Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 535

Germany’s Latest Green Problem Is Spelled N-I-M-B-Y

Germany’s rapid rollout of renewables has jacked up power bills, but that’s not the only manner in which it’s upsetting concerned citizens. As the New York Times reports, Germans have mobilized to block the construction of new power transmission lines that would connect new sources of renewable supplies to areas of higher demand:

Most of [Germany’s wind turbines] are in the north of the country, near Denmark and the Netherlands, or off the coast in the North Sea. The majority of Germany’s electricity demand, however, comes from some 400 miles to the south, in the factories and corporate headquarters of Bavaria.

Transporting electricity from the place where it is generated to the place it will be used means installing high-voltage power lines. But while renewable energy is extremely popular among the German public, power lines are not.Public protests against construction have been influential enough that, in July, the country’s governing coalition had to agree to bury high-voltage lines wherever possible — a move that could raise the cost of those lines by billions of dollars.

Green energy isn’t immune to Not In My Back Yard (NIMBY) problems, and in fact because of the more distributed nature of renewables, can in some ways run afoul of local landowner concerns more easily than more centralized fossil fuel or nuclear plants.

And as Germany is discovering, you don’t just have to worry about where to site your wind turbines and solar panels. You also have to make sure that those new supplies can physically meet demand; you have to plug them in to the grid. Berlin has been slow to update its grid to keep up with its recent renewables-at-any-cost energy policy, and as a result its network stability—and that of its neighbors, as well—is being undermined by its new intermittent sources of power.But building out a power grid isn’t a simple task by any means, and NIMBY concerns only compound the difficulty of the task ahead for Germany. Berlin hoped to set an example for the world with its green energy transition, its energiewende, and in that respect it can claim some measure of success: other nations can look to the German example and see how poorly green dreams directly translate to reality.

Opposition Wins in Venezuela

For the first time in 16 years, Venezuela’s opposition has won a majority in the legislature, setting up a potential showdown with President Nicolás Maduro, whose government has presided over a catastrophic economic decline in the oil-rich South American nation. Reuters:

Ecstatic opposition leaders vowed on Monday to use their new majority in Venezuela’s legislature to free jailed opponents of the Socialist government but also said they would not move to dismantle popular welfare policies.

The opposition Democratic Unity coalition won more than twice the number of National Assembly seats as the Socialists in elections on Sunday that punished President Nicolas Maduro’s government for the country’s deep economic and social crisis.

Venezuela’s socialist regime has been crumbling since the death of Hugo Chávez in 2013. Chávez consolidated power through the force of his charisma, which is to say he silenced opposition, falsified official statistics, and rigged elections. But his death also coincided with the collapse of the global commodities market. Even without plummeting oil prices, Maduro would have struggled to repeat Chávez’s performance. But now, Venezuelans’ discontent has reached new highs and the leaders aren’t powerful enough to appease or silence it. Whether the opposition can continue to gain seats and perhaps even win the presidency is the big question.

Venezuela is one of three major flailing leftist regimes in Latin America. In Brazil, President Dilma Rousseff faces impeachment. Argentina is nearing a historic transition of power from the Peronist Kirchner dynasty to the centrist regime of businessman Mauricio Macri. Although Washington must tread carefully given the strong anti-American sentiments many Latin Americans harbor, the United States should be looking to support these hopeful, if nascent, efforts at reform.

The President As Pangloss

With public approval of his anti-ISIS efforts at 33 percent, President Obama took to the airwaves last night to bolster support for his counterterrorism strategy. Judging by the reaction in the national press, the speech fell flat. We shall see what the polls say, but it seems safe at this point to rule out a dramatic surge in the President’s support as a grateful nation responds to his dramatic appeal. A president once compared to Lincoln as an orator and Eisenhower as a strategist by his adoring supporters no longer seems credible or even interesting on the terror threat that many voters now think is the biggest concern facing the nation.

