OBAMA ON THE RUN…AND NOW AFGHANISTAN…..HUGH FITZGERALD
http://www.jihadwatch.org/2009/11/fitzgerald-instead-of-sending-more-troops-to-afghanistan-what-should-obama-do.html
Obama is on the run. He has spent the past year in many separate, long trips all over the place. In Great Britain, he gave Gordon Brown some DVDs and Michele Obama in chummy fashion — nobody here but us queens — put her arm on the Queen’s shoulder. In Russia, Obama decided to hold a Town Meeting to which both dissidents and members of the government, that is, of the K.G.B., were invited. He thus effectively shut up the dissidents and appalled all Russian liberals, who were distinctly unimpressed with his understanding of their situation.
In China, he received nothing for all his attempts at “dialogue” with others far more worldly and ruthless than he — not once did he suggest, for example, that the American government, or American consumers, could stop buying Chinese goods in an organized fashion, if China did not cooperate on Iran and North Korea, though that conceivable threat should have been an obvious one to slyly make.
Then of course he went to Cairo, where he delivered a speech on Islam. Though that speech contained more grotesque misinformation about Islam — its texts, its tenets, its attitudes, its atmospherics — than any speech by any non-Muslim leader in history, it did not even have the intended effect. The intended effect was to win over Muslims. Yet they are — our “allies” that is, never mind our declared enemies — just as intransigent, just as corrupt, just as determined to use us and inveigle as much aid as they can, just as unwavering in their desire to create the conditions that will inexorably lead to the disappearance of the tiny non-Muslim nation-state of Israel.
They remain just as determined to defeat from within the Western world, by terrorism or, for some, not by terrorism but rather by such “peaceful” means. For those “peaceful” means we are apparently all supposed to be grateful, and breathe a sigh of relief — deployment of the Money Weapon, well-financed and carefully-targeted campaigns of Da’wa in North America and Europe and, not least, demographic conquest. That demographic conquest proceeds, without attempts to halt it, much less reverse it, all over the Western world. This in the short term causes an enormous security headache and a situation of permanent societal worry and disruption and general upset. It leads to threats to free speech. If not dealt with, it could lead to the destruction of our own, far more advanced, tolerant, decent, societies, whose freedoms, whose science, whose art, whose everything could not for one minute have developed under Islam.
And on the domestic front, Obama, the most left-wing of our Presidents, has done more damage to the middle class. He has indeed been responsible, with the terms and conditions and negligence with which the TARP program was fashioned, for what is surely the greatest single transfer of wealth from the deserving middle class to the most undeserving segment of our rich. And the terms that the Obama Administration struck, the tens of billions for which it overpaid (see A.I.G.), are further cause for alarm.
Because of Obama’s ignorance about Islam, and his simultaneous deep belief that he “knows about Islam” because, you see, from the ages of 6 to 10 he lived in Indonesia, and went to a school with both Muslim and Christian children (that is, went to a most unrepresentative school, in a most unrepresentative Muslim city, Jakarta, in a most unrepresentative and easygoing country, at the most secular moment in its history), he will have a hard time admitting to others and to himself that he really has a duty to study, and have his advisers, and members of the State Department and the Pentagon study, the texts, tenets, attitudes, atmospherics of Islam. They will get it right, however disturbing what they will find out, if they rely not on the venal espositos and comical armstrongs and Mesanostrans (google “MESA Nostra”) but on the hundred or so great Western scholars of Islam (fl. 1870-1970). Obama’s disastrous miscomprehension of Islam is likely to lead him to continue the squandering of men, money, materiel and morale in Afghanistan, and to continue to cruelly hector the Israelis (as part of a strategy of appeasement to win unwinnable Muslim hearts and minds), and to ignore the legal, moral, and historic claims of the Jews.
It is likely to lead him to ignore, above all, the intention of the League of Nations, and the juridical status of what the Jordanians renamed the “West Bank.” See Julius Stone, see Howard Grief, whose books are the most authoritative legal studies on the matter. There Jewish settlements are legal by the terms of the Mandate — and the territory of the “West Bank” is part of that assigned to be part of the Jewish National Home. It was not only because the Jordanian Army managed illegally to seize that territory in 1948-49 and to hold onto it until it was re-taken by its rightful claimant, Israel, in the Six-Day War.
More troops will be sent to Afghanistan because Obama does not know how to undo what he did in Cairo. He does not know how to explain to himself, much less to the American public, that Islam is not “tolerant” and “peaceful” and that the worldwide Jihad (the sum of all the local Jihads), is a threat that, at present, has as its most important theatre of war not Iraq, not Afghanistan, not Pakistan, but rather the countries of Western Europe – and that the instruments of Jihad that are most dangerous, in those countries, are the Money Weapon, campaigns of Da’wa, and demographic conquest. And instead of sending troops to quixotically “defend” one set of (hopelessly hostile) Muslims against another (even more hopelessly hostile) Muslims, we should withdraw, as an intelligent sheriff would refuse to enter a saloon where two outlaws, who are dead set on killing him but also dead set on killing each other, are circling one another, just about to draw their guns from their holsters.
