YOM KIPPUR IS ONE OF THE HOLIEST HOLIDAYS IN THE JEWISH CALENDAR. IT IS A DAY OF FASTING AND REFLECTION WHICH I WILL OBSERVE UNTIL THE BLOWING OF THE SHOFAR BEST WISHES FOR A HEALTHY, HAPPY AND PEACEFUL YEAR. RSK
“The enemy of my enemy is my potential ally” underlies the 2014 Western policy toward Iran, the enemy of ISIS. It underlay US policy toward Iraq’s Saddam Hussein – the enemy of Iran – until Saddam’s occupation of Kuwait on August 2, 1990.
The 1990 reckless policy toward Iraq triggered a conventional conflict, a $1.25 trillion cost to the US taxpayer, 4,500 US military fatalities, a surge of anti-US Islamic terrorism and a dramatic destabilization of the Persian Gulf. The 2014 mischaracterization of Iran could produce a nuclear conflict, a mega-trillion dollar cost to the US taxpayer, an unprecedented level of fatalities, a tidal wave of global anti-US Islamic terrorism and tectonic eruptions of insanity throughout the globe.
During 1989-1990, upon the conclusion of the Iraq-Iran war, the US Administration portrayed Iraq’s Saddam Hussein – the enemy of America’s enemy, Iran – as a potential ally, enhancing Baghdad’s strategic capabilities through an intelligence-sharing agreement, supplies of sensitive dual-use systems and the extension of $5bn loan guarantees. Instead of constraining Saddam’s regional maneuverability and inherent, violent, megalomaniac expansionism, the US Administration chose to ignore Saddam’s core, imperialistic, rogue, radical, anti-US ideology, which triggered the Iraq-Iran war.
The larger, historical, ideological, complex context was overtaken by a narrowly and simplistically-designed policy-de-jour.
The recklessness of “the enemy of my enemy is my potential ally” was underlined by an intense US-Iraq diplomatic traffic. For example, Saddam’s meeting with Ambassador April Glaspie on July 25, 1990, which convinced Saddam that he could invade Kuwait with impunity. Thus, an erroneous US policy led to Iraq’s plunder of Kuwait, and consequently to the First Gulf War (1991), the devastatingly costly Second Gulf War (2003-2010) and possibly the Third Gulf War (2014-).
The victory of wishful-thinking over reality, also, undelay Israel’s 1993 policy toward the PLO – the enemy of Hamas – which was gullibly expected to align itself with Israel’s war on Palestinian terrorism, in return for the unprecedented Israeli territorial concessions of the Oslo process. Instead, since 1993, Israel has been a victim of an unprecedented wave of PLO/Hamas anti-Israel terrorism, reinforced by daily hate-education and incitement in Mahmoud Abbas’ schools, mosques and media, as well as a surge of terrorism from 2000-2003, the 2006 Hamas takeover of Gaza and the 2008/9, 2012 and 2014 wars against Palestinian terrorism in Gaza.
There is no one that the left hates more than a man who does not hate, who goes through the day without outrage and who does not spend his life stewing with vindictive resentments.
Leftists call it “privilege” now. They have called it apathy, escapism and a hundred other things. They will find a thousand other names for it as they march through the future centuries grinding their teeth.
Privilege is the accusation that the very lack of resentment and grievance, neurotic responses to simple phrases and a cloud of free-floating anger, represents an ignorant oppression. The happy are only happy at the expense of the unhappy and must recognize the unhappy privilege of their happiness.
Leftists are missionaries of unhappiness. Their creed is salvation through anger. Their governing philosophy is to make others miserable in order to teach them how they have overlooked the misery of others. They are forever spreading misery around the world for the sake of the greater good.
If the left sees anyone being happy, it must immediately set out to ruin the fun. The simple joy of others turns out to be only a cover for monstrous abuses that they are determined to make everyone else see. If it’s an object, it was made by oppressed workers. If it’s a social group, it’s discriminatory. If it’s food, it makes you sick. If it’s a sport, it’s abusive. If it’s art, then it’s escapism from the misery the left creates.
