Will Mass Immigration Lead to Collapse of Western Political Inclinations?

 By Henry Srebrnik, Saint John Telegraph-Journal

The horrors of Nazi race theory led to the murder of millions of innocent people. As a postwar reaction, it became taboo to assert that ethnicities or religious groups differ in their readiness to adapt to Western institutions. To acknowledge the reality of profound cultural differences was now beyond the pale. Every link between peoplehood and political inclinations was verboten.

Instead, this was replaced by the belief that nations must henceforth be “ideas” rather than historical inheritances -- which meant anyone arriving would immediately realize that the benefits of liberal democracy outweighed whatever cultural and religious norms they brought with them and join the polity. A win-win situation.

That postwar rejection of “ethnopolitical” thinking produced a liberalism that contended that belonging is for “everyone,” and treated every border as a nuisance, if not a prejudice. Hence, we have today’s European Union. Ideally, the Brussels bureaucrats would like to erase even indigenous national differences in some far-off future, the way Russian Communists assumed that the various ethnic groups in the USSR would blend into a new Soviet nationality under Communism.

In the last half-century in Europe, this kind of thinking allowed for massive postwar immigration and a resulting dependence on population growth. As native birth rates declined below replacement levels, these countries became dependent on immigration to sustain their economies and social systems.

But it didn’t work out the way they expected, and so you have a liberal capitalist order now in crisis. Multiculturalism and globalization have profoundly altered communities. As such, public trust has measurably declined. Shared identity, traditions, and a common sense of belonging have all eroded. Illegal migrants are dispersed nationwide, and – of course! -- disproportionately housed in poorer neighbourhoods, away from those who rule.

In European debates today, migration is not simply presented as a problem to be managed. Rather, its opponents now hold it responsible for a gamut of problems, from poor social services to wage stagnation to crime. The rioting and disorder in France are a harbinger of what may be coming everywhere. What they are now living through is the unravelling of the postwar liberal order. Eventually, this divergence between what most of the population wants and what leaders prefer will bring down governments across the Continent, as surely as “socialism” collapsed in eastern Europe and Russia last century.

Europe’s political and social problems surrounding immigration will become even more intractable. Germany is an obvious example. Within a decade, even in its most urban and populated areas, it went from a stable nation with high levels of social trust and generous social safety nets, to something rather different. Everyone there knows the cause, everyone sees the “elephant in the room” -- it’s immigration, lawful and otherwise.

There is a frustration with immigrants who don’t seek to integrate into the fabric of the culture and its identity, or at least seek to understand and respect it, but who desire to change the identity of the countries in which they move or to create isolationist enclaves within them. The broader illiberal treatment of women by some non-Western immigrants to Europe, for example, is a ticking time bomb, and tensions are likely to continue rising, especially as Western populations continue to reject mass immigration at every electoral opportunity. Western leaders, of course, are more eager to prove their cosmopolitan bona fides and dedication to postwar liberal principles. 

The rise of right wing parties has been driven in most European countries by public perception showing recent immigrants have disproportionately been involved in crime and have resisted many liberal norms for cultural and or religious reasons, and in at least a few of these countries, well grounded data supports the perception, so much so that some countries, like Denmark and Sweden, have enacted strict controls on immigration and asylum for more than just political reasons.

France will elect a new president on April 18, and it looks as if the Rassemblement National’s Marine Le Pen might finally win in her fourth attempt. In Spain, the leftist prime minister Pedro Sanchez has just called snap elections for November 29 and is in trouble over the Ceueta incursion by Moroccans last summer. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz lurches from crisis to crisis as the far-right Alternative fur Deutschland gains strength in regional elections. In Italy, Giorgia Meloni is already too conservative for many tastes, but her supporters may defect to Roberto Vannacci’s authentically fascist Futuro Nazionale. A decrepit Labour Party in Britain faces Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party on the right.

