Trump was wrong to attack the NFL players; it is beneath the dignity of the U.S. presidency to bully individuals or groups. (Exceptions made for political figures who have volunteered for the fray.) It’s understandable that NFL players wanted to make as strong a counterattack as possible. Unfortunately, huddling in a locker room is not a very effective method of striking back at the president. If it was supposed to defuse the tension, it didn’t. Trump’s base is fired up over this conflict, their sympathies entirely with the president. And the mushy middle that such protests need to persuade are unlikely to be swayed by a refusal to honor the anthem.

To get those people on your side, you first need a common connection, a claim on their sympathy and support. Where does that claim come from? Appeals to universal moral values like justice and equality may feel more important, more virtuous, than mere patriotic symbolism. But the historical record indicates that however much people honor those virtues in theory, in practice they are unwilling to actually do much to secure justice and equality for distant strangers. No, to really move people to action you need a more primal, less abstract connection, which is to say, precisely the sort of sentiments of loyalty and solidarity that the anthem evokes.

Without them, we find ourselves where we are now: tribe against tribe, lofty ideals against gut patriotism. It’s a battle that both sides are losing, at immense cost.

Can We Stop Calling It a ‘Muslim Ban’ Now? The list of restricted nations never included some of the largest Muslim countries. Now it includes North Korea and Venezuela.by Eli Lake

When President Donald Trump came into office, one of the first things he did was issue a temporary ban on travelers from seven Muslim-majority countries. It was an early flash point for the so-called resistance, prompting Americans to protest the executive order by going to airports.
It also prompted legal challenges and rebukes from the courts, and its implementation was chaotic.
On Sunday, the White House announced a new version of the policy, and it bears little resemblance to the president’s campaign promise to ban Muslim travel to America.
There are a few reasons. To start, two Muslim-majority countries — Iraq and Sudan — are no longer affected by the executive order. Considering that other countries with large Muslim populations — like Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and India — were never on the list, even the earlier iteration hardly fulfilled Trump’s crude campaign promise.
Also two non-Muslims countries have been added to the list: North Korea and Venezuela. (Of course, North Korea does not allow its citizens to travel….) For Venezuela, the new policy affects government officials and not citizens. Chad is also added to the list. According to a 1993 census, a little over half of the population in Chad is Muslim.

This leaves five countries from the original executive order: Iran, Yemen, Somalia, Syria and Libya. There are some exceptions here as well. Somalis will be able to travel to the U.S. but not emigrate here. Iranian student exchanges will continue, but other travel will be restricted.

It’s worth asking why certain countries are included in the travel ban. According to U.S. officials, it’s because they could not meet basic standards for improving their visa systems. In the case of Iran, this is because the government in Tehran is engaged in a proxy war against U.S. allies in the Middle East, and it has a bad habit of detaining U.S. dual national citizens on trumped-up charges.

For Yemen, Somalia, Syria and Libya, the answer is much more straightforward. These are all basically failed states with weak governments. All four are still fighting civil wars, to varying degrees. The ability of the state to perform basic services, let alone seriously screen travelers to the U.S., is almost non-existent in many cases. Just this month, the German press reported that Berlin assesses the Islamic State holds 11,000 blank Syrian passports.

None of this is to say that a ban is the best policy. There are more subtle ways to deal with this problem. It has the unintended effect of turning away talented citizens who would otherwise help make America great again. A ban is a crude instrument.

Merkel’s Mutilated Victory By:Srdja Trifkovic

German general elections are usually rather boring affairs, with polite debates, disagreements over minor issues and predictable outcomes. The one last Sunday was an exception. It was interesting not because the incumbent, veteran “center-right” Chancellor Angela Merkel (a nominal Christian Democrat), and the “center-left” opposition leader Martin Schulz (a nominal Social Democrat) differ on any major issue—they don’t—but because the cosy bipartisan idyll is over. The barbarians are inside the gates. The AfD (Alternative für Deutschland) has entered the Bundestag with 12.6 percent of the vote, which will translate into over 90 deputies.

