http://jamieglazov.com/2016/01/16/daniel-greenfield-moment-islams-american-identity-crisis/
This special edition of The Glazov Gang presents The Daniel Greenfield Moment with Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center who writes the blog The Point at Frontpagemag.com.
Daniel discussed Islam’s American Identity Crisis, explaining the pathological process of confusing your way to theocracy.
Don’t miss it!
On the Corner this week, the eminent Jim Talent touted (with some reservations) an essay about “moderate Islam” by Cheryl Bernard. A Rand Institute researcher, she is also a novelist, a defender of war-ravaged cultures, and the wife of Zalmay Khalilzad, the former U.S. ambassador to post-Taliban (or is it pre-Taliban?) Afghanistan. With due respect to Dr. Bernard, who does much heroic work, I believe the essay highlights what is wrong with Western academic analysis of Islam.
The problem comes into focus in the very title of Senator Talent’s post, “Aggressive Traditionalism.” That is the attribute of Islamic societies that Dr. Bernard blames for the frustration of her high hopes for “moderate Islam.” In truth, however, the challenge Islam poses for moderation is not its tradition; it is Islamic doctrine — the scriptural support for traditional sharia and Islamic supremacist ideology.
I give Bernard credit. She is the unusual strategist who is willing to admit failure — in this instance, of the strategy of promoting “moderate Islam” as the antidote to “radical Islam.” But even this concession goes off the rails: She maintains that the strategy was somehow “basically sensible” despite being “off track in two critical ways.” The real problem, though, is not the two errors she identifies but the fatal flaw she fails to address: The happenstance that there are many moderate Muslims in the world does not imply the existence of a coherent “moderate Islam.” Try as she might, Bernard cannot surmount this doctrinal hurdle by blithely ignoring the centrality of doctrine to a belief system — without it, there is nothing to believe.
But let’s start with the two critical problems she does cite. The first is the matter of defining what a “moderate” is. Bernard concedes that she and other thinkers adopted a definition that was “too simplistic” — meaning, too broad. It made “violence and terrorism” the litmus test for “moderation.” This enabled what she labels “aggressive traditionalists” to masquerade as moderates.
Psephology is a branch of political science which deals with the study and scientific analysis of elections. rsk
“Our expert psephologists tell us that Trump is way ahead in many polls. But as I say, I suspect they are measuring fans, not supporters. The difference is between cheering on a successful mud wrestler and appointing a general to lead the army.Donald Trump is an amusing entertainer whose antics have shone a light on some dark corners that needed illumination. He is a sort of Liberace of Liberalism: a recent supporter of Chuck Schumer, of Nancy Pelosi, of Hillary Clinton, who also (until about ten minutes ago) was as pro-abortion as it is possible to be.”
The consensus seems to be that Ted Cruz, Donald Trump, and Marco Rubio were the only three candidates who emerged standing from the debate last night. Christie got off some good lines as usual, while Ben Carson once again left me wondering what pharmaceutical cocktail he had ingested before mounting the stage, and John Kasich once again made me feel sorry that he had to cope with that species of motor-neuron disease with which he is afflicted.
I also felt a little sorry for Jeb Bush.
He is clearly a competent man whose record as governor of Florida should inspire admiration. Sure, you might disagree with him about this or that — Common Core, for example, or the details of his ideas about immigration — but he is a thoughtful, steady person of good will. He exudes maturity, and it tells us a lot about the texture of our current political situation, I think, that Donald Trump should have been able to score one of his first rhetorical victories of the primary season by charging that Jeb Bush was “low energy.”
The charge stuck, but it was unfair. Jeb is not low energy. He is simply deliberate — a good thing in a statesman.
I say this not because I am a Bush supporter. I’m not, for many reasons. But I think it is worth pausing to acknowledge that he acts with dignity, like an adult. Last night, Chris Christie described Barack Obama as a “petulant child.” That was apt. Obama is notoriously thin-skinned, as are many narcissists, and that combined with his breathtaking incompetence has been a recipe for petulance.
For the last seven years, the nation has suffered under a president who ignores the law and treats the legal process as a political weapon. Yet in the most recent Republican debate, Donald Trump displayed a clownish, similar disregard for the law when he demanded Senator Ted Cruz “get a declaratory judgment” about his eligibility to run for president.
