RUTHFULLY YOURS

Obama’s “strategy” against ISIS and the rest of the terrorist world has disintegrated. You can’t fight Islamic terrorists with political correctness tying your hands.

Throughout his presidency, Barack Obama has maintained his willful ignorance of the fact that weakness against terrorists abroad, coupled with weakness against them at home, add up to more than the sum of their parts. To defeat terrorists, we need to have policies at home and strategies abroad that are integrated and support each other.

From the State Department came a petition of dissent, signed by dozens of employees, asking for military action against Syria’s Bashar Assad. If many in the State Department — the last bastion of diplomatic wimpery — are calling for military action, the president’s policies must have disintegrated.

And they have, as CIA Director John Brennan said last week. Mr. Brennan said that two years of President Obama’s war against the Islamic State, or ISIS, haven’t even disrupted its ability to conduct terrorist attacks globally. This despite the president’s insistence that ISIS is suffering low morale and loss of territory.

The Orlando nightclub massacre, committed by a man claiming allegiance to ISIS, leaves Mr. Obama’s shattered policies in stark relief.

The media has desperately tried to blame anything and everything for the Orlando Muslim massacre. The bloodshed by a Muslim terrorist has been attributed to guns, homophobia, family problems and mental illness. By next week, the media may be blaming global warming and UFOs.

But Omar Mateen told his Facebook friends and a 911 operator exactly why he was doing it. Omar killed 49 people as part of the Islamic State’s war against America.

The motive is there in black and white. This was one of a number of ISIS attacks. The roots of the Orlando attack lie in Iraq forcing us to dig down into Obama’s disastrous mishandling of ISIS. Without understanding what went wrong in Iraq, we cannot understand what happened in Orlando.

Under Bush, Al Qaeda in Iraq had been on the run. Under Obama, it began overrunning the region.

In 2009, Obama vowed a “responsible” end to the Iraq War. He claimed that the “starting point for our policies must always be the safety of the American people”. But the safety of the American people was the first casualty of his foreign policy. In 2011, he hung up his own “Mission Accomplished” sign and boasted that “The long war in Iraq will come to an end by the end of this year.” It did not and would not.

Obama claimed that his withdrawal from Iraq and his invasion of Libya were both examples of successful policies. Both countries are now ISIS playgrounds. The “sovereign, stable and self-reliant” Iraq he told the country we were leaving behind was a myth. The new Libya was an equally imaginary and unreal place. ISIS gained power and influence as a result of that chaos. And it used that influence to kill Americans.

Today the battle for Fallujah is raging. When ISIS first took the city, Obama breezily dismissed them as a JayVee team. He specifically insisted that ISIS posed no serious threat to America. “There is a distinction between the capacity and reach of a bin Laden and a network that is actively planning major terrorist plots against the homeland versus jihadists who are engaged in various local power struggles and disputes, often sectarian.”

Ever since Richard Nixon opened relations with Communist China in 1972, Chinese intentions have been a matter of incessant and often fevered speculation in this country.

In particular, national security and regional experts, non-governmental organizations and office-holders alike, have endlessly debated whether the People’s Republic of China could be brought into a U.S.-dominated international order and world economy in a manner consistent with American interests and, better yet, as a partner in opposition to mutual adversaries (e.g., the Soviet Union, North Korea, and the global jihad movement).

Regrettably, this controversy over China’s intentions has now been largely settled by actions of the Chinese government – and a rapid militarization. Under successive regimes – and most especially that of the incumbent Chinese ruler, Xi Jinping – the Chinese have relentlessly and unmistakably striven to put themselves in a position to challenge, and ultimately to displace, the post-World War II Pax Americana with a new order. This position would return China to what its leaders consider to be China’s rightful place as the Middle Kingdom, the preeminent global power strategically and economically.

At this critical juncture, it is both foolhardy and irresponsible for America and its allies to continue to construe China’s conduct as non-threatening. That conclusion is powerfully articulated by eight essays featured in a book just released by the Center for Security Policy, entitled Warning Order: China Prepares for Conflict and Why We Must Do the Same. (A video introduction is here.)

