RUTHFULLY YOURS

The targets in all the Paris attacks were not chosen “randomly.” Charlie Hebdo stood for the Enlightenment value of free speech, for the right to challenge, even to make fun of figures who deem themselves above criticism: politicians, religious leaders, the rich and famous. It stood for the right to be secular: for refusing to fence off religion, or award believers greater respect than non-believers.

Like the attempts to shut down all criticism of Islam — whether in novels such as Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, cartoons such as those of Muhammad drawn and published in Denmark, or debates between academics — the Charlie Hebdo killings were intended to instil fear and silence all honest discussion of Islam and its values.

Through bold criticism in a secular manner, European states have been able to create a more pluralistic, tolerant, and humane culture. For devout Muslims (not just radicals), this is blasphemy of the worst sort: democracy, made by man and not by Allah, is evil, and tolerance for all beliefs is a path to hell.

This ongoing failure to admit that the law of jihad is explicitly cited by spokesmen for Islamic State is the root cause of our inability to fight this war. The ancestors of today’s Europeans knew how to fight against Islamic encroachment, but today, hundreds of thousands of Muslim migrants, some of them devoted to waging jihad, are being given free access to enter Europe.

Before we’re confronted with an AK-47 killer or suicide bomber, we must confront those who claim that our lives aren’t precious enough to defend.

Readers may be surprised to learn that I watch – but am not a fan of – the apocalyptic series, The Walking Dead (TWD). Of course I dismiss the notion of zombies as pure nonsense, just as I dismiss much past and current science fiction as nonsense. However, the series fascinates me because it presents, in spite of its ludicrous premise, moral dilemmas and issues related to emergency ethics. I can’t stand the graphic comic books on which the series is based. And in this culture, with its too visible protective and insular cloak of moral relativism and multiculturalism, there isn’t much else to watch on TV.

So I’m left with a series in which zombie craniums are disabled with a squelch of a knife or by a bullet or by decapitation, and in which still-living human predators are gunned down without mercy. It says a lot about our culture that virtually the only place one might find interesting and challenging moral conflicts and compelling characterizations is in a TV horror series.

Yes, this column is connected to the Islamic raid on Paris on November 13th, and it’s about an element of “mercy” that has been introduced in the series.

In one of the very first episodes of Season One of TWD we are introduced to Morgan Jones (played by British actor, Lennie James), who saves deputy sheriff Rick Grimes (played by another Brit, Andrew Lincoln; James and Lincoln’s Georgia accents, characters, and on-screen persona are so convincing you’d hardly believe these actors are British) after the latter awakens from a coma to find the world gone to hell. He was shot by a criminal after a car chase through the Georgia countryside before the apocalypse.

Mike Lee represents Utah in the U.S. Senate. Mike Kelly represents Pennsylvania’s third district in the U.S. House of Representatives.

‘What will it take to get an agreement in Paris?”

That’s the question on the minds of environmental activists, U.S. State Department officials, and foreign bureaucrats as we approach the latest round of United Nations climate-change negotiations in France’s capital city.

It was also the question asked of Sam Kutesa, the president of the United Nations General Assembly, at an event on April 17, 2015, according to an e-mail obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request.

The author of the e-mail — subject line: “Best answer of night” — was President Obama’s chief climate-change negotiator, Todd Stern. Stern was writing to a colleague to recount how President Kutesa responded to this all-important question.

His answer? One word: “Money.”

Michael Auslin is a resident scholar and the director of Japan Studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he specializes in Asian regional security and political issues. Before joining AEI, Auslin was an associate professor of history at Yale University.
There is a real threat here to peace in Asia, and the U.S. must not allow allies such as the Philippines to be browbeaten.
“Expect more.” That is the succinct response of a senior U.S. defense official when asked informally whether the dispatch in October of a U.S. Navy ship within 12 nautical miles of one of China’s newly constructed islands in the Spratly Island chainwas a one-off event.

Officials in the Obama Administration seem well aware that failure to follow on with their highly publicized freedom of navigation operations will send a signal of irresolve to China and Asia. The sail-through did little to settle the issue of Sino-U.S. tussling over the South China Sea, and the question now, is how will China respond.

From one perspective, the length of time that it took Washington to make the decision to send the USS Lassen near Subi and Mischief Reefs itself is an admission that the Obama Administration remains wary of provoking China. Months of public comments by officials from the president on down resulted in no action until last week, and even then, it was but a lone U.S. destroyer sent to transit what until a few months ago had always been considered international waters.

Even worse, claims that the destroyer engaged simply in “innocent passage” as opposed to any legally-allowed military activity on the high-seas further undermines the administration’s argument that it is not tacitly conceding China’s territorial claims.

Because (per Obama’s latest complaint) of “how decentralized power is in this system”, over 30 American governors have told the President they don’t want him shipping battalions of “Syrian” “refugees” to their states. He, in turn, has sneered that his critics are scared of “widows and orphans”. With his usual brilliant comic timing, he said this a couple of hours before a female suicide bomber self-detonated in St Denis.

