This new special edition of the Glazov Gang was joined by Nonie Darwish, the author of The Devil We Don’t Know. The discussion focused on Moronic Questions After Brussels, analyzing why the media keeps searching for a “motive” in Islamic terror attacks — and asking the same stupid questions since 9/11.
http://jamieglazov.com/2016/04/05/moronic-questions-after-brussels-on-the-glazov-gang/
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“Islamophobia…is sort of like the ocean. It is working, it is churning, it is ebbing, it is flowing, even when we are asleep. There are larger systems of power and structures of power in place,” warns Georgetown University researcher Nathan Lean. Such conspiracy-mongering typifies the thesis of his book, The Islamophobia Industry: How the Right Manufactures Fear of Muslims, of an inherently innocuous Islam slandered by the American military-industrial complex and Zionist Jews.
Lean is a perfect fit for his employer, the Saudi-funded Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (ACMCU). Amid ACMCU’s exclusion of opposing views, Lean rails against a vague “Islamophobia” as “discrimination against Muslims” but never defines what remains acceptable “[r]ational criticism of Islam or Muslims.”
Lean’s “Islamophobia” radar is especially sensitive when Muslims are the voices raising concern. He castigates former radical Maajid Nawaz, as a tool of bigoted neoconservatives. He has also called former Wall Street Journal reporter Asra Nomani an “anti-Muslim hate enabler” and ex-Muslim Ayaan Hirsi Ali someone “dangerously close to advocating genocide.”
Lean’s oceanographic observations occurred during a discussion of Islam and American military conflicts Feb. 23 at Washington, D.C.’s Rumi Forum, an entity in the empire of the shadowy Turkish Islamist Fethullah Gülen. “Islamophobia has really long been connected to American foreign policy and America’s military engagement with Muslim enemies real or perceived,” he said. “America’s first military engagement as a newly formed republic was with a Muslim enemy,” the Barbary Pirates, and “narratives emerge from the Barbary Wars about Muslims and Islam…very similar to a lot of kinds of things we hear today.”
In a statement that reveals yet again how out of touch the administration is, Josh Earnest, White House spokesman, said that the massive suicide bombing in Lahore, in which 70 people were killed and about 300 injured, didn’t simply target Christians since many Muslims were victims as well.
Yet the terrorist organization that launched the attack and is a Taliban splinter group, Jamaat-ul-Ahrar, said it specifically targeted Christians celebrating Easter in the park. The same militant group also took responsibility for the twin bombings of a Christian church in Lahore last year. Christians account for two percent of Pakistan’s total population.
Admittedly most of those killed were Muslims, and the loss of innocent life whether Muslim or Christian, is to be lamented. However, the U.S. State Department did not respond to the aftermath of the attack as one specifically targeting Christians.
This attack underscored the precarious position of Pakistan’s minorities and the significant fact that, despite increased military vigilance, extremists are still capable of staging wide-scale assaults. Prime Minister Sharif announced recognition of holidays celebrated by Pakistan’s minorities – the Hindu festival of Holi as well as Easter. Unfortunately, if the Taliban members got the message, they chose to ignore it.
Speaking to the bereaved who lost a son in battle during the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln noted, “I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the alter of freedom.”
Disillusionment with Barack Obama coupled with concern that his legacy could help put Donald Trump in the White House has now entered respectable European political discourse. The notion reflects profound doubts at Europe’s core about a country with both a president who broke his word and failed to attack Syria for its use of poison gas—damaging American credibility as the West’s ultimate recourse to justice by military intervention—and a leading candidate for the White House whose campaign resounds with brutality, bigotry and ignorance of the world.
Norbert Roettgen, chairman of the German Bundestag’s foreign-affairs commission, pointed to a possible Obama-begets-Trump link last week. Mr. Roettgen, a member of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic party, said the situation meant U.S. allies in Europe and elsewhere were right to express their serious concern about America.
“Paradoxically, Trump is completely inward-looking,” Mr. Roettgen told me. “But he touches on a question of American pride. It’s there that many voters, in terms of the U.S. role in the world, feel that the country has lost considerable ground under Obama. What they see is Obama’s weakness. For example, his allowing the Russians to militarily establish the upper hand in Syria.”
Although polls late last year showed strong French support for sending ground troops within an international coalition to fight Islamic State, and Mrs. Merkel has said “military efforts” are needed as the first step in defeating the Islamist terrorists, Mr. Obama hasn’t dealt convincingly and head-on with the challenge.
“The damage is done,” said a senior European security official during an hour’s conversation after the murderous March 22 terrorist attacks in Brussels. Over these past years, he made clear to me, America’s credibility as a reliable guardian against chaos has been broken.
