Giulio Meotti : Europe's Childless Leaders Sleepwalking Us to Disaster

Europe's Childless Leaders Sleepwalking Us to Disaster

by Giulio Meotti
May 6, 2017 at 5:00 am

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/10306/childless-europe

• As Europe's leaders have no children, they seem have no reason to worry about the future of their continent.
• "Europe today has little desire to reproduce itself, fight for itself or even take its own side in an argument". — Douglas Murray, The Times.
• "'Finding ourselves' becomes more important than building a world." — Joshua Mitchell.

There have never been so many childless politicians leading Europe as today. They are modern, open minded and multicultural and they know that "everything finishes with them". In the short term, being childless is a relief since it means no spending for families, no sacrifices and that no one complains about the future consequences.

As in a research report financed by the European Union: "No kids, no problem!".
Being a mother or a father, however, means that you have a very real stake in the future of the country you lead. Europe's most important leaders leave no children behind.

Europe's most important leaders are all childless: German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte and the French presidential hopeful Emmanuel Macron. The list continues with Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Löfven, Luxembourg's Prime Minister Xavier Bettel and Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon.

As Europe's leaders have no children, they seem have no reason to worry about the future of their continent. German philosopher Rüdiger Safranski wrote:

"for the childless, thinking in terms of the generations to come loses relevance. Therefore, they behave more and more as if they were the last and see themselves as standing at the end of the chain".

Living for today: Europe's most important leaders are all childless, among them German Chancellor Angela Merkel (left) and Mark Rutte (right), Prime Minister of the Netherlands. (Image source: Minister-president Rutte/Flickr)

"Europe is committing suicide. Or at least its leaders have decided to commit suicide", wrote Douglas Murray in The Times. "Europe today has little desire to reproduce itself, fight for itself or even take its own side in an argument". Murray, in his new book, entitled The Strange Death of Europe, called it "an existential civilisational tiredness".

Angela Merkel made the fatal decision to open the doors of Germany to one million and half migrants to stop the demographic winter of her country. It is not a coincidence that Merkel, who has no children, has been called "the compassionate mother" of migrants. Merkel evidently did not care if the massive influx of these migrants would change German society, probably forever.
Dennis Sewell recently wrote in the Catholic Herald:

"It is that idea of 'Western civilisation' that greatly complicates the demographic panic. Without it, the answer would be simple: Europe has no need to worry about finding young people to support its elderly in their declining years. There are plenty of young migrants banging at the gates, trying to climb the razor wire or setting sail on flimsy boats to reach our shores. All we need to do is let them in".

Merkel's childless status mirrors German society: 30% of German women have not had children, according to European Union statistics, with the figure rising among female university graduates to 40%. Germany's Minister of Defense, Ursula von der Leyen, said that unless the birth rate picked up, the country would have to "turn the lights out".

According to a new study published by the Institut national d'études démographiques, a quarter of European women born in the 1970s may remain childless. Europe's leaders are no different. One in nine women born in England and Wales in 1940 were childless at the age of 45, compared to one in five of those born in 1967.

French politician Emmanuel Macron has rejected French President François Hollande's assertion that, "France has a problem with Islam". He is against suspending the citizenship of jihadists, and keeps insisting, against all evidence, that Islamic State is not Islamic: "What poses a problem is not Islam, but certain behaviours that are said to be religious and then imposed on persons who practice that religion".

Macron preaches a sort of multicultural buffet. He speaks of colonialism as a "crime against humanity". He is in favor of "open borders", and for him, again against all evidence to the contrary, there is no "French culture".

According to philosopher Mathieu Bock-Coté, the 39-year-old Macron, who is married to his 64-year-old former teacher, is the symbol of a "happy globalization freed of the memory of the French lost glory". It is not a coincidence that "Manif Pour Tous," a movement that fought the legalization gay marriage in France, urged voting against Macron as the "anti-family candidate". Macron's slogan, "En Marche!" ("Forward!"), embodies the globalized élites who reduce politics to an exercise, a performance.

That is why Turkish leader Erdogan urged Muslims to have "five children" and Islamic imams are urging the faithful to "breed children": to conquer Europe. Islamic supremacists are busily building a clash of civilizations in Europe's midst, and they depict their Western host countries collapsing: without population, without values, and abandoning their own culture.

If you look at Merkel, Rutte, Macron and others, are these Islamic supremacists so wrong? Our European leaders are sleepwalking us to disaster. Why should they care, if at the end of their lifespans Europe will not be Europe? As Joshua Mitchell explained in an essay, "'finding ourselves' becomes more important than building a world. The long chain of generations has already done that for us. Now let us play".

Giulio Meotti, Cultural Editor for Il Foglio, is an Italian journalist and author.

