Unschooled Socialists Erronerously Cite Capitalist Countries As Success Stories. Once Again They Are Wrong

Why Democratic Socialists Can’t Legitimately Claim Sweden, Denmark as Success Stories

Julia Howe / Anthony B. Kim / @AKFREEDOM / August 10, 2018 / 162 Comments

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., asks a witness a question during a Senate hearing on presidential war powers on June 6. (Photo: Alex Edelman/picture alliance / Consolidated/Newscom)

COMMENTARY BY

Julia Howe

Julia Howe is a member of the Young Leaders Program at The Heritage Foundation.

Anthony B. Kim@AKFREEDOM

Anthony B. Kim researches international economic issues at The Heritage Foundation, with a strong focus on economic freedom. Kim is the research manager of the Index of Economic Freedom, the flagship product of the Heritage Foundation in partnership with The Wall Street Journal. Read his research.

Sen. Bernie Sanders and congressional candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are popularizing the philosophy of democratic socialism, especially among younger age groups.

Meanwhile, the Young Democratic Socialists of America (YDSA) are gaining influence on college and high school campuses, claiming to have organizing activities planned at more than 250 campuses across the nation.

The YDSA website describes the group’s vision as “a humane social order based on popular control of resources and production, economic planning, equitable distribution, feminism, racial equality and non-oppressive relationships.”

Many on the right question this vision, pointing to countries such as Venezuela and Cuba as examples of socialist disasters. Democratic socialists claim those countries implemented socialism “incorrectly” or that other factors are to blame.

They prefer to cite Norway, Sweden, and Denmark as examples of socialist success. There are, however, several key problems with that.

First, these countries are not technically socialist. By the YDSA’s definition, socialism entails a centrally planned economy with nationalized means of production. Although these countries have high income taxes and provide generous social programs, they remain prosperous because of their free-market economies.

Denmark ranks as the 10th most economically free country in The Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom, which cites free-market policies and regulatory efficiency as reasons for the high standard of living. Sweden is ranked 15th and Norway 23rd, both with similar descriptions of thriving private sectors and open markets.

These three countries are clearly not operating under centrally planned economies, or their economic freedom scores would be significantly lower.

Second, the success of these countries is clearly based on a capitalist foundation, and it predates the expansion of social programs. Sweden, for example, became a wealthy country in the mid-20th century under a capitalist system with low tax rates.

Social programs and high tax rates were not implemented until the 1970s, which caused the economy to significantly underperform and unemployment to rise.

In recent years, Sweden has been privatizing socialized sectors, such as education and health care, cutting tax rates, and making welfare less generous. Even though tax rates and government spending remains comparatively high, open-market policies generate the revenue to support the spending.

Finally, these countries are largely homogeneous and have a culture that is conducive to a large welfare state. Scandinavians are described as hardworking citizens with extremely high levels of social trust and cohesion.

By contrast, America is a much larger country with lower levels of social trust, and therefore, a comparison is difficult to assess. Norway, Denmark, and Sweden are not democratic socialist countries that the U.S. can be accurately compared with, and could be better described as “compassionate capitalists.”

As such, the “democratic socialists”—as they define socialism—are left with no successful examples of their vision, only disastrous ones.

"Socialistic" Author Gets Her Clock Cleaned

WaPo Columnist Who Advocated Socialism: No, I Really Just Meant Norway. Okay, Here Are Some Facts About Norway.

Photo by Clive Mason/Getty Images

ByBEN SHAPIRO

@benshapiro

March 11, 2018

Elizabeth Bruenig is back.

The Washington Post columnist memorably wrote last week that she wished for an upsurge in support for socialism. I critiqued that column. Now she’s written a response to that critique, claiming that I (among others) interpreted her in bad faith for mentioning several countries that have tried socialism and failed, from Venezuela to the Soviet Union, and for pointing out that many of the supposedly socialist countries that socialists so often proclaim as their examples aren’t actually socialist (see, for example, Denmark and Sweden).

First off, it’s worth noting that Bruenig mentioned no country in her original article. She talked about the concept of socialism in rather classical Marxist terms — terms which better describe Cuba and Venezuela than mixed economies like Denmark and Sweden, as I pointed out.

Nonetheless, Bruenig thinks I somehow misinterpreted her purposefully.

So, let’s consider her latest argument.

