RUTHFULLY YOURS

Countries don’t act only in a narrow, largely financial definition of self-interest.

‘I should have anticipated the optics,” President Obama said by way of acknowledging that golfing right after making a statement about the beheading of James Foley looked bad. “Part of this job is also the theater of it,” he said. “It’s not something that always comes naturally to me. But it matters.”

For those who remember that this is the same guy with the Greek pillars, the campaign stop in Berlin, the newly minted “seal” of the president-elect, it was an odd confession. Obama likes theater just fine; he just doesn’t like having to read from a script not of his choosing.

That is probably why it took him so many tries to come up with the right words for what we will do about the Islamic State. One wonders whether he looked at the prepared remarks, turned to Valerie Jarrett and asked, “What’s my motivation?”

Senator Rand Paul (R., Ky.) has a similar problem. Much like Obama in 2007–08, he has been enjoying swimming with the current on foreign policy. War-weary, fed up with Arab countries hating us for trying to help, and convinced that our priorities are closer to home, Paul’s noninterventionism was sounding just right to many Americans.

Then some jihadi punks beheaded two Americans and taunted the U.S. in the process. The same jihadis conquered and enslaved territories that Americans fought, bled, and died to liberate. They boasted that they beat us in a war and vowed — ridiculously — that their flag would fly over our White House. Lo and behold, it turns out that Americans don’t like that sort of thing.

Attitudes, particularly among the very patriotic and pro-military tea-party crowd, suddenly and predictably shifted. This time last year only 18 percent of Republicans told pollsters for the Pew Research Center that the U.S. does “too little” abroad. That number had more than doubled according to a similar poll last week. And a new Washington Post/ABC News poll shows 71 percent of Americans favor strikes in Iraq and 65 percent favor them in Syria.

Suddenly, Paul, who just weeks ago was calling Hillary Clinton a warmonger, is doing some mongering himself.

President Obama says he intends to shrink the al-Qaeda-spawned Islamic State into a “manageable problem.” Perhaps we’ll learn more about how when he speaks to the nation on Wednesday evening. Still, the question presses: Is he the manager for the job?

In answering that question, past performance is more a guarantee of future results than is any statement of newfound purpose from a president whose innate dishonesty has turned his signature phrase “Let me be clear” into notorious self-parody.

In late September 2012, Mr. Obama’s administration quietly approved the transfer of 55 jihadist prisoners out of the Guantanamo Bay detention center. As Tom Joscelyn explained at the time, most of the detainees had previously been categorized as “high risk” because they were deemed “likely to pose a threat to the US, its interests, and allies” if released. Almost all of the rest had been assessed “medium risk” — still posing a threat, albeit one less certain than the “high risk” jihadists.

But Obama officials overruled those judgments. Rife with members of the Lawyer Left vanguard who had stampeded to volunteer their services to al-Qaeda detainees during the Bush years, who had smeared Gitmo as a gulag, and who had fought bitterly against the Bush/Cheney paradigm that regarded al-Qaeda’s jihad as a war rather than a crime wave, the administration determined that the anti-American terrorists were fit to be sprung from American custody.

Wait a second . . . two years ago in September . . . what was going on then? Why yes, the Benghazi massacre — whose second anniversary we mark this Thursday.

The Obama administration would like us to forget that bit of old news since “dude, this was like two years ago.” You may nonetheless recall it as an act of war in which al-Qaeda-affiliated jihadists attacked a sovereign American government compound. The terrorists murdered our ambassador to Libya, killed three other Americans, and wounded many more in an eight-hour siege during which President Obama declined to take any meaningful responsive action. Indeed, agents of the U.S. security team in Benghazi say they were prevented from trying to save Ambassador Stevens.

Among those carrying out the attack were operatives of Ansar al-Sharia. That’s the al-Qaeda affiliate with cells in Eastern Libya’s jihadist hotbeds, Benghazi and Derna. Ansar is led by Sufian Ben Qumu, a former Gitmo detainee who, inexorably, went right back to the jihad.

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There are always lunatics lurking in the crevices of Muslim politics prepared to proclaim a new caliphate; there isn’t always a recruiting pool in the form of nearly 14 million displaced people (11 million Syrians, or half the country’s population, and 2.8 million Iraqis, or a tenth of the country’s population). When I wrote about the region’s refugee disaster at Tablet in July (“Between the Settlers and Unsettlers, the One State Solution is On Our Doorstep“) the going estimate was only 10 million. A new UN study, though, claims that half of Syrians are displaced. Many of them will have nothing to go back to. When people have nothing to lose, they fight to the death and inflict horrors on others.

