Last year Muslim jihadists murdered more people in France, than were killed by terrorism in the country during the entire 20th century.

In response, the Prime Minister of France, Manuel Valls, has announced a range of innovative legal measures, introduced in response to the terrorist outrages which struck France in 2015.

On January 7, of that year, Saïd and Chérif Kouachi stormed the Paris offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, massacring twelve and injuring eleven others.

In the days that followed, a comrade of the earlier jihadists committed a string of murders, which culminated in a siege at the kosher supermarket. Amedy Coulibaly killed five and injured eleven more.

On February 3, 2015, three military personnel guarding a Jewish community center in Nice were stabbed, by Moussa Coulibaly.

On June 26, the severed head of Hervé Cornara was placed on display, at the gas factory near Lyon where he worked, alongside twin ISIS flags, by Yassine Salhi.

On August 21, an attempted mass shooting on the Thalys high-speed train between Amsterdam and Paris, by Moroccan-born Ayoub El Khazzani, was foiled by American tourists, leading to the wounding of four.

In two days, starting on November 13, multiple jihadist attacks once again struck the French capital. 130 were killed and 352 injured, by perpetrators operating in three teams of three, which included suicide bombers.

Last January, Amedy Coulibaly (left) murdered a policewoman and four Jews in Paris, before being shot dead by police. Right: Medics carry a victim wounded in an attack by Islamist terrorists, who shot hundreds of concert-goers, killing 90, at the Bataclan theater in Paris on November 13, 2015.

France’s Socialist Party government has unveiled a new legislative program designed to decrease the likelihood of further Islamic atrocities, largely it seems that would have ensured the success of the jihadist attacks committed so far.

“A range of measures” are set to be introduced to combat the alleged “Social, Ethnic and Territorial Apartheid” currently blighting France.

Not only were the jihadist proclivities of most of last year’s perpetrators fully known to the authorities in France, some had been released from prison early following crimes of violence involving automatic weapons.

In the measures revealed by Prime Minister Manuel Valls, however, proactively combatting criminals appears to have taken a backseat to placating the communities from which they are drawn.

The first aim of the new laws contained within the Equality and Citizenship bill, reports Le Monde, is to centralize the provision of social housing in France. Until now the growth of Islamized areas has largely been limited to suburbs around major urban centers.

Much as in Germany, where Muslim migrants to Europe are being sent directly into rural areas, the prime minister is proposing a new nationwide system designed, “to make a better distribution of the public housing supply” in France. This nationwide transformation of housing policy is aimed at curtailing “concentrations of poverty,” within problematic Islamic enclaves infamous as no-go zones.

“Recalcitrant” locally-elected mayors who oppose the construction of new housing projects in their areas will be overruled by the state in the interests of “social diversity.”

Second, in the guise of improving literacy in French amongst those of immigrant descent, a new fast-track employment scheme has also been drawn up.

The scheme “will allow youths with few or no qualifications” to enter France’s “citizens’ reserve,” a government initiative established last year which links the nation’s education system with its civil service, allowing an accelerated path into state employment.

The euphemism “youths” is used in the French media to describe the country’s increasingly problematic young Muslim population. In 2014, an ICM poll discovered that 27% of French citizens aged 18-24 supported ISIS.

The glowing account given to the proposals being forwarded by Prime Minister Valls, in his country’s leading left-wing daily, fails to mention how the newly foreseen “third path” job scheme will address the greater key issues.

Unease is growing at the level of Islamist sympathies already held by state employees in France, such as members of the military and police.

Third, as nationwide protests continue to mount over migrant chaos in French towns, spread across the coast of the English Channel, even greater criminal penalties against free speech are also set to be introduced by the new bill.

Verbal communication has, apparently, been largely exempted from legal free speech curtailment in France, unless recorded and posted online. Such cases then fall under the same strict law that governs the printed word, originally passed in 1881.

This law is why Charlie Hebdo is famous for distributing its most challenging content in the form of cartoons, thereby seeking to exempt itself from strict sanctions against “defamation” in print. Fictional novels published this year about France’s Islamic future have sought to do the same.

