RUTHFULLY YOURS

Debate is raging in the expert community over what ISIS is: a state, transnational ideology, or just a way of life? The case for ‘state’ is made by in a Defense News article [1] where a state department official testifies that ISIL (ISIS) is ‘no longer a terrorist group, it’s a full blown army’.

In a telling assessment that provides a glimpse into Obama administration officials’ thinking about the situation in Iraq, [US State Department’s Brett] McGurk told the panel ISIL is “no longer a terrorist group.”

Rather, he said the group has morphed into “a full-blown army.”

This is comforting to the State department. If ISIS is a state, the same as Canada, then it can be contained in the same way any ordinary country is restrained; by alliances, diplomacy, sanctions. The all purpose nostrum of diplomacy is to ‘statify’ an adversary. If Hamas, for example, can be turned into a state, then it becomes something familiar and safe, that in time might even have an embassy in Washington.

Others view ISIS as a transnational organization [2], with a broad global appeal, the heir to al-Qaeda. Briefly, the good news is that young militants are no longer joining al-Qaeda. The bad news is that they are joining ISIS instead.

Islamists now coming of age are more frequently dismissing al-Qaida as a worn down and ineffective organization, the wire service reported on Wednesday. Using social media services known for attracting candidate supporters, the young radicals have increasingly voiced admiration for the newer group that declared a new “Islamic State” last month in recently seized Middle Eastern territory.

One supporting piece of evidence that ISIS is transnational rather than a state are warnings that Norway is preparing for a possible Syria-linked terrorist attack [3]. Canada wouldn’t do that, now would it? States don’t do that. Ideological movements do.

Benedicte Bjoernland, head of Norway’s intelligence service, announced at a press conference this morning that the agency has received “‘reliable information’ about plans for some kind of attack ‘within days,’” linked to jihadists in Syria. This is the sort of threat many Western countries have recently been worried might come out of Syria eventually. Norway is beefing up its airport and border security in response to the threat.

The House Armed Services Committee will next week bring up a bipartisan resolution condemning President Obama’s release of five Taliban leaders in exchange for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl.

Obama didn’t notify Congress before the early June swap, which brought to an end five years of captivity for Bergdahl. The administration claims they had to make an emergency decision because of concerns about Bergdahl’s health.

Bergdahl has completed his reintegration process and is now back on active duty in Texas while the Pentagon investigates the circumstances surrounding his capture.

On Tuesday, the committee will consider a bill from Rep. Scott Rigell (R-Va.), along with Reps. Reid Ribble (R-Wis.), John Barrow (D-Ga.), and Nick Rahall (D-W.Va.), to condemn the commander in chief.

The bill has a total of 82 co-sponsors. It:

(1) condemns and disapproves of the failure of the Obama administration to comply with the lawful 30-day statutory reporting requirement in executing the release of five senior members of the Taliban from detention at United States Naval Station, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba;

(2) expresses grave concern over national security implications that may arise due to the release of Taliban officials, including the national security threat to the people and Armed Forces of the United States and complications of the current efforts of the United States to combat terrorism worldwide;

(3) expresses grave concern over the repercussions of negotiating with terrorists, and the risk that such negotiations with terrorists may further encourage hostilities and the abduction of Americans as a means of further prisoner exchanges;

(4) stipulates that further violations of the law set forth in section 1035 of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2014 (Public Law 113-66; 10 U.S.C. 801 note) and section 8111 of the Department of Defense Appropriations Act, 2014 (Public Law 113-76) are unacceptable;

(5) declares grave misgivings about the prospect of any other similar transfers from United States Naval Station, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, even if undertaken pursuant to statutory requirements; and

Progressive Jews, Wake Up
At pro-Hamas demonstrations in U.S cities in recent weeks, anti-Semitism rises up and is heard.

Abraham H. Miller is an emeritus professor of political science at the University of Cincinnati. He has served on the faculty of the University of California, Davis, and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

In the largely Orthodox Jewish neighborhood of Chicago’s Petersen Park, residents last Saturday morning found anti-Semitic leaflets on their way to synagogue to observe the Sabbath. The leaflets threatened violence against the community unless Israel stopped the war with Gaza.

