RUTHFULLY YOURS

ISTANBUL—Suicide bombers struck Turkey’s busiest airport Tuesday, killing at least 36 people and injuring scores more on the eve of a major holiday, the deadliest in a string of attacks in Istanbul this year.
Three bomb blasts shook the arrivals area of the international terminal at Istanbul Atatürk Airport around 9:22 p.m., Istanbul Governor Vasip Sahin said. At least 147 people were wounded.

One assailant set off a bomb after being shot by police near a checkpoint just inside the terminal, a Turkish official said. Two other attackers blew themselves up outside—one near the entrance and one in a parking lot across the street, the official said.

No group had claimed responsibility hours after the attack. However, Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said initial findings of an investigation suggested Islamic State carried out the assault. U.S. and other Western officials said the attack bore the hallmarks of the extremist organization, but added it was too early to assign blame.

Since last summer, Turkey has faced threats from Islamic State and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, an outlawed militia that has attacked Turkish security forces and civilian targets, including Istanbul’s second busiest airport, Sabiha Gokcen.

In almost every situation, Horace’s advice was as pragmatic as it was wise. Item: “Aequam memento rebus in arduis servare mentem.” Remember, when faced with difficult things, to preserve a calm mind.

I thought about that sage advice when I was at a drinks party last night in London. The mood was grim. The wine, chatter, and conviviality flowed (another bit of Horatian advice, nunc est bibendum, was liberally followed), but behind, and not very far behind, the bonhomie loomed an ominous-looking shadow, as if war had just been declared but the troops had yet to mobilize.

There was near-unanimous agreement among the revelers that last week’s referendum on Britain leaving the European Union represented an economic catastrophe of incalculable proportions.

There was also a more-or-less unspoken assumption that it represented a gigantic act of political stupidity and, finally, a sort of moral stain. It was assumed the EU, whatever its faults, was “for” human rights, the environment, fairness to Muslims, etc., in ways that the angry, nativist population who voted for Brexit couldn’t possibly understand.

There was, in short, a current of near panic coruscating about the room, though the intelligent and well-spoken party-goers were too polite to indulge in anything like histrionics. Somewhat muted vituperation, especially against the Brexiteer-in-chief Boris Johnson, there was aplenty. But mostly the assembled multitude was like those doctors Hilaire Belloc described in his poem about little Henry King, whose chief defect was chewing little bits of string:

Physicians of the utmost fame were called at once, but when they came they said (as they took their fees), “There is no cure of this disease. Henry will very soon be dead.”

I think the doom-and-gloom is vastly overstated. As the Remainders’ Bête Blond, Boris Johnson himself observed:

At home and abroad, the negative consequences [of the Brexit vote] are being wildly overdone, and the upside is being ignored.

Indeed. As I have stressed in this column over the last few days, the referendum to leave the EU was not a vote to leave Europe. The UK is part of Europe, by spirit and history as well as by geography. The vote was partly a vote against the officious, interfering EU bureaucrats and their vast thicket of prosperity-sapping regulation.

Mostly, however, it was an affirmative vote — a vote for British sovereignty, British freedom.

A balanced alternative view of the consequences of Brexit was set forth more than two years ago by the great James Bennett, the man who popularized the term Anglosphere and who has done as much as anyone to outline its political, economic, and existential advantages.

In an essay called “After the Brexit,” which appeared in The New Criterion in January 2014, Bennett compared America’s cooperation with Canada on the manufacture of cars — where vehicles are shipped back and forth across the border several times in the process of assembly — to one possible post-Brexit arrangement between the UK and Europe:

[M]uch of the cross-border trade between the United Kingdom and the European Union could continue with relatively simple arrangements comparable to North American arrangements.

As negotiations proceed towards the invocation of Article 50, the formal request to withdraw from the EU, a series of such arrangements could be agreed upon:

Britain’s trade with the Continent could continue at something near its current levels.

“Our only prospect for impacting this diseased, racist environment is to appeal to the conscience of those Europeans who still have one. Beyond that, the time has come to write them off.”

One of the more remarkable aspects of the blood libel sounded by Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas in his address before the European Parliament in Brussels last week is the claim that he ad-libbed the part about rabbis poisoning Palestinian wells.

After refusing to meet President Reuven Rivlin who was also in Brussels last week, Abbas ascended the podium in Brussels and began his custom of demonizing Jewish and Israel. Clearing his throat, the man whose incitement is most responsible for the fact that the Palestinians are the most anti-Semitic people in the world, began his speech by saying, “We are against incitement.”

Then, as is his wont, Abbas proceeded to incite mass murder of Jews by accusing rabbis of ordering the poisoning of Palestinian wells.

In his words, “Just a week ago, a week, a group of rabbis in Israel announced, in a clear announcement, demanding their government, to poison, to poison, the water of the Palestinians.”

“Is this not incitement? Is this not clear incitement, to the mass murder of the Palestinian people?” It’s not quite clear what it was that he was ad-libbing but a reasonable bet is that he was embellishing what was already in his planned speech. In the days preceding his speech, the Abbas-controlled PLO media put out stories claiming that a non-existent rabbi, who heads a non-existent rabbinical council issued an opinion that Jews in Judea and Samaria should poison Palestinian wells.

As the IsraellyCool website pointed out, by Abbas’s telling, it wasn’t just one non-existent rabbi, who heads a non-existent rabbinical council that told Jews in general to poison wells. In Abbas’s ad-libbed version, the entire non-existent council, led by the non-existent rabbi ordered the government to poison Palestinian water.

At any rate, whether Abbas winged the blood libel or just embellished a less powerful one, far from being a mitigating factor for judging the significance of his statement, the claim that he was speaking on the fly makes it all the worse.

Abbas simply couldn’t help himself.