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August 2016

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The Fog of Forever War In a world where a weapon can be a roadside bomb or a computer virus, confusion reigns. Do the laws of war or peacetime apply? By Gabriel Schoenfeld

By on August 9th, 2016

Was the Sept. 11, 2001, attack on the United States a crime or an act of war? In 2009, Rosa Brooks, a professor of law at Georgetown, was brought into Barack Obama’s Pentagon to ponder that question and others like it. Her conclusion about the 9/11 attack: Its legal status is “effectively indeterminate.”

That is a lawyerly finding and not one that is especially useful to policy makers. But such maddening ambiguity is precisely the problem we now face, argues Ms. Brooks in “How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything.” Many of the categories with which we think about national security, she says, have become obsolete.

In a world where our enemies do not belong to armies or wear uniforms—where a weapon can be a roadside bomb or a computer virus—confusion reigns. Do the laws of war apply, allowing for the liberal use of force? Or must we adhere to the laws of peacetime, which constrict the application of force within a web of legal procedures? “We don’t know,” Ms. Brooks writes, “if drone strikes are lawful wartime acts, or murders.” We don’t know “when it is acceptable for the U.S. government to lock someone up indefinitely, without charge or trial.” We don’t know “if mass government surveillance is reasonable or unjustifiable.”
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Photo: wsj
How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything

By Rosa Brooks
Simon & Schuster, 438 pages, $29.95

Thanks to the haziness of our present situation, Ms. Brooks concludes, we are losing “our collective ability to place meaningful restraints on power and violence.” Decisions taken first by George W. Bush and then by Barack Obama, she writes, “have allowed the rules and habits of wartime to pervade ordinary life.” She cites “the militarization of U.S. police forces,” evident in the proliferation of SWAT teams armed with equipment intended for war zones; the blanket of secrecy thrown over court proceedings; and intensified surveillance that can have “chilling effects” on the exercise of constitutional rights.

Such domestic troubles are matched by what Ms. Brooks sees as a disastrous record abroad. Our invasion of Iraq in 2003 brought chaos, she says; our departure in 2011 brought more. In Afghanistan, “we caused untold suffering for the very population we so earnestly tried to help.” The more we try to fix things around the world, she laments, “the more we end up shattering them into jagged little pieces.”CONTINUE AT SITE

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Chevron Shakedown Rout Steven Donziger suffers another legal humiliation.

By on August 9th, 2016

One of the most egregious legal frauds in history may finally be over. On Monday a unanimous three-judge panel of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that an Ecuadorian judgment against Chevron was the product of fraud, coercion and bribery and couldn’t be enforced.

In a 127-page opinion, Judge Amalya Kearse said the court “found no basis for dismissal or reversal” of a lower court’s decision and called lawyer Steven Donziger’s conduct in pursuit of Chevron “corrupt” and a fiasco of legal terrorism and ransom at the highest level. “Donziger hoped for an astronomic estimate that would have an in terrorem effect,” the court wrote, “impelling Chevron to agree to a settlement.”

That’s an understatement. Readers will recall the parade of malfeasance perpetrated by Mr. Donziger as he pursued a $113 billion case for what he claimed were oil pits left by Texaco (now merged with Chevron) in the 1970s. Texaco’s pits had long been cleaned up and the company had been released from liability by Ecuador’s government, but Mr. Donziger lined up environmentalists and even actress Daryl Hannah to create a media circus that would force the company to settle. CONTINUE AT SITE

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Integration vs. Assimilation-Does integration prevent radicalization? Edward Cline

