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August 2017

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The Black Hole of Modern Conservative Rhetoric By Mike Sabo

By on August 31st, 2017

At one of the big summer events that enthrall those who dwell inside the D.C. bubble, interns from Conservatism, Inc. square off against interns from Libertarian, Inc. at a debate hosted by the libertarian Cato Institute. The annual event, which occurred earlier this month, once again exposed a problem that has hounded conservatives for quite some time: they’ve forgotten how to persuade. They speak in clichés. And even the youngsters sound like old fogeys. https://amgreatness.com/2017/08/30/black-hole-modern-conservative-rhetoric/

“From what I observed,” writes Maria Beiry, an editorial assistant for the American Conservative who reported on the event, “millennials at this debate—many of whom will go on to be leaders in Washington—were not taking to conservatism.”

Why not? While the libertarians “favored data” and used it “to not only drive home their points but also to call into question the conservative argument,” conservatives spurned those arguments and “favored philosophy.”

“At the mention of philosophers such as Aristotle,” Beiry reports, “audible ‘what’s’ and ‘heh’s’ could be heard among the students.”

Jargon and Checklists
These difficulties flow from a central problem: conservatives seem to go out of their way not to be understood. More and more, there appears to be nothing of substance behind the jargon they employ.

Just as “Christianese”—used increasingly in Evangelical Christian circles—has had a tendency to crowd out biblical orthodoxy, “conservatese” has similarly tended to push aside anything of intellectual substance in political conservatism. Words and phrases that have been carefully crafted in the conservative echo chamber sound a false note when they’re used in front of audiences who aren’t predisposed to nod their heads in agreement.

And over time, such language has had a wearing and wearying effect on those who use it, dulling their minds in the process. Conservative rhetoric has become full of slogans and shortcuts for arguments—mere boxes on a checklist—rather than invitations to dialogue and debate.

As Paul Gottfried points out, vague sentiments such as “the permanent things” and words like “values” appropriated and defined in the popular imagination by Progressives have come to define conservative rhetoric. It’s become a bit of a joke that’s apparently over the heads of those who regularly speak in such dreary ways.

Modern conservative rhetoric also has a penchant for the non-political, attempting to drain political life of its vitality and seeking to replace it with the contemplative life simply.

For instance, the notion that “beauty will save the world” heard on many a serious liberal arts campus offers no real guidance for politics and can be harmful for the young, especially because they are so likely to misunderstand it. Children, after all, are typically moved by their untutored passions rather than by reason and often mistake ugliness or fads for beauty. On an intellectual level, this kind of rhetoric is imprecise, sloppy, and undermines the philosophical foundations upon which the conservative project is built. Cut it out, already.

Conservative Rhetoric on Race
Not all conservative rhetoric, however, is quite so self-defeating.

The argument from some conservatives that the “Democrats are the real racists” should not be so easily dismissed. It is an understandable attempt to turn the tables on their foes, pointing out that Republicans have a much better track record on civil rights and simultaneously laying bare the Democrats’ grim legacy on race.

Gerard Alexander, for example, has demolished the narrative that the Republicans’ rise in the South in the latter half of the 20th century was due to racism. In a deep dive into the research, he shows

the GOP finally became the region’s dominant party in the least racist phase of the South’s entire history, and it got that way by attracting most of its votes from the region’s growing and confident communities—not its declining and fearful ones.

The GOP, of course, was founded on anti-slavery principles. The Republican Party platform of 1856 opposed both slavery and, interestingly, polygamy, calling them the “twin relics of barbarism.”

Democrats, in contrast, historically have been more opposed to the principle of natural human equality than not. From Alexander Stephens, who as the vice president of the Confederacy argued that the principle of equality was an “error,” to Barbara Norton, a Louisiana state representative who said that the founders were “teaching . . . a lie” when they wrote “all men are created equal,” Democrats have habitually been on the wrong side of human equality.