This is an immensely important development. The AfD is the first authentically opposition party to enter the diet since the Federal Republic came into being in 1949. It is the first party which represents millions of Germans who are sick and tired of not being allowed to express their views on the meaning of being German, who no longer want to be told how to think about their culture, identity, history, ancestors . . .

For over seven decades since the Untergang it has been first desirable, then necessary, and ultimately mandatory for a mainstream German to be ashamed of his past. De-nazification of the early occupation years had morphed into de-Germanization. An integral part of the final package is to subscribe to the postmodern liberal orthodoxy in all its aspects. It must include the willingness to welcome a million “migrants” in a year (with millions more to come if the Duopoly so decides – and Merkel and Schulz both agree that there must be no upper limit.) The AfD begs to differ, but when its leaders make a reality-based statement like “Islam does not belong to Germany,” or a common sense one like “We don’t need illiterate immigrants,” they are duly Hitlerized.

The result, on September 24, was a revolt of the deplorables. It did not amount to an uprising yet, but nothing will stay the same. The Social Democrats (SPD), having suffered the worst result in history with twenty percent of the vote, will go into opposition. Merkel’s CDU-CSU lost 8 percentage points to capture under one-third of all votes. She will continue to rule by forming an uneasy coalition with the Free Democrats—who are back from the cold—and the Greens (the “Jamaica coalition,” named after the parties’ colors of CDU’s black, FDP’s yellow and green), but her power and authority are fatally undermined.

The “inconvenient” Kurds By David Goldman

Except for the State of Israel and the Kingdom of Jordan, there isn’t one state in Western Asia that is viable inside its present borders at a 20-year horizon. All the powers with interests in the region want to kick the problem down the road, and that is why the whole world (excepting Israel) wants to abort an independence referendum to be held by Iraq’s eight million Kurds on Sept. 25. If Iraq’s Kurds try to convert the autonomous zone they have ruled for a quarter of a century into a fully independent state, the Iraqi state probably will collapse, Turkey likely will invade northern Iraq and Syria, and Iran will join Turkey in military operations against Kurdish-led forces in Iraq.

There is no precedent in diplomatic history for the whole world closing ranks against the aspirations of a small people, let alone one that has governed itself admirably amidst regional chaos for the past generation. On Thursday, the United Nations Security Council voted unanimously to warn of “potentially destabilizing effects” of the independence vote. Turkey’s parliament Sept. 23 renewed a mandate for the Turkish army to invade Syria and Iraq, and Ankara’s defense minister warned that the vote could collapse a “structure built on sensitive and fragile balances.” The White House warned, Sept. 15 that “the referendum is distracting from efforts to defeat [the Islamic State] and stabilize the liberated areas.”

Just what is the “sensitive and fragile balance” that the Kurds might up-end by substituting the word “independent” for “autonomous” in the description of their land in Northern Iraq?

Most of Turkey’s military-age men will come from Kurdish-speaking families by 2040 or so, because Turkey’s 20 million Kurds have twice as many children as ethnic Turks. Last year I reviewed Turkey’s 2015 census data, which show the trend towards Kurdish demographic preponderance accelerating (“Turkey’s Demographic Winter and Erdogan’s Duplicity”). Concentrated in Turkey’s southeast, the Turkish Kurds dominate a part of the country contiguous to the Kurdish Autonomous Region of Iraq. After half a century of dirty war by the Turkish army against the Kurdish minority, Turkey’s Southeast might break away to join an Iraq-centered Kurdish state.

Stitched together from three Ottoman provinces by the British Colonial office, Iraq maintained a brutal sort of stability under the minority rule of Sunni Arabs who controlled the army and used it murderously against the Shi’ite Arab majority as well as the Kurdish minority. George W. Bush insisted on majority rule, namely Shi’ite domination, which pushed the Sunnis into the embrace of al-Qaeda and later ISIS, and left the Kurds to fend for themselves.

