The level of unreality created by the masters of Europe is reaching new heights. It is like hallucinating to observe the politicians driving in expensive cars to meet one another, inspecting guards of honor, arranging for ministerial get-togethers, and all the while the construct that put them into office is collapsing all around them. These same politicians chatter extensively about saving the euro and the European Union, about bailouts and firewalls and fiscal pacts, as though words were deeds. No satirist could do justice to the sight of German Chancellor Angela Merkel and newly elected French President François Hollande shaking hands and vowing to work together to save the union and its currency. Insofar as this pair has any coherent ideas, they disagree. All they have in common is the precariousness of their position. Just trounced in local elections, Mrs. Merkel and her party are well on the way to joining the gathering crowd of electoral rejects. As for Hollande, he believes that growth comes from higher taxes and hundreds of thousands more state jobs, and all in arch-protectionist France. It can’t be long before such socialist illusion comes back to haunt that country.

Our satirist will also find it comic that the masters of Europe blame the Greeks while determined to ensure that the Greeks are rescued to carry on regardless. I cannot hold it against the Greeks. Entry into the EU was their opportunity as rather poor people to enrich themselves on other peoples’ money. Who would refuse such a gift? Of course they want to go on free-loading so pleasantly. It’s all part of the joke that they have voted for a politician called Alexis Tsipras, who in his well-honed Communist style believes that Greece should continue to pocket other peoples’ money. There’s consistency! But Greece came up with the wrong answer in its general election, and the masters of Europe may well make it vote and vote again until they have the right answer — though nobody can tell what that might be.

Ordinary people everywhere recognize reality, and now do not believe a thing they hear from the masters of Europe. The last world war and the Cold War survive in folk memory, and everyone is hunkering down for the hardships and injustices now brewing — defaults, conversions into new currencies, runs on banks, mass unemployment, everything that Mrs. Lagarde of the IMF in her elegant French salon way calls “messy.” Not forgetting violence. Fascist parties are rising once more. The neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party did well in the last Greek election and will do better in the next. The other side of it is the climbing suicide rate, especially among retired professional people who are defenseless as their pensions are cut.

In 1940, a book with the title “Guilty Men” became a historic marker by naming and shaming the democratic politicians whose ineptitude had allowed the Hitler catastrophe to unfold. What’s wanted now is an onslaught of just that kind to excoriate and drive out of the public arena the politicians whose fantasies about power, lack of insight into human nature, and refusal to acknowledge mistakes, have brought Europe to another perilous pass.

A few years ago a well-known historian told me that the European Union was a noble undertaking. I replied that surely he had lived long enough to know the dreadful ends to which noble enterprises have come within living memory. Yet he and those who think like him refuse to accept this reality. No matter what the cost, the determination of such people is what keeps the EU going. This is very like the determination that was all that kept the Soviet Union going in the dim and pointless era of Brezhnev when everyone could see that Communism was a busted flush.

The elections in France and Greece have thrown up Trotskyite and neo-Nazi parties. Such extremes pretend to be noble enterprises but are expressions of pure will, disconnected from reality, from anything that people actually want. Even François Hollande’s socialism is an act of pure will. His remedies of taxing and spending by centralized government have been proved time and again not to work. The European crisis, in other words, is opening the way to totalitarians who by definition cannot correct their mistakes and so must make the crisis worse. It’s the 1930s all over again, but fortunately for the time being without a Hitler on the horizon.

Should Israel Exist? is the title of a new and excellent book by Michael Curtis, professor emeritus at Rutgers and well-known as a political scientist. In a very measured way he reflects on the dominant fact concerning Israel, namely that, from the earliest proposal for such a state right up to the present, the Arabs have always refused to recognize that Israel has any right to exist; at intervals they go to war and would destroy it if they could. The United Nations, the European Union, the old Soviet Union, sometimes the American president, are among the various bodies and personalities that time and again intervene to take victory away from Israel and rescue Arabs from the consequences of their obsession. Geopolitics thus ensures that another war is bound to occur one day. Determination to defend itself, and success in doing so, is the cause of the international hostility Israel attracts.

In order to focus their hostility, the enemies of Israel ascribe to it all the sins today associated with abstract nouns like imperialism, colonialism and the like. This defies rational explanation, Professor Curtis writes, but it is serviceable. People with nothing to say about North Korea or Zimbabwe willingly dream of reducing Tel Aviv to the ruined level of Homs. In the past Jews were singled out and condemned for reasons now obviously malicious fictions. Today’s liberals and leftists are making common cause with Islamists who share falsehoods and fantasies with them.

