RUTHFULLY YOURS

“Unfortunately, the West has rejected the idea of solidarity with the Christians of the Middle East, prioritizing diplomacy based on oil interests and the Arab-Israeli conflict. Thus, the United States, Britain, and France have largely ignored the persecutions of the Christians of Iraq, Lebanon, Egypt, and Sudan, while rushing to save the oil-rich Muslim states of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait…” — Hannibal Travis, Professor of Law, 2006.

Indigenous Christians in Iraq and Syria have not only been exposed to genocide at the hands of the Islamic State and other Islamist groups, but also their applications for immigration to Western countries have been put on the back-burner by, shamefully but not surprisingly, the UN.

When one brings up the issue of Western states taking in Muslim migrants from Syria and Iraq without vetting them for jihadist ties, while leaving behind the Christian and Yazidi victims of jihadists, one is accused of being “bigoted” or “racist”. But the real bigotry is abandoning the persecuted and benign Middle Eastern Christians and Yazidis, the main victims of the ongoing genocides in Syria and Iraq.

The German government is also rejecting applications for asylum of Christian refugees and deporting them unfairly, according to a German pastor.

Nearly a third of the respondents said that most of the discrimination and violence came mostly from refugee camp guards of Muslim descent.

It is high time that not only the U.S. but all other Western governments finally saw that the Christians in the Middle East are them.

Finally, after years of apathy and inaction, Washington is extending a much-needed helping hand to Middle Eastern Christians. U.S. President Donald Trump recently announced that persecuted Christians will be given priority when it comes to applying for refugee status in the United States.

Christians and Yazidis are being exposed to genocide at the hands of ISIS and other Islamist groups, who have engaged in a massive campaign to enslave the remnant non-Muslim minorities and to destroy their cultural heritage.

The scholar Hannibal Travis wrote in 2006:

On the competing strains of populist politics.

The West is abuzz with reports of a populist wave: rolling through Europe, sweeping across the Atlantic, and crashing into Gomorrah-by-the-Potomac. Donald Trump’s election as president of the United States—a watershed event as unthinkable as it was improbable to many across the ideological spectrum of American punditry—followed hard on the British people’s vote to exit the European Union, a cognate popular rejection of bipartisan elite opinion.

In short order, Matteo Renzi was the next shoe to drop. Italy’s now-former prime minister, a young, attractive, politically “progressive” technocrat, darling of the European cognoscenti, had been hailed—it seemed like only yesterday—as Rome’s (or is it Brussels’s?) answer to Barack Obama. He resigned in November, though, after the Italian people resoundingly defeated his proposed constitutional “reform.” The scare-quotes are offered advisedly: Italy having been virtually ungovernable since Garibaldi forced what passes for its unification, Sig. Renzi’s reform was a scheme to end the paralysis by accreting power to himself at the expense of the legislature. Think of it as a gambit to codify U.S. President Barack Obama’s “I’ve got a pen and I’ve got a phone” style of centralized rule.

The victorious Trump had the populist wind at his back. Thus, efforts to caricature the real-estate mogul and reality-television star as a budding Hitler fell flat. Renzi, by contrast, ran into the teeth of that wind. The hyperbole casting him as a would-be Mussolini took its toll.

Renzi’s fall is the continental aftershock of the Brexit earthquake. The “Remain” camp’s failure ushered out David Cameron of the Europhile center-right. He is succeeded by Theresa May, who has promised to carry out the public will despite her (understated) support for “Remain.”

But that’s not all, not by a long shot.

In France, the socialist President François Hollande’s favorability rating is so infinitesimal—well under 10 percent in some polls—that a reelection bid was inconceivable. The two viable candidates to succeed him are both riding the populist wave: the virulently anti-Islamist Marine Le Pen of the Nationalist Front, and the intriguing François Fillon, the former prime minister. As Fred Siegel incisively details in City Journal, Fillon is a social conservative whose economic program is Thatcherite (sacré bleu!) and has its sights trained on Paris’s bloated public sector. One way or another, dramatic change is coming.
Is “populism” the right diagnosis for the upheavals in the West?

While most politicians across Europe – Nigel Farage excepted – responded to Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy with sneers of condescension and greeted his victory with either grudging congratulations or cries of apocalyptic alarm, Geert Wilders was an outspoken Trump cheerleader all along. The day after the American election, the crusading Dutch politician characterized America’s verdict as “a political revolution” and a “stunning and historic achievement” that “sent a powerful message to the world.” He added: “I never doubted Mr. Trump would win. We are witnessing the same uprising on both sides of the Atlantic. The Patriotic Spring is sweeping the Western world.”

Well, let’s hope so. So far the only other evidence of any such Patriotic Spring has been Brexit (and even that’s starting to look shaky, thanks to the court ruling that the British Parliament has to ratify the referendum vote). The next major test of the “Patriotic Spring” will come on March 15, when Wilders’s own Freedom Party (PVV) will compete in the elections for the Tweede Kamer, the more powerful lower house of the Dutch Parliament. Things have changed a lot since the last election, in 2012, when the two big vote-getters were the left-wing Labor Party (PvdA) and the conservative People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD). Wilders’s PVV came in far behind, more or less tied with three other parties, each of which took about a dozen seats out of 150, the rest being distributed among five even smaller parties. In the wake of the 2012 election, the VVD and PvdA formed a coalition government, with VVD head Mark Rutte staying on as Prime Minister.

The new government wasn’t in office for long, however, before Wilders’s PVV skyrocketed in the polls, becoming the nation’s largest party. Next thing you knew – surprise! – the demonization of Wilders kicked into high gear. The pretext: in a speech to supporters, he asked if they wanted more or less of the EU, more or less of the Labor Party, and more or fewer Moroccans. Wilders’s suggestion that the Netherlands might not want to take in limitless numbers of Moroccans outraged pretty much the entire Dutch establishment: the political and media elite savaged him; schoolteachers denounced him in classrooms; clergy decried him from pulpits. Wilders responded by pointing out that three in five Dutch-Moroccan men under age 23 had rap sheets and that Moroccans were 22 times more likely than ethnic Dutchmen to commit violent crimes. But it didn’t help. The slime campaign worked. The PVV’s numbers dropped, and it became the nation’s #3 party.

But not for long. The PVV soon rebounded, and since summer before last, it’s been the Netherlands’s top-polling party, leading the VVD by a comfortable margin and leaving the fast-disappearing PvdA entirely in the dust. After living through their country’s distinctively dramatic post-9/11 history – the assassinations of Pim Fortuyn in 2002 and Theo van Gogh in 2004, the Ayaan Hirsi Ali debacle that ended with her emigration to the U.S. in 2006, and the rise (and international vilification) of Wilders – Dutch voters seem finally to be on the verge of making the PVV the largest party in the Tweede Kamer.