To be of the left is to confuse perpetual outrage with righteousness. The professional leftist believes that the path to utopia on earth lies in constantly denouncing thought criminals until they have all been unthought so that only their kind of ethical and empathetic people walk the earth.
Like most utopians, they plan for a utopia that they could never actually live in.
Leftists without grievances are like an army without guns. The leftist isn’t seeking freedom from capitalism, religion, nationalism, racism, sexism, office dress codes, bar codes and any of the other great evils of the moment. His resentments came before his ideology. They are in a very real sense his ideology. These are just outrage fuel for the willfully outraged whose resentment is both culture and religion.
Many Republicans are excited about the midterm elections. They see a good chance of taking over the Senate, which means they can neutralize Obama’s last few years in office. Many also are hopeful about the presidential election in 2016, though Hillary Clinton will enter that race with decided advantages. Regaining the presidency, some believe, will lead to a reprise of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, in which the country was turned from its leftward drift under Jimmy Carter.
Yet even if this scenario unfolds as the Republicans hope, it is doubtful the deeper structural problems of the country will be solved. The entitlement Leviathan, nourished under governments dominated by both parties, is unlikely to be reformed as significantly as it must in order to ward off looming fiscal catastrophe. Too many Republican politicians are enablers of government spending, voting to keep funding handouts like the $20 billion a year in agricultural subsidies. Others are plotting “comprehensive immigration reform,” aka amnesty, to ensure a steady supply of cheap labor. Too many have seemingly accepted the disastrous cuts in military spending that put at risk our ability to defend our interests and security.
Then there are the nearly 66 million American people who reelected as president an inexperienced narcissist, serial liar, racial divider, and manifest failure. Whether they did so out of juvenile idealism, hope for racial reconciliation, or the lure of more government handouts doesn’t really matter. This lack of judgment and basic information, or sacrifice of principle to self-interest, bespeaks an electorate significant numbers of whom are unlikely to support any politician or party that seriously attempts to halt runaway entitlement spending, debt, and deficits, or to rebuild our military deterrence and reassert our will globally.
Yet despite these obstacles, the political order created in 1787, assaulted as it has been over the last 100 years, still possesses resources for putting us back on the right track. If we fail to take advantage of those resources and modern information technologies, we will have no one blame but our fellow citizens or ourselves for our country’s decline.
First and foremost, we still hold elections every 2 years, and elections have consequences. We can remain mystified that 66 million voters chose Barack Obama over Mitt Romney in 2012, but think how much worse it could have been without the 2010 midterm “shellacking,” as Obama called, that gave the House of Representatives to the Republicans. We can disagree over what the Republican House should or shouldn’t have done with their power, but they at least slowed down the slow-motion train-wreck of the Democrats’ progressive policies.
Jah’Keem Yisrael (formerly Alton Alexander Nolen), who beheaded one of his coworkers and was shot while in the process of trying to behead another on September 26 in Vaughan Foods, a food processing plant in Moore, Oklahoma, didn’t live in a vacuum. His mosque, the Islamic Society of Greater Oklahoma City, worked hard to distance itself from him before its leaders stopped talking to the media altogether, and has denounced his actions. That will probably be good enough for the clueless and politically correct Obamoid FBI, which has forgotten what the “I” stands for in its name, but it leaves too many questions unanswered. Chiefly this one: when Jah’Keem Yisrael went to his mosque, what kind of teachings did he hear?
Unfortunately, the Islamic Society of Greater Oklahoma City doesn’t offer tapes or transcripts of Friday khutbas. And while they have been affecting a pose of being as moderate as the day is long, some clues to the contrary have appeared. Last week I received this insider report from a former member of the Islamic Society of Greater Oklahoma City:
I went to the same mosque the Oklahoma Muslim who beheaded his co-worker today. I live ten minutes away!
The Imam was Imad Enchassi the last I heard. He was a friend of mine. He is a Lebanese-born Sunni who hates Israel. He once gave a sermon that the Israelis were trying to collapse al-Aqsa mosque by digging tunnels underneath it. They have no issue with Palestinian suicide bombings because, as it was explained to me, that is the only weapon the Palestinians have.
