OPINION

The Crushing Wages of Progressivism

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On the same day, September 27, 2016, nine days before the first presidential debate between Clinton and Trump, a Somali American, Dahir Adan, stabbed nine people in a Minneapolis mall and an Afghan American, Ahmad Rahami detonated a pressure-cooker bomb in the heart of Manhattan, injuring 31. During his knife attack, Adan demanded to know if his victims were Muslim before stabbing them but made the fatal mistake of threatening an armed off-duty cop, Jason Falconer, who shot him dead. Rahami who came to the U.S. with his family as part of an Afghan asylum program, was arrested in 2014 for stabbing his brother. His father told the police then that his son was a terrorist. But the FBI interviewed him and dismissed his case despite his numerous trips to visit the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The topics for the debate between Trump and Clinton were supposed to have been America’s Direction, Achieving Prosperity, and Securing America. But securing America during the most watched political event in human history was hardly discussed. Unlike the agenda advanced by the progressive moderator, Lester Holt, the debate should not have focused on Donald Trump’s tax returns and trivia, but on how America prevents internationally sponsored terrorists from importing weapons of mass destruction into the US, as well as other related threats to our existence.

Despite all the other misdirection commentary posited by the largely-left-leaning punditry, the simple truth is that the country cannot afford to put another Democrat in charge of fighting global terrorism. Why? Because Democrats don’t want the job. Moreover, things could be a lot worse. We could become Europe.

Four days after the attacks in New York and Minneapolis, at the annual back-to-school conference at a preschool in western Paris, parents were told by the school’s principal, Oliver Rosignol, that there is a new item on the agenda—“Intrusion Alert Drills” designed to prepare teachers and children in the case terrorists attempt to storm the school. With these words, a hush fell over the assembled parents. “We must train little by little so that the children can keep quiet and hide themselves in the classroom,” he said.

Matt Dalton of the Wall Street Journal reported that given the attacks on French soil over the past year, “the new security procedures are required at every school in the country and are a sobering sign of how Islamist violence has changed life in France.” The article also included an ironic photo of a pot-bellied French President Holland sitting in a classroom in Orleans, presumably overseeing and giving his blessing to the new “Intrusion Alert” directives.

Next to Dalton’s article, Ruth Bender posted an article, Germany Nabs Syrian Refugee Over Bomb Plot. She reports, “German police said they arrested a 16-year-old Syrian refugee with connections to the Islamic State who had been planning a bomb attack, the latest in a series of arrests of suspected radical Islamists and terrorists among the over one million migrants that came to the country last year. The teenager, who police didn’t identify to due Germany’s privacy laws, had radicalized quickly after coming to Germany with his family.” Such is the state of Muslim gratitude and Euro progressive governance.

As I write in my book, Lessons from Fallen Civilizations, (See www.larrykelley.com) the Europeans were twice nearly conquered by the armies of Allah. In 732, had Charles Martel not defeated the Muslim invaders which had conquered all of North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula and were pouring into flat lands of infant France, historians believe Europe would have been subsumed by Islam. Similarly, in 1683, had the Polish King Sobiesky not defeated the Ottoman hoards at the battle of Vienna, historians also believe would Western Civilization would have been snuffed out. In past centuries, Europeans fought to save their civilization, then called “Western Christendom.” The “Reconquista” which was the complete expulsion of Muslims from the Iberian Peninsula, took 700 years.

Now the guilt-ridden feckless Europeans have invited hostile hoards into their cities and even pay to house, to feed, and to subsidize the cell phones with which they plot to kill them. This is, of course, not say that all Muslim military age men pouring into Europe are terrorists (or for that matter, gang rapists) but it is simply a fact that nearly all terrorists are Muslim. And many are recent refugees inhabiting Europe.

Not only do the modern progressive Europeans appear unwilling to defend their homes and culture from their Muslim enemies within but they do not seem to have the will to resist the new Russian bear amassing troops and weaponry on their eastern borders should Putin elect to attack. The former NATO Secretary General and Prime Minister of Denmark, Anders Rasmussen, in recent article, The United States Must be the World’s Policeman, laments that Europe is in danger of losing its protector and benefactor. He dolefully writes a massive condemnation of the world left to us by Obama, Clinton, Kerry and of the past eight years of progressive rule: “In this world of interconnections, it has become a cliché to talk about the “global village.” But right now, the village is burning, and the neighbors are fighting in the light of the flames. Just as we need a policeman to restore order, we need a firefighter to put out the flames of conflict and a kind of mayor, smart and sensible, to lead the rebuilding.”

The former boss of NATO goes on to aver that only the US, of all world powers has the moral authority to address the challenges posed by Russia which is obviously obsessed with rebuilding its lost empire and from China which is on the march to take over vast portions of the Southern Asia. Almost in confessional-like prayer reminiscent of a once Catholic Europe, nearly now forgotten Rasmussen writes, “Europe is weak, divided and leaderless. The old powers of Britain and France are simply too small and exhausted to play a role they once did.”

The fact that the French are teaching their children to run and hide when the attacker enters their schools, is a perfect metaphor for the failed governance of progressive Europe. Pray that our progressives do not take the US to that sorry state.