For those progressive Jews who have found solace in the myth that anti-Zionism has nothing to do with anti-Semitism, the events across the globe of the last few weeks have been a rude and discomforting awakening. And so they turned to their final recourse, the belief that America was different.

Sure, there was a pogrom at a synagogue in Paris, but, well, that’s Paris. Muslims and their neo-fascist and leftist allies might walk through the streets of Germany shouting anti-Jewish slogans reminiscent of the Hitler Youth, but, well, that’s Germany.

Then came the pro-Hamas demonstrations in Los Angeles, Boston, and Chicago.

In San Francisco, if not for the police, some 30 pro-Israel protesters would have been brutalized by over 300 people demonstrating on behalf of the genocidal Hamas terrorists.

The media portray Israel as an all-white colonialist state. What’s the real story?
Mainstream-media outlets in the West love to run photographs of Palestinians, typically looking sympathetic in the ruins of bombed-out buildings. On the rare occasions when editors include photos of Israelis, the images bear a striking similarity to one another: All the people in them are white.

In reality, Israelis — including thousands of soldiers in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) — are not uniformly white or even Jewish. Consider the commander of the Golani Brigade, one of the country’s elite infantry units, currently fighting in Gaza as part of Operation Protective Edge. Colonel Rasan Alian is an Arab Druse who has served in the IDF for over two decades. Recently wounded in the eye and hospitalized, he returned to the front lines as quickly as he could to lead his men. In Alian’s own words, quoted in the Israeli press, “I want to go back to Gaza, and get to as many terrorists as possible.”

Do you find it intriguing that an Arab abhors Hamas and has spent 20 years of his life defending the Jewish state? Well, CNN doesn’t. Its investigative journalists prefer to malign Israelis as “scum.” Apparently Rasan Alian just isn’t a compelling story.

Or what about Chief Warrant Officer Baynesian Kasahun and Staff Sergeant Moshe Malko, two of the Israeli soldiers tragically killed in combat? They are both black. In fact, peruse the entire list of those who have given their lives to stop Hamas’s reign of terror. There is a lot of diversity there.

From all the photos in the New York Times over the past decade, you would never know that more than 125,000 Ethiopian Jews live in Israel, and many of them have served in the IDF. Or that, in addition to the Druse, large numbers of Bedouins volunteer to join the Israeli army, even though they are exempt from conscription. Or that Israel and the IDF boast Jews of Middle Eastern descent.

Instead, much of the Western media carefully “whitewashes” images from Israel to give the impression that Israelis are all of European heritage. Why? Because whitewashing fits the post-colonial narrative the Left applies to Israel. In that mindset, the Jewish state is the “colonizer/occupier,” and the Palestinians living in Gaza and the West Bank are the “natives.” If IDF soldiers have the same skin tone as British imperialists or Christopher Columbus, the template is that much easier to apply.

Why does Israel battle Hamas? Visualize San Diego in the hands of Mexican revanchists.

To understand why Israel fights in the Gaza Strip, try this thought experiment:

Imagine that Mexicans loudly and violently demand that America vacate the territory that Mexico previously controlled in the U.S. southwest. To make their case, Mexican revanchists brutally attack American diplomatic posts, assassinate U.S. officials, and even kidnap and kill American athletes at the summer Olympics. Despite such bloodshed, these Mexicans gain supporters among anti-American governments and elites worldwide.

Caving into this pressure, America gives the Mexicans San Diego. Dubbed “land for peace,” Washington’s concession would let Mexicans manage that city and show how they might govern if granted a “right of return” on even larger, previously Mexican lands.

While most Americans leave San Diego quietly, the U.S. military ejects holdouts from their property and removes them just before the Mexicans move in.

San Diego’s Mexican citizens soon reject the comparatively tame Institutional Revolutionary Party and elect leaders from the radical Zapatista Army of National Liberation. As its recent communiqué declares, “The anti-capitalist struggle below and to the left continues.”

In its propaganda war against Israel, Hamas will do whatever it takes.

