RUTHFULLY YOURS

Author David Kilcullen “Blood Year” is scathing of Barack Obama’s deer-in-the-headlights response to the rise of ISIS. The last thing Vladimir Putin had to fear on the eve of his bold intervention in the Syrian civil war, was the reaction of a supine US president

Blood Year: Islamic State and the Failures of the War on Terror
by David Kilcullen
Black Inc, 2016, 304 pages, $29.99

The United States will remain in a kind of purgatory until it unlocks the full meaning of 9/11. Without the right understanding of what that terrorist attack signified, there cannot be an effective response to it. David Kilcullen’s Blood Year makes the case that the administrations of both George W. Bush and Barack Obama have badly misjudged the nature of the challenge to America and the wider world in general. As a direct consequence of this, asserts Kilcullen, the power and reach of militant jihadism appear much