An Iraqi police man stands next to a flag of Imam Hussein in Tuz Khurmato, Iraq on Sept. 24, 2017. Photo: Reuters/Ako Rasheed

Iran faces a demographic catastrophe over the next 20 years because the present generation of Iranians were born to families of seven children, but have only one or two children. As the present generation ages, Iran’s elderly depends will comprise 30% of the total, about the same as Europe, but with about a tenth the per capita GDP. Iran will be the first country to get old before it gets rich, and its economy will implode. Like Turkey, though, Iran has huge ethnic disparities in birth rates. In Tehran province, Iranian women have less than one child apiece on average, but in the restive province of Baluchistan on the Pakistani border, women have 3.7 children.

Syria’s Sunni majority suffered long under the heel of a deviant Shi’ite (Alawite) minority, and rebelled with Obama’s encouragement in 2011. With Russian and Iranian backing, the Assad government squared off against al-Qaeda and ISIS elements, until the Kurds created a third force that could defeat ISIS on the ground while holding off Assad’s Iranian mercenaries. After the Iraq and Afghanistan wars America lacked the stomach to put boots on the ground, and the Kurds became America’s designated proxy.

The United States brawled into the region in 2003 in order to create a stable and democratic Iraq, and instead opened Pandora’s Box. That left Russia (as well as China) in a quandary: the emergence of a Sunni jihad movement claiming the legitimacy of a new caliphate threatens the security of Russia, a seventh of whose citizens are Muslims, and overwhelmingly Sunni. Suppressing the Sunni jihad was a prime objective of Russia’s intervention in Syria, and its uneasy alliance with Shi’ite Iran.

Washington is left without an appetite for a fight, and without the gumption to declare its Mesopotamian and Afghan adventures a failure. America’s military leadership of the past 20 years rose through the ranks by supporting nation-building in Iraq. Although the US military has backed and armed the Kurds, it will not support any action that undermines Iraq’s territorial integrity.

German Voters Shake Up the Elites Will Angela Merkel respond to voters’ concerns or keep ignoring them? By John Fund

German chancellor Angela Merkel has paid a steep price for her controversial 2015 decision to let in millions of people fleeing Middle Eastern and African countries.

Merkel’s party, the Christian Democratic Union, came in first in Sunday’s elections, but its 33 percent haul was its worst result since the party’s founding in 1945, at the end of WWII. (The opposition Social Democrats also turned in their worst post-war result.)

Merkel’s policies on refugees and, in particular, her poor record on assimilation of migrants led 1.1 million of her party’s 2013 voters to flee to the nationalist Alternative for Germany, which won a stunning 13 percent of the vote. Merkel’s failure to stand up for free-market policies caused an additional 1.3 million of her party’s previous voters to plump for the pro-market Free Democrats, who doubled their 2013 vote and reentered parliament.

The big news out of the election is that Merkel is now weakened and will probably have to take on the odd couple of the Free Democrats and the left-wing Greens to form a government. She has ruled out having any alliance with Alternative for Germany, which polite society in Germany brands as anti-democratic, racist, and xenophobic. Its political opponents tar it with even worse names. Katrin Göring-Eckardt and Cem Özdemir, co-leaders of the Green party, used their post-election speeches to tell supporters that there were “again Nazis in parliament.”

That sort of name-calling obscures the real reasons for the rise of the Alternative for Germany party. More than 80 percent of Germans are satisfied with their economic condition, but in the formerly Communist eastern states that reunited with Germany in 1990, life has been tough and employment prospects limited. In those areas, the Alternative party won 22 percent of the vote (it placed first with male voters at 27 percent). Similarly, many Germans believed that the “grand coalition” of Merkel’s Christian Democrats and the left-wing Social Democrats had suffocated political debate in Germany, closing out real discussion over the migrant problem, crime, bailouts of countries hurt by the faltering euro, and the loss of German sovereignty.

Everyone who voted for the Alternative knew they wouldn’t enter government, but many wanted them to have a voice. Groups that have felt behind by economic and cultural change were especially attracted by its promise to upset the cozy political culture of the capital in Berlin.

