RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Saudis and Iranians are building outposts in Kabul. Meanwhile, a U.S. university there needs bolstering.

Two new initiatives focused in Kabul but originating in the Middle East threaten to draw Afghanistan into the vortex of Middle Eastern strife and to undermine prospects for a secular government. America will need to present an alternative to forces that seek to roll back much of what has been accomplished in Afghanistan.

In November, Saudi Arabia launched a huge new mosque and Islamic Center on a hill in Kabul’s center. The Saudi ambassador declared unconvincingly that the mosque’s purpose is to fight terrorism and “present a moderate and true face of Islam.” Iran is also constructing a mosque in central Kabul and, if asked, would probably make the same claim. Both complexes include a mosque and school, but the similarity ends there. One will promote the Saudi’s hard-line Sunni Wahabbism, while the other will propagate the Ayatollahs’ hard-line Shiite Islam.

Just as these two states and religions are engaged in an undeclared but bloody war in Iraq, Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East, they are at loggerheads in Afghanistan and view the struggle there as a zero-sum game. If either prevails, Afghanistan will be the loser.

So far the country has largely escaped the strife arising from the millennium-old conflict between Sunni and Shiite Islam and the more ancient struggle between Persians and Arabs. Afghans do not consider theirs to be a Middle Eastern country. Even the branch of Islamic law that prevails in Afghanistan, the relatively mild Hanafi school, sets it apart from the Saudis and Iranians.

Mr. Caldwell is a senior editor at the Weekly Standard and the author of “Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West.”

France and the rest of Western Europe have never honestly confronted the issues raised by Muslim immigration

The terrorist assault on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo on Jan. 7 may have been organized by al Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen. But the attack, along with another at a Paris kosher market days later, was carried out by French Muslims descended from recent waves of North African and West African immigration. Well before the attacks, which left 17 dead, the French were discussing the possibility that tensions with the country’s own Muslim community were leading France toward some kind of armed confrontation.

Consider Éric Zemmour, a slashing television debater and a gifted polemicist. His history of the collapse of France’s postwar political order, “Le suicide français,” was No. 1 on the best-seller lists for several weeks this fall. “Today, our elites think it’s France that needs to change to suit Islam, and not the other way around,” Mr. Zemmour said on a late-night talk show in October, “and I think that with this system, we’re headed toward civil war.”

To call for an end to Israel, or to its sovereignty, is now, more glaringly than ever, to call for an end to the Jews.

The four people gunned down in Paris on January 9 had not even been buried yet — four men murdered by a Muslim terrorist just for being Jews — when Amsterdam’s pro-Palestinian student group demanded an academic boycott against Israel.

Not that they are anti-Semitic — not a bit, insists Studenten for Rechtvaardig Palestina [SRP], which models itself on the American Students for Justice in Palestine, an organization that accuses Israel of genocide. A leader of the group, Sarah (who would not give her last name to reporters, she said, for fear of reprisals), declared, rather, “I find anti-Semitism terrible. We are against it, and we said so from our first informational meeting. I find Israel as bad as IS,” she continued, “and I am Muslim myself.”

Have you noticed a lull on the part of the BDS, J(erk) Street, Students for (in)Justice in Palestine and other Israel bashing groupies? Hhhhmmm….they can’t blame the outbreak of Islamic violence and jihad on the “settlers” or “occupation” or perceived oppression of fish,fauna, and everything in between by those Israeli meanies. Trust me, the calumnists like Tom Friedman and their amen crowd will ultimately find a way to pin this on Israel….but, they make find a diminished audience now that some realism is spreading.

In the meantime I hope those bastards boycott and divest themselves from oxygen…..rsk

When the jihadists slaughtered the cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo, I worried that they had killed satire.

But Charlie Hebdo produced this week’s issue on schedule.

Alas, however, satire is now officially dead. Earlier today, the US Secretary of State flew James Taylor into Paris to sing “You’ve Got A Friend” to the French nation. Seriously. Under Bush, extrajudicial rendition meant the CIA shipping you overseas to be tortured by the Saudis and Pakistanis. Under Obama, an extrajudicial rendition means shipping fey old folkies to Europe to torture the natives:

I’m in Europe myself at the moment and I was shocked when someone said to me, “Did you hear about the huge bomb in Paris?” It took me a couple of minutes to realize she was talking about Kerry’s press conference.

But, as I said, satire is dead.

It was the French who dubbed America l’hyperpuissance – the hyperpower. But now the hyperpower is the hippiepower – and who doesn’t love that? Following his rendition of “You’ve Got A Friend”, James Taylor saluted the visiting mullahs from Qom with the Ayatollah Khomeini’s favorite song, “How Sweet It Is (to be loved by ewes)”.

Barack Obama then joined John Kerry on stage for a moving duet of “I’m So Vain (I prob’ly think this song is about me)”, after which Secretary Kerry updated us on the latest talks with Teheran with a highly nuanced version of Joni Mitchell’s “(I’ve looked at Iranian mushroom clouds from) Both Sides Now”.

His lovely wife Teresa then delighted the French audience with a riveting selection of slides of the Kerrys’ home in Boston as she and John sang Crosby, Stills and Nash’s “Our House (is a very very very fine house).” Mahmoud Abbas got into the spirit and serenaded the Secretary of State with the Beatles’ “Hey, Jew!”, but Mr Kerry explained that was just one great-grandfather and it was a long time ago back in the Hapsburg Empire.

