RUTHFULLY YOURS

Potential allies against ISIS doubt America’s commitment to being engaged abroad.

The so-called Islamic State has left destruction everywhere that it has gained ground. But as in the case of the tribal Scythians, Vandals, Huns, or Mongols of the past, sowing chaos in its wake does not mean that the Islamic State won’t continue to seek new targets for its devastation.

If unchecked, the Islamic State will turn what is left of the nations of the Middle East into a huge Mogadishu-like tribal wasteland, from the Syrian Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf. And they will happily call the resulting mess a caliphate.

It is critical for United States to put together some sort of alliance of friendly Middle East governments and European states to stop the Islamic State before it becomes a permanent base for terrorist operations against the U.S. and its allies. Unfortunately, it appears unlikely that the U.S. will line up a muscular alliance — at least until the Islamic State reaches the gates of Baghdad or plows on through to Saudi Arabia and forces millions of Arabs either to fight or submit.

Why the reluctance for allies to join the U.S.?

Most in the Middle East and Europe do not believe the Obama administration knows much about the Islamic State, much less what to do about it. The president has dismissed it in the past as a jayvee team that could be managed, contradicting the more dire assessments of his own secretary of defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

President Obama has another unilateral plan.

There is one policy arena in which President Obama definitely does not lead from behind: the imposition of costly and pointless environmental regulation.

The president on Tuesday announced a crackdown on hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), a group of coolants used in virtually every home, office, and automobile. Unless we discontinue their use, we are told, the oceans will swallow our coastlines, hurricanes will lay waste to entire states, and all creatures great and small will fry under scorching temperatures.

The true believers are deadly serious about this. Eco-lawyer Durwood Zaelke told the Washington Post: “If we don’t deal with the HFC problem now, in the future these gases are going to kill us.”

It’s all a scam. Banning HFCs will have essentially no impact on global climate. In the first place, despite increases in so-called greenhouse gases, there’s been no warming during the past 15 years — which thoroughly contradicts all the climate modeling cited by the warm-mongers. But even if greenhouse gases such as HFCs were solidly linked to climate change, unilateral reductions by the U.S. would be insignificant compared with the increased emissions emanating from China, India, and the rest of the developing world. (Ironically, the federal government promoted the use of HFCs beginning in the late 1980s, as a substitute for the chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) that were blamed for thinning the Earth’s ozone layer.)

As a bit of camouflage for this latest regulatory incursion, the president secured “voluntary” commitments from some of America’s largest corporations to reduce HFC emissions and to phase out their use. (One wonders just how many highly regulated corporations would likely spurn a request for such “voluntary” action from the regulator-in-chief.)

The companies that pledged to cooperate — including Coca Cola, Target, DuPont, and the like — won’t be crushed by the costs of converting to alternative coolants.

Yes, it must be contained; but no, it’s not likely to mutate harmfully.

We should not be deathly afraid of Ebola.

Dr. Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy and author of the bestselling book Living Terrors: What America Needs to Know to Survive the Coming Bioterrorist Catastrophe, strongly disagrees. He has been telling us for a long time that we shouldn’t be sleeping at night for fear of one contagion or other, even though loss of sleep is one of the greatest threats to our health of all.

Back in 2006 it was bird flu. I debated Dr. Osterholm on national TV, and he contested my caution by stating that he couldn’t sleep at night from worry over bird flu. I pointed out at the time that just because H5N1 was killing millions of birds didn’t automatically mean that it would mutate to kill millions of humans. Osterholm acted as if my doubting his end-of-the-world scenario was heresy. We took the debate to NPR, where I pointed out that two amoebas, one of them enteromoeba histolytica, the other enteromoeba coli, look almost identical under the microscope, yet the first is a pathogen that gets you very sick, and the other one is completely benign. And one amoeba doesn’t mutate to become the other or take on its characteristics. In other words, imagining what might happen if the most dreaded mutation occurs is not the best kind of science.

Dr. Jeffery Taubenberger, director of the Viral Pathogenesis and Evolution Section at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), told me back in 2006 that he found it extremely difficult to even induce in the laboratory the kind of mutation to the bird-flu virus that would make it pass easily from one human to another. He pointed out at a joint lecture we were giving at the then–Armed Forces Institute of Pathology museum that while we were worrying over the H5N1 bird-flu virus, another flu virus would likely “come in the back door” and cause the next pandemic. This statement proved prophetic in 2009, when H1N1 swine flu began to emerge, though it too ended up causing far more fear than death.

