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2016

Suffering From Trumphobia? Get Over It Before the 1980 election, Reagan’s opponents said he would ignite a nuclear holocaust. Didn’t happen. By Edward N. Luttwak

FROM MARCH 2016
Unlike the fear of Islam, which is a rational response to Islamist violence across the world, the fear of Donald Trump really is a phobia. There is a precedent for this: the panicked Reaganphobia that preceded the 1980 election. We heard that Ronald Reagan was a member of the John Birch Society—whose essential creed was “Better Dead Than Red.” He therefore rejected “mutual assured destruction,” the bedrock strategy of the liberal consensus to guarantee coexistence by nuclear deterrence. Reagan, it was said, believed in “counterforce,” that is in a disarming first strike to win a nuclear war.

Mr. Trump irritates many with his vulgarities but Reagan was insistently depicted as a threat to human survival, so that most of the columnists and editorial writers of the quality press reluctantly called for Jimmy Carter’s re-election, despite the clamorous failures of his hopelessly irresolute administration. In Europe there was no reluctance. In London, Paris and Bonn, then the capital of West Germany, the re-election of Jimmy Carter was seen as a necessity to keep the bomb-thrower Reagan out of the White House, and well away from the nuclear button.

So many eminent people, including W. Averell Harriman, adviser to five U.S. presidents and chief negotiator of the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty, asserted that Reagan wanted to start a nuclear war that the KGB went on maximum alert from inauguration day for more than two years, forcing its officers around the world to take shifts on 24-hour watches of all U.S. strategic air bases to detect the telltale simultaneous launchings of a nuclear first strike.

In 1983, two years into his first term, Reagan did send U.S. troops into action to fight a war . . . in tiny Grenada, whose 133 square miles was the only territory that Reagan invaded in eight years. As for nuclear weapons, Reagan horrified his advisers at the 1986 Reykjavik Summit with Mikhail Gorbachev with his eagerness for nuclear disarmament, thereby disclosing that he didn’t even believe in strike-back, let alone in attacking first. He wanted ballistic-missile defenses, not ballistic missiles.

Mr. Trump’s lack of good manners may be disconcerting, but as president his foreign policies are unlikely to deviate from standard conservative norms. He would only disappoint those who believe that the U.S. should send troops to Syria to somehow end a barbaric civil war, or send troops to Libya to miraculously disarm militias, or send troops back to Iraq to preserve its Iran-dominated government, or send more troops back to Afghanistan where the Taliban are winning because of the government’s incapacity and corruption.

President Trump would do none of the above. He will send troops home from Afghanistan and Iraq, while refusing to intervene in Libya or Syria, or anywhere else in the Muslim world, where U.S. troops are invariably attacked by those they are seeking to protect. Real conservatives want to conserve blood and treasure, not expend them lavishly to pursue ambitious political schemes.

Fueling a Future Republican Majority The most important book of this election year makes the case for America’s energy exceptionalism. By Rupert Darwall

Battle has been joined in a war that — fought right — promises to realign American politics. Leading environmental activist Bill McKibben says that economic growth is a problem to be “solved.” The economy has grown too large. A new trajectory is needed, a managed descent for relatively graceful decline, McKibben argues in his 2010 book Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet. While Democrats are in hock to radical environmentalism, Steve Moore and Kathleen Hartnett White’s Fueling Freedom, perhaps the most important book of this otherwise dismal election yea​r, provides the ideas around which Republicans can unite and regroup.

“Never before have the rulers of a society intentionally driven it backwards to scarcer, more expensive, and less efficient energy,” Moore and Hartnett White write at the start of Fueling Freedom. There’s no letup in the rest of the book’s 252 pages. Modern economic growth is the “greatest surprise in economic history.” The authors demonstrate how industrialization is inseparable from access to abundant fossil fuels — first coal and then petroleum and other hydrocarbons. The good news is that cheap energy is here to stay, “as long as government doesn’t outlaw it.”

They fell global-warming catastrophism with a series of swift, sharp blows. “How can a ‘greenhouse effect’ reduce food production?” they ask. As recently as 2008, when oil briefly went over $150 a barrel, peak oil was the rage. Today, the world is drowning in oil. Technology is outpacing depletion. America has twice the reserves it had in 1950 and has produced nearly ten times as much oil as government surveys said there was.

