We are almost to the middle of 2013 and, in Lord Melbourne’s words, “What all the wise men promised has not happened.” Todd Ganos of Forbes recently surveyed the economic situation since the “budget sequester” went into effect on January 1. In the first three months of 2013 the GDP grew at a 2.5% annual rate, slightly better than 2012’s growth rate of 2.2%. In the first four months of 2013 about 800,000 jobs were created. Initial jobless claims have been consistently lower then in 2012. The Congressional Budget Office has modified its budget estimates and now predicts that the deficit would shrink by $52 billion to $378 billion in 2015.

This is all very bad news. Of course, there is still time for the situation to turn around and for the economy to dive into a tailspin and enter another Great Depression. In the short run, though, things are looking dark. Suppose people draw the totally unjustified conclusion that cutting the federal budget—not draconian cuts, of course, but still not derisory ones either—could be accompanied by, or even causally related to, a slowly improving economy. No, no. It is too awful even to contemplate.

That the unrest is abating has been evident from the muted reaction of the markets. In recent days the lira registered a modest decline, reaching the October 2011 level against its dollar/euro basket, but this may be seen as good news for Turkey’s export-oriented economy. The cost of insuring Turkish debt against default rose slightly but not alarmingly: it the same now as in August of last year, well below crisis levels.

A further sign of government confidence is the continuing clampdown on the Turkish army top brass. On June 6 a criminal court in Ankara approved an indictment filed by the prosecutor’s office under which 102 retired officers (76 of whom are in prison) will be tried for allegedly staging the military coup in 1997. Right now there are 450 active and retired officers accused of either toppling former governments, or making plans to unseat the current government. As The Daily Zaman’s columnist Lale Kemal noted the other day, this raises the issue of the state of the morale of the Turkish Armed Forces at a sensitive time.

In the early days of unrest, street protests in Turkey were compared in the Western media to the misnamed “Arab Spring.” The comparison was inaccurate: no regime change was on the cards, no foreign money and logistics were in evidence, and outside a few hotspots in Istanbul, Ankara, and a few other cities Turkey’s life went on as usual. The government remained firmly in control of the state apparatus, the police proved obedient, and the army—already purged of hundreds of senior officers and no longer a significant political factor—stayed silent.

Prime Minister Rejep Tayyip Erdogan’s decade-old, increasingly personal rule is being challenged, but that challenge comes from unexpected quarters: from his fellow religious conservatives who resent his authoritarian style and arrogance.

There are many influential Turks of Islamist persuasion—both within and outside the ruling AKP (Justice and Development Party)—who are increasingly disenchanted with Erdogan. They have not been adverse to the drift away from secularism at home and to the assertive pursuit of neo-Ottomanism abroad, but they believe that the power of “the Sultan” (as Erdogan is known among his friends and foes alike) needs to be curtailed. While they do not identify with the values and aspirations of the secular and liberal urban middle class which has provided the backbone of protests, some religious conservatives see recent unrest as an opportunity to persuade the “Sultan” that he needs to listen to the neglected pashas and viziers.

For the first time since he became prime minister 11 years ago, some AKP-friendly media outlets have started to criticize Erdogan, following his near-paranoid reaction to the demonstrations. His calling protesters looters, drunks, marauders, extremists, and foreign agents, his ominous hints that his “patience is running out,” and his calls for counter-rallies by his supporters have not played well with Turkey’s more cautious conservatives, especially in the business community, who see his combative style as counterproductive. They are uncomfortable with Erdogan’s portrayal of the protest as a struggle between the “white Turks” (non-religious, upper-class, urban elites) versus the ‘black Turks’ (socially conservative, lower-middle and working class Sunnis from Anatolia). Even in his hitherto reliable power base in the Anatolian heartland, President Abdullah Gul—Erdogan’s long-time ally—is now mentioned as someone who could pursue the long-term AKP project of de-Kemalizing Turkey with greater caution and tact.

The real test will come later this year, when Erdogan will try to change the constitution and inaugurate an authoritarian presidential system. On June 6 Foreign Affairs published an interesting article by Halil Karaveli which aptly summarized the “Sultan’s” problem: “Erdogan’s own party members sense the changing tide. Indeed, even before the protests, there was widespread uneasiness within the AKP ranks. Most AKP parliamentarians had little enthusiasm for Erdogan’s plan to change the constitution and introduce an executive presidency. His scheme would have concentrated all power into the hands of a supreme leader, a position that Erdogan covets, basically neutering all other government officials.”

There is unease with Erdogan in Washington, too. Nobody in the U.S. Administration wants a regime change in Ankara, but some old Turkish hands advocate more strongly worded criticism of Erdogan’s methods as a means of reining him in. His switch from neutrality to support for the rebellion in Syria a year ago was welcomed in Washington, but his continuing public advocacy of intervention is becoming wearisome in view of Bashar’s recent battlefield successes. His open support for Hamas in the Palestinian Authority, and his close links with the putative Kurdish statelet in northern Iraq, are also deemed problematic in Washington—not to mention his strident criticism of Israel, which has decisively turned Israel’s friends on the Hill against him.