She writes:

Last week, I wrote a column arguing that liberals concerned about ongoing failures in the American experiment should consider socialist remedies. I knew there would be quite a bit of disagreement. And I knew that most — though, crucially, not all — of it would unfold in bad faith…In the case of my column, this meant many interlocutors taking socialism to mean something along the lines of Soviet communism or the Venezuelan system, genocides, calamities, disasters and all. I don’t think anybody actually believes I’m rooting for totalitarian forms of socialism, nor for its most devastatingly ill-managed variants: I said I wasn’t, after all. If one genuinely thought a person was campaigning for genocide, one surely wouldn’t engage with someone so unreasonable.

Now this is a strawman. Nobody claimed that Bruenig wants the outcomes we’ve seen in Venezuela or under the Soviets. But it would be ridiculous to ignore the results of those socialist experiments in responding to an argument calling for the advent of socialism. I seriously doubt whether the original instigators of socialism in Venezuela wanted people eating dogs in the streets. But that’s not stopping the starving citizens of Venezuela from eating dogs in the streets as a result of that socialist philosophy in action.

According to Bruenig, I wronged her by mentioning those countries — but then I also wronged her by mentioning Nordic states socialists frequently claim as their own.

I also suspect my critics knew I wasn’t recommending the United States go Khmer Rouge based on a particular theme they kept returning to: Scandinavia. I hadn’t named the Nordic countries in my piece, but my opponents were quick to discard them from the conversation. After all, they’re inconvenient when arguing that socialism necessarily means mass murder and famine. “No, Sweden and Denmark aren’t socialist countries,” the Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro noted, apropos of nothing, in his piece on my alleged Stalinism, “. . . they’re capitalist countries with redistributionist tendencies.” It’s the kind of preemptive rebuttal one supplies when one knows what their opponent means but would rather spend time attacking something else.

Now you would expect Bruenig to rebut the presumption that Sweden and Denmark are capitalist countries with redistributionist tendencies, and claim that they are actually socialist. But she doesn’t bother. Instead, she sets up a new metric: she doesn’t want full-scale socialism, she just wants some redistributionism here or there:

I think it makes sense to think of socialism on a spectrum, with countries and policies being more or less socialist, rather than either/or. It’s fair to say, for example, that single-payer health care is a more socialist policy than private, market-based health care. But that doesn’t mean that single-payer is the most socialist health-care policy one could dream up, nor that any country that uses such a system is de facto socialist. Certain policies will lean more in the direction of decommodification and social or cooperative ownership of certain goods, and others will incline toward commodifying certain goods and relying on market devices to decide their distribution. Along these axes, we can determine whether policies are more or less socialist.

This is, of course, a fair argument. At least, it’s a much better argument. It’s also not the argument she made in her original column. Her original column suggested that capitalism itself was soul-sucking, and she stated clearly, “capitalism seems to be at odds with the harmonious, peaceful, stable liberalism of midcentury dreams.” Not “certain capitalist institutions.” Not “the privatized health care system.” Capitalism itself.

So this is a rather major concession on her part, which she pretends never happened, of course.

Finally, she decides on her favorite new socialist paradise: Norway.

Now, this is useful. We can argue over whether the United States ought to embrace policies more like those of Norway. Again, that wasn’t her original argument. But let’s talk about her case for Norway:

As of 2015, Norway owned roughly 59 percent of the country’s wealth; by contrast, China, which is still considered at least a quasi-communist state by many, owned only 32 percent of its national wealth. In Norway, government also owns about a third of the country’s stock market, along with some 70 businesses valued at almost 90 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product……Taken together, this means that the people of the Nordic states have come a long way toward democratizing ownership, dispersing wealth, lowering inequality and placing workers’ lives under their own control — in other words, the socialism of the Nordic states seems pretty close to the kind of socialism that I wrote would satisfy me.

First off, a huge portion of Norway’s wealth ownership is thanks to their nationalization of their oil industry; like the United Arab Emirates or Venezuela, this gives them an enormous amount of cash to play with (their social wealth fund, worth $1 trillion, was seeded with oil money). The oil industry represents approximately 22% of Norway’s GDP two-thirds of their exports. (It also pays for 36% of the national government’s revenue.) That’s not the extent of their government holdings — Norway also nationalized all German-owned stocks after World War II, which partially explains the state’s high level of ownership of the stock market. Stockholding in companies does not mean the state runs the companies — in fact, the board runs the companies separately, not for the benefit of the state specifically or for the benefit of the workers, as Marx would prefer; Norwegian law requires that all shareholders be treated equally, with no preference for state shareholders. In fact, companies in which the state owns majority stock have even gone into bankruptcy before. The state essentially operates along the lines of so-called “state capitalism.”

