Category: Europe

Our So-Called ‘Allies’

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If you’re old enough to remember the debates that preceded the Iraq War, a key point was the posture of our so-called “allies” in Europe. Many liberals argued that if European countries didn’t support the U.S., we couldn’t go to war against Saddam Hussein. In effect, liberals wanted to give Europe a veto over U.S. foreign policy. Americans had to endure the humiliating spectacle of our leaders basically begging France to join the anti-Saddam coalition, only to be rebuffed in the end.

Without regard to the specific issue of Iraq, however, that debate called attention to the general uselessness of our so-called “allies.” How many armored divisions can France put in the field? How many brigades of combat infantry can Belgium or Portugal deploy? How many attack helicopters and fighter aircraft do Spain and Italy have? If you scrutinize Europe’s military preparedness, you realize that even if they had wanted to join the U.S.-led coalition in smashing Saddam, they didn’t have very much operational equipment and manpower to contribute to the effort.

Consider the current condition of the German military:

Germany has come up short once more in meeting its military obligations to NATO. Leaked readiness data indicates that a key component of the NATO rapid reaction force, which Germany is to supply in 2019, is nowhere near ready to perform duties German said it could handle. The German armored brigade that was promised for 2019 is not able to fulfill its duties. Only about 20 percent of the armored vehicles (Leopard 2 tanks and Marder infantry vehicles) are fit for service. German military aircraft continue to have the lowest readiness rates in NATO and Germany continues, as it has for over twenty year, to promise the situation would be fixed but it never is. When the Americans press Germany to meet its NATO obligations (which includes spending at least two percent of GDP on defense) there are promises but no performance.

(Hat-tip: Austin Bay at Instapundit.)

All we ask is that our NATO partners spend 2% of their gross domestic product on defense, and they can’t even meet that obligation. Keep in mind that one reason for the creation of NATO’s rapid reaction force is the need to counter Vladimir Putin’s recent aggression in Eastern Europe. So while President Trump is accused of “collusion” with Russia, the reality is that our NATO partners are either unwilling or unable to do what is necessary to defend against Russian aggression.

Ask your liberal friends if they are aware of this problem. Our so-called “allies” in Europe are in a state of pathetic helplessness, unable to meet their military obligations, and how do they expect Trump (or any future American leader) to stand up to Putin, when NATO is dysfunctional?

 

‘Europe Is Already Under an Invasion’

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On the occasion of the anniversary of the 1848 revolution, Hungary’s prime minister Viktor Orban gave a powerful speech in Budapest:

The situation, my dear friends, is: They want to take away our country! . . . They want us to hand it over willingly to others. To strangers from another continent, who do not speak our language, who do not respect our culture, our laws and our way of life. Who want to replace our way of life with theirs. From now on they do not want us and our descendants to live here, but someone else. . . .
There is no exaggeration in this! We can see it day by day, as great European peoples and nations, step by step, area by area, from city to city, lose their homeland. The situation is such that those who do not stop the migration at their borders will be lost. Slowly but surely they will be consumed. All of this by external forces, international powers that are trying to force it upon us, with the help of their local allies, and they see the upcoming election as a great opportunity for this.
Europe is already under an invasion. If we let it, in the coming decades, tens of millions will begin to move into Europe from Africa and the Middle East. Western Europe is watching this with their hands in the air. Whoever puts his hands up is disarming himself. He is no longer making decisions about his fate. The history of the losers will be written by others in the years ahead. The young people in Western Europe will see it, when they become a minority in their own country and they lose the only thing in the world they can call home. Such forces as now reveal themselves have not been seen in the world for a long time.
Africa will have ten times more young people than Europe. If Europe does nothing, they will kick down the doors, and Brussels will not protect Europe. They do not want to stop the migration, but rather to support it and organize it. They want to dilute and replace the people of Europe!

You may be wondering, who are “they”?

Media financed by foreign groups, and a domestic oligarchy, professional activists . . . agitators, organizers of riots, chains of NGOs paid by international speculators, which can be summed up with George Soros’ name, since he personifies it. This is the world we must fight against, to defend our own.