By on August 9th, 2016

If we are speaking of Muslims, I would say no. Muslims would need to repudiate Islam or leave it as apostates. Because Islam is a totalitarian ideology melded to the “religion” of Islam, such an action would require intellectual honesty, a fealty to reality, and a dollop of courage in the face of death threats prescribed in the Koran or leave it as apostates. Because Islam is a totalitarian ideology melded to the “religion” of Islam, such an action would require intellectual honesty, a fealty to reality, and a dollop of courage in the face of death threats prescribed in the Koran for leavers of the “faith.” I also base my conclusion on the record of crimes by jihadists who are first- or second-generation Muslims, a record compiled and documented by Clarion and numerous other sites that report on the rapes, murders, knifings, and suicide-bombings committed by Muslims who have resided in the West for any measurable time. The more barbarous the origins of these Muslims (Somalia comes to mind, and there is also a racist element in Somalian crimes against Westerners), repeatedly commit the most heinous crimes and plead ignorance of Western mores and standards of behavior. The authorities and the MSM jump on a “mental illness” explanation before a victim is taken away in an ambulance.

Islam does not prepare average Muslims for any degree of intellectual enquiry on any subject, especially when it comes to the multitude of contradictions and fallacies inherent in the “faith” which would leave Socrates or Aristotle massaging their heads. Islam is anti-mind to the core, and does not much tolerate Muslims who “want to know.” Islam is a mortal enemy of free minds. This will help to explain why Muslim populations in Western countries represent a “silent majority” reluctant to or will not condemn jihadist outrages, and this silence is to my mind tacit approval of the crimes, even when Muslims are collateral victims of terrorist attacks (as there were on 9/11, e.g.). This tacit sanctioning may be based on fear of reprisals or on an inbred indifference to the death and suffering caused by terrorism. Islam is, among other charges one may level against it, profoundly anti-life and anti-individual, and so I shall always remain “Islamophobic.”

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The College Formerly Known as Yale Any renaming push on the Ivy campus should start at the top—with Elihu Yale, slave trader extraordinaire. By Roger Kimball

By on August 9th, 2016

The English novelist Kingsley Amis once observed that much that was wrong with the 20th century could be summed up in the word “workshop.” On American campuses today, I suspect that the operative word is “committee.”

On Aug. 1, Yale University president Peter Salovey announced that he is creating a Committee to Establish Principles on Renaming. There has been a craze for renaming things on college campuses the last couple of years—a common passion in unsettled times.

In the French Revolution, leaders restarted the calendar at zero and renamed the months of the year. The Soviets renamed cities, erased the names of political enemies from the historical record, and banned scientific theories that conflicted with Marxist doctrine.

At Princeton, Stanford, Georgetown, Harvard and elsewhere, students have demanded that buildings, programs and legacies be renamed to accommodate modern sensitivities. Amherst College has dropped Lord Jeffrey Amherst as its mascot because the colonial administrator was unkind to Indians. Students at the University of Missouri have petitioned to remove a statue of the “racist rapist” Thomas Jefferson. This is part of a larger effort, on and off campuses, to stamp out dissenting attitudes and rewrite history to comport with contemporary prejudices.

But isn’t the whole raison d’être of universities to break the myopia of the present and pursue the truth? Isn’t that one important reason they enjoy such lavish public support and tax breaks?

A point of contention at Yale has been the residential college named for John C. Calhoun, a congressman, senator, secretary of war and vice president. Alas, Calhoun was also an avid supporter of slavery.

Mr. Salovey is also perhaps still reeling from the Halloween Horror, the uproar last year over whether Ivy League students can be trusted to pick their own holiday costumes, which made Yale’s crybullies a national laughing stock. In the wake of that he earmarked $50 million for such initiatives as the Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration.

He then announced that Calhoun College would not change its name. Apparently, he has reconsidered. After the Committee on Renaming has done its work to develop “clearly delineated principles,” he wrote, “we will be able to hold requests for the removal of a historical name—including that of John C. Calhoun—up to them.”