The protesters cannot threaten the overall architecture of Turkish politics because the majority of Turks are in agreement with the dual policy of de-secularization of the state and capitalist-based growth. That growth has been impressive, almost on par with China after Deng, but it has not dampened political and cultural tensions. There is an inherent discrepancy at work between the Islamic stamp on the country’s cultural and political scene which Erdogan has imposed, and the deepening gap between Turkey’s haves and the have-nots which the decade of prosperity has produced. The AKP-connected new oligarchs, in many ways similar to their uncouth Russian and East European counterparts, are Erdogan’s creation. Thanks to their party political affiliations they have profited from massive government-financed construction projects—like the proposed redevelopment at Taksim that triggered off the protests two weeks ago. To a devout yet poor, unemployed or underemployed Turk, increasing social stratification is incompatible with Erdogan’s advocacy of Islamic moral and social values which are deeply egalitarian. The losers in the process of Turkey’s transition in the villages generally do not oppose further de-secularization, but their loyalty to Erdogan personally should no longer be taken for granted.

Erdogan is in trouble because the harmless Istanbul protests showed him to be an intransigent autocrat and his rivals within the establishment sense his weakness. Having scored his third consecutive election victory in 2011, Erdogan focused on empowering his core constituency through a crony capitalism. He also pushed through a series of measures for state enforcement of conservative religious mores, like banning Turkish Airways flight attendants from wearing red lipstick and restricting the sale and consumption of alcohol, which even his supporters see as unnecessarily divisive and potentially destabilizing. Abroad, they feel that he has overplayed his hand on Syria. Most Turks, AKP supporters and Kemalists alike, are opposed to Erdogan’s support for the Syrian rebels and advocacy of foreign intervention, which is perceived as an “American,” rather than “Turkish” policy. By overplaying his hand on Syria, Erdogan has forfeited his hoped-for role as the leader of the Islamic Greater Middle East. His foreign minister Ahmet Davutoglu’s policy of “zero problems with all neighbors” has failed, not only in Syria, but also vis-à-vis Iraq and Iran, both of which support Bashar.

A powerful Sunni imam, Fethullah Gülen, may decide Erdogan’s political future. Little-known in the West—although he has lived in self-imposed exile in rural Pennsylvania for years—Gulen controls a global empire of media outlets (including Turkey’s top circulation daily), charities, businesses and schools now known simply as Hizmet (“The Service”). Shortly after the military coup in 1997, the army leaders started a purge of the movement. Gülen went abroad, was tried in absentia for seeking to overthrow Turkey’s secular order, but he was cleared in 2006, after Erdogan came to power. His is by far the most powerful religiously-based movement in Turkey, described as the country’s third power, alongside Erdogan’s increasingly authoritarian AKP and Turkey’s decreasingly influential military. “While the group is often described as ‘shadowy’ or ‘mysterious,’ this is inaccurate,” according to journalist Claire Belinski, based in Istanbul. “Quite a bit is known about it. Its behavior is both observable and predictable.”

Having supported Erdogan’s rise to power in 2002, Gülen was able to expand his network within the political establishment. The two men had a strategic partnership at first, with Gülen providing the AKP with votes while Erdogan protected the “cemaat,” as the former’s network is known. Already by 2004 one-fifth of the AKP’s members of parliament were members of the Gülen movement, including the justice and culture ministers. In 2006, former police chief Adil Serdar Sacan estimated that the “Fethullahcis” held more than 80 percent of senior positions in the Turkish police force. As we noted in these pages last August, for all his philanthropic pretenses Gülen controls a fundamentalist sect calling for a New Islamic Age based on the “Turkish-Islamic Synthesis.” By now it is all-pervasive, with many rich businessmen, judges and senior civil servants donating an average of 10 percent of their income to the cemaat.

Gülen now feels strong enough to engineer Erdogan’s comeuppance that will not disrupt the regime while increasing the power of his followers. The rift between Erdogan (a fellow imam) and Gülen is now in the open. Speaking in the U.S. last week, the latter effectively blamed Erdogan for the protests: “Are the ones at fault those who were unconcerned, who underestimated [the protest] by labeling it as ‘this and that’? ... If innocent people are killed, if some are choked with gas bombs and if some are blind enough not to see this, the fire could rage.” Shortly before the protests erupted Gülen warned against the arrogance of power, saying “even if a person is a believer, they can morally be a pharaoh… He may always look at people from on high, telling them ‘stay in your place’.”

Gülen seems to think that the power structure will not be unduly strained if Erdogan is weakened or even replaced. The army has been neutered and there is no strong leader in the ranks of secularists and liberals. The protesters have unwittingly aided Fethullahcis, ominously Stalinist in their steady march through Turkey’s institutions, against Erdogan’s Trotsky-like zeal for rapid re-Islamization.

All this was in stark contrast with our assessments from two years ago (“On current form it is an even bet that [Bashar] will survive, which is preferable to any likely alternative,” I wrote in the May 2011 issue of Chronicles), and from February 2012 (“The regime of Bashar al-Assad is… not in any immediate danger of collapsing; if there is no foreign intervention it may survive”). It was reiterated most recently in March of this year, two weeks before Obama’s statement in Amman (“The rebels are unable to bring down the government of President Bashar al-Assad, foreign political support and military supplies notwithstanding”).

