German Chancellor Angela Merkel Under Fire After Muslim Rape Attacks in Cologne (VIDEO)

At the Wall Street Journal, "New Year’s Eve Assaults Put Heat on Germany’s Angela Merkel":

COLOGNE, Germany—The aftershocks spreading from allegations of New Year’s Eve assaults by migrants in German cities have provoked the biggest challenge to Chancellor Angela Merkel since she threw open Germany’s borders to refugees last summer.

On Sunday, German officials disclosed that the man French authorities say tried to attack a Paris police station in an Islamic State-inspired assault last week had been living at a German refugee shelter—adding more fuel to a debate that has exploded over the security threats tied to the arrival of more than 1 million asylum seekers in Germany over the past year.

Meanwhile, a growing number of people, largely women, have reported being robbed and sexually assaulted on New Year’s Eve by mobs of what many described as largely North African or Arab-looking men. In Cologne, where most of the assaults have been reported, police said 516 complaints had been filed by Sunday—40% of them for sexual offenses, including at least two rape allegations—and that many of the suspected attackers were migrants.

The assaults and fresh evidence of other security risks linked to migrants bring new difficulties to Ms. Merkel’s efforts to preserve her open-door refugee policy and get other European Union countries to agree on a common response to the migration crisis. The chancellor—Western Europe’s most influential political leader—has warned that without a united strategy, the EU’s cherished principle of open internal borders will fall.

At home and abroad, politicians skeptical of Ms. Merkel’s migrant policy pointed to the assaults as a turning point, casting the events as confirmation of their warnings of a violent culture clash resulting from the mass migration.

Conservative Polish Prime Minister Beata Szydlo said the incidents “should shake up public opinion at last.” UK Independence Party leader Nigel Farage, who advocates much stricter immigration policies and wants his country to leave the European Union, warned the events in Cologne were “not far removed from us” in Britain, adding, “Whilst these men may not have EU passports, they soon will.”

The German chancellor reacted to the public outrage over the assaults with what has become her trademark strategy after 10 years in power: She sought to channel the public mood without substantially changing course.

She used tough language after a meeting of senior party officials on Saturday, pledging to more aggressively deport migrants convicted of crimes. But she gave no indication that she would back away from her refusal to cap the number of refugees Germany accepts or from her insistence that Europe come up with a joint solution to the crisis.

Ms. Merkel described the New Year’s Eve assaults as “repugnant, criminal offenses” that required a decisive response. “When crimes are committed, and people place themselves outside the law then there must be consequences for asylum claims,” she said.

Whether this response will suffice to quell the public’s concerns is uncertain...

Actually, she's toast if you ask me. It's going to get worse before it gets better, and it's still a ways off until Germany's scheduled for federal elections. She could be forced to resign before then.

But keep reading.

Germans Reconsider Welcoming Refugees After New Year's Assaults (VIDEO)

Well, at some point they're going to hold an election over there in Germany, and the collectivist establishment's going to be shocked -- shocked! -- at the strength of the purported "far-right" parties, whatever those are in Germany. Any gesture of support for traditional values is basically prohibited, since leftists will attack you as a Nazi and have you arrested. Yes, they do that in Germany. Don't be joking around with any "Sieg Heils" or you might spend the night in the slammer, to say the least.

At the Los Angeles Times:

Germany's acceptance of more than a million refugees fleeing Syria and other troubled spots last year is undergoing intense scrutiny after an outburst of reported assaults on women in at least five cities on New Year's Eve.

By Friday, nearly 300 women in Cologne, Hamburg, Stuttgart, Duesseldorf and Frankfurt had filed complaints with police saying they were groped, molested or robbed by unruly mobs of up to 1,000 young men when New Year's Eve street-party celebrations turned into wanton violence, officials said.

A spokesman for the interior ministry in Berlin said officials have questioned 31 men in their investigation of the assaults, including 18 refugees registered as seeking asylum. Among those identified were nine Algerians, eight Moroccans, five Iranians, four Syrians, one Iraqi, one Serb and one American as well as two German citizens. Two have been arrested in Cologne, where 170 complaints have been filed, according to media reports.

The assaults — and a slow trickle of information from authorities in Cologne, Hamburg and Stuttgart acknowledging that the suspects included newly arrived refugees — unsettled some Germans and appeared to at least temporarily damage public support for giving shelter to so many refugees. For many Germans, there has been a growing sense that the country of 82 million is losing control of its borders and city centers after 1.1 million people from the Middle East, Africa and Asia arrived in the last 12 months.

Even German Chancellor Angela Merkel, a supporter of an open policy toward refugees, said in a speech late Friday that some of the assailants in Cologne deserved to be kicked out of the country and that she is now open to changing laws to make it easier to send people who commit crimes elsewhere to serve their prison time...

Chancellor Merkel? You mean, Time's Person of the Year?

She's just as bad as all the other bureaucratic barnacles handing Europe over to the Islamic barbarians. It's probably too late. But Germany's got elections coming up in 2017, so we'll see. We'll see if these people come to their senses before it's too late, if it's not too late already.

Still more.

Is the West Disintegrating?

From Pat Buchanan, at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, "Is the West done?":

On Jan. 1, 2002, the day that euro coins and bank notes entered into circulation, my column “Say goodbye to the mother continent” contained this pessimistic prognosis: “This European superstate will not endure but break apart on the barrier reef of nationalism. For when the hard times come, patriots will recapture control of their national destinies from Brussels bureaucrats to whom no one will ever give loyalty or love.”

The column described what was already happening.

“Europe is dying. There is not a single nation in all of Europe with a birth rate sufficient to keep its population alive except Muslim Albania.”

What was predicted 14 years ago has come to pass.

Migrants into Germany from the Middle and Near East reached 1 million in 2015. EU bribes to the Turks to keep Muslim migrants from crossing over to the Greek islands, thence into the Balkans and Central Europe, are unlikely to stop the flood.

My prediction that European “patriots will recapture control of their national destinies” looks even more probable today.

