Dinesh D’Souza on “America: Imagine a World Without Her” — on The Glazov Gang.
The acclaimed conservative author and filmmaker discusses his new book and motion picture — playing in theaters everywhere.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/dinesh-dsouza-on-america-imagine-a-world-without-her-on-the-glazov-gang/
How will future generations look back on our gravest national emergency of all time? And how will they regard what their forebears didn’t do about it?
This will include what we didn’t do about border nullification, which collapsed the U.S. as a sovereign nation. What we didn’t do about the alignment of our foreign policy with that of jihad movements, which meant the end of liberty, also life itself, for our best allies. What we didn’t do about the growth of tyranny from corruption and Marxism in this cradle of liberty.
Most of our progeny – and certainly those millions descended from the Latin American (and other) populations President Obama invited to invade the former United States – will never ask such questions. But some Americans – those who will throw off their burqas and speak English in the privacy of their caves – will be aghast at the paralysis of their ancestors who lost all.
“Seriously,” they will say to a granny whose granny told her. “You’re telling us that in 2014, the people still had the vote? Still had the Internet? That they still could elect a Congress with the powers of the purse, which could, at the very least, have provided funds to states for the National Guard to stop the Invasion of 2014-2024 (taught by government schools as the ‘Gran Liberacion’)? And they did … nothing?”
“That’s right,” she will croak. “They did nothing.”
“Why? Tell us again why they didn’t love liberty enough to defend” – their voices will drop to a whisper – “the Former Constitution and impeach the tyrant?”
Why, indeed. The very old lady, confused herself, will restate the reasons, the ones she first heard long ago. They still wouldn’t make sense, but it was almost all the history they had left.
The reason was the Republicans – that was the name of the Stupid Party before the Obamacrats instituted the single-payer health care and political system combined – would have had a terrible time dealing with Obamacrat anger against impeachment proceedings in an election year. “In an election year” sounded like one word, the way she said it.
President Obama cannot pressure Israel effectively when it comes to suspension of joint military exercises, disruption of the supply of advanced military systems, supporting anti-Israel resolutions at the UN Security Council, etc.
Contrary to President Obama and all prior US presidents (since 1948), Congress has displayed systematic and sweeping bi-partisan support of the Jewish state, which constitutes one of the very few bi-partisan consensus topics on an otherwise highly polarized Capitol Hill. In fact, since the conclusion of the 1993 Oslo Accords – when Israel ceded the Gaza Strip and 40% of Judea and Samaria to the PLO – many US legislators have outflanked Israeli prime ministers from the hawkish side.
According to the US political system of limited government and checks and balances – and unlike all other democracies – the Executive (the President) is balanced by the Legislature (the Congress), which is co-equal and co-determining, independent of the President, possessing the power of the purse and the muscle (but not always the will) to amend and suspend presidential policies, as well as to initiate its own domestic, foreign and national security policy.
Congress has demonstrated its foreign policy and national security muscles – in defiance of presidential policies – by ending the US military involvement in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia (the Eagleton, Cooper and Church Amendments), Angola (the Clark Amendment) and Nicaragua (the Boland Amendment); forcing the USSR to open its gates to free emigration (the Jackson-Vanik Amendment); suspending the supply of AWACs to Iran on the eve of the Khomeini revolution; refusing to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty; upgrading US-Israel strategic cooperation in a significant manner; providing Israel with advanced military systems; and forcing the Obama Administration, in February 2011, to prevent Israel’s condemnation in the UN Security Council.
Immigration has not led to integration, as the multiculturalists have wished, but to intimidation.
It is time to draw the line and stand with Israel against terrorism.
When the Turkish neighbors of Leah Rabinovitch, a Jewish woman in Amsterdam, adorned their apartment with a Palestinian flag, she did the same with an Israeli flag. Leah lives in a neighborhood where 48% of the population is of non-Western origin – many of them Muslims. Stones were thrown through her windows, a Molotov cocktail was thrown at her balcony and an anonymous letter was put in her letter box. “Hitler will be back. Death to the Jews,” it said.
Fifteen different policemen, Rabinovitch says, advised her to remove the flag. She refused. She also received a letter from Rochdale, the Dutch company owning the apartment block. “Rochdale has noticed the Israeli flag on your balcony. This is a provocation,” the letter said. The company then urged her to remove the flag and warned that otherwise she would have to cover all costs of vandalism herself. Did the neighbors with the Palestinian flag receive a similar letter? No, they did not. In Europe, displaying the Israeli flag is a provocation, displaying the Palestinian flag is not.