Moore and Hartnett White quote Robert Zubrin, who notes in Merchants of Despair that leftists used to claim that human activity must be limited because the resources are limited and will run out. Zubrin observes that leftists now insist that it’s not the resources themselves that are limited but the rights to use those resources. This new variant is morally worse than its previous incarnation. It is one thing to urge people to use less of something because it’s believed to be in short supply. It’s another to knowingly make people poorer and restrict their freedom to pursue prosperity and a better life — which is what we’d do by permanently locking up potential hydrocarbon wealth.

Cotton vs. Sasse: Which Approach to Trump Will Define the GOP’s Future? The two rising conservative stars have had opposite responses to Trump’s rise. Which one will prove the wiser bet? By Eliana Johnson see note please

I like and admire Ben Sasse very much but on Trump I am with my favorite American Senator….Tom Cotton….rsk

Over the weekend, Mitt Romney showcased two of the party’s brightest national prospects, Arkansas senator Tom Cotton and Nebraska senator Ben Sasse, at his annual Experts and Enthusiasts summit in Deer Valley, Utah. The pair sat on stage before a crowd of about 300 attendees, the vast majority of them depressed and disconsolate about the rise of Donald Trump, for a discussion moderated by former Romney adviser Dan Senor. Their appearance was intended not only to highlight them as future leaders of the GOP, but to convey the message that the party has a bright future beyond Trump.

“If there is ever hope for the future of our nation it rests with Tom Cotton and Ben Sasse,” says David Parker, an investment banker and Romney friend who attended the weekend’s conference. “These guys are young, brilliant, extremely articulate.”

If only it were that simple. For Romney, the choice of Cotton and Sasse was an interesting one: As some of the earliest shadowboxing for the party’s 2020 nomination kicks off, the two rising stars have staked out essentially opposing positions with respect to Trump. Cotton believes the billionaire developer represents a populism the GOP should and must incorporate, while Sasse sees him as a grave, existential threat to the future of conservatism.

Two years ago, the New York Times noted the obvious similarities between the two men: Both are Harvard graduates from relatively humble backgrounds, and both worked as management consultants — Cotton at McKinsey, Sasse at UBS and then at McKinsey — before running for office. Both were elected to the Senate in 2014, Cotton at the age of 37, Sasse at the age of 42.

But they’ve parted ways on Trump, and the divide has already had political consequences for each of them. If Sasse has become the poster boy for the anti-Trumpers, Cotton was, until recently, himself something of a hero to the small but influential group of conservative intellectuals — journalists, donors, and political operatives — driving opposition to the presumptive GOP nominee. The Weekly Standard gushed in a 2011 article that there is “an ease about his manner that masks his intellectual prowess and the courage that marked his service.” The magazine’s editor, Bill Kristol, compared him favorably to Bill Clinton. In the House, Cotton led the fight against the Gang of Eight bill and cast a vote against the farm bill, an act virtually unheard of for an Arkansan. He made national headlines in his first days as a U.S. senator when he penned an open letter to the Ayatollah Khamenei in an attempt to scuttle the Iran deal.

And then he chose to stay silent on Trump.

Islamic Terrorism Is Not Domestic Terrorism The Orlando massacre is not “homegrown extremism.” Daniel Greenfield

Obama described the massacre carried out by Muslim mass murderer Omar Mateen as “an example of the kind of homegrown extremism that all of us have been concerned about.” But there’s nothing “homegrown” about Omar Mateen. Omar was fighting for a foreign ideology. He just happened to be born in this country. Being born in America does not make him a domestic terrorist.

One of our biggest errors in the fight against Islamic terrorism has been to treat it as a domestic terrorism problem. Islamic terrorism is not domestic terrorism. Not even when its perpetrators, like Omar Mateen or Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood killer, are born in the United States.

What distinguishes domestic terrorism from international terrorism is not the perpetrator’s place of birth.