“The United States’ relative power has decreased in relation to Russia and China,” the official said. “You can only play the American [guardian’s] role when you have communality at home. But I’m not sure the United States is ready to restore this or is able to. Vladimir Putin is present at the places where America and Europe are weak.” CONTINUE AT SITE
Once upon a time there were people who naively fantasized about how all the incompatible cultures of the world were going to magically blend, weaving a beautiful tapestry of colors and variations. They called this “Multiculturalism”. Increasingly, the tapestry is made up of glass shards and human remains. At what point do we begin to tally the lives ruined or taken by members of all the “guest” cultures from members of all the host cultures? Pretty soon, I hope, since that seems to be a recurring element of multiculturalism. Wherever you see one, you see the other.
Cultures are either consciously abandoned, or consciously enforced. The theory of multiculturalism has always been a tonic for simpletons, since it celebrates the perpetuation and imposition of an incompatible culture, still being practiced by those who carry it, upon a host culture with which it is mutually exclusive. Multiculturalism is entirely subversive. It is intended to force one or more cultures upon the hosts who do not want or need them. Since both cultures cannot successfully coexist within the host, which has its own successful working culture, the purpose of the exercise has always been fraudulent. The “melting pot” concept worked not because of the concept of multiculturalism, but as testament against it. Those who came here in our parents’ and grandparents’ generation consciously chose to abandon the cultures they left in favor of the American culture. They became Americans, embracing one culture.
If one was being less generous than to call multiculturalism a tonic for simpletons, it would be more accurate to say that modern leftist multiculturalism is actually a weapon. Its purpose is not to enhance the host, but to consume it. If the host’s culture is peaceful, it has no use for malcontents who insist upon the dominance of their native culture. Malcontents, in the form of angry and entitled guests, foment chaos and disorder. And yet, the leftists insist that we demonstrate our cultural superiority by abandoning the superiority of our own culture and importing incompatible languages, traditions, practices, and morals.
Islamic terrorism threatens our lives in ways both visual and dramatic. Primordial screams, the stench of death, and blood-streaked streets where bodies so mutilated they are virtually unrecognizable capture our senses of hearing and sight. It is horrific, real and frightening. It is meant to scare. It does.
The danger from political correctness is different, but no less treacherous. It arrives like the morning fog that, as Carl Sandberg wrote, “comes on little cat feet.” It settles imperceptibly and enshrouds us. Political correctness makes one feel noble and caring, because it is said to be inclusive and sensitive to the feelings of others, especially those who are racially and culturally different. But it is exclusive; it impugns those whose thinking is at odds with convention. It is based on “group think.” It is dependent on minds closed to ideas outside what is deemed correct. It was the basis of fascism and underlies communism. Its consequence can be deadly to those who value freedom and democracy.
We see it on college campuses when students and faculty prevent conservatives from speaking, and in the willingness of administrations to provide “safe places” for those who feel threatened by opinions and expressions that do not match what they have been taught to believe. Political correctness ill prepares students for a world that does not march to a single drummer and puts them at a disadvantage when they enter the workforce where diversity of ideas is as commonplace as cultural diversity. Diversity is a powerful force for good, but only when it extends beyond genetic traits and delves into the realm of ideas. Its adherents claim idealism, but that is not true, as it denigrates those who think differently. It is, in fact, anti-intellectual and anti-liberal. It suffocates curiosity, accountability and individualism, characteristics critical to a liberal education and necessary for life after college.
Iran and North Korea exposed its hollowness weeks before our president convened it.
Hours before President Obama convened a fifty-nation summit on nuclear weapons last Thursday, he celebrated himself in a Washington Post op-ed. He began the article by reminding us that nuclear proliferation and the use of nuclear weapons are the greatest dangers facing the world, saying that was why he committed us, seven years ago, to stopping the spread of such weapons and seeking a world without them.
Obama went on to praise his nuclear weapons deal with Iran, saying that it closed every single one of Iran’s paths to the bomb. (He omitted to mention those that remain open, such as the agreement’s risible inspections regime which guarantees Iranian cheating by allowing it to self-inspect some of its key nuclear sites. And the one that allows it, after fifteen years, to enrich as much uranium to weapons grade as it likes, ensuring it can produce nuclear weapons then whenever it likes.)
Unsurprisingly, neither is there anything to learn from nor anything accomplished at Obama’s summit. There’s much more to learn and dissect in the actions and pronouncements of Iran and North Korea before the summit.
On March 8 and 9, Iran launched ballistic missiles in tests of weapons that have at least the range to hit Israel. According to the Iranian FARS news agency, the missiles were painted with the slogan, “Israel must be wiped off the Earth” in Hebrew. UN Security Council resolutions are supposed to be stopping Iran from testing such missiles, but those resolutions are having the same effect they usually have, which is exactly none.
On March 30, the day before Obama’s summit, Iran’s “supreme leader” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said, “Those who say the future is in negotiations, not in missiles, are either ignorant or traitors.”
