http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/If-you-see-something–say-nothing-7654 Changes to the AP stylebook show that we’re blinding ourselves to the connections between Islamic extremism and terrorism. It was a report of the now numbingly familiar sort. Witnesses at the synagogue in Paris recounted that an Iranian immigrant had been screaming “Allahu Akbar!” while he chased the rabbi and his son. When he […]
A RESPONSE FROM GERALD WALPIN:
I find the definition of “bigot” very interesting:
“One who is strongly partial to one’s own group, religion, race, or politics and is intolerant of those who differ.”
When it comes to politics (even the other categories) most people are, and are entitled to be, strongly partial to one’s own views — indeed, if one is not, one doesn’t really have one’s own views.
As to “intolerant of those who differ,” that can mean nothing more than believing that those who disagree are dead wrong — an allowed view. As you so well show with your examples, the accusation of being a bigot often is thrown against those with whom one disagrees, making the accuser the bigot!
Now that is real food for thought. rsk
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/the-angel-band-project-why-it-matters?f=puball Readers of Family Security Matters who have followed my work over the years have noticed in the nearly 100 articles I’ve written that most often I address terrorism, geoglobal as well as domestic threats to the security of our nation, and preparedness issues. Often these are discussions about WMDs. Big picture stuff. In the […]
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/350183/when-sunni-and-shiite-extremists-make-war-daniel-pipes
“The fighting now underway benefits those of us outside the Middle East. May it weaken both combatants even as our governments take meaningful steps to help civilians caught in the crossfire.”
In his article “The Muslim Civil War,” Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal disagrees with my argument about Syria. He characterizes the position I hold this way:
If al Qaeda fighters want to murder Hezbollah fighters and Hezbollah fighters want to return the favor, who in their right mind would want to stand in the way? . . . If one branch of Islam wants to be at war with another branch for a few years — or decades — so much the better for the non-Islamic world. Mass civilian casualties in Aleppo or Homs is their tragedy, not ours. It does not implicate us morally. And it probably benefits us strategically, not least by redirecting jihadist energies away from the West.
Wrong on every count.
Why wrong and on how many counts? Actually, Stephens points to just one count: He looks back on the Iraq-Iran war of the 1980s, arguing that it harmed both the West’s interests and its moral standing. He assesses its impact on the West:
It’s true that the price of crude declined sharply almost every year of the war, but that only goes to show how weak the correlation is between Persian Gulf tensions and oil prices. Otherwise, the 1980s were the years of the tanker wars in the Gulf, including Iraq’s attack on the USS Stark; the hostage-taking in Lebanon; and the birth of Hezbollah, with its suicide bombings of the U.S. Marine barracks and embassy in Beirut. Iraq invaded Kuwait less than two years after the war’s end. Iran emerged with its revolutionary fervors intact — along with a rekindled interest in developing nuclear weapons. In short, a long intra-Islamic war left nobody safer, wealthier or wiser.
He finds that the fighting left the West morally tainted.
The U.S. embraced Saddam Hussein as a counterweight to Iran, and later tried to ply Iran with secret arms in exchange for the release of hostages. Patrolling the Strait of Hormuz, the USS Vincennes mistakenly shot down an Iranian jetliner over the Gulf, killing 290 civilians.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/05/business/energy-environment/us-to-hold-sale-for-offshore-wind-energy-leases.html?_r=1&
U.S. to Lease Federal Waters for Commercial Offshore Wind Energy
By JOHN M. BRODER
WASHINGTON — The federal government will hold the first lease sale for commercial offshore wind energy projects at the end of July, the Interior Department announced on Tuesday.
The sale will offer 164,750 acres of federal waters off the coasts of Rhode Island and Massachusetts. If that is fully developed, officials said, it could produce as much as 3,400 megawatts of electricity, enough to power more than one million homes.
The lease sale shows the Obama administration’s determination to pursue a wide range of domestic energy production, from fossil fuels and renewable sources. Sally Jewell, the new secretary of the interior, said the department would accelerate offshore wind leasing if the July 31 lease sale was successful.
“Today we are moving closer to tapping into the enormous potential offered by offshore wind to create jobs, increase our sustainability and strengthen our nation’s competitiveness in this new energy frontier,” Ms. Jewell said in a statement. “As we experience record domestic oil and gas development, we are also working to ensure that America leads the world in developing the energy of the future.”
