RUTHFULLY YOURS

Not only have Islamic revivalists declared war on the West, our ruling elites have joined them. This is the arena in which the Battle of Ideas will be won or lost, and not through the version of appeasement given voice in British MP Liam Byrne’s deceptively ‘objective’ book.

Black Flag Down: Counter-Terrorism, Defeating ISIS and Winning the Battle of Ideas
by Liam Byrne
Biteback Publishing, 2016, 272 pages, £12.99
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Liam Byrne, former British Labour cabinet minister and author of Black Flag Down: Counter-Terrorism, Defeating ISIS and Winning the Battle of Ideas, has been a harsh critic of President Trump, describing him as a megalomaniac “trumpeting anti-Muslim hate speech”. Byrne, who sought the opinions of Muslims in his inner-city Birmingham constituency, extensively interviewed British intelligence and police officers and even spent time in Iraq, prefers the softly, softly PC approach in “bringing down the black flag of extremism”. His Black Flag Down is an almost plausible account of how the Battle of Ideas might be won in this era of the global jihad.

Black Flag Down positions itself as a sensible and practical response to radical Islamic terrorism, although Liam Byrne would not label the phenomenon beyond calling it “violent extremism”. Any attempt to connect Islam with the atrocities perpetrated by Salafi jihadism, from the Islamic State group and Al Qaeda to Al Shabaab, Ansar al-Sharia and Boko Haram, is straight-out wrong. Additionally, it can only be unhelpful in the Battle of Ideas, the key to winning our confrontation with what Byrne does, at least, agree is a global insurgency (if not a global jihad).

Not that Black Flag Down undervalues the role of the military, security and counter-intelligence in defeating terrorism. Byrne champions the role of security agencies in monitoring the terrorist recruiters and thwarting attempts to co-opt young Muslims in the United Kingdom for their nefarious cause. By February 2016, the Islamic State group, according to the statistics in Black Flag Down, was boasting that it operated 10,000 Facebook accounts and 5000 Twitter profiles. The sheer scale of digital communication among the British general public is overwhelming, with Scotland Yard’s figures indicating that every minute of the day some 3.3 million Facebook posts, 342,000 tweets, 41,000 Instagram photos and 120 hours of video to YouTube are uploaded. As Byrne says: “Try policing that.” The longer-term answer, in his opinion, is not policing but self-policing. It is more important to train Muslim parents “to spot the warning signs in their children’s online habits” rather than “fight the last war against extremist preachers in the backrooms of mosques”.

black flag downThis will obviously come as cold comfort to the British victims of radical Islamic terrorism—I mean violent extremism—in the short period since the publication of Black Flag Down. In March this year, we recall, a jihadist drove a four-wheel-drive into a crowd of pedestrians on London Bridge, killing four people, before going on a knife rampage and slaughtering a policeman. Two months later, a suicide bomber killed twenty-two people and injured dozens more at the conclusion of an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester. On June 3, three radical Islamic terrorists drove into a crowd of pedestrians on London Bridge, before going on a knife rampage resulting in eight dead and dozens wounded. And then, on June 19, an anti-Muslim fanatic drove his car into a crowd of worshippers outside a London mosque, killing one person and injuring nine others. People have a right to know why this kind of carnage is happening in Britain, not to mention the atrocities perpetrated in Nice, Paris, Brussels, Berlin, Sydney, San Bernardino, Orlando and Barcelona.

Liam Byrne has been a leading figure in calling for the British government to crack down on global tech companies that allow terrorist organisations to spread their propaganda. He might even be able to take some credit for Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, in July this year, announcing plans to introduce into Parliament laws that would compel businesses such as Apple and Facebook to release encrypted data to assist urgent counter-terrorism operations: “Encryption is vital for information security but the privacy of the terrorist must never trump the personal security of Australians. We cannot allow the internet to be an ungoverned space.” But even Byrne—if not Turnbull—would acknowledge that increased security, online and off, is not an all-encompassing remedy for terrorism.

At the beginning of the 20th century, three figures dominated the rapidly expanding world of American philanthropy. Two— Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller —are still remembered, mostly because of the foundations they established. But the third—Julius Rosenwald—is largely forgotten. No foundations, and few buildings, bear his name. If his approach to giving was more modest in spirit, it was no less influential and effective in its day.