Is the Muslim world as a whole responsible for the epidemic of jihadist terrorism that has rocked the globe in recent years? The question will strike many who consider themselves enlightened as offensive. And yet few of those who recoil from it reject out of hand the possibility that an entire society could be responsible for racially motivated terrorism.
Philosopher-turned-activist Cornel West is among those who do not seem to see any tension in this juxtaposition. On the January 15, 2016, episode of Bill Maher’s HBO show, Real Time, West admonished his host not to infer from the recent sexual attacks in Cologne, Germany, that the newly arrived Syrian migrants do not share European values. After all, West noted, many crimes are committed by non-Muslims, and many Muslims did not participate in the Cologne crimes.
“I think you have to distinguish between culture and morality,” West said. “Every culture has good morality and bad morality.”
On a CNN appearance several months earlier, in the aftermath of the notorious racially motivated Charleston shooting that left nine people dead at a church, West didn’t bother distinguishing between America’s racist culture and its (presumably deplorable) morality. He asserted that the “vicious legacy of white supremacy is still shot so deep in the culture” of the United States that politicians of both parties are unable to address it. In this social context, it makes sense to see racial terrorism as a manifestation of widely accepted racism.
According to Tuskegee University figures, some 4,743 “lynching” murders occurred between 1882 and 1968. That figure doesn’t even cover all of the terroristic racial murders during this period: so many bombs exploded in Birmingham, Ala., during the 1960s, targeting black homes and churches, that it earned the moniker “Bombingham.”
By now, last summer’s nuclear deal between Iran and the P5+1 countries, including the United States, is widely understood to have been a windfall for the clerical regime in Tehran. The agreement, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), netted the Islamic Republic some $100 billion in previously escrowed oil revenue, a sum roughly equivalent to a quarter of Iran’s annual economy.
That, however, now appears to be just the tip of the iceberg. Recent days have brought new revelations that the Obama administration is planning still more economic concessions to Iran’s ayatollahs. Specifically, the White House appears to be mulling the possibility of allowing Iran limited access to the U.S. financial system, as a sweetener for its continued compliance with the terms of the JCPOA.
That plan effectively reneges on promises made by the White House last summer in selling the nuclear deal to a skeptical Congress. Back in July, in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Treasury secretary Jack Lew waved away congressional worries that Iran’s regime might be unjustly enriched as a result of the JCPOA. Lew pledged that, regardless of the provisions of the new nuclear deal, the administration was committed to keeping existing, and extensive, trade restrictions in place.
“Iranian banks will not be able to clear U.S. dollars through New York, hold correspondent account relationships with U.S. financial institutions, or enter into financing arrangements with U.S. banks,” Lew promised. “Iran, in other words, will continue to be denied access to the world’s largest financial and commercial market.”
Now, however, the secretary and his colleagues are singing a decidedly different tune. “Since Iran has kept its end of the deal, it is our responsibility to uphold ours, in both letter and spirit,” Lew told an audience at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington last week. The message was abundantly clear: For the administration, allowing Iran access to the U.S. market has become an article of good faith.
Seven months ago, after he signed a pledge to support whoever won the GOP nomination, Donald Trump said, “I see no circumstances under which I would tear up that pledge.”
That was then. Today we see a different Trump. On Sunday, he told Chris Wallace of Fox News that while he wanted “to run as a Republican,” he wouldn’t rule out an independent or third-party race this fall. “We’re going to have to see how I was treated,” he warned.
GOP leaders should have known better than to have taken his pledge seriously. As the Associated Press pointed out in September 2015, his record on honoring contracts is at best spotty:
When lender Boston Safe Deposit & Trust refused to extend the mortgage on his Palm Beach resort, Mar-a-Lago, he ceased making loan payments until the bank capitulated in 1992.
In his book The Art of the Comeback, Trump proudly recounts forcing his unpaid lenders to choose between fighting him in bankruptcy court or cutting him an additional $65 million check. Afraid of losing their jobs, the bankers folded, Trump says.
Reince Priebus, the chair of the Republican National Committee, has dismissed the chance of a Trump independent bid as “posturing.” Robert Eno of Conservative Review noted last week that Trump could be kept off many state ballots by “sore loser” laws that bar a candidate who has run in a partisan primary from running in another party in a general election. “If Trump were to wait until after the Republican National Convention to declare an independent candidacy, he could only compete for a maximum of 255 electoral votes,” Emo concluded. “This means he cannot win the presidency were he to wait until after [the] convention to run an independent bid.”
But many Republicans worry that Trump could still play “spoiler” by merely threatening to run an independent campaign. “Sore loser laws don’t hold up well in court,” says Richard Winger, the editor of Ballot Access News. “They also aren’t easily enforced. John Anderson ran as an independent in all 50 states in 1980 after ending his Republican campaign, and not one of the sore-loser laws was enforced against him.”
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