A view of the apartment building in Amsterdam where Leah Rabinovitch lives. After hanging an Israeli flag, she was subjected to stone-throwing, a death threat and a firebombing. (Image source: AT5 News video screenshot)
Seraphina Verhofstadt, another Jewish woman in Amsterdam, also reacted to the many Palestinian and Hamas flags in Amsterdam by displaying the Israeli flag. She received threats that her throat would be slit. When she left her apartment, she was assaulted by youths wearing Palestinian shawls and severely beaten.
In Europe, immigration has not led to integration, as the multiculturalists have wished, but to intimidation. People defending the West and its values, people who show their solidarity with the West’s international allies, such as the U.S. and Israel, are threatened with vandalism and worse.
Unfortunately, at the same time, however, the defenders of Western values are also losing public support among indigenous Westerners, who no longer seem to believe that Israel has the moral right on its side.
Netflix, a bargain Internet venue featuring a cornucopia of movies and TV series for a minimal monthly charge, is a craps shoot, a spin of the roulette wheel, what winning or losing card emerges from the banker’s baccarat shoe.
One thing you can depend on before a movie unreels, European or American, is a series of initial credits: Widget Cinema….in association with Piglet Productions….A Floyd Floozy Film….in cooperation with the Film Board of Patagonia….A Wholesome Fare Film…..a Cayman Island Entertainment Production….together with Melody Lane LLC…..in partnership with Howling Banshees Studios….Handcrafted Cinema Company….and on and on, each with its own animated graphics. One almost falls asleep waiting for the cast and directorial credits. For a person who grew up with the MGM lion, the Columbia lady, Paramount’s Mount Everest, and even the British Rank/Ealing Studios muscle man hitting a giant gong, and other signature production credits, the parade of entities responsible for most of the movies offered by Netflix is disconcerting. But, apparently that’s “progress.”
After a movie has been made, do these entities vanish like puffballs, or go airborne like dandelion seeds, or roll out of sight like tumbleweeds? Are they intertwined tax dodges, or cinematic pyramid schemes? I have yet to see a single “associated with” name reappear in the credits of any of the independent productions. Major producers, such as TriStar with its white Pegasus, limit such credits to one or two before introducing the major producer. And the older MGM and RKO credits, for example, put the “associated” entities in parenthetical positions somewhere around the major studio’s name. One never really notices them.
That complaint being lodged, here are some appraisals of a handful of Netflix’s offerings.
Barbara Sukowa plays a credible Hannah Arendt, released in 2012, as the German-Jewish author of The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) and Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil ( 1963). This “docudrama” of her conflict with other Jews about the true nature of the men behind the Holocaust highlights her struggles as she attends Adolf Eichmann’s trial. She was not prepared for the bitter opposition to her covering the trial for The New Yorker, and was ostracized by many of her best friends. This is definitely worth watching qua docudrama, with great chunks of Arendt’s life left out or merely shown in passing, such as her affair with Martin Heidegger, the Nazi intellectual.
Also from 2012 is No God, No Master, a deceptive title because it has little or nothing to do with God or masters. The title is nowhere explained in the film. The phrase was an early anarchist slogan coined by French anarchist Auguste Blanqui in 1880. However, the film is just a very well done “docudrama” of the early years of the FBI’s first director (then known as the Bureau of Investigation), William Flynn, ably portrayed by David Strathairn, and is set chiefly in 1919. It chronicles the detective work of Flynn before he was appointed B.O.I. director. When he stepped down after two years at the post, he was succeeded by J. Edgar Hoover. The story begins with his trying to determine who is responsible for a series of package bombs left on the doorsteps of prominent Boston men or mailed to them.
SPANISH JOURNALIST on why Hamas is never filmed or photographed in action
“If ever we dared point our cameras on them, they would simply shoot and kill us.”
Algemeiner A Spanish journalist told Israeli filmmaker Michael Grynszpan that the reason television news does not broadcast images of Hamas fighters in action is because of fear of immediate execution.
Grynszpan, who directed the film ‘Forgotten Refugees‘, about the 800,000 to 1 million Jews expelled from their homes in the Arab world in the 1950s, posted his interview with the unnamed Spanish journalist on Facebook on Wednesday.
