Mead:
Evidence accumulating that jihadi groups, including the one that planned the Paris attacks, are using the migration of hundreds of thousands of refugees to cover their own movements. The New York Times reports:
The investigation into the Paris terrorist attacks, previously focused on jihadist networks in France and Belgium, has widened to Eastern Europe, with a Belgian federal prosecutor announcing Friday that one of the people suspected of terrorism traveled in September by car to Hungary, where he picked up two men now believed to have links to the carnage of Nov. 13.
The disclosure of a Hungarian connection has not only dramatically expanded the scope of the investigation but has also put a spotlight on the question of whether jihadist militants have concealed themselves in a huge flow of asylum seekers passing through Eastern Europe.
A statement issued by the Belgian federal prosecutor on Friday said that Salah Abdeslam, a former Brussels resident who is the only known survivor from three terrorist squads that killed 130 people in Paris, had made two trips to the Hungarian capital, Budapest, in a rented Mercedes-Benz a few weeks before the Paris attacks.
Europe, which just a few years ago thought that it inhabited a post-historical universe in which nothing could ever go seriously wrong, is painfully waking up from the dream. It’s now crystal clear that one can’t combine a passive foreign policy with a legalistic adherence to absolutist ideals—that, for example, one can turn a blind eye to a disintegrating Middle East and North Africa while opening the gates to every refugee and migrant that the meltdown creates.On a drive back to Western Europe on Sept. 9, he was stopped during a routine check at Hungary’s border with Austria and found to be transporting two men using what have since turned out to be “fake Belgian identity cards.”
Not far
behind this lurks the realization that a cosmopolitan and tolerant society
can’t thrive if it admits millions of migrants who hate and despise
cosmopolitan values. Still obscure to most European elites (and to their
American counterparts) is the understanding that neither the values nor the
liberties of liberal civilization can long flourish if the religious and
spiritual foundations of that civilization are allowed to decay, and are
treated with scorn and neglect by society’s leaders.
Today’s
Western elites, in the U.S. as much as in Europe, have never been so
self-confident. Products of meritocratic selection who hold key positions in
the social machine, the bien-pensant
custodians of post-historical ideology—editorial writers at the NY Times, staffers in cultural and
educational bureaucracies, Eurocratic functionaries, much of the professoriat,
the human rights priesthood and so on—are utterly convinced that they see
farther and deeper than the less credentialed, less educated, less tolerant and
less sophisticated knuckle-dragging also-rans outside the magic circle of post
historical groupthink.
And
while the meritocratic priesthood isn’t wrong about everything—and the
knuckle-draggers aren’t right about everything—there are a few big issues on
which the priests are dead wrong and the knuckle-draggers know it. Worse, as the
mass of the people become more aware that the elites are too blind and too
wrapped up in the coils of elite ideology to deal effectively with society’s
most urgent problems, an age of demagogues is opening up around us. People need
leaders; when the meritocratic priesthood seems incapable of providing
leadership, people start looking elsewhere.