Sound bites are usually meant to obfuscate as much as clarify. Rarely is one so incisive as the line uttered by Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu the other day about the difference between Israel and Hamas: “We’re using missile defense to protect our civilians, and they’re using their civilians to protect their missiles.”

This is the ground truth of the latest Gaza War that gets obscured by the relentlessly repeated stark disparity in casualties between the Gazans, hundreds of whom have died in the conflict, and the Israelis.

Each civilian death in Gaza is a tragedy, but who is ultimately responsible? The moral calculus here is simple. Hamas precipitated the war and persisted in waging it even when Israel was willing to accept an Egyptian offer of a cease-fire. Hamas hides its rockets in schools and places its command bunkers under hospitals. It wants war, and it wants civilian casualties.

Joseph Stalin infamously said that one death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic. Hamas is happy with either a tragedy (the four kids killed on the beach by Israeli shells last week) or a statistic (the climbing civilian toll), so long as it is death and so long as it can be used in the propaganda war against Israel.

This isn’t hard to understand. Yet even supporters of Israel give in to the twisted logic that the Gaza conflict is somehow an indictment of the Jewish state. Former secretary of state Madeleine Albright said on CNN “that this is hurting Israel’s moral authority.” Which is exactly the conclusion Hamas wants “the international community” to draw from its depraved indifference to the safety of Gazans.

The world is aflame and our leader is on the 14th green.

The president’s demeanor is worrying a lot of people. From the immigration crisis on the Mexican border to the Islamic State rising in Mesopotamia, Barack Obama seems totally detached. When he does interrupt his endless rounds of golf, fundraising, and photo ops, it’s for some affectless, mechanical, almost forced public statement.

Regarding Ukraine, his detachment — the rote, impassive voice — borders on dissociation. His U.N. ambassador, Samantha Power, delivers an impassioned denunciation of Russia. Obama cautions that we not “get out ahead of the facts,” as if the facts of this case — Vladimir Putin’s proxies’ shooting down a civilian airliner — are in doubt.

The preferred explanation for the president’s detachment is psychological. He’s checked out. Given up. Let down and disappointed by the world, he is in withdrawal.

Perhaps. But I’d propose an alternate theory that gives him more credit: Obama’s passivity stems from an idea. When Obama says Putin has placed himself on the wrong side of history in Ukraine, he actually believes it. He disdains realpolitik because he believes that, in the end, such primitive 19th-century notions as conquest are self-defeating. History sees to their defeat.

“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice” is one of Obama’s favorite sayings. Ultimately, injustice and aggression don’t pay. The Soviets saw their 20th-century empire dissolve. More proximally, U.S. gains in Iraq and Afghanistan were, in time, liquidated. Ozymandias lies forever buried and forgotten in desert sands.

Remember when, at the beginning of the Ukraine crisis, Obama tried to construct for Putin “an off-ramp” from Crimea? Absurd as this idea was, I think Obama was sincere. He actually imagined that he’d be saving Putin from himself, that Crimea could only redound against Russia in the long run.

If you really believe this, then there is no need for forceful, potentially risky U.S. counteractions. Which explains everything since: Obama’s pinprick sanctions; his failure to rally a craven Europe; his refusal to supply Ukraine with the weapons it has been begging for.

“It’s Virtually Impossible to Be a Successful Modern President” declares the headline of a blog post by the Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza. The post has drawn a great deal of ridicule, but to our mind most of the critics fail to appreciate just how feeble an effort it is. Our aim is to correct that.

Cillizza’s argument is based on four observations: First, the presidency is a difficult job. Second, the “bully pulpit” isn’t what it used to be. Third, the electorate and elected officials have become more ideologically polarized. Fourth, the “mainstream media” are no longer a coherent and powerful entity, in part because of the rise of social media.

These utterly banal observations add up to a causal claim: that because of the last three factors, it has become impossible for a president to succeed. Well, no, not impossible, he admits at the very end, and the headline does include the weasel word virtually. “But failure is far, far more likely. Ask Barack Obama. Or George W. Bush.”

