Giulio Meotti: A Jew-free Europe
According to the statistics available, due to aliyah and assimilation, French Jewry is projected to experience a dramatic decline from 520,000 in 2000, to 480,000 in 2020, to 380,000 in 2050, and to 300,000 by 2080. The Jewish population in the United Kingdom will also decline to 240,000 in 2020, 180,000 in 2050, and 140,000 in 2080.
Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz, the world’s leading Talmudic scholar, recently delivered an apocalyptic vision: “The Jewish community in Europe is dying.” Enclaves of ultra-Orthodox Jews are likely to prevail in the main European cities, but Judaism will survive as mere folklore.
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The Pew Research Center’s 2008 Global Attitudes Project found that 46% of Spanish residents held an unfavorable view of Jews. Meanwhile, 47% of Germans are of the opinion that “Israel is exterminating the Palestinians,” according to a poll undertaken by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, affiliated with the German Social Democratic Party.
There are more than 1,000 Jews in Oslo, but you never see them. Not one. Jews in Norway make upjust 0.003% of the total population, but the country is a bulwark of global anti-Semitism. Elsewhere, due to security reasons, Jews are fleeing the Swedish city of Malmo and Antwerp in Belgium, a town once proudly called “the Northern Jerusalem.”
To quote psychiatrist Zvi Rex: “Europe will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz.” Europe doesn’t want to live under the psychological burden of Auschwitz forever. The Jews are living reminders of the moral failure of Europe. This leads to the projection of guilt on Israel and the remaining European Jews.
Indeed, it’s a tragic but unavoidable process: the New Europe will be a Jews-free continent.
FP: To reiterate, Europe has exchanged her Jews for Muslims. We see the consequences and it is entitled to them. Watch it go down the drain.
Daniel Pipes: Israel's Arabs, Living a Paradox
My interlocutors generally brushed aside questions about Islam. It almost felt impolite to mention the Islamic imperative that Muslims (who make up 84 percent of the Israeli Arab population) rule themselves, Discussing the Islamic drive for application of Islamic law drew blank looks and a shift to more immediate topics.
This avoidance reminded me of Turkey before 2002, when mainstream Turks assumed that Atatürk's revolution was permanent and assumed Islamists would remain a fringe phenomenon. They proved very wrong: a decade after Islamists democratically rode to power in late 2002, the elected government steadily applied more Islamic laws and built a neo-Ottoman regional power.
I predict a similar evolution in Israel, as Israeli Arab paradoxes grow more acute. Muslim citizens of Israel will continue to grow in numbers, skills, and confidence, becoming simultaneously more integral to the country's life and more ambitious to throw off Jewish sovereignty. This suggests that as Israel overcomes external threats, Israeli Arabs will emerge as an ever-greater concern. Indeed, I predict they represent the ultimate obstacle to establishing the Jewish homeland anticipated by Theodor Herzl and Lord Balfour.
What can be done? Lebanon's Christians lost power because they incorporated too many Muslims and became too small a proportion of the country's population to rule it. Recalling this lesson, Israel's identity and security require minimizing the number of Arab citizens – not by reducing their democratic rights, much less by deporting them, but by such steps as adjusting Israel's borders, building fences along the frontiers, implementing stringent family reunification policies, changing pro-natalist policies, and carefully scrutinizing refugee applications.
Ironically, the greatest impediment to these actions will be that most Israeli Arabs emphatically wish to remain disloyal citizens of the Jewish state (as opposed to loyal citizens of a Palestinian state). Further, many other Middle Eastern Muslims aspire to become Israelis (a phenomenon I call Muslim aliyah). These preferences, I predict, will stymie the government of Israel, which will not develop adequate responses, thereby turning today's relative quiet into tomorrow's crisis.
FP: Indeed, I’ve warned about this frequently and I expressed skepticism about the tendency to confuse the wish to live in Israel with loyalty to the state—hence Pipes’ disloyal citizenship. But I very much doubt Israel will do what Pipes suggests, committing another strategic blunder, in part out of denial and in part to appease the West.