Most of the public is no longer listening to President Obama on this topic; it is waiting for 2017 and the decisive repudiation of a global strategy that many of the President’s closest advisors and senior aides believe has failed. One thinks of the famous Boston Globe headline about a Jimmy Carter speech, added by a printer as a placeholder that somehow survived to the first morning edition: “More Mush From the Wimp.” Fairly or not, that is what more and more Americans hear when Obama speaks about terror.The political consequences of the perceived failure of Obama’s national security approach are already on display. Secretary Clinton is running against the foreign policy of the man she served for four years. The neo-isolationist wing of the Republican Party has subsided into irrelevance. Donald Trump’s support surges on a wave of voter anger at a government and establishment many believe to be failing the threshold test on national security. President Obama’s legacy begins to look tragic; the primary goal of his presidency was to banish the specter of Andrew Jackson from American politics. Jacksonian foreign policy and Jacksonian populism at home are the forces Obama sees as embodying all that he fears and dislikes in America. Disappointed in Bush, bitter about the Iraq war, shocked by the Great Recession, Jacksonianism was on the retreat in the America of 2008. Obama and liberal Democrats hoped that as the “new FDR” and the “Democratic Reagan,” Obama would give Jacksonian America the coup de grace. The “bitter clingers” would fade away.This clearly won’t be happening anytime soon. Jacksonian America has been energized rather than euthanized by the Obama presidency; in 2016 the Republican Party is looking to ride a Jacksonian wave into the White House, while the Democrats will do their best to deflect that wave by adapting to it. Hillary Clinton is going back to her roots as a “liberal hawk” in the hopes that she can assuage enough Jacksonian concerns about national security to ride out the storm.The President’s defenders at this point are reduced to a single contention: For all its faults and flaws, no better strategy can be designed than the one the President has adopted. This is what you say when there is nothing else to be said. It is the argument of Voltaire’s Doctor Pangloss: No matter how ugly the world may appear, President Obama has adopted the best of all possible strategies and so, given where the world stood in 2009, we now live in the best of all possible worlds. As each new disaster unfolds across the Middle East, the Panglossian chorus repeats the refrain: No better strategy exists; as bad as the consequences of the President’s policies appear to be, no better choices exist. It is one of those little ironies of history that President Obama has now adopted Margaret Thatcher’s response to her critics: There Is No Alternative.Meanwhile, the President resolutely refrains from acknowledging the failures of conception, execution, and explication that have sapped the world’s confidence in his leadership. He does not speak about “lessons learned,” which leads people to believe that he hasn’t learned any. He does not acknowledge the corrosive consequences of unforced Presidential errors that have made the world worse (Libya, for example). He says nothing about the ruin of his strategy to heal the Middle East by building alliances with moderate Islamists. He does not address public concerns that he misjudged Putin’s Russia. He does not attempt to repair the damage that ill-chosen remarks (ISIS as the “junior varsity”) have done to public confidence in his judgment. He speaks about the “evolution” of the terror threat without acknowledging his earlier pronouncements that terror was devolving and becoming less dangerous.The President and his defenders do not seem to understand that the track record of missteps undercuts the Panglossian defense. Does the best of all possible foreign policy strategies by the best of all possible leaders really involve a pointless invasion of Libya that turns the country into a haven for ISIS? Does it really involve hapless “red line” kerfluffles in Syria? Was there really nothing better anyone could have done in Afghanistan? Is the disaster in Syria now really something that no American President could have done anything to prevent or to mitigate? Is the growing chorus of ex-officials from his own staff completely misguided when so many of them point to errors and omissions that have cost the United States dearly on his watch? Is this really the best of all possible foreign policy track records in the best of all possible worlds?The President remains wedded to the idea that he can enhance his prestige by ignoring his failures. And so his speeches fall flat. He lectures the public, still de haut en bas, still condescending to the fears of many Americans, still warning them against indulging their base Jacksonian instincts, still calling them to join him on the higher plane of a more sophisticated understanding of world affairs. At this point, the more the President speaks, the more he feeds the fears of the American people. The contrast between his smug self-assurance and what to so many Americans looks like a massive collapse in both our foreign and our counter-terror policies frightens and angers people and turbocharges Jacksonian reaction.The President doesn’t just need a better strategy for coping with America’s enemies in the Middle East and at home. He needs a better strategy for describing and defending his policies to the American people. When prime time presidential speeches on matters of the highest importance leave no positive imprint on the public mind, it is a sign that the public is tuning a president out and writing him off.