One of the worst foreign terrorists in American history was Anton Dilger, who, like Hasan, was born in Virginia. As part of the German terrorist campaign against the United States during WW1, which included attacks such as the Black Tom explosion that damaged the Statue of Liberty and was heard in Philadelphia, Dilger plotted a biological warfare campaign that would decimate American horses. Working out of a laboratory near the White House, he experimented with anthrax on animals and his fellow operatives worked to infect as many horses as they could.

This entire episode of history has been largely forgotten. As have its lessons.

Anton Dilger was an international terrorist, despite being born to a Civil War hero, because his agenda was foreign, not domestic. Domestic terrorists seek political change in the United States. International terrorists seek to damage the United States. They are interested in domestic politics only to the extent that it serves their larger agenda for damaging the United States.

Islamic terrorists are not seeking domestic political change the way that Bill Ayers was. They are not domestic elements, but foreign elements. And yet we treat them as if they were domestic terrorists.

Bangladeshi Muslims Murder Hindus Bangladeshi government conjures up conspiracy theories while Islamist murder spree continues unabated. Ari Lieberman

In the past few days, we’ve witnessed unspeakable acts of brutality perpetrated by Muslims against non-Muslim nationals, principally American, French, Canadian and Israeli. The carnage began last Wednesday night when two “Palestinian” Muslim gunmen drew automatic weapons in a posh Tel Aviv café and began shooting everyone in sight. Four Israeli civilians, including two women were murdered in that attack to revolting cheers of Gazan and West Bank Muslims.

That bestial incident was followed by the largest act of mass murder ever committed by a lone gunman in the U.S. The attack by an ISIS inspired gunman at an Orlando night club claimed the lives of at least 49, with the death toll likely to climb as several of the wounded remain in critical condition. Barely a day later, a Muslim terrorist stabbed a French police chief to death in the town of Magnanville while chanting Allahuakbar. He then proceeded to torture to death the man’s wife in front of their toddler son. And yesterday in the Philippines, Muslims belonging to the Islamist Abu Sayyaf terrorist group beheaded a Canadian national after their ransom demands for his release were not met.

But the victims of Islamist terror and barbarism have not been limited to Westerners or those whose values are otherwise rooted in the Judeo-Christian faith. Hindus too have recently come under attack in the Indian subcontinent.

In Bangladesh, Muslims, who constitute 90% of the population, have carried out a series of deadly attacks targeting Hindus, Christians, gay rights activists and secularists. The most recent victim, named Nitya Ranjan Pandey, was an elderly Hindu monastery worker who was hacked to death. His decapitated body was found in a rice field. A few days prior to that gruesome discovery, another Hindu, a 69-year old priest, was found hacked to death. Hindus, who constitute roughly 9% of the population, have always been victims of discrimination in Bangladesh but oppression by the Muslim majority has worsened in recent years.

A Tale of Two Terrorists The deadly lesson not learned. Lloyd Billingsley

On June 7, Nicholas Teausant, the aspiring ISIS fighter from California, was sentenced to 12 years in prison. As he handed down the judgment, U.S. District Judge John Mendez told Teausant “There is no room for error. The risks are too high.” Omar Mateen, the Muslim racist who on June 11 gunned down 49 innocent people at an Orlando, Florida, nightclub, confirms that the judge’s statement is all too true.

Teausant, 22, has been portrayed as something of a dim bulb, a National Guard washout with mental issues. “Assad Teausant bigolsmurf,” as he called himself online, discussed his desire to train Syrian fighters, bomb the Los Angeles subway system and launch a civil war that would topple the American government. The Muslim convert had little military experience but gathered information on bomb making and jihad tactics from the English-language al-Qaida magazine Inspire. He spoke of attacking a “Zionist” daycare center.

Teausant wanted to join the ISIS, explaining “I would love to join Allah’s army” and “I want to go fight in Syria.” He would only return to America after President Obama was dead, Congress gone, and chaos prevailing across the nation. Teausant offered to make a video for the ISIS and leave his face “wide open to the camera.” He wanted to be a “commander” and if he landed on the FBI’s 12 most wanted list, he explained, “that means I’m doing something right.” The aspiring terrorist was unaware that the FBI was onto him. He planned to reach Syria by flying from Canada but FBI agents arrested him on March 16, 2014, in Blaine, Washington, near the Canadian border.