Under the legislation currently being proposed by Valls, this existing status quo is set for a radical shake-up. The new restrictions planned for France are more in line with the Europe-wide harmonization of hate speech offences, mandated by the European Union.

The augmented provisions against incitement to hatred, previously limited to the 1881 press law, are set to be expanded throughout the French criminal justice system, under the new bill.

Much as in the UK, the new creation of aggravated offences will also ensure that any existing crime can be claimed, by its victim, also to contain a “hate speech” component, incurring far stiffer penalties against the alleged perpetrator.

The application of existing French laws, however, after the last major atrocity in Paris, on November 13, point to the likely reasons for the new proposals being put forward by France’s government.

Since the massacre at the Bataclan nightclub and suicide bombings that struck the French capital, the Republic of France has been in a state of emergency. This gives the country’s President, François Hollande, “extraordinary powers” under Article 16 of the French Constitution.

In February, the duration of these powers, which enable warrantless searches whilst limiting freedom of expression and peaceful assembly, were extended until May 26 by the lower house of the French legislature, the Assemblée Nationale.

In the intervening period, soldiers have become such a common sight in the French capital, that they often give Paris the impression of being under martial law. Half of the country’s army is now deployed on the streets of France.

Yet, whereas protests by French people against Islamization or government policy have been rigorously curtailed by the authorities, migrant gangs have still felt able to terrorize French towns, stampede French motorways, or conduct mass armed brawls in Paris, with little fear of intervention from either security services or the law.

Although the law being introduced by Mr. Valls is chiefly claimed to be about “youth engagement,” the new bill seems more the result of a realization that one group in France — its natives — can generally be relied upon to obey the law, while apparently another cannot.

There is a certain group of young people, however, with whom Manuel Valls clearly does not wish to engage. He recently excoriated members of the controversial Europe-wide Identitarian Movement, a nationalist youth group notorious for engaging in acts of civil disobedience in response to the changing culture and demography of France and Europe.

Described as the “hipster right” by some outlets, Mr. Valls decried supporters of the movement — which began in his country — as “those who want the country closed while dreaming of going back to a France that never existed.”

“I believe in my country, in its message and its universal values,” Valls added. In the interview published by Libération, on April 12, he continued:

I would like us to be capable of demonstrating that Islam, a great world religion and the second religion of France, is fundamentally compatible with the Republic, democracy, our values, and equality between men and women.

Manuel Valls was later forced to admit, in the interview, that this “compatibility” is something doubted by “a majority of our fellow citizens.”

Some 3.3 million people have dual citizenship in France, most of them Muslim. After President Hollande had announced that his country was “at war,” in the immediate aftermath of November’s attacks, the French Prime Minister unveiled plans to amend France’s constitution.

The proposed amendment was intended to strip French citizenship from dual-nationals convicted of terrorism offences. At the time Manuel Valls was described, in the left-wing media, as a “strongman” who had taken a “hard line against terror.”

On March 30, however, after a split within the Socialist Party over the issue, the Prime Minister’s plans were dropped.

The new, more comprehensive, legislative proposals are set to go before the Assemblée nationale this month.

George Igler, a political analyst based in the City of London, is the Director of the Discourse Institute.

The notion that the creation of a state of Palestine will herald everlasting peace is naïve in the extreme.

After 50 years of a two-state failure, the French and other diplomats, in their duplicitously-named “peace initiative,” have no other idea for how to settle the Palestinian problem, except to behave like parched men trudging across a burning desert toward a distant mirage that they think is an oasis paradise. It is not, and the same diplomats will take no responsibility for cleaning up the dangerous outcome of such a disaster.

The international community is pressuring Israel to make wholesale concessions in territory and security, risking social and political upheaval, to grant the so-called Palestinians a state of their own.

The sole criterion for making this happen is for the international community to accept the Palestinian precondition of forcing Israel withdraw to pre-1967 lines, which are the 1949 armistice lines and not a defined border.