They sold Milestones in the book shop while I was there, which as you know calls for replacing all non-Islamic governments with Islamic ones. I remember listening to a tape a friend of mine, Yahya Graff, another white convert to Islam, had that prayed for the destruction of Israel and America.
The imam when I first converted, Suhaib Webb, is hailed as a moderate by liberals in the United States but he was the one that explicitly told me that according to Islam, three choices are to be given to non-Muslims: convert, pay the jizyah tax and live under Islamic rule, or jihad. They try very hard to whitewash Islam when the media is around, but they believe in their religion and the ultimate goal of an Islamic caliphate.
Then on September 30, I interviewed this man, who has left not only the Islamic Society of Greater Oklahoma City but also Islam as a whole. He gave more details to demonstrate that this mosque was not at all as “moderate” as its leaders claimed in the wake of the beheading:
Acting in the name of multiculturalism and inclusion, it was the West’s ‘free and open societies’ that afforded state funding to advocates of jihadism. How could they have been so misguided? How can they still refuse to recognise their mistake?
I. The Nurture of Sacred Violence within Western Multiculturalism
Western governments and their security agencies appear not only shocked by the ultra-violence of the new Islamic State (ISIS), but also surprised that jihadist recruits from Britain, Australia and Europe celebrate the killings they commit. Significantly, British and Australian jihadis promulgate the majority of the English-language posts and internet videos that glorify violent extremism.
They justify their methods on the grounds of their allegiance to a radical, anti-democratic, non-negotiable modern form of Islam committed to world purification and the violent restoration of the caliphate. In 1924, the Turkish modernising autocrat, Ataturk, dissolved the Ottoman caliphate, a lineal descendant of the Ummayad and Abbasid caliphates that dated back to the first centuries of Islam. In Mosul, in June 2014, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the nominal head of the Islamic State, declared its re-establishment and styled himself the new caliph, Ibrahim.
On the eve of the NATO summit in South Wales last month, the US President and UK Prime Minister declared that the way to contain the problem of global jihadism and its aspiration to a cyber-caliphate was to “invest in the building blocks of free and open societies, including creating a new and genuinely inclusive government in Iraq”.[1] Not only does such a response seem naive, it notably fails to address the problem of home-grown radicalism and how the ideology that legitimates and ultimately sanctifies violence emanated less from the Middle East and more from the radical Islamist NGOs that have proliferated across Europe and to a lesser extent Australia since the last decade of the Cold War.
In other words, it was the “free and open societies” of the West that tolerated and afforded state funding to the leading advocates of jihadism. In so doing, they incubated this distinctively illiberal, ideological mutation. European and Australian political elites acted in this curiously self-destructive manner, because, at the end of the Cold War, they came to share a commitment to multiculturalism and diversity as the basis for greater political inclusivity and enhanced global and social justice.
It was, however, in the UK that the political elites, their media and leading academics (together with their Australian offshoots, in a perverse postmodern version of the cultural cringe) most fervently embraced this post-imperial, multicultural commitment, and it was in its capital, Londonistan, that the new political religion found its most congenial home.
Before committing more men and materiel overseas, it would seem “prudent”, to use Tony Abbott’s favourite epithet, to examine the character of this home-grown jihadist phenomenon, and why the media, academe, the political elites and, most disturbingly, the police and security agencies either discount its political appeal or attribute its “root causes” to social deprivation, marginalisation or anything other than the ideology that renders it seductive. How did this costly misunderstanding evolve, and what precisely is the basis of Islamism’s appeal to wealthy, often university-educated, second- and third-generation migrants from Asian or Middle Eastern provenance in Britain and Australia?
Third way multiculturalism and war
In order to understand how jihadism achieved its current status we need first to examine how British, and to a lesser extent Australian, elites prosecuted the war on terror abroad after 2001, whilst allowing elements of Islamism’s command-and-control sanctuary and state handouts in multicultural cities like London, Birmingham, Sydney and Melbourne. Multiculturalism’s classic manifestation as a security doctrine may be located in Tony Blair’s way post-1997, Rudd’s way in Australia after 2007, and latterly, Cameron’s way since 2011.