I was right and Obama, Clinton et al were wrong. The proponents and opponents of Western intervention now agree that the tide has turned. Sen. John McCain, a hawk par excellence, declared that “Bashar al-Assad is winning” while visiting rebel-held territory last month to urge U.S.-led intervention. The fact that Bashar is winning has prompted other, more levelheaded commentators to insist that we should stay out of Syria. Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) warns that our record of arming “rebels” has resulted in a disaster in Libya and elsewhere. Writing in the National Review, Andrew McCarthy (former Assistant U.S. Attorney who prosecuted the “Blind Sheik,” Omar Abdel Rahman) ridiculed McCain’s call for yet another war. While rubbing elbows with Syria’s motley jihadists last month, McCarthy wrote, the increasingly senile Arizona Senator said that they “are just trying to achieve the same thing that we have shed American blood and treasure for well over 200 years”:

Yeah, just like in Benghazi. And in Egypt, where a pogrom against Christians is underway, and the Muslim Brotherhood government McCain joins Obama in supporting has just installed a sharia constitution. And in Iraq, where Sunnis and Shiites are back to slaughtering each other under the sharia constitution our State Department helped them write. And in Afghanistan, where, under a similar American-sponsored sharia constitution, the Taliban bides its time while the U.S.-backed Islamist forces turn their guns on their American trainers. And in Turkey, where an Islamic-supremacist regime jails its political opponents, supports terrorist organizations, undermines sanctions against Iran’s nuclear program, and gradually suffocates what was once a pro-Western democracy.

“Liberty is not spread by fueling sharia supremacists,” McCarthy concluded – and he used to be a proponent of military intervention, once. The Financial Times also used to favor intervention, but now its columnists admit that “the fact that Mr. Obama is refusing to respond to calls for ‘tough action’ in Syria is not a sign that he is a weak leader,” it is a sign of his prudence. Writing in the Boston Globe, America’s leading foreign policy realist Andrew Bacevich warned that, on Syria, the U.S. Government “is manifestly clueless and powerless.”

The Syrian rebels are far from powerless, but they are utterly out of their depth. Their most recent announcement that they will not attend the proposed Geneva conference on the crisis unless their fighters receive new supplies of arms and ammunition is a sign of despair. They will not get anti-aircraft weapons they crave because no Western power will deliver such weapons to the bearded human flesh-eaters, the rhetoric in Washington, London and Paris notwithstanding. Their real message is that the fall of Qusayr has changed the equation so radically that the rebels do not want to attend any conference at a time of evident and increasing battlefield weakness. That weakness will be even more evident when Aleppo is cleared of rebel forces, which I predict will happen in the next two to three weeks.

Foreign intervention is bad in principle if no vital American security and economic interests are at stake. In Syria this is manifestly not the case. Foreign intervention is bad in particular if its likely outcome is worse than the status quo. In Syria it is clear that the only likely alternative to Bashar is a nosedive into terrorist jihadist mayhem. That is infinitely worse from the vantage point of U.S. interests, geopolitically as well as morally, than what we have now in Damascus. Bashar is certainly no John Douglas, 9th Marquess of Queensberry, but he is the least bad option.

Sixteen of those convicted were Americans. All but one, Robert Becker of the National Democratic Institute, had already departed. Becker fled this week rather than serve two years in an Egyptian prison.

And U.S. interventionists are in an uproar.

"Appalling and offensive," said Sen. Pat Leahy of the verdicts.

"The 2011 revolution was supposed to end the repressive climate under Mubarak," said The Wall Street Journal of our ally of 30 years whom Hillary Clinton called a family friend.

This "crackdown," decries The Washington Post, was defended with "cheap nationalism and conspiracy theories." As for Egypt's proposed new law for regulating foreign-funded groups promoting democracy, it is "based on ... repressive and xenophobic logic."

Yet the questions raised by both the Cairo and Moscow crackdowns on U.S.-funded "democracy" groups cannot be so airily dismissed.

For these countries have more than a small point.

While U.S.-funded democracy promotion is portrayed as benign, the National Endowment for Democracy, the International Republican Institute, DNI and Freedom House have been linked to revolutions that brought down regimes in Serbia, Ukraine, Georgia, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, and nearly succeeded in Belarus.

People who pride themselves on bringing about revolutions should not whine when targeted regimes treat them like troublemakers.

And who directs these "pro-democracy" groups?

Before 2011, Freedom House was headed by ex-CIA Director Jim Woolsey, who says we are in "World War IV." The IRI is chaired by John McCain, who pushed for U.S. intervention in the Russia-Georgia war and is clamoring for air strikes on Syria.

The DNI chairman is ex-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who says: "We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall, and we see further than other countries into the future."

Is it not understandable to patriots of the original "Don't Tread on Me" republic that foreigners might resent paid U.S. agents operating inside their countries to alter the direction of their politics?

We have a right to advance our democratic values, we say.

But for the United States to push, for example, for freedom of speech, press and assembly in the People's Republic of China is to promote political action that must lead to the fall of Beijing's single-party state. Do we not understand why that might be seen by the Chinese Communist Party of Xi Jinping as subversive?

In the Cold War Americans learned that not only was the Communist Party U.S.A. a wholly owned subsidiary of Joseph Stalin's Comintern, that party had deeply infiltrated the U.S. government and Hollywood. In the late '40s and early '50s, America was convulsed over communist penetration of our institutions.

Martin Luther King Jr. was wiretapped by J. Edgar Hoover at the direction of JFK and Attorney General Robert Kennedy because he refused to dump an adviser, Stanley Levison, who was a communist and thought to be a Soviet spy.

