Europe’s Future: Merkel or Le Pen?
Dec 23, 2016 By Patrick J. Buchanan
Italian Police cordon off an area after a shootout between police and a man near a train station in Milan’s Sesto San Giovanni neighborhood, Italy, early Friday, Dec. 23, 2016. Italy’s interior minister Marco Minniti says the man killed in an early-hours shootout in Milan is “without a shadow of doubt” the Berlin Christmas market attacker Anis Amri. (AP Photo/Daniele Bennati)
The terrorist who hijacked a truck in Berlin and ran over and killed 12 people, maiming and wounding 48 more, in that massacre in the Christmas market, has done more damage than he could imagine.
If the perpetrator is the jihadist from Tunisia who had no right to be in Germany, and had been under surveillance, the bell could begin to toll not only for Angela Merkel but for the European Union.
That German lassitude, and the naivete behind it, allowed this outrage validates the grim verdict of geostrategist James Burnham in “Suicide of the West”: “Liberalism is the ideology of Western suicide.”
Both the transnational elite and populist right sense the stakes involved here. As news of the barbarous atrocity spread across Europe, the reactions were instantaneous and predictable.
Marine Le Pen of France’s National Front, leading candidate for the presidency in 2017, declaimed: “How many more people must die at the hands of Islamic extremists before our governments close our porous borders and stop taking in thousands of illegal immigrants?”
Geert Wilders, the Party for Freedom front-runner for prime minister of Holland, echoed Le Pen: “They hate and kill us. And nobody protects us. Our leaders betray us. We need a political revolution.
“Islamic immigration/Is an invasion,” he went on, “An existential problem/That will replace our people/Erase our culture.”
“These are Merkel’s dead,” tweeted Marcus Pretzell of the far-right Alternative for Germany about the victims in the Christmas mart.
Nicholas Farage, who led the campaign for British secession from the EU, called the Christmas massacre “the Merkel legacy.”
Europe’s populist right is laying this act of Islamist savagery at the feet of Merkel for her having opened Germany in 2015 to a million migrants and refugees from Syria and the Middle East wars.
Before Berlin, she was already on the defensive after mobs of migrants went about molesting and raping German girls in Cologne last New Year’s Eve.
Even admirers who share her belief in a Europe of open borders, that welcomes immigrants and refugees from Third World wars and despotisms, sense the gravity of Merkel’s crisis.
“Germans should not let the attack on a Christmas market in Berlin undermine liberal values,” ran the headline on The Washington Post editorial Dec. 22. Alarmed, the Post went on:
“What Germany cannot and must not do is … succumb to the siren song of the anti-foreigner right-wing, which has been gaining strength across Europe and moved immediately to exploit the attack ahead of the September 2017 national elections.”
The New York Times delivered its customary castigation of the European populist right but, in a note of near-desperation, if not of despair, implored Europe’s liberals not to lose faith.
“With each new attack, whether on a Christmas market or a mosque, the challenge to Europe to defend tolerance, inclusion, equality and reason grows more daunting. If Europe is to survive as a beacon of democratic hope in a world rent by violent divisions, it must not cede those values.”
But less and less does Europe appear to be listening.
Indeed, as Europe has been picking up its dead and wounded for over a decade, from terrorist attacks in Madrid, London, Paris, Berlin and Brussels, the peoples of Europe seem less interested in hearing recitals of liberal values than in learning what their governments are going to do to keep the Islamist killers out and make them safe.
Salus populi suprema lex.
Liberals may admonish us that all races, creeds, cultures are equal, that anyone from any continent, country or civilization can come to the West and assimilate. That discrimination against one group of immigrants in favor of another — preferring, say, Lebanese Christians to Syrian Muslims — is illiberal and undemocratic.
But people don’t believe that. Europe and America have moved beyond the verities of 20th-century liberalism.
The cruel experiences of the recent past, and common sense, dictate that open borders are Eurail passes for Islamist terrorists, who are anxious to come and kill us in the West. We have to deal with the world as it is, not as we would wish it to be.
In our time, there has taken place, is taking place, an Islamic awakening. Of 1.6 billion Muslims worldwide, hundreds of millions accept strict sharia law about how to deal with apostasy and infidels.
Scores of millions in the Middle East wish to drive the West out of their world. Thousands are willing to depart and come to Europe to terrorize our societies. They see themselves at war with us, as their ancestors were at war with the Christian world for 1,000 years.
Only liberal ideology calls for America and Europe to bring into their home countries endless numbers of migrants, without being overly concerned about who they are, whence they come or what they believe.
Right-wing and anti-immigrant parties are succeeding in Europe for a simple reason. Mainstream parties are failing in the first duty of government — to protect the safety and security of the people.
http://www.cnsnews.com/commentary/patrick-j-buchanan/europes-future-merkel-or-le-pen
Europe’s Open Borders Increasingly Look Like Continent’s Achilles’ Heal
Dec 24, 2016 By ANGELA CHARLTON
This image made from video released by Amaq News Agency of the Islamic State group on Friday, Dec. 23, 2016 shows Anis Amri, a Tunisian suspect in the Berlin truck attack pledging allegiance to its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and vowing to fight against what he calls “the Crusader pigs.” The video, which appeared to have been taken by Anis Amri himself, shows him standing on a footbridge in the north of Berlin, not far from where he allegedly hijacked the truck used in the attack that killed 12 people and injured dozens more at a Christmas market on Monday. (Militant video via AP)
PARIS (AP) — Europe’s open borders symbolize liberty and forward thinking — but they increasingly look like the continent’s Achilles’ heel.
