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~The essential difference between the rulers and the ruled is that the former get to swan off to banquets hosted by the hottie Dutch queen where they make grand plans for places even more distant and unpronounceable, while the latter can't help noticing that their own towns and countries are a lot crapper than they were twenty years ago. And they would greatly appreciate it if their visionary leaders would cease scanning the far horizon and focus on the home front.

When I said as much at the beginning of the week, several readers commented that there was no reason we couldn't do both. There's not a lot of evidence that western governments are capable of multi-tasking, and quite a lot to suggest they have difficulty uni-tasking. So it helps to be able to prioritise. You'll recall that Donald J Trump famously inquired of his learned viziers why America only got immigrants from what he called bleephole countries. Maybe the reason is that almost every western city anyone's heard of - San Francisco and Los Angeles, London and Paris - is now itself a bleephole, so the newly arrived bleepholers fit right in. In that sense, if you're a New Yorker, the most significant event of recent days is not the bunker-busting of the mullahs but their fellow Shia Twelver Muslim winning the Democrat mayoral primary.

Thus John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, began the week accusing Sean Davis of The Federalist of a blood libel - for noting entirely accurately that Lindsey Graham-type "regime change" led to the extinction of the Christian community in Iraq, and was now doing the same to the even older Christian community in Syria:

If they "broke the swastika mould" when they made Sean Davis, what did they use for all those Democrat progressives who stampeded to the polling booths for a younger and dishier version of London's taqiyya mayor? Forty per cent of New Yorkers are immigrants; in the city's schools, two-thirds of children live in immigrant households. This is not normal outside conquest or the plague. And yet, despite all the vibrant diversity, they're expected to keep voting for Chuck Schumer and low-grade Cuomos now and forever?

By midweek, the Commentary honcho had, with some effort, managed to avert his gaze from Mr Davis:

So a Muslim supporter of jihad is likely to be the next mayor of a city that was once 31 percent Jewish (in 1950) and is now 12 percent Jewish.

New York is famously the most Jewish city outside Israel. If the above stats sound bad, well, it could be worse: at the dawn of the twentieth century, the most Jewish city outside Palestine was Baghdad, which was also thirty-one per cent Jewish, give or take a decimal point; now it's down to zero per cent. The Jewish community in Baghdad was almost as old as Islam itself: it dates from the founding of the city in the eighth century. But it's gone.

Before ill-health clobbered my ability to travel, I always used to make a point - from Scandinavia to the Bukovina to North Africa - of visiting Jewish cemeteries. Not because I'm especially interested in Jews, but because it's sobering to be in places where once were Jews and now are none. If John Podhoretz is not interested in the extinction of Christians on America's watch, then how about the extinction of Jews on America's watch? Jews were in Afghanistan even longer than they were in Baghdad - almost three thousand years. In the early Sixties, they still numbered in the thousands, and the Kabul synagogue was known to locals, rather charmingly, as the "Jewish mosque". By the time the Taliban were overthrown, the Jewish community was down to two men, who, in what sounds like an Afghan summer-stock production of a Neil Simon play generated by AI, did not get on. The one guy lived in the basement of the synagogue; above him, the other started a kebab shop to conceal the fact that behind the rotating meats lay a house of God. Despite the deep cover of his kebabs, someone from the Taliban confiscated the "Jewish mosque"'s copy of the Torah, which was over four hundred years old.

The Torah-purloiner wound up at Gitmo, but Zablon Simintov, by now "the last Jew in Afghanistan", clung on in Kabul because he hoped to recover the scrolls. He threw in the towel only after the 2021 implosion of Washington's client state. It turned out he had a distant female cousin, the other Jew in Aghanistan. I believe one is now in Israel, the other in Canada, which doesn't seem such a smart move. So two decades as an American protectorate finally extinguished one of the world's oldest Jewish communities.

Mr Simintov did not want to leave what he still regarded as his country. I don't blame him: it is not a small thing to move on. But, if you're a Jew in Montreal or Dublin or Lyon, your children will also be moving on. Come to that, on present demographic trends, what is to prevent the Jewish community of New York going the same way as those of Baghdad and the Bukovina? Zohran Mamdami is the Democrats' future; Chuck Schumer might as well be running a kebab shop in Kabul. Why be surprised at what was entirely predictable?

And, of course, this column is not really about Jews at all, is it? As I wrote from the Jewish cemetery in Malmö:

A community in such steep decline that it can no longer tend its graves is a sobering preview of the demographic eclipse Catholics and Protestants will shortly be confronting across the Continent.

London and New York might as well be occupied cities. To liberate them would require "remigration" at the very least - and more likely something more bloody and violent. Here are two recent Tweets from my friend Eva Vlaardingerbroek. First:

That's what the diversity-is-our-strength crowd have in mind for you. The more multiculti the state gets, the more uniform the permitted public discourse. So why John Podhoretz thinks he needs to police Sean Davis Tweets is mystifying, unless he's angling for a gig with the German coppers.

And here's Eva's second post:

The intersection of transformative demography and western leftism is nowhere to go for your future: the incoming mayor's maternal grandfather was a Hindu civil servant of the British Raj; his grandson is a socialist Shia Twelver who wants government grocery stores and dormitories for the homeless in the subway.

But yeah, sure, they broke the swastika mould when they made Sean Davis and Mollie Hemingway.

~As The Mark Steyn Club settles into its ninth year, we're very appreciative of all those who signed up in our first flush and are still eager to be here as we cruise on towards our first decade. We thank you all. For more information on the Club, see here.