Were the Kennedys being "repressive and xenophobic"?

If we were apoplectic that Soviet-funded communists were seeking to influence our culture and politics, why ought not other countries, with cultures and institutions far different from our own, react even as we did?

In the stricter societies of the Islamic world, governments have enacted laws regarding alcohol, premarital sex, divorce, abortion, homosexuality, gay marriage and religious conversions different from any such laws in the U.S.A.

In some of those countries, such activities can produce floggings, amputations, stonings and beheadings. In many of these countries, children are indoctrinated in the Islamic faith in government-supported schools. Not here.

We may deplore this, but where do we get the right to intervene in the internal affairs of these countries if they do not threaten us?

And are we really consistent in our democracy promotion?

How many U.S.-funded agents of Freedom House, NED, IRI and NDI are in Bahrain demanding elections that would permit the Shia majority to dump the king and oust our 5th Fleet from its Persian Gulf base?

How would we react if Riyadh funneled billions of petrodollars into organizations and agents to finance Wahhabi madrassas and assist local Muslim communities in the U.S.A. with their efforts to enact sharia law?

What lies behind U.S. interventions in the internal affairs of countries all over the world?

There is, first, the residual Cold War mindset. What we did for Solidarity in Poland was right and successful, and we cannot give up this tool of democracy just because the Cold War is over.

Second, there is the arrogance of power, the End-of-History babble about democracy being the last, best hope of earth to which all nations should aspire—and if they don't, give them a kick in that direction.

Once the most admired of nations, America is no longer so.

Why not? Because of our compulsive interventions, military and political, in the internal affairs of nations that are none of our business.

Defund the American Comintern, and bring the outside agitators home.

COPYRIGHT 2013 CREATORS.COM

In the last entry in his blog, posted on the day of his suicide, he bewailed the failure of peaceful mass protests to prevent the passage of the marriage law and wrote of the need for “new, spectacular and symbolic gestures to wake up the sleep-walkers, to shake the slumbering consciousness and to remind us of our origins.” In his words, “We are entering a time when words must be backed up by actions.” “It is here and now that our destiny is played out to the very last second,” he wrote. “And this final second has as much importance as the rest of a life.” He also warned that “the population of France and Europe is about to be replaced,” brought under Islamist control and sharia law. The content of a sealed letter which he placed at the altar of the cathedral before shooting himself is still unknown.

Venner first gained prominence in 1956, when he took part in an attack on Communist Party headquarters in Paris in protest at the Soviet suppression of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. He later joined the Organisation de l'Armée Secrète (OAS), an illegal organization which opposed Algeria’s independence, and served 18 months in jail after the group’s failed plot to kill President Charles De Gaulle.

Following his release from prison, in January 1963 Venner joined Alain de Benoist to create a movement and magazine called “Europe-Action,” which was composed of nationalists, Europeanists, and former OAS members. He also created, with Thierry Maulnier, the Institut d'études occidentales (IEO). In 1970 founded its revue, Cité-Liberté (City-Liberty), which attracted numerous French and foreign intellectuals, including Thomas Molnar. In 1981 his Histoire de l'Armée rouge won a prestigious award from the Académie française. In 2002 Venner wrote a major work, Histoire et tradition des Européens, which sought to trace the common cultural bases of European civilization, and in which he presented his theory of “traditionalism.” At the time of his death he was editor of the La Nouvelle Revue d'Histoire.

Venner’s editor, Pierre-Guillaume de Roux, said that his suicide went “far beyond” the same-sex marriage issue. He added that Venner had been writing a new book, “A Samurai of the West: The Breviary of the Unsubued.” That title brings to mind the ritual suicide of Yukio Mishima in 1970, after a failed coup attempt. This is Venner’s explanation for his gesture in full:

The Reasons for a Voluntary Death

I am healthy in body and mind, and I am filled with love for my wife and children. I love life and expect nothing beyond, if not the perpetuation of my race and my mind. However, in the evening of my life, facing immense dangers to my French and European homeland, I feel the duty to act as long as I still have strength. I believe it necessary to sacrifice myself to break the lethargy that plagues us. I give up what life remains to me in order to protest and to found. I chose a highly symbolic place, the Cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris, which I respect and admire: she was built by the genius of my ancestors on the site of cults still more ancient, recalling our immemorial origins.

While many men are slaves of their lives, my gesture embodies an ethic of will. I give myself over to death to awaken slumbering consciences. I rebel against fate. I protest against poisons of the soul and the desires of invasive individuals to destroy the anchors of our identity, including the family, the intimate basis of our multi-millennial civilization. While I defend the identity of all peoples in their homes, I also rebel against the crime of the replacement of our people.

The dominant discourse cannot leave behind its toxic ambiguities, and Europeans must bear the consequences. Lacking an identitarian religion to moor us, we share a common memory going back to Homer, a repository of all the values on which our future rebirth will be founded once we break with the metaphysics of the unlimited, the baleful source of all modern excesses.

I apologize in advance to anyone who will suffer due to my death, first and foremost to my wife, my children, and my grandchildren, as well as my friends and followers. But once the pain and shock fade, I do not doubt that they will understand the meaning of my gesture and transcend their sorrow with pride. I hope that they shall endure together. They will find in my recent writings intimations and explanations of my actions.