It required Anglospheric democracies to prosecute the war forcefully against those who resort to jihad (holy war) abroad, actively participating in coalitions of the willing whether in Afghanistan or Iraq, whilst, at the same time, affording some of Islamism’s key ideologists and strategists a high degree of latitude at home. This reflects the fact that, whilst recognising that “today, conflicts rarely stay within national boundaries” and “interdependence defines the new world we live in”, Blairism and its watered-down Ruddite equivalent also wished to “celebrate the diversity in our country” and gain strength “from the cultures and races” in their midst, some of whose adherents drew upon the interdependent and transnational character of conflict to render UK or Australian infrastructure a soft civilian target.[2]
Although, after February 2011, David Cameron sought to distance his government from a policy of “state-led multiculturalism” that, he argued, facilitated radicalisation, official policy nevertheless remained, at best, ambivalent. [3] Meanwhile the European Social Science Research Council (ESCRC), like the Australian Research Council (ARC), continues to disperse large grants to teams of sociologists, educationalists and psychologists to demonstrate that, despite some “concern” over the London bombings of July 2005, the model of successful multiculturalism remains intact.[4]
In the UK and Australia, this quasi-official doctrine of multiculturalism masked an incoherent policy oscillation between prosecution and celebration, complacency and arbitrariness. Thus, while Tony Blair, remained steadfast in his commitment to the war on terror abroad, until 2004 the British Home Office permitted self-styled sheikhs Abu Hamza al-Masri and Omar Bakri Mohamed to recruit for Al Qaeda from their state-subsidised mosque in Finsbury Park, North London, whilst Abu Qatada operated as Al Qaeda’s emir in Europe.
These leading figures in the protoplasmic Al Qaeda network sought the achievement—by jihad, if necessary—of a unified Islamic world. Groups like Omar Bakri Mohammed’s Al Muhajiroun (the migrants) and its breakaway front organisations like the Saviour Sect and Hizb ut-Tahrir (Party of Struggle), which, after 2002, extended its outreach activities to Sydney and Melbourne, dismissed the more moderate voices of diasporic Islam, who dissented from their promotion of a de-territorialised salafist utopia, as “chocolate Muslims”. The proselytising missionary work of groups like Hizb preached to a generation of alienated Muslim youth the inevitable confrontation of their creed with British and latterly Australian democracy’s decadent secularism.
Deracinated second- and third-generation migrants, thus, found solace not in the polymorphous joys of secularism and multiculturalism, but in a re-Islamisation that favoured “supranational [Islamist] organisations instead of ‘national’ Islamic movements”. Hizb ut-Tahrir exemplified this transition to a universalist mode of Islamic identity. As Olivier Roy explains:
this fundamentalist party based in London … was originally set up as a Palestinian Islamic movement in 1953. Officially non-violent, its ideas are nevertheless very radical. It advocates the immediate re-establishment of the caliphate … and the ultimate conversion of the entire world to Islam. Hizb ut-Tahrir is now a genuinely international movement. [5]
Ed Husain, a former member of Hizb, observed that the party “borrowed” its organisational structure and confrontational tactics from “radical socialists”. It functions as an elite vanguard party, recruiting from university campuses, which it finds particularly congenial. As Husain again observes,
At many universities the tactics of confrontation and consolidation of Muslim feeling under the leadership of Hizb activists were being adopted … What dumbfounded us was the fact that the authorities on campuses never stopped us. [6]
Prior to the London bombings of July 2005, the UK government, as with university campuses, did little to discourage Islamist activism or to encourage a sustained criticism of its questionable premises. The same was perhaps even truer of Australia where media and academic elites railed against Australia’s commitment to a US-inspired “violent peace” at the expense of a misunderstood and non-Western “other”.
“The most toxic weapon in the Left’s post-colonial armoury is the concept of Holocaust Inversion, which Mike Carlton wields in his op-ed: that is, modern-day Israelis are the equivalent of the German Nazis while the plight of the Palestinians is comparable to that of the Jews of the Shoah. ”
We shall never know exactly how many Gazans have been murdered by their tyrannous subjugator over the years, let alone the number of Gazan homosexuals incarcerated and tortured, women brutalised and forced into the hijab against their will.