That is what civilizational decline looks like in real time. The roots of the crisis were visible four years ago before the so-called Arab Spring beguiled the foreign policy wonks. Hundreds of thousands of displaced Syrian farmers already were living in tent camps around Syrian cities before the Syrian civil war began in April 2011. Israeli analysts knew this. In March 2011 Paul Rivlin of Tel Aviv University released a study of the collapse of Syrian agriculture, widely cited in Arab media but unmentioned in the English language press (except my essay on the topic). Most of what passes for political science treats peoples and politicians as if they were so many pieces on a fixed game board. This time the game board is shrinking and the pieces are falling off.

The Arab states are failed states, except for the few with enough hydrocarbons to subsidize every facet of economic life. Egypt lives on a$15 billion annual subsidy from the Gulf states and, if that persists, will remain stable if not quite prosperous. Syria is a ruin, along with large parts of Iraq. The lives of tens of millions of people were fragile before the fighting broke out (30% of Syrians lived on less than $1.60 a day), and now they are utterly ruined. The hordes of combatants displace more people, and these join the hordes, in a snowball effect. That’s what drove the Thirty Years’ War of 1618-1648, and that’s what’s driving the war in the Levant.

When I wrote in 2011 that Islam was dying, this was precisely what I forecast. You can’t unscramble this egg. The international organizations, Bill Clinton, George Soros and other people of that ilk will draw up plans, propose funding, hold conferences and publish studies, to no avail. The raw despair of millions of people ripped out of the cocoon of traditional society, bereft of ties of kinship and custom, will feed the meatgrinder. Terrorist organizations that were hitherto less flamboyant (“moderate” is a misdesignation), e.g. the Muslim Brotherhood (and its Palestine branch Hamas), will compete with the caliphate for the loyalties of enraged young people. The delusion about Muslim democracy that afflicted utopians of both parties is now inoperative. War will end when the pool of prospective fighters has been exhausted.

Arne Duncan blinked. After being hammered for much of the summer by the two main teacher’s unions, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the National Education Association (NEA), the Education Secretary said states could delay the use of test results in teacher performance evaluations by another year. It was disappointing, but understandable, as he and his Party have been financially reliant on Teachers’ unions. Let us hope he only blinked and not shut his eyes, as did so many of his predecessors. Teachers’ unions (and, in fact, all public sector unions) have Democrats in a chokehold. (Collectively, unions are the largest contributors to political campaigns.) Over the past twenty-five years the NEA and the AFT have given about $100 million to political campaigns, with 97% of that going to Democrats. The relationship has been symbiotic, as elected Democrats have ensured that the demands of union leaders are met.

Nevertheless, I have always thought Mr. Duncan a good Education Secretary. And positive developments are altering the public school landscape. Two of those were highlighted over the past weekend. In the Sunday magazine section of the New York Times, Daniel Bergner wrote of Eva Moskowitz’s battle with Mayor Bill de Blasio regarding Success Academy Charter Schools, which Ms. Moskowitz runs. In the weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal, Allysia Finley interviewed Kevin Chavous. Mr. Chavous is a founding board member and executive counsel for the nonprofit American Federation for Children (AFC). Both Ms. Moskowitz and Mr. Chavous are Democrats.

No one denies the success Ms. Moskowitz has had. There are roughly five applications for every seat available in her charter schools. Her students are among the top performers in the City and the State. She has achieved those results while operating in New York’s most challenging neighborhoods. However, Mayor de Blasio argues that all one million public school children must be “saved,” not simply the few thousand who attend charter schools – that money’s spent on charters is money that cannot be spent on other public schools. That argument is disingenuous, in that students in charter schools are public school students. And the success they have brought to minority students speaks for itself. The difference is that charter schools are non-unionized. Ms. Moskowitz can fire underperforming teachers and reward good ones. She can require dress and behavioral codes. She can demand longer hours on the part of students and teachers. Her standards are more exacting than what is permitted in traditional public schools. Diane Ravitch, a New York University professor and education historian fears that charters, with their wealthy Wall Street backers, are pulling the City and the Country toward the privatization of education. That may be the goal of some, but I believe most support charters simply because Traditional public schools are failing, in part because of a lack of competition, but more importantly due to union rules – tenure after eighteen months in some places, and the difficulty administrators have in firing bad teachers. Mayor de Blasio, while claiming to be supportive of children, acts as a front for the unions that helped put him in office.