For more information, one can go to my publisher, Pierre-Guillaume Roux. He was not informed of my decision, but he has known me a long time.

What went wrong? I shared a light lunch with a friend whose assessments of Hungary’s social and political scene are trustworthy. Dr. Peter Kiss is an Hungarian-born American who retired from the U.S. Army a decade ago after 20 years’ service. Back in his native city, he now teaches at the elite University of Public Service (formerly the Miklos Zrinyi National Defense University). Peter is a Cold Warrior of yore. As a high school senior and then student in the bland years of Janos Kadar’s “goulash socialism,” he could only dream of the fall of the Wall. A cultural and social conservative, he should be a natural ally of Hungary’s present, ostensibly nationalist government—but this is not the case. Peter’s experiences of Hungary’s post-communism have been disheartening, prompting him “to start reading some leftist papers.”

My first question concerned Viktor Orban, Hungary’s Prime Minister for the past three years, who has the reputation of l’enfant terrible of the European Union. On May 17 he deepened his government’s latent tensions with Germany by comparing the policies of German Chancellor Angela Merkel to the 1944 Nazi invasion of his country. “The Germans already sent the cavalry once, and in the form of tanks,” Orbàn told listeners to his weekly radio broadcast last Friday, “Our request would be that they did not send them again.” Who is Orban, and what does he stand for? Someone who is chronically in the EU’s bad books, and who has the guts to stand up to Merkel, presumably is a decent sort…

Peter Kiss: I have a negative view of Orban. Everything done by him and his party has only one goal: to keep Orban and the party in power. If riding the nationalist sentiment gets them there, then they will act accordingly. If some other ideology appears preferable, they will embrace it. In the meantime they are not doing much good for the country, for the economy, and for the prosperity of the average Hungarian. The policies of this government have made the economic environment unpredictable. Investors are either fleeing the country if they can, or else they are stuck. Foreigners with investment capital will think twice or three times before they commit themselves to a project in Hungary. The rate of investment has fallen significantly over the past three years. Orban is a very dividing person. He thrives on conflict. He picks up fights when there is no real sense or need for those fights. He has successfully divided the country between his supporters –who have very close ranks, and who have a strong leader they can follow—and the opposition which is disunited. Orban managed to create a very firm base of support, very determined and united, but he has not been a good leader for the country.

ST: But he has resisted various attempts by Brussels to meddle in Hungary’s internal affairs…

PK: True enough, but the EU is no longer an economic community, it is a political union which expects certain rules to be followed. Orban has challenged this by removing, over the past three years, various checks and balances that allow democracy to function. For example, over the past twenty-odd years the Constitutional Court had functioned as a watchdog, but with the majority that Orban has gathered at the last election he has managed to undermine that role. The Court’s authority is now severely limited. It no longer has the ability to examine the constitutionality of new laws concerning taxation. Even constitutional amendments adopted in Parliament are beyond the Constitutional Court’s reach. When it found certain items in the new law on the media unconstitutional, it was powerless to change them. The same applies to the electoral law, which many Hungarians find objectionable. Too many laws are passed with the two-thirds super-majority which makes them untouchable, either by the Constitutional Court or by the parliamentary opposition. The fact that the constitutional authority and legislative authority are no longer divided is really a self-inflicted wound by the Hungarian polity. In the U.S. a constitutional amendment needs to be ratified by two-thirds of the states. There is no equivalent check in Hungary’s case.

ST: But from the vantage point of a traditional American conservative, there are many aspects of Hungary’s current scene that seem agreeable. “Same-sex marriage” is not an issue, immigration is not an issue, and the obsession with PC multiculturalism is absent. Hungary appears to be a stable, pleasingly monocultural society…

PK: Yes, absolutely. I am not saying that the Orban government is wrong on every count, but even a broken clock is right twice a day. My objection is that if you draw the balance sheet, in my view the balance is negative. Take the demographic problem. In Hungary it is as bad, or even worse, than in many parts of Europe. The problem is exacerbated by a very high level of emigration. Many young people go to Germany, Austria or other EU countries, initially with the intention of eventually returning, but few actually do.

The Gypsy minority of 8 percent has three times the birth rate of the non-Gypsy population, and the tension between those two communities is not good for the country in the long run. The Gypsy problem exists partly because of the Gypsies, but also in a large part because of the Hungarians’ attitude towards them. The Gypsies are the big losers of the collapse of Communism. Since then, successive governments have tried, and failed, to handle the problem. Meanwhile, the Gypsies’ demographic growth results in their increasing presence, which is resented by the majority population.

I see a negative cultural transfer taking place, manifested in a very strong far-right movement, Jobbik. It is probably stronger than anywhere in Eastern Europe, and with 17% of the vote they are in parliament. They enjoy a strong following among university students, so it is not only a blue-collar phenomenon. I am not suggesting that Jobbik is part of a brewing insurgency, but extreme movements—of the far-left or the far-right—tend to have a dual character. There’s the official party, represented in parliament, and there’s the movement with a radical agenda, somewhat like the official Sinn Fein and the IRA in the 1980’s. We have not seen that level of violence yet, but the street gangs are there, the potential is there. Their deputies have the immunity and the respectability of having been elected, and they can easily deny any connection with the street gangs. But if you are skeptical enough, or cynical enough, you can see something similar in the case of Fidesz, Orban’s party. They are the majority party with all the power that this gives them, but there are also the rubble-rousers who follow the leaders’ guidance. I see significant potential for future discord, especially since there seems to be little chance of any major economic improvement in the years to come.