Yves Mamou : France: Emmanuel Macron, Useful Idiot of Islamism

France: Emmanuel Macron, Useful Idiot of Islamism

by Yves Mamou
May 7, 2017 at 1:30 am

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/10310/emmanuel-macron-islamism

• Emmanuel Macron, a "Useful Infidel," is not a supporter of terrorism or Islamism. It is worse: he does not even see the threat.
• Louizi's article gave names and dates, explaining how Macron's political movement has largely been infiltrated by Muslim Brotherhood militants.
• Is Macron an open promoter of Islamism in France? It is more politically correct to say that he is a "globalist" and an "open promoter of multiculturalism". As such, he does not consider Islamism a national threat because the French nation, or, as he has said, French culture, does not really exist.

During the cold war with the Soviet Union, they were called "Useful Idiots". These people were not members of the Communist Party, but they worked for, spoke in favor of and supported the ideas of Lenin and Stalin. In the 21^st century, Communism is finally dead but Islamism has grown and is replacing it as a global threat.

Like Communism, Islamism -- or Islamic totalitarianism -- has been collecting its "Useful Infidels" the same way Communism collected its Useful Idiots. There is, however, an important difference: under the Soviet Union, Useful Idiots were intellectuals. Now, Useful Infidels are politicians, and one of them may be elected president of France today.

Emmanuel Macron (Image source: European External Action Service)

Emmanuel Macron, Useful Infidel, is not a supporter of terrorism or Islamism. It is worse: he does not even see the threat. In the wake of the gruesome attacks of November 13, 2015 in Paris, Macron said that French society must assume a "share of responsibility" in the "soil in which jihadism thrives."

"Someone, on the pretext that he has a beard or a name we could believe is Muslim, is four times less likely to have a job than another who is non-Muslim," he added. Coming from the direction of Syria and armed with a Kalashnikov and a belt of explosives would, according to him, be a gesture of spite from the long-term unemployed?

Macron comes close to accusing the French of being racists and "Islamophobes". "We have a share of responsibility," he warned, "because this totalitarianism feeds on the mistrust that we have allowed to settle in society.... and if tomorrow we do not take care, it will divide them even more ".

Consequently, Macron said, French society "must change and be more open." More open to what? To Islam, of course.

On April 20, 2017, after an Islamist terrorist killed one police officer and wounded two others in Paris, Macron said: "I am not going to invent an anti-terrorist program in one night". After two years of continuous terrorist attacks on French territory, the presidential candidate said he had not taken the country's security problems into account?

Moreover, on April 6, during the presidential campaign, professor Barbara Lefebvre, who has authored books on Islamism, revealed to the audience of the France2 television program L'Emission Politique, the presence on Macron's campaign team of Mohamed Saou. It was Saou, apparently, a departmental manager of Macron's political movement, "En Marche" ("Forward"), who promoted on Twitter the classic Islamist statement: "I am not Charlie".

Sensing a potential scandal, Macron dismissed Saou, but on April 14, invited onto Beur FM, a Muslim French radio station, Macron was caught saying on a "hot mic" (believing himself off the air): "He [Saou] did a couple things a little bit radical. But anyway, Mohamed is a good guy, a very good guy".

"Very good", presumably, because Mohamed Saou was working to rally Muslim voters to Macron.

Is Saou an isolated case? Of course not. On April 28, Mohamed Louizi, author of the book Why I Quit Muslim Brotherhood, released a detailed article on Facebook that accused Macron of being a "hostage of the Islamist vote". Republished by Dreuz, a Christian anti-Islamist website, Louizi's article gave names and dates, explaining how Macron's political movement has largely been infiltrated by Muslim Brotherhood militants. It will be interesting to see how many of them will be candidates in Macron's movement in the next parliamentary elections.

On April 24, the Union of Islamic Organisations of France (UOIF), generally known as the French representative of Muslim Brotherhood, publicly called on Muslims to "vote against the xenophobic, anti-Semitic and racist ideas of the National Front and [we] call to massively vote for Mr. Macron."

Why?
Is Macron an open promoter of Islamism in France? It is more politically correct to say that he is a "globalist" and an "open promoter of multiculturalism". As such, he apparently does not consider Islamism a national threat because, for him, the French nation, or, as he has said, French culture, does not really exist. Macron has, in fact, denied that France is a country with a specific culture, a specific history, and a specific literature or art.
On February 22, visiting the French expatriates in London, Macron said: "French culture does not exist, there is a culture in France and it is diverse". In other words, on French territory, French culture and French traditions have no prominence or importance over imported migrant cultures. The same day, in London, he repeated the offense: "French art? I never met it!"

Conversely, in an interview with the anti-Islamist magazine, Causeur, he said: "France never was and never will be a multiculturalist country".
Because he is a politician, Macron is not addressing the French people as a whole. He is addressing different political customer bases.
 When visiting Algeria, Macron said that colonization was a "crime against humanity". He evidently hoped this remark would help him to collect the votes of French citizens of Algerian origin.

During the presidential campaign, Macron was always saying to people what they wanted to hear. French people may well be on their way to discovering that for Macron, belonging to a homeland, thinking of borders and defining oneself as belonging to a mother language or a specific literature or art, is nothing more than junk.

Yves Mamou is a journalist and author based in France. He worked for two decades for the daily, Le Monde, before his retirement.

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