Assuming there was no foul play, Iranians turned out en masse on Friday to reelect Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in a landslide. Yesterday, there were reports of violent protests in the streets of Tehran, as supporters of Ahmadinejad’s top challenger, Mir Hussein Moussavi, disputed the election results. According to the New York Times,

Witnesses reported that at least one person had been shot dead in clashes with the police in Vanak Square in Tehran. Smoke from burning vehicles and tires hung over the city late Saturday.

According to Stratfor, however, Iran’s security apparatus is more than capable of breaking up the demonstrations. Already, Stratfor notes,

sms messaging and Facebook have been shut down intermittently in Iran to prevent the protests from gaining momentum. Considering that most of Mousavi’s supporters are among Iran’s urban liberal upper class—who would use sms messaging and Facebook—these security measures have been moderately effective in keeping protesters from organizing mass demonstrations.

More important than these measures, the Times notes,

Ayatollah Khamenei closed the door to any appeals for intervention in a statement issued on state television on Saturday afternoon, congratulating Mr. Ahmadinejad on his victory and pointedly urging the other candidates to support him.

In Washington, President Obama told of group of reporters a Friday that he was “excited” about the lively campaigning that took place in the lead-up the Iranian election. “Whoever ends up winning the election in Iran, the fact there has been a robust debate hopefully will advance our ability to engage them in new ways,” Obama said.

After the results were in, however, the New York Timesreported, “There was palpable disappointment within the administration, where there were hopes, as President Obama said Friday, that the throngs of people at the polls augured a change in Iran.” Last night, Associated Press added that Washington refused to accept Ahmadinejad’s victory and “said it was looking into allegations of election fraud.”

Europe Swings Right in Elections

Despite a low voter turnout, European Parliament elections last week revealed a clear political shift to the right, Spiegel Online wrote:

Far-right and right-wing populist parties … did well in the election. In the Netherlands, the anti-Islam Freedom Party of the filmmaker Geert Wilders won around 17 percent of the vote, making it the second strongest party. The right-wing populist party True Finns won around 14 percent of the vote in Finland, up from just 0.5 percent in 2004. In Denmark, the right-wing populist dvp increased its share of the vote from 6.8 percent in 2004 to around 15 percent. Italy’s right-wing populist Northern League won around 10 percent of the vote, giving it eight seats, while in the UK the far-right British National Party won four seats.

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard wrote in the Telegraph that European politics are seeing “the delayed detonation of two political time-bombs: rising unemployment and the growth of immigrant enclaves that resist assimilation.” He noted,

In Germany and Austria, the Social Democrats suffered their worst defeats since World War ii. I don’t say that with pleasure. A vibrant labor-spd movement is vital for German political stability. It was the peeling away of Socialist support during the Bruning deflation of the Depression years—so like today’s Weber-Trichet deflation—that led to the catastrophic election of July 1932, when the Nazis and Communists took half the Reichstag seats.

We’ve been following this trend for some time. Here is a brief excerpt from an article we posted three years ago:

Bible prophecy indicates that a strong politician will soon come to power within Germany—perhaps more of a center-right figure who appeals to the extreme right, but who is sophisticated enough to appeal to a much broader swath of a right-leaning populace.The similar pattern being played out in other European countries only supports the idea that the rest of the Continent will one day unite behind this man with the help of the Vatican.A rise in conservative governance is reminiscent of a Europe just before World War ii. A right-wing Europe will soon unite completely to meet the threats of our modern world. Watch this shift in European psychology reach the point where Germans, and Europeans as a whole, cry out for that “all-European Hitler.”

Repeating Chamberlain’s Mistake

Just how significant was Barack Obama’s speech in Cairo? Jeffrey Kuhner explained in the Washington Times yesterday: “The real meaning of President Obama’s recent address to the Muslim world in Cairo is that he is turning his back on the Jews at a time when they face another possible Holocaust” (emphasis mine throughout).

Throughout the speech Mr. Obama pined for a “new beginning” in relations between America and the Muslim world, praised Islam’s commitment to “peace,” “justice” and “religious tolerance,” and sang the praises of Islam’s contribution to history. But the speech was more than a “puerile and pathetic exercise in political correctness,” writes Kuhner.

It will be remembered as the pivotal moment in history when the United States ceased to be a superpower. Sapped of its self-confidence and sense of grandiose destiny, America chose the policy of appeasement over confrontation, lies over truth, illusion over reality. At the heart of Mr. Obama’s speech as well as his foreign policy is the notion that we are not “at war” with Islam. But the real issue is the very opposite: Political Islam is at war with us—or to be more precise, radical fundamentalists are bent on destroying America, Israel and the West.

