RUTHFULLY YOURS

After years of studiously ignoring it, dismissing it, whitewashing it, excusing it and even justifying it, progressives have rediscovered anti-Semitism. With this amazing archeological find the intrepid Indiana Jones’ of the left dug up anti-Semitism, brushed it off and put it up on the shelf right behind Islamophobia, transphobia, racism, homophobia and sexism (in that order of importance).

Anti-Semitism on the left has been abruptly transformed from an excuse that Jews use to silence discussion about whether the Jewish State should be nuked or merely boycotted, to an issue worthy of concern. Assorted liberal celebrities with Jewish last names have surfaced to voice amazement that they had “not expected to see anti-Semitism return in my lifetime.”

As if anti-Semitism had been vacationing in the Alps until it came to their attention. The truth is that anti-Semitism never went anywhere. The left just endorsed it. And therefore it ceased to be a bad thing.

There was plenty of anti-Semitism to find even on the local college campus. Almost every synagogue I have been to in the past few months has armed guards outside giving visitors the TSA treatment. Jews are fleeing to America, Canada and Israel from major European cities because of Muslim persecution. The largest Jewish population in the world faces an endless war against a genocidal ideology that not only calls for their extermination, but works toward it, from suicide bombers to nuclear weapons.

But there is a progressive gentleman’s agreement not to discuss that real wave of anti-Semitism which has cost thousands of Jewish lives and ethnically cleansed cities because of the left’s complicity in it.

The recent interest in anti-Semitism across editorial pages and social media carefully avoids discussing the anti-Semitic past of Keith Ellison, progressive favorite for DNC chair, and his time with the anti-Semitic Nation of Islam cult whose ugly views and hatred he had defended. The left isn’t interested in Muslim anti-Semitism. It is greatly interested in discussing and promoting a small group of loathsome neo-Nazi trolls who recently held a conference in D.C. attended by a few hundred of history’s losers.

These Twitter troll babies cling to Trump’s legs almost as eagerly as he tries to shake them off. The “Hail Trump” stunt was a calculated gesture based on the certain knowledge that the media will only give their movement publicity if they try to smear Trump by associating him with their failed movement.

Despite the media’s lies, they’re not President-elect Trump’s allies, but his needy desperate stalkers.

The mix of politics and culture is far too complex to be predictable. Even the best-laid political plans can lead to unintended consequences, both good and bad — what we sometimes call irony, nemesis, or karma.

Take the election of 2008, which ushered Barack Obama and the Democrats into absolute control of the presidency, House, and Senate, also generating popular goodwill over Obama’s landmark candidacy.

Instead of ensuring a heralded generation of Democratic rule, Obama alienated both friends and foes almost immediately. He rammed through the unworkable Affordable Care Act without a single Republican vote. He prevaricated about Obamacare’s costs and savings. Huge budget deficits followed. Racial polarization ensued. Apologies abroad on behalf of America proved a national turnoff.

By the final pushback of 2016, the Obama administration had proven to be a rare gift to the Republican party. The GOP now controls the presidency, Congress, governorships, and state legislatures to a degree not seen since the 1920s. “Hope and change” ebullition in 2008 brought the Republicans salvation — and the Democrats countless disasters.

The Republican establishment hated Donald Trump. So did the conservative media. His unorthodox positions on trade, immigration, and entitlements alienated many. His vulgarity turned off even more. Pundits warned that he had brought civil war and ruin to the Republican party.

But instead of ruin, Trump delivered to the Republicans their most astounding political edge in nearly a century. The candidate who was most despised by the party unified it in a way no other nominee could have.

Obama proved Israel’s best friend — even though that was never his intention. By simultaneously alienating Israel and the Sunni moderates in Jordan and Egypt, and by warming up to the Muslim Brotherhood, appeasing Iran, and issuing empty red lines to the Assad regime in Syria, Obama infuriated but also united the entire so-called moderate Middle East.

The result was that Arab nations suddenly no longer saw Israel as an existential threat. Instead, it was seen as similarly shunned by the U.S. — and as the only military power capable of standing up to the soon-to-be-nuclear theocracy in Iran that hates Sunni Arabs and Israelis alike.

Today, Israel is in the historic position of being courted by its former enemies, as foreign fuel importers line up to buy its huge, newly discovered deposits of natural gas. As the Arab Spring and the Islamic State destroyed neighboring nations, Israel’s democracy and free market appeared as an even stronger beacon in the storm.

Almost every major initiative that Obama pushed has largely failed. Obamacare is a mess. He nearly doubled the national debt in eight years. Economic growth is at its slowest in decades. The reset with Russia, the Asian pivot, abruptly leaving Iraq, discounting the Islamic State, red lines in Syria, the Iran deal — all proved foreign-policy disasters.

Yet Obama has been quiet about one of the greatest economic revolutions in American history, one that has kept the U.S. economy afloat: a radical transformation from crippling energy dependency to veritable fossil-fuel independence. The United States has become the world’s greatest combined producer of coal, natural gas, and oil. It is poised to be an energy exporter to much of the world.

The revolution in fracking and horizontal drilling has brought in much-needed federal revenue, increased jobs, weakened Russia and our OPEC rivals, and given trillions of dollars in fuel savings to American consumers.

Yet Obama opposed the energy revolution at every step. He radically curtailed the leasing of federal lands for new drilling, stopped the Keystone XL pipeline, and subsidized inefficient and often crony-capitalist wind and solar projects. Nonetheless, Obama’s eventual failure to stop new drilling ended up his one success.