A Warning Order is a technique long used by the U.S. military to put its units on notice of an impending danger that requires countervailing action. The draft Secretary of Defense directive that briefly summarizes and suggests how to operationalize the findings of the contributors to this new volume – former U.S. Senator Jim Talent, former Commander-in-Chief, U.S. Pacific Fleet Admiral James “Ace” Lyons, China and national security experts Dr. Peter Navarro, Gordon Chang, Dean Cheng, Kevin Freeman and Lindsey Neas and journalist Bill Gertz – reads as follows:

WARNING ORDER: Required Preparations for Conflict with China

The unfolding misrepresentations of the Obama Administration’s “deal” with Iran, suggest that either the President or the Iranians or both, have been avid readers of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes.”

As in Andersen’s tale, the vain American president, Obama (the Emperor,) cares about nothing except for living up to his preordained legacy as Nobel Peace Laureate, wrapping himself in yarns of deceptions as accomplishments.

Although the American public and the world is led to believe that Emperor Obama initiated the rapprochement with Iran, it seems more likely, just as in Andersen story that idea came from the scheming weavers.

The crafty, terrorism trend-setting, Ayatollah Khamenei and his artful team of disinformation weavers, eagerly sought the opportunity to become the regional power and develop their in-house nuclear arsenal, recognized as early as 2007, the unique opportunity offered to them by then Democratic presidential candidate Obama, who declared he wanted “to talk to Iran.”

After decades of terrorist designations and sanctions, the election of Emperor Obama who strived to justify his unwarranted Nobel Peace Prize, and who did not hide his naked ambition to wear his power as no other American leader has done before him, offered the Iranian the perfect punter to their knotty scheme.

In 1988, Bradford Muslims didn’t apparently manage to incinerate Rushdie’s book — symbolic, says Kenneth Baker, of the endurance of the written word.

This is a book which, as one eyes its lavish illustrations and dips into its elegant prose, looks as if it ought to come with an option to buy a cut-price John Lewis coffee table.

On the Burning of Books is, in fact, much more than that. It wears its scholarship lightly. A weightier treatment of the topic for those interested can be found in Matthew Fishburn’s Burning Books (2008).

Kenneth Baker? A name that rings bells. But what did he do? He enjoyed high office in the Thatcher years. At one point he was touted as a contender for Downing Street. His legacy is the National Curriculum. Best forgotten is the Dangerous Dogs Act. Spitting Image caricatured him, spitefully, as a beslimed slug. He was probably the last politician in England seriously to use Brylcreem.

He has been out of the political game for decades now and, as Baron Baker of Dorking, has enjoyed his later years as a connoisseurial man of letters. Over the years (he is now 81) he has compiled notes on flagrant examples of book-burning. It’s something that gets his goat.

Fishburn devoted thoughtful chapters to what he called humanity’s ‘fear of books’. ‘I’ll burn my books,’ screams a desperate Faustus in Marlowe’s play, thinking thereby to escape the flames of Hell. He doesn’t: he can’t obliterate the books in his brain. He is what he’s read and must burn for it.

Monotonously cited, in various forms, is the Miltonic epigram, ‘Where men are burned, books are burned.’ (Baker recalls being setAreopagitica as an A-level text in 1952: things were different then.) There’s a sacred aura in printed books, even in the lowliest pulp paperback. My Waitrose has a rack or two. But whoever said ‘Where baked beans are burned, men are burned’?

EDITOR’S NOTE: The following article is adapted from Heather Mac Donald’s new book, The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe.

Often accompanying the spurious claim that blacks are disproportionately imprisoned because of the war on drugs. An even more audacious argument is that incarceration itself causes crime in black neighborhoods, and therefore constitutes an unjust and disproportionate burden on them because blacks have the highest prison rate. This idea has gained wide currency in the academic world and in anti-incarceration think tanks. Professor Jeffrey Fagan of Columbia Law School (whom we met as in “expert witness” in earlier chapters) offered a representative version of the theory in a 2003 law review article coauthored with two public-health researchers. Sending black males to prison “weakens the general social control of children and especially adolescents,” Fagan writes. Incarceration increases the number of single-parent households. With adult males missing from their neighborhoods, boys will be more likely to get involved in crime, since they lack proper supervision. The net result: “Incarceration begets more incarceration [in] a vicious cycle.”