South Africa Heading to Junk Status

Two of the three major agencies lowered their ratings of South Africa’s debt:

Fitch Ratings on Friday cut South Africa’s debt to one notch above “junk” status, an indictment of the government’s persistent fumbling of policies that could help to boost growth and woo foreign investors. […]

Standard & Poor’s Ratings Services, meanwhile, lowered its outlook on South Africa’s debt to negative from stable.“The country faces domestic constraints including an inadequate electricity supply and overall weak business confidence inhibiting substantial private sector investment,” S&P said.Moody’s Investors Service is now alone in rating South Africa’s debt one notch higher than its competitors, at Baa2 on its scale.

At their core, South Africa’s problems have much in common with those of other poorly governed commodity producers around the developing world. When times were good and prices were high for commodities ranging from soybeans to platinum, the developing countries that produced them were flush with cash. Some used the windfall wisely; some used the good times as a reason to postpone painful reforms and to indulge their political leaders’ tastes for populist rhetoric and corrupt practice.

Jihadists Using Refugee Flows?

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.

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.”

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.

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.

Brazil Can’t Afford A/C for Summer 2016 Olympics

Brazil’s economy has fallen into a deepening recession, its president is facing impeachment, and a corruption scandal has forestalled any possibility of reform. So with the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro around the corner, officials are realizing they may have to adjust some of their plans. Bloomberg:

The Brazilian economic crisis has finally hit the 2016 Olympics. Following a new round of cost-cutting by the Rio 2016 organizers, athletes will be asked to pay for the air conditioning in their dorm rooms. Stadium backdrops will be stripped to their bare essentials. Fancy cars and gourmet food for VIPs are out.

“The goal here is to organize games without public funding and to organize games that make sense from an economic point of view,” Rio 2016 spokesman Mario Andrada said in an interview.That economic focus has changed radically in the six years since Rio was awarded the Games – South America’s first. At the time, Brazil’s government pledged $700 million toward any budgetary overrun. Then the economy tanked. Unemployment has soared, and the local currency, the real, has lost one-third of its value against the dollar in the last year.

When Brazil was selected for the 2016 Olympics, its economy was booming and the country appeared on the cusp of becoming a serious world power. The festivities were meant to be Brazil’s coming out party, much as the ostentatious 2008 Beijing Olympics were for China. Unless things change quickly, that doesn’t look like it’s going to happen. In 2008, China showed the world a booming economy, high architecture, and technological sophistication. Brazil, by contrast, might not be able to afford air conditioning for its guests. Then again, maybe Brazilians don’t think A/C is necessary for its version of the Summer Olympics. After all, it’s going to be winter in the Southern Hemisphere then anyway.

A Nobel Laureate’s Sobering Message about Belarus

On Monday, the Nobel Committee will present its prize for literature to Svetlana Alexievich, a writer from Belarus, which is frequently called “Europe’s last dictatorship.” Unlike most authors who have received this prize, Alexievich doesn’t write fiction or poetry. Her books are based on interviews with ordinary people who speak for themselves about the traumas of Belarus’s modern history, including the Chernobyl disaster, the war in Afghanistan, and the experience of being “preserved in a time warp” under the dictatorship of Alexander Lukashenko. These “voices of utopia,” as she calls them, document “Homo Sovieticus,” the mindset of people who live in what she calls a “second-hand time…of the old, old prejudices.”