The fatal mistake of misreading an enemy as a friend is not unique in history.

During the 1930s, appeasement was based upon the notion that a majority of Germans were decent people who simply wanted peace and national self-determination. Thus, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain made the fateful decision to give away the Sudetenland, Czechoslovakia’s ethnic German region, to Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime.By betraying the Czechs at the Munich conference, Chamberlain believed he had secured “peace for our time.” Instead, he had emboldened Hitler to wage a war of conquest. The end result was a Europe in tatters, 50 million dead and the Holocaust. The fact that there were countless moderate, anti-Nazi Germans meant nothing. Their refusal to speak out against Hitler’s Aryan racialism guaranteed its march to power—and destruction. History reveals that it is militant minorities—not reasonable majorities—that often drive events.

President Obama is repeating Chamberlain’s tragic mistake, Kuhner writes, “except this time, the Israelis are to play the role of the Czechs, the sacrificial lamb at the altar of appeasement.”

A notable difference between Nazi Germany and Ahmadinejad’s Iran, though, is: The latter is on the cusp of acquiring nuclear weapons. To learn more about Iran and its future, read The King of the South.

Obama on High

In response to President Obama’s recent six-day swing through the Middle East and Europe, several commentators have noted his “stay above the fray” approach to international relations. On Friday, Charles Krauthmammer wrote,

When President Obama returned from his first European trip, I observed that while over there he had been “acting the philosopher-king who hovers above the fray mediating” between America and the world. Now that Obama has returned from his “Muslim world” pilgrimage, even the left agrees. “Obama’s standing above the country, above—above the world. He’s sort of God,” Newsweek’s Evan Thomas said to a concurring Chris Matthews, reflecting on Obama’s lofty perception of himself as the great transcender.

Krauthammer criticized Obama for equating injustices committed by Islamic regimes with minor inequalities witnessed in the West. He said the “problem with Obama’s transcultural evenhandedness” is that it “gives the veneer of professorial sophistication to the most simple-minded observation: Of course there are rights and wrongs in all human affairs. … But that doesn’t mean that these rights and wrongs are of equal weight.”

The Toronto Sun added that the president should be “the embodiment of his country and its interests. When he appoints himself the go-between who sees all sides and takes no sides—who chastises all conflicting parties equally and impartially—he does a disservice to himself, his country and to truth.”

The National Postasked: “Shouldn’t an American president feel an attachment to his own country above all? Shouldn’t misrepresentations aimed against that country energize him more? Yet here is an American president intervening in an internal Muslim debate—on the more reactionary side!”

Krauthammer concluded with this:

Obama undoubtedly thinks he is demonstrating historical magnanimity with all these moral equivalencies and self-flagellating apologetics. On the contrary. He’s showing cheap condescension, an unseemly hunger for applause and a willingness to distort history for political effect.Distorting history is not truth-telling but the telling of soft lies. Creating false equivalencies is not moral leadership but moral abdication. And hovering above it all, above country and history, is a sign not of transcendence but of a disturbing ambivalence toward one’s own country.

Let the Shooting Begin

As South Africa prepares to host the 2010 Soccer World Cup, the “rainbow nation” is disintegrating into Zimbabwe-style living, with thousands of whites being murdered, police doing nothing, and unskilled black squatters take over the farms, according to the Mail Online.

Officially there are about 50 murders a day, and three times that number of rapes. Most victims are poor blacks in South Africa’s cities: reported deaths last year totaled more than 18,000.But among the casualties of the violence are white farmers, whose counterparts in Zimbabwe are singled out for international press coverage; here in the “rainbow nation” their murders, remarkable for their particular savagery, go largely unreported.There are no official figures but, since the election of Nelson Mandela in 1994, farmers’ organizations say 3,000 whites in rural areas have been killed. The independent South African Human Rights Commission, set up by Mandela’s government, says the number is 2,500.Its commission’s report into the killings does not break down their figures by color; but it says the majority of attacks in general—i.e. where no one necessarily dies—are against white people and that “there was a considerably higher risk of a white victim of farm attacks being killed or injured than a black victim.”

Meanwhile, police are doing little to quell the racist violence. The commission report states that since 2006, farmer murders have jumped by 25 percent and adds: “The lack of prosecutions indicates the criminal justice system is not operating effectively to protect victims in farming communities and to ensure the rule of law is upheld.”