A few questions present themselves. How many convicts were living in a stable relationship with the mother (or one of the mothers) of their children before being sent upstate? (Forget even asking about their marriage rate.) What kind of positive guidance for young people comes from men who are committing enough crimes to end up in prison, rather than on probation (an exceedingly high threshold)? Further, if Fagan is right that keeping criminals out of prison and on the streets preserves a community’s social capital, inner cities should have thrived during the 1960s and early 1970s, when prison resources contracted sharply. In fact, New York’s poorest neighborhoods — the subject of Fagan’s analysis — turned around only in the 1990s, when the prison population reached its zenith.

Fagan, like many other criminologists, conflates the effects of prison and crime. Neighborhoods with high incarceration rates suffer disproportionate burdens, he claims. Firms are reluctant to locate in areas where many ex-convicts live, so there are fewer job opportunities. Police pay closer attention to high-incarceration zones, increasing the chance that any given criminal within them will wind up arrested. Thus, incarceration “provides a steady supply of offenders for more incarceration.”

But if business owners think twice about setting up shop in those communities, it’s because they fear crime, not a high concentration of ex-convicts. It’s unlikely that prospective employers even know the population of ex-cons in a neighborhood; what they are aware of is its crime rates. And an employer who hesitates to hire an ex-con is almost certainly reacting to his criminal record even if he has been given community probation instead of prison. Likewise, if the police give extra scrutiny to neighborhoods with many ex-convicts, it’s because ex-cons commit a lot of crime. Finally, putting more criminals on probation rather than sending them to prison — as Fagan and others advocate — would only increase law-enforcement surveillance of high-crime neighborhoods.

Orlando’s Pulse nightclub terror attack will go down in U.S. history as the single largest case of mass slaughter ever conducted by a lone gunman in the nation’s 240-year history. Barack Obama’s shameful but predictable response to the carnage can best be characterized as deceitful spin involving a two-part strategy of obfuscation.

The first part involves deflection. Divert America’s attention from the main culprit – Islamic terrorism – to forwarding dual strawman/red herring arguments designed to confuse and mislead. By doing so, he hoped to draw America’s attention away from his own flawed foreign and domestic policies which enabled the ISIS-inspired Muslim terrorist to commit mass slaughter.

Obama cleverly but disingenuously framed the issue as a gun control matter, cynically exploiting the tragedy to advance his agenda for further eroding Second Amendment rights. In his eyes, it was the AR-15 sporting rifle (which turned out not to be the gun that was actually employed) and the National Rifle Association that bore direct responsibility for the killings. He then referred to the carnage as a “hate crime” directed against the gay community, completely glossing over the central role played by a malevolent political ideology that seeks to dominate and impose Sharia law on the West.

In fact, Omar Mateen never expressed anti-gay animus during his 911 rants to police though he did express disdain for U.S. foreign policies and unambiguously professed his Islamic leanings and allegiance to the Islamic State. Moreover, he scouted other locations, having no nexus with the LGBT community, before finally settling on the Pulse nightclub to execute his diabolical plans. Perhaps he did so because he was familiar with the club’s layout, having been there on multiple prior occasions as a patron. Or perhaps he viewed it a soft target in which he could easily inflict mass carnage. No one will know for certain why he chose Pulse but Obama has already set the agenda and charted a course for its trajectory. That trajectory places Americans on a thought process that deliberately diverts attention away from the main causes and culprits.

ATTEMPTS TO LEGISLATE AWAY INCORRECT OPINION ARE SIGNS OF ENCROACHING TOTALITARIANISM

My friend Kathy Shaidle has recently posted a no-holds-barred article on the disaster of “hate speech” legislation, focussing on a proposed Liberal bill to punish “anti-transgender speech” by up to two years in prison. She reminds us that such totalitarian interventions into a presumably democratic society are by no means unique to Canada. As she writes, “bear in mind that New York state, for one, already has similar laws on the books, and they carry fines of up to $250,000. And [an] Oregon ‘transmasculine’ teacher got $60,000 because her colleagues wouldn’t refer to ‘it’ as ‘they.’”