CAMERA: Two Faces of Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad
Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, in a statement for publication, appropriately condemned the Jewish school attack by an Arab Muslim jihadist in France:
It is time for these criminals to stop marketing their terrorist acts in the name of Palestine and to stop pretending to stand up for the rights of Palestinian children who only ask for a decent life... This terrorist crime is condemned in the strongest terms by the Palestinian people and their children ... No Palestinian child can accept a crime that targets innocent people. (Agence France Presse -- English – March 21, 2012 Wednesday)
But to his own people, Fayyad praised terrorists who kill innocent people:
“Prime Minister, Salam Fayyad, opened his weekly radio address by sending greetings to the Palestinian mother in honor of Mothers' Day,” Palestinian Media Watch reports. Fayyad’s greetings included:
I make special mention of all the women prisoners who are mothers: Iman Ghazawi, who has been imprisoned for ten years; Qahira Al-Sa'adi; Irena Sarahneh; Latifa Abu Dhiraa; Ibtisam Al-Issawi; Muntaha Al-Tawil; and Kifah Qatash.
PMW explains that "Qahira Al-Sa'adi drove a suicide bomber to an attack in Jerusalem in 2002, in which 3 were killed. Irena Sarahneh drove a suicide bomber to an attack in the Israeli city Rishon LeZion in 2002, in which 2 were killed and dozens injured. Iman Ghazawi placed a bomb at the central bus station in Tel Aviv in 2001, which was discovered before it exploded. Latifa Abu Dhiraa smuggled a bomb into Israel for a suicide terror attack in 2003 that was uncovered before it was implemented."
FP: So when Arik Sharon told Condi that Palestinians are treacherous and murderous, he was actually describing reality quite correctly, no?
Islamists seek influence in Syria uprising
The gunmen in eastern Syria, wielding grenade launchers and assault rifles, announced on the Internet they were forming the "God is Great" Brigade and joining the country's rebellion. They swore allegiance to the Free Syrian Army and vowed to topple President Bashar Assad.
But unlike many other rebel bands, they wrapped their proclamation in hard-line Islamic language, declaring their fight to be a "jihad," or holy war, and urging others to do the same.
"To our fellow revolutionaries, don't be afraid to declare jihad in the path of God. Seek victory from the One God. God is the greatest champion," the brigade's spokesman said in the January video. "Instead of fighting for a faction, fight for your nation, and instead of fighting for your nation, fight for God."
As Syria's uprising evolves into an armed insurgency, parts of the movement are taking on overt religious overtones. Islamic movements in and out of the country are vying to gain influence over the revolt in hopes of gathering power if Assad falls.
The Islamists' role complicates choices for the United States and other nations who say they want to help the opposition without empowering radicals; a string of anti-regime suicide bombings have raised fears of al-Qaida involvement.
FP: What did I tell you?
California struggling to prepare quake early warning system
Japan has one. So do Mexico, Taiwan, Turkey and Romania.
But California has struggled to develop and deploy an earthquake warning system that would give cities seconds of crucial time to prepare for the impact of a massive earthquake.
California is spending only a fraction of what Japan and Mexico have devoted, and scientists said the progress is so slow that they cannot say when the state might complete its own system.
Until recently, researchers were spending only about $400,000 a year developing the technology. Last year, they received a $6-million grant for work on a new prototype. But experts said it would cost about $150 million to build and $5 million a year to operate a system covering California and other quake-prone states along the Pacific.
FP: That California cannot have what Romania—a failed state—has, tells you how consequential US decline is.
How the rich took over airport security
The other day at Bergstrom Airport in Austin, Texas, I witnessed a striking manifestation of the new American plutocracy. Along with getting a photo at the Department of Motor Vehicles and sitting in a jury pool, standing in line at airport security with a mob of other people, miserable though it is, remains one of the few examples of civic equality in our increasingly oligarchic republic. Much airport security, of course, is theater, designed to provide alibis for bureaucrats and politicians in the event of a terrorist attack. But while we can debate what a rational airport security system would look like, no rational system would discriminate among passengers on the basis of ability to pay.
That is what makes the policy of Delta Airlines so shockingly un-American. In Austin, Delta had not one but two lines that fed into the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) checkpoint area. One line was mixed race, mixed class, and mixed age. The other line was usually empty. Now and then a white, middle-aged man would appear in the second line and the first line would be halted as he went directly into the TSA checkpoint.
FP: As the US declines and inequities deepen, this is how the society will increasingly look.
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