These right-wing parties draw moral force from claiming to represent people who consider the parties of the left to have forgotten them. Their supporters are united by a sense of meaninglessness that was once filled by other structures and parties which no longer give them a framework for identity.

Anti-immigration policies are essentially about providing an identity, whether rooted in whiteness, language, Christianity or something else. Mainstream parties need to come up with competitive platforms. The right thrives on the questions everyone else refuses to answer.

The immigration issue is fundamentally a fight between universalism and particularism. The state has been attempting to reshape society around a secular, universalist moral ideology. We don’t yet know which side will prevail.

 

What Constitutes Genocide, and is Israel Guilty?

 By Henry Srebrnik, Jewish Post, Winnipeg

Genocide is a grave and exceptional violation of international law, defined and prohibited by the Genocide Convention of 1948. But maybe Raphael Lemkin did us no favour in coining the word during the Holocaust. It is now used by antisemites against Israel.

Raphael Lemkin was a Polish-Jewish jurist who escaped from Europe when the Nazis occupied Poland. He moved to Washington, DC, in the summer of 1942, and went on to document Nazi atrocities in his 1944 book, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. In this text, he introduced the word “genocide,” the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group. This new word is made from the ancient Greek word genos (race, ethnicity or tribe) and the Latin cide (killing).

But it’s not that cut and dried. Even before the antisemites accused Israel of genocide in Gaza, as a way of ridding themselves of any residual guilt about the destruction of European Jewry, the word had become little more than a term used by states and “human rights” groups who for one reason or another want to punish their adversaries.

Most of the time they really are talking about “ethnic cleansing,” pogroms, massacres and war crimes. By such criteria, every participant in World War II committed “genocide.” The mass killings of civilians in Hiroshima and Dresden in 1945 would today qualify. But these were acts against even far worse perpetrators of what we now call genocide, designed to speedily end the war.

What about the American war in Vietnam, and of course the almost numberless conflicts across Africa? The wars that dismembered Yugoslavia involved terrible massacres, particularly in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo, but did they really meet the criterion for genocide? The numbers killed needn’t be huge. About 8,000 Bosniak Muslims were murdered in Srebrenica by Bosnian Serb militias in 1995 during the Bosnian war. In the Western Hemisphere it would -- and lately does -- refer to the cultural and also physical extinction of pre-contact peoples from the Arctic down to Patagonia.

Are ideological attempts to kill groups of identifiable people within a state -- the Holodomor in Ukraine, but also elsewhere in Stalin’s USSR -- genocide? What about the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia? Should we call this an “auto-genocide,” since it was perpetrated by the nation’s own mad Maoist regime? Was China’s Cultural Revolution a genocide? Millions probably died. Rwanda is an interesting case -- obviously a mass murder by one class-cum-ethnic group against another, a giant pogrom involving intertwined peoples, but where the victims have now turned the tables.

Actually, there have been very few ideologically intentional attempts to destroy a powerless and helpless people, in whole or in part. Only a few qualify by that definition, the Holocaust being an obvious one, as well as the Turkish mass murders of Armenians in World War I. The allegations that Israel committed this crime do not meet the established definition and standards of genocide, are unsupported by established facts, nor do they stand up to common sense scrutiny.

A finding of genocide requires evidence of acts that are intended to destroy a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group, in whole or in part. Israel has neither intended to, nor destroyed, Palestinians as a group in Gaza. Israel’s accusers allege genocide mostly because of the supposed number of civilians killed in Gaza. Such claims are rife with flaws. Genocide is not a quantitative crime; there is no specific number of civilian casualties that constitutes genocide.

Israel set a high bar for how to conduct urban warfare against an enemy who will stop at nothing, including the death of its own civilians. What kind of genocide is it when the population of Gaza is larger today than it was three years ago? And how could it be that Israel is trying to kill innocents when the ratio of civilian-to-combatant casualties is lower than that of other urban wars fought in even less-difficult conditions?