That Rosenwald became one of the leading philanthropists of his era is itself a remarkable story. As Hasia R. Diner tells us in “ Julius Rosenwald : Repairing the World,” a volume in Yale’s Jewish Lives series, he was the son of an immigrant peddler who arrived in Baltimore in the middle of the 19th century and eventually wound up in Springfield, Ill., running a clothing store. In 1879, the 17-year-old JR (as he was known) went to New York to learn the garment business from his relatives. Soon enough, he made connections with other ambitious young men, such as the future financiers Henry Morgenthau and Henry Goldman.

After returning to the Midwest and starting his own clothing store in Chicago, Rosenwald invested in a catalog sales company that needed capital: Sears, Roebuck. He gradually became more involved in the business and, when co-founder Richard Sears resigned in 1908, took over its leadership. An initial public offering two years earlier (underwritten by Henry Goldman in his first IPO) had not only provided resources for the company’s growth but had also made JR a wealthy man.

Because the rise and fall of Sears, Roebuck is already well-chronicled, Ms. Diner, a professor of American Jewish history at New York University, concentrates on what Rosenwald did with the status and fortune he accumulated. By one estimate, he donated, in today’s dollars, close to $2 billion before he died in 1932, as well as considerable time to the causes he cared about.

Photo: WSJ
Julius Rosenwald: Repairing the World

By Hasia R. Diner
Yale, 237 pages, $25

Many of these centered on his hometown of Chicago. Rosenwald’s gifts helped to create the city’s Museum of Science and Industry, build the University of Chicago, and support the settlement houses run by Jane Addams and others. He also underwrote a wide range of Jewish organizations, including cultural institutes, theological seminaries and, most notably, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, a fund that was set up during World War I to aid Jewish refugees and that has continued to do so ever since.

Islam is a totalitarian system that regulates down to the smallest detail the life of Muslims, obliges them to impose this system to the ends of the earth, and teaches genocidal hatred of those that do not submit. It is no surprise to learn that this system impacts societies and individuals subject to its oppressive ideology. The opposite would be contrary to everything we have learned about the psychological development of human beings. It is curious to observe that the stubborn refusal to make the connection between ideology and psychology is buttressed by flimsy socio-economic explanations that fall apart as soon as they’re touched.

Not a day goes by without confirmation of the insights compiled in Kobrin’s Jihadi Dictionary. Case in point: Mamade Y, the 19 year-old that tried to commit an attack at the Eiffel Tower on August 5th, had been released for the weekend from the psychiatric institution where he was slated to remain for the next 6 months. The aspiring jihadi’s father explained that his son has problems managing his anger. In the past, whenever he had a fit of anger, he would see a masked man telling him to do things. Lately, it’s a jhadi. The young man, who has been in psychiatric treatment since the family moved to France from Mauritania some sixteen years ago, was angry that weekend because the hospital had refused to give him a smartphone. The family is described as “observant but not radicalized.”

Not “radicalized?” The answer, I think, can be found in the intricate coherent argument developed by Dr. Nancy Hartevelt Kobrin, psychoanalyst and counter-terrorism expert. The pathology that produces a young man inspired to stab a soldier at the iconic Tour Eiffel originates in the impossible bonding of the infant with the devalued mother, herself terrorized by a shame-honor culture that leaves her defenseless against male brutality, with all avenues for personal fulfillment blocked by a culture/ideology/religion that perverts every aspect of human relations. Kobrin has opted for a multi-dimensional dictionary format that provides insight into the chasm that separates, term by term, Western and jihadi meanings. Each entry lists a standard dictionary definition, etymology, and usage, followed by a specific jihadi meaning. “Brothers,” for example: The term denotes a spectrum of meaning, from fraternal comradeship to, at the far end, jihadi brothers acting in tandem to commit butchery. Among the examples cited are: Hassan and Walid bin Attash (9/11); Ali Imron, Amrosi, and Muhlas (Bali 2002); Mohamed & Abdulkader Merah (Toulouse, Montauban 2012); the Tsarnaev brothers (Boston Marathon 2013); Ibrahim and Salah Abdeslam (Paris November 2015), the el Bakraoui brothers (Brussels 2016)…[pp 43-4, and “Twinship” p 255]

The sharply observant treatment of this one entry, which is characteristic of the entire dictionary, contrasts vividly with the slack, evasive journalistic approach by which most people consume information about a life and death struggle that, on the contrary, demands clarity, lucidity and vigorous action by democratic governments.