The meritless nature of Trump’s birther controversy was neatly summarized by Susan Carleson in the Washington Times:
As the Supreme Court made clear, there are only two types of American citizenship — citizens at birth, such as Sen. Cruz, and those who become citizens through the naturalization process.
A declaratory judgment is when a judge, in a legitimate contested lawsuit, makes a ruling about which side is correct about a legal controversy.
Trump has some knowledge of this process — because of what he did to Vera Coking.
Vera Coking lived for 30 years in a modest Atlantic City home, until Trump coveted her land. As David Boaz summarizes:
Trump turned to a government agency — the Casino Reinvestment Development Authority (CRDA) — to take Coking’s property. CRDA offered her $250,000 for the property — one-fourth of what another hotel builder had offered her a decade earlier. When she turned that down, the agency went into court to claim her property under eminent domain so that Trump could pave it and put up a parking lot.
Coking wasn’t the only person who faced a declaratory judgment because Donald Trump wanted the government to take their land for his private benefit. He did the same thing to others in Atlantic City, and proposed the same for an amusement park in Connecticut. Trump still supports the abusive eminent domain practices that took the home of Susette Kelo in New London, Connecticut.
A birther lawsuit challenging Ted Cruz’s eligibility was filed today in federal court in Texas. I had previously written that such a lawsuit challenging the eligibility would most certainly lack standing and would be frivolous. The lawyer who filed the complaint, Newton B. Schwartz, Sr., had been suspended from the practice of law by two separate states for disciplinary infractions.
According to the detailed disciplinary ruling against Schwartz in Louisiana, he engaged in legal matters in Louisiana but was never admitted to practice law in the state and never sought temporary admission. (You can read the lengthy disciplinary case against Schwartz here).
Like the vagaries of the weather itself, true believers in man-caused global warming twist with the wind as challenges to their beliefs blow by. For example, I recently pointed out to a graduate of a large, well-respected university that one of the highly credentialed, long-time professors in the university’s atmospheric sciences department was an outspoken skeptic of disastrous anthropogenic global climate change. The graduate promptly responded by informing me that it was well-known that this professor was off medication, literally “nuts,” and this is why the professor was outspoken (even to the point of maintaining a popular contrarian website) regarding their fantasy that humans are not likely to have much culpability for cataclysmic climate change.
So, doing some twisting myself, I suddenly realized how much sense this argument made. Professors who believe that they can confidently predict the global climate decades from now are on medication. When they go off their medication, they start to think differently. Other professors, still medicated, notice this independent thinking and become upset. (After all, settled science must not tolerate unsettled thinkers.) The flustered faculty, finding the uncomfortable situation a tough pill to swallow, cast aspersions on their antiseptic colleague, calling them nuts, off-their-medication, and the like, trying to shame the colleague back on sedation. Ultimately, the true-believer professors simply resort to shunning their loose-cannon colleague and go on with the palliative knowledge that climate will be calamitous as long as humans continue to live comfortably.
In classrooms across the country, high school students are taught the scientific method. It consists of constructing a doubtful hypothesis and designing a series of experiments to test the hypothesis with the observable facts. After a number of tests prove positive. The student can then take the facts and reach a conclusion. When a conclusion is constantly verified, it is enshrined in what might be called “established” science.
There is a second kind of science that uses methods very different from those of “established” science. In fact, this science, if indeed it might be called such, uses the exact opposite method. It consists of constructing a conclusion and then testing that conclusion with a hypothesis that is repeated over and over again using doubtful data to back it up.
The “logic” of this particular scientific method is that the truth of the conclusion is determined by the number of times the hypothesis is affirmed. With enough repetition, even the data starts to take on the appearance of the truth. The secret is to get as many people and media as possible to parrot the great discovery. At a certain point, the conclusion can be enshrined in a special pantheon that might be called “settled” science, and woe betide any “denier” who dare question it.
Like its cousin “settled” law, “settled” science can be useful even outside its field. It can be employed to silence opposition, impose laws and promote political agendas. It respects no rank or positions. August researchers and famous professors can be toppled from their positions if they express the slightest doubts about a “settled” position. Even the strongest evidence is ignored with disdain and disbelief. Meanwhile the hypothesis mantra is just repeated over and over again.
“Settled” science cases abound in today’s politically-correct times. The most obvious one is the dogma of “global warming.” Many old-school scientists have suffered persecution for calling into question the faulty computer models and fudged data associated with this doctrine. They have even shown that the globe is not warming. Flexible “settled” scientists immediately tweaked the hypothesis to speak of “climate change,” and thus cover both sides.