 

Last July, I reported how Orban’s anti-Soros rhetoric was condemned by some (including the Israeli ambassador) as anti-Semitic. Nevertheless, it is a fact that “professional activists” funded by Soros, along with other “external forces,” do support unlimited immigration to Europe, and have sought to undermine Hungary’s government, which opposes this Islamic “invasion.” Hungary faces an election on April 8 — about three weeks from now — and Orban’s speech could be seen as an effort to rally support for his party and to counter the challenge of the Jobbik party, which is even farther to the right than Orban’s nationalist Fidesz party.

Michael Brendan Dougherty is concerned by a passage of Orban’s speech which “reads like a checklist drawn from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” but it must be asked: What is the alternative? That is to say, if the meddling activists funded by Soros have inflamed public opinion in Hungary, so that the nationalist government of Orban is threatened by openly anti-Semitic rivals, do we expect Orban to ignore this threat? And if Orban does a bit of dog-whistling about the “crafty” Soros who “speculates with money,” is that worse than what would happen in Hungary if Orban were to fall, and Jobbik were to gain power?

The Left has sown the wind and is reaping the whirlwind, including an ugly resurgence of anti-Semitism. It is a mistake to blame the reaction in Europe without acknowledging the Left’s role in provoking that reaction. The crisis in Europe is a result of two decades of misguided policies promoted by the elites in Brussels and elsewhere, policies that were supported by many American politicians in both parties. It is reasonable to hope that, if Orban wins a solid victory in next month’s election, this will relieve the pressure against his government, and thereby help suppress the more extremist elements in Hungary.

It is a shame, and also highly ironic, that George Soros has managed to rekindle the toxic politics of European anti-Semitism. It will be recalled that Soros was a Nazi collaborator in World War II, and is it anti-Semitic to despise a self-hating Jew? Yet no one could imagine that the Jews of Europe will benefit from an influx of Muslim immigrants. So it appears that once again, Soros is collaborating with the enemies of the Jewish people, while at the same time causing his own enemies to hate Jews!

What is happening in Europe could be a harbinger of our own future, unless more Americans wake up to the danger of cultural Marxism.



 

 

‘Europe’s Last Hope’

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The trumpet sounds in Hungary:

Hungary’s prime minister says that “Christianity is Europe’s last hope” and that politicians in Brussels, Berlin and Paris favoring migration have “opened the way to the decline of Christian culture and the advance of Islam.”
Viktor Orban said Sunday during his 20th annual state of the nation speech that his government will oppose efforts by the United Nations or the European Union to make migration acceptable to the world.
He conjured the image of a Western Europe overtaken by Muslims, saying that “born Germans are being forced back from most large German cities, as migrants always occupy big cities first.”
Orban claimed that Islam would soon “knock on Central Europe’s door” from the west as well as the south.

UPDATE: Turns out this was a timely warning:

ISIS has claimed responsibility for a gun rampage at an Orthodox church in Russia that left five women dead.
Khalil Khalilov screamed ‘Allahu akbar’ as he opened fire with a hunting rifle before he was shot dead by police in Kizlyar, a town in the mainly Muslim region of Dagestan.
Chilling footage shows the bearded 22-year-old attacker walking to the church on Sunday and a terrified woman fleeing the scene.
ISIS claimed one of its ‘soldiers of Islam’, who they referred to as Khalil Daghestan, carried out the attack using his gun to ‘kill five of them and wound four others’.

People need to wake up to this threat, and start praying.

 

Actress Flees Italy as ‘Sophisticated’ Europeans Side With Harvey Weinstein

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Our “allies” are so thoughtful and enlightened:

Italian movie actress and director Asia Argento is facing pushback in her home country after speaking out about an alleged rape at the hands of disgraced movie mogul Harvey Weinstein. While Argento’s courage in speaking about what happened to her was praised in Hollywood, and helped encourage at least 40 women to speak out about their own experiences of assault at the hands of Weinstein, public opinion in Italy has sided more with Weinstein than with Argento, according to Quartz’s Annalisa Merelli.
Merelli points out that the opinion writers have been remarkably bold in their condemnation of Argento and other actresses speaking out against sexual assault — former journalist and MP Renato Farina, for instance, has suggested that the assaults described by actresses are “prostitution, not rape.” Vittorio Feltri, editor in chief of Libero, a right wing populist newspaper, said that since Weinstein didn’t physically harm Argento that the sex must have been consensual — and that, if anything, Argento should be thankful to Weinstein for forcibly performing oral sex on her. Politician Vittorio Sgarbi went still further, arguing that Weinstein “was actually assaulted by her.”
Prominent Italian women have targeted Argento as well, questioning why she didn’t speak out earlier about the rape or claiming that she deserved what happened to her since she willingly visited Weinstein in his hotel room.
In wake of the public outcry against her, Argento has said that she is leaving Italy for Germany to escape the “climate of tension” and “victim blaming.”
“Italy,” Argento said, “is far behind the rest of the world in its view of women.”