It is obvious, observes Kobrin, that our counter-terrorism programs fall short of reasonable expectations. One reason is the “lethal blind spot” due to lack of knowledge of the “mechanics and dynamics of primitive mental states, mechanisms of defense, and …misuse of objects, constituting perverse behavior.” [pp 59-60] To wit: the August 9th car ramming of soldiers as they came out of their bivouac in Levallois-Perret was met with stubbornly ignorant wonder about the “mystery of the attacker’s motivations.” His “radicalization” was soon revealed.

Richard Reeves of the Brookings Institution has written a flawed but important book about inequality and opportunity in present-day America. According to Reeves’s Dream Hoarders, ours is no longer a mobile society that gives people from all walks of life a fair shot at the American Dream. Although much has been written about the rising fortunes of the top 1 percent over past decades, Reeves’s focus is the highest quintile of the population, the top 20 percent by income and wealth. In his account, people in this tier unfairly “hoard” their privileges. Too many born into affluence remain well-off, and too few from modest backgrounds end up bettering their lot.https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/saving-american-dream/

Reeves is on firm ground in describing the charmed life lived by the upper fifth of society. People in this echelon have pulled away from the rest, with their earnings and wealth steadily increasing in recent decades relative to the larger population. Compared with those lower down on the income scale, those at the top enjoy stable marriages, good health, longevity, safe neighborhoods, superior schools, and steady employment. But according to Reeves, these upper-middle-class Americans have become “dream hoarders.” They have figured out how to preserve their status and pass it on to their offspring. Thanks in no small part to their parents’ advantages, as well as a host of social practices and public policies, the children born to this class are more likely than their peers to graduate from college, especially a selective or prestigious one; attain good jobs; and earn top-quintile incomes themselves. Meanwhile, children born lower on the economic scale struggle to rise, with most never making it into the top 20 percent. To Reeves, this fact alone is deeply unfair and represents a failure of the American Dream.

Dream Hoarders is not just a j’accuse, but a call to action. Something must be done to clear the channels of opportunity, and Reeves recommends that key aspects of private conduct and public policy be structured in service of that goal. But his desire to speed the path upward runs into some serious impediments.
Theorists have long acknowledged, and Reeves agrees, that the main obstacle to social mobility, and indeed to the very existence of a level playing field, is that powerful machine of social reproduction, the family. Compared with those who have less income and education, affluent parents are blessed with a host of advantages, many of which they secure through their choices about how to live their lives. As Charles Murray has noted in his magisterial Coming Apart (to which Reeves only alludes), people in the top tiers are more likely to be well-educated, get and stay married, be dedicated and attentive parents, work hard at their jobs, obey the law, and invest in their communities. They live healthier, more orderly, and longer lives. By contrast, the habits, behaviors, and communities of those lower down on the American totem pole are fast deteriorating, and these trends tell on their children.

Reeves recognizes that these developments are hard to arrest. And he concedes he must meet the challenge of deciding what counts as a legitimate versus an illegitimate advantage, and thus what changes he is willing to recommend to give the less well-off a leg up and make good on his conception of fair opportunity.

He is of two minds about the habits and practices of the upper middle class. He praises affluent parents for their devotion and diligence and the personal attention they lavish on their children, but is concerned that these very virtues tilt the playing field. He doesn’t specify precisely which of their efforts he would leave undisturbed, but they can be surmised from the reforms he proposes. Seeking out safe and pleasant neighborhoods, engaging in enriching activities (including paying for tutoring, lessons, and private schools), helping with homework and college applications, and throwing cash in children’s direction for college, summer support, and even subsidies beyond graduation, would appear to be allowed. But other now-commonplace parental interventions—such as pulling strings to procure jobs—would not.

Reeves also devotes considerable attention to policies and practices that assist well-off families in securing their perch. His main targets are exclusionary zoning, legacy admissions, and unpaid internships. He also provides a familiar laundry list of other proposals, including supplying low-cost, long-term contraception, funding free SAT preparation, eliminating tax credits and savings plans used primarily by higher-income families, and improving lower-income schools by paying teachers more or luring them into less affluent communities.

But is there any reason to believe that these measures will make much difference, especially against the untouchable benefits that privileged parents personally provide? Assessing effects requires taking a harder look at the problem Reeves is purporting to solve.