Essentially rooted in superstition, this phenomenon keeps cropping up. Professor Moty Cristal is an Israeli expert on negotiation, and what has happened to him illustrates very clearly the racism now the proud prerogative of the Left. The British National Health Service had invited him to a workshop on “The Role of Negotiation in Dealing with Conflict.” The very man for it, you might think. But no. Unison is the trade union representing the NHS, and according to the media its members have requested the withdrawal of Cristal’s invitation,” as part of “a direct boycott of all Israeli people.” In 1933 the Nazis also declared a direct boycott of Jews, so without apparent self-consciousness or shame Unison is asking to be compared with stormtroopers.

Most of the million members of Unison, we may well suspect, will have no strong feelings about Israel and Palestine or Professor Cristal and his specialty. The insult to him is likely to be the work of a few surviving Stalinist or Trotskyite pit-ponies in a position to hijack some relevant committee in the moribund trade union.

The simultaneous death of Khalil Dale seems to offer another insight into the Islamo-leftist alliance. He was a British convert to Islam, had a long experience of do-gooding among Muslims, and was finally an aid worker in Pakistan. Islamists there took him hostage and then abandoned his decapitated corpse by a roadside. He has been the subject of a number of admiring articles, one of them in the London Times by Abdal Hakim Murad. Also a Muslim convert, he had been born in England as Tim Winters and now holds a lectureship in Islamic Studies at Cambridge University paid for by one of the Gulf rulers. He rejoices in the growing number of British people like him and Khalil Dale who have converted, especially women since 9/11, concluding, “We have found Islam to be a path to God.” Actually the unfortunate Khalil Dale found it to be a path to a grisly death. Michael Curtis argues that Jew-hatred has no rational explanation, but the subconscious sense that Islamists are unstoppable is widening. To be pleading for mercy is not enough; it’s too late for that, so it’s best to be on their side — and if that means sacrificing Israel and Jews, so be it.

Queen Elizabeth II is celebrating her Diamond Jubilee. A year or two more, and she will have been on the throne longer than her great-great-grandmother Queen Victoria. Her intention is to visit every county in Britain, and yesterday was the turn of Powys, in Wales. If you live here you had better get accustomed to rain. My father used to say, “I’m Welsh, I don’t get wet.” Yesterday the sky was extremely grey and low, and everyone got wet.

There are few grand houses hereabout, but one of them is Glanusk. The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh flew in by helicopter at midday for lunch, and drove through the park afterwards in a motorcade. Perfunctory, you might say, merely fulfilling an obligation. I suppose you might also say that it was merely the occasion for a day off for the thousands of people present. Most of us in Powys are sheep farmers. Tents and marquees and stalls stretched around the park; children from almost 50 schools were taking part and singing; the brass band played; the flags flapped.

Since I am in the business of generalizing, I would say that most people here take life as they find it, with a sense that government is going to be against you, much like the weather. And here they all were soaked to the skin and slipping on mud underfoot, yet with expectation rising as the moment approached when the Queen would drive past. And there she was, in the back of a Rolls Royce driven at walking pace, dressed in turquoise blue, waving through the open window and looking half her age.

What can this lady mean to these cheering and excited people? Continuity, I suppose, though the country today is very different from what it was when she began her reign. Duty, perhaps responsibility, just being loyal to the things it is right and proper to be loyal to. Walter Laqueur is one of the most experienced and far-sighted political analysts of the day, and his new book After the Fall lays out how Europe has come to a dead end, with no way out of the inextricable mess its foolish leaders have got the continent into while the Queen has been getting on with public service these 50 years. In a judicious questioning tone which is particularly convincing, he unfolds why the nations of Europe have no further part to play in history. And yet the emotional energy of the crowd at the sight — really only a momentary glimpse — of the lady who is the national emblem made me wonder whether for once Walter Laqueur mightn’t be wrong, and in fact the world hasn’t heard the last of Britain.

Nazir Ahmad is the first Muslim immigrant to have been made a member of the House of Lords. Born in Pakistani Kashmir in 1955, he came to Rotherham in Yorkshire at the age of seven, and lives there still. A municipal councilor and Labour Party activist, he was ennobled by Tony Blair in 1998. Ahmad was unknown nationally but Blair liked to imagine that gestures of the kind brought him popularity at no cost and the Muslim vote into the bargain. For Ahmad, this was an honor that ought to have carried responsibility with it.

Ahmad instead has pushed Muslims and everyone else into mutual confrontations. He gave a book launch in the House of Lords for one Israel Shamir, a renegade Jew turned Swedish who builds a literary career by writing disgusting anti-Semitic books. In 2006 Ahmad wrote an open letter to Blair criticizing British foreign policy on the grounds that involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan is criminal. He was very upset when Salman Rushdie became another Muslim to receive a title. Other members of the House of Lords invited Geert Wilders, the Dutch politician, in 2009 to show his film about Muslim extremism, and Ahmad threatened to bring 10,000 Muslims to Westminster to prevent it. The government swiftly caved in and prohibited Wilders, an elected parliamentarian, from entering the country.