Prime Minister David Cameron, who almost lost a referendum on Scottish secession, is demanding a return of British sovereignty from the EU sufficient to satisfy his countrymen, who have been promised a vote on whether to abandon the European Union altogether.

Marine Le Pen's anti-EU National Front ran first in the first round of the 2015 French elections. Many Europeans believe she will make it into the final round of the next presidential election in 2017.

Anti-immigrant right-wing parties are making strides all across Europe, as the EU is bedeviled by a host of crises.

Mass migration into the EU is causing member nations to put up checkpoints and close borders. The Schengen Agreement on the free movement of goods and people is being ignored or openly violated.

Then there is the surge of sub-nationalism, as in Scotland, Catalonia, Flanders and Veneto, where people seek to disconnect from distant capitals that no longer speak for them and reconnect with languages, traditions and cultures that give more meaning to their lives.

Moreover, the migrants entering Europe, predominantly Islamic and Third World, are not assimilating as did the European and largely Christian immigrants to America of a century ago. The enclaves of Asians in Britain, Africans and Arabs around Paris, and Turks in and around Berlin seem to be British, French and German in name only. And some of their children are now heeding the call to jihad against the crusaders invading Muslim lands.

If these trends continue, and they seem to have accelerated in 2015, the idea of a United States of Europe dies, and with it, the EU...

Still more.

The Bleak Reality Driving Trump's Rise

Well, it's particularly bleak if you're a leftist. Democrats are going to get hammered.

From William Galston, at WSJ, "Workers with low or middle incomes sense a deep and alarming economic shift":

Elections are about more than counting votes. They reveal peoples to themselves. They are democracy’s mirror. And what we see is often disconcerting.

In 2015, for the first time in decades, an angry, disaffected U.S. white working class has found its voice. Xenophobia, nationalism and bigotry are the dominant tones, so it is tempting for the rest of us to turn away in dismay. We should resist that temptation, because underlying the harsh words are real problems that extend well beyond our shores.

Throughout the West, democratic governments are struggling to maintain a postwar order premised on prosperity and economic security. Since the onset of the Great Recession, established center-right and center-left parties have failed to meet that test, opening the door to the far left and the populist right. From Hungary to France to Poland (long regarded as the poster-child for postcommunist democratization), illiberal populism is on the rise.

Western democracies may be on different decks, but we are all in the same boat. In a world of mobile capital and global labor markets, we have not figured out how to maintain jobs and incomes for workers with modest education and skills. In Europe the result has been sustained double-digit unemployment and a generation of young adults on the economic margins. The U.S. has made a different choice: large numbers of low-wage jobs that don’t offer the promise of upward mobility.

Beneath the dry statistics of the latest report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, we can see that future emerging. Over the next decade, the service sector will provide 95% of all the new jobs. Manufacturing, which shed more than two million jobs between 2004 and 2014, will shrink by an additional 800,000, to only 7% of the workforce. Of the 15 occupations with the most projected job growth, only four ask for a bachelor’s degree; eight require no formal education credentials; nine offer median annual wages under $30,000.

Few Americans know these statistics, but most of them are living the reality they represent. Since the beginning of the 21st century, the economy has ceased to work for households at and below the middle. A recent report from the Pew Research Center finds that the median income for middle-income households is about where it was in 1997. For lower-income households, median income stands where it did in 1996...

Galston's a Democrat analyst, so naturally he's going to dismiss rising populism as "illiberal." It's not. That's the big lie the media's foisting on the American people, designed to help the Democrat Party. The truth is regular folks have had it with political correctness and politics-as-usual, and the first casualties are those responsible for the mess we're in --- establishment politicians from both parties. Next year's election promises a realignment in American politics, particularly if an outsider wins the White House.

More at the link.

And ICYMI, "Donald Trump's Rise Coincides with Decline of the Middle Class."

Magical Thinking About #ISIS

A far left-wing take on the attacks, from Adam Shatz, at the London Review of Books:

Before the Lebanese civil war, Beirut was known as the Paris of the Middle East. Today, Paris looks more and more like the Beirut of Western Europe, a city of incendiary ethnic tension, hostage-taking and suicide bombs. Parisians have returned to the streets, and to their cafés, with the same commitment to normality that the Lebanese have almost miraculously exhibited since the mid-1970s. Même pas peur, they have declared with admirable defiance on posters, and on the walls of the place de la République. But the fear is pervasive, and it’s not confined to France. In the last few weeks alone, Islamic State has carried out massacres in Baghdad, Ankara and south Beirut, and downed a Russian plane with 224 passengers. It has taunted survivors with threats of future attacks, as if its deepest wish were to provoke violent retaliation.

Already traumatised by the massacres in January, France appears to be granting that wish. ‘Nous sommes dans la guerre,’ François Hollande declared, and he is now trying to extend the current state of emergency by amending the constitution. Less than 48 hours after the event, a new round of airstrikes was launched against Raqqa, in concert with Russia. With a single night’s co-ordinated attacks, IS – a cultish militia perhaps 35,000 strong, ruling a self-declared ‘caliphate’ that no one recognises as a state – achieved something France denied the Algerian FLN until 1999, nearly four decades after independence: acknowledgment that it had been fighting a war, rather than a campaign against ‘outlaws’. In the unlikely event that France sends ground troops to Syria, it will have handed IS an opportunity it longs for: face to face combat with ‘crusader’ soldiers on its own soil.