Dave Rich, an Associate Research Fellow at the Pears Institute for the Study of Anti-Semitism, writes extensively about the intersection of anti-Israel activism, far-left politics, and modern antisemitism. He observes that people respond to the genocide charge through facts and data: Israel’s supporters take the charge of genocide on its face, as an evidence-based allegation of a crime, and try to construct the case for the defence. But there is no defence, because the charge is not made on that basis, or for that purpose, he states. 

The term “genocide,” he notes in “From Be’eri to Bondi: Global Antisemitism After October 7, published in Fathom, October 2026, has shed its legal meaning and become a political label, whose antithesis is “resistance.” These two terms represent two states of being: in a colonial setting, either you are engaging in genocide or you are resisting it. There is no middle ground. “Israel is condemned as genocidal, not by observation, but through logical deduction: Israel is colonial, therefore by definition it is genocidal. It cannot be otherwise. And Gaza represents resistance against the entire Western colonial and capitalist power structure.”

Maia Zelkha, editor-in-chief of Yad Mizrah, a Sephardi and Mizrahi cultural magazine, also contends that the left employs the word “genocide” as an ideological weapon. “Before Israel had even launched its ground invasion of Gaza, and before there was any evidentiary record of Israel’s military campaign,” she writes, in her article “Genocide and Its Jurors,” in Quillette, Sept. 24, 2026, many leftist groups “were already describing Israel’s response as genocide.”

On Oct. 8, just a day after Hamas’s massacre and kidnappings, thousands of demonstrators gathered in New York’s Times Square in an “All Out for Palestine” rally to support “Palestinian resistance.” Within days, other organizations were issuing statements describing Israel’s unfolding military response as genocide, situated within a pre-existing theory of Israel as a colonial project that had produced genocidal dehumanisation. Prominent academics, human-rights organisations, activists, journalists, and public intellectuals described Israel’s conduct as genocidal.

Although the conviction that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians is not new, it has garnered ever more strength since the beginning of this war. In March 2024, the UN special rapporteur on the Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese, published a report alleging that the Israeli war in Gaza constituted a genocide. In December of the same year, both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch did the same. Then in July 2025 came both Physicians for Human Rights and B’Tselem, followed almost immediately by the International Association of Genocide Scholars. A resolution from the latter organization requires a two-thirds vote of its members, academics in the field of genocide studies, to pass. One would be hard-pressed to find a more reputable source for the libel.

On Sept. 16, 2025, a UN Commission of Inquiry concluded that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza; other prominent left-wing organisations and scholars have reached the same conclusion. And finally, on Oct. 9, the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced that it awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 2026 to South African judge Navanethem “Navi” Pillay, who led the 2025 UN commission that found Israel guilty of genocide against the Palestinians while completely ignoring many of the world’s worst human rights abusers, including, of course, Hamas. Pillay’s commission found that Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups committed war crimes. Yet it accused Israel of genocide. This is a staggering moral inversion. And now the award of the Nobel; this appears to be the greatest possible legitimization of the now-established consensus about Israel’s war in Gaza. The icing on the cake!

But remember this: When a jihadist terrorist organization like Hamas applauds a Nobel Peace Prize, the moral judgment of the Nobel Peace Prize Committee should rightly be called into question.

 

Suspicious Election Result in Brazil Means Trouble Ahead

 By Henry Srebrnik, Saint John Telegraph-Journal

Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has been re-elected president of Brazil in a result marred by controversy. He won an unprecedented fourth term after a dramatic comeback from a first-round defeat.

The Oct. 25 runoff saw Lula capture 51.8 per cent of the total vote over opponent Flavio Bolsonaro’s 49.2. It capped an evening of chaos at polling places following a last-minute decision to extend voting by two hours. Supreme Court Justice Cristiano Zanin ruled three minutes before the scheduled end of voting to keep polls open for two more hours.

Bolsonaro, whose father Jair is serving a 27-year prison sentence for attempting a coup after he lost the 2022 presidential election to Lula, pointed out that Justice Cristiano Zanin is Lula’s former lawyer and criticized him for “changing the rules of the game in the middle of the game.”