Whenever I approach a European diplomat with the following questions, none of them can give me an answer:

1) What happens when a new emboldened Palestinian government continues calls for the liberation of the “rest of Palestine”?

They call Haifa, Acre, Jaffa and the Galilee — in fact, all of Israel — “occupied Palestinian land”. Just look at any Palestinian map: it is identical to Israel.

It is little known that members of the Palestinian Authority call Israeli Arabs “Palestinians of the Interior.”

They also call Israeli Arabs the “Palestinians of ’48.” They have been joined in this by Arab Knesset Members, who also would not object to the eventual displacement of Jews by Arabs in Israel.

According to their ambition, these Israeli Arabs will be “liberated” by a new Palestine.

2) What will happen when inevitably — by the ballot or by the bullet — this Palestine is taken over by Hamas, designated an Islamic terror organization by the U.S. Department of State?

If you think this question is far-fetched, think again. The students of Bir Zeit University voted overwhelming to elect Hamas representatives to head their student body. Bir Zeit is not in the Gaza Strip. It is less than ten kilometers north of Ramallah, literally a stone’s throw from the offices of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank.

These Hamas-supporting students will be the Palestinians’ future opinion-makers after graduation.

And let us not forget how in the Gaza Strip, in June 2007, Hamas seized power in a bloody coup that left more than a hundred dead and more than five hundred wounded.

Hamas will continue its incendiary calls to destroy the Jewish state and to slaughter Jews.

3) Do you really think that we Israelis will call upon our government to make territorial concessions that will bring these terrorists closer to our families and homes?

So, what is the answer I get from the diplomats based in Israel to these genuine concerns? Well, nothing really. Just a throwaway line about it being up to the parties to solve their ongoing difficulties.

If the international community wants to see Israel make dangerous concessions, then they, and they alone, must ensure that Israel has a united and pragmatic peace partner, not a weak, aging, corrupt, rejectionist and undemocratic leader to our east, who constantly says he will never recognize Israel as the Jewish State, and to our south, in Gaza, a rabid Islamic terror regime bent on our destruction.

This should be Israel’s basic demand: that a united Palestinian political leadership will recognize the right of all the citizens of the Jewish State of Israel to live in peace and security, alongside the State of Palestine.

It is that simple. That is all it takes.

Let the diplomatic world spend the next 50 years educating and training the divided Palestinian political leadership to come together as a force for peace.

Then Israel will be happy to consider making concessions that might well be life-threatening, as it has done before.

If the international community wants to see Israel make dangerous concessions, then they, and they alone, must ensure that Israel has a united and pragmatic peace partner, not a weak, aging, corrupt, rejectionist and undemocratic leader to our east, who constantly says he will never recognize Israel as the Jewish State, and to our south, in Gaza, a rabid Islamic terror regime bent on our destruction. (Image source: Palestinian Media Watch)

Barry Shaw is a Senior Associate at the Israel Institute for Strategic Studies.

The Western euphemism for Turkey’s supposedly mild, “post-modern” Islamists, who came to power in 2002, was problematic from the beginning. The past five years has seen the Turkish “post-modern” Islamist’s sad funeral — sad because they, in reality, never lived in this universe. They were the brainchild of the optimists sipping their coffee at a Washington café, or a London pub or a Berlin beer house. Now there is just the official funeral service with an empty coffin: there was, in fact, no such a thing as “post-modern” Islamism.

Political Islam, when it wins popular support, tends to adopt direction of the majority rather than the pluralistic route [see Turkey and Egypt]; and when mixed with cultural and religious nationalism in the Orient, it often adopts not just the direction of the majority but also a few militant turns [see Hamas].

It was not even considered shocking when the Turkish man who shot at the journalist Can Dundar outside a courthouse said in his testimony, “I was deeply annoyed by his [Dundar’s] news reporting … I knew he had been to Britain for a while… I thought he was a British spy… I planned this [shooting] in order to teach him a lesson.”

