RUTHFULLY YOURS

Eminently predictably, Angela Merkel just got the first taste of her well-deserved comeuppance at the polls over the weekend. There will be more to come:

The ripple effects of the German voter rebellion against Merkel’s open-door immigration policy will rapidly be felt across the continent. It will not matter much that the Chancellor has tried to modify it after the fact, reaching out to Turkey and seeking ways to slow down the migration inflow, with NATO and the EU looking for joint solutions to strengthen the borders. If anything, the public rejection of Merkel’s policy has reinforced the sense that her leadership has failed to grasp fully the complexity of the nearly thirty-year-old European Union—especially the enduring strength of the national identity politics of its newer members and the ultimate insularity of state interests in the United Kingdom, France, and Spain. Today, regardless of how Germany ultimately adjusts its immigration policy, the amount of damage done to the EU’s cohesion by Merkel’s initial open door policy will endure. It has already reinforced an increasingly nationalized approach to managing immigration by individual member states, while feeding the European public opinion’s growing anti-Brussels sentiment.

The anti-Merkel vote in Germany also casts in a different light the early decision by Viktor Orban of Hungary to build a fence across his country’s border, and, more recently, the refusal by France to take in more migrants, the ongoing resistance in Poland to the mandatory resettlement quota system advocated by the EU Commission, and the Macedonian government’s decision to close the country’s border completely. Likewise, the creeping de facto reintroduction of national border controls across the Schengen Zone is but the latest reaffirmation of what was once derided in Berlin, Vienna, and Brussels as the “Orbanization of Europe.” This was, in hindsight, at least on the border question, a prudent if clumsily executed effort to manage the flow so as to stay attuned to the public mood in the European Union and to preserve individual states’ absorption capacity. Whatever one thinks of Orban’s questionable economic and foreign policy priorities, he correctly anticipated the public’s resistance to the current wave of MENA migrants.

But today, these novelists hold a deep, uninformed, irrational hatred… Instead of backing the only country that gives full rights to all its citizens, they are instrumental in attacking not only Israel but the Jewish people.

What is notable is that every single time, these most illustrious writers “forget” to say why Israel built those fences, checkpoints and roadblocks in the first place.

Mr. Saramago chose not to see and talk about the Israeli restaurants, shopping malls and hotels turned into carpets of human bodies while he was visiting Ramallah. The wholesale slaughter of Jews was the only reason Israel had to send tanks and soldiers back into the Palestinian cities after the Oslo Accords. Saramago did not mention the context; he preferred to give credence to a distorted, demonizing vision.

What is the only country about which can be said:

Its very existence is disputed? (Clue: Not Zimbabwe, not Tuvalu, not even overrun Tibet.)
Its boundaries, bought with blood in wars initiated by others, is challenged by all nations, who now seem determined to destroy it through boycotts, unjust defamation and purported “laws” that are applied to no other nation?
It fully respects the rights of women and every kind of ethnic, religious and sexual minorities, notwithstanding that it is condemned at the United Nations for being “the worst violator of women’s rights.” Worse than Syria, Afghanistan, Somalia, Pakistan, China, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Sudan?
It provides its own enemy with water, electricity, food and medical treatment; its Defense Forces, to avoid enemy civilian casualties, warn the enemy to evacuate buildings before attacking them, and — instead of simply carpet bombing the enemy as all other nations do, including most democracies –sends its own soldiers poissibly to die on land missions?

Yet this is the only country that even famous writers, intellectuals and Nobel laureates target, demonize and criminalize.

Some of these police officers have openly refused to to protect synagogues or to observe a minute of silence to commemorate the deaths of victims of terrorist attacks.
That police officers are armed and have access to police databases only intensifies anxiety.
In July 2015, four men, one of whom is a Navy veteran, were called in for questioning. They had planned to penetrate a Navy base in the south of France, seize a high-ranking officer, decapitate him, and then spread photos of the decapitation on social media networks. The Navy veteran was one of the leaders.

According to a confidential memo, dated January 2015, from the anti-terrorist unit of the interior ministry, France was already host to 8,250 radical Islamists (a 50% increase in one year).

Some of these Islamists have gone to Syria to join the Islamic State (IS); others have infiltrated all levels of society, starting with the police and the armed forces.

A confidential memo from the Department of Public Security, published by Le Parisien, not only details 17 cases of police officers radicalized between 2012 and 2015, but that this increase had accelerated during 2014. Particularly noted were the police officers who listen to and broadcast Muslim chants while on patrol.

Some of these police officers have openly refused to to protect synagogues or to observe a minute of silence to commemorate the deaths of victims of terrorist attacks.

In addition, the police were alerted to a policewoman who incited terrorism on Facebook, and called her police uniform a “filthy rag of the Republic” while wiping her hands on it. When she came out of the restroom she was wearing a hijab. In January 2015, immediately after the attacks on Charlie Hebdo and the Hypercacher market in Vincennes which had left 17 people dead, she wrote on her Facebook page: “Masked attack led by Zionist cowards… They need to be killed.”

That police officers are armed and have access to police databases only intensifies anxiety.

Although Police headquarters in Paris confirm that this situation is rare, they have decided to review on a weekly basis any behavior that overstep the principle of separation of church and state, such as that of Muslim officers who appear to be leaning toward radicalization. Patrice Latron, who manages the office of the Paris police prefect, told Le Parisien that these circumstances are “very marginal.”

Americans have long associated the fight against Islamist terrorism with the Middle East, as Sunday’s attack in the Turkish capital of Ankara reminds us. But that geographical horizon is also increasingly out of date. Witness the expanding grip of jihadists in Africa—and the Obama Administration’s belated but increasingly urgent attempts to fight it.

This is apparent from the March 5 air strike, by manned and unmanned U.S. planes, on an al Shabaab training camp in Somalia that killed an estimated 150 terrorists. Four days later U.S. Special Forces assisted the Somali military in taking down another Shabaab camp. In both cases Pentagon officials cited intelligence suggesting an imminent threat of attacks by the al Qaeda-allied group, whose name means “the youth.”

Ostensibly, U.S. Special Forces are in Somalia to train and assist the African Union Mission in Somalia, or Amisom, which helps Somalia’s federal government. Shabaab is a menace to all of East Africa, with outrages including the 2013 attack on the Westgate Mall in Nairobi and last year’s rampage at Kenya’s Garissa College that massacred 148 Christian students.

But Shabaab is also a menace to the West. A Shabaab member tried to kill Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard in 2010 with an ax in revenge for drawing the prophet Mohammed. Shirwa Ahmed of Minneapolis became the first known American suicide bomber when he drove a truck bomb into a Somali government compound, killing 20. An estimated 40 U.S. citizens have traveled to Somalia to join Shabaab, which has called for attacks on U.S. shopping malls. If Islamic State can radicalize the San Bernardino killers from afar, Shabaab can do the same.

Al Shabaab militants parade new recruits after arriving in Mogadishufrom their training camp south of the capital on October 21, 2010. Photo: feisal omar/Reuters

The Obama Administration has sent 300 troops to Cameroon to fight the Islamist terrorists of Boko Haram in neighboring Nigeria, and it’s an open secret that the U.S. operates a drone base in Garoua in northern Cameroon. A U.S. air strike last month near the Libyan city of Sabratha killed an Islamic State leader and 48 terrorist comrades, and the Pentagon is reported to be drawing up plans for a broader air campaign against Islamic State in Libya. CONTINUE AT SITE