RUTHFULLY YOURS

We’ll have to forgive what’s left of the staff at the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo if they don’t take much comfort from the ostentatious displays of sympathy and support from their colleagues in the Western media today, and from the similarly defiant words of Western political leaders. For the hysterical reaction of mainstream Western media outlets and politicians to the publication of cartoons mocking Mohammed — first by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten and then by Charlie Hebdo – set the stage for Wednesday’s atrocity.

By turning what was little more than a teacup storm on Islamist websites into a major international story when Jyllands-Posten published its Mohammed cartoons back in 2005, and by providing extensive coverage of Charlie Hebdo’s subsequent “provocations,” the media ensured that the cartoons came to the attention of a global Muslim audience.

The tone of the coverage back then, particularly in the U.S. and British media, was largely sympathetic to Muslims.

Masked gunman stormed the offices of a satirical French magazine, Charlie Hebdo (The Daily Charlie), and slaughtered 12 people in cold blood. Their perceived “crime” was to have published caricatures of Muhammad. And let’s be clear, this was no act of the deranged. The terrorist gunmen were heard screaming, “Allahu Akbar” as they shot, with one assailant shouting, “The Prophet has been avenged,” as they escaped the scene. This was a terrorist act carried out by ideological barbarians over a cartoon.

Aside from the deadly serious problem Islamists have with invoking violence at every turn – in protest, in conquest, in celebration of their “religion” – this incident stands as a pointed reminder that Islamists purposefully calculate these murderous actions; plotting them meticulously down to the second. But even in the perfection of their plans one thing is always a constant for the Islamist. They are willing to wait a lifetime to affect the moment, a concept antithetical to the Western “sitcom attention span” culture. To wit, the management of Charlie Hebdo was first warned of reprisals for their publishing of the Muhammad cartoons eight years ago.

As Daesh (the Islamic State) continues its conquest of the Middles East – leaving fathers crucified and dismembered, mothers sold into slavery or used as concubines and children’s heads left on pikes as warnings against any refusal of subjugation, Yemeni suicide bombers kill scores each day. As Boko Haram kidnaps, rapes and slaughters Christian girls in Africa, axe wielding “lone wolf” Islamists slash people on subway platforms in New York and “home grown” terrorists are routinely thwarted in their murderous plans, but for the grace of God, by law enforcement around the world. Myriad evidence is provided every day that the Islamic ideology has a potent, malignant and metastasizing cancer for which the patient itself must seek treatment. Yet, but for a very few brave voices, the Islamic community does nothing to address the problem. There is no defense for their inaction or their deafening silence.

Paris: City of Darkness The fatal attack on Charlie Hebdo in Paris is the latest Islamic attack on freedom of speech everywhere.

Had the French government adopted a consistent policy of protecting the freedom of speech, nothing like today’s attack on the satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo, would ever have occurred. Muslims and Islam would not be so visible in France had the government also put out the unwelcome mat to Muslim “refugees,” as most European and American governments have. With the Muslim “refugees” and “asylum seekers” came Islam, on one hand, the cruddiest “religion” on the face of the earth, and, on the other, a totalitarian system of slavery and submission, applicable to Muslims and infidels alike.

To British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey is attributed the memorable line, “The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our life-time,” at the onset of World War I. The lamps have been going out in Europe for decades as the invitation to invade (aka, “immigrate”) was broadcast by European governments to any and all Muslims who sought refuge or asylum from living under their own creed in various pest holes in the Middle East and Africa.

Fouad Ajami Goes to Israel The Lebanese-born scholar knew more about the Jewish state than any Arab intellectual of his generation.

In a curious way, my exposure to Israel was essential to my coming to terms with Arab political life and its material.” —Fouad Ajami

The scholar and public intellectual Fouad Ajami, who was born in Lebanon and died last summer in Maine at the age of sixty-eight, specialized in explaining to Westerners the complex and traumatic encounter of the Arab peoples with modernity. He didn’t write much about Israel per se, or claim any unique insights into its complexities. And yet, at a certain point in his life, he decided he would discover Israel for himself—not only by reading and meeting Israelis abroad, but by visiting the place.