Europe’s No. 1 terrorism suspect crossed at least two borders this week despite an international manhunt, and was felled only by chance, in a random ID check. The bungled chase for Berlin attack suspect Anis Amri is just one example of recent cross-border security failures that are emboldening nationalists fed up with European unity. Extremist violence, they argue, is too high a price to pay for the freedom to travel.
Defenders of the EU’s border-free zone say the security failures show the need for more cooperation among European governments, even shared militaries — not new barriers. Hidebound habits of hoarding intelligence within centuries-old borders, they contend, are part of the problem.
But their arguments are easily drowned out by the likes of far right leader Marine Le Pen, hoping to win France’s presidency in May.
“The myth of total free movement in Europe, which my rivals are clinging to in this presidential election, should be definitively buried. Our security depends on it,” she said in a statement Friday, calling the free-travel zone a “total security catastrophe.”
That poses a dilemma for EU devotees like German Chancellor Angela Merkel, facing a re-election battle next year.
Her defense of the EU, and the open hand she extended to Syrian war refugees, were once seen as assets, signs of her moral authority. Today, with anti-immigrant, anti-establishment sentiment rising across Europe, they are threatening to become liabilities.
Millions cross borders in the 26-country Schengen travel zone every day, thanks to a 31-year-old system encompassing nearly 400 million people that has dramatically boosted trade and job prospects across the world’s largest collective economy.
It’s a pillar of a system designed to prevent new world wars — a system that’s under growing strain. While EU countries debated over how to manage an influx of migrants last year, eastern nations rebuilt fences and exposed EU weaknesses.
The German far right is insisting on closing the borders. Merkel’s conservatives are suggesting “transit zones” to hold migrants at the borders while their identity is confirmed, and making it easier to hold people in pre-deportation detention.
Berlin attacker Amri is a painful example of how Islamic extremists have used Europe’s open borders to attack the principles of tolerance they’re meant to epitomize.
After migrating illegally from Tunisia in 2011, he was imprisoned for burning down a migrant detention center in Italy. When freed, attempts to deport him to Tunisia failed for bureaucratic reasons. He subsequently traveled to Switzerland and then Germany, where he apparently fell under the influence of a radical network accused of recruiting for the Islamic State group.
Though his asylum application was rejected and he was flagged as a potential terror threat, Germany obediently waited for Tunisia to produce his paperwork before deporting him.
And just as the deportation was being finalized Monday, Amri is believed to have hijacked a truck and rammed it into holiday crowds at a Berlin Christmas market, killing 12 and wounding dozens.
He evaded an international manhunt for more than three days, slipping apparently into France — possibly with a pistol in his pocket — and then Italy before stumbling into a standard ID check in suburban Milan, where he died in a police shootout.
Germany, France and Italy have failed to explain how he escaped the dragnet.
“Movement from one country to another in Europe is easy, especially for someone like Anis Amri, who had lived in Europe for several years” and knew which borders were easier to cross, said Tunisian Foreign Ministry spokesman Bouraoui Limam.
France is especially embarrassed.
It’s been under high security as part of a state of emergency since last year. It’s acutely aware of the risks of violence on trains, after American passengers thwarted an attack on a Paris-Amsterdam train in 2015.
Yet French President Francois Hollande visited the Alpine town of Chambery on the same day that Amri is believed to have passed through its train station en route to Italy, unnoticed by border guards or the president’s security detail.
The next morning, as Italian police were identifying Amri’s body, France’s interior minister visited a Paris train station to talk about vigorous transport security in place for the holidays.
France’s far right and the conservative opposition assailed the Socialist government as lax.
“It’s a veritable kitchen strainer,” said Eric Ciotti, lawmaker for the Republicans. “How could this person enter in Europe without being monitored? How could we let him settle in Europe?”
What’s worse, it’s not the first time.
Last year, hours after IS extremists killed 130 people at multiple targets in Paris, key suspect Salah Abdeslam fled to Belgium despite increased checks on both the French and Belgian borders. It took authorities four months to find him. Further, Abdeslam, a French national, had traveled through the Italian port of Bari on a roundtrip journey to Greece in August, months before the attack.
And in 2014, Mehdi Nemmouche allegedly killed four people at the Jewish Museum in Brussels, then crossed into France and traveled to the Mediterranean city of Marseille before being picked up in a police check.
Security and migration will be central issues in elections in the coming year in Germany, France and the Netherlands — all founding nations of the EU. And related fears could be key to fueling opposition calls for early elections in Italy after the recent political crisis.
The leader of Italy’s anti-migrant Northern League, Matteo Salvini, called for closing and reinforcing Europe’s borders after the latest terror attack.
“I don’t want another two or three massacres before Europe wakes up,” Salvini said Saturday.
A candidate for France’s left-wing primary next month, Vincent Peillon, pleaded Friday for joint European rules on borders, defense and intelligence. “It’s all of Europe that is being attacked,” he said.
Le Pen’s party, though, wants to retrench rather than reach out. She says she wants to “give France back full control over its sovereignty.”
As Europeans head home for the holidays, many crossing multiple borders on the way without showing a single passport or changing any currency, people are asking themselves: Is it all worth it?
___
Geir Moulson in Berlin and Colleen Barry in Milan, Italy, contributed.
After Berlin attack, Europe weighs freedom against security
http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/after-berlin-attack-europe-weighs-freedom-against-security
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