Wooing young voters with a $58 billion plan that gives money primarily to college graduates who don’t need it.

Democrats face an uphill battle in their quest to hold the Senate in November. In their effort to get an edge, they’ve targeted one group in particular: college-educated voters with student-loan debt. Democratic plans to help student-loan borrowers have been a key talking point on the campaign trail this year, and sit at the center of the party’s “Fair Shot” agenda.

Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren has become the party’s chief evangelist on the issue, thanks to her proposal that would allow borrowers to refinance their student loans at current rates, supposedly paid for with a tax increase on millionaires. After Republicans blocked Sen. Warren’s bill in June, she went straight to Kentucky to campaign against Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, and has accused him and fellow Republicans of “choosing to side with billionaires instead of with students.” This week Sen. Warren and her fellow Democrats raised the issue again as the campaigns enter the home stretch.
Enlarge Image

Sen. Elizabeth Warren in Kentucky campaigning for Democratic Senate candidate Alison Lundergan Grimes at the University of Louisville, June 29. Timothy D. Easley/Associated Press

Democrats want to define the student-loan debate as a choice between poor college students and the super rich. But Sen. Warren’s ideas are an expensive and ineffective way to ease the burden of student debt. Worse yet, they set up a far more troubling tension: Lavishing federal money on the college-educated erodes our ability to help disadvantaged students make it to college in the first place.

Take Sen. Warren’s refinancing plan. Allowing former students to refinance at lower interest rates would bring down almost every borrower’s payments. So while this would provide some modest assistance to those who are struggling to pay back their loans, it would also give nearly three-quarters of borrowers who are doing fine a handout from the federal government. Think of it as a stimulus package for the college-educated.

“Israel has been proving even its sharpest critics wrong for nearly 70 years. Here’s betting its light outshines Mr. Cohen’s dim bulb.”
Worse than the book’s derivative history is Richard Cohen’s undiminished need to patronize Israelis and supporters of the Jewish state.

Can a reviewer go on strike? Though I am not a member of any union, there were moments while reading Richard Cohen’s book when I was tempted to throw up a literary picket line. Mr. Cohen, a longtime Washington Post columnist, originally titled his book “Can Israel Survive?” but renamed it “Israel: Is It Good For the Jews?” for final publication. He fails to answer either question. Yet that’s far from the only problem with this well-meaning volume that flirts too often with outright illiteracy.

Consider the following sentences: “Anti-Semitism is a prejudice of the zeitgeist. It is now situated in the Middle East, in the Arab world. It stirs in Europe and elsewhere, but the noxious stink of the Hitlerian abattoir clings to it still, so it is a sotto voce sort of thing.”

Reading these lines—the remainder of the paragraph is even worse—you get the sense that Mr. Cohen thinks this is writing of a high order. Does it occur to him that something with a “stink” to it cannot be “sotto voce”? Or that “the zeitgeist” cannot have a prejudice? Or that a prejudice cannot be “situated” in the Arab world, as if it were a pyramid or a mosque? Or that anti-Semitism is hardly a “sotto voce sort of thing” in certain neighborhoods of Paris or London?

Yes, the reader more or less gets the point. But as George Orwell warned in 1946, the English language “becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.” Mr. Cohen’s book is a case study in Orwell’s timeless lament.

A sense of déjà vu all over again descends as Congress debates President Obama’s commitment to fight the Islamic State terrorists in Iraq, or ISIS. If the United States ever loses its status as global superpower, historians in search of the triggering event can start with the Vietnam War.

After Vietnam, the belief took hold in some quarters—Democrats, midtown New York media, northeastern law schools—that the military and presidency could no longer be trusted with the war-making powers. Notwithstanding that “commander in chief” is embedded in the Constitution, Washington for some 40 nonstop years has defaulted repeatedly to the same, wrong solution: Send in the lawyers. The law is about many things, some of them good. Taking action isn’t one of them.

Listen to the ISIS debate closely, and what you’ll notice is not the sound of U.S. soldiers planning how to defeat the people who killed James Foley, Steven Sotloff and thousands of others but the language of lawyers.