Hillary Clinton, in her presidential bid, did everything by the playbook — and therefore her campaign went catastrophically wrong. Her campaign raised more than $1 billion. She ran far more ads than did Trump. She won over the sycophantic press. She got all the celebrity endorsements. She united the Democratic party.

Logically, Clinton should have won. The media worked hand in glove with her campaign. Her ground game and voter registration drives made Trump’s look pathetic.

Yet all that money, press, and orthodoxy only confirmed suspicions that Clinton was a slick but wooden candidate. She became so scripted that even her Twitter feed was composed by a committee.

The more she followed her boring narrative, the more she made the amateur Trump seem authentic and energized in comparison. Doing everything right ended up for Hillary as doing everything wrong — and ensured the greatest upset in American political history.

The ancient Greeks taught us that arrogance brings payback, that nothing is sure in a fickle universe, that none of us can be judged successful and happy until we die, and that moderation and humility alone protect us from own darker sides.

In 2016, what could never have happened usually did.

Yesterday (11/29/16), in an essay published at Pajamas Media, I urged POETUS Trump not to name either Generals Petraeus or Mattis to his cabinet, based upon the proven failure of the see-no-real-Islam COIN doctrine these men concocted, and implemented in Iraq, and Afghanistan.

Today (11/30/16), M.G. Oprea, writing at The Federalist, gushes, in her headline, that General James Mattis, who remains under serious consideration for Secretary of Defense by POETUS Trump, “Could Bust Our Deathly Political Correctness About Islam.” Ms. Oprea then proceeds to make a factually-challenged distinction between the Islam of her title, and “Islamism,” deeming the latter “political Islam,” a basic error given the designed, intractably political nature of Islam, and its quintessence, the Sharia. Notwithstanding this erroneous conception, she continues apace linking to a brief extract from a Heritage Foundation speech General Mattis gave last year (2015) which also alludes to “political Islam,” and “whether it is in America’s best interest.”

Mattis elaborated on these remarks during a March 2015 extended interview with Peter Robinson, which included the same “political Islam” comment, prefaced by the General’s more revealing observations on the alleged “root” of Islam’s—not Islamism’s—“problem.”

The problem with Islam goes back to the days of “The Prophet” [note: Mattis’s reverent usage]…when he dies and it splits into two halves and at that point they’ve got an internal war…that’s kept waxing and waning over the years…between the Sunni and the Shia…obviously it’s in a waxing phase

Thus Mattis’s formulation of Islam’s central “problem” ignores nearly 14 centuries of brutal, often genocidal jihad war—initiated by Muhammad, Islam’s prototype jihadist—against non-Muslims, ongoing to this day, which included decimation of Iraq’s residual Assyrian Christian population, during the General’s own tenure. Mattis essentially regurgitates the Muslim apologetic narrative which rivets on the alleged “breach of Islam’s political innocence”—the internecine struggle which punctuated Muhammad’s succession, including the assassinations of three of the four “Rightly Guided” Caliphs who followed Muhammad, and the ensuing violent Sunni-Shiite sectarian carnage after Caliph Ali’s killing, which persists to this day.

Despite reflexive mainstream media contempt for the practice, on the campaign trail, President-elect Trump frequently invoked iconic U.S. World War II Generals Douglas MacArthur and George Patton to “emphasize the need to strengthen the U.S. military, talk less and do more to protect America.”

Mr. Trump, albeit unfortunately, in somewhat mangled fashion, also referenced MacArthur/Patton era predecessor General Pershing’s successful early 20th century campaign against the Filipino Moro’s jihad “insurgency.” The irrefragable truth which our president-elect inartfully alluded to was that Pershing “materially reduced” Moro jihadist attacks in the rural Philippines (~1911), employing, as described in Pershing’s autobiographical account:

[A] practice that Mohammedans held in abhorrence … The bodies [of slain jihadists] were publicly buried in the same grave with a dead pig. It was not pleasant to have to take such measures, but the prospect of going to hell instead of heaven sometimes deterred the would be assassins.

Retired Army Major General Jerry Curry, who served as both President Carter’s deputy assistant defense secretary, and acting press secretary to the secretary of Defense in the Reagan administration, writing August 5, 2016, after the GOP convention, opined on the Trump-Patton connection:

Mr. Trump has more than the normal amount of fire in his belly. Like General Patton, he is not happy unless he is fighting and winning. The American people deserve to be led by someone like him. It is time the political elites in Washington realized this and subordinated themselves to the will of the American people.

According to military historian Rick Atkinson, a young George Patton “caught the eye” of General Pershing during the 1916 U.S. Mexican expedition against Pancho Villa, Pershing declaring, “This Patton boy! He’s a real fighter.” Patton, the consummate “fighter” and “winner,” having sojourned in North Africa, also shared his former commander Pershing’s unbowdlerized early to mid-20th century American wisdom about Islam, observing:

One cannot but ponder the question: What if the Arabs had been Christians? To me it seems certain that the fatalistic teachings of Mohammed and the utter degradation of women is the outstanding cause for the arrested development of the Arab [Muslims]. He is exactly as he was around the year 700, while we have kept on developing. Here, I think, is some text for an eloquent sermon on the virtues of Christianity.

Tragically, these informed, experience-based understandings shared by Generals Pershing and Patton have been replaced with the self-delusive (and self-destructive) see-no-real-jihad/Sharia-based Islam “COIN” Counterinsurgency doctrine, jointly “catalyzed” — and evangelized — by two men President-elect Trump is considering in earnest for his cabinet: Generals Mattis and Petraeus.