Short of impeachment, there is really nothing Congress can do.

You’re not going to like this.

Our commander-in-chief is recklessly releasing jihadists from Guantanamo Bay. The president’s Bush-deranged base is buoyed by the all-out effort to fulfill his vow to shut down the detention camp. But the vast majority of Americans remain opposed, and increasingly alarmed. The pace of releases has surged since November’s midterm elections, with over two-dozen detainees sprung — aiding the enemy even as the terror threat intensifies.

But if you want it stopped, the president has to be impeached.

Yes, yes, I know you don’t want to hear that. I have the scars to prove it. A few months back, Beltway Republicans got even more annoyed than Obama Democrats when my book, Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama’s Impeachment, was published. Contrary to what you’d infer from all the shrieking, I actually argued that it would be a big mistake to impeach President Obama absent strong public support for his removal. And as I conceded, that level of public support does not exist and never will exist unless a compelling political case for impeachment is made.

The Left’s Islamophobia obsession shows the extent to which victimology dominates our politics.

Dear Reader (including my Twitter followers who are just scanning this for the hidden glottal stops),

So Charlie Hebdo is selling like hot cakes, giving new meaning to the Profit Mohammed. And, just as I suspected, the images are pissing off lots of Muslims who aren’t terrorists. And, again just as I suspected, the New York Times et al. can’t help but make that the real story. No doubt millions of people hashtagging “Je Suis Charlie” were sincere — or thought they were — but the real reason that slogan spread into nearly every ideological quarter is that sympathizing, empathizing, and leeching off the moral status of victims is the only thing that unites Western societies these days. Celebrating winners is divisive. How long did it take for the Sharptonians to leap on the Oscar nominations?

The Islamists of Boko Haram rage through northeastern Nigeria [1] with kidnappings, suicide bombings and last week’s mass murder in the town of Baga, acquiring turf in ways that some top-notch experts are comparing to ISIS [1] — with which Boko Haram has a flourishing kinship. Hashtags on Twitter have done nothing to stop this horror, and it gets ever harder to see who or what will. But if there’s one thing that is assuredly not needed, it’s the advice of Kofi Annan. You remember Kofi: former secretary-general of the United Nations from 1997-2006, and joint winner with the UN of the 2001 Nobel Peace Prize.

Annan’s public career should have ended along with his tenure at the UN (or even earlier). But, like another of the Nobel’s more dubious Peace laureates, Jimmy Carter, Annan just keeps turning up, perpetually ready to dispense terrible advice about the next crisis. Right on cue, here he is, telling the BBC [2] that politicians have to find a way to “reach out” [3] to Boko Haram.

Let’s be clear. Boko Haram is not a group of sensitive souls desperate to surrender to politicians or international bureaucrats who come bearing gifts and professing an interest in their grievances. These are terrorists who have been doing quite well for themselves with guns, bombs, abduction, invasion and slaughter. A few days ago they strapped a bomb vest to a girl who may have been as young as 10, and sent her as a suicide bomber [4] into a busy market, to die in an explosion that killed some 20 others. Like ISIS, they are carving out turf for themselves in ways that suggest ambitions unlikely to be addressed by diplomatic group therapy.

The jihadist killing spree in Paris last week (seventeen people murdered, twice as many wounded) has been described as ”France’s 9/11“ by Le Monde, the French liberal daily newspaper. Indeed, just like the American 9/11 fourteen years ago, it was a moment of truth: for France as a nation, for the French political class and — last but certainly not least — for French Jews. The question, however, is not so much whether one sees the truth or not, but rather what one is supposed to do once truth has been seen.

America’s instincts after its own 9/11 were sound: it understood that it was in a state of war and that it had to react accordingly, but it wavered about what war to wage and what strategy to follow. As a result, the War On Terror, in spite of considerable American and Western investment, pugnacity, and heroism, has been largely inconclusive and even, in many respects, a failure. Likewise, whatever the emotional or philosophical impact of the present French 9/11, either in France or abroad, it is not clear whether it will translate — or can translate — into adequate policies.

The carnage in France that left 17 people dead has Europeans rightly regarding these latest outrages by Islamic fanatics as direct assaults on their nation’s secular culture and the Western way of life. Finally, many came to recognise that hard-won freedoms – free speech and the right to offend most of all – are at grave risk. The sincerity of protesters who filled the streets in sympathy with the Charlie Hebdo martyrs cannot be doubted, but what took them so long? French Jews have endured years of escalating assaults on their synagogues, businesses, even their children, but these outrages seem not to have bothered fellow Frenchmen until the terror went mainstream.

Some three million French men and women demonstrated their outrage at the latest butchery, many carrying those small signs which read je suis Charlie. Some would have been more honest if they had hung other notifications around their necks. It would have been a single word: “Hypocrite!”

Take French President Francoise Hollande, as our first example. There he was, walking in the front row of the huge Paris rally organised in defence of liberte, egalite, fraternite. Yet he owes his election in no small measure to the country’s ten million Muslim voters, who support him overwhelmingly. And why wouldn’t they? He campaigned on promises of higher social welfare payments, also vowing to make it much easier for those of Tunisian, Algerian and Moroccan origins to settle their families in France. And just to cement the backing of Muslim voters, he pledged the right to vote for immigrants who are not yet citizens. Now what is the French word for pandering?