Why did the man think that a Turkish journalist, declared an undesirable by the country’s president, was a British spy? Was it actually because Dundar had been to Britain, like thousands of other Turks do every year? Hardly. It was because the president of the country had loudly labelled him a spy, a traitor, a terrorist — even without a court verdict. Dundar was eventually acquitted of the charges.

Murat Sahin (left) attempts to shoot journalist Can Dundar (crouching at right, with his back to the camera) outside a court in Istanbul, Turkey, on May 6, 2016. Sahin later stated that “I was deeply annoyed by his news reporting … I knew he had been to Britain for a while… I thought he was a British spy… I planned this [shooting] in order to teach him a lesson.” (Image source: RT video screenshot)

In his newly-published book, The Glorious Defeat: The Islamists’ Test With Power, the author Levent Gultekin, himself a figure from the Islamist ranks, concludes:

“The war [within] has been won by the Akit line thanks to [President] Erdogan. The Akit approach has captured not just the Islamists but Turkey as a whole … Erdogan has hauled the voters to this line. That [Akit’s] is the [political] lingua franca in every field.”

The “Akit” in question is the daily newspaper Yeni Akit. It is a fiercely pro-Erdogan, fiercely Islamist newspaper, whose editors often find a seat in the president’s private jet on his foreign trips — an expression of the president’s appreciation of their less than subtle editorial line.

In 2014, one Yeni Akit columnist wrote that a “Gaza fund contribution tax” should apply to Turkish Jews, as well as foreign Jews doing business in Turkey and Turkish nationals with commercial ties to Israel. He suggested that the tax should apply to any company or business that maintains a partnership with a Turkish Jew. The penalty for failing to pay the tax should be the revocation of the Jew’s business license and the seizure of his property.

Shortly before the November 1 general elections, another Yeni Akit columnist claimed that Erdogan would become the new “ecumenical” caliph once he has won the executive presidential powers he so passionately desires: the 105th Caliph!

Yeni Akit also recently published a list of companies under the headline: “Muslims who pay [buy from] these companies are bathing in Palestinian children’s blood.” The subtitle read: “Muslims who consume these products are financing Israel that occupies Palestine.”

The list includes the world’s most prominent brands: 17 in the tobacco industry, six fast-food chains, 11 soft-drink producers, 12 technology giants, 15 carmakers and brands of cars, 16 clothing and fashion brands, a whisky producer, two cargo companies, three oil companies, one battery-maker, one famous cigarette lighter producer, dairy products companies, coffee, tea, drinking water producers, detergent, margarine and ice-cream companies and… one credit card company, one of the usual top three that we all use — call it X.

This author asked a friend to call Yeni Akit’s subscription office for our little socio-political experiment. This was the conversation:

– Hello, is that subscription?

Yeni Akit: Yes, how can we help you?

– Could I subscribe to your newspaper and pay by credit card?

Yeni Akit: Of course you can. What region or city are you in?

– Ankara, (…) neighborhood. Can I pay with my X credit card?

Yeni Akit: Sure, you are more than welcome.

Ah, those Muslims who bathe in Palestinian children’s blood…

Burak Bekdil, based in Ankara, is a Turkish columnist for the Hürriyet Daily and a Fellow at the Middle East Forum.

A major threat to Sweden’s security today is the Swedish journalistic establishment: it downplays the migration crisis with ridiculous arguments.

As migrants flooded into Sweden in December 2015, Fredrik Virtanen, a writer for Sweden’s largest newspaper, Aftonbladet, wrote an article entitled, “Have refugees forced you to buy worse red wine?” It is not really dangerous, Virtanen argues, that that Sweden was accepting 160,000 migrants; such migratory movements, he wrote, do not really impact anyone’s life.

Today, however, we know that many people’s lives have been affected by the influx of migrants and that the problems are about more than wine. They are, for example, about sexual assault, the murder of staff in asylum accommodations and chaos in the Swedish school system. But Virtanen was right: red wine is still here.

Another of Aftonbladet’s editorial writers, Linnea Swedenmark, writes about a village in the Swedish province of Jämtland. The village she writes, is an example of how migrants are ensuring that the consumption of goods is increasing in the rural areas of Sweden.