Recognition as a war combatant is not IS’s only strategic gain. It has also spread panic, and pushed France further along the road to civil strife. The massacre was retribution for French airstrikes against IS positions, but there were other reasons for targeting France. Paris is a symbol of the apostate civilisation IS abhors – a den of ‘prostitution and vice’, in the words of its communiqué claiming responsibility for the attacks. Not only is France a former colonial power in North Africa and the Middle East but, along with Britain, it helped establish the Sykes-Picot colonial borders that IS triumphantly bulldozed after capturing Mosul. Most important, it has – by proportion of total population – more Muslim citizens than any other country in Europe, overwhelmingly descendants of France’s colonial subjects. There is a growing Muslim middle class, and large numbers of Muslims marry outside the faith, but a substantial minority still live in grim, isolated suburbs with high levels of unemployment. With the growth rate now at 0.3 per cent, the doors to the French dream have mostly been closed to residents of the banlieue. Feelings of exclusion have been compounded by discrimination, police brutality and by the secular religion of laïcité, which many feel is code for keeping Muslims in their place. Not surprisingly, more than a thousand French Muslims have gone off in search of glory on the battlefields of Syria and Iraq. Most of these young jihadis became radicalised online not in the mosque. Some, like the perpetrators of the attacks in January and November, have histories of arrest and time spent in prison; about 25 per cent of IS’s French recruits are thought to be converts to Islam. What most of the jihadis appear to have in common is a lack of any serious religious training: according to most studies, there is an inverse relationship between Muslim piety and attraction to jihad. As Olivier Roy, the author of several books on political Islam, recently said, ‘this is not so much the radicalisation of Islam as the Islamicisation of radicalism.’

By sending a group of French – and Belgian – citizens to massacre Parisians in their places of leisure, IS aims to provoke a wave of hostility that will end up intensifying disaffection among young Muslims. Unlike the Charlie Hebdo massacre, the 13 November attacks were universally condemned. The victims were of every race, the murders were indiscriminate, and many Muslims live in Seine-Saint-Denis, where the bombing at the the Stade de France took place. In theory, this could have been a unifying tragedy. Yet it is Muslims who will overwhelmingly bear the brunt of the emergency measures and of the new rhetoric of national self-defence. Fayçal Riyad, a Frenchman of Algerian parents, who teaches at a lycée in Aubervilliers, a few hundred metres from where the 18 November raid against the fugitive attackers took place, pointed out the change in the air. ‘In his January speech,’ Riyad said, ‘Hollande clearly insisted on the distinction between Islam and terrorism. This time he not only abstained from doing so, but in a way he did the opposite by speaking of the necessity of closing the frontiers, insinuating that the attackers were foreigners, but above all in echoing the National Front’s call for stripping binational French people of their nationality if they’re found guilty of acts against the interests of the country. So that is aggravating our fear.’ Marine Le Pen, whose National Front expects to do well in the regional elections in December, is exultant. But anti-Muslim sentiment is hardly confined to the far right. There has been talk in centre-right circles of a Muslim fifth column; a leading figure in Sarkozy’s party has proposed interning 4000 suspected Islamists in ‘regroupment camps’.

IS achieved a further strategic objective by linking the massacre to the refugee crisis. The memory of Aylan Kurdi, the three-year-old boy from Kobani who was found drowned on a Turkish beach, has now been eclipsed by a passport found near the corpse of one of the attackers. That this assailant made his way to France through Greece, carrying a passport in the name of a dead Syrian fighter, suggests careful planning. The purpose is not merely to punish Syrians who have fled the caliphate, but to dampen European compassion for the refugees – already strained by unemployment and the growth of right-wing, anti-immigrant parties. Marine Le Pen called for an immediate halt to the inflow of Syrian refugees; Jeb Bush suggested that only Christian Syrians be admitted into the United States. If the West turns its back on the Syrian refugees, the effect will be to deepen further their sense of abandonment, another outcome that would be highly desirable to IS.

It is hard not to feel sentimental about the neighbourhoods of the 10th and the 11th, where IS attacked Le Petit Cambodge and the Bataclan theatre. I know these neighbourhoods well; a number of my journalist friends live there. In a city that has become more gentrified, more class-stratified and exclusionary, they are still reasonably mixed, cheap and welcoming, still somehow grungy and populaire. Odes to their charms have flooded the French press, as if the attacks were primarily an assault on the bobo lifestyle. ‘They have weapons. Fuck them. We have champagne,’ the front page of Charlie Hebdo declared. But as the journalist Thomas Legrand noted on France Inter, ‘the reality is that we have champagne … and also weapons.’

France has been using those weapons more frequently, more widely, and more aggressively in recent years. The shift towards a more interventionist posture in the Muslim world began under Sarkozy, and became even more pronounced under Hollande, who has revealed himself as an heir of Guy Mollet, the Socialist prime minister who presided over Suez and the war in Algeria. It was France that first came to the aid of Libyan rebels, after Bernard-Henri Lévy’s expedition to Benghazi. That adventure, once the US got involved, freed Libya from Gaddafi, but then left it in the hands of militias – a number of them jihadist – and arms dealers whose clients include groups like IS. France has deepened its ties to Netanyahu – Hollande has made no secret of his ‘love’ for Israel – and criminalised expressions of support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement...

Still more.

Paris Attacks, Rise of Islamic State, Shake a Weakened Europe — And the International System

A great piece, from Robert Kagan, at the Wall Street Journal, "The Crisis of World Order":

The only alternative [to European and Obama-led global chaos] is to address the crisis in Syria and Iraq, and with it the terrorist threat posed by Islamic State. But just as in the 1990s, when Europeans could address the crisis in the Balkans only with the U.S. playing the dominant military role, so again America will have to take the lead, provide the troops, supply the bulk of the air power and pull together those willing and able to join the effort.

What would such an effort look like? First, it would require establishing a safe zone in Syria, providing the millions of would-be refugees still in the country a place to stay and the hundreds of thousands who have fled to Europe a place to which to return. To establish such a zone, American military officials estimate, would require not only U.S. air power but ground forces numbering up to 30,000. Once the safe zone was established, many of those troops could be replaced by forces from Europe, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and other Arab states, but the initial force would have to be largely American.

In addition, a further 10,000 to 20,000 U.S. troops would be required to uproot Islamic State from the haven it has created in Syria and to help local forces uproot it in Iraq. Many of those troops could then be replaced by NATO and other international forces to hold the territory and provide a safe zone for rebuilding the areas shattered by Islamic State rule.