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/350116/whos-brainwashed-kathryn-jean-lopez You don’t have to be a brain surgeon to find the subject of how our brains work fascinating. As Sally Satel points out in an interview with National Review Online’s Kathryn Jean Lopez, because the “brain is a very attractive topic to both readers and journalists . . . the sheer numbers of articles present many opportunities for […]
http://www.thecommentator.com/article/3695/scantily_clad_israeli_soldiers_inspire_headline_writers Scantily clad Israeli soldiers inspire headline writers… In all the coverage of the IDF soldiers posing topless or half naked, The Sun’s headline has got to be the breast… (pun intended… I assure you) In case you missed it, and I don’t know how you could have, a group of female Israel Defense Forces […]
http://www.thecommentator.com/article/3715/prepare_for_war_over_the_balfour_declaration
WELL THE BRITS HAVE A LOT OF APOLOGIZING TO DO WITH RESPECT TO BETRAYALS OF PALESTINIAN JEWS, THE TRAPPING OF MILLIONS OF JEWS IN EUROPE BY ACCEDING TO ARAB DEMANDS, AND POST WAR BLOCKADES OF PALESTINE INCLUDING FIRING UPON VESSELS OF REFUGEES TRYING TO REACH PALESTINE. TO MY KNOWLEDGE, HOWEVER, ISRAEL HAS NEVER DEMANDED THE APOLOGY THAT IS DUE…..RSK
November 2017 marks 100 years since the famous “Balfour Declaration” was made in a letter to the British Jewish community, including the famous words, “His Majesty’s government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object”.
The letter started a chain of events that led, by no means smoothly, to the eventual formation of the modern state of Israel. With the advent in recent years of campaigns such as BDS (Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions), an essentially anti-Israel movement, Sabeel (Palestinian “Liberation Theology”), and a plethora of other anti-Israel organisations and groups, attempts to attribute the blame for today’s conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs have delved back into history long before 1948.
Now has arisen a group that wants Britain to apologise for the Balfour Declaration ever having been made. The Balfour Project claims that Britain deceived both Jews and Arabs in making the 1917 declaration in favour of a “Jewish national home” in what was then Palestine.
http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/
Few figures in American political life have been as consistently wrong as often as John Kerry. The former Senator bet on every Communist leader and Middle Eastern tyrant he could find only to watch the wheels of history roll over his mistakes. And now as Secretary of State, Kerry is at it again.
In between peddling a Syrian peace process that no one but him believes in, he took a break to peddle the even more discredited peace process between Israel and the terrorists.
In a speech to the American Jewish Committee, Kerry invoked the litany of failures, “Madrid to Oslo to Wye River and Camp David and Annapolis”, but urged his audience not to pay attention to history and “give in to cynicism”.
“Cynicism has never solved anything,” he said. But then again neither has the Peace Process. And while cynicism isn’t likely to usher in an era of peace or grow money on trees, it offers you the power to extract yourself from bad situations instead of taking refuge in more of the same wishful thinking that got you into them.
If you find yourself mailing your tenth check to that Nigerian prince, cynicism won’t get you a 200 percent return, but it will keep you from losing more money.
“Why should any Israeli start giving in to that cynicism now?” Kerry asked. Perhaps because it’s been twenty years. Or because thousands of Israelis have been killed and wounded. Or because there isn’t a single piece of supporting evidence to show that the other side is interested in any kind of final peace agreement.
http://pjmedia.com/blog/are-we-tired-of-fighting/?print=1
In a June 9, 2005 speech [1] in New York, former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert, praising what would turn out to be Israel’s disastrous unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, announced that “we are tired of fighting, we are tired of being courageous, we are tired of winning, we are tired of defeating our enemies. … We want them to be our friends, our partners, our good neighbors.” This misguided gesture of reconciliation came back to haunt Israel in the form of thousands of rockets launched from Gaza upon Israeli population centers and a humiliating conflict with Hezbollah in the 2006 “Summer War.” Olmert is further on record [2] as assuring us that “peace is achieved through concessions. We all know that.” Well no, we don’t. What we do know, or should know, is that the concessionary mentality without credible force to ensure reciprocity empowers tyrants and warlords. In such cases, peace now means war later. Or even sooner.
