French Terror Attacks Are a Stark Warning to US Voters

On Thursday, a knife-wielding assailant crying “Allahu Akbar” murdered three people at the Catholic basilica of Notre Dame de Nice, beheading one woman.

The savagery in France is a reminder of the choice facing American voters at the ballot box next week. Will we stick with a president who intuited that our elites were sleepwalking toward a deadly precipice — and taking the rest of us along for the plunge? Or do we choose to return to power those same pre-Trump elites, with their dreams of a borderless world?

Europe made its choices. In 2015, right around the time then-candidate Donald Trump was shaking up the staid orthodoxies of the Republican Party, the Continent’s de facto leader, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, threw open the gates to more than a million newcomers from the Middle East and ­Africa.

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Yet the terror attacks committed by the newcomers mounted, exactly as the skeptics had predicted: a knife attack in Reutling­en, Germany (committed by a Syrian asylum seeker); a truck attack at a Christmas market in Berlin (Tunisian asylum-seeker); a bombing outside a music festival (Syrian refugee); a stabbing at a train station in Marseille (Tunisian illegal immigrant); and on and on.

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{snip} It was on the night of the Nov. 13, 2015, massacres in Paris, in which jihadists, several of them Syrian and Iraqi nationals, killed 130 innocents and wounded scores more that I became convinced Trump might just become the next president — simply because he described reality as it was, rather than as globalist elites on both sides of the Atlantic might wish.

While then-French President François Hollande vowed to accept 30,000 newcomers under the European migrant-relocation scheme, and Obama continued to sing a similar tune, Trump said, in effect, enough. And as president, he took steps to curb migration from terror-producing states — and decisively crushed ISIS.

This realism produced ­results for which Trump doesn’t get nearly enough credit. As Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, CEO of the security-analysis firm Valens Global, told me: “There have been fewer and less lethal mass-casualty jihadist attacks in the United States over the past four years, however one defines the term.”

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