At the same time, an internationally negotiated and blessed process of transition in Syria should take place, ushering the bloodstained Mr. Assad from power and establishing a new provisional government to hold nationwide elections. The heretofore immovable Mr. Assad would face an entirely new set of military facts on the ground, with the Syrian opposition now backed by U.S. forces and air power, the Syrian air force grounded and Russian bombing halted. Throughout the transition period, and probably beyond even the first rounds of elections, an international peacekeeping force—made up of French, Turkish, American and other NATO forces as well as Arab troops—would have to remain in Syria until a reasonable level of stability, security and inter-sectarian trust was achieved...

RTWT.

Hungary Prime Minister Viktor Orban Rejects Angela Merkel's 'Welcoming' Ideology of Unchecked Immigration Suicide

Well a right-wing party, and apparently anti-immigrant, just won the majority in Poland's parliamentary elections this week, so perhaps we're witnessing a major shift in European politics. Or at least, in East European politics.

From James Traub, at Foreign Policy, "The Fearmonger of Budapest":

BUDAPEST, Hungary — The European response to the refugee crisis that escalated this August has two poles: Germany’s Angela Merkel and Hungary’s Viktor Orban. Merkel has consistently maintained that the immense flow of refugees from Middle Eastern war zones constitutes a collective moral obligation for Europe; Orban has called this view a species of madness. Orban is as powerful a spokesman for nativism and xenophobia as Merkel is for universalism.

And Orban got there first. In mid-January, after attending a mass rally in Paris honoring the victims of the attacks on Charlie Hebdo and at a kosher supermarket, Orban said in an interview, “We should not look at economic immigration as if it had any use, because it only brings trouble and threats to European people. Therefore, immigration must be stopped.” Orban was quite explicit about the kind of immigration he especially opposed. “We do not want to see a significant minority among ourselves that has different cultural characteristics and background,” he said. “We would like to keep Hungary as Hungary.” That was the lesson he took from Charlie Hebdo.

Orban is fully prepared to wade into the darkest pools of the Hungarian psyche. In April, still well before the refugee flood, Orban’s government distributed a questionnaire to all adult Hungarians which stated, among other things, “Some people believe that the mishandling of immigration issues in Brussels and the spread of terrorism are connected.” It then went on to ask, “Do you agree with this opinion?” Citizens were also told, “Some people say that immigrants threaten the jobs and livelihood of Hungarians,” then asked, “Do you agree?” The U.N.’s human rights commission condemned the questionnaire as “extremely biased” and “absolutely shocking.” Nevertheless, most of those who bothered to answer did, of course, agree. Having thus manufactured a show of public support, Orban’s Fidesz party posted billboards around the country with messages like, “If you come to Hungary, you cannot take the jobs of Hungarians.”

Orban had prepared the Hungarian people in advance for the Biblical tide of refugees who began pouring through Hungary on their way to Germany or Sweden. The fences he ordered built at the border with Serbia and then with Croatia; his use of the army to turn back refugees; his scathing rhetoric; his passage of emergency laws that criminalized the very act of seeking asylum — all have been denounced across Europe, but they’ve done wonders for his standing at home. In recent years, support had been steadily draining from Fidesz to the ultranationalist Jobbik party, but by September of this year the trend had begun to reverse.

Why is Hungary different? To be fair, Poland, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic have all resisted the idea of accepting Muslim refugees, but unlike Hungary they don’t have to deal with 300,000 refugees crossing their territory and overwhelming their infrastructure. Yet both Croatia and Slovenia, which have had to deal with refugees diverted from Hungary, have behaved and sounded more like Germany than Hungary. In Slovenia, the army fed the refugees and walked them to the Austrian border. Croatia’s interior minister explained his country’s policy by saying, “Nobody can stop this flow without shooting.”

That is not the view I heard in Budapest, including from people otherwise suspicious of Orban. Istvan Gyarmati, a retired diplomat who now runs a democracy promotion institute in Budapest, told me that “now everyone agrees that Orban was right about the refugees.” It would not be long, he predicted, before Merkel realized that she had a policy and political catastrophe on her hands. I asked Gyarmati how he thought the problem should be resolved. That was easy: “The alternative is to keep them out of Europe.” Once they had fled the war zone for the safety of Turkey or Jordan, they no longer needed asylum or could legally claim such status. They were just migrants. I heard the same argument — which does, in fact, correspond to the letter, if not the spirit, of the Geneva Conventions — from several government officials. When I pointed out that this meant building a wall around Europe, they shrugged...

Traub talked to all these people and he still doesn't get it, marinated in his "welcoming" collectivist ideology that both Poland and Hungary are rejecting.

Put a wall around Europe? Yeah, you think?

Still more.

Greeks Expect Little from Latest Elections (VIDEO)

Greek voters go to the polls -- again!

At WSJ, "Disillusioned Greeks Hope for Stability, and Little Else, From Sunday’s Elections":

NAOUSA, Greece—Greeks are going to the polls for the third time this year on Sunday, but fewer of them than ever believe their politicians will end the country’s long economic crisis.

After a turbulent year including elections in January, a referendum in July, a showdown with Europe and the imposition of crippling capital controls, the only thing many Greeks hope for from Sunday’s new parliamentary elections is some calm that would allow them to get on with their lives and searches for prosperity.

“These constant elections bring everything to a halt in business. Nobody is hiring, everyone is waiting to see what will happen,” says Panagiotis Fountoulakis, a former information-technology manager who says he needs to find work again by this winter before his family’s savings run out. “Political stability is my big wish, but I’m not confident we will get it.”

Disaffection with politics and a potentially low turnout could decide who wins Sunday’s contest: Syriza and its leader, Alexis Tsipras—who stepped down as premier last month to trigger snap elections—or their conservative challengers New Democracy under Vagelis Meimarakis. The two parties are neck and neck, according to most opinion polls.

The victor will probably have to form a coalition government. In Greece such pacts are usually fractious and short-lived. Policies will be heavily constrained by the bailout agreement with Europe that Mr. Tsipras signed this summer, which imposes further fiscal retrenchment after five years of unpopular austerity...

Keep reading.

Greece Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras Resigns! Snap Elections Called! (VIDEO)

I saw something about new elections in Greece last night, but nothing about the prime ministers resignation.

