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The Week in Nothing to do with Islam by Mark Steyn

Posted By on November 23rd, 2015

And so now we have the considered position of Kerry, Clinton and Obama: Terrorism is to do with everything except Islam.
The British Home Secretary, Theresa May, was a little behind the curve when she reacted to the bloodbath in Paris by insisting that “the attacks have nothing to do with Islam”. This is the old spin that, although some terrorists might claim to be Muslim, there’s nothing inherently Muslim about their terrorism.

But why be so modest? In the United States, the most senior members of the Democrat establishment are taking it to the next level. Secretary of State John Kerry:

It has nothing to do with Islam; it has everything to do with criminality, with terror, with abuse, with psychopathism – I mean, you name it.

As my friend Douglas Murray remarked:

So long as you don’t name it ‘Islam’.

Quite. Secretary Kerry doesn’t care what you name it as long as you don’t name it “Islam”. Because the not-naming of Islam is more important than the actual naming of whatever it is. Even the qualification that many have been careful to make over the years – of course, most Muslims aren’t terrorists but an awful lot of terrorists unfortunately happen to be Muslim – will no longer suffice. As President-in-waiting Hillary Clinton assures us:

Muslims are peaceful and tolerant people and have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism.

So not only is terrorism nothing to do with Islam, but Muslims have “nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism”. She said this a few hours before yet another US citizen was killed by terrorists shouting “Allahu Akbar!” – this time in a mass slaughter at the Radisson Hotel in Bamako, Mali. Hostages were given a stark choice: if they could recite from the Koran, they would live; if they were incapable of reciting from the Koran, they would die. So whoever these terrorists were – “you name it” – they knew enough about Islam to be able to recognize quotations from the Koran. Yet they can’t be Muslims because Muslims have “nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism”.

So who does have something to do with terrorism? Republicans mainly. Republicans are the greatest recruiting tool for terrorism that has ever been devised – far more effective than jihadist snuff videos on social media. Just ask President Obama:

MANILA, Philippines — President Obama on Wednesday angrily accused Republicans of feeding into the Islamic State’s strategy of casting the United States as waging war on Muslims, saying the GOP’s rhetoric has become the most “potent recruitment tool” for the militant group…

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Roger Franklin: Ubiquitous Aly

Posted By on November 23rd, 2015

It was said of Trotsky that, had he never existed, Stalin would have had to invent him, useful as he was for focusing discontent on an elusive, handy enemy. Today, faced with the implacable evil of Islamist assaults, we invent a talking head to diminish our society’s will to respond.

It is not easy to avoid Waleed Aly. See him holding forth with that blonde and those boys on The Project and the urge to switch channels is immediate and irresistible. But no, it doesn’t work. There he is again, whack-a-mole style on the ABC! Twist the nob to “off” and still it does no good, for Ubiquitous Aly pops up again in the Fairfax Press. If the ACCC wishes to set aside its quest to make consumers pay more for petrol, it might find a fruitful topic for investigation in Aly’s apparent monopoly of the media spots available to contextualisers of Muslim misbehaviour. It is a booming industry, yet few other representatives of the Religion of Peace seem to get a look-in.

To be fair, Aly is in such high demand because he has no peer. The Chief Imam is a such a proud exponent of multi-culturalism that he has not bothered to learn English and Hizbee honcho Uthman Badar might launch into a rave about honour killings or the inevitability of sharia, so he and his ardent ilk are appropriate only during the dull, relaxed interregnums between Islamist assaults. Q&A tried out convicted criminal Zaky Malah as a spokesman for Muslim youth, but that little exercise backfired badly, obliging the ABC to pay friend-of-the ABC Ray Martin a presumably large, but undisclosed, consultancy fee to give his former ABC colleagues the once-over. Certification that all hands are clean and everything sanitary at the national broadcaster is expected any day now.

Ubiquitous Aly would have been a much safer proposition. So quiet, so reasonable and so measured, he is once again the toast of those who reckon a massacre in Paris, the latest one, needs to be taken in our ho-hum stride, as doing more than sporting flowers and expressions of mournful forbearance will play into the hands of ISIS. It is a perspective aired but by no means coherently explained in Aly’s newly famous TV editorial, said to have become one of the hottest draws on YouTube. Again, it is easy to understand why that might be so. Watch below and see the magic of the man. There is, first of all, his definite talent for timing and theatrical certainty, for the light and shade of pace and emphasis. But most appealing of all is his salesman’s gift for dressing shallow slogans as penetrating insight.

It seems there is no cliché nor vapid truism that cannot be buffed into a faux profundity at a touch of those oh-so-reasonable, un-accented lips. Nor do they recoil from insinuation. Who is the “them” of which he speaks, that same “them” being just as bad by implication as his own creed’s fundamentalist firebrands? A less gifted rationaliser could not have dared to make such a smooth, slick case for relativism and moral equivalence, not with the shocking footage from Paris still vivid in the public mind. It seems Western politicians (including an un-named “has-been” wink wink) critical of Islam are infected with much the same moral leprosy as those with the Kalashnikovs and body bombs. By the beard of the Prophet the man is slick! If Olympic judges were to rate the daring, degree of difficulty and execution of such a glib dive into obfuscation’s bottomless pool, a gold medal would dangle from Aly’s neck. For the moment, however, he must content himself with a Local Hero nomination, a Walkley, a mantelpiece of other awards and a bank account fattened by talk-show bookers’ constant need to have grim reality reassuringly framed by hardly-anything-to-see-here sophistries.