The political, social, and economic problems of today’s Hungary are largely invisible to the casual visitor. Budapest seems vibrant and prosperous. The city’s half-dozen Danube bridges that connect Buda’s hilly maize of cobbled streets and alleyways with Pest’s belle-epoque business district are teeming with foreign tourists. Not all is well in Pannonia, however, and Hungary will provide a barometer of the wider dilemmas and tensions of the Old Continent in the years to come.

The Department of State and the White House did their utmost to conceal the true nature of the attack last September 11, in which Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans were killed. It was a brazen act of Islamic terrorism, carried out by hard-core jihadists, of course, but the Administration was understandably loath to admit that its former Libyan protégés were the culprits. The result was an elaborate, conspiratorial subterfuge. It entailed penalizing a senior career diplomat—Gregory Hicks, the Deputy Mission Chief in Tripoli—who refused to go along with the Administration’s patently absurd claim that the attack was the result of a spontaneous demonstration sparked off by an “anti-Islamic” video posted on YouTube.

Last Wednesday, Hicks testified before the House Oversight Committee that he called an acting assistant secretary to dispute Susan Rice’s claim—made on Sunday news shows five days after the attack—that the outrage was caused by the clip. He said he was “stunned” by the claim, because he knew that the video was actually a “nonevent” in Libya. “My jaw dropped,” he said. “I was embarrassed.” Hicks was immediately rebuked for his misgivings, and told in no uncertain terms to drop that line of questioning. He got a call from Beth Jones, an acting assistant secretary to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, to stop doubting Washington’s stance that the attack was spurred by a protest: “The sense I got is that I needed to stop my line of questioning.” All efforts to get military help to the consulate were rebuffed, according to Hicks, and special forces in Tripoli wanting to help were “furious.”

Hicks further said that, within weeks, his performance was criticized by superiors: he received a “blistering critique” of his management style. This was a classic case of punishing the potential whistle-blower, not for speaking out—Hicks had remained silent until the hearing—but for doing his job. Hicks also revealed that Cheryl Mills, Hillary Clinton’s Chief of Staff, told him that he could not speak to Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah)—who went to Libya on a fact-finding mission—unless a State Department attorney was in attendance. Hicks called the attorney “the minder,” send to monitor what was being said.

The end result was a demotion of Hicks. As Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) noted, his testimony provided proof conclusive that Hillary Clinton was personally involved in trying to suppress information about the true nature of the attack.

Mark Thompson, under-secretary at the Department of State’s counterterrorism bureau, provided evidence that supported Hick’s account—and then some more. He testified that the Foreign Emergency Support Team (FEST), was not allowed to respond to the attack. Thompson noted that FEST was specifically created to respond to just such attacks. This tallies with Hicks. “Is anything coming?” he asked a defense attaché at the embassy in Tripoli as he worked to coordinate a response during the attack. “Will they be sending us any help? Is there something out there?” There was nothing, by the will of Washington.

Following Hick’s testimony House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) asked the White House and State Department to release all emails related to the attack which House committees were able to see, but not keep or share, during their investigation: “Last I remember, the President said, and I'll quote, ‘Would be happy to cooperate with the Congress in any way the Congress wants.’ Well, this is his chance to show his cooperation so that we can get to the truth of what happened in Benghazi.” Boehner is asking for two sets of emails which show that the White House tried to change the initial characterization of the attack in Benghazi from a potential terrorist attack by Islamic terrorists to a spontaneous demonstration in reaction to the amateur film: “The truth shouldn't be hidden from the American people behind a White House firewall.”

The first set of emails, sent one day after the attack, provide evidence that a senior State Department official told her superiors that in his final message Stevens said the attack “was conducted by Islamic terrorists.” This was four days before Susan Rice said went on Meet the Press and other Sunday news shows to claim that the attack was the result of a spontaneous demonstration. The second set of emails concerns frantic exchanges between the White House and State Department officials, where the former “insisted on removing all references to the terrorist attack to protect the State Department for providing inadequate security.”

According to Boehner, “somebody clearly decided they didn’t like the references to Islamic terrorism and made changes in this document.”

Contrary to administration claims that the mistaken description of the nature of the attack reflected “the best intelligence at the time,” we now know that the talking points that led to Susan Rice’s statement were revised 12 times. Early drafts contained references to Al Qaeda but they were later deleted. Especially damning is the fact that State Department spokesman Victoria Nuland pressed the CIA to delete references to the agency’s earlier warnings. As ABC News reported on Friday, the original paragraph read:

The Agency has produced numerous pieces on the threat of extremists linked to al-Qa’ida in Benghazi and eastern Libya. These noted that, since April [2012[, there have been at least five other attacks against foreign interests in Benghazi by unidentified assailants, including the June attack against the British Ambassador's convoy. We cannot rule out the individuals has previously surveilled the U.S. facilities, also contributing to the efficacy of the attacks.

Nuland wrote that the lines “could be abused by members [of Congress] to beat up the State Department for not paying attention to warnings, so why would we want to feed that either? Concerned ...” The offending paragraph was duly deleted. It is now also known that then-CIA Director David Petraeus voiced surprise when he learned three days after the attack that officials had deleted all prior references to Al Qaeda and jihadists, leaving only the word “extremists.”