What she did not write is that in Jämtland’s largest city, Östersund, many women have been assaulted by men who speak “Swedish with an accent.” The police have warned women not to go out alone. Swedenmark is right when she writes that “the grocery store sells three times as many eggs” — but the women of Jämtland feel less secure in the public domain.

In the magazine, Café, the journalist Andrev Walden wrote in December 2015, that “no nation has perished from too much goodness.” The pictures for his article compared Sweden’s new restrictive immigration laws with the Holocaust.

When the migration crisis started last year in Sweden, the Swedish comedian Henrik Schyffert calculated and wrote on Facebook that it costs each Swede “two Quattro Stagionis (a popular local pizza), a large Fanta soda and a Netflix subscription to save the lives of 80,000 people this year.”

His Facebook post was praised by all major media outlets in Sweden. They were apparently looking to a comedian who counted the counted the cost of immigration in pizza and soda currencies for the solution to Sweden’s migration crisis.

Since Schyffert made his statement, those amazing pizzas that would finance the mass influx of migrants are nowhere to be found, and Sweden has to borrow more money for the migration crisis on its hands.

These quotes are from the mainstream media in Sweden, and it is how large parts of the Swedish establishment sound every day. This is the level at which the debate on immigration in Sweden is being conducted.

While 800,000 migrants in Libya are waiting to invade Europe, Sweden has a refugee policy whereby only by obtaining livelihoods will those migrants with a refugee status and a temporary residence permit get permanent residence permits. So if you get a job, you get to stay in Sweden permanently. It is a strange refugee policy, because those who actually are refugees and not economic migrants are often traumatized and have difficulties finding a job. So Sweden’s refugee policy is tailored to economic migrants.

In Sweden’s third largest city, Malmö, the children of illegal migrants receive income support payments from the government, and families that are in Sweden illegally have their rent paid by the taxpayers. For some reason, the Swedish authorities want to pay people who should not even be in Sweden. It is an open invitation to more migrants to come to Sweden.

Tens of thousands of migrants have passed through Denmark to enter Sweden during 2015 and 2016, attracted by Sweden’s generous welfare payments and free housing.

What the established Swedish media does not tell people about are the threats and risks that come with increased migration. When the European Union’s border agency, Frontex, recognized that it could not control the migrants coming to Europe, and that many Europeans who had joined terrorist organizations outside Europe were coming back to Europe among the migrants, this was not major news in the Swedish media. This is strange, since Sweden is one of the countries in Europe from where many citizens have traveled from to the Middle East to fight in jihadi terrorist organizations.

Such news does not fit in the narrative that the Swedish media is trying to tell the Swedish people. The narrative that the Swedish establishment wants to tell the Swedes is that the more immigrants come to Sweden, the richer Sweden will become. It does not matter which country these immigrants come from. If they just come to Sweden, then Sweden will become a richer country.

A month before the migration crisis started making waves in the media, the think tank Arena Idé — which has close ties to the Social Democrats, the governing party — published a report that was mentioned in all the major Swedish media outlets.

According to the report, Sweden, between 1950 and 2014, had made a “profit” of $110 billion on immigration. The report also said that without immigration, an $8 billion tax increase would be needed to sustain Sweden’s defense, infrastructure and research. That there could be a conflict between a welfare state and immigration was called a “myth.” As expected, the established Swedish media rejoiced over these “facts.”

When the report went public in June 2015, the Swedish media celebrated it. Today, when the Swedish welfare state is under severe pressure because of immigration, the authors refuse to answer any questions about it. Last June, it was treated as a confirmation of the pro-immigration ideology of the Swedish establishment. With 9.5 million people in Sweden and its many universities, only a few economists protested the report. The loudest criticism came from the economist Tino Sanandaji. Needless to say, Sanandaji, despite being an immigrant from Iran with a Ph.D. in public policy from the University of Chicago, was depicted by some in the established Swedish media as a right-wing extremist.