Beware the zeal of the reformer. True, the reform impulse has occupied a long and sometimes necessary place in American politics, going back to Andrew Jackson’s fiery allegation that John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay stole the 1824 presidential election through a “corrupt bargain.” Four years later, Jackson rode to the White House on the wings of the outrage he had summoned. His refrain—that malefactors of power had undermined American democracy by thwarting the will of the people—has probably been the most catalytic recurrent theme in the country’s politics. Even when the flames of populist passion subside, they seem ever-present through a kind of after-burner of latent protest.
Yet the political reforms generated by these passions often go awry, producing unintended consequences. Sometimes they fall victim to the vicissitudes of human nature and the reality that politics is rarely about good guys versus bad guys. Reformers are human, and often when power comes their way their frailties are exposed.
Let The People Rule
By Geoffrey Cowan
Norton, 404 pages, $27.95
A particularly potent period of reformist zeal followed the tumultuous campaign year of 1968, when activist Democrats infuriated by the Vietnam War flooded the early presidential primary states and obliterated President Lyndon Johnson’s hopes for a second full term. For their pains they got, instead, Johnson’s vice president, Hubert Humphrey, who embraced Johnson’s war policy and cadged his party’s nomination without having entered a single primary. The reformist refrain went up: The party’s nomination process was dominated by backroom bosses who exercised power without regard to voter sentiment.
The reformist answer was to revise party rules in order to encourage states to select national convention delegates through primaries rather than boss-controlled caucuses and state conventions. The result was the nominating system we have today, with generally 80% of national convention delegates selected through primaries.
The nation tuned in to Round Six of the Republican debate mashup Thursday night, and the media is busy micro-covering every last rift between the GOP candidates. In the process reporters are ignoring the far more interesting party crackup going on.
You might not know it, but the Democratic Party is in the middle of an internecine battle that potentially dwarfs that of conservatives. On one side is a real but weakened mainstream Democratic movement that has its roots in Clinton centrism. On the other is a powerful, ascendant wing of impatient and slightly unhinged progressive activists. This split has been building for years, but The Donald has been so entertaining that few have noticed.
Now it’s getting hard to ignore. Polls this week show Bernie Sanders tying or beating Hillary Clinton in Iowa and New Hampshire. Put another way, a self-declared socialist, a man who makes many think of their crazy uncle Bob, is beating a woman who spent eight years planning this run, who is swimming in money, and who oversees the most powerful political machine in operation.
Some of Mrs. Clinton’s struggles are self-imposed. She’s a real-world, political version of Pig-Pen, trailing along her own cloud of scandal dust. Even Democrats who like her don’t trust her. And a lot of voters are weary or unimpressed by the Clinton name. For all the Democratic establishment’s attempts to anoint Mrs. Clinton—to shield her from debates and ignore her liabilities—the rank and file aren’t content to have their nominee dictated.
Shortly after a conservative website on Wednesday posted 2008 footage of Sen. Marco Rubio backing a cap-and-trade program to combat climate change, his campaign roared back with a counterattack that included an entire web page aimed at debunking the video.
Mr. Rubio’s muscular response revealed how toxic the issue of climate change has become in the Republican Party under President Barack Obama, who has sought to make reducing carbon emissions to alleviate global warming one of his signature accomplishments.
As speaker of the Florida House, Mr. Rubio did vote for a 2008 bill authorizing the state to come up with rules for a cap-and-trade plan, though he raised questions about its cost and effectiveness. A press release from the House Majority Office at the time described the bill as a “responsible response to concerns about global climate change.”
But since running for U.S. Senate in 2010 as the conservative alternative to then-Gov. Charlie Crist, Mr. Rubio has questioned whether climate change is man-made, and opposed potential remedies like cap-and-trade that he says would hurt the economy.
Shifts by Mr. Rubio and some of his rivals on the issue recall an inconvenient past that many in the GOP would like to forget: Republicans, not Democrats, first championed market-based systems to control pollution, as a way to avoid more direct regulation.
Until 2008, many Republicans, including then-presidential nominee John McCain, supported cap-and-trade to address climate change. Once Mr. Obama won the White House, Republicans swiftly unified against nearly all of his initiatives, including a cap-and-trade bill that would have set limits on carbon emissions and allowed companies to trade pollution credits to comply.
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