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Liberals and the Headlines By Steven Feinstein

By on August 31st, 2017

Liberals feel no compunction about making the accusation on Page 1. The retraction — if it ever happens at all — is buried deep on page 27, seen by no one.
have mastered most aspects of manipulating an already-sympathetic mainstream media to their advantage, but there is perhaps no liberal skill more highly developed and accomplished than this one: their ability to exploit virtually any situation or occurrence to their political advantage by making an outrageously inaccurate accusatory statement about conservatives. Liberals feel no compunction about making the accusation on Page 1. The retraction — if it ever happens at all — is buried deep on page 27, seen by no one.

It seems that almost every single headline or trending story on the figurative front page (printed, digital or broadcast) of the liberal mainstream media (the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, CBS/NBC/ABC News, Facebook, “Good Morning America,” “The View,” etc.) falls into one of the categories below. The particulars may change depending on what the circumstances of the day might be, but the general themes below remain constant and reliable, and can be adapted to the President, another officeholder or any high-profile conservative as needed:

Conservatives only want tax breaks so their wealthy donors can give them more money.
Every natural disaster (hurricanes, floods, tornados, etc.) is further evidence of the harm caused by Global Warming, the existence of which conservatives continue to deny — even in the face of overwhelming scientific consensus. In other words, natural disasters are the fault of conservatives.
Conservatives are anti-women, proven by their desire to defund Planned Parenthood and their unwillingness to address gender-based wage inequality.
Conservatives are anti-Hispanic, proven by their irrational obsession with immigration and their desire to keep Hispanics out of the country.
Conservatives have little regard for the environment and will willingly let environmental protections slide if doing so means that their big business cronies will prosper.
Conservatives care more about Wall Street than Main Street and always prefer policies that favor the high-end financial class to the detriment of the ‘average guy.’
Conservatives are warmongers and always favor a big military buildup, with lots of fancy weapons to make themselves feel powerful.
Conservatives applaud police brutality against the poor and downtrodden, especially against minorities.
Conservatives want to perpetuate a climate of discrimination and oppression against blacks, and therefore favor limiting or eliminating government-mandated race-based admission and hiring programs.
Conservatives are morally inferior to liberals, as evidenced by their admiration of Southern Civil War symbols, their acceptance of hate groups and their intolerance of same-sex marriage/gender-identity issues. It has nothing to do with conservatives’ religious beliefs (religious beliefs are an anachronistic irrelevancy anyway) and everything to do with conservatives’ moral shortcomings and lack of intellectual sophistication.
Conservatives are heartless and cold, since they want to repeal and replace Obamacare, even if that means pulling healthcare away from the previously uninsured, resulting in the death of thousands. Conservatives want to hurt the elderly by ending Medicaid, in order to divert those funds to other wealthy conservative interests.
Conservatives are self-centered, short-sighted and fundamentally dishonest, while liberals are selfless, far-seeing and primarily concerned only with the greater good.

Liberals know all this quite well. They know how the game is played and they know how to get around the rules. All the above anti-conservative clichés can be convincingly, factually refuted, but the explanations are long and tedious, well past the attention span of the average person.

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The Unmaking of a President By:Srdja Trifkovic

By on August 31st, 2017

The aftermath of the Cold War has seen the emergence of what neocon gurus Robert Kagan and William Kristol have called “benevolent global hegemony” of the United States. Throughout this period, key figures of both major parties have asserted that America’s unchallengeable military might was essential to the maintenance of global order. This period was marked by military interventions in the Balkans, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and (less overtly) in Syria. Each violent exercise of hegemony was validated by the rhetoric of “promoting democracy,” “protecting human rights,” “confronting aggression,” and by the invocation of alleged American exceptionalism.