(Hat-tip: Instapundit.) Every American woman I’ve known who has traveled in Europe has talked about how different attitudes are there. Especially in France and Italy, women report that the cat-calling is horrific. In fact, if you pay attention to complaints about cat-calling in America, you’ll notice that the problem has an ethnic aspect. When a video of a woman being harassed on the streets of New York went viral in 2014, nearly all the harassers were black or Latino. This resulted in a discussion among feminists of whether complaining about cat-calling is racist. This is how “intersectionality” works: Only white men are to blame for sexism — and only American white men, because every American liberal believes Europe is better than America.

 

Muslim Who Killed 12 in Berlin Terrorist Attack Is Caught, Shot Dead in Italy

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German officials issued a bulletin seeking Berlin terror suspect Anis Amri.

 

Immediately after Monday’s deadly truck rampage in Berlin, it was reported that police had apprehended a Pakistani suspect in the Islamic terrorist attack. However, evidence showed that a Tunisian immigrant — a man well-known to European anti-terrorism authorities — was the actual perpetrator. He managed to elude capture for three days:

Video has emerged of the Berlin Christmas market attack suspect Anis Amri pledging allegiance to ISIS. The footage emerged hours after he was killed in an early-morning shootout in Milan on Friday morning.
The Tunisian man, who has been the subject of a Europe-wide manhunt since Monday’s market attack in which 12 people were killed, was stopped in Sesto San Giovanni — a district in the northeastern part of Milan — just after 3am local time, Italian police said on Twitter. . . .
When the man was asked for his papers by Italian police, he pulled a .22 calibre gun out of his backpack and fired at them. . . .
The driver of the police car returned fire, killing the 24-year-old suspect. . . .
Italian Interior Minister Marco Minniti said the man shot was Amri “without any doubt.” The Tunisian had previously lived in Italy. . . .
Italian news agency ANSA said Amri arrived in Milan by train from the French region of Savoy. . . .
It suggests that Amri passed through at least two European borders after fleeing Berlin. . . .
German officials are now working to determine whether Amri had a network of people helping him flee from Germany to Italy, German federal prosecutor Peter Frank said.
Amri was considered to be one of the most dangerous Islamists in the country months before Monday’s attack, according to German intelligence officials.
He was put on a German security services list of dangerous people in March, which currently includes 549 individuals. . . .

(Via Memeorandum.) So, a Tunisian who was on a German security watch list nevertheless managed to pull off a major terrorist attack in Berlin, eluding authorities in Germany, crossing the French and Italian borders without anyone noticing and, if he had not randomly encountered a police patrol in Milan, Anis Amri might have escaped altogether.

 

Is anyone surprised by this? Europe’s political elites have effectively surrendered their countries to Muslim invaders. The elite have celebrated this invasion — #RefugeesWelcome, as Emma Watson says — while claiming that the real danger is “Islamophobia” and the “far right.” Even when police are successful in identifying dangerous Muslim extremists, government policies prevent them from taking measures to prevent terrorist attacks, because political leaders are under constant pressure from left-wing activists in the media to protect the so-called “refugees.”

People in Europe are being slaughtered by Muslims because European governments have effectively abolished their own borders, and anyone who complains about this insanity is denounced as a far-right “racist.”



 

 

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TERROR ATTACK IN EUROPE: BOMB BLASTS ROCK BRUSSELS AIRPORT; UPDATE: ISIS TO BLAME; ‘LET’S STOP PRETENDING,’ OFFICIAL SAYS UPDATE: 34 DEAD, CNN REPORTS

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Islamic terrorists struck early Tuesday morning in Europe, as bombs exploded in the Brussels airport. Early reports indicate at least two bombs were used in the attack, which came just days after authorities in Belgium arrested a fugitive sought in the 2015 massacre in Paris.