Furthermore, Norway is a relatively friendly business climate; Heritage Foundation ranks it 23rd in the world, with the United States ranking 18th.

More than that, it’s important to recognize that the total population of Norway is 5.6 million; the total population of the United States is 323 million. It’s also rather important to recognize the cultural homogeneity of Norway: just 15.6% of the population are immigrants or children of immigrants, and 32% of the population has a higher education degree. Why does that matter? Because if we’re to compare Norway and the United States, we should probably compare Norwegian Americans with Norwegians in Norway. Here’s National Review’s Nima Sanandaji:

It was mainly the impoverished people in the Nordic countries who sailed across the Atlantic to found new lives. And yet, as I write in my book, Danish Americans today have fully 55 percent higher living standard than Danes. Similarly, Swedish Americans have a 53 percent higher living standard than Swedes. The gap is even greater, 59 percent, between Finnish Americans and Finns. Even though Norwegian Americans lack the oil wealth of Norway, they have a 3 percent higher living standard than their cousins overseas.

So, how’s state capitalism working out? Norway has a significantly higher per capita GDP than that of the United States — about $70,600 per year, as opposed to $59,500 in the United States. But a large portion of that per capita GDP is due to oil wealth. And the top personal income tax rate is 47.8%, and the corporate tax rate is 25%; overall, the tax burden represents 38.1% of total domestic income (compared to 26.4% in the United States). Government spending amounts to 48.6% of GDP (compared to 38.1% in the United States). Norway is an incredibly expensive country to live: it’s the second-most expensive country to buy food in Europe, and the most expensive to buy alcohol and tobacco. A haircut can cost $50. Vehicles can cost nearly twice as much as in the United States, and food costs vastly more than in the United States. There’s a reason that in 2013, Norway elected a far more conservative government — and they re-elected that government in 2017.

So, is Norway actually a socialist country? Not quite. It’s far more socialistic than the United States — but that’s not really a good thing, which is why immigration to Norway has been historically low, while immigration to the United States has remained remarkably high. And making apples to orange comparisons between Norway and the U.S. isn’t statistically or intellectually honest.

READ MORE: NORWAY

Islam Has NOT Changed in 1400 Years And Neither Has The Ignorance For What It Stands

