RUTHFULLY YOURS

Historian of science Thomas Kuhn famously argued that scientific progress comes not from an incremental, stepwise accumulation of knowledge, but rather from a “paradigm shift,” the relatively sudden collapse of an old paradigm under the weight of new evidence and new insights. Kuhn’s idea has implications beyond scientific research. Historical changes as well often reflect an abrupt shift, as the old received wisdom is no longer adequate for understanding new events.

For example, the collapse of the Soviet Union was anticipated by at most a handful of analysts and historians. Indeed, in 1984 esteemed economist J.K. Galbraith claimed, “The Russian system succeeds because, in contrast to the Western industrial economies, it makes full use of its manpower.” Yet in a few years looming economic collapse swept away the communist superpower that for half a century threatened liberal democracy. In an instant, the seemingly permanent Cold War geostrategical paradigm disappeared, taking with it the whole academic discipline of Sovietology.

Perhaps today we are witnessing the beginning of a similar paradigm shift: the end of the notion that universal progress driven by scientific and technological innovations will eventually improve human life and political order to the point where the tragic constants of human existence––conflict, violence, oppression, brutal autocracy, and violations of basic human rights––will disappear. Considering the current failures of the West both domestically and abroad, this faith seems on shaky ground.

Someone should tell Barack Obama and all the potential scavengers attempting to make a haul at COP-21 in Paris this week — global warming, climate change, or whatever you want to call it, is over.

Any runway model can tell you — Paris is for new fashions. Not last year’s retreads. Climate change is so 2009!

Only the neo-Leninist “useful idiots” on the New York Times editorial board still believe in it. The American public certainly doesn’t. Ninety-seven percent now disbelieve it — or, more accurately, put it far on the back burner. Yes, that’s the same number we used to have shoved down on our throats as the percentage of scientists who supposedly believed in catastrophic anthropogenic global warming. That proved to be absurd. Yet still the UN persists with its annual fiesta for moral narcissists, almost always in a luxe venue best accessed by carbon-spewing corporate jets.

Well, where better than Paris? Just watch the cholesterol. And don’t worry about ISIS. They know what’s worth attacking and it’s not this utter balderdash. (At least people pay attention to a soccer game and a rock concert.)

Not even Stalin during the days of Trofim Lysenko tried to pull off something so scandalous (and anti-science!) as the global warming scam. And good old Joe made nowhere near as much money for his lies as Al Gore — the D student in geology — did by running around declaring “The ice is melting! The seas are rising! The storms are raging!” thereby netting himself one billion dollars and an Oscar. That the seas never rose and the ice never melted and the hurricanes didn’t even happen, in fact literally stopped, is beside the point. (Well, maybe that last fact is some sort of climate change.) People felt good about themselves. They believed in Mother Earth, even if they didn’t have anything else to believe in — more likely because they didn’t have anything else to believe in.

Ten thousand Syrian refugees should be brought to the U.S., President Obama says, because that’s “who we are.” Secretary of State John Kerry and his predecessor, Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton, have used similar language to explain America’s obligation. More than half of the nation’s state governors have objected. On Nov. 20, a bipartisan majority of the U.S. House of Representatives voted, in effect, to block the administration’s resettlement plan on security grounds.

While the debate rages in the U.S., and as Europe struggles to cope with refugees streaming north, too little attention has been directed to the region where the refugees could best start life anew: the Arabian Peninsula and its Arabic-speaking oil-rich countries, including Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.

Approximately 4.3 million Syrian civil-war refugees are now in Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, Turkey and Egypt, and registered with the United Nations. Vast camps attest to the refuge these countries have provided even though they struggle without the oil wealth of their neighbors.

Our French feminine newscasters are attractive, charming, refined, and fashionably dressed. (Though a few have disfigured themselves with silicone lips that interfere with their ability to speak). Compared to their American and British counterparts, they are stunningly beautiful. And it just might have something to do with French culture, because women on the French channel of Israel’s i24 news are in general better looking than their colleagues on the English channel.

I’m not sure of the appropriate vocabulary for their profession. Some are simple newsreaders, others are full-fledged journalists. They don’t go into the grimy field like the American and British big names that stood up, rain or shine, at Place de la République for hours on end last week. Decades ago they were called “speakerines,” a word that has been dumped, along with “concierge” for custodian and “garcon” for waiter. For some reason that escapes me, our indoor journalists have taken to baring their arms to the shoulder when temperatures drop and normal people are bundled up in sweaters and jackets. In my experience, TV studios are more likely to be cool than overheated. But I was surprised to see a sweet young thing on the 14th of November dressed in a summery pastel sleeveless top reciting press releases filled with shock and gore. By the end of the day the word had apparently gone out. Since then, it’s jackets or long sleeves, all black for the first week, now varied but still appropriate to a grieving nation.

Since Paris was attacked, these anchors have been asking invited guests, “What do they want?” Well, if they’re terrorists it follows that they want to terrorize us and résistance consists of not being afraid. We’ll go to concerts, restaurants, cafés, and shopping centers. The terrorists will not prevail. Then, since they are all Muslim, it means they want to divide our society, turn us against all Muslims, so we will resist by holding hands, forming human chains, and proclaiming friendship with our Muslim fellow citizens. TV cameras focused on a blindfolded man at Place de la République carrying a sign that said “I’m Muslim, give me a hug.” Of course he got lots of hugs. No one seemed to notice that the blindfold was a keffieh… like the ones worn by the caliphators that brought the jihad flag to the statue of Marianne in the summer of 2014.