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney nevertheless maintains that “what we said and what remains true to this day is that the intelligence community drafted and redrafted these points.” He stood by claim that White House involvement was minimal: “the only edits made by anyone here at the White House were stylistic and non-substantive. They corrected the description of the building or the facility in Benghazi from consulate to diplomatic facility and the like.” On the same day State Department spokesman Patrick Ventrell asserted that Rice’s comments were based on the intelligence community’s “best assessment that there was not any evidence of months-long pre-planning or pre-meditation, which remains their assessment.”

This is no mere spinmaster’s misrepresentation, it is a lie. On the basis of numerous off-the-record conversations with those in the know, I can aver that it never was the intelligence community’s true assessment, and it is not its assessment now.

The truth of the matter is that Obama and his team remain hell-bent on constructing user-friendly jihadists, and they will not allow the reality to get in the way of their construct. Egypt, the pivotal Arab nation, has already paid the price, as well as Libya and Tunisia. Syria may be next. Boston was but a minor sideshow, in terms of blood but not in terms of impact, in the unfolding tragedy. We have the most jihad-friendly administration the non-Muslim world has ever known.

The culprit-in-chief is President Barack Obama, who has banned the use of the words “Muslim” or “Islam” in the official American discourse on terrorism. In mandating the disconnect Obama has gone well beyond the squeamishness of Western bien-pensants in naming the enemy and their chronic tendency to see all religions as interchangeable. By placing a ban on any meaningful debate on the link between Islam and terrorism Obama is effectively aiding and abetting the enemy. In reality the jihadist threat can never be controlled by focusing on causes external to Islam itself. That enemy has a clear ideology and a standard blueprint for radical political and social action. The result is a global phenomenon that cannot be compared in fanaticism and readiness for violence with any other ideology in today’s world.

It is an undeniable fact that Muslim immigration and the existence of a Muslim diaspora in a country are directly connected to that country being the target of terror. The aversion to profiling is a glaring symptom of the elite class pathology. Law-enforcers in other parts of the world pay no heed to the dictates of “sensitivity.” Arabs profile other Arabs, Indians profile Pakistanis, Japanese profile Chinese, and everyone profiles Africans. Israel profiles everyone entering and exiting all the time, and makes no qualms about it. One percent of Muslims living in the United States were responsible for over 90 percent of terrorist offences and serious threats in the country since 9-11. A young Muslim man is literally tens of millions of times more likely to carry out a terrorist attack in the United States than an Episcopalian, Roman Catholic, or Orthodox Christian, a Jew, a Hindu, or a Buddhist. Or for that matter a Lebanese Christian. Membership of a group is a valid pointer in assuming and judging unobserved behavioral characteristics of an individual, especially in the absence of specific information about that individual's background. To suggest otherwise is neither moral nor sane.

It is essential to define and understand the enemy. Are Muslim terrorists—the only variety that seriously threatens the United States and the Western world—true or false to the tenets of their faith? The answer has to be based on Islam’s history and dogma, not on any a priori judgment by those who presume to know the answer or, worse still, may have ulterior motives—e.g. Obama—for not wanting the truth known. The result is that most Americans remain largely ignorant of Islam’s record of interaction with other societies and faiths, and therefore unable to understand the motives, ambitions and methods of terrorists. Some will understand intuitively that the attacks in Boston were not an aberration of Islam’s alleged peace and tolerance, but a predictable consequence of the ideology of Jihad. That understanding needs to be universal.

Obama clearly sees the above view as illegitimate today and punishable under some hate speech statute tomorrow. His forthcoming amnesty of all those unknown millions of illegal aliens will go hand in hand with the treatment of a growing Muslim diaspora as a fixed given that must not be scrutinized in any anti-terrorist context. As I wrote in Defeating Jihad seven years ago, an effective defense against terrorism demands a re-think of our foreign and military policies. What were the costs and benefits of supporting the Muslim side in the Caucasus and the Balkans? But let me repeat the obvious: the impact of ongoing Muslim migratory influx into the developed world is inseparable from any coherent long-term defense strategy. Controlling the borders is only the first step. The application of clearly defined criteria related to terrorism in deciding who will be admitted into the country, and in determining who should be allowed to stay from among those who are already here, is essential. Carefully evaluating the ideological profile of all prospective visitors to America, and systematically re-examining the behavior of all resident aliens and checking the bona-fides of naturalized citizens, is an essential ingredient of a serious anti-terrorist strategy. To that end, Islamic activism needs to be treated as an excludable, eminently political, rather than “religious” activity.

The victory against terrorism ultimately has to be won in the domain of morals and culture. It can be won only by an America hat has regained its awareness of its moral, spiritual, and civilizational roots. Instead, after every act of Islamic terrorism, we are served fresh doses of antidiscriminationism and tolerance. In 1938 Hilaire Belloc wondered, “Will not perhaps the temporal power of Islam return and with it the menace of an armed Muhammadan world which will shake the dominion of Europeans—still nominally Christian—and reappear again as the prime enemy of our civilization?” Now we know the answer. We are on fast track towards the grand Gleichschaltung of nations, races, and cultures that will mark the end of history.