I have unhappy news for Mr. Salovey. In the great racism sweepstakes, John Calhoun was an amateur. Far more egregious was Elihu Yale, the philanthropist whose benefactions helped found the university. As an administrator in India, he was deeply involved in the slave trade. He always made sure that ships leaving his jurisdiction for Europe carried at least 10 slaves. I propose that the committee on renaming table the issue of Calhoun College and concentrate on the far more flagrant name “Yale.” CONTINUE AT SITE

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Review: Uri Bar-Joseph, ‘The Angel: The Egyptian Spy Who Saved Israel’ David Isaac

By on August 9th, 2016

‘The Angel: The Egyptian Spy Who Saved Israel’ by Uri Bar-Joseph is a book that should be required reading—as a terrible warning—for everyone involved in intelligence. It is the tale of how an intelligence agency, despite having the best information imaginable, can still get it wrong. Bar-Joseph recounts how, prior to the Yom Kippur War of 1973 when Israel suffered a near-fatal blow, Israel had been given detailed knowledge of Egypt’s plans thanks “to an exceptionally rare situation in the history of espionage: the direct assistant to the leader of a country preparing to launch an attack on its enemy was a secret agent on behalf of that enemy.”

That secret agent was Ashraf Marwan, the son-in-law of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser and a trusted confidante of his successor, Anwar Sadat. Bar-Joseph, a professor of political science at the University of Haifa, himself a veteran of the war, has the ideal background to write this book. His earlier effort, The Watchman Fell Asleep, took a broad view of the intelligence failures leading up to the Yom Kippur War; it is considered the most important study on the subject and won the Israeli Political Science Association Best Book Award in 2002. In The Angel, ably translated by David Hazony, Bar-Joseph focuses exclusively on the story of the spy central to the drama and the ossified thinking that prevented Israel from taking advantage of the secrets he provided.

In the summer of 1970, Marwan simply consulted the phone book and called the Israeli Embassy from a London telephone booth to offer his services. It took a second phone call five months later for Mossad agents to wake up to the fact that they were being offered what a former Mossad chief would call “the greatest source we have ever had.”

What was Marwan’s motivation? Bar-Joseph hazards some conjectures. Nasser, unusually for an Arab leader, was immune to financial corruption and had no intention of allowing his ambitious son-in-law to use his new family connections to enrich himself. He disliked Marwan and, when his daughter refused his order to divorce him, put him in a job with little pay or scope. But while the desire to get back at Nasser and improve his finances might explain his initial decision, as Bar-Joseph notes, it does not explain why Marwan spied for Israel after Nasser’s death. Marwan’s situation radically improved after he backed Sadat in the face of an attempted palace coup d’état; from then on he enjoyed a key role in Sadat’s inner circle. Bar-Joseph suggests instead that Marwan had a need to live dangerously and seek out risk, almost like an adrenaline junkie. Whatever his motives, writes Bar-Joseph, the cornucopia of information that poured forth from him, the most important concerning the Egyptian military, “went far beyond anything [the Israelis] had known. It was unprecedented in its quality.”

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SYRIAN REFUGEES IN AMERICA? BY ED ZIEGLER

By on August 9th, 2016

The world has a serious problem, that of the massive number of refugees fleeing middle eastern war torn countries. The vast majority of these refugees are Syrian and Iraqi Muslims while non-Muslims constitute less than three percent.

Some countries refuse to admit refugees. Lebanon and Jordan shut their borders to Syrians in 2014. Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, United-Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait and Oman will not take a single refugee because of the crime and violence threat to their safety, as Jihadist terrorists hide among those fleeing.

After the Paris attacks, Poland said, ” Forget about taking in refugees.” Turkey has ended its open door policy of admitting Syrian refugees. Last autumn, Hungarian soldiers sealed her border with barbed wire. By refusing to issue visas, Egypt effectively closed its borders to Syrian refugees. Switzerland’s pertaining to Muslims is ” If you reject our customs, we will reject your application.” On the other hand Slovakia is OK taking in Syrians – as long as they’re not Muslim.

The massive migration is due to warring Islamic factions with ISIS as the main aggressor. ISIS has declared that it is restoring the Islamic Caliphate naming Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi as Caliph and designated him as political leader. ISIS is attempting to establish itself, by force if needed, as the leader of one Islamic world, worldwide Muslim movement with no national boundaries.

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