I refer initially to Olmert since he strikes me not simply as a failed and timorous Israeli leader but as a figure representative of our times. It is no secret that the liberal and “progressivist” echelon in the Western media and political circles long ago capitulated to our despotic and theo-totalitarian enemies, going soft on Russia and bending the knee to an aggressive and supremacist Islamic juggernaut. We can expect no better of a pervasive left sociopolitical orientation that envisages the erosion or supersession of the Western cultural heritage, including the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648 which established the rule of nations, in order to promote the agenda of transnational governance and the oversight of the United Nations. Also under assault are the core principles of individual liberty (freedom of thought and speech, habeus corpus or freedom from arbitrary arrest, freedom of assembly, and non-intrusive government), to be eventually replaced by certain precepts and maxims of Islamic law, not the least of which are the so-called “blasphemy laws.” Under the rubric of “hate speech,” it will become an indictable offencs to criticize Islam. Indeed, the media, political, and ecclesiastical effort to scumble [3] and pardon the horror of Islamic ideology as it remorselessly encroaches has an evident purpose: to find a means of living with it, to posit distinctions that enable us to legitimize it, and thus to relieve us of the civilizational duty to confront the greatest menace of our day.
All this is standard fare. But what is profoundly shocking is the strange turn in the Western conservative consensus that has seen it veer into nominal alignment with the sensibility of its opponents on the left. Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus is also distressed by this unfortunate divagation, lamenting with respect to his party that “we’ve sort of lost our history.” [4] What is one to make, for example, of a Republican senator like John McCain — a former presidential candidate to boot — leading the charge against Michele Bachmann when she called for an investigation into the problematic Muslim Brotherhood ties [5] of Hillary Clinton’s aide Huma Abedin? This example serves as a good indicator of the extent to which liberal values — undifferentiated tolerance of the Other and ultra-sensitivity to charges of Islamophobia — have come to trump even national security at the highest levels of political authority.
I have seen this shift, this reversion or deflection, surreptitiously yet starkly — a truly troubling paradox — at work in a number of my own friends: a Red Tory behaving from one day to the next like a Blue Liberal; an intelligent poet (another paradox) suddenly casting aspersions at anyone voting Republican; an exceptionally talented writer and close colleague who, without the slightest warning, began denouncing Israel and celebrating Ramadan and who now appears to have converted to Islam; an apparently staunch conservative, and a friend of many years, at a convivial supper one evening, attacking Pamela Geller as “arrogant” and “a disgrace,” slandering “mosque buster” Gavin Boby [6] as an unreconstructed bigot, tarring the brave and much-defamed Tommy Robinson of the English Defense League as a community-dividing fascist, expressing suspicion of Geert Wilders’ bona fides, and dwelling approvingly on the distinction between Islam and Islamism. What has happened?
It seems as if some sort of microbial agent has subtly infected their minds, manifesting as a falling away from an earlier critical outlook accompanied by a growing tendency to regard Islam as inherently peaceful, beneficent, and innocuous. Terrorist violence is to be understood as the tradecraft of an “extremist fringe,” conveniently known as “Islamists,” as opposed to the sociable and nonbelligerent character of the “moderate majority” and the living marrow of Islamic orthodoxy.
Pointing out that “moderate Muslims” are largely invisible in the public arena as a countering presence to their more enthusiastic brethren cuts no ice with these new proselytes. Suggesting that the “moderate majority” actually provides the religion of violence with the continuity and staying power that it requires, lending it viability and enabling its more extreme practitioners to carry out their scriptural mandate is dismissed out of hand. Showing that violence against the infidel and the apostate is intrinsic to the Koran, Hadith, Sira, and Fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence) — the normative bedrock of the faith — and that jihad constitutes a bounden duty for all believing Muslims is equally ineffective. Limning the 1400 year history of civilizational warfare prosecuted by Islam, detailing the provisions of Sharia law insinuating its way into Europe and America, and alluding to the thousands upon thousands of Islamic-sponsored terrorist acts and attempts, from the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center to the Boston Marathon atrocity to the plot to blow up [7] a VIA Rail passenger train over Niagara Falls to the beheading [8] of a British soldier on a London street, has no impact on these insulated fantasists. After all, none of them has been singed by Islamic fire. They do not have to worry about mosques being erected in their generally tony neighborhoods and the ensuing thuggery forcing them out of their homes, as in many English working class districts. They have yet to confront bombs exploding at their festivities and communal events. They are not in wheelchairs but in Passats.
The gradual weakening and even betrayal of a once reasonably robust conservative consensus has begun to exert its influence even on those commentators and analysts whose acumen and traditional allegiances we have previously trusted. According to the swelling legion of propitiators and accommodationists, we must under no circumstances offend the community of “moderate Muslims” who presumably represent the last best hope for both Islam and for us — a hope, be it said, projected into a distant and Arcadian future. No matter. It is thus no surprise that a considerable number of our intellectual and social elite have been profoundly impressed by Bassam Tibi’s 2012 book Islamism and Islam [9], with its intent to bifurcate what is canonically one, and by Daniel Pipes, who insists on the same distinction.