The Huffington Post just raised some eyebrows in the journalism world last week by hiring an unusual political commentator to cover national security issues: ex-football player Donté Stallworth.

Stallworth, 33, played for the New Orleans Saints, Philadelphia Eagles, New England Patriots, Cleveland Browns, Baltimore Ravens, and Washington Redskins before being waived by the latter team a year ago (asked in an interview where he stood on the Redskins name controversy, Stallworth stalled for 330 words only to end up saying “I don’t know”). In 2009 he was charged with DUI manslaughter for striking a pedestrian with his Bentley Continental; he plea-bargained to a 30-day sentence, probation, and community service, and settled with the victim’s family out of court.

As for his transition from pro athlete to political pundit for the HuffPost, Stallworth, who describes himself on Twitter as a “Leonardo da Vinci wanna-be that reveres Frederick Douglass Love books, sports, history & politics Advocate for peace, truth & equality 10 year NFL vet,” became a political junkie after 9/11. In an interview with Mother Jones magazine, Stallworth said he set out to understand “why these people are terrorizing us, and who are they?”

He disagreed with Bush’s assessment that “they hate us because of our freedoms.” Stallworth didn’t elaborate in the interview on why he thinks the jihadists do hate us; he only stated that his attitude toward foreign policy sprang out of researching “9/11, the Patriot Act, the FISA/warrantless wiretapping, Gitmo, kidnapping, extrajudicial killings, all that… What other countries,” he wondered, “have the capability to do this? And what kind of precedent are we setting with other countries when they have the capabilities that we have?”

As he dug into all this, Stallworth developed a reputation as a 9/11 Truther. “I don’t know how to say this nicely,” a friend joked, “but everything’s a conspiracy to him,” as evidenced in assertions like this on Twitter, where Stallworth spends a lot of time issuing forth 140-character sports and political commentary to his 152,000 followers:

NO WAY 9/11 was carried out by ‘dying’ Bin Laden, 19 men who couldn’t fly a damn kite. STILL have NO EVIDENCE Osama was connected, like Iraq.

Gggrrrrrrrrrrrrr @ ppl who actually believe a plane hit the pentagon on 9/11… hole woulda been ASTRONOMICALLY bigger, God bless lost lives.

Asked about this, HuffPost’s Washington bureau chief Ryan Grim defended Stallworth:

“That doesn’t represent how he thinks today. You know, that was five years ago, and people say dumb things, but that shouldn’t define him.”

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/obamas-manufactured-unwinnable-wars-on-the-glazov-gang/print/

Obama’s Manufactured Unwinnable Wars — on The Glazov Gang

This week’s Glazov Gang was guest hosted by Michael Hausam and joined by Mark Tapson, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, Mike Munzing, a Tea Party Activist and Jennifer Van Laar, a writer at Independent Journal Review.

The guests gathered to discuss Obama’s Manufactured Unwinnable Wars, analyzing how a Radical-in-Chief sets America up for defeat in the face of terror. The dialogue occurred within a focus on Obama’s ‘Managing’ of ISIS, which shed light on the administration’s discomfort with American victory:

Every week another lad or lass from St. Louis, Toronto or Sydney makes the trip through Turkey to the Islamic State. A reporter dispatched by a local paper to talk to the neighbors scribbles down the same recollections about how nice and normal Jihad Joe or Jihad Jane was.

Classmates remember a loud partier or a shy student. Neighbors mention that everything seemed normal until those last few years when he began wearing a robe and she began wearing a burka.

The Somali and Algerian immigrants, the German and American converts, the black burkas and dyed beards, headed into the dying summer to kill Christians and Kurds, Turkmen and Shiites, to behead babies and crucify critics, don’t seem like monsters.

They loved their parents. They posed for jokey snapshots on Facebook. They had dreams of becoming biologists or boxers. Until they began killing people, they seemed just like the rest of us.

And with one difference, they were.

The forensic examinations of their lives rarely reveal anything of significance. The extensive digging into the lives of the Boston bombers told us nothing about why they would plant a bomb near a little boy.