Mushir Al Masri, a Hamas MP and media spokesman, being interviewed by media in front of backdrop showing a destroyed house, and being filmed inside the Al Shifa hospital in Gaza. The photo was posted on Twitter by WSJ correspondent Nick Casey, and has since been removed.
.
“I met today with a Spanish journalist who just came back from Gaza. We talked about the situation there. He was very friendly. I asked him how come we never see on television channels reporting from Gaza any Hamas people, no gunmen, no rocket launcher, no policemen. We only see civilians on these reports, mostly women and children.”
“He answered me frankly: ‘It’s very simple, we did see Hamas people there launching rockets, they were close to our hotel, but if ever we dared pointing our camera on them they would simply shoot at us and kill us.’”
“Wooh, impressive. Then I asked him ‘Would you mind saying that on camera? I can film you explaining this…’”
“For some reason I cannot really understand, he refused and almost ran away. I guess my camera is as dangerous as Hamas threats…”
“So just for you to know, the truth will never appear on the images you see on television.”
To prevent an even more brutal and extreme successor from taking over, Gaza must be dismantled and the non-belligerent population relocated.
Our neighbors want to see us dead. This is not a question that leaves much room for compromise.
– Golda Meir, cited in The New York Times, December 9, 1978
We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.
– Lord Palmerston in the House of Commons, March 1, 1848
If only Israeli strategic policy were founded on the enduring, down-to-earth wisdom embodied in the two preceding quotations. They convey the essence of Israel’s international and regional environments – the cynical self-interest that characterizes the former, and the unbridled brutality that characterizes the latter.
In recent decades, any understanding of these basic precepts seems starkly absent from the formulation – and certainly, the implementation – of Israeli strategic plans.
Politics as moralistic self-recrimination
As The Wall Street Journal’s Bret Stephens recently pointed out, the conduct of Israel’s international politics, which ought to be an exercise in power and preservation of self-interest, has degenerated into moralistic self-reflection and self-recrimination.
In an international environment characterized by cynical self-interest and a regional environment characterized by unbridled brutality, such behavior is wildly inappropriate, and unless reined in and reversed, self-destructive.
As Operation Protective Edge drags on, needlessly and inexplicably, into its fourth week, one thing is becoming excruciatingly clear: Israel has lost all sense of strategic direction.
They come from every corner of the country – investment bankers, farmers, computer geeks, jazz drummers, botany professors, car mechanics – leaving their jobs and their families. They put on uniforms that are invariably too tight or too baggy, sign out their gear and guns. Then, scrambling onto military vehicles, 70,000 reservists – women and men – join the young conscripts of what is proportionally the world’s largest citizen army. They all know that some of them will return maimed or not at all. And yet, without hesitation or (for the most part) complaint, proudly responding to the call-up, Israelis stand ready to defend their nation. They risk their lives for an idea.
The idea is Zionism. It is the belief that the Jewish people should have their own sovereign state in the Land of Israel. Though founded less than 150 years ago, the Zionist movement sprung from a 4,000-year-long bond between the Jewish people and its historic homeland, an attachment sustained throughout 20 centuries of exile. This is why Zionism achieved its goals and remains relevant and rigorous today. It is why citizens of Israel – the state that Zionism created – willingly take up arms. They believe their idea is worth fighting for.
Yet Zionism, arguably more than any other contemporary ideology, is demonized. “All Zionists are legitimate targets everywhere in the world!” declared a banner recently paraded by anti-Israel protesters in Denmark. “Dogs are allowed in this establishment but Zionists are not under any circumstances,” warned a sign in the window of a Belgian cafe. A Jewish demonstrator in Iceland was accosted and told, “You Zionist pig, I’m going to behead you.”
In certain academic and media circles, Zionism is synonymous with colonialism and imperialism. Critics on the radical right and left have likened it to racism or, worse, Nazism. And that is in the West. In the Middle East, Zionism is the ultimate abomination – the product of a Holocaust that many in the region deny ever happened while maintaining nevertheless that the Zionists deserved it.
What is it about Zionism that elicits such loathing? After all, the longing of a dispersed people for a state of their own cannot possibly be so repugnant, especially after that people endured centuries of massacres and expulsions, culminating in history’s largest mass murder. Perhaps revulsion toward Zionism stems from its unusual blend of national identity, religion and loyalty to a land. Japan offers the closest parallel, but despite its rapacious past, Japanese nationalism doesn’t evoke the abhorrence aroused by Zionism.