As it happens, I witnessed several of the stages of this discovery, first as his student and later as his friend. Here I want to mark those stages, and then offer some observations on the crucial insight I believe he derived from his quest.

I start with a passage written in 1991:

At night, a searchlight from the Jewish village of Metullah could be seen from the high ridge on which my [own] village lay. The searchlight was a subject of childhood fascination. The searchlight was from the land of the Jews, my grandfather said . . . . In the open, barren country, by the border, that land of the Jews could be seen and the chatter of its people heard across the barbed wire.

Fouad’s native village, Arnoun in southern Lebanon, stands less than five miles from Metullah, the northernmost point in Israel. The story of his discovery of Israel surely begins with this searchlight, beaming and beckoning across an impenetrable border. From childhood, he would later recall, “I retained within me an unrelenting sense of curiosity” about the Jewish state.

But the actual discovery began only much later, after Fouad passed through Beirut and came to America. Exactly 40 years ago, in the fall of 1974, I was a Princeton University senior in Fouad’s class, Politics 320, “Modernization in the Middle East and North Africa.” I was twenty, with two years of study in Israel under my belt; Fouad, recently arrived as an assistant professor of politics, was twenty-nine. Richard Falk, who taught international law at Princeton and would later become notorious as an anti-Israel agitator, played some role in bringing him onto the faculty; he has remembered Fouad as one who “shared a critical outlook on the follies of the American imperial role and felt a deep sympathy for the Palestinian struggles for their place in the sun.” Falk also claims that he introduced Fouad to Edward Said, with whom there was a “rapid bonding.”

Although I place little faith in Richard Falk’s word on anything, I imagine this to be true. Still, I have no personal recollection, from the fall of 1974, of Fouad as a firebrand. In that class there was an Israeli freshman, a twenty-four-year-old artillery captain who had distinguished himself in the October 1973 war and who was the first Israeli officer to go abroad on undergraduate study leave. He later rose to the rank of brigadier general. I can’t be absolutely certain, but he may have been the first Israeli whom Fouad ever encountered.

This young Israeli came right out of central casting—a confident soldier-scholar, not only a sabra but a graduate of Phillips Exeter, the elite New Hampshire boarding school. My vague recollection is that Fouad was fascinated by him, and the class often turned into a back-and-forth between the two of them. When this Israeli was profiled in Princeton’s alumni weekly, he said of Fouad that “we get along well. Relationships at Princeton are very intellectual.” That same semester, incidentally, some of my Jewish classmates decided to invite Fouad to dinner at the kosher dining facility on campus. I’m sure it was his earliest kosher culinary experience—the first (and quite possibly the worst) of many to come.

After my graduation and a year in New York, I returned to Princeton as a graduate student in 1976. Fouad was still there. He had become a star lecturer, with a huge course in international politics enrolling more than 300 students. In those years, he still wore his Palestinian sympathies on his sleeve. Many will have seen a Youtube clip from 1978 of an exchange between one Ben Nitay, a twenty-nine-year-old economic consultant known today as Benjamin Netanyahu, and a thirty-three-year-old Fouad in a jet-black beard. In this encounter, which took place a scant two years after the IDF’s dramatic rescue of Jewish hostages held by Palestinian terrorists at Entebbe (an operation in which Jonathan Netanyahu lost his life), Fouad is very much the angry Arab, peppering an unflappable Bibi with aggressive questions about Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians.

In the archives of the Daily Princetonian, I find an April 1979 report under this headline: “Politics Professor Informs Precept of PLO Invitation to Visit Lebanon.” According to a student cited in the report, Ajami “told us that Yasir Arafat had invited him and six students to come visit him.” According to another student, Ajami “said jokingly the reason he had received the invitation was because he had spoken out for the PLO in the past, and they hoped he would do so again.”

The State of Israel is up in arms over the Palestinian Authority’s recent request for accession to the International Criminal Court and its plans to force a major war crimes trial against the Jewish state. “The Palestinian Authority has chosen confrontation with Israel and we will not sit idly by,” Prime Minister Netanyahu said on Sunday. “We will not allow IDF soldiers and commanders to be hauled before the International Criminal Court in the Hague.” Meanwhile it appears a trial is more likely than ever.