That bipartisan consensus was codified in the official strategic doctrine. George W. Bush’s 2002 National Security Strategy declared that the U.S. would “extend the peace by encouraging free and open societies on every continent,” and—furthermore—bring about an end to “destructive national rivalries.” The Obama Administration’s 2012 Defense Strategic Guidance (“Sustaining U.S. Global Leadership: Priorities for 21st Century Defense”), which is still in force, claimed that the task of the United States was to “confront and defeat aggression anywhere in the world.” Such continuity of utopian objectives reflected the chronic refusal of the policymaking community in Washington to establish a rational correlation between strategic ends and means, or to see America as a “normal” nation-state pursuing limited political, economic, and military objectives in a competitive world.

As a result, one major source of instability in contemporary global order is the tendency of the most powerful player to reject any conventionally ordered hierarchy of American global interests. Traditional foreign policymaking may be prone to miscalculations (e.g. Vietnam), but in principle it is based on some form of rationally adduced raison d’etat. Deterritorialized strategy of full-spectrum dominance, by contrast, had its grounding in ideological assumptions impervious to rational discourse. It consistently creates outcomes—in Iraq, Libya, etc.—which are contrary to any conventional understanding of U.S. security interests.

Over the years, American “realists”—who accept that the world is imperfect, that violence is immanent to man, and that human nature is immutable—have often lamented the absence of grand-strategic thinking within the U.S. foreign-policy establishment. For the past quarter-century at least, successive administrations have displayed a chronic inability to deploy America’s political, military, economic, and moral resources in a balanced and proportionate manner, in order to protect and enhance the country’s rationally defined security and economic interests. Washington’s bipartisan, ideologically-driven obsession with global primacy (“full-spectrum-dominance”) has resulted in a series of diplomatic, military and moral failures, costly in blood and treasure, and detrimental to the American interest.

The 2016 presidential election, on the subject of foreign affairs, seemed to confront two polar opposites. On November 8, it appeared that Donald Trump, an outsider victorious against all odds and predictions, had a historic opportunity to make a fresh start. The moment was somewhat comparable to Ronald Reagan’s first victory in 1980. Reagan used grandiloquent phrases at times (notably the “Evil Empire”), but in practice he acted as an instinctive foreign policy realist. Likewise, Trump’s “America First” was a call for the return to realism based on the awareness that the United States needs to rediscover the value of transactional diplomacy aimed at promoting America’s security, prosperity, and cohesion in a Hobbesian world.

Some resistance from the upholders of hegemonistic orthodoxy was to be expected, as witnessed even before Trump’s inauguration by the outgoing administration’s frantic attempts to poison the well on every front possible. Giving up the neurotic desire to dominate the world, and recognizing that it cannot be shaped in line with the bicoastal elite class “values,” was never acceptable to the controllers of the mainstream media discourse and the government-subsidized think-tank nomenklatura. More seriously, some key components of the intelligence, national-security and military-industrial conglomerates proved effective in resisting Trump’s attempt to introduce traditional realist criteria in defining “interests” and “threats.”

Hillary’s World—Hillary Clinton was a leading exponent of the hegemonistic consensus. In 2002 she voted in favor of the Iraq war, the greatest foreign policy disaster in recent American history. In 2011 she tipped the balance within the Obama Administration in favor of the Libyan intervention, with devastating consequences for Libya, the region, and the world. She was the first major political figure in the world to compare Vladimir Putin to Hitler. She routinely saw military power as a tool of first resort: In the Obama cabinet she had been “the most hawkish person in the room in every case where she was in the room in the first place.” According to her aides, she subscribed to “a textbook view of American exceptionalism.”

Clinton’s strategic vision was a “known-known” of the 2016 campaign: open-ended global commitments in pursuit of hegemonistic goals. During the campaign she still advocated providing arms to the “moderate” Syrian rebels, which in reality meant further enabling non-ISIS jihadists supported by Turkey and Saudi Arabia. Her speech at the American Legion National Convention (August 31, 2016) was an exultant restatement of the doctrine of global hegemony. “The United States is an exceptional nation,” she declared,

“and is still the last, best hope of Earth . . . And part of what makes America an exceptional nation, is that we are also an indispensable nation. In fact, we are the indispensable nation. People all over the world look to us and follow our lead . . . [W]e recognize America’s unique and unparalleled ability to be a force for peace and progress, a champion for freedom and opportunity . . . U.S. power comes with a responsibility to lead, with a fierce commitment to our values . . . [W]hen America fails to lead, we leave a vacuum that either causes chaos or other countries or networks rush in to fill the void.”