Can Obama rise to the occasion? Can he be as necessarily ruthless as he must be, and without announcing his new policy, combine a withdrawal from Afghanistan with other acts that will show that, nearly a year into his presidency, and eight years after the attacks of 9/11/2001, he has finally begun to rethink the threat of Islam? Can he show that he has begun to recognize the usefulness of recognizing, analyzing, and exploiting pre-existing fissures within the Camp of Islam, not only to weaken it from within by forcing its rival groups to use up their men, their money, their war materiel, but also to keep them preoccupied with the threats to their own well-being? One hopes, for example, that disorder in Yemen, ideally supported by Iran, will keep Saudi Arabia on edge for a long time. In such an event they will have less money to spend, and less time to cause mischief, in Dar al-Harb, the Domain of War, the House of the Infidels.
There is so much that needs to be done to signal that leaving Afghanistan – and ceasing to provide the vast sums that, as in Iraq, or in Egypt, or Jordan, or among the soi-disant “Palestinians” — supplies the very wherewithal for the corruption we deplore. Some things cannot be avoided, and must be undertaken. The frantic worry over Pakistan’s nuclear bombs shows that we have to deal with Iran’s nuclear project, not through sanctions which will not work, but through bombing that will work, and will set back efforts for years. (Contrary to the hopes of outsiders, the most intelligent people within Iran believe the Islamic Republic of Iran cannot be overturned or dislodged, despite the mediagenic efforts of the opposition on which such hope has been too optimistically placed, and its strength overrated.) What’s more, after an initial rally-round-the-flag, the humiliation of the destruction, and the obvious waste of many tens of billions of dollars on that nuclear project, and the implied threat that it will, when necessary, be bombed again – all this is the thing, the only thing, that might lead to the successful collapse of the miserable regime in Tehran.
But that is something that has to be done in any case. Other things can be done as part of signaling that far from yielding to the forces of Islam, the pullout of American troops and civilians, and the ending of aid, are part of a much more clever, and even ruthless strategy. With Iran, the bombing should not be left up to tiny Israel — the American government should assume its responsibilities as a great power, as the most powerful of the Infidel nation-states. To show that the American military will be used when it makes sense, the Americans should consider seizing the southern (Christian) Sudan and (Muslim, but non-Arab, black African) Darfur, with a small force, and holding both territories until such time as a referendum on independence for both places can be plausibly held. The spectacle of grateful black Africans will be one that the Arab and Muslim bloc at the U.N. will have a great deal of trouble with, as it tries to claim the divine right of Arabs to impose their will on black Africans. Black African Christians, the object of increasingly aggressive and violent attacks for years (see, for example, the genesis, conduct, and outcome of the Biafra War), will be heartened. And they need some heartening, and the forces of Islam need to be checked.
In Western Europe, people are fed up with what their political and media elites have done, in allowing so many Muslims into their countries. The large-scale presence of such Muslims has led to a situation now widely recognized as one that is far more unpleasant, expensive (the increased costs for monitoring large Muslim populations), and physically dangerous, both for the indigenous non-Muslims and for other, but non-Muslim, immigrants. The Americans must make common cause with, and encourage, and do nothing to discourage, those who have come to understand, at long last, what the ideology of Islam is all about, and why it makes little sense to hope that more than a few Muslims can truly be integrated into societies where Infidel laws and customs. For all of these laws and customs are flatly contradicted by the letter and spirit of the Shari’a. They are likely to be undone, sooner or later, by the pressure of inexorably – if nothing is done – increasing Muslim populations, whose presence demoralizes, and disrupts, in every way, the non-Muslims who have not made a fanatical fetish of that unexamined Idol of the Age, “Diversity.”
Is Obama, are his advisers, capable of rising to the occasion? Are they capable of any of this? If they are, they can show it by withdrawing from Afghanistan for the right reasons, and stopping the transfer of enormous sums from our own Treasury to various Muslim states. They should demand that those states go and ask the rich Arabs to support them. This would put to the test the supposed unity of the worldwide Umma, by putting Saudi Arabia, the U.A.E., Kuwait, Qatar, Libya, and others on the spot. Whether the rich Arabs (and Iran) give or withhold aid, the resentments of the oil-and-gas-less Muslims will grow, and so will the resentments of the rich Arabs and Iranians, who have grown quite comfortable with the way in which the rich Infidel countries have taken on the responsibility of transferring still more of their wealth to Muslim countries, this time not by buying oil, but by the even more psychologically disturbing transfer of aid. These transactions resemble the classic attitudes observable when the Jizyah is being exacted, both on the part of the Muslim recipients, who take this aid as a given and display no gratitude at all, and on the part of the non-Muslim donors, who show a reluctance to end or diminish such aid because of what they fear would be the reaction of the Muslim recipients.
But perhaps Obama and his advisors will fool us, and show, at long last, that they are not prisoners of their past pieties and misunderstandings.
A hope.
A fairly forlorn hope.
But still – a hope.
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