Hamas, also known as the Islamic Resistance Movement, excels at only two things—terrorism and propaganda. On August 26, 2014, an open-ended ceasefire began with Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri declaring to the world: “We have won.” What they had won did not seem entirely clear. This was the same deal Hamas had rejected—and Israel accepted—on July 15. But terrorism is propaganda and propaganda is terrorism, and so Zuhri felt free to boast that Hamas had accomplished “what no Arab army has done. We have defeated them.” With victories like this Hamas need never experience defeat.
Hamas is the first cousin of the Islamic State (IS). Hamas fighters might not bury civilians alive with their own shovels, but they fire off rockets in an attempt to entomb Jewish, Christian and Muslim civilians in Israel. Moreover, Hamas fires off rockets from hospitals, schools, mosques and built-up residential areas in Gaza with the express purpose of initiating retaliatory Israeli fire on those very same hospitals, schools, mosques and built-up residential areas. Hamas-style butchery could be categorised as more grotesque than IS atrocities because Hamas connives to bring about the burying alive of its own people for the purpose of advancing a propaganda agenda. Hamas dismisses the charge of adopting a human-shield strategy as a Zionist lie, although genuine investigative reporters in Gaza—including NDTV’s Sreenivasan Jain—have now provided incontrovertible proof to the contrary. Should we believe the Islamic Resistance Movement or our lying eyes?
There are some who claim that Operation Protective Edge had its genesis in the June 12, 2014, abduction of the Israeli teenagers Gil-Ad Shaer, Naftali Fraenkal and Eyal Yifrah, and that the assault on Gaza was an expression of Israel’s blind fury that the boys were kidnapped and later found murdered. One major drawback to this argument is that Hamas began its unprovoked rocket attacks on the citizens of Israel on June 11, the day before the kidnapping. By the time the bodies of the three teenagers were discovered in the West Bank, on June 30, Hamas’s attack on Israel had been proceeding for nineteen days. On that day alone sixteen rockets were fired off, a number of them landing in the Negev. Hamas had been keen for war irrespective of—or, more likely, in conjunction with—the slaughter of the three Israeli boys. This is corroborated by the fact that Hamas, and not the Netanyahu administration, broke at least eleven ceasefire arrangements before August 26.
Barack Obama had a choice between liberalism and the Democratic party. He chose the latter, and it cost him dearly.
Liberalism, as an ideology, insists that government can do good and great things for the people and the world if the people running the government are smart liberals. The Democratic party says the exact same thing. But liberalism is an ideal, while the Democratic party is that ideal’s representative here in the real world — and in the real world, political parties always disappoint.
Just to be clear — and to avoid a lot of “Oh, yeah? What about Republicans?!” responses — this is true of the GOP, too. Conservative ideology holds that government should do only those things that only government can and should do, a list that is very short. For instance, government shouldn’t be in the business of playing favorites in the economy. It shouldn’t “pick winners and losers.” Rather, it should be a fair umpire and let competition work its magic. Alas, Republican politicians routinely fall short of this ideal, preferring to be pro-business rather than pro-market. That, in so many words, is why the Export-Import Bank is immortal.
But this was supposed to be liberalism’s moment. This was supposed to be a new Progressive Era. Obama came into office vowing to be “transformative,” just like Ronald Reagan — the difference being that Reagan ushered in an era of skepticism about government, while Obama wanted to usher in an era of hope and idealism about all the wonderful things government can do. In Obama’s mind, this put him at odds with Republicans, and in a partisan sense, it obviously did.
But as a matter of policy, Obama’s real challenge came from within. Government’s failures in recent years can be laid not at the feet of the Republican party but at the feet of the Democratic party. If you were to ask most serious liberal policy wonks how they would make government more effective, a good number of their answers would involve doing things the Democratic base of the party would never, ever allow.