But it's official.

At WSJ, "Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras Resigns, Clearing Way for Elections in Bid to Uphold Bailout Deal":

ATHENS—Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras resigned in a bid to trigger snap elections and return to power stronger, plunging his country into weeks of political paralysis just as it seemed to have scraped through a summer of fraught bailout talks and near-bankruptcy.

Mr. Tsipras’s gambit, announced in a short televised address late on Thursday, is expected to lead to his re-election in September, thanks to his popularity and the absence of strong challengers. But whether elections bolster his grip on Parliament, as he hopes, hinges on his ability to persuade Greeks that the €86 billion ($96 billion) bailout he negotiated with Europe is the only path out of the country’s long crisis.

Greece’s head of state, President Prokopis Pavlopoulos, was expected to accept Mr. Tsipras’s proposal to hold the vote on Sept. 20.

The election will effectively be a referendum on the 41-year-old Mr. Tsipras and his bailout agreement with the rest of the eurozone.

The deal commits Greece to further years of stringent economic retrenchment, including tax increases and cuts to pension entitlements. Greeks elected Mr. Tsipras and his left-wing Syriza party only in January this year to put an end to five years of unpopular austerity measures, which the country’s creditors demanded in exchange for bailout loans.

Mr. Tsipras’s acceptance in July of creditors’ policy demands followed months of diplomatic confrontation. The standoff ultimately led to Greece defaulting on its debts to the International Monetary Fund and imposing capital controls, further battering Greece’s depressed economy.

The premier’s U-turn has split Syriza. Dozens of his lawmakers have withheld support for legislation needed to clinch the bailout package. Mr. Tsipras has had to rely on the votes of opposition parties, but they have warned they won’t prop him up for long...

More.

Twilight of the Euro Welfare State?

Well, as I was saying a little while ago.

From Holman Jenkins, at the Wall Street Journal, "Twilight of the Euro Welfare State?":

Journalists have strained to apply their good guy-bad guy conventions to the Greek crisis. But are the bad guys the greedy, wastrel Greeks? Or are the bad guys the imperious, demanding Germans?

In fact, this narrative is a poor construction. What we’re seeing is less a story of good guy-bad guy than a terminal falling out among Europe’s club of welfare states over the inevitable problem that eventually other people’s money (in Margaret Thatcher’s phrase) runs out.

The Greek combination of welfarism-plus-cronyism, with a large helping of outright corruption, has long relied on other people’s money from abroad to make ends meet. But if the terms imposed by fellow Europeans for fresh loans-cum-aid have lately seemed intolerable to Greek voters, they still took the availability of fresh loans for granted. This week they are learning their right to their neighbors’ money is not automatic after all—and yet, for reasons we’ll get to, don’t be surprised if there’s an 11th-hour bailout.

Let us not kid ourselves, the way many Europeans are kidding themselves, that Greece is entirely unique. Portugal, Italy and Spain—“core” European welfare states—already have made the same transition to dependence on external “other people’s money” to uphold their welfare systems.

Their version of other people’s money is Mario Draghi’s implicit promise to tax all Europeans with future inflation (a promise that remains implicit at this point) to keep their welfare states afloat. If not for the European Central Bank’s promise, these governments likely would already be in the same position as Greece—unable to finance their deficits.

As long as Mario Draghi is on the job, there should have been no dramatic, visible “contagion” from the Greek crisis. And there hasn’t been, for the same reason there was none from the Cyprus crisis two years earlier. There is no “surprise” involved: The markets had already fully internalized that Greece and Cyprus were outside the circle of Mario’s magic guarantee, so there is no reason their default need be seen as heralding other defaults.

But the fundamental long-term problem still remains: How will France and Italy especially (the key too-big-to-fail economies) find their way back to reliance on internal taxation plus voluntary, market-based lending to keep their welfare states up and running? Is this even possible in a democratic political system with large, calcified interest groups? Then again, if European states are already maximizing their option to avoid reform, might not the feared triumph of populist parties in future elections actually be a good thing, producing a crisis that forces action?

Well, Germany has a robust, export-led industrial economy that generates enough wealth to support its welfare state (for now, at least). France, not so much.

But keep reading, in any case.

Voting Begins in Greece Referendum

At the Guardian UK, "Greeks begin voting in referendum as the euro faces its biggest challenge":

Almost 9.9 million Greeks have the right to vote in Sunday’s plebiscite on whether the country should accept the terms of its creditors.

Greeks began voting in a referendum on Sunday that presents the biggest challenge to the running of the euro since its adoption and risks sending shock waves through the world’s financial markets.

The nationwide ballot was taking place at the end of a week of unending drama that saw Greece close its banks, ration cash, fail to repay the IMF and lose billions of euros when its bailout programme expired. The vote is on the last terms offered to Greece before its prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, abandoned talks with his country’s lenders last weekend, saying their conditions would only exacerbate the plight of a country whose economy has already shrunk by a quarter.

At a rally in the centre of Athens on Friday night, Tsipras urged his compatriots to cast a no ballot, assuring them it would not be a vote for leaving the euro, but for remaining in Europe “with dignity”. Greece’s creditors and most of the opposition parties have claimed that, on the contrary, it could lead to exit from the single market (“Grexit”) and even the European Union.

Almost 9.9 million Greeks have the right to vote in the referendum, which the interior ministry said would cost less than half the amount spent on the general election in January that brought Tsipras’s Syriza party into office in a coalition with the populist, nationalist Anel party.

Among the many imponderables was the impact of votes cast by Greeks living abroad. Under the same rules that govern elections, expatriates must return to the country if they are to cast valid ballots. There was evidence that large numbers of Greeks living abroad were coming back for the referendum and that most leaned towards voting yes...

Keep reading.

Double Blow to Germany's Leadership

At the Wall Street Journal, "Victory Shuffles European Politics":

BERLIN—For five years, Europe’s common-currency bloc has squabbled over whether the solution to its economic crisis lies in slimming the state and deregulating markets, or in more expansionary fiscal and monetary policies.