As I wrote six years ago and reiterate today, we need laws that will treat any naturalized citizen’s or legally resident alien’s known adherence to an Islamist world outlook as excludable—on political, rather than “religious” grounds. The sharia, to a Muslim, is not an addition to the “secular” legal code with which it coexists; it is the only true code, the only basis of obligation. To be legitimate, all political power therefore must rest exclusively with those who enjoy Allah’s authority on the basis of his revealed will—and for as long as they remain infidel, both Europe and America are illegitimate. So how can a self-avowedly devout Muslim take the oath, and expect the rest of us to believe that it was done in good faith? Because he is practicing taqiyya, the art of elaborate lying that was inaugurated by Muhammad to help destabilize and undermine non-Muslim communities almost ripe for a touch of Jihad. (Or else because he is not devout enough and confused, but in that case there is the ever-present danger that at some point he will rediscover his roots.)

Those who preach or promote jihad and advocate the introduction of sharia can and should be treated in exactly the same manner that adherents of other totalitarian ideologies had been treated in the free world during the Cold War. My five key conclusions from 2005-6 still stand:

Seek zero porosity of the borders. No anti-jihadist strategy is possible without complete physical control of borders. Illegal immigration is a major security threat.

Demand denial of amnesty to illegal immigrants from nations and groups at risk for Islamic terrorism.

Discard the irrational ban on “profiling.” Not all Muslims are terrorists, but all transnational terrorist networks that threaten Western countries’ national security and way of life are composed of Muslims. It is time to accept that “profiling” based on a person’s appearance, origin, and apparent or suspected beliefs is an essential tool of trade of law enforcement and war on terrorism. Just ask the Israelis!

Subject the work of Islamic centers to legal limitations and security supervision. All over the Western world, Islamic centers have provided platforms for exhortations to the faithful to support causes and to engage in acts that are morally reprehensible, legally punishable, and detrimental to the host country’s national security. They have provided shelter to the outlaws, and offered recruitment to the leaders.

Treat affiliation with Islamic activism as grounds for denial or revoking of any level of security clearance. Such affiliation is incompatible with the requirements of personal commitment, patriotic loyalty and unquestionable reliability that are essential in the military, law enforcement, intelligence services, and other related branches of government (e.g. immigration control, airport security). Presence of practicing Muslims in any of these institutions would present an inherent risk to its integrity and would undermine morale.

Yesterday's pop media was abuzz with the story (on the story), and left-wing sports jocks around the country screamed at callers that the very belief that homosexuality is a sin is bigotry.  The talk-radio scenario, repeated all day, got especially dicey when African-American men called in, self-identified as Christian, and denounced the coming-out celebration and its supposed connection to Jackie Robinson.

Naturally, daytime's Peter Pan Ellen DeGeneres was thrilled at the news, applauding Collins for being a "very brave man."  Then she said something particularly interesting: "Because of you, there's a little boy playing basketball right now who knows he can be who he is and still play the sport he loves."

What exactly is her point?  Collins, as mentioned, is not a flouncing fairy.  So he can't be a "role model" for little boys who want to act like little girls while at the same time (incongruously) dreaming of playing pro-basketball.  I'm not sure what age range qualifies in Miss DeGeneres's reckoning as "little boy," but it isn't unreasonable to hope that a "little boy" would not be thinking about the mechanics of gay sex or even some more vague sense of being attracted to other little boys, considering that normal "little boys" are not sexually attracted to little girls.

But getting children to think about gay sex is exactly the result of this propaganda push, and those children will "be what they are" (boys and girls) unless preyed upon by these degenerates who crave acceptance and affirmation at all costs.

Another educational problem: several million people who have been made unemployable by being sent to college, for which they were unqualified. And being exposed to professors who are part of the education problem above.

If we really must avoid speaking evil of the dead, we will have to give up all serious history and political commentary. Traditional Anglo-American law recognizes this. Slander or libel against a dead person is not actionable because such person cannot be harmed by it.

The U.S.’s most hallowed military cemetery is on stolen property---indeed, property stolen from the family of George Washington.

Culturally, the U.S. is already a Third World country.  Just watch a few hours of daytime television. Or experience the raucous noise of public places. Or take a look at your local magazine rack.

In films about famous Americans of the past, the characters are almost always played by Brits or British Commonwealth natives.  (Lincoln has recently been played by the Englishman Daniel Day-Lewis and Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gelhorn by two Australians.)  Why is this? Could it be because there are too few Americans with the requisite intelligence or Anglo-Saxon appearance and demeanor?  The same is true, to a lesser degree for other American characters in film. If Brits, Canadians, and Australians were eliminated from Hollywood, there would be few major actors left.

The federal takeover of education and medicine a half-century ago, known as “the Great Society,” has been a colossal failure if its goal was a better society.  It has, however, made a lot of people richer than they were and provided politicians with endless opportunities for benevolent posturing, bribery, and patronage. Maybe that was its real goal all along.

A certain way to identify a Republican: one who blames economic difficulties on workers, unions, and the minimum wage rather than on the incompetence, irresponsibility, and greed of capitalists and politicians.

A society that will send poor women to fight while rich men wallow in luxurious safety is not worth fighting for and has a poor prospect of long-term survival.

Many Americans are alarmed right now about possible military force against American civilians in the future. They forget that it has already happened in a major way. It is known as the Civil War and Reconstruction.