The answer lay in the topic that the media carefully avoided. As with the other Muslim terrorists, the meaning of their motives was in the little black book of their religion which commanded them to kill.

The Jihadist isn’t a serial killer. While there are some converts attracted to Islam for its violence, the Muslim convert usually doesn’t convert for the killing, he kills because he converted. Likewise the nice Muslim Jihadist next door might well be moderate by inclination and immoderate by faith.

IDF Saves Irish Troops from Jihadists

Ireland is one of the most consistently anti-Israel countries in Europe. So it was interesting to read in Ireland’s Sunday Independent yesterday that Israeli troops were instrumental in saving the lives of Irish peacekeepers on the Golan Heights last week. Citing “senior sources,” the newspaper reported that after the peacekeepers were attacked by a Syrian rebel group, the al-Qaeda-affiliated Nusra Front, “Irish soldiers would have been killed or taken hostage by Islamist extremists if it wasn’t for the military intervention of the Israeli army … The Israeli assistance was described as ‘decisive’ in the success of the mission.”

Specifically, the Israel Defense Forces used its precise intelligence about the area to guide the troops to safety along a route that avoided Nusra fighters. Additionally, there were “unconfirmed reports that the Israelis directed fire at the Islamists to stop them from attacking the Filipino and Irish soldiers.”

There’s nothing surprising about the IDF’s intervention. After all, Israel has consistently intervened to save Syrian lives even though it’s formally at war with Syria, providing food and other humanitarian assistance to besieged Syrian villages and offering medical care to everyone from wounded fighters to mothers in labor. (Safed’s Rebecca Sieff Hospital delivered its seventh Syrian baby earlier this month.) So intervening to save the nationals of a country it’s not at war with is a no-brainer.

What is surprising, however, is what this says about Ireland, and by extension, about Europe as a whole. For here you have the difference between Israel and its enemies in the starkest form: on one hand, radical jihadists who sought to kill or kidnap Irish soldiers; on the other, a stable country that intervened to save their lives. The choice between the two would seem self-evident. But in fact, Ireland has consistently chosen the jihadists.

As the media continues to pounce on the story of Ray Rice’s elevator assault on his fiancee last February, I wonder why there is no background story on who this woman is and why she married Rice after that knockout punch and rag doll drag that has the rest of us so appalled. It turns out that both Janay Palmer and Ray Rice were arrested on Feb 15, 2014 and charged with mutual assault at the Revel Casino. A month later, Rice alone was indicted by a grand jury for 3rd degree aggravated assault, the penalty for which is a possible 3-5 years in jail and a fine of $15,000. Janay Palmer married her assailant one day after this indictment.

The couple first met when Janay was 16 but started dating seriously in 2008, becoming engaged in 2012, months before their daughter Rayven was born. But Back in 2010, Janay was arrested for stealing a dress from a shopping center – a puzzling event given that she was already living with a star football player. Most of us assume that battered women are people without agency, women whose domestic lives are so complicated and fragile that they see no other options open to them. This case seems to fall into another category – a young woman whose batterer was her live-in multi-millionaire fiance and the father of her child. Had she decided to walk out after the knockout, she and her child would undoubtedly have remained financially secure for the foreseeable future. On the other hand, had she testified against Rice, he might have gone to jail or had his contract terminated even sooner than it eventually was. Marrying Rice was clearly a hedge against a possible big financial loss. Was Palmer given or promised a large monetary inducement to marry Rice immediately? Does that in any way color the way we consider her decision to marry the man who not only brutalized her but displayed no concern for her medical condition after she was unconscious?

Is the story of Ray Rice just one of another thuggish athlete who beats up on women? Or are the larger issues the huge amounts of money paid to athletes who live outside the moral constraints of most of us; the huge amounts of money made by owners of teams who try their best to ignore the players’ behavior; the refusal of fans to boycott over-priced athletic events and their concomitant merchandising; our squeamishness at criticizing women who have the wherewithal to make other choices but prefer to live and procreate with violent men whose actions are clearly mitigated by their enormous wealth. In the elevator incident, Rice’s casual indifference to his prostrate fiancee suggests that the odds are great that Janay had been punched or otherwise abused before and that neither she nor Rice was as shocked as we are. Though her sin of venality is not as great as the crime of assault, knowingly choosing to marry a wife-beater makes her complicit when she once again becomes his victim.