The battle lines just got messier, the way out even less clear.

Since the start of the eurozone’s debt crisis, the bloc’s wealthier countries—led by Germany—have largely prevailed in pushing economic overhauls, not stimulus, as the main way to nurse indebted nations to financial health. Now, eurozone voters are in open revolt against such fiscal strictures, while the European Central Bank just overthrew German monetary orthodoxy.

Sunday’s historic victory for the radical left-wing Syriza party in Greece’s elections is likely to embolden populist movements in other eurozone countries, including Spain, France and Italy, which reject German-sponsored austerity.

Their growth on both the left and right of Europe’s political spectrum suggests the breadth and complexity of voter discontent. Spain’s far-left Podemos party has surged in opinion polls, and elections are due late this year. France’s far-right National Front is roiling the country’s establishment with attacks on austerity as well as immigration. Italy’s populist, euroskeptic Five Star Movement wants to renegotiate the national debt.

Greece is the most extreme example of the fraying of support for the mainstream center-right and center-left parties that have dominated Western European politics for decades. The antiestablishment surge comes amid the Continent’s longest economic slump since the Great Depression.

Meanwhile the ECB’s decision on Thursday to buy eurozone government bonds and other assets to stimulate growth and inflation broke with Germany’s deeply held belief that central banks shouldn’t print money to buy public debt.

The ECB used to back Germany loudly on the benefits of austerity, before suggesting last fall that the eurozone overall had become too austere and that Germany should spend more. Lately, ECB head Mario Draghi has avoided provoking Berlin on fiscal policy while also antagonizing it with his bond-buying program.

The bank and Berlin agree on one thing: the need for market-friendly overhauls to make eurozone economies more flexible. Yet those overhauls are harder than ever to sell to voters.

The three-way standoff between Germany, the ECB, and angry voters in Southern Europe is likely to resonate throughout 2015 in the eurozone, which lags behind the rest of the world in recovering from the global financial crisis...

More.

The Threat to the West from al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP)

The tide of war is receding and we've got the terrorists on the run.

Famous last words.

See Ahmed Rashid, at the New York Review, "Waking Up to the New al-Qaeda":

The Yemen branch of al-Qaeda should be a particular concern to the West. AQAP is almost as old as the original al-Qaeda organization formed in Afghanistan and Pakistan by Osama bin Laden in the early 1980s. Bin Laden’s family was from Yemen and it was always his aim to maintain an organization in that country, where territory was fairly easy to acquire, in order to provide permanent bases from which to eventually seize power there. It never happened in bin Laden’s own lifetime, but now the Yemeni state is in chaos and the possibility that AQAP could gain control of a significant part of the country cannot be ruled out.

Moreover, in its fundamental aims, AQAP poses a more direct threat to Western targets than ISIS. From its initial rise to power in Iraq and Syria, ISIS has given top priority to the “near enemy,” what it views as the corrupt secular Arab regimes of the Middle East. Thus, while there have been some attacks in the West by supporters of ISIS, the group itself has set out to seize Arab territory, destroy borders, and establish a unitary Islamic state or Caliphate stretching from Morocco to India. By contrast, AQAP has maintained the original al-Qaeda aim of attacking the “far enemy”—Western countries and Western capitalism—in order to bring about the collapse of Arab regimes.

Despite a sustained US drone campaign and a brutal civil war in Yemen, AQAP continues to have a strong organization and is far from being annihilated. Unlike other branches of al-Qaeda, AQAP has never picked a fight with ISIS, despite rivalry between the two groups. ISIS may have ambitions in Yemen but the country is far from ISIS’s heartland in Iraq and Syria, and the group has decided for the moment to leave AQAP alone. All of this should make Western intelligence agencies particularly vigilant about further AQAP attacks in the West.

However, the phenomenal growth of ISIS in the past twelve months has distracted Western intelligence from the continued threat of al-Qaeda. ISIS battlefield successes have helped draw some 18,000 foreign jihadists from ninety 90 countries to join and fight for the movement in Syria and Iraq. The original al-Qaeda never managed to recruit such large numbers of followers, and ISIS’s success has provided inspiration and ideological clarity to many extremists in Europe and around the world. It also has overwhelmed Western intelligence agencies. In numerous reports, we have been told that the European intelligence agencies had far too many leads to follow, too many returning fighters from Syria and Iraq to keep tabs on, and not enough manpower to do all the tasks required. There is now little doubt that the first beneficiary of this de-facto switch in Western intelligence priorities was AQAP.

The attacks in France killed seventeen people—far fewer than the attacks on New York and Washington on September 11—but they seem to have had nearly as powerful an effect, terrifying governments across Europe, turning security protocols and precautions upside down, and even provoking demands by some leaders that the Schengen open-border policy be revised. Doubtless, in the weeks ahead we will see even greater social, political, and economic repercussions in France and other European countries, including a change in security practices at airports and train stations, and possibly in laws and detention rules by the courts. Worst of all, it may draw new support to right wing, anti-migrant, anti-Muslim political parties, making them more likely to win elections in several countries, including France.

In other words, the Paris attacks could dramatically change the way Western governments operate, which is exactly what the old al-Qaeda tried to do when it attacked the twin towers in New York. AQAP will continue to make this its strategic aim—to bring Western capitalism to its knees. ISIS represents an extraordinary threat of its own, but the Paris attacks have demonstrated that the greatest danger to the West is still al-Qaeda.

Be sure to RTWT.

Plus, from Reuters, "Al Qaeda claims French attack, derides Paris rally."

Republicans' 2016 Divisions

There's "divisions" every presidential primary season, although what would we do without the Old Gray Lady to remind us of the GOP's?

At the New York Times, "A Deep 2016 Republican Presidential Field Reflects Party Divisions" (at Memeorandum):

BOCA RATON, Fla. — Republican presidential primaries have for decades been orderly affairs, with any momentary drama mitigated by the expectation that the party would inevitably nominate its tested, often graying front-runner.