Reeves claims that the prospects for upward mobility are dismal and deteriorating, at least compared with his benchmark ideal of random sorting, which would have only a fifth of children from each quintile staying where they are. Based on that, he cites data showing that our society has both a “glass ceiling” and a “glass floor”—with more than 20 percent of children born at the top staying there, and significantly fewer in the lower tiers managing to rise. He is also concerned with differences in educational prospects that correspond to income. As befits a member of the elite knowledge class, he has a college fixation and is especially obsessed with children’s unequal chances of ending up at a “selective” college. But the data he cites on educational opportunity and income mobility tell a mixed and equivocal story—one less consistent with “privilege hoarding” than he claims.

Reeves himself admits that mobility rates have never been completely random, and he notes that “scholars are divided on whether relative mobility rates have worsened” since the middle of the 20th century, when the GI Bill sent unprecedented numbers of Americans on to higher education. Moreover, a look at Reeves’s charts reveals that income mobility across quintiles is still substantial, with 20 percent of children born into the bottom fifth rising out of that tier, those born in the middle quintiles as likely to move up as down, and only a minority born into the top tier managing to stay there. Inheritance of educational status is somewhat stickier, but not rigidly so. About 40 percent of those born to parents in the top educational quintile maintain that status, while most in the bottom quintile obtain more years of education than their fathers did.

Editor’s Note: The following is the fourth and final installment in a series of excerpts adapted from Victor Davis Hanson’s new book The Second World Wars. It appears here with permission.

Throughout history, conflict had always broken out between enemies when the appearance of deterrence — the material and spiritual likelihood of using greater military power successfully against an aggressive enemy — vanished. From Carthage to the Confederacy, weaker bellicose states could convince themselves of the impossible because their fantasies were not checked earlier by cold reality. A stronger appearance of power, and of the willingness to employ it, might have stopped more conflicts before they began. Put another way, deterrence in the famous formulation of the 17th-century British statesman George Savile, 1st Marquess of Halifax, meant that “men are not hanged for stealing horses, but that horses may not be stolen.”

But once thieves were not hanged and more horses were indeed stolen, who is strong and who weak became confusing, and the proper recalibration that pruned rhetoric and posturing from knowledge of real strength returned only at the tremendous cost of a world war. Hitler’s Mein Kampf — “the new Koran of faith and war,” according to Winston Churchill — was in truth a puerile rant that gained credence only through German rearmament and aggressiveness, at least before Stalingrad. After that battle, Hitler was no longer read widely and was only rarely heard by Germans, as the ambitions of the Third Reich waned and Nazi Germany was exposed as far weaker than its enemies and led by an incompetent strategist. The prewar reality was that Russian armor was superior to German. Inexplicably, the Soviets had not been able to communicate that fact, and in consequence lost deterrence. Hitler later remarked that had he just been made aware of the nature of Russian tank production, and specifically about the T-34 tank, against which standard German anti-tank weapons were ineffective, he would never have invaded the Soviet Union. Maybe. But it took a theater war in the East that killed over 30 million people to reveal the Soviets’ real power. Accordingly, leaders and their followers are forced to make the necessary readjustments, although often at a terrible price of correcting flawed prewar impressions. In the case of the timidity of the Western democracies in 1938–1939, General Walter Warlimont explained Hitler’s confidence about powers that easily could have deterred Germany: “(1) he felt their [the Allies’] Far Eastern interests were more important than their European interests, and (2) they did not appear to be armed sufficiently.” What a terrible cost ensued to prove Hitler wrong.

Only after the disastrous battles of Leipzig (1813) and Waterloo (1815) did Napoleon finally concede that his armies had never been a match for the combined strength of Russia, Prussia, Austria, Sweden, and England. Had all those states combined in a firm coalition a decade earlier, Napoleon might well have been deterred. Churchill without much exaggeration said of Hitler’s military agenda, “up till 1934 at least, German rearmament could have been prevented without the loss of a single life. It was not time that was lacking.”