I realize that one is supposed to grieve incessantly over the loss of civilian life in Gaza, over the deaths of innocent women and children, or over the mourning of mothers for their sons and wives for the husbands. All of them have been robbed of their lives by a cruel world, or just the nefarious Jews who wantonly fire into civilian areas just to kill people.
Israel has certainly publicly embraced this outpouring of anguish, saying all the right things, as in “we deeply regret the loss of civilian life…” or “we do everything to avoid civilian casualties…” or PM Netanyahu’s now-famous sound bite that “we use our missiles to protect our civilians, while they use their civilians to protect their missiles” (it is a good line). And Israel is sincere in these protestations.
Count me among those who found it hard to muster any sympathy for these Gazans, who routinely rejoice over Jewish deaths and would applaud the massacre and slaughter of any Jews. Let’s face a few facts and debunk the canard of the sacred civilian of the Gaza Strip.
First, even their combatants are “civilians,” and intentionally so. In blatant violation of the Geneva Conventions, Hamas terrorists (the same applies to Islamic terrorists across the world) do not wear uniforms and intentionally try to blend in to the “civilian” population. Thus, when they are killed, the familiar scenes of sorrow can appear on the television screen, of the bereaved Arab crying, “look, they killed the teacher…the preacher…the butcher…the baker…the bomb- (rather, the candlestick-) maker.” Israel has to habitually identify – even by name! – these alleged civilians in order to refute the accusation that they are killing civilians. To the Arab way of thinking, no one is ever a soldier; they are all civilians.
Second, as is now well known, Hamas conceals its weapons and launches its rockets from the very heart of its civilian population. They have made their civilians the targets, and official Israel has done an outstanding job in underscoring this point. Homes and hospitals, mosques and schools, are used as both weapons storage sites as well as launching pads for rockets and missiles. That is a war crime, and Israel would do well to ignore all the hollow complaints and continue its offensive until Gaza is rid of Hamas. It would dramatically improve the lives of the civilians in Gaza, however many remain alive.
Of course, Israel’s sensitivity to this issue is such that it undermines the military success of this mission – while certainly acting in a humanitarian way – by warning the Arab inhabitants of targeted areas to leave, and to leave quickly, before a raid. This saves civilian lives, but it also allows Hamas-niks to escape their day of reckoning. In the end, buildings are destroyed, but the enemy, who can soon rebuild those buildings and those weapons sites, lives to terrorize another day
While Israelis are fighting and dying, families huddling in bomb shelters and soldiers going off to face death, the men and women in suits and power suits moving through the great halls of diplomacy are using them as pawns in a larger game.
During the Cold War, Israel was a pawn in a larger struggle between the US and the USSR. Now it is back to being a counter in a larger game.
Israel’s function within the great halls of diplomacy was always as a lever on the Arab states. It was not an end, but a means of moving them one way or another. When the Arab states drifted into the Soviet orbit, the “Special Relationship” was born. The relationship accomplished its goal once Egypt was pried out of the Soviet orbit. It has lingered on because of the emotional and cultural ties of Israel and the US.
Now Obama is using Israel as a lever to push Egypt back into the Islamist camp. Egypt’s rejection of the Muslim Brotherhood broke the Arab Spring. Political Islam, which seemed to be on the ascendance, is back to being a freak show represented by terrorists and Turkey’s mad mustachioed dictator.
Egypt was where Obama went to begin the Arab Spring. Egypt is still his target. Israel is just the lever.
The reason Israel was never allowed to truly win any wars was because it was being used as a lever. By being a “good lever” during the Cold War, it could damage Egypt enough that the latter would come to the negotiating table overseen by the US and move back into the Western sphere of influence.
Israel couldn’t be allowed to win a big enough victory because then there would nothing to negotiate. Likewise, Israel wouldn’t be allowed to keep what it won because then there would be no reason for Egypt to come to the negotiating table. Sometimes Israel would even be expected to lose, as in the Yom Kippur War, to force it to come to the negotiating table.
Swap Egypt for the PLO and that’s how the disastrous peace process happened. Then swap the PLO for Hamas and that is where we are now.
Obama’s initial support for Israel’s war on Hamas was only to the extent necessary to bring the terrorist group to the negotiating table. And then once Hamas comes to the negotiating table, the White House will back its demands against Israel in exchange for getting the Brotherhood on board with its agenda.