Smart liberalism has no love for bureaucratic inefficiencies. There’s nothing inherent in liberalism that says public-sector unions should have a stranglehold on the government payroll the way they do. FDR loathed the idea of government workers unionizing.
Our lazy president skipped his daily briefings — and missed the rise of ISIS
If Obama always looks stunned by America’s throbbing foreign-policy headaches, it may be because more than half the time, Obama is not listening to warnings about national-security threats — literally.
On last Sunday’s 60 Minutes, Obama pointed fingers, yet again. This time it concerned his being surprised by the rise of ISIS. Obama said: “I think our head of the intelligence community, Jim Clapper, has acknowledged that I think they underestimated what had been taking place in Syria.”
Obama should have fingered himself. He might have been able to anticipate ISIS’s steamrolling across Syria and Iraq if he had not blown off nearly 60 percent of his Presidential Daily Briefs (PDBs) with America’s top intelligence officers.
The Government Accountability Institute, a conservative watchdog group, has analyzed the official White House calendar and Politico.com’s presidential schedule from Obama’s January 20, 2009, inauguration through September 29, 2014. Overall, Obama skipped 58 percent of his PDBs.
This outrage has gotten worse throughout Obama’s tenure. He missed 57.6 percent of his first-term PDBs, GAI calculates. In his second term, his truancy increased to 58.7 percent. So Obama was more AWOL from these interactive sessions after his reelection — even as the embers of the deadly Benghazi attack roared into pan-Libyan bedlam, Vladimir Putin snatched Crimea, Hamas’s rockets pummeled Israel, and America’s southern frontier became a moving sidewalk for illegal aliens from around the world.
Are significant chunks of the mainstream media in despair over Barack Obama? This past week, Obama used 60 Minutes to attempt to shift blame for the failure to anticipate the rise of ISIS, endured a cover-up of White House security disasters by the Secret Service, and saw a government-agency report that he had skipped nearly 60 percent of his intelligence briefings.
The reaction from some longtime Obama defenders was swift and harsh. “President Obama this week committed professional suicide,” wrote former CNN host Piers Morgan, now an editor-at-large for Britain’s Daily Mail.
He called Obama’s throwing of the intelligence community under the bus a “shameless, reprehensible display of buck-passing” that will result in some analysts’ exacting “cold-blooded revenge on Obama by drip-feeding negative stories about him until he’s gone.” As for the Secret Service fiasco, Morgan said it was “no wonder the Secret Service gets complacent when The Boss exudes complacency from every pore.”
Chris Matthews of MSNBC, the former White House speechwriter who once rapturously recounted that he “felt this thrill going up my leg” as Obama spoke, didn’t hold back on Wednesday’s Hardball. “Let’s get tough here,” Matthews began, as he lambasted Obama for being “intellectually lazy” and “listening to the same voices all the time.” He even named names, saying that Obama had become “atrophied into that little world of people like Valerie Jarrett and Mrs. Obama.”
Jonathan Alter, a columnist for Bloomberg News and the author of a sympathetic book on Obama’s first term, reported that Jarrett is an unusual presence in the White House: “Staffers feared her, but didn’t like or trust her. At meetings she said little or nothing, instead lingering afterwards to express her views directly to the President, creating anxiety for her underlings and insulting them by saying, ‘I don’t talk just to hear myself talking.’”
Everyone expects a presidential spouse to weigh in on issues, but the reference to Valerie Jarrett, the White House senior adviser who mentored both the president and the first lady at the start of their careers in Chicago, is telling. Her outsize role in many presidential decisions is known to insiders, but she remains resolutely behind the scenes. So when Jarrett does enter the news, it’s significant, because it may provide a window into how the Obama White House really works.
This week, Greg Hinz of Crain’s Chicago Business noted that President Obama was back visiting Chicago but “having to share headlines with Valerie Jarrett.” She began the week with a cameo appearance on CBS’s highly rated show The Good Wife. Then a column by Michael Sneed in the Chicago Sun-Times reported that Jarrett “may be the worst abuser” of any executive-branch official with a Secret Service detail, using guards “round the clock” even while she was shopping, at the gym, or visiting friends in Chicago.