U.S. Lawmakers this week will be pushing the Pentagon and other administration officials to come up with a tougher policy against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) even though President Barack Obama refuses to make any adjustments or revision following the Paris Islamic terrorist attacks. Meanwhile, the head of Britain’s government, who always appeared to be decisive in contrast to Obama, promulgated the United Kingdom’s strategy for both ISIS and Syria’s oppressive regime.

The government of the United Kingdom on Thursday released a strategy detailing the arguments for why it would be “militarily, legally, and morally right for Britain to join the U.S.-led coalition in attacking Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) targets in (President Bashar al-Assad’s] Syria,” according to Friday’s Homeland Security News Wire.

The 38-page dossier was released just before Prime Minister David Cameron delivered a speech in front of the House of Commons in which he called on all House members to vote for authorization to conduct the proposed anti-ISIS campaign that includes the removal of Assad and his regime.

Horrific footage has emerged of the moment an Islamist rebel fighter and his Syrian activist cameraman were killed by a Syrian Arab Army artillery shell in northern Hama, Syria.

The horrific 40-second video begins with a bearded fighter, believed to be fighting with the Islamist allied Ajnad al-Sham, describing his joy at capturing Tal Sukayk in the Hama countryside.

Just a short while after he begins talking, an artillery shell fatally crashes down directly on to the fighter and his cameraman, who is named as Ahmed Abu Hamza.

Final moments: The unnamed fighter gives a short speech just before the shell hits their position

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Final moments: The unnamed fighter gives a short speech just before the shell hits their position

The telling example of Palestinian death cult.

“An attack on all of humanity and the universal values we share,” was what President Obama called the Paris terror attack. As commentators have pointed out, it’s unfortunately not so; Western values, even including the sanctity of life, are not shared by all of humanity and do not necessarily prevail in some parts of the world.

Here in Israel, where we’ve been under an assault variously dubbed the Knives Intifada or the Children’s Intifada for two months, it’s impossible not to be aware of a lack of universality of values. Many, but not all, of the examples I give below (which, of course, are far from comprehensive) are taken from Palestinian warfare.

Combatants and noncombatants. This is a Western distinction that is often conspicuously lacking in other parts of the world. While Palestinians sometimes attack Israeli security personnel, they more often attack Israeli civilians. Age and gender, of course, are of no consequence; the concept of the “enemy” is tribal and includes any and all Israeli Jews at any and all times. The principle of tribal assault applies, of course, in surrounding countries as well. The only reason Israelis are not massacred on the same scale as Syrians, Iraqis, Sudanese, and others is Israel’s military and security capability. What happened in Paris was a Middle Eastern tribal assault, not just an attack by lone “terrorists.”

What if the terrorists had been targeting “just Americans,” or “just diplomats” — would that be “understandable terrorism” in John Kerry’s thinking?

“If we should stop drawing cartoons, should we also stop having synagogues? Should they be converted into something else? Should we ask the Jewish people to leave?” — Organizer of a targeted fee speech event, in response to the question if they had brought the attack on themselves.

Much of the world may only have been just bragging or emoting in saying, “Je Suis Charlie” or “Je Suis Juif” in January. But it turns out not to matter: the terrorists of ISIS think we are all cartoonists and Jews anyway.

Since we cannot live with ISIS and similar groups, we had better do whatever it takes to speed up an end of our choosing before they speed up an end of their choosing.

When the truth is revealed, it can be not merely unpleasant but often accidental. There have been several striking examples of this since the massacre in Paris earlier this month. In the days immediately after the attack, The Times of London interviewed residents of Paris. Referring to the latest attacks, one 46-year old resident also referred back to the attacks in January on the offices of Charlie Hebdo and a Jewish supermarket. “Every Parisian has been touched by these attacks,” she said, referring to the latest attacks. “Before it was just the Jews, the writers or cartoonists.”

More than a decade ago I wrote my first novel, Enemies Foreign and Domestic. Part of my motivation was to establish my bona fides at forecasting social, political and military trends. I didn’t like the direction America was heading, and I wanted to warn as many readers as possible about some of the dangers I saw coming. At the end of 2015, I hope that my past success at prognostication will encourage people to pay heed to this essay.

As we roll into the New Year, we are witnessing the prelude to the culmination of a titanic struggle between three great actors. Three great social forces are now set in motion for a 2016 showdown and collision that will, in historical terms, be on par with the First and Second World Wars.

Two of these great social forces are currently allied in a de facto coalition against the third. They have forged an unwritten agreement to jointly murder the weakest of the three forces while it is in their combined power to do so. One of these two social forces would be content to share totalitarian control over large swaths of the globe with the other remaining social force. One of these social forces will never be satisfied until it achieves complete domination of the entire planet. So what are these three great social forces? They are Islam, international socialism, and nationalism.

Allow me to explain the salient aspects of each, and how they relate to the coming 2016 cataclysm.

BERLIN—The Paris attacks have raised fears of terrorists slipping into Europe by posing as refugees. But in Germany, the top migrant destination, security officials have another worry: Local extremists will recruit the newcomers to join the Islamist cause once they arrive.

German authorities warn that migrants seeking out Arabic-language mosques in search of the familiar are increasingly ending up at those attended by Islamist radicals. In interviews, security officials from Berlin to the southwest German state of Saarland said they have registered a sharp rise in the number of asylum-seekers attending mosques they believed attracted extremists.

Federal officials said they have counted more than 100 cases in which Islamists known to them have tried to establish contact with refugees. According to state and local agencies across the country, Islamists have offered migrants rides, food, shelter and translation help. In some cases, they have invited them to soccer games and grill parties, or brought them copies of the Quran and conservative Muslim clothing.