The notion of “hate speech” has begun to infect an entire culture quivering under the aegis of political correctness, with the result that multitudes of subjects are increasingly off limits. But are there not things in this world that are truly hate-worthy? Should we not hate a racially supremacist ideology like Nazism or a totalitarian philosophy like Communism? Should we not hate individuals like Hitler or Haj Amin al-Husseini or Stalin or Pol Pot or Mao or Che Guevara or any mass murderer who comes to mind? Should we not hate tyrants who subjugate entire populations? Should we rather pity or love or labor to make excuses for those who blow up buildings and massacre thousands of ordinary citizens going about their daily lives? Are such movements and people not genuinely hateful? And is there not, as the Preacher exhorts, “A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak?”

When we observe pervasive cultural trends which are based on demonstrable falsehoods, like the global warming boondoggle or the feminist distortion of sound tradition and common sense or the epidemic of dodgy rape claims in a gynolatric culture or the Middle East Studies flagrant revisions of the historical archive or the politicization of the educational system as occurred in the Germany of the 1930s, is this not “a time to speak”?

If we are dismayed by the concerted attack on biological reality that leads to grotesque bodily mutilations and social policies that favor violations of the natural order while stigmatizing the skeptical and, as Robert Reilly cogently argues, promoting “the substitution of pure will as the means for unshackling us from what we are as given,” should we not be permitted to voice our outrage or express our beliefs, however unseasonable? If we object to the “slaughter of the innocents,” aka pro-choice abortion, which has given us the atrocities of Planned Parenthood’s craniotomies-for-profit, why should a free society not allow for debate and discussion?

Why should morally responsible convictions be tarred as “hate speech” and become socially rebarbative or even prohibited by law? It is the very essence of what we are as human beings that will have been rendered offensive or repugnant—a shrivelling of the self that is the signet of despotic societies everywhere. Indeed, where does “hate” enter into the equation? Or if we insist that it does, why should those on the side of repression not be equally accused of “hate speech” or, for that matter, outright hatred against those whom they would ostracize or imprison?

The term “hate speech” is like a kind of verbal spandex taken off the rack that can stretch to fit any intended wearer. If I should make a joke of the inherently preposterous identity category of transgenderism and refer to it as “transJennerism,” would I be liable to prosecution under Canada’s tendered Bill C-16? It’s not beyond the realm of possibility. “Hate speech” has come to mean anything one wants it to mean, just as “sexual assault” in the repuritanized West may encompass nothing more than a flirtatious look or compliment. The notion of “hate speech” is a convenient, multi-purpose strategy for silencing opposition to the shibboleths of our current political and cultural mandarins, subjecting us to what French philosopher Gilles Deleuze dubbed the “microfascism of the avant-garde.” In the last analysis, it is the broad and malleable concept of “hate speech” itself, which has developed into a license to abuse, that is hateful.

A Daesh of hope at the Obama-Hillary-Kerry State Department.

After last week we must conclude that not everyone in the State Department is an idiot. That conclusion — guarded, reluctant, and certainly temporary — is based on a truly earth-shattering event.

As the Wall Street Journal reported, fifty-one State Department officials, all of whom are or were advisors on the State Department’s policy on Syria, authored a “dissent channel cable” (State’s grandiose term for an email) petitioning for military strikes against Bashar Assad’s government and urging regime change in Damascus as the only way to defeat the ISIS terrorist network.

The petition, in part, says, “Failure to stem Assad’s flagrant abuses will only bolster the ideological appeal of groups such as Daesh [ISIS], even as they endure tactical setbacks on the battlefield.”

There is no modern equivalent to that petition. One can only imagine such events. The Harvard faculty could endorse Donald Trump. Al Gore could admit that global warming is a hoax. Or Hillary Clinton could confess to the federal crime of intentionally mishandling top secret information. Nothing else would come close.

Can it be that, after nearly eight years of gladly helping sell America’s national security down the river that a few of the State Department’s bureaucrats have seen the error of Obama’s, Kerry’s, and Clinton’s ways? That’s one way to read it.

It’s entirely appropriate to view the petition with skepticism. It could easily be that a bunch of these folks, coming near their retirements, want to pave their way into the book world. You don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to detect a whiff of opportunism in it as well as a healthy dose of unreality.

Some or all of these people must have participated — with Hillary Clinton and Vichy John Kerry — in crafting the disasters of foreign policy we and our allies have endured since 2009. As “experts” on the Middle East, they must have aided Obama’s and Kerry’s dogged efforts — over almost two years — to bully Israel into a peace agreement with the Palestinians on terms that would have sacrificed Israel’s national security to false promises.