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Garth Paltridge The Depths of the Climateers’ Deception

Posted By on November 23rd, 2015

Stonewalled in his efforts to grasp how US scientists turned an 18-year pause into a temperature increase, a powerful congressman is on the warpath. Even as the climate-change establishment heads to Paris, its scam is much closer to surfacing than the heat they now insist is hiding in the deep ocean
A grandiose United Nations Climate Change conference is to be held in Paris at the end of the month. It has been extensively billed as the last chance for world leaders to sign up to the massive expenditure supposedly necessary to save the world from the global warming disaster. A previous effort of this sort in Copenhagen six years ago went horribly wrong, so it is not surprising that the propaganda associated with the lead-up to the Paris conference has been vastly more intrusive and hysterical. As a consequence, the apparently coherent scientific story behind the politics is beginning to fall apart.

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ISIS in Egypt: The Other Big Threat to the West By P. David Hornik

Posted By on November 23rd, 2015

Senior U.S. intelligence officials now say they’re almost sure—one of them calls it “99.9% certain”—that a Russian plane that crashed into the northern Sinai Peninsula on October 31 was brought down by a bomb. (Update: Russia now confirms it.)Although the attacks in Paris on Saturday, November 14, which killed about 130, have gotten far more media attention, the Russian crash exacted a considerably higher toll with 224 people killed, mostly Russian holidaymakers returning from the Sharm al-Sheikh resort in Sinai.

One of the reasons the Paris attacks had a greater impact is that ISIS was clearly behind them. But U.S., British, and Israeli intelligence officials are now saying it was apparently behind the Sinai crash, too.

That assessment is based on chatter that was picked up after the crash between Sinai Province—an ISIS affiliate in Sinai that claims credit for the atrocity—and ISIS Central.

Investigators also say the plane’s cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder indicate that the crash was no accident and an explosion was involved.

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Obama: U.S. ‘Could Never Be at War with Any Religion’

Posted By on November 23rd, 2015

The president vowed to “destroy” ISIS: “a bunch of killers with good social media.”

President Obama stressed at a press conference today in Malaysia that “the United States could never be at war with any religion because America is made up of multiple religions.”

He also hit at critics — namely, the Politico headline “Obama’s Asian Distraction?” — who have suggested that his focus on the Asia pivot came at a bad time with new ISIS and al-Qaeda attacks.

“This region is not a distraction from the world’s central challenges, like terrorism. The Asia Pacific is absolutely critical to promoting security, prosperity and human dignity around the world,” he said. “That’s why I’ve devoted so much of my foreign policy to deepening America’s engagement with this region.”

Obama said the American victims over the past several days — Nohemi Gonzalez in Paris and Anita Datar in Mali — “remind me of my daughters, or my mother, who, on the one hand, had their whole life ahead of them, and on the other hand, had devoted their lives to helping other people.”

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Politics and What Remains of the English Language By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on November 23rd, 2015

Here is a list of a few trendy words, overused, politicized, and empty of meaning, that now plague popular communications.

“Intersection” How many times have we read a writer, columnist, pundit, or job applicant self-describe himself with this strange word? Here’s an example: “Joe Blow is a social theorist working at the intersection of class oppression, racial stereotyping, and transgendered emergence.”? Or: “Amanda Lopez writes at the intersection of Latina identity, Foucauldian otherness, and social media.” Most of the time “intersection” exists only in the grandiose mind of the writer. It is a patent though feeble attempt to become a threefer or fourfer on the race/gender/generic victim/revolutionary activist scale. The intersected topics are individually irrelevant — and all the more so when cobbled together. The use of “intersection” is a postmodern way of plastering bumper-sticker narcissisms without writing, “I am an identity-studies person without much knowledge of literature, history, or languages, but am desperately trying to convey expertise of some sort by piling up a bunch of pseudo-disciplines that credential my victimhood activism.”

“Diversity” The noun was rebranded in the 1980s, and does not mean what it by nature should — “a range” or “multiplicity.” No one furthers the goals of “diversity” by ensuring plenty of conservatives, liberals, radicals and reactionaries on campus, or welcoming lots of Christian fundamentalists as well as atheists and Muslims. The word instead is a euphemism for non-white, non-male, non-heterosexual, non-Christian, and non-liberal. It is a relative and entirely political noun. The University of Missouri football team can both be 52% African-American and proof of diversity, even if African-Americans make up less than 12% of the population — in a way that all white and elderly Democratic primary candidates are honorifically diverse by virtue of their homogeneous left-wing politics.