Flavio Bolsonaro bested Lula in the first round of the election Oct. 4, coming in at 47 per cent to 45 per cent for the president. Almost all polling had continued to show Bolsonaro in the lead in the three weeks between the balloting. 

But with just 2.2 million votes separating the candidates in the first round, it turned out even a small change in turnout tipped the balance. This result marked the first time since Brazil’s military dictatorship ended in 1985 that the second-highest vote-getter in the first-round elections won the presidency.

Brazil over the past decade has been dominated by two political forces: Lula, who governed from 2003 to 2016 and again since 2023, on the left; and Jair Bolsonaro, who governed from 2019 to 2023. The imprisonment and electoral exclusion of Jair Bolsonaro attempt have not dissolved his movement

Both men had been hit by corruption suspicions involving family members and allies, so this is not the first time Lula faced an uphill climb. He had in the past been serving a 12-year sentence over a corruption scandal that appeared to have ended his political career. But his convictions were annulled by the Supreme Court in 2021 amid evidence that the judge, prosecutors and the police had colluded to put him behind bars. This freed him to run against the elder Bolsonaro in 2022, a race he won in a huge political comeback.

Jair Bolsonaro’s admission that he accepted about US$12 million from disgraced former banker Daniel Vorcaro to produce a film on his father’s life cast a shadow over his campaign. He is under investigation for corruption, money laundering and tax evasion in connection with the case. Last week the Brazilian magazine Piaui claimed that at the height of Brazil’s 2020 coronavirus outbreak, Bolsonaro attended a boat party attended by sex workers and vaccine lobbyists hoping to strike a deal with the government of his father.

The background to the election is a nationwide corruption case -- the so-called Banco Master scandal, which has tarnished many senior figures, including some in Lula’s entourage. This includes his own son, as well as a key political ally: the country’s most powerful judge, Alexandre de Moraes of the Federal Supreme Court, hero of the Brazilian left and the man responsible for taking down Jair Bolsonaro. Recently, the juror’s ties to the bank’s head, Daniel Vorcaro, now under arrest, have come to light. Investigators believe that Vorcaro acted on different occasions based on advice from de Moraes.

The Banco Master scandal is apparently the largest bank fraud in Brazil’s history. Five years ago, Vorcaro bought a nearly bankrupt bank and renamed it Banco Master. The institution grew exponentially, based on a highly risky strategy, selling fixed-term deposits with interest rates far exceeding those offered by the competition, and without verifying whether it would have the liquidity to pay investors.

The operation functioned, in practice, as a pyramid scheme, in which applications from new customers covered the deficit of previous customers. The bank evidently went as far as to also launder money from the Primeiro Comando da Capital, the largest drug gang in the Western Hemisphere and Brazil’s most powerful crime syndicate. The bank also overvalued the property and assets it offered as collateral.

The fraud was uncovered in late 2025 with the launch of Operation Compliance Zero by the Federal Police and the liquidation of the financial institution by the Central Bank. Vorcaro was arrested last November. The Central Bank is expected to set aside over US$970 million to cover transactions with the failed lender, and the bank’s missing funds may reach US$2.2 billion. A minimum of 1.6 million people may have been affected and lost money.

This has been huge, but not unprecedented. Corruption has been endemic on both sides. Lula’s handpicked successor, Dilma Rousseff, was impeached and removed from office in 2016, also for corruption.

Lula emerged on the political stage in the 1970s, making his name as a union leader on the outskirts of São Paulo. As president between 2003 and 2010, Lula, a former metalworker with a fifth-grade education, created generous social programs that helped some 20 million Brazilians climb out of poverty.

The fiercely contested presidential race has come to a chaotic conclusion, and Lula will face a hostile Congress, where Bolsonaro’s allies are in the majority, and a polarized country. Brazil’s politics, always volatile, may get even worse. Stay tuned.