Alexievich’s central message is that post-communist countries like Belarus—and here she includes Russia and Ukraine as well—will not become free and democratic if the people of these societies cannot free themselves from the destructive Soviet legacy that affects even young people who never lived under communism. It is one thing to remove the external trappings of communism, she has said, “but cutting it from one’s soul is something different.”She is not without hope, since the people whose painful experiences she has recorded in her books show “the strength of the human spirit.” But she also knows that, as long as the collective memory of denunciations, gulags, forced collectivizations, and Orwellian inverted truths is not questioned, discussed, and dealt with, the post-Soviet life will be nothing more than “a mixture of prison and kindergarten.”Lukashenko, who is the archetypal “Soviet man,” makes such a truthful reckoning very difficult. He was elected two decades ago by evoking nostalgia for Soviet times, and he uses state control of all broadcast media and educational institutions in Belarus to promote the Soviet narrative, especially regarding the Great Patriotic War, which is how “the Russian World” refers to World War II.According to historian Timothy Snyder, no country suffered more bloodletting and dislocation in the war than Belarus, “the center of the confrontation between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.” One-fifth of the country’s population of ten million was killed, and another third was deported as forced labor or fled. Yet as Snyder has written, the regime has made this devastating struggle an object of nostalgia, spinning “the straw of wartime suffering…into the gold of political meaning.” It is used not just to exalt the heroism of Soviet soldiers but also to erase from memory the crimes of Stalinism, which were responsible for up to 1.6 million deaths in Belarus during the Great Purges of 1937-41.The Lukashenko regime is unchallenged because repression in Belarus has bred fear and apathy, and as Alexievich has documented, the society remains atomized and deeply scarred. Yet she also believes that “new people are appearing with civic courage.” A potential constituency for change is reflected in polls showing that half the population feels the country is going in the wrong direction and 84 percent want reform; and in civic movements that organize annual remembrance events in Kurapaty, where there is a mass grave of victims of the purges.But the small democratic community in Belarus is relatively isolated from the general public. There is a fragmented political opposition that has a stable electoral base of 25-30 percent, but it is not viewed as a plausible alternative to Lukashenko. It needs to come together, expand its following by reaching out to the general public, and offer a credible vision for the country’s future. Alexievich has also called upon Belarusian intellectuals to speak out and to start a dialogue with young people to help them “begin to master the difficult experience of freedom.”The United States and the European Union can also help by pressing for real political and economic changes in Belarus and by establishing clear benchmarks to measure progress. The current Western policy of “small steps” means that there are not any tough demands or large expectations. This is the result of Lukashenko’s cleverly balancing relations with Russia and Europe and offering to host the ceasefire talks on Ukraine in Minsk. But Belarus’s economic troubles and its own concerns about Putin’s revanchism mean that the West has leverage with Lukashenko that it should use.The Nobel Committee’s recognition of Alexievich is an opportunity to take a fresh look at Belarus. The Belarusian playwright Andrey Kureychyk says that she is “a new national leader” who has “more authority now than any politician.” Alexievich is not a politician, but she has brought honor to her long-suffering country, and the attention her message will now receive could spark an awakening in Belarus that will help it find its place in the modern world.

America’s Energy Future Rosier than Ever

Global supplies of oil and natural gas have spiked in recent years, and the resulting glut is making life very difficult for producers around the world. That’s especially true for the companies plumbing U.S. shale formations, because the relatively high cost of those fracking operations makes the industry particularly vulnerable to the bearish market. But while the short-term outlook for our domestic energy production has darkened somewhat on the basis of falling prices, the longer-term view looks rosier, as our proved reserves—resources deemed to be both technically and commercially viable—of oil and natural gas keep going up, up, up. The EIA reports:

U.S. crude oil and lease condensate proved reserves increased by 9% to 39.9 billion barrels, and natural gas proved reserves increased by 10% to 389 trillion cubic feet in 2014, according to EIA’s U.S. Crude Oil and Natural Gas Proved Reserves report. U.S. crude oil and lease condensate proved reserves reached the highest level since 1972, and natural gas proved reserves surpassed last year’s record level. […]

Texas had the largest increase in proved reserves of crude oil and lease condensate, representing 60% of the nation’s total net increase in 2014. This increase was driven by development of tight oil plays (e.g., Wolfcamp, Bone Spring) in the Permian Basin and the Eagle Ford Shale play. North Dakota had the second-largest increase, 362 million barrels, which came mostly from the Bakken tight oil play in the Williston Basin.