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Jihad in Denmark by Judith Bergman May 15, 2017 at 5:00 am https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/10363/jihad-in-denmark Share206   Comment Danish Minister of Justice Søren Pape hopes to solve the issue by prosecuting the imam. However, Danish politicians appear to miss the critical fact that there is clearly a thirsty audience for sermons like this. This sermon is a call to violence against Jews. As the Quran cannot be changed, it is crucial to make more broadly known what is in it, so at least people can see the facts confronting them, to help them determine what choices they might care to make for their own future and that of their children. In 2015, Omar El-Hussein listened to the imam Hajj Saeed, at the Hizb-ut-Tahrir- linked Al-Faruq-mosque in Copenhagen, decry interfaith dialogue as a "malignant" idea and explain that the right way, according to Mohammed, is to wage war on the Jews. The next day, El-Hussein went out and murdered Dan Uzan, the volunteer Jewish guard of the Jewish community, as he was standing in front of the Copenhagen synagogue. El-Hussein had also just murdered Finn Nørgaard, a film director, outside a meeting about freedom of speech. Two years later, nothing has changed. A visiting imam from Lebanon at the Al-Faruq mosque, Mundhir Abdallah, is preaching to murder Jews: "[Soon there will be] a Caliphate, which will instate the shari'a of Allah and revive the Sunna of His Prophet, which will wage Jihad for the sake of Allah, which will unite the Islamic nation after it disintegrated, and which will liberate the Al-Aqsa Mosque from the filth of the Zionists, so that the words of the Prophet Muhammad will be fulfilled: 'Judgement Day will not come until the Muslims fight the Jews and kill them. The Jews will hide behind the rocks and the trees, but the rocks and the trees will say: 'Oh Muslim, oh servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.' ..." The "words of the Prophet" are from a well-known hadith, number 6985. Far from hiding this incitement, the mosque posted the sermon, delivered on March 31, on the YouTube page of Al-Faruq Mosque on May 7. The invaluable research organization, MEMRI, translated it. A reporter from Danish TV channel TV2 news, who recently spent two hours around the Al-Faruq mosque, could not find a single Muslim willing to condemn the imam. "I don't think he meant anything bad by it," said Bayan Hasan, a female student. Another Danish Muslim, Mohammed Hussein, incorrectly replied, "According to Islam, Muslims are not allowed to kill". The Quran verse 8:12, to mention one of many examples, says otherwise: "...I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieved, so strike [them] upon the necks and strike from them every fingertip." Denmark's Minister of Integration, Inger Støjberg, called on the mosque and all Muslims in Denmark to condemn the sermon. "If this had happened in a Danish church, it would not have been necessary to ask people to condemn it. It would have been automatic", she said. Muslim organizations and imams have, in fact, been completely quiet on the matter. One leading imam, Naveed Baig, from the Danish Islamic Center, simply dismissed the sermon: "Islam as a religion cannot be anti-Semitic, as Islam itself is a Semitic religion", he said. The Quran and the hadiths are in fact brimming with anti-Semitism, not to mention exhortations to kill Jews and other "infidels", and calls for jihad (war in the cause of Islam) -- a fact of which Naveed Baig is doubtless well aware. According to the Quran, people who refuse to acknowledge Allah as the one true god are unbelievers destined for hell: "Verily Allah has cursed the unbelievers and prepared for them a blazing fire" (Quran 33:64). Muslims therefore are superior to all others: "Ye are the best of peoples, evolved for mankind... believing in Allah... If only the People of the Book had faith, it were best for them: among them are some who have faith, but most of them are perverted transgressors." (Quran 3:110). "Soon shall we cast terror into the hearts of the unbelievers... their abode will be the fire: And evil is the home of the wrong-doers." (Quran 3:151). As for specific passages about the Jews, the Quranic passages 5:60 and 7:166 talk of the Jews being cursed and transformed by Allah into apes and pigs: "...those who incurred the curse of Allah and his wrath, those of whom some he transformed into apes and swine, those who worshipped evil..." This is the reason Jews today in large parts of the Muslim world are commonly called apes and pigs. Furthermore, "Jews and pagans [are] among the worst