The fact that the Palestinian Authority – an entity that is wholly undemocratic, unjust, and unwelcoming to Jewish sovereignty next door – plans to use the ICC to criminally indict the Middle East’s only democracy stretches the bounds of absurdity even in our topsy-turvy 21st century world.

“Can Europe yet save itself? Can Islamic extremism be defeated? Not easily. But the necessary first step is acknowledging the extent of the problem and the challenge. Or, as Meyer Habib put in Wednesday, first “we have to open our eyes.”

It is Europe’s free press, its freedom of expression, and thus its very civilization, that the Islamists behind the Paris attack seek to destroy. Only if the West internalizes the scale of the threat will it stand a chance of vanquishing it.

Speaking to Israeli television from Paris on Wednesday night, hours after gunmen shouting “Allahu Akbar” had shot dead 12 people at the offices of the “Charlie Hebdo” satirical magazine, the French-Jewish parliamentarian Meyer Habib called the massacre France’s 9/11.

Remember your personal physician? He or she may not be yours much longer. And even if they are still your doctor, the odds are they are not really working for you. Soon, most doctors will have abandoned their private practices and become employees of hospitals, multihospital affiliations, or the Government. Only 35% of doctors currently describe themselves as independent, compared with 62% in 2008. This trend will undoubtedly continue; a doctor graduating from medical school today has little or no chance of starting their own solo practice. How did this happen, and why does it threaten patients?

The main culprits are the Government, insurance companies, and large hospital systems. As a result of the Obamacare payment provisions, the Government essentially encourages hospitals to “own” doctors. With inscrutable logic, the Government pays more for the exact same medical procedure or doctor’s visit if it is done in a hospital clinic rather than in an independent doctor’s office. This is a strong incentive for hospitals to buy physicians and their practices, thereby controlling payment and referral sources. Doctors may have no alternative but to take salaried hospital positions if their practices disband.

Part of the reason that Islamic terrorism continues to proliferate in the western world is that too many of our opinion-molders and interpreters have been hamstrung by not understanding that we are fighting a war which always means that certain freedoms need emergency adjustment. We all accepted the need for us to remove our shoes and submit to personal searches when airplane hijacking became part of our new normality. But we also submitted to the notion that blaming Islam for the murderous deeds of a minority was somehow a “phobic” over-reaction and unacceptable in our politically correct society. So we went out of the way to mislabel a terrorist attack at Fort Hood as “workplace violence” and to insist that not erecting a mosque less than two blocks away from the killing fields of Ground Zero was an assault on our freedom of religion. Some among us became enraged at the revelation of how much data the NSA had collected in its extraordinary surveillance, forgetting that the loss of some privacy may have been essential for increased security from terrorist acts. The tagline for Nicholas Kristof’s article in today’s Times is “Let’s not respond to extremists with our own brand of intolerance.” (1/8/15)

Will we keep on blaming the victims? Perhaps the media assume that it is easier to force good people to keep quiet, or keep their own media offices from being attacked, than to than to tackle the problem of Islamic extremism head-on. It is easier to blame Geert Wilders, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Lars Hedegaard, Suzanne Winters, Salman Rushdie or Charlie Hebdo — and even put some of them on trial — than to attack the attackers, who might even attack back!

The press and the media seem to prefer coerced self-censorship: It is your own fault if you get hurt: none of this would be happening to you if you had only kept your mouth shut. It is easier to denigrate the people warning us about a danger than it is to address the danger they are warning us about.

Do you think a country should change its policies because segments of one community will run into newspaper offices and gun people down if you don’t?

Over several months last year, in an effort to understand the Islamic State movement, Maj. Gen. Michael K. Nagata, commander of American Special Operations forces in the Middle East, sought the advice of Defense, intelligence and State experts, and academicians. According to the New York Times, the general told the group: “We do not understand the movement, and until we do, we are not going to defeat it.” Gen. Nagata admitted: “We have not defeated the idea. We do not even understand the idea.”

Why not?

The terrorist group’s name “ISLAMIC State” should have given at least a vague clue to understanding its ideology, Islam. “Islam does not mean peace but rather means submission to the commands of Allah alone” is constantly and adamantly repeated by all Islamists.