UPDATE 4:45 a.m. ET: The exact number of killed and wounded in the attack is unknown. CNN’s first online report:

Two explosions occurred at the airport in Brussels, Belgium on Tuesday.
Several people were killed, according to the country’s public broadcaster, RTBF. Initial reports say up to 10 people were killed and more than 30 people were injured.
Federal police at the airport at Zaventem told CNN that “there has been an explosion” and “something has happened.”
Dozens of people have been taken on stretchers out of the airport, according to eyewitnesses.

The New York Times reports:

Two explosions killed at least one person and forced the evacuation of Brussels Airport around 8 a.m. on Tuesday, according to the authorities and news reports, halting arrivals and departures.
The sources of the blasts were unclear, as was the number of wounded, though a witness told CNN that he had seen people being taken away on luggage carts, and photographs on social media showed people streaked with blood and soot, looking stunned but conscious.
Other images posted on social media showed smoke rising from the departure hall, where the windows had been blown out, and people running away from the building. Hundreds were herded outside.
“We are trying to know more about what is going on,” said Anke Fransen, a spokeswoman for the airport. “It is certain there are several victims in our departure hall.”

UPDATE 5 a.m. ET: There are also reports early Tuesday of possible attacks on the Metro commuter rail in Brussels. The attacks follow on the arrest Friday of a key suspect in the November attack in Paris:

The arrest of terror suspect Salah Abdeslam resulted in authorities finding a large number of weapons, Belgian Foreign Minister Didier Reynders said Sunday.
“He was ready to restart something in Brussels,” said Reynders, speaking at the German Marshall Fund’s Brussels Forum. “And it’s maybe the reality because we have found a lot of weapons, heavy weapons, in the first investigations and we have found a new network around him in Brussels.”
The investigation also showed more people were involved in the November 13 Paris attacks than first thought, he said. . . .
His comments were reiterated by Belgian State Security Chief Jaak Raes, who told CNN Belgian affiliate VTM News on Sunday that it was “of the utmost importance that Abdeslam was captured alive, because we can now try to reconstruct the entire scenario.”
That was crucial in order “to see to what extent the intelligence services can learn lessons from the information that is gleaned,” he said.
He warned that the threat posed by ISIS to Europe was far from over, saying: “We know that a number of people are possibly on their way to Western Europe, with the intention of conducting an attack — to, with the ‘jihad mentality,’ do damage to Western democracy. We need to stay very vigilant about that.”
Authorities have said nine terrorists killed 130 people with guns and bombs in Parisian restaurants, shops and a concert venue the night of November 13.

UPDATE 5:50 a.m. ET: The latest news from BBC:

The first set of explosions took place at around 08:00 (07:00 GMT) [3 a.m. EDT] at Zaventum airport.
Some time later, a blast was reported at Maalbeek metro station, close to the city’s EU buildings. . . .
The explosion at Maalbeek station, near the EU institutions in Brussels, at 09:11 (08:11 GMT) [4:11 a.m. EDT] this morning has prompted a shutdown of the entire metro system, and trams and buses are not running either. . . .

  • A French student has tweeted video of people being moved away from Maalbeek station along the metro track.
  • Belgian broadcaster VRT says at least 13 people were killed and 35 were wounded at the airport
  • Shots were heard before the explosions, which appear to have struck near the American Airlines and Brussels Airline check in desk

UPDATE 8:10 a.m. ET: The London Daily Express:

ISIS revenge: Terror group claims
responsibility for Brussels attacks
Reports from Kurdish media said the terror group had admitted being behind today’s strike. . . .
Spanish Foreign Secretary José Manuel García Margallo immediately laid the blame with ISIS — also known by its Arabic acronym Daesh.
He said: “Let’s stop pretending, let’s worry about Daesh, which is the enemy.”
Describing the group as a “terrorist cancer”, he said: “We must be aware that as they are hit in Syria and Iraq, they are going to go elsewhere.
“They have sleeper cells all over the world and Belgium has a very serious problem.”

As of 7:30 a.m. ET, reports indicate at least 15 killed and 55 injured in the Metro bombing. With the 13 reported killed at the airport, that brings the death toll to 28 in Brussels.

UPDATE 10:15 a.m. ET: CNN now reports that the death toll in Brussels is 34, with at least another 170 people injured.

 

INVASION: European Union Faces ‘Millions of Potential Refugees’

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Syrian refugees enter Hungary last month.