Nonetheless, the presidential-gubernatorial split is an interesting development. Obama has responded with a brand new hashtag: #RefugeesWelcome. If you live in Hashtagistan, this is another great hashtag to add to such invincible hashtags as #PeaceForParis, #JeSuisCharlie, #UnitedForUkraine and, of course, #BringBackOurGirls. If you live in the real world, the magic hashtags don’t seem to work so well, and these governors seem to think #RefugeesWelcome will perform no better for New Mexico and New Hampshire than the others have worked out for Paris, Ukraine and Boko Haram-infested West Africa.

It’s frighteningly easy for an aspiring ISIS terrorist to obtain the documents needed to gain asylum in Europe, a Daily Mail reporter recently discovered. According to the Mail’s Nick Fagge, it took only four days and $2,000 to obtain a Syrian passport, ID card, and driver’s license at a Turkish border town:

The genuine documents were stolen from Syria when they were blank. The forger added our reporter’s picture and gave him the identity of a Syrian man from Aleppo killed last year. The documents, on sale for around $2,000, would help an asylum claim in Europe.

The forger who sold us the papers said that they are being used by ISIS fanatics to travel undetected across borders into Europe hidden among tens of thousands of genuine refugees fleeing the terror and destruction.

The forger told Fagge:

ISIS fighters are among the people going to Europe in this way. They are going to wait for the right time to become a fighter for ISIS again.

One day, maybe, Muslims who have fled their Syrian homelands might return. No such option exists for the region’s persecuted religious minorities. Yet even as they are massacred, raped and enslaved, the West rejects their priority claims to resettlement as “discriminatory”
“If you look a little closer, the scene becomes a horror show. Clumps of hair and fragments of bone poke grotesquely out of the ditch. It is estimated that almost 80 women are buried in this mass grave, aged between 40 and 80-years-old. The bodies are of Yazidi women, murdered by Islamic State butchers.” — UK Telegraph

They were butchered because they were non-Muslims and considered too old to be used for sex or sold as sexual slaves by Islamic State. Meanwhile, their daughters and younger sisters were raped, often many times a day. And then, like other stolen loot and war booty, they were listed on social media for sale. The going price was nominal, frequently no more than a packet of cigarettes, and the Islamic State thugs that bought them were promised a great bargain. “Brothers,” proclaimed one such ad, “you won’t be disappointed!”

Like the Christians and Jews throughout the Middle East, the Yazidi people are treated as infidels, devil-worshippers, polytheists and non-persons, lacking any rights or even any status as human beings. Instead, they are being exterminated and subjected to ethnic cleansing. Masses of people whose faith and residence in their ancestral homelands goes back 2000 years are being systematically expunged from the earth.

Could Putin ever be trusted as an ally in the jihad war?

Here are some thoughts.

1) Putin can be trusted to act in his own self-interest. If we elect a patriotic American next year (i.e., never a Democrat), a win-win arrangement might be achieved with Russia. Europe and the democratic nations of Asia would follow.

2) Putin was trained as a KGB agent and a fast-rising career star before the Soviet Empire fell apart. He specialized in studying and infiltrating the West, particularly (West) Germany. He is personally sophisticated, speaks fluent German, and understands Europe and the Middle East as well as any national leader today.

In his words and public actions Putin presents as a classical Russian nationalist leader, using the Russian Orthodox Church as his main ideological support. What the Communist Party used to do for the Kremlin — creating domestic direction and credibility — the Patriarch of Moscow is now doing. If you doubt that, please check the web.

It is always possible that Putin is faking it, but he is a Russian nationalist, and those people have always allied with the Orthodox Church.

Eurosocialists like Obama will never understand it, but Russians know that Putin’s strong support for the Church — building hundreds of new churches and monasteries — creates deep credibility among the Russian people. As far as ordinary Russians are concerned, whether they are atheists or not, Putin’s support of the Church puts him on their side.

After the fall of the Communist delusion, the Russian Church and the state know they must work together. Putin believes that the Soviet Union was a noble experiment that failed, and he experienced the breakdown personally. That was traumatic period, with his own career at risk for years. Putin does not believe in Marxism, except as a way to sucker the Obamas of this world. He learns from the disasters of the past.

We are back where we came in. After 9/11, 98 U.S. senators voted to pass the USA Patriot Act. In time, the political and moral solidarity of that moment dissolved. The words “Patriot Act” became anathema on the global left—a moral affront. How long will the solidarity of Paris last?

Before Islamic terrorists murdered 132 people in Paris last Friday, the biggest news story in the U.S. was the bonfire of the academy. Protesters at the University of Missouri forced the resignation of the president of the 35,000-student campus. They said his efforts to reduce racism were “inadequate.” University officials at other campuses expressed solidarity with the Missouri protesters’ goals.

Missouri and Paris have something important in common. Both represent the inability of primary social institutions to defend themselves. American institutions of higher learning are beset by an intellectual anarchy that is eroding their reason for being. In the Middle East, unchecked anarchy has caused millions of refugees to flow into a Europe incapable of handling that crisis and now reeling from its vulnerability to terrorist attacks on normal life.

How has this happened?