Clinton’s triumphalist vision reflected the post-Cold War consensus, to which both ends of the Duopoly subscribed with equal zeal. Bipartisan consensus which she embodied prompted many establishment Republicans to support her. The continuity of duopolistic key assumptions, and the escalation of risks and tensions resulting from their application, was clearly predictable in case of her victory.

Donald’s Vision—Trump’s strategic concepts seemed less ideologically coherent than Clinton’s, but he was more rational in espousing his stated guiding principles and certainly more “realist” in policy detail. In the early days of his candidacy he repeatedly asked why must the United States be engaged everywhere in the world and play the global policeman. He raised the issue of NATO’s utility and core mission, a quarter-century after the demise of the USSR which it was created to contain. He even suggested creation of a new coalition in order to put America’s resources to better use, especially in the fight against terrorism. He repeatedly advocated rapprochement with Russia. He criticized the regime-change mania of earlier administrations, pointing out the “disastrous” consequences of toppling Saddam Hussein in Iraq. He said that he would leave Syria’s Bashar al-Assad well alone and focus on degrading the Islamic State.

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UN failure is leading to another Lebanon war Benny Avni

By on August 30th, 2017

‘Precision-guided missile factories” are being built in Lebanon and Syria, and unless the UN stops them, Israel will.

That, more or less, was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s message to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres in Jerusalem on Monday.

The new UN chief vowed to “do everything in my capacity to make sure that the [UN Interim Force in Lebanon] fully meets its mandate.” UNIFIL, established after Israel’s 2006 war with Hezbollah in south Lebanon, was charged with disarming Hezbollah. It didn’t.

The UN Security Council is set to renew UNIFIL’s mandate Wednesday. It automatically does so each year, even as Hezbollah, no longer a ragtag organization, now commands a formidable Lebanese-based army that dominates vast swaths in Syria, with tentacles in Yemen, Afghanistan and elsewhere. All while UN forces look on.

In Lebanon, Hezbollah has amassed over 100,000 missiles and other arms, hidden in plain view at private homes, or under schools and infirmaries, ready to hit neighboring Israel. And as Bibi noted Monday, new factories in Lebanon and Syria would allow Hezbollah to manufacture missiles there, rather than risk losing them en route from Hezbollah’s patron, Iran.

“This is something Israel cannot accept. This is something the UN should not accept,” the prime minister told Guterres.

Well, when Israeli leaders say they won’t “accept” something, they usually mean it — the country sets red lines and enforces them. But the UN? Could it actually help prevent a looming war? Not with its current blasé attitude.

UN Ambassador Nikki Haley wants change. On Friday, she told reporters that UNIFIL commander Maj. Gen. Michael Beary of Ireland is the “only person in south Lebanon who is blind” to Hezbollah’s arming. In an unprecedented personal rebuke, Haley added, “That’s an embarrassing lack of understanding on what’s going on around him.”

Haley said she wouldn’t accept an automatic renewal of the force’s mandate, demanding “more robust” action on Hezbollah’s arms.

Is that realistic?

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SPLC Warns of ‘Turmoil and Bloodshed’ With New Map Identifying Confederate Monuments, Cities, Middle Schools By Tyler O’Neil

By on August 30th, 2017

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a far-left outfit that labels mainstream conservative organizations “hate groups” and whose “hate map” inspired a terrorist attack in 2012, has released a map of every Confederate monument in America. But the map does not just include statues: it also lists towns, cities, counties, and even middle schools that bear the names of Confederate generals.