On Tuesday, two newsmaking statements emerged about the U.S.’s mindset in the war—or whatever it is—to defeat the Islamic State terrorists.

Gen. Martin Dempsey, the Joint Chiefs Chairman testifying to Congress, said that “if we reach the point where I believe our advisers should accompany Iraqi troops on attacks against specific ISIL targets, I will recommend that to the president.” The White House pushed back, calling Gen. Dempsey’s remark a “hypothetical.”

The first statement was the voice of a soldier. The second was the sound of lawyers.

The David H. Koch Plaza in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art has finally been unveiled and it is a beautiful addition to New York’s premier cultural attraction. Mr. Koch, a trustee of the museum, financed this roughly 65 million dollar project himself, his gift to the general public as well as to the museum. Many environmental considerations went into the landscaping of the trees – allowing both greater sun in the winter and increased shade in summer. The plantings were also designed to soften noise pollution at a plaza that attracts so many thousands of people each day. Given the very successful completion of this project in a timely fashion, as opposed to other urban projects that have labored under decades of delay and mammoth cost over-runs, we can only scratch our heads at how the city has defiled it.

Bordering the architectural beauty of the new fountains, the handsome red umbrellas, the stone benches, the portable cafe style seating and the verdant glory of approximately 100 additional trees is a veritable wall of about 20 food carts with hardly breathing space between them. Anyone who wants to step off the curb to hail a cab has to navigate between the hot dogs and the shwarma. The odors, fumes and litter attendant to these carts gives this elegant residential stretch of Fifth Avenue the atmosphere of a third-world bazaar. Apartment dwellers who previously enjoyed incomparable views of the museum facade now have this framed by the offensive view of the backs of street carts; neighborhood residents have the omnipresent flashing of the neon crawl advertising the type of food available.

“No religion condones the killing of innocents.” — U.S. President Barack Obama, September 10, 2014.

“Islam is a religion of peace.” — U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron, September 13, 2014.

“There is a place for violence in Islam. There is a place for jihad in Islam.” — U.K. Imam Anjem Choudary, CBN News, April 5, 2010.

Regrettably it is impossible to re-interpret the Qur’an in a “moderate” manner. The most famous modern interpretation by Sayyid Qutb (d. 1966), the Muslim Brotherhood ideologue, leads the reader again and again into political territory, where jihad is at the root of action.

If they deviated from the true faith — as we are seeing in the Islamic State today — “backsliders,” like pagans, were to be fought until they either accepted Islam or were killed.

In India alone, between 60 and 80 million Hindus may have been put to death by Muslim armies between the years 1000-1525.

Last week, before the Islamic State beheaded its third Westerner, U.S. President Barack Obama announced that, “ISIL is not Islamic. No religion condones the killing of innocents.”

Well, not exactly.

How often — despite the current spectacle of the Islamic State [IS, ISIL or ISIS] in Syria and Iraq — do we hear politicians and church leaders say that Islam is a religion of peace; that Islamic extremism is a modern innovation, a profound deviation from some imagined “true” Islam, and even that its very name, the word “Islam,” means peace?

It is not just Muslims who say that Islam is a religion of peace: some Western politicians and churchmen repeat it too.

Britain’s Prime Minister, David Cameron, emphasized it last week on BBC on Sept 13, in response to the beheading by ISIS of the British aid worker, David Haines.

Americans must first extricate themselves from the claws of statism before they can begin to credibly address peripheral issues such as immigration.

The debate over immigration and open borders or open immigration continues.

A British correspondent argued with a reader of Andrew Bernstein’s “Immigration and the Welfare State” about the pros and cons of open borders or open immigration, vis-à-vis Muslims and Mexicans.

The reader’s position on the matter is confusing, as he seems to want it both ways: a total ban on all Muslim immigration into Western countries, and a selective or discriminating ban on Muslims who advocate violence to impose Islam on others or a whole country (in conformance with the official Ayn Rand Institute position).

So he isn’t clear on his own position at all. He also contradicts himself when he says that Islam is both a criminal organization and a religion. But a genuine criminal organization, such as the Mafia or a drug cartel, is not moved by an ideology of any kind; these organizations are merely opportunistic gangs taking advantage of irrational laws. Islam, however, is a totalitarian ideology moved by the agenda of supremacy over all other religions and political systems, even though it has little ideational content, and little such content in its “jurisprudence,” Sharia law, other than the “prophet’s” say-so or the pretzel-like logic of its judges.