Prosecutors sought approval from the Justice Department for a plea deal, but on December 1, 2015, apart from any such agreement, Teausant pleaded guilty to supporting a terrorist organization. The next day, American-born Syed Farook and his wife Tashfeen Malik, a Pakistani national, murdered 14 Americans and injured 21 in San Bernardino, California. The mass murder was the worst terrorist attack since September 11, 2001, but in the early going public officials hesitated to identify the killings as terrorism.

Why 17-Year-Old Mayar Mohamed Mousa Had to Die A young Egyptian girl dies during female genital mutilation surgery. Where are the cries from Women’s Studies Departments? Jamie Glazov

Mayar Mohamed Mousa, a young 17-year-old girl, died the other day in a hospital in the province of Suez in Egypt while undergoing female genital mutilation surgery.

Don’t wait for Obama to repeat her name and to say that she could have been one of his daughters. If she had died while having a back-alley abortion because her evil white Christian father forbade her to have a safe one in a medical clinic, Obama would be up for it. But Mayar died at the cruel and sadistic hands of Islamic theology and so she doesn’t make the cut.

Mayar was in the process of being maimed and mutilated the way a vast number of Egyptian women are. They usually undergo the horror as young girls, but if they avoid the knife and broken glass, then they undergo the barbarity before they begin dating and get married.

A United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) report explains:

“Many Egyptians believe that for a girl or woman to be ‘clean,’ ‘pure’ and ‘feminine,’ she must have her genitals cut at a young age. . . .Many parents will have their daughters cut as a proactive measure so that they will be ‘marriageable’… In some communities, men refuse to marry any woman who has not been cut.”

Get ready, of course, to hear from media darling Reza Aslan and many other leftists that what happened to Mayar, and what is happening to millions of Muslim girls like her, is not because of Islam. You will be told that it is only some kind of “extreme” Muslim fringe that is supposedly practicing this crime, and, yes, you guessed it, non-Muslims do it too!

But here is a question:

If Islamic genital mutilation is not Islamic, where are all the Muslim imams, muftis and clerics in the world, and in Egypt in particular, who will be vociferously denouncing and repudiating what happened to Mayer just recently and that continues to happen to millions like her? Why aren’t they shouting from the rooftops about the un-Islamic nature of this crime and coming to the defense of Muslim girls and women? Why haven’t they shut down FGM under Islam since it is so un-Islamic?

The Disappearing Continent: A Critique of the Revised AP European History Examination by David Randall

https://www.nas.org/articles/the_disappearing_continent

Editor’s Note: What follows is the digital publication of an important new NAS study: a critique of the College Board’s new Advanced Placement European history standards. Two years ago NAS’s critique of the College Board’s dramatically revised U.S. History Standards touched off a national debate. That debate led the College Board in 2015 to revise those standards again. NAS’s critique also prompted a movement to develop a competing set of standards and tests to provide American schools an alternative to the College Board’s monopoly.

What the College Board did to American history it has now done to European history: erase and contort. Much of the European past goes missing in the new AP European History Course and Exam Description, as it is officially called. Columbus is absent, and Churchill is reduced to a single prompt. The College Board tells the story of European history as the triumph of secular progressivism, and shunts to the margins the continent’s centuries-long rise to political freedom and prosperity.

In his 12,200-word essay, The Disappearing Continent, NAS Director of Communications David Randall (Ph.D., History, Rutgers University, 2005; specializing in early modern European history) traces the pattern of exclusions and inclusions in these standards, which are already shaping high school curricula across the country. The Disappearing Continent is the first extended examination of the College Board’s European history initiative. We hope to inspire others to join us in the effort to challenge the new standards—to improve them if possible and to replace them if necessary.

David Randall is director of communications at the National Association of Scholars. He writes on early modern European history and has taught European history survey courses.

‘Collective Responsibility’ for Terror By Lawrence J. Haas

Israel responded to a Palestinian terror attack in Tel Aviv which claimed four lives by revoking 83,000 travel permits for Palestinians to enter the country during Ramadan. The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights suggests that response amounts to “collective punishment” and is, thus, illegal under international law.