“More than 1,500 Confederate monuments stand in communities like Charlottesville with the potential to unleash more turmoil and bloodshed,” the SPLC posted with the map (emphasis added). “It’s time to take them down” (emphasis original).

The post urges visitors to send a letter to the editor of their local newspaper. “White supremacists incited deadly violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, last week in defense of a Confederate monument. We must show the country that [your city’s or county’s name] gives no safe harbor to such hatred. We must remove the monument at [location],” the sample letter read.

“If our government continues to pay homage to the Confederacy, people of color can never be sure they will be treated fairly,” the letter continued. “And we will never solve our community’s problems if an entire group of citizens is alienated or feels targeted for discrimination.”

As is often the case when the SPLC takes up a cause, this issue is far from clear cut. An NPR/PBS News/Marist poll found that 62 percent of Americans supported leaving “statues honoring leaders of the Confederacy” standing. At the same time, 86 percent of those in the poll said they disagreed with white supremacy and 73 percent said they disagreed with white nationalists.

Even African Americans favored keeping the statues (44 percent to 40 percent). Indeed, a group in Dallas organized to protect Confederate statues — and the members are mostly African-American.

“I’m not intimidated by Robert E. Lee’s statue. I’m not intimidated by it. It doesn’t scare me,” former city council member Sandra Crenshaw, a black woman, told CBS Dallas-Fort Worth. “We don’t want America to think that all African Americans are supportive of” removing the statues. She denounced as “misguided” the idea that “by taking a statue down, that’s going to erase racism.”

But the SPLC not only encourages this “misguided” idea, it warns of “more turmoil and bloodshed” unless the statues are removed.

The group does not only list statues, either. Its Confederate map includes counties named after Confederate generals like Lee County, Fla., in the Fort Myers area. It also includes parks like Confederate Park in Demopolis, Ala. It lists cities like the city of Fort Bragg in California. CONTINUE AT SITE

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Christopher Carr The Beijing-Pyongyang Nexus

By on August 30th, 2017

North Korea will remain an outlaw until China wholeheartedly joins the international effort aimed at bringing Kim Jong-un to heel — a commitment it has made but of which we are yet to see hard evidence. That might change for the better were the US to endorse a nuclear-armed Japan.

How do we deal with North Korea? This is the perennial question, going back to the last decade of the twentieth century. In response to recurring posturing by Pyongyang, successive US administrations have concluded so-called agreements with the rogue state, facilitating aid in return for the regime promising to suspend its nuclear program. As should have been expected, such agreements have proved worthless. Both Kim Jong-il and his son, Kim Jong-un were emboldened and the result is a greatly enhanced and a possibly irreversible nuclear shield.

How often do you hear repeated the popular mantra that Kim Jong-un is a madman likely to start a nuclear war any moment, that he is prepared to risk self-destruction in a final gotterdammerung? Yet, whilst Islamic totalitarians may welcome death in exchange for paradis and 72 virgins, Kim Jong-un, like the communist totalitarians of the twentieth century, is only interested in a socialist paradise in the here and now. Like Stalin and Mao, he is a survivalist. His ideology is evil and insane but in terms of regime survival, Kim Jong-un is tactically rational. Playing the irrational madman is one of the oldest tricks in the totalitarian rule book, designed to keep adversaries in a permanent state of uncertainty.

Far more likely is that the possession of nuclear weapons is the last line of defence for North Korea. For all the belligerent talk, it would seem unlikely that any rocket fired from North Korea would strike the territory of any adversary, except by accident. Firing missiles directly over Japan, as he did this week, cements the madman image and strategy. The prime aim of Kim Jong-un is to sustain his evil regime and profitably exchange nuclear technology with other thug states around the world.