The European Union could collapse unless emergency measures are taken to halt the invasion of Muslim immigrants, which is likely to grow worse, an official warned Wednesday:

Donald Tusk, president of the European Council, warned the EU was now facing a “critical point” and that the migrant crisis hadn’t even reached its peak.
As he chaired an emergency meeting of EU leaders in Brussels last night Mr Tusk painted a bleak picture of the EU’s future, saying the 28-member bloc was on the verge of breakdown with “recriminations and misunderstanding” pitting nations against one another.
The future of free movement was at stake, he said, as the continent had lost control of its borders as well as a “sense of order”.
He added: “The most urgent question we should ask ourselves…is how to regain control of our external borders.
“Otherwise, it doesn’t make sense to even speak about common migration policy.” . . .
“Today we are talking about millions of potential refugees trying to reach Europe, not thousands.
“It is likely that more refugees will flow towards Europe, not less. Especially as almost all of them feel invited to Europe.” . . .
More than half a million migrants have arrived in Europe so far this year, and experts believe the total figure for 2015 could top one million.

In 1973, the French novelist Jean Raspail’s book The Camp of the Saints depicted an eerily similar scenario. Widely condemned as “racist,” Raspail’s book was a sort of right-wing samizdat when I first read it 20 years ago. Much like The Bell Curve, it was one of those Books You’re Not Supposed to Read. Yet now the daily headlines seem as if they were scripted by Raspail, and I wonder if he has gotten due credit for having so clearly prophesied this crisis.




 

Greece Runs Out of Other People’s Money

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The Eurozone’s problem child throws a tantrum:

Two senior Greek retail bank executives said as many as 500 of the country’s more than 7,000 ATMs had run out of cash as of Saturday morning, and that some lenders may not be able to open on Monday unless there was an emergency liquidity injection from the Bank of Greece. An official with Greece’s Capital Markets Commission, the markets’ regulator, also warned that the Athens Stock Exchange may be unable to operate on Monday without a cash injection into the banking system. A Greek central bank spokesman said it was making efforts to supply money.
The European Central Bank’s governing council was expected to hold a conference call on Sunday to review the banks’ liquidity condition, said a Greek official, who asked not to be named in line with policy. The Frankfurt-based central bank said in a twitter post that it’s closely monitoring developments and would review the situation “in due course.” . . .
Euro-area finance ministers rejected Greece’s request for a one-month extension of its aid program, which expires Tuesday, shutting down any last chance for a financial stopgap until the referendum is held.
After withdrawing more than 30 billion euros as the anti-austerity Coalition of the Radical Left, or Syriza, took power, depositors are now reacting to the latest twist in the five-month standoff with European leaders and creditors.

(Via Memeorandum. More at Legal Insurrection.)

In addition to Margaret Thatcher’s famous maxim about socialists eventually running out of other people’s money, there is also Stein’s Law. This was coined by Herb Stein, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers during Richard Nixon’s presidency: “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.” And the problem of the Eurozone’s weaker nations expecting bailouts from their rich neighbors obviously cannot go on forever. So what happens when it stops? We don’t know.

Portugal, Spain, Italy and Ireland — the other fiscal weak sisters in the Eurozone — may manage to avoid default, and the richer EU nations may be able to stabilize the overall regional economy. If so, the Greek problem is just a Greek problem. On the other hand, who knows?

Greece’s European partners shut the door on extending a credit lifeline to Athens, leaving it facing a default that could push it out of the euro after the leftist government rejected tough lender demands and put their bailout deal to a referendum.
Finance ministers of the other 18 countries sharing the euro met for the first time without Greece and flatly rejected its pleas to extend an expiring bailout until after the referendum on July 5 and setting the stage for Athens to default on a crucial IMF payment on Tuesday.
The 18 pledged to do whatever it takes to stabilize the common currency area and said they were in much better shape to do so than at the height of the euro zone crisis a few years ago. In a formal statement, they also implicitly urged Greece to impose capital controls to stabilize its banking system.

We’ve spent seven years in a slow, weak recovery from the crash of 2008, and it might be that the Greek crisis will trigger a worldwide recession. Riots, famine, hyperinflation — anything is possible.

“Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling! Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes! The dead rising from the grave! Human sacrifice!
Dogs and cats living together! Mass hysteria!”

OK, probably not that bad. But you never know . . .