Three other observations: First, racial and ethnic diversity, without assimilation and integration into one culture, and when identity becomes essential rather than incidental to a nation (i.e. a salad bowl society rather than the melting pot), leads to Armageddon, whether in Austria-Hungary, the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, or Iraq.

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Brown U. admits to racism, offers reparations By Ed Straker

Posted By on November 23rd, 2015

Brown University is finally coming out and admitting that despite its delightfully multicultural name, it is a deeply racist institution.

Expressing gratitude to students of color for calling attention “to actions needed to address racism and injustice on our campus,” Brown President Christina H. Paxson has developed a plan and asked students, faculty and staff to comment on it.

Brown’s own president is admitting there is racism on campus. What is it about liberal universities that make them hotbeds of racism? Why do liberals hate blacks and other minorities so much?

But at least they are offering reparations:

The university plans to invest $100 million over the next 10 years on achieving the goals outlined in the plan, Paxson said in her introduction.

Called “Pathways to Diversity and Inclusion: An Action Plan for Brown University,” the 19-page plan outlines steps for “creating a just and inclusive campus community,” increasing the university’s racial and ethnic diversity and adding issues of race, ethnicity and identity to teaching and research on such topics as environment, health, technology and global affairs.

So you have a school that claims to be one of the top in the country, Brown University, and yet it teaches environment, health, and technology, all from a white perspective. Can you imagine being forced to learn only the white version of physics? The white version of anatomy? The white version of oceanography? It’s like we’re still stuck in racist Woodrow Wilson’s early 20th century worldview!

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Useful Idiots Gone Wild By Robert Weissberg

Posted By on November 23rd, 2015

Race-related protests on American college campuses are spreading faster than head lice at a daycare center (for an update, see here). Though each disturbance has its own idiosyncrasies, all include demands that the university recruit more black faculty and students, forcefully “re-educate” all students and faculty to expel lingering anti-black racism and then do whatever is necessary to make the campus a warm, caring and, most of all, a safe space for communities of color.

Far more is involved here than howling for school president’s head or cancelling a mid-term exam to permit traumatized students time to heal. The ruckus is entirely about pushing the university leftward, and these immature campus social justice warriors are what Lenin called useful idiots. All the nattering about diversity and dialogue is a subterfuge; these hypersensitive snowflakes and fellow traveler thugs are just the ground troops in a much larger ideological war.

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Iran sentences Washington Post reporter Rezaian to prison

Posted By on November 23rd, 2015

DUBAI (Reuters) – An Iranian court has sentenced Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian to a prison term, the state news agency said on Sunday quoting the judiciary spokesman, a case that is a sensitive issue in contentious U.S.-Iranian relations.

The length of the prison term was not specified. “Serving a jail term is in Jason Rezaian’s sentence but I cannot give details,” judiciary spokesman Gholamhossein Mohseni Ejei told a weekly news conference in Tehran, according to IRNA.

In Washington, U.S. State Department spokesman John Kirby told reporters he was aware of the IRNA report but could not independently confirm it. It was not immediately clear why Iran has not given details of the ruling against the 39-year-old Rezaian, who Iranian prosecutors accused of espionage.

On Oct. 11, Ejei said Rezaian, the paper’s Tehran bureau chief who has both U.S. and Iranian citizenship, had been convicted, without elaborating. He said then that Rezaian had 20 days to appeal against the verdict.

The Washington Post said last month that the verdict, issued soon after Iran raised hopes of a thaw in its relations with the West by striking a nuclear deal with world powers including Washington, was “vague and puzzling”.

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Selective Sensitivity By Marilyn Penn

Posted By on November 23rd, 2015

At a time when the liberal left is consumed with placating the sensibilities of minorities and creating “safe places” on campus to insure that words will never harm them, I wonder if our president and other pundits are considering the sensibilities of 9/11 and Boston Marathon survivors and the grieving families of those who were murdered. How devastating it must be to have lived through those domestic Jihadist attacks, suffered permanent physical and mental impairment and then have to listen to our president proclaim that there is no need to fear the influx of 10,000 Muslim immigrants, or to read the Times’ daily vilification of people with the opposite point of view.

At the same time that the newspaper reports the bombing of the Mali hotel due to security lapses, its columnists excoriate those who question the efficacy of our national security to safeguard us from terrorist interlopers. Fear is the appropriate reaction for people who have experienced firsthand or suffered the consequences second-hand of the stated aims of Islamic Jihad. Too many of us have felt sick just seeing the images of executioners lopping off the heads of innocent people, raping and kidnapping scores of women and militarizing African children – forcing them to do unspeakable things including cannibalism. It’s impossible to pretend after this year’s double catastrophe in Paris that we can walk the streets of NYC, a prime stated target for repeat attack, completely confident that our excellent police and anti-terror squads can be omniscient and omnipotent. It just isn’t feasible in an open society where we don’t have security screening in our public museums, city transportation hubs, multiplex theaters or most of the myriad places where people congregate. A day after the Paris attack, I saw a New Yorker with a backpack large enough for a weeklong camping trip enter a movie theater, sit down and casually place that baggage on the floor beside her.