RUTHFULLY YOURS

It’s no rare thing for the Israeli prime minister to enrage the Jews of the diaspora. But three years ago, Benjamin Netanyahu delivered a speech that won him near-universal condemnation.

In the aftermath of several deadly attacks in European cities like Paris and Copenhagen, Mr. Netanyahu called on Jews to leave Europe. “Of course, Jews deserve protection in every country. But we say to Jews, to our brothers and sisters: Israel is your home,” he said, echoing comments he had made more subtly the month before at Paris’s Grand Synagogue.

Mr. Netanyahu’s suggestion of “mass immigration” was “unacceptable,” said Rabbi Menachem Margolin, the head of the European Jewish Association. Abraham Foxman, then head of the Anti-Defamation League, suggested such a policy would “grant Hitler a posthumous victory.” Denmark’s chief rabbi, Jair Melchior, said he was “disappointed.” Smadar Bar-Akiva, the executive director of JCC Global, said “the calls for French Jews to pack their bags” and move were “disturbing and self-defeating.”

François Hollande, then president, echoing a chorus of European leaders, pushed back hard, appealing to his country’s Jews: “Your place is here, in your home. France is your country.”

Is it?

This is a question worth seriously asking following the barbaric murder last week of Mireille Knoll.

Ms. Knoll, 85, believed Mr. Hollande. France was her place, her home, her country. And Paris was her city.

She believed this despite the fact that it was also the city where, when she was 9 years old, the police rounded up 13,000 of the city’s Jews, 4,000 of them children, and crammed them into Vélodrome d’Hiver, a cycling stadium, before shipping them to their deaths at Auschwitz. Ms. Knoll narrowly escaped this largest French deportation of Jews during the Holocaust and fled to Portugal with her mother.

Our story begins with two Swedish government agencies. The job of the National Board of Health and Welfare (Socialstyrelsen) is “to ensure good health, social welfare and high-quality health and social care on equal terms for the whole Swedish population.” It is part of the Ministry of Health and Social Affairs. The Swedish Migration Agency (Migrationsverket) is “the authority that considers applications from people who want to take up permanent residence in Sweden, come for a visit, seek protection from persecution or become Swedish citizens.”

On March 24, the two agencies released a four-page brochure. It was entitled “Information for Those who Are Married to Children.” Yes, you read that right. Its cover featured a cheery drawing of a very dark-skinned girl in hijab and a somewhat dark-skinned boy and girl in more Western-looking garb. The style of illustration was recognizable from a thousand children’s books. But this wasn’t a children’s book. It was a brochure for adults living in Sweden whose “spouses” are minors.

The brochure started off by stating: “Child marriages are prohibited in Sweden.” Well, yes, technically. But the very existence of the brochure is a reflection of the fact that such marriages exist and are officially tolerated. The brochure explained the reason for the prohibition: “Children have the right to be children and not to have the responsibility that a marriage involves.” Also, children need schooling; marriage can lead a child to experience physical and psychological problems; and if a child gets pregnant, that, too, can lead to problems.

There followed a list of some of the rights that children supposedly enjoy in Sweden, among them the right to divorce, to refuse sex (even with a spouse), and to obtain an abortion. The brochure stated that having sex with a child is illegal, even if you are married to her. Again, all this is technically true. But in practice, nobody is arrested or imprisoned for being “married” to a child.

While this country is embroiled in a shouting match over gun violence, Germany finds itself in an internal debate about the rise in knife violence. Unlike this country, though, many in Germany seem to be focused on finding the root cause and, hence, the solution. As The Local reports of Germany, “police statistics [show] that refugees and asylum seekers are significantly over-represented in violent crime statistics.”

Titled “String of knife attacks further fuels debate over refugees and violence,” the article begins by listing a series of violent knife attacks. Almost all of the attacks were done by male teenage refugees. The listed knife attacks are disturbing and the article concludes with the statement, “At least seven knife attacks were recorded last weekend alone.” The article then adds, “the prevalence of asylum seekers as suspects in these crimes has given voice to those who say the government’s liberal refugee policies have made the country less safe.”

While there are undoubtedly leftists in Germany pushing back on ascribing the rising knife violence to refugees, it is refreshing that a country is seemingly interested in finding the actual problem instead of blaming knives—something that leftists in America would do well to imitate.

In an earlier article, I wrote about how guns have been around for as long as there have been schools in this country. In fact, previous generations openly carried guns to school. That fact means that the rise in gun violence in schools is not due to the presence of guns. In the article, I then explained that “when looking for solutions to problems, you need to first deal with variables that were introduced around the time the problem began. Guns are not the actual problem, and treating them as the actual problem will help ensure that the problem will never be solved.”