of the enemies of the believers". (Quran 5:82). The Jews are described as hypocrites (Quran 2:14), and "slayers of His [Allah's] messengers" (Quran 2:61), who are "cunning" and "hate to see your success and rejoice if any misfortune befalls you" (Quran 3:120). These examples constitute only a part of the innumerable examples in the Quran and the hadiths, not to mention the writings of Islamic scholars. Therefore, there is nothing unusual about imams calling for the murder of Jews in certain mosques, even in the West. In Canada, for example, in 2016, at Montreal's Dar Al-Arqam Mosque, an imam recited the same hadith about stones and trees asking Muslims to come and kill Jews hiding behind them. In Denmark, however, among politicians, news of the sermon generated the usual "shock". Minister of Justice Søren Pape said it is "insane" that people such as the imam "exist in Denmark": "It is deeply unsympathetic," he said. "These are medieval thoughts and it makes me very sad that in Denmark in 2017 there are still people who really have not evolved further." Other Danish politicians reacted with similar degrees of "shock" -- appearing utterly surprised by basic tenets of Islam, which have only been public for 1400 years. Søren Pape hopes to solve the issue by prosecuting the imam. In December 2016, Denmark introduced a new provision in the penal code aimed at religious preachers. It is known in Denmark as the "imam provision," as it is, in practice, mainly aimed at imams. According to the provision, speaking approvingly of terror, murder, rape, violence, incest, pedophilia, coercion and polygamy, whether at private or public events, is prohibited and punishable by fine or prison of up to three years. The "imam provision" exists in addition to the general provision in the penal code, according to which it is prohibited and punishable by fine or prison publicly to threaten, insult or demean a group of persons because of their race, skin color, national or ethnic origin, faith or sexual orientation. However, even if a Danish court should succeed in convicting the imam, Danish politicians appear to miss the critical fact that there is clearly a thirsty audience for sermons like this. The Danish Jewish Community reported the imam to the police. Jewish community leader Dan Rosenberg told the newspaper Politiken: "We are concerned that weak and impressionable people may perceive this kind of preaching as a clear call to violence and terror against Jews." This sermon, however, is not a question of "perception": This sermon is a call to violence against Jews. Danish Jews also have more reasons to feel threatened. In October 2015, a Danish girl, then 15, converted to Islam and immediately planned to bomb the Jewish school in Denmark (in addition to a plan to bomb her own school). Her mother, who was concerned about the girl's new behavior, desperately sought to alert the Danish authorities. The Danish police intelligence service (PET), told the mother not to worry, and assured her that her daughter would not "do anything", despite being told that her daughter was "desperate" to wage jihad. According to the mother: "The only advice I got was to do with the food. They thought that if [my daughter] refused to eat pork and I insisted on making it for dinner, then I would have to make two separate dinners." A few months after her daughter's conversion, in January 2016, the mother found a stash of chemicals in her basement and a note where her daughter had written the name of the Jewish school and its opening hours, and the words "jihad" and "Allah is great". The girl also apparently looked up to Omar El-Hussein, the terrorist who killed Dan Uzan and Finn Nørgaard, and even took his name as her own. After finding the chemicals, the mother reported the girl to the police. The girl is considered so dangerous that she spent part of her detainment in solitary confinement. Her trial recently ended; sentencing is expected mid-May. As the Quran cannot be changed, it is crucial to make more broadly known what is in it, so at least people can see the facts confronting them, to help them determine what choices they might care to make for their own future and that of their children. Copenhagen, Denmark. (Image source: Romina Amato/Red Bull via Getty Images) Judith Bergman is a writer, columnist, lawyer and political analyst. © 2017 Gatestone Institute. All rights reserved. The articles printed here do not necessarily reflect the views of the Editors or of Gatestone Institute. No part of the Gatestone website or any of its contents may be reproduced, copied or modified, without the prior written consent of Gatestone Institute.