This hydrocarbon bonanza comes to us courtesy of—what else?—shale drilling, and the fracking industry continues to defy analyst expectations in its ability to keep oil and gas production up, despite prices falling to levels many believed would put shale firms out of business. Companies are busy innovating and iterating processes, using the same experimental attitude that unlocked shale in the first place to pump more oil and gas for less time and money. Thanks to those efforts, our proved oil and natural gas reserves are hitting some very high water marks.

No Surrender This Time

The November 13 killing spree in Paris came as no surprise. The Islamic State had threatened France explicitly and repeatedly for more than a year, and French government officials high and low issued warnings as well. Most pointedly, Judge Marc Trevidic, who was in charge of antiterrorist investigations in France for ten years, disclosed in September that IS was planning “something big” against France. He spoke of an “overbid logic” among competing jihadi groups: “Each group is eager to strike further and in a heavier way than other groups. They all want to win the Pulitzer prize of terrorism–that is to say to do something as grand and as lethal as 9/11.” Hence ISIS in Paris on November 13, and al-Qaeda in Bamako on November 20.

If the French were not surprised by the November 13 atrocities, they were nevertheless bewildered. We thought we understood terrorism well, and we thought, especially after the January Charlie Hebdo attack, that we were mobilized and able in our own defense. We had activated a low-key state of emergency, Plan Vigipirate, following the 1995 bombings by Algerian Islamists in Paris, and maintained it constantly ever since. After the Charlie Hebdo attack, Vigipirate was supplemented by another security program, Sentinelle. However, November 13 was different: It was not merely terrorism, but war: not just in the sense that this enemy controls territory in the Middle East and is undertaking a state-building and governing process such as no previous terrorist enemy has ever done; but also in the sense that it trains military style units to operate among us, using complex and sophisticate plans, and ultimately to secure enclaves or bridgeheads on our soil.Nonetheless, people here wonder why, if French officials knew so much and talked so much about the threat, they failed to neutralize it? And even deeper questions are still in the process of being formed and answered.First, as has been widely remarked, to some extent the failure to prevent the attack came down to the failure of the state to keep up with the threat level. Governments usually move much slower than non-state actors on the prowl. So the combination of the outflow of the Syrian civil war, the power vacuum in Libya, and the increasing pace of French engagement against terrorism (in Mali and in the Levant most prominently) combined to overwhelm the budgets of the security services. All true, but the problem goes beyond that.The French people are slowly coming to appreciate that the state lacks the tools required for war, on either the domestic or the foreign front. The deficit starts with numbers. According to Vincent Desportes, a former Army general who now teaches at Sciences Po in Paris and author of La Dernière Bataille de la France (France’s Last Battle), the French security apparatus has been overstretched since before the Syrian civil war. Operational strength fell by 25 percent under the conservative Administration of Nicolas Sarkozy (2007–12), and by another 25 percent under the first three-and-a-half years of the socialist Hollande Administration. These cuts together have shrunk the force from 200,000 combat-able personnel to just a bit more than 100,000 in a delayed French version of a “peace dividend”—but it has been a reduction in truth propelled more by recent anxieties about a growing national debt, a consequence of the very difficult math involved in reconciling a still-generous welfare state with a stultified economy.On the other hand, France is still eager to be seen as a global military power, so much so that about a third of its remaining combat force—30,000 men and women—are dispatched to permanent or semi-permanent missions abroad, from the Sahel countries to the Middle East to Afghanistan. To have nearly a third of the country’s active-duty military forces overseas in the absence of a major war is unprecedented, and it is both expensive and dangerous.Beyond the armed forces proper, the French rely on the Gendarmerie, a semi-militarized police corps originally in charge of the rural areas but now active in urban areas as well, and the regular police, each over 100,000 strong in terms of operational personnel. The operational defense and security apparatus as a whole can thus be estimated to be about 300,000 or so, which is barely enough, by any standard, for a population of 67 million (overseas territories included) in a state of multilateral war.Security personnel, including army personnel, involved in the post-Charlie Hebdo Operation Sentinelle, the protection of places deemed “sensible” (sensitive, i.e. more