The police tell the farmers not to fight back. And the government is against those who do.

Since Nelson Mandela came to power, 900,000 mainly white South Africans, approximately 20 percent of the white population, have fled the country. Most commonly cited reason: soaring crime rates.

And in an eerie parallel with Zimbabwe, unskilled blacks are taking over farms where whites have been forced off. The government’s land redistribution policy has caused agricultural production to suffer a “massive hit” in areas where it has been implemented, the Mail Online reports.

For God’s perspective on the curses befalling the once-prosperous South African nation, read what we wrote 12 years ago on the subject.

Advice for Graduates

In his New York Times column last week, David Brooks struck a chord we have played a number of times ourselves here at theTrumpet.com. In preparing for a speech to be given before high school graduates, Brooks noted,

The most important decision any of us make is who we marry. Yet there are no courses on how to choose a spouse. There’s no graduate department in spouse selection studies. Institutions of higher learning devote more resources to semiotics than love.The most important talent any person can possess is the ability to make and keep friends. And yet here too there is no curriculum for this.The most important skill a person can possess is the ability to control one’s impulses. Here too, we’re pretty much on our own.What young people really need is a lesson in how to choose a spouse and how to make and keep friends.These are all things with a provable relationship to human happiness. Instead, society is busy preparing us for all the decisions that have a marginal effect on human happiness. There are guidance offices to help people in the monumental task of selecting a college. There are business schools offering lavish career placement services. There is a vast media apparatus offering minute advice on how to furnish your home or expand your deck.

In Education With Vision, we write about the great paradox there is in education. This paradox

has proven, beyond doubt, that even the most advanced technical skill and sophisticated scientific data cannot solve the world’s problems. For that matter, it can’t even keep those problems in check! Evil has multiplied many times over.Education should accept its part of the blame for this ugly phenomenon. We do not mean to suggest that specialized courses or vocational training is the sole cause of increasing evil. But young people ought to be taught how to live before they are taught the finer points of making a living. Liberal education should come before specialized study.

Shocker: UN Goes After Israel

The United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (unifil) was meant to stop Hezbollah rearming and rebuilding south of the Litani River. But it’s decided to go after Israel instead. A video aired by Israel’s Channel 10 showed the Spanish unifil commander reporting that his troops had been engaged in “looking for Israeli spies.”

“I would like to note the continuation of operations that were conducted this week, searching for an Israeli spy ring,” he said. “A number of arrests were made.”

The UN has a terrible track record in the region. In the past, it has done more to help Hezbollah terrorists than to hinder them. In the Oct. 7, 2000, kidnappings of three Israeli soldiers at Shebaa Farms, according to Israel Defense Forces Reserve Col. Kobi Marom, Hezbollah paid the Indian contingent of the UN force to help them in the attack. The Indians allowed Hezbollah to occupy UN positions, according to Marom, and Israel has video evidence to prove it. Even an Indian soldier in the area admitted that unifil “could have prevented the kidnapping.”

At the time, Israel believed that Hezbollah only made small payments to bribe a few soldiers. As they investigated the incident, however, Israeli officials were shocked to discover that Hezbollah had paid the Indian soldiers hundreds of thousands of dollars. “The event that occurred in Lebanon serves as a big red light against all involvement of international forces in our conflict,” then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said. “If there is a lesson to be learned, it is that we should not involve foreign forces in our region.”

Elsewhere on the Web

Due to a 17 percent drop in revenues compared to May of last year, California’s Controller John Chiang is warning that the Golden State risks financial catastrophe. “Without immediate solutions from the governor and legislature, we are less than 50 days away from a meltdown of state government,” Chiang said last week. A balanced budget is the only way out, he continued, “of the worst cash crisis since the Great Depression.”

According to statistics published by the British Office for National Statistics (ons), nearly two thirds of all 3- to 4-year-olds are enrolled in an early education program, while their mothers are off at work. Over half of all children under the age of 16 live in a home where the parents work. The Daily Mail noted the ugly side effects that often result from this phenomenon: “Repeated studies have shown that children who spend long hours in child care can become more aggressive than other youngsters and that they may fall behind in some areas when they go to school.” The ons report also found that only 63 percent of children live with two married parents, compared with 70 percent in 1998.

If President Obama claims to be a “student of history,” he didn’t listen very well in class, says historian Victor Davis Hanson. Read Hanson’s full piece here. Mr. Obama’s track record of historical inaccuracy and misinterpretation is truly astounding.