RUTHFULLY YOURS

Bill Kristol has opened the french doors of his ivory tower, stepped out and deigned to address the great unwashed conservative quarter. High above the people and reality, he admonishes those on the right for not embracing the catastrophic events unfolding in the Middle East.

In his opinion piece, Stand for Freedom, he dismisses or summarily denies the concrete facts on the ground. Of course, we all want freedom. Of course, we support voices yearning to be free. We fought for and believed The Bush Doctrine, and still do. But there is far more at work here, as evidenced by the fierce behind-the-scenes jockeying and arm-twisting by the on-the-ascent Muslim Brotherhood, an organization created after the fall of the Ottoman Empire.

The left wing lemmings are eating up this discourse among us like maggots on dead flesh, but that is their only joy, so let them have it.

But Kristol is so wrong, inexcusably so. Glenn Beck nailed it. The advance of Islamic supremacism is exactly what is at play here. And we are right to be cautious. Nobody expects Mubarak to survive — we only care about what comes after. There is Kristol-lite and there is reality.

Muslim Brotherhood: Egyptians demanding restoration of Islamic law

And yet William Kristol writes:

The United States has played a role in helping those transitions turn out (reasonably) well. America needn’t be passive or fretful or defensive. We can help foster one outcome over another. As Krauthammer puts it, “Elections will be held. The primary U.S. objective is to guide a transition period that gives secular democrats a chance.”

Now, people are more than entitled to their own opinions of how best to accomplish that democratic end. And it’s a sign of health that a political and intellectual movement does not respond to a complicated set of developments with one voice.

But hysteria is not a sign of health. When Glenn Beck rants about the caliphate taking over the Middle East from Morocco to the Philippines, and lists (invents?) the connections between caliphate-promoters and the American left, he brings to mind no one so much as Robert Welch and the John Birch Society. He’s marginalizing himself, just as his predecessors did back in the early 1960s.

Nor is it a sign of health when other American conservatives are so fearful of a popular awakening that they side with the dictator against the democrats. Rather, it’s a sign of fearfulness unworthy of Americans, of short-sightedness uncharacteristic of conservatives, of excuse-making for thuggery unworthy of the American conservative tradition.

We welcome freedom. We are not siding with dictators, but fighting against the tyranny of Islamic totalitarianism, and so should you, Mr. Kristol. Shame on you.

We are not naive. We saw these same Western liberals usher in the reign of the Ayatollah Khomeini and that, too, changed the world forever, for the worse. Much worse.

It was not so long ago, after all, when conservatives understood that Middle Eastern dictatorships such as Mubarak’s help spawn global terrorism. We needn’t remind our readers that the most famous of the 9/11 hijackers, Mohammed Atta, was an Egyptian, as is al Qaeda’s number two, Ayman al Zawahiri.

Indeed. Islam produces jihad, Mr. Kristol. Islam produces fundamentalism. The quran commands it, demands it. Millions of jihadis are reading the same playbook. Blaming Mubarak or US policy for jihad is like blaming a woman for being raped (ah, if only she didn’t have that vagina, all would be well).

The idea that democracy produces radical Islam is false: Whether in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, the Palestinian territories, or Egypt, it is the dictatorships that have promoted and abetted Islamic radicalism. (Hamas, lest we forget, established its tyranny in Gaza through nondemocratic means.)

Is that so? So please, Mr. Islamic scholar Kristol, explain all of the jihadists and home grown terrorists born and raised in Western nations. Think, man. Quoting Robert Spencer, “Muslims are the first immigrant group that has ever come to this country with a ready-made model of society and government they believe to be superior to what we have here.”

What irks me is that Kristol is dead wrong on Beck’s presentation. Finally, someone had the gonads to speak to Islamic supremacism and its global project nine years after September 11, and Kristol has the gall to smack him down. How the Weekly Standard has failed the right!  Mnay of us have been covering this for years, perplexed and disturbed that no one in the mainstream media dare touch it.