The only thing he’s right about is that the Koran is a prescription for conquest and committing criminal acts, criminal per Western concepts of individual and civil rights, which Islamic spokesmen deny the validity of, because Islam doesn’t recognize individual rights or the civil liberties of Western nations. However, Muslims do avail themselves of them to advance Islam; they have adopted Lenin’s assertion that capitalists will hang themselves with the rope they sell to the Reds; it’s much the same thing.

Frankly, I think the open borders “faction” on this issue is guilty of a severe dropping of context. This is not the early 20th century when hundreds of thousands of Jews and Italians and other ethnic/religious groups immigrated to this country. The overwhelming majority of them were not trying to impose Judaism or Catholicism or the Mafia on everyone else. Their personal religious convictions were not a threat to anyone else. True, some Jews and Italians who came here were gangsters, or became gangsters. In many instances, when they were identified and apprehended, they were either deported or imprisoned after a trial for their crimes.

But Islam isn’t the same thing. Jews and Italians did not pose a peril to everyone else, native-born or not. Whether or not your average Friday-go-to-prayers Muslim is active in propagating or proselytizing Islamic doctrine or engages in criminal actions based on Islamic scripture, such as terrorism, they’re still culpable and indirectly responsible for the actions of their more consistent brethren, who engage in violence per the diktats of the Koran. On that point, I agree with Leonard Peikoff 100%. My policy would be: Either repudiate Islam altogether, or leave for and/or return to a country where your ideology is implemented, but you’re not implementing it here.

Most prosecutors would be all over emergent evidence that culpable actors had obstructed justice. Yet the House Select Committee investigating the Benghazi Massacre under the direction of South Carolina Republican and former prosecutor Trey Gowdy is not exactly tripping over itself to probe such evidence – at least not publicly.

Earlier this week, a retired high-ranking State Department official publicly revealed that former Secretary Hillary Clinton’s top aides hid damaging documents from her hand-picked investigative panel. Subsequently, that panel, the vaunted “Accountability Review Board” (ARB), did not even bother to interview Mrs. Clinton despite her pivotal roles in (a) the appalling security lapses prior to the terrorist attack that killed Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans; (b) the administration’s response on the night of the attack; and (c) Obama officials’ fraudulent claim that the attack was caused by spontaneous reaction to an anti-Muslim video, rather than by entirely predictable jihadist terrorism.

Yet, as Chairman Gowdy’s select committee finally convenes its first hearing later today – four long months after being established, ostensibly to press urgently for truth and accountability regarding an act of war by al Qaeda affiliated terrorists on the second anniversary of the 9/11 attacks – obstruction of justice is not the focus. Nor are allegations leveled just two weeks ago by members of the Annex Security Team in Benghazi. In a new book, 13 Hours: The Inside Account of What Really Happened in Benghazi (profiled in a Fox News special and in this review by the American Spectator’s Ross Kaminski), three team members recount the official reluctance and indecision that delayed their response to the attack – a delay they believe cost the lives of Ambassador Stevens and Mr. Smith.

This morning’s hearing is likely to be the last word the public will hear from the select committee for many weeks, if not months, as Congress glides towards its midterm election recess. Gowdy is nonetheless giving Democrats – who initially threatened to boycott the committee – an opportunity to use it as a showcase for the Obama administration’s implementation the ARB recommendations.

The Chairman’s decision was popular at the hard Left Mother Jones, which pronounced this hearing “Actually Worth Having.” It is nonetheless a disappointment for those of us hoping the select committee would focus on real accountability: Why did our government change sides in Libya for the benefit of anti-American jihadists? What exactly was our government doing in Benghazi – what mission was worth assigning U.S. personnel to one of the most dangerous places in the world for Americans? Who is ultimately responsible for the appalling lack of security at the American compound? Where was President Obama, and what exactly was he doing, during the hours Americans were under siege? Why did the commander-in-chief and the military-chain-of-command take no meaningful action taken to respond to the attack? What role did election-eve politics – Obama’s repeated claims to have “decimated” al Qaeda – play in the administration’s misleading decision to portray the video, rather than al Qaeda-tied terrorists, as the culprit?