But as the 2016 White House campaign effectively began in the last week, it became apparent that this race might be different: a fluid contest, verging on chaotic, that will showcase the party’s deep bench of talent but also highlight its ideological and generational divisions.

As Democrats signal that they are ready to rally behind Hillary Rodham Clinton before their primary season even begins, allowing them to focus their fund-raising and firepower mostly on the general election, the Republicans appear destined for a free-for-all.

Balance of Power: What 2014 Elections Can Tell Us About 2016: Not Much at AllNOV. 6, 2014
“I can think of about 16 potential candidates,” said Haley Barbour, the former governor of Mississippi and a veteran of Republican presidential politics dating to 1968. “Almost every one of them have a starting point. But there is no true front-runner.”

The sprawling nature of the race was on display Thursday as an array of would-be candidates took steps to position themselves.

At a gathering of Republican governors here, Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey sought to capitalize on the party’s victories this year in Democratic-leaning states while at least six fellow governors tested their messages and met with potential donors.

On the same day in Washington, Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor, addressed an education conference and tried to tamp down differences with the right on the Common Core standards. On Capitol Hill, Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky continued his outreach to African-Americans by having breakfast with the Rev. Al Sharpton, while Senator Ted Cruz of Texas appealed to conservatives by citing Cicero on the Senate floor in a speech castigating President Obama’s executive action on immigration.

And in California, Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas, just back from taking a group of evangelicals from early primary states on a trip to Europe honoring Ronald Reagan’s Cold War leadership, venerated Mr. Reagan in a speech at his presidential library.

If the dizzying activity on a single day captured the depth of the Republican field, it also underlined its factions, split among pragmatists, hard-liners and those trying to bridge the blocs.

Just reading this made me realize how not ready I am for the 2016 presidential cycle. It's on, folks. We're barely out of the midterms and the presidential election is on. Who'll be the first Republican to declare his or her candidacy?

More.

#ISIS is Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's Dream Come True in Iraq

The Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) is not an "offshoot" or an "affiliate" of al-Qaeda in Iraq. It is al-Qaeda in Iraq, updated and expanded into Syria, with new leadership at the helm. Very few media outlets have resisted using the false characterization of ISIS as an abandoned stepchild of Ayman al Zawahiri. At most there's a leadership quarrel at the top levels of organization, without which no one would be saying how much more horrible is ISIS than al-Qaeda. It's a stupid and malicious program of downplaying the evil and significance of al-Qaeda's global jihad. IBD is one of the few outlets that truly gets it, as seen in its piece the other day, "#ISIS Coming to America: 'See You in New York'."

However, this morning's Los Angeles Times does an excellent job of putting ISIS in the context of al-Qaeda's religious and ideological program for the global holy war. See, "Long-dead militant's battle plan resurrected in Iraq":

ISIS in many ways seems better equipped for a long, complex insurgency than its precursor organization of a decade ago, Zarqawi's Al Qaeda in Iraq. Rebranded as the Islamic State of Iraq after Zarqawi was killed in a U.S. airstrike in 2006, the group exploited a U.S. military occupation to rally its fighters. Its current incarnation has railed against the Iraqi government that was formed during the U.S. occupation and has been led by Prime Minister Nouri Maliki, a Shiite who critics say has systematically marginalized minority Sunnis.

Now headed by Abu Bakr Baghdadi, a reclusive former teacher, the group added Syria to its name to reflect its widening ambitions. In March 2013, ISIS seized the Syrian city of Raqqah, the first provincial capital it held, and by taking several more cities in eastern Syria over the last year the group has gained what Zarqawi wanted but never had: a safe haven in which to hide fighters and plot major operations.

In his 2004 letter to Al Qaeda leadership, Zarqawi lamented his inability to invite large numbers of foreign Islamic militants to Iraq to help fight U.S. and Iraqi forces.

"What prevents us from [calling] a general alert is that the country has no mountains in which we can take refuge and no forests in whose thickets we can hide," he wrote. "Our backs are exposed and our movements compromised."

Thanks to its conquests in Syria, analysts say, ISIS has become a magnet for foreign radicals, particularly from Europe. The influx of eager fighters has allowed the group to dramatically increase the pace of its attacks in Iraq over the last 18 months even as it continues to battle President Bashar Assad's troops in Syria.

Read the whole thing at the link.

Remember, Zarqawi personally beheaded numerous hostages and al-Qaeda in Iraq gained notorious propaganda victories by posted those to online videos, an early exploitation of social media, before Twitter was invented. Bare Naked Islam has Zarqawi's execution of American contractor Nicholas Berg here, "AMERICAN ‘Leftist’ NICK BERG’S BEHEADING (WARNING: GRAPHIC IMAGES)." Today's mass beheadings by ISIS forces advancing toward Baghdad are not new, only a more widespread campaign of terror that has been the hallmark of al-Qaeda's totalitarian jihad.

Al-Qaeda in Iraq's leadership struggle began in 2005, when Zawahiri wrote a letter to Zarqawi warning against building flamboyant "cults of personality," though seeking compromise on the organization's ideological program. See Long War Journal, "Dear Zarqawi: A Letter from Zawahiri, and a Constitutional Compromise." And that is key: Today ISIS in Iraq is securing the Islamic caliphate that has been the stated goal of al-Qaeda since the days of Osama bin Laden. See Walid Phares on that, for example, "Bin Laden’s Dream of a Caliphate Lives On," and Tara Servatius, "The Realization of Osama bin Laden's Dream."

In 2011, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger warned that the Arab Spring revolution would bring the most fundamental change in international politics "we have known since World War Two." In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood came to power following the elections of June 2012, but was later ousted when the military toppled the government of Mohamed Morsi last year. But now with ISIS establishing a quasi-state stretching from Raqqah in Syria to Mosul in Iraq and beyond, Zarqawi's dream of the Islamic caliphate is coming to fruition, as brutal as ever, and with an endless supply of jihadists ready to die in the name of Allah.

Europe's So-Called 'Far-Right' Parties

I'm really fascinated by the language that mainstream outlets deploy in describing the populist revolt that's shaken Europe's poxy political establishment to the core.