They must have been there through Obama’s negotiations with Iran, helping craft the nuclear weapons agreement that is everything Obama and Kerry assured us it was not, guaranteeing Iran will have nuclear weapons and the intercontinental missiles to deliver them, as soon as it wants them.

And these same people must have been there, helping Obama and Kerry craft the Syria policy that willfully ignored the facts on the ground and assured that Russia and Iran can control the outcome in the so-called Syrian civil war.

I am in Norway on business for my product and written on a wall I read ‘Down with Israel.’ I think, ‘What did Israel ever do to Norway?’ I know Israel is a terrible country, but after all, there are countries even more terrible….why is this country the most terrible? Why don’t you read on Norwegian walls, ‘Down with Russia,’ ‘Down with Chile,’ ‘Down with Libya’? Because Hitler didn’t murder six million Libyans? I am walking in Norway and I am thinking, ‘If only he had.’ Because then they would write on Norwegian walls, ‘Down with Libya’ and leave Israel alone.

Philip Roth, The Counterlife (1986)

While reading Alvin Rosenfeld’s formidable, encyclopedic, and terrifying collection of essays entitled Deciphering the New Antisemitism, I kept wondering what Hannah Arendt would make of it. Her classic study of the subject, called simply Antisemitism, was written in the late forties and published in 1951 as the first volume of her three-volume Origins of Totalitarianism. She ended Antisemitism with this remarkable statement:

Thus closes the only episode in which the subterranean forces of the nineteenth century enter the full light of recorded history. The only visible result [of the Dreyfus Affair] was that it gave birth to the Zionist movement—the only political answer Jews have ever found to antisemitism and the only ideology in which they have ever taken seriously a hostility that would place them in the center of world events.

Were Hannah Arendt to publish this statement today, she would immediately disqualify herself for employment in most American or European universities. Can one imagine Vassar College, in which even the Jewish Studies faculty is knee-deep in the muck of Israel-hatred, hiring the Arendt of 1951 to teach about Zionism, or even to give a lecture on campus? Would she be allowed to set foot on the grounds of Brandeis University? And what about Rutgers, which long ago established a Hannah Arendt Professorship of Sociology and Political Science but now hires semi-literate crackpots like Jasbir Puar, who travels about the country lecturing at elite colleges on how Israelis “shrink” Arab children and steal organs from dead Palestinians in order to carry out their bloodthirsty program of “weaponized epigenetics.”

When Arendt wrote Antisemitism—a book whose effect on him Norman Podhoretz (in Ex-Friends) likened to that of a great poem or novel—her vision was as yet unclouded by the haughtiness towards established Jewish institutions and “those coarse Israelis” which her research assistant at Schocken in 1947 (a young literary critic and socialist named Irving Howe) had already noticed when he worked for her. Neither had it been distorted by what a German-born Israeli named Gershom Scholem called the “heartlessness” that permeated her Eichmann book of a decade later, in which she accused Jewish leaders of collaboration with the Nazis.

She would not have been surprised to learn that the “new antisemitism” is largely a left-wing enterprise, or that it flourishes openly on university campuses in student organizations (Black Lives Matter, Students for Justice in Palestine, BDS) and in those academic departments and programs, based on nothing more than the revolution du jour, which threaten to turn many colleges and universities into Goshens of mediocrity. Neither would she have been shocked to learn that “progressive” Jews (examined in Doron Ben-Atar’s essay in this book) play a huge role, as modern “apostates,” in “kosherizing antisemitism.” But she would have been surprised to learn that, in an anachronistic reversal of cause and effect that now permeates progressive thought, the single movement in which Jews took antisemitism seriously is held to be the sole cause of “worldwide hostility” against them, of Middle Eastern chaos, and indeed, in such bogus (if not demented) academic enterprises as “intersectionality,” the cause of every evil on the planet, ranging from race riots in Missouri or underpaid teaching assistants in Manhattan, to man-made global warming and avian flu. This is especially the case in Middle East Studies, where, as Martin Kramer long ago pointed out, if you expect to acquire wisdom from the majority of its professors, you should also try warming yourself by the light of the moon.