What is China’s role in this current crisis? There is much, possibly misplaced, hope that China might be induced to effectively restrain North Korea. Whilst China joined in the unanimous UN Security Council resolution, tightening economic sanctions against North Korea, we await clear evidence that China is fully abiding by its commitment. In any case, there is little evidence the sanctions will slow Pyongyang’s nuclear program. Instead, the regime, accompanied by xenophobic propaganda, will make the condition of much of the expendable populace even worse. China may be content to play the good cop, bad cop routine, happy to keep the United States and her allies permanently distracted by Kim Jong-un’s antics. I suspect that China would like to see the United States engaged forever and a day in futile efforts to negotiate some sort of settlement.

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U.S. Delivers Airstrike to Block Relocation of ISIS Fighters From Lebanese-Syrian Border In deal with Hezbollah, ISIS fighters, families were moving to area close to Iraq By Nancy A. Youssef in Washington and Margherita Stancati in Beirut

By on August 30th, 2017

The U.S. military on Wednesday carried out two airstrikes aimed at stopping hundreds of Islamic State militants evacuated from the Lebanese-Syrian border from relocating to an extremist stronghold in Syria near the border with Iraq.

The first of the airstrikes came shortly after the U.S. criticized a deal brokered by the Lebanese militia Hezbollah that allowed hundreds of Islamic State militants and their families free passage out of an area straddling Syria’s southwestern border with Lebanon. Their convoy left Monday and was headed to a part of eastern Syria’s Deir Ezzour province very close to the border with U.S. ally Iraq.
Syrian forces members standing on a tank next to a bus waiting to transport Islamic State fighters and their families on Monday. Photo: Louai Beshara/Agence France-Presse/Getty Image

“We created a crater. It was to block them so they could not continue on the road,” a U.S. defense official said on Wednesday, adding the coalition didn’t strike the buses because family members were present.

That airstrike, which also destroyed a bridge, took place after the convoy entered Deir Ezzour province, one of Islamic State’s last strongholds in Syria, from territory controlled by the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

U.S. Central Command said that within two hours of the first strike, it conducted a separate but related second strike west of Deir Ezzour on a handful of logistical vehicles that were known to be affiliated to Islamic State. That strike may have killed Islamic State fighters, the U.S. military said.

“Irreconcilable #ISIS terrorists should be killed on the battlefield, not bused across #Syria to the Iraqi border without #Iraq’s consent,” Brett McGurk, U.S. President Donald Trump’s special envoy for combating Islamic State, tweeted ahead of the airstrike. “Our @coalition will help ensure that these terrorists can never enter #Iraq or escape from what remains of their dwindling ‘caliphate.’”

Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi also criticized the Hezbollah deal.

“We consider it an insult to the Iraqi people. Moving this number of terrorists for such a long distance through Syria is unacceptable,” Mr. Abadi told reporters on Tuesday night. “We are fighting terrorism in Iraq and we are killing them in Iraq. We don’t send them to Syria.” CONTINUE AT SITE

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Nuclear Missiles Over Tokyo Accepting a nuclear North Korea probably means a nuclear Japan.

By on August 30th, 2017

Residents of northern Japan awoke Tuesday to sirens and cellphone warnings to take cover as a North Korean rocket flew overhead. The intermediate-range missile test will further roil the politics of security in Northeast Asia and is another prod toward Japan acquiring its own nuclear deterrent.

Pyongyang tested long-range missiles over Japan in 1998 and 2009, claiming they were satellite launches. The first shocked Japanese and led to cooperation with the U.S. on theater missile defense. After the second, Tokyo curtailed the North’s funding sources within Japan’s ethnic Korean community. Tuesday’s launch is even more threatening because U.S. and allied intelligence agencies assess that North Korea now has the ability to hit Japan with a miniaturized nuclear warhead mounted on a missile.

Much of Japan is protected by its own missile defenses as well as systems operated by U.S. forces in the region. Japan also recently deployed four Patriot PAC-3 missile-defense batteries to the west of the country, but these didn’t cover the northern island of Hokkaido overflown by Tuesday’s missile.