Lashkar-e-Taiba is the terror group that killed 166 people in Mumbai. The United States announced a bounty of ten million dollars to whoever brings in its leader, Hafiz Muhammad Saeed. Happening to be in Pakistan, Ahmad responded. It was first reported that he was offering a bounty of ten million pounds to the captor of Barack Obama or George Bush. In fact he was recorded on camera saying something not so very different, “Even if I have to beg I am willing to raise and offer £10 million so that George Bush and Tony Blair can be brought to the International Court of Justice on war crimes charges.” The Labour Party suspended him while investigations are made into this speech.

Ahmad repays the man who ennobled him by asking for that man to be brought to court. This is effectively a defense of terror. Justice for those murdered in Mumbai counts for nothing. Gratitude to Blair and responsibility to the British people are forfeit. A recent David Calling drew attention to David Hume’s observation that good manners are the pre-requisite of democracy. Nazir Ahmad has brought to a head a career of bad manners which makes him an enemy of democracy and all decent people.

Every European country is in the throes of dealing with the Muslim minority that is settling in its midst. At this point nobody knows whether accommodation is possible, or on what terms. Looking back on the civil war in the England of the 1640s, the great philosopher David Hume concluded that democracy in the last resort rests on good manners. Among Europeans, the Swiss have set an example of manners that allow different ethnicities and religions to live peacefully in a single nation state.

The number of Muslims in Switzerland has now risen to about 400,000, or five percent of the population. There are at least 300 Muslim associations in the country, and with them comes friction. Geneva already had a mosque, for example, and the City Fathers were prepared to grant permission for a second one only when a church could be built reciprocally in Saudi Arabia. The Swiss flag has an emblematic white cross at its center, and Muslims have called for its removal on the grounds that it offends multiculturalism. 

The Swiss People’s Party is on one side of such issues. At a conference a few months ago, one of its members of parliament had a pie thrown in his face for speaking about “a certain religious dogma” alien to everything Swiss. A referendum in 2009 passed the banning of minarets on future mosques and the wearing of burqas looks like being banned as well. 

The major Muslim associations for their part want to set up a Muslim parliament, to be called Umma Schweiz — Umma being the Arabic for the worldwide Muslim collective. This is intended to be a legislative body parallel to the Swiss parliament, and operating on principles of Sharia law. It is very bad manners even to raise the prospect of what would be a big step in colonialism.

Swiss national independence is celebrated in the story of William Tell and his rebellion against tyranny. It so happens that Rossini’s heroic opera about Tell is being currently staged in Zurich. The tyrant’s soldiers march under the twelve star banner of the European Union, another collective that bullies Switzerland and pressures it to change its ways and become a member. To my knowledge, it is the first time that the European Union has been openly represented anywhere as a militarized tyranny, and this response to another set of very bad manners is therefore also a portent. Lots of students unexpectedly entered the auditorium to join in singing Rossini’s final great chorus in praise of the Swiss nation. 

The moral of the story is that David Hume had an important insight: Good manners will always determine democracy.

Günter Grass thinks that Israel is a threat to world peace, and he’s written a poem to say so with the title “What must be said.” It is really rather amazing how adept and persistent the man is at getting things wrong.

He lived through the Nazi experience, and his explanation of it is that Hitler was a magician who bewitched the Germans. Metaphysical fantasy, in other words, replaces the political reality that Germans became enthusiastic Nazis in the belief that Hitler was fulfilling huge national ambitions. This imaginative excuse for the intellectual and moral breakdown of the Germans made Grass popular and won him the Nobel Prize.

Throughout his career Grass insisted that Germans had to confess to the wrongful ways in which they had allowed themselves to be deceived. Only after some six decades of heavy moral bombardment of other Germans did he let drop that he too had been a member of the Waffen SS. The hypocrisy of the concealment is as rich as any example to be found.

This expert in double-dealing now claims that he is tired of “Western hypocrisy” for calling to end the Iranian nuclear program while tolerating the Israeli nuclear program.  Not so fast, please. It was Nazism that finally drove numbers of post-war Jewish survivors to seek safety in the state of Israel.  Again it is intellectually and morally bankrupt for a former member of the SS to come up with warnings and prescriptions to these survivors or their descendants, most of whom have been driven to extremes precisely by the SS.  Grass is blaming the Jews of Israel for taking steps to stay alive and also delighting those who still want to kill them — and that’s what must be said.