By any fair measure, Germany in 1939 — in terms of the number and quality of planes, armor, manpower reserves, and industrial output — was not stronger than the combined French and British militaries — or at least not so strong as to be able to defeat and occupy both powers. The later German–Italian–Japanese axis was far less impressive than the alliance that would soon emerge of Great Britain, America, and Russia — having only little over a third of the three Allies’ combined populations, not to speak of their productive capacity. After all, the United States by war’s end in 1945 would achieve a wartime gross national product nearly greater than that of all of the other Allied and Axis powers combined. In sum, 60 million dead, 20th-century totalitarian ideologies, the singular evil of Adolf Hitler, the appearance of V-2 rockets, the dropping of two atomic bombs, the Holocaust, napalm, kamikazes, and the slaughter of millions in Russia and China seemed to redefine World War II as unlike any conflict of the past — even as predictable humans with unchanging characteristics, fighting amid age-old geography and weather patterns, continued to follow the ancient canons of war and replayed roles well known from the ages.

Why the Western world — which was aware of the classical lessons and geography of war, and was still suffering from the immediate trauma of the First World War — chose to tear itself apart in 1939 is a story not so much of accidents, miscalculations, and overreactions (although there were plenty of those, to be sure) as of the carefully considered decisions to ignore, appease, or collaborate with Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany by nations that had the resources and knowledge, but not yet the willpower, to do otherwise.

Editor’s Note: The following is the third in a series of excerpts adapted from Victor Davis Hanson’s new book The Second World Wars. It appears here with permission.

Over 2,400 years ago, the historian Thucydides had emphasized the military advantages of sea powers, particularly their ability to control commerce and move troops. Not much had changed since antiquity, as the oceans likewise mattered a great deal to the six major belligerents in World War II. Three great powers were invaded during the war: Germany, Italy, and Russia. Three were not: America, Britain, and Japan. All the former were on the European landmass, the latter were either islands or distant and bounded by two vast oceans. Amphibious operations originating on the high seas were a far more difficult matter than crossing borders, or in the case of Italy, crossing from Sicily onto the mainland. The protection afforded Great Britain and the United States by surrounding seas meant that containing the German threat was never the existential challenge for them that it always was for the Western Europeans. The generals of the French may have always appeared cranky to the Anglo-Americans, but then, neither Britain nor America had a common border with Germany. The only way for Germany to strike Britain was to invade and occupy the French and Belgian coasts, as reflected both in the German Septemberprogramm of 1914 and in Hitler’s obsessions with the Atlantic ports between 1940 and 1945. Since the 15th century, European countries that faced the Atlantic had natural advantages over those whose chief home ports were confined to the North, Baltic, and Mediterranean Seas.

Even if weaker than Germany, the islands of Japan nevertheless made an Allied invasion a far more difficult proposition than would crossing the Rhine or Oder into Germany. In fact, no modern power had ever completed a successful invasion of the Japanese homeland, a fact well known to Allied planners who wished to, and did, avoid the prospect through dominant air power.

Japan’s various strategic choices in 1941 were predicated a great deal on traditional geographical considerations. Japan could further reinforce its decade-long presence in China, or in June 1941 join Hitler by attacking the Soviet Union from the east, or absorb more orphaned colonial territory in Asia and the Pacific, or allow the Imperial Navy to begin new wars against the United States and Britain because it was an island sea power with few immediate worries about ground invasions or enemy amphibious landings. Left unspoken was the fact that in almost all these geographical scenarios, an often xenophobic and resource-hungry Japan had few friends. It had alienated the Western powers during the 1930s, invaded China in 1937, fought the Soviets in 1939, and been aggressive toward India; it was disliked and distrusted in the Pacific and unable to partner effectively with its own Axis allies.

Any eastward expansion of 20th century Japan into the Pacific depended also on the status of its western geography. If either Russia or China were to be hostile — and both usually were — by definition Japan would be faced with an uninviting two-front war. In World War II, the bulk of Japanese ground forces — over 600,000 at any given time — was fighting in China, where over a half-million Japanese soldiers eventually perished. Japan was willing to risk a two-front war after its nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union in April 1941, given that the Chinese front was mostly stalemated, but it never envisioned the possibility that Pearl Harbor would lead to a three-theater conflict in which Japan would be fighting China, the United States, and finally the Russians. Because pulling out of the Chinese morass was deemed unacceptable by the government of General and Prime Minister Hideki Tojo, and given that the Imperial Japanese Army had already fared poorly against the Russians from 1932 to 1939 along the Mongolian border, Japan felt its best choice of aggression was a surprise “preemptory” naval air attack on the geographically distant Americans, who allegedly might soon have attacked Japan or would eventually have strangled its importation of key resources. General Tojo told the Japanese war cabinet that he had thought of all the alternatives “until it makes my head ache, but the conclusion always is that war is unavoidable.”