No, Sweden is not the Soviet Union, but the way large parts of the Swedish establishment turn ideology into “facts” through “reports,” and smear those who have different opinions, undermines debates that are of such critical importance in a democracy.

Not only the media and think tanks connected to the government advocate a liberal immigration policy. There is also loud support for it in academic circles. “Immigrants are a profit for Sweden,” Dick Harrison, professor of history at Lund University, wrote in a December 2014 article for the Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet. In the article, he states:

“Sweden is not in any way unique. The same logic — that immigration strengthens the country politically, economically and culturally – can be said of all peacetime immigrations through the ages, whether it has been about refugees or labor immigration. The more immigrants, the stronger [the] state. The prime example is the United States. There is not a single historical example of immigration in the long term being negative for the host country. At this point, our historical experience is crystal clear — the only form of immigration that has been, and is, directly harmful is comprised of warlike invasions.”

While Harrison gives the United States as an example, he forgets to mention that while immigrants to the U.S. often come from countries such as Mexico, China and India, the three countries from which Sweden received the highest number of asylum seekers in 2015 were Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria. They have also delivered most asylum seekers to Sweden during the first four months of 2016. As most people know, these three countries house large numbers of jihadi terrorists.

In Sweden, moreover, it is difficult for people without a high level of education to get a job. In Malmö, the unemployment rate among foreign-born men aged 18-24 years is at 41%. In Sweden, those who do not have jobs receive generous welfare payments from the local authorities.

Sweden also has a welfare system in which municipalities are obligated to ensure that everyone has housing. Sweden’s homeless people live in hostels or hotels paid for by taxpayers. These immigration policies have therefore have therefore saddled Swedish taxpayers with huge expenses.

Without the establishment’s campaign to convince the Swedish people that immigration will make Sweden rich, Sweden would not have the liberal immigration policies they do, eroding the country’s safety and welfare. Even though the Swedish establishment campaigns in every way possible for a liberal immigration policy, and despite the fact that a few months ago anyone advocating for a restrictive immigration policy was called a “racist,” resistance among Swedes against immigration has increased.

The Swedish people have defied their establishment and recently forced liberal politicians to support a more restrictive immigration policy. The Swedish people, despite having an ideologically blind establishment, have been smart enough to use their common sense.

As for the Swedish establishment, there is no word to describe them other than dangerous.

The Swedish establishment is characterized by incompetence combined with an extreme left-wing ideology and a hillbilly-like mentality that refuses to see the rest of the world and the risks involved in it. The Swedish establishment has not dealt with Sweden as if it were a country, but as if it were a village.

What is happening in Sweden right now is a cultural and political revolution. The Swedes have trusted their establishment for a long time. This trust has been a part of the political culture in Sweden. But now that culture is changing — to be anti-establishment in Sweden today is not marginalized anymore. Sweden is developing a powerful anti-establishment movement, dominating the political debate.

By gross miscalculations, the Swedish establishment has eroded its own legitimacy. Today, fewer than one in four Swedes have confidence in their government. The damage that the Swedish establishment’s liberal immigration policies inflicted on Sweden during the migration crisis of 2015 — and is about to inflict during the coming migration crisis of 2016 — is likely to cause a tectonic political shift in Sweden.

The Swedish media has failed in its journalistic obligation to report objectively about the problem, and Swedish politicians have not acted in the best interest of Sweden. While Sweden faces its biggest crisis since World War II, the Swedish establishment has clearly failed to lead.

The average Swede needs to be tougher to cope with the challenges facing Sweden today and in the years to come. The problems that will face Sweden after it has received 160,000 asylum seekers in 2015 and the 150,000 asylum seekers expected in 2016 will create a political, cultural and social environment in which there is no place for political naivety and ideological blindness. To survive as a stable and civilized country where the rule of law and democracy will prevail, Sweden will be forced to recognize the threats and risks that come with massive immigration — and to respond.

Nima Gholam Ali Pour is a member of the board of education in the Swedish city of Malmö and is engaged in several Swedish think tanks concerned with the Middle East. He is also editor for the social conservative website Situation Malmö.