Japan’s ultimate security is the U.S. defense and nuclear umbrella, with its treaty guarantee that the U.S. will respond if Japan is attacked. But the logic of deterrence depends on having a rational actor as an adversary, and rationality can’t be guaranteed in North Korea. Its recent development of an ICBM capable of hitting the U.S. mainland also changes the equation. If North Korea attacked Tokyo and the U.S. responded with an attack on Pyongyang, U.S. cities might then be endangered.

Japanese leaders have long resisted building their own nuclear arsenal, but that could change if they conclude America isn’t reliable in a crisis. Or Japanese may simply decide they can’t have their survival depend on even a faithful ally’s judgment. Some Japanese politicians are already talking about their own nuclear deterrent. And while public opinion currently opposes nuclear weapons, fear could change minds. Japan has enough plutonium from its civilian nuclear reactors for more than 1,000 nuclear warheads, and it has the know-how to build them in months.

This prospect should alarm China, which would suddenly face a nuclear-armed regional rival. The U.S. also has a strong interest in preventing a nuclear Japan, not least because South Korea might soon follow. East Asia would join the Middle East in a new era of nuclear proliferation, with grave risks to world order. This is one reason that acquiescing to a North Korea with nuclear missiles is so dangerous.

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Will this Man be Norway’s First Muslim Prime Minister? Sharia in sheep’s clothing? Bruce Bawer

By on August 30th, 2017

Born in Norway to Pakistani parents, Abid Q. Raja studied law, criminology, and psychology at the universities of Oslo, Southampton, and Oxford, and later worked in Norway at several law firms, the Immigration Appeals Board, and the Police Department’s Immigration Office. He was also active in groups with names like the Center against Ethnic Discrimination, the Council for Crime Prevention, and the Equality and Anti-Discrimination Tribunal.

In 1999, Raja began to appear frequently on Norwegian TV and in the newspaper op-ed pages as a commentator on immigration and integration issue and as a spokesman for the nation’s Muslims. As it happens, that was the same year I moved to Norway, so I’ve followed his entire public career. During those early years, Raja came off as angry and radical. In 2004, while serving as a spokesman for an Oslo mosque called World Islamic Mission, he argued that the Norwegian government should pay to build a school in Pakistan for the children of Pakistani Muslims living in Norway. (Many Muslims in Europe send their kids to schools “back home” to prevent their Westernization.) In 2005, after a Norwegian court found a father and son guilty of forcing a family member to marry, Raja wrote an article for Aftenposten in which he insisted that not all arranged marriages are forced marriages. Some young people, he risibly maintained, “can’t manage to find their own spouse,” while some “don’t want to find their own spouse” and therefore ask their parents to do the job for them. Yeah, right.

In 2004, after a TV2 discussion program called Holmgang addressed the recent jihadist slaughter in Amsterdam of Islam critic Theo van Gogh, Raja went on the warpath, making several TV appearances in which he charged that the show’s host, Oddvar Stenstrøm, had “stigmatized” Muslims. (Stenstrøm reacted angrily to what he described as Raja’s “purely personal attacks” and outright lies: “In my nearly forty years as a journalist I’ve never experienced anything like it.”) Three years later, when Holmgang addressed the question of whether radical Islam represented a threat to Western values (99% of viewers said “yes”), Raja wrote a furious op-ed demanding that Stenstrøm be fired. It’s not clear what happened behind the scenes at TV2, but Stenstrøm was gone within a few months.

At some point – I don’t remember exactly when – I noticed that Raja had tamed his rhetoric. He was trying to sound reasonable, trying to come off as cool and reasoned. He even made the occasional, very carefully worded criticism of this or that aspect of the Muslim subculture. I didn’t believe for a second that he had actually changed his opinion about anything. As far as I was concerned, it was all an act. Raja, I surmised, was cynically modifying his image. The only question was: why? The answer seemed obvious: he wanted to pursue a political career. And he wouldn’t be satisfied with just being a member of Parliament, representing a mostly Muslim constituency: if that was all he was after, he wouldn’t have to undergo any kind of makeover.