likely to be attacked), have consistently complained of being overworked. What about the much broader assignments they now face now under a heightened state of emergency? True, the Hollande Administration decided in the wake of November 13 to reverse the previous trends and expand the security forces: some 8,000 troops are to be recruited to start with. Another project is the formation of a voluntary reserve force, already dubbed the National Guard. Yet such things cannot be implemented overnight. New organizations must be adjusted to the larger defense and security structure, and of course all new personnel must be trained and equipped.A second major difficulty arises from the ethnic and religious diversity of contemporary France, the discussion of which has taken on a different, and more frank, tone since November 13. Whereas the November 13 terrorists in Paris were apparently Muslim French or Belgian citizens of North African descent, their victims were overwhelmingly ethnic French. Some media attempted to conceal these facts, if only by highlighting the presence at Bataclan and other places of some people of North African or African descent. However, such intimations melted away before the fairer faces of the majority of victims and missing persons, seen across the web and on social networks. The unsettling sense that the terrorist attacks contained an element of minority-versus-majority genocidal intent has become very widespread, not so surprising really in what is, despite centuries of attempted transcendence, a country with a bloodline-based nationalism.Also dawning is the uneasy realization that a war on terror might escalate into a kind of civil war between the ethnic French and the French Muslims, even if the security forces are thoroughly integrated and in fact list a high proportion members of the ethnic and religious minorities, including observant Muslims. Again, the numbers seem to matter.Due to a combination of immigration and natural increase, the French Muslim community grew from about 5 percent of the total population of 60 million in 1997 to 9 percent of 67 million in 2014. Where in 1997 there were 3 million French Muslims there are now 6.5 million. Moreover, some places—big cities as well are rural areas—now have Muslim majorities. And in younger cohorts, thanks to greater fertility or the inflow of immigrants, the proportion of Muslims is much higher than the national average: Fully a fifth of French citizens or residents under age 24 are Muslims.Once one sees these demographic, geographical, and generational factors together, the likely consequences of an internecine conflict become clear. For instance, in the département (county) of Seine Saint-Denis in the northern suburbs of Paris—of which Saint-Denis is the administrative center—around 30 percent of the population and about 50 percent of the youth are Muslim. Since war, including civil war, is fought by young persons (usually young men) in their late teens and early twenties, the Muslim/non-Muslim ratio there would not be 1 to 9, as the overall demographic data would suggest, but closer to 1 to 1.Which raises a further question: How central is radical Islam to the lives of French Muslims, and, by implication, how “French” do they feel ? According to a comprehensive investigation published just one year ago by Fondapol (the French Foundation for Political Innovation), a political science think tank, French Muslims split into three group: “observants”, believers, and “French citizens of Muslim origin.” The first group, which enforces strict religious practice among its members and is largely influenced by Wahhabism and other fundamentalist movements (more often than not, its mosques are funded by Saudi Arabia or Qatar), grew from 36 percent in 2001 to 42 percent in 2014. It is much more likely than the two other groups to entertain negative views of non-Muslims. The second group, whose members advocate a measure of compromise between traditional Islam and the French way of life, and entertains slightly less negative views against non-Muslims, fell from 42 percent in 2001 to 34 percent in 2014. The third group, whose members clearly identify with French culture, human rights, and French democratic patriotism, and which tends to be more positive toward non-Muslims, including Jews, fell from 25 percent in 2007 to 21 percent in 2014. All in all, religious assertiveness is clearly growing among French Muslims and, in a political age, is bound to be politicized before long and at least to some extent.These trends are leading to the increasing de facto segregation of Muslims from non-Muslims, a condition that Muslim communities increasingly seem to choose. It is now frequently the case that neighborhoods with Muslim majorities are “no-go zones” where the even the police fear to tread. Christine Angot, a liberal-minded best-selling writer, participated this past summer in a television program at the working-class neighborhood in Chateauroux in central France, where she was brought up. She realized that the place had become such a Muslim “no-go zone.” She described her experience in Le Monde on October 1:

When we arrived—all of us, the TV crew complete with their cameras and sound booms, and the writer who grew up there—we had to account for ourselves, to show our identity cards, to prove who we were, to state exactly where I had lived. . . . And then, the director’s first name—David, his full name being David Teboul—supplied material for unsavory jokes. . . . Some of the locals tried to intimidate us, saying that television was a cartel of the Jews. . . . All this was uttered in a very menacing tone. . . . We shot a few scenes under a running fire of jibes and jeering, and as we left we were told to pay our compliments to the Talmud. . . . I swear we felt most uncomfortable.

The talk of a civil war may be somewhat paranoid, but the prediction that internal support for terrorism will grow has already been borne out by events. Most observant and traditional Muslims are peaceful citizens, and understand well that Islam benefits from French-style democracy. They perceive a vested interest in keeping it functioning, but some still cannot help but entertain sympathies for radical groups outside of France. According to an ICM Research poll released in 2014, 19 percent of French Muslims expressed “positive” or “very positive” views of the Islamic State. Among those under the age of 24, the figure was 27 percent. Evidently, this is the milieu that provides volunteers for ISIS training camps in Syria and Iraq.

Some experts think that the Islamic State’s ultimate goal in the current terror attacks actually is to arouse more suspicion and hostility among ethnic French about French Muslims, and as a consequence create a more polarized atmosphere that will drive more French Muslims to identify with ISIS—thus making the prospect of a ghastly civil war more likely. The jihadi calculation, according to this thesis, is that France will not risk such an outcome and will instead surrender, by withdrawing its forces from Africa and the Middle East.It could be, but France’s resilience may be stronger than its enemies think. The French are learning anew the importance of national sovereignty, identity, defense, and solidarity, and even the value of their Christian heritage as well. This may translate into a political upheaval: the rise of either the classic Right or the National Front, or of a new brand of liberal or leftwing patriotism. Either way, the upheaval could translate into a simultaneous cultural revolution that could include the abandonment of multiculturalism, the return of Christian pride (Catholic churches are now packed on Sundays), and the rehabilitation of family values. The very notion of surrender or appeasement of militant Islam is becoming so repugnant that the French are increasingly willing to bear very high costs to avoid it.In recent years Jews have been a main target of jihadi violence in France, from the Jewish school massacre in Toulouse in 2012 to the HyperCasher massacre in 2015. It goes on: Four days after the November 13 attacks, a Jewish teacher was stabbed in Marseilles by three men wearing pro-ISIS t-shirts. While the government and the political class constantly expressed their concern, and the police have provided large-scale protection to synagogues and other Jewish public places under the Vigipirate and Sentinelle programs,, many Jews wondered whether parts of the public are not in fact indifferent, ready to wave away Muslim anti-Semitism and terrorism, even in France, as an outcome of an alleged Israeli unwillingness to come to terms with the Palestinians.The new patriotic mood that has been emerging since November 13 seems to have muted this “argument.” Since everybody feels threatened now and everybody demands protection, there is much greater understanding and sympathy for the special case of the Jews. Israel is no longer described in the media as a country engaged in a colonial war of sorts against the Palestinians, but rather as a victim, along with France, of jihadi terrorism—and even sometimes as a positive example of successful antiterrorist mobilization.For all that, the long-term consequences may not be positive for Jews, and French-Jewish emigration, either to Israel or North America, will likely not subside. One reason is that greater ethnic and religious polarization means less toleration of all third parties. Jews are seen as enemies, just as Christians are so seen, by radical Muslims—and the fact that Jews and Muslims have a lot in common religiously is irrelevant. Jules Renard, an early 20th-century writer, noted how difficult it was to teach cats to chase mice but leave canaries alone: “A subtle point, and even the smartest cats do not quite get it.” Alas, radical Muslims are rarely well educated in their own traditions; they are far from being the smartest cats. The geopolitical consequences of November 13 might be problematic as well. There is a near-consensus in France that ISIS must be punished and destroyed. There is also a temptation, due to the present eclipse of American power and influence in the Middle East, to enter into a broad anti-ISIS coalition with Russia, Iran, the Assad regime in Syria, and Hizballah in Lebanon. This would be disastrous. Russia is everything but a reliable geopolitical partner for Western countries, and seems to be more interested in asserting itself or strengthening its vassals than in fighting the Islamic State. As for Iran, the Assad regime, and Hizballah, they have been heavily involved for decades in religious and political radicalism and terrorism, not just in the Middle East, but in Western countries as well, from France to Argentina.As for Israel and Judaism, Russia’s present stand is outwardly not negative, but the three other partners in the Russian-led coalition are rabid enemies of the Jewish State and among the contemporary world’s main purveyors of anti-Semitism. To throw France’s lot in with such allies may be no improvement on surrendering to the jihadists.France’s ideal allies in the fight against the Islamic State are the United States, because it is powerful and tends to see the problem in more or less the same way, and Turkey, because it is close by, locally potent, and has recently been savaged by ISIS attacks itself. Alas, both the present American Administration and the present Turkish government have been wavering in their strategic priorities and neglecting their obvious national interests. Moreover, the Russian-Iranian-Alawi axis complicates and deters the formation of an effective coalition more than it helps it. The complications could be overcome were strong U.S. leadership brought to bear, but that leadership apparently will not be forthcoming until at least January 2017. The time between now and then will be difficult. France must therefore be patient as well as resolved.