High Commissioner Zeid Ra’ad Al-Hussein’s comments last week received a somewhat sympathetic ear in Washington, where State department spokesman Mark Toner refused to agree or disagree with his “collective punishment” characterization but noted the inconvenience that the travel ban would prove to Palestinians.

“We strongly support Israel’s right to ensure the security of its citizens,” Toner said, adding, “We hope that any measures that it does take will be designed to minimize the impact on the lives of Palestinian civilians who are going about their daily lives.” While “understanding the precautions and the understandable security measures that Israel is taking in the wake of these kinds of attacks,” Toner said the United States asks that “we don’t see measures taken that will add to tensions.”

Rather than fret that reasonable Israeli security efforts will somehow “add to tensions,” U.N. and U.S. officials should focus on the cause of ongoing slaughter in Israel – a Palestinian society that nurtures it. Rather than debate Israeli “collective punishment,” those truly interested in a path to Israeli-Palestinian peace should confront the reality of Palestinian “collective responsibility.”

Nick Turner Brexit, Part III: The Road Ahead

Accept for argument’s sake that the vote on June 23 favours the Leave case, what next? No longer in the thrall of Brussels technocrats and having rejected the political project that is the EU, Britain would have a free hand to innovate. A move to a flat-tax, for example.
‘Uncertainty’ is a term in common usage. Both the Leave and Remain campaigns would have to admit to using negative tactics while economic fears are hawked in almost biblical language. Many Britons feel afraid of leaving. They have had to endure President Hollande’s “consequences”[1] and his heir apparent M. Macron warning that he will “roll out the red carpet” for the bankers who will leave London for Paris[2]. They have had warnings from the International Monetary Fund (with more yet to come), the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and the Leader of the Free World himself[3]. President Obama’s remark that Britain would be “at the back of the queue” as regards to any trade deals was slightly at odds with his speech in Germany two days later where he said he wanted the US-EU TTIP trade deal concluded by the end of the year. How long is this queue again?

The IMF report mentions Britain only four times[4]: In the foreword; predictably in the “Outlook for Individual Countries and Regions”; that the potential of Brexit is one of the “Heightened downside risks” facing the world economy[5]; finally in a special section of a hundred odd words[6]. The actual risk from Brexit is quantified as that dreaded word “uncertainty” again as well as potential damage to trading relationships[7]. It is undermined by the report itself pointing out that Britain’s strong economic performance will offset any “heightened uncertainty ahead of the June referendum”[8]. All these are potential risks and are hedged with many ‘coulds’ and ‘likelys’. None of the report’s authors, no matter how experienced, have ever witnessed such an event and all forecasts should be treated as the worst scenario they wish to imagine.

The OECD report, while more detailed, can be dismissed out of hand. A hatchet job deliberately painting the most damaging picture. In presenting the report one almost expected that OECD head, Señor Gurría[9], would unveil the younger Bill Murray of Ghostbusters drily warning of “human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together… mass hysteria!” but relations between the US and Mexico seemed to have soured of late. The underlying assumptions of the report, in all of its scenarios, are so flawed as to be laughable. They surmise that Britain would become inward looking, with little trade, immigration or investment. Even its most neutral assessments rest on premises such as “most of this stems from the decline in trade openness” and “a failure to undertake regulatory reforms”[10] which completely misses the point of why Britain would wish to leave.

Both the OECD and the IMF base their hypotheses on the idea that Brexit is a “turn toward more nationalistic policies, including protectionist ones”[11]. The OECD do concede Britain may wish to “improve the business climate” post Brexit but even its best case assumes it would only do so at a speed it calculates partly from Mr Brown’s Ministry, hardly known as a great de-regulating one, and in its worst case that it would do nothing[12]. Its fundamentally flawed view of the UK is highlighted by its pointing out that despite business opposition to labour market regulation and the Working Time Directive, the “political constellation after Brexit” would probably not heed that[13]. Perhaps the best example of its partisan nature is in its summation of the financial sector. Highlighting the risks it then, apropos of nothing, mentions that Switzerland exports an even greater proportion of its banking services to the EU but that they got a good deal[14].