RUTHFULLY YOURS

Americans love to name places after legislators, mayors and presidents. I have a suggestion. Perhaps New York’s Gowanus Canal should have its name altered. The waterway has been described as “a fetid corpse of water” after decades of industrial dumping and “a toxic-swamp of a river that crawls through much of south Brooklyn.” I can think of several pols that merit the honor.

However, now that President McKinley has been dismounted, the choice may not suit because it is named after after “Gouwane” chief among the Lenape tribe called the Canarsee, who lived and farmed on the shorelines.
In that case, how about the Waste Transfer Station on the upper East side of New York?

A delighted Mick Jagger just visited the Stalinist nation that criminalized his music and herded many of its listeners into forced-labor camps at Soviet bayonet-point as punishment.

The visit was reported by the proud Stalinist regime’s captive (literally!) press this week.

The exact purpose of the visit was not ascertained but the Rolling Stones (renown for their tributes to black music and musicians) seem to be planning a concert sponsored by the lily-white regime that jailed and tortured the most and longest-suffering black political prisoners in the modern history of the Western hemisphere.

In fact, this Castroite jailing and torture of blacks took a nice uptick precisely during Jagger’s visit.

Back in 1985 Rolling Stones’ guitarists Keith Richards and Ron Wood proudly joined Artists United Against Apartheid and played on the ad-hoc music group’s anti-Apartheid anthem titled: “Sun City.” Sun City was a resort in segregationist South Africa during the 1980’s (but this resort wasn’t itself subject to segregationist laws.)

As a direct consequence of the carnage and chaos in the Middle East millions of people are literally running for their lives. Their desire to put distance between themselves and the violence of their own leaders as well as the violence of ISIS, al Nusra and other terrorists organizations is certainly understandable.

However, among the innocent people fleeing the violence are terrorists seeking to enter European countries as well as the United States. These terrorists attempt to blend in with the massive number of bona fide refugees hoping to gain entry into European countries and the United States. Their ultimate goal is to carry out terror attacks, repaying the generosity of countries willing to help them by killing as many of the civilians of those countries as possible.

Alain El-Mouchan is the pen name of a professor of history and geography in Paris.
French Jews are emigrating to Israel by the tens of thousands. Their departure isn’t just about them; it’s about the end of the French idea.

The violent turmoil in today’s Middle East is producing an array of bewildering and seemingly contradictory effects. One of them is this: hundreds of thousands of refugees, soon perhaps millions, are fleeing the region in hopes of finding shelter in a Europe deeply uncertain both of itself and of what to do with them. Simultaneously, on a much smaller but historically portentous scale, tens of thousands of Jews are departing France, the home of Europe’s largest Jewish population, and heading for the same Middle East, but in their case for a country ready, willing, and eager to enfold them.

What meaning can be given to this apparent coincidence of opposites? Focusing almost entirely on the situation in France, the analyst Alain El-Mouchan here teases out the causes that lie behind the departure of thousands of its Jews for home in Israel. Much has already been written about the crisis of European Jewry, including notably here and here in Mosaic. But, especially in the light of the continent’s stark disorientation as it confronts masses clamoring for entry, the topic has become timely again, carrying as it does lessons not only about the past but for the future.

“If 100,000 Frenchmen of Spanish origin were to leave, I would never say that France is no longer France. But if 100,000 Jews leave, France will no longer be France. The French Republic will be judged a failure.” Thus declared Prime Minister Manuel Valls to the National Assembly in January 2015, within days of the homicidal jihadist attacks in Paris on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and at a kosher supermarket.

What prompted this impassioned declaration? It is true enough that increasing numbers of French Jews have been leaving for Israel. In the past five years alone, more than 20,000 have done so, and since 2012 the annual figures have been moving steadily upward. Still, the French Jewish population, standing at about 480,000, remains the largest in Europe, and the latest surge, following as it does upon earlier, smaller movements of French Jews to Israel, is a far cry from the Prime Minister’s alarmed figure of 100,000. Is so massive an outflow really imminent, and, no less important, is there a sense in which the departure of a cohort of 100,000 Jews would truly mean the failure of the French political model of republican governance—that is, of France itself?