“Yes Means Yes” Continues to Gain Ground

The “Yes Means Yes” sexual consent standard, which requires that a person receive ongoing, affirmative consent throughout every phase of every sexual encounter, is gaining momentum. Both the California and New York state legislatures have required that all colleges in their jurisdiction use this standard when adjudicating sexual assault (meaning, technically, that a woman who reaches out to hold her boyfriend’s hand on the quad, without asking permission, is guilty of misconduct, even if the standard would not be applied in that case). Now it looks like one of the most well-respected legal organizations in the country may endorse “Yes Means Yes.” The Chronicle of Higher Education reports:

The American Law Institute, a scholarly group influential in legal circles, is beginning to craft guidelines on campus sexual assault that will seek to outline best practices and bring some clarity to the tangles of compliance with federal law. […]

[Stephen Schulhofer, a law professor at NYU and leading member of the committee] wasn’t intending to recommend an affirmative-consent benchmark for criminal law. But he said it was worth considering something close to it for a college setting. “I think it’s better to have both parties understand that you don’t take the next step unless you’re sure that it’s welcome,” he said.

The ALI doesn’t have the authority to compel campuses to adopt this standard. But if it endorses “Yes Means Yes,” we can likely expect even more universities and state legislatures to follow its lead and enact similar policies. This would be a disaster for campus civil liberties, hugely expanding the authority of administrators to punish students they don’t like (since virtually everyone who has had a romantic encounter has technically run afoul of the standard).

Supporters of affirmative consent clearly have good intentions—in particular, to level a sexual playing field that all-too-often seems to be tilted in favor of exploitative frat boys—but “Yes Means Yes” is simply unworkable, and incompatible with due process of law. At least one wise judge has issued a ruling to this effect. Let’s hope that the academics at ALI pay attention to her reasoning, rather than caving to political pressure from campus activists.