One suspects if asked, either Obama or Bush would dispute the premise that he is a failure. But rather than argue over specific cases, let’s ask Cillizza to define his terms. What constitutes a failed presidency? Here’s his answer: “A president who [sic] a majority of the country disapproves of and a country even more split along ideological lines on, well, everything.”

The second component of this definition begs the question. Cillizza claims ideological polarization causes presidential failure, which he defines in part as ideological polarization. So ideological polarization causes ideological polarization. At the end of the post, Cillizza tries to isolate disapproval from polarization and comes up with this:

I was talking to a Democratic pollster recently about President Obama’s weak job approval ratings and what it might mean for Democrats on the ballot this fall. I asked how Obama could move his numbers up and what a “good place” for him might look like. The pollster responded that the political world needed to change its definition of what being a popular president entails in this day and age. His point was that if Obama could somehow crawl back to 50 percent approval before November, that would be a huge success. Obama’s ceiling–almost no matter what he said or did–was around 52 or 53 percent, the pollster argued.

Of course that goes both ways: A polarized electorate means that a president’s approval rating has a floor (in Obama’s case a bit below 40%) as well as a ceiling. But in any case, if contemporaneous approval ratings were the measure of presidential success, Truman would be considered a failure and Harding would be on Mount Rushmore.

The supposedly independent agency harassed the administration’s political opponents and saved its health-care law.

One of the big questions out of the IRS targeting scandal is this: How can an agency that engaged in such political misconduct be trusted to implement ObamaCare? This week’s Halbig v. Burwell ruling reminded us of the answer. It can’t.

The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in Halbig that the administration had illegally provided ObamaCare subsidies in 36 insurance exchanges run by the federal government. Yet it wasn’t the “administration” as a whole that issued the lawless subsidy gift. It was the administration acting through its new, favorite enforcer: the IRS.

And it was entirely political. Democrats needed those subsidies. The party had assumed that dangling subsidies before the states would induce them to set up exchanges. When dozens instead refused, the White House was faced with the prospect that citizens in 36 states—two-thirds of the country—would be exposed to the full cost of ObamaCare’s overpriced insurance. The backlash would have been horrific, potentially forcing Democrats to reopen the law, or even costing President Obama re-election.

The White House viewed it as imperative, therefore, that IRS bureaucrats ignore the law’s text and come up with a politically helpful rule. The evidence shows that career officials at the IRS did indeed do as Treasury Department and Health and Human Services Department officials told them. This, despite the fact that the IRS is supposed to be insulated from political meddling.

There are two dimensions to fighting a War on Terror. One is fighting terrorists and the other is fighting terrorism. In conventional warfare there isn’t that much of a difference between fighting men and their tactics. There is a wider space between fighting terrorists and their tactics.

Conventional armies use tactics to defeat enemy forces and seize territory. Terrorists however use tactics to take over mental territory. A suicide bomber is not out to take over a particular block. He is out to change how the enemy and his side think about that city block and the larger conflict.

Terrorism has succeeded in accomplishing that goal in Israel. The scale of terrorism turned every piece of land into a mathematical equation. How many lives was this village in Gaza worth? How many lives is this West Bank town worth? How many lives is East Jerusalem worth?

This emotional calculus is misleading because it is an immediate response to a set of deaths. However terrorists are not trading an end to violence for a village or a town. They are calculating how many deaths it will take to force Israel to abandon that village or town. And once they have it, they will use it to inflict more terror on another town or village, this time using rockets.

Israelis were convinced that a price in lives had been put on Gaza and that if they withdrew, the killing would end. But Gaza was just the beginning. Not the end. There is never an end.

The goal of a terrorist movement is to change the relative perceptions of strength and the freedom of movement of both sides. Terror tactics create the perception that the winning side is losing. This perception can be so compelling that both sides come to accept it as reality. Terrorists manufacture victories by trapping their enemies in no-win scenarios that wear down their morale.

That is what has been happening to Israel. The entire carrot and stick of the peace process and the suicide bombing, the final agreement that never comes and the final solution that is coming, were designed to wear down Israelis, to make their leaders and people chase down empty hopes and argue among themselves over who is to blame because there is still no peace.