No, this was a guy who was determined to go straight to the top. I had no doubt whatsoever that he could make it. He’s articulate and can put on the charm. He has an extremely slick, lawyerly way of fielding ticklish questions – not that the Norwegian media ever ask him ticklish questions. No, they fawn over him and give him protection, the way the U.S. media did with Obama. Given this – and given Raja’s high level of name recognition, the rapid rise in Norway’s Muslim population, and the number of Norwegian voters who are eager to prove at the ballot box that they’re not Islamophobes – he could eventually be a shoo-in. In short, when I looked at the newly made-over Raja, I realized I was looking at the man who someday might well become Norway’s first Muslim prime minister.

Indeed, Raja did end up pursuing a political career. He became active in the smallish Venstre (Liberal) Party, which loves two things: the environment and mass Muslim immigration. In 2009 he won an “alternate” seat in Parliament; the next year he founded Minotenk, a think tank devoted to “minority politics.” He said he wanted to be a “bridge-builder.”

Until Obama became president, I was invited every year to the Fourth of July garden party at the residence of the American ambassador to Norway. At one of the last parties I attended, I noticed a familiar figure in the middle of the crowd. It was Raja. He was surrounded by a circle of admirers, holding court, shaking hands, flashing a big smile. Clearly, this was a man on the make, a star on the ascendant.

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False Choice: Ending DACA or Building the Border Wall President Trump doesn’t have to choose. And he shouldn’t. Michael Cutler

By on August 30th, 2017

Though there is no shortage of “fake news” appearing in the mainstream media, there are a number of reports claiming that members of the Trump administration are attempting to convince President Trump to renege on his campaign promise to rollback the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program in exchange for funding for the construction of the border wall.

Before we consider this news, let’s be clear about the absolute need to secure the dangerous U.S./Mexican border. I have frequently compared securing that border with a wing on an airplane. Without a wing an airplane will not fly. However, a wing by itself goes nowhere. Though it has been estimated that nearly half of all illegal aliens did not run the southern border, and instead were admitted through America’s 325 ports of entry, securing that border is nonetheless a vital element of our immigration law enforcement system and national security.

The U.S./Mexican border is particularly dangerous because of endemic corruption of the Mexican government on all levels and the extreme level of violence in Mexico, both attributable to the Mexican drug cartels. Mexican government officials are given the choice of “silver or lead.” Either take a bribe (silver) or expect to be shot (lead).

That violence and potential for corruption flows across our border: The majority of violent crimes in the United States have a connection to the drug trade and drug addiction.

For years I have written about how the most reliable metric to determine the level of border security for the United States is not the arrest statistics by the Border Patrol, but the price and availability of heroin and cocaine in the United States since those substances are not produced in the country. Every gram of those narcotics is smuggled into the United States.

Today the United States is experiencing unprecedented levels of heroin addiction that wreaks havoc on lives and our communities. Drug smugglers also engage in human trafficking and smuggle transnational gang members into the United States.

While not all drug smuggling involves the U.S./Mexican border, a huge amount of narcotics does enter the United States along that dangerous corridor that stretches roughly 2,000 miles.

Furthermore, the 9/11 Commission made the compelling case for making border security a cornerstone of national security policy. This conclusion, in point of fact, was laid out in the preface of the official report, “9/11 and Terrorist Travel: Staff Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States.”

Now let’s consider the wrong-headed program created by the Obama administration, DACA.

The mainstream media and immigration anarchists have, since the inception of the illegal implementation of the DACA program on June 15, 2012 by the Obama administration, provided blatantly false and misleading statements about this program, duping Americans into believing that DACA is for alien children.

While President Obama sold this program to the American people as providing lawful status for young aliens, in reality aliens as old as 31 years of age could qualify if they claimed to have entered the United States prior to their 16th birthdays.

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