Consider that the Alternative party won support across the political spectrum. While 1,070,000 voters left Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union to vote for them, almost as many voters (970,000) abandoned the Social Democrats, the Greens, and the Left party (which has it roots in the old Communist regime of East Germany) to vote for a nationalist party that combines hostility to radical Islam with opposition to bigger government. After the votes were in, Left-party leader Katja Kipping mourned that “the progressive Left has fallen below 40 percent of the vote” for the first time in any modern German election.

Bill de Blasio Is America’s Most Irrelevant Mayor The one-time progressive star who leads our nation’s largest city is now virtually invisible. How did this happen? By Kyle Smith

New York City’s mayor, Bill de Blasio, was elected with 73 percent of the vote, and on November 7 he’ll probably be reelected in a comparable landslide. On September 12 he faced token opposition in the Democratic primary, to be followed by token opposition in the general election. (Staten Island assemblywoman Nicole Malliotakis is the GOP’s sacrificial lamb, while celebrity private detective Bo Dietl is running as an independent.)

Employment is up. Crime is down. The New York City economy and Wall Street are in bloom. In the grumbliest city in America, New Yorkers have little to kvetch about, except the trains, which, everyone knows, aren’t run out of City Hall. Yet in a fiercely progressive city, the progressive mayor’s approval rating hovers around 50 percent and has been underwater for much of his first term. In a City Hall that still rings with echoes of the footsteps of outsized personalities — Ed Koch, Rudy Giuliani, Mike Bloomberg — de Blasio barely makes a sound. No one credits him with engineering New York’s current state of ease. When the history of the period is written, he’ll be a footnote to the two-decade revolution that was the Giuliani–Bloomberg period. He’s a six-foot-five-inch dwarf.

Why doesn’t New York love Bill de Blasio?

It’s a question that preoccupies the mayor as he coasts to his second (and final, given term limits) stint in City Hall. “You’d assume they’d be having parades out in the streets,” he tells New York magazine.

Actually, New Yorkers are having parades out in the streets, such as the Puerto Rican Day parade, in which de Blasio marched behind a convicted terrorist, Oscar López Rivera, to whom the parade initially planned to give a place of honor. De Blasio initially said he would march behind López Rivera but then, after major sponsors, Governor Andrew Cuomo, and his own police commissioner dropped out, told reporters he had quietly been campaigning behind the scenes to get López Rivera dropped, calling the FALN separatist movement Rivera co-founded “mistaken from the beginning, because it used violence in the context of a democratic society, and that is not acceptable to me.” Then, after López Rivera announced he would not accept a ceremonial honor but would march at the head of the parade anyway, de Blasio joined him, albeit keeping his distance a few blocks behind.

That was pure de Blasio — allying himself with the most vicious and extreme elements of the Left, bumbling in an attempt to get himself out of a jam of his own creation, and coming off comically foolhardy and inept. The mayor whose big college experience was a trip to work for the Sandinistas in 1988, who toured the Soviet Union in 1983 and later honeymooned in Cuba, would love to turn New York into New Stalingrad. But he can’t figure out how to do it. So he settles for fuming about the ills of private property, luxury housing, and income inequality. The more he does so, the more he resembles background static in New York’s glorious cacophony — irritating but irrelevant.

“A wallflower. There is no sense of alpha male about him,” wrote Vanity Fair’s Bryan Burrough. This was in a sympathetic profile.

“He just didn’t have the stars lined up,” Al Sharpton, another fan, told the New York Times, as though already looking back on the man who becomes a lame duck on January 2.

In a Politico list of 18 hot mayors, de Blasio wasn’t even mentioned. The Times reported that he is such a nonentity that he has to wear a nametag at national conferences, even gatherings of mayors. The tallest man in most any room is somehow the most pathetic one in it, the Empire State gelding. Among his best-known and least New Yorky traits is a penchant for oversleeping, rendering him late to, for instance, a memorial service for victims of a plane crash and three different events on one St. Patrick’s Day, including a reception at Gracie Mansion — “his own house,” noted the Times with exasperated italics. Exhausted from his morning workouts, he has a habit of following up with naps in his office. The city that never sleeps has a narcoleptic chief.