The West Gives Up Before There Is A Fight. Islamist Violence Is The Norm Now And No One Fights It!

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When "Peace" Means Capitulation to Islam by Giulio Meotti January 8, 2017 at 5:45 am https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/9726/peace-capitulation-islam Share546   Comment "We will win because Americans don't realize... we do not need to defeat you militarily; we only need to fight long enough for you to defeat yourself by quitting." — Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, one of the al-Qaeda planners of the 9/11 attacks. "This Spanish retreat [in 2004] will be perceived as a huge political triumph for Al Qaeda and like-minded Islamic radicals -- probably their most important achievement since September 11, 2001." — James Phillips, Heritage Foundation. ISIS's henchmen butchered 90 people at the Bataclan Theater. What did the French government do to avenge them and to destroy the Islamists responsible? Absolutely nothing. The day after an Islamist killed Westerners at a Christmas market in Berlin, no German military flight took off to bomb ISIS. The next "peace conference" in Paris, on January 15, is where 70 nations will probably agree to another UN Security Council vote, to establish a Palestinian State, presumably with the Old City of Jerusalem, the heart of the Jewish people and sacred to the Christian people, as its capital. It is another terrible sign of the West's soft capitulation to terror. Like Israel today, the Czechs in the 1930s were accused of being "disturbers of the peace". "Peace," as in the inversions of George Orwell -- sometimes means capitulation to Islam. What inspired al-Qaeda to attack the United States, according to one of the terrorists, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), who helped plan 9/11? The American psychologist, James E. Mitchell, who crafted the interrogation program that helped stop terrorist attacks and saved countless lives after 9/11, just published a book, Enhanced Interrogation. In it, KSM is quoted as saying that al-Qaeda expected the United States to respond to 9/11 as it had to the 1983 bombing of the US Marine barracks in Beirut -- the United States "turned tail and ran." In the end, KSM told Mitchell: "We will win because Americans don't realize... we do not need to defeat you militarily; we only need to fight long enough for you to defeat yourself by quitting. ... Eventually, America will expose her neck for us to slaughter." That is exactly why Islamists are trying to hit the West's soft underbelly: the office of the magazine, Charlie Hebdo, restaurants and theaters in Paris, a café in Copenhagen, a promenade in Nice, a church in Normandy and a Christmas market in Berlin. Islamists perfectly understand that the West's most exposed flank is its home front. The same lifestyle that we defend by words is the main obstacle to the initiative of the defense against Islamists. Islamists have told us in every way, "we love death more than life", while we in the West love the expectation of life more than life itself. Anyone who has listened to statements of Osama bin Laden and ISIS's Abu Bakr al Baghdadi knows that they showed a deep understanding of Europe's situation by offering "a truce" to any country that would distance itself from the war on terror -- or in other words, surrender. Through terror attacks, many jihadists are already proving able to decide the fate of many governments. Compare what happened in two different countries after the 9/11 attacks. November 2001: Within two months after the terror attacks in New York, Pennsylvania and Washington, the U.S. overthrew the Taliban in Afghanistan. March 2004: Within a month after the terror attacks in Madrid, the Spanish public toppled its conservative government, elected a Socialist one and abandoned the Western military coalition in Iraq. A few days after taking office, Zapatero's Socialist government withdrew the 1,300 Spanish troops that were deployed to Iraq by the previous conservative government of José Maria Aznar. As James Phillips at the Heritage Foundation explained: "This Spanish retreat will be perceived as a huge political triumph for Al Qaeda and like-minded Islamic radicals -- probably their most important achievement since September 11, 2001." In an interview with Time magazine a few months after Iraq's withdrawal, Zapatero declared that "sexual equality is a lot more effective against terrorism than military strength." He then promoted the "Alliance of Civilizations," an initiative calling on the West to negotiate a truce with Islamic terrorists. The Spanish result was understood in al-Qaeda circles as a monumental victory, and prompted the Islamists' networks to invest in seeking to influence the outcome of elections elsewhere in the West. The public relations department of al-Qaeda and ISIS have learned how to talk in a language the soft West can understand. After Spain, jihadists have been able to determine the fate of another election, in France: President François Hollande, in fact, just announced that he will not stand for re-election in 2017. His presidency was mortally defeated by a campaign of multiple terror attacks that demoralized Hollande's government and destroyed his political credibility. ISIS's henchmen butchered 90 people at the Bataclan Theater in Paris. What did the French government do to avenge them and to destroy the Islamists responsible for that carnage? Absolutely nothing -- or Raqqa would have been dust. In December 2016, a new Islamist terror attack may have ordained the future of another European political leader: Angela Merkel. But beyond Merkel's electoral chances, jihad had already destined the course of Europe's most important nation when its Chancellor, after 12 people were murdered at a Christmas market in Berlin, said that Germany "is stronger than terrorism." Merkel refused, however, to show how Germans are stronger than Islamists, such as through changing their policy on migration and multiculturalism. The day after an Islamist killed Westerners at a Christmas market in Berlin, no German military flight took off to bomb ISIS. ISIS's henchmen butchered 90 people at the Bataclan Theater. What did the French government do to avenge them and to destroy the Islamists responsible? Absolutely nothing. The day after an Islamist killed Westerners at a Christmas market in Berlin, no German military flight took off to bomb ISIS. Pictured above: French President François Hollande and German Chancellor Angela Merkel chat during a "unity march" of world leaders held in Paris on January 11, 2015, days after Islamist terrorists murdered 17 people in the Paris area. (Image source: AFP video screenshot) "Many Westerners have accepted the normality of the most sordid attacks," said the Canadian philosopher, Mathieu Bock-Côté. "We have internalized the presence in our lives of the Islamist violence. We do not know what this war against radical Islam would mean." The fate of another European country, Denmark, was decided by Islamists in 2005, when Danish appeasement and impotence dominated the cartoon crisis. Beyond the electoral map, jihad is already changing the face of Europe's soft underbelly in different ways: freedom of expression is retreating everywhere from Berlin to Amsterdam, Islamic veils are proliferating, sharia courts work at full speed in many EU capitals, and Jewish communities are fleeing. Muslim reformers are silenced, the assimilation of Muslims is failing, and the Western intelligentsia is already signing letters of capitulation. The latest have been such as the fraudulent resolution at the UN, and UNESCO declaring Jewish holy sites and even the Old City of Jerusalem -- the heart of Judaism for nearly 4,000 years and the seat of Christianity for 2000 years -- Islamic, despite Islam not even existing historically until in the seventh century, hundreds of years later. The next "peace conference" in Paris, on January 15, is where 70 nations will probably agree to another UN Security Council vote to establish a Palestinian State, presumably (according to UNSC Resolution 2334) with the Old City of Jerusalem, the heart of the Jewish people and sacred to the Christian people, as its capital. It is another terrible sign of the West's soft capitulation to terror. It is also reminiscent of another "peace conference," in 1938, when in Munich the Western democracies bowed to Hitler and the Czechoslovak state was mutilated and deprived of defensible borders. Six months later, abandoned by its French and British allies, and bullied by the Nazis, Czechoslovakia was overrun by Germany. Like Israel today, the Czechs in the 1930s were accused of being "disturbers of the peace". "Peace," as in the inversions of George Orwell, sometimes means capitulation to Islam. Giulio Meotti, Cultural Editor for Il Foglio, is an Italian journalist and author. © 2017 Gatestone Institute. All rights reserved. The articles printed here do not necessarily reflect the views of the Editors or of Gatestone Institute. No part of the Gatestone website or any of its contents may be reproduced, copied or modified, without the prior written consent of Gatestone Institute.