At Independent UK, "European elections 2014: Marine Le Pen’s Front National victory in France is based on anguish, rage and denial."

Spain's Socialist Leader Resigns After Party Hammered in European Elections

At Toronto's Globe and Mail,"Euroskeptic election surge threatens governments across EU":

Spain’s Socialist opposition leader Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba said on Monday he was stepping down after the party had its worst-ever election result on Sunday with an upstart rival leftist group grabbing 8 per cent of the vote.  Recession-weary voters, unhappy with public-sector wage cuts, layoffs and corruption scandals also punished the ruling center-right People’s Party.

Together, the two parties that have dominated Spanish politics since the country returned to democracy in the 1970s, took less than 50 per cent of the vote. A brand new leftist party led by 35-year-old university professor Pablo Iglesias was the big winner, taking 8 per cent of the vote and five seats in the European Parliament.

The Socialists lost nine of their 23 seats in the European Parliament while the ruling centre-right People’s Party lost eight of its 24 seats. Together, the two parties that have dominated Spanish politics since the country returned to democracy in the 1970s, took less than 50 per cent of the vote.

“It’s clear that we haven’t regained voters’ confidence,” Mr. Rubalcaba said in a televised news conference. “There has to be new leadership that takes on change.”

More at the Chicago Tribune, "Spain's Socialist leader quits after party's worst-ever election."

And a new leftist party, "Podemos," took five out of Spain's 54 seats in the European Parliament. At the BBC, "Spain's 'we can' party proves it can."  Pablo Iglesias, the party leader, can be seen at the clip above.

PREVIOUSLY: "Established Parties Rocked by Anti-Europe Vote."

"These 'Jewish leaders' are morons..."

At Algemeiner, "Jewish Groups Concerned Over Far-Right Surge in European Union Parliamentary Elections."

When I saw this headline I thought, "Huh, it's the far-left that's the biggest threat to Jews in Europe today."

And what do you know? Here's the very first comment:

These “Jewish leaders” are morons that have ideological blinders on. Yes, Jobbik is a threat, and to some extent, the FN too (but not the UKIP – Farage is pro-Israel). But the real growth in Jew-hatred in Europe has long been due to the left, and not just the radical left, but the mainstream left – which after all, has the power to spread its Israel-bashing, Jew-hating lies due to the left’s control of media, the arts, the Universities, the EU bureaucracy and the NGOs. Sweden has become a neo-Nazi state due to Jew-hatred by its mainstream Socialists; the country has no far-right to speak of. Same with Norway, and sadly now Denmark as well.

FN will be no worse, and probably less bad, in this regard, than all those Communists, Socialists, Greens and Trotskyists who dominate the EU and European media and culture.

My earlier coverage is here and here.

Danish People's Party Wins Nearly 27 Percent of Vote in European Parliament Elections

That's Morten Messerschmidt of the DDP at the clip.

And this is especially interesting for Denmark, which is the quintessential European social welfare state.

And at the Guardian UK, "Far-right takes victory in Danish European elections."

And at Telegraph UK, "EU election 2014: Danish eurosceptic People's Party wins - and calls for alliance with Cameron":

The eurosceptic wave that swept across the continent engulfed Denmark on Sunday night, as the anti-immigrant Danish People's Party topped the polls at the European election.

The DPP, which had campaigned to reclaim border controls and curb benefits to other EU citizens living in Denmark, won 26.7 per cent of the vote – and doubled its number of MEPs from two to four.

The result means that Ukip, France's Front National, and the DPP are the three biggest eurosceptic parties in the European Parliament. But the DPP - like Ukip - has repeatedly distanced itself from Marine Le Pen's FN – and on Sunday night announced that they were seeking an alliance with David Cameron's party.

"We want as much influence as possible in order to pull Europe in another direction, namely in the British direction," said Morten Messerschmidt, the leading DPP candidate. He said Mr Cameron and Mark Rutte, the Dutch prime minister, were potential partners.

More.

PREVIOUSLY: "UKIP's Political Earthquake," and "National Front Smashes French Establishment in European Parliament Elections."

National Front Smashes French Establishment in European Parliament Elections

At the Guardian UK, "Front National wins European parliament elections in France."

And at Telegraph UK, "EU elections 2014: France's Hollande holds crisis talks on record far-Right win":

President François Hollande staged a crisis cabinet meeting at the Elysée Palace this morning as France reeled from the “earthquake” of seeing the far-Right Front National come first in European elections.

The deeply unpopular Mr Hollande scrambled his government to find ways to parry what is the French Socialist Party’s worst score since European elections were first held in 1979.

The president may make a televised statement reacting to the rout that saw Marine Le Pen’s FN come top in a nationwide vote for the first time in its 40-year history. Sunday’s election saw FN clinch almost 25 per cent of the vote, according to IFOP, quadrupling its 2009 score.

Miss Le Pen said it constituted a "massive rejection of the European Union" and a desire for “politics by the French, for the with the French". “They don’t want to be led anymore from outside, to submit to laws,” she insisted.

The FN finished well ahead of the opposition centre-Right UMP of Nicolas Sarkozy, on 20.8 per cent, and which remains deeply split over Europe and appears on course for another bloody leadership battle.

The ruling Socialists mustered less than 14 per cent with the centrist UDI-Modem on 9.9 per cent and the Greens on 8.9 per cent.

This suggests the FN will now have 24 seats in the European Parliament of the 74 allotted to France – up from three in 2009 – leaving the UMP with 20, the Socialists with 13, the centrists with seven and the Greens with six.

While other parties’ main message on Europe appeared ill-defined or even divided, "the Front National was able to mobilise the electorate thanks to a clear line on Europe and immigration”, Joël Gombin, an FN expert, told Le Nouvel Observateur.

Hmm, I wonder if these result have implication for the 2014 midterms back in the states? Perhaps there's a desire for "politics by the Americans, for the with the Americans."

PREVIOUSLY: "UKIP's Political Earthquake."