The left always aligns itself with the totalitarian ideology of the day (ie Stalinism, communism, national socialism [nazism]), and so it is with Islamic supremacism. Those of us covering the anti-America, anti-war, anti -Israel movement have documented this for years. CODE PINK, ANSWER, Al Awda, Socialist Workers Party, International Solidarity Movement (ISM), CAIR, ISNA, If Americans Knew (IAK), Friends of Sabeel-North America (FOSNA), Muslim American Society (MAS), Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) have bee working and agitating together for years.

Trust me, Mr. Kristol, Beck did not “invent” that.

There is nothing that Beck said that was inaccurate. It’s all there. You don’t have to look for ghosts. There is vast historical, political, and judicial evidence of the global jihad and its ties. As for the existence of the violent goals of the caliphate, read the quran and hadith. Tally the daily death toll of non-Muslims in Muslim countries around the world. Or better yet, take a quick look at the past millennium and the 270 million victims of jihadi wars, land appropriations, cultural annihilations and enslavements.

An American conservatism that looks back to 1776 cannot turn its back on the Egyptian people. We should wish them well—and we should work to help them achieve as good an outcome as possible.

This prig is lecturing us on 1776? We live it. Every day. I have for the past nine years since 911. I strongly recommend Mr. Kristol step back and read Ibn Warraq, Wafa Sultan, Sir Martin Gilbert, Mark Durie, Jewish history, the Muslim Brotherhood project, the news accounts of the jihad in Thailand, Somalia, the Philippines, Ethiopia, China, Beslan, Moscow, London, Madrid, Israel, Lebanon, Sudan, Tunisia, Kenya ……. you get the picture.

This blog has 20,000-odd posts reporting on jihad across the world. The Middle East was once a Christian region, it is now all islamic save for the tiny Jewish state, and outside of Israel, non-Muslims in the Muslim world suffer brutalities unimaginable, sanctioned by Islamic law.

Let us not forget that William Kristol was a fierce supporter of Gush Katif, the attempt to placate the annihilationists with Jewish sacrifice. Kristol was contemptuous of the Jewish people who did not want to give up their homes and understood the motivation of their enemy and knew that this was surrender in installments. Kristol was wrong. Desperately, horribly, jewicidally wrong. Fairyland gave way to Hamastan and he never apologized. He never reconsidered. He never backtracked. He never acknowledged that the enemies he attacked were right all along.

William Kristol is impervious to evidence.

This is not an attack on Kristol. This is in defense of our position against William Kristol’s attack on us.

The right needs new intellectuals. These soft dough boys are going to bring us down. Hard. It is the lack of backbone on the right that has gotten us into such a position of weakness and compromise. Mr. Kristol, you are more damaging to us then our avowed enemies, because so many folks trust your impaired judgement.

A personal note from Salim Mansur sent to an editor at Ricochet:

Extremely distressed by the crew in Washington, and in most European capitals. Media is so corrupted by left-leaning thinking that there is not much of an analysis to be expected in the media that is now competing with facebook, twitters, etc. The dumbing down of thinking is itself a huge problem the West is facing now as it tries pathetically to undertstand/explain politics and history of other cultures when it no longer has faith in its own civilizational values. I despair, and so I follow Samuel Pepys who confined himself to his diaries while London burned and I am trying to devote my time to reading and writing of my own (that of course I might not be able to publish, and even if published few will read).

I am more convinced now, as I wasn’t when Paul Kennedy wrote about the rise and fall of great powers, that the West has gone over the tipping point in its terminal decline. That intelligent people, or people who claim to be intelligent, (I have in mind the talking heads in the U.S. media such as Chris Matthews or Fareed Zakaria) cannot make the difference between the sham of the Muslim Brotherhood talking about freedom and democracy and the generic thirst in man to be free. These are the people who have like the Bourbons learned nothing and forgotten nothing. They are glibly about to put the Lenins of our time into trains heading for Moscows of our time, they find nothing odd that they are pushing for the Muslim Brotherhood to be taken into governing when everything needs to be done to keep the Muslim Brotherhood out even as one carefully negotiate the long historic transition of Arab societies from tribal autorcracy and military dictatorships to representative rule and constitutionally limited government. I read you when I can, and I wish that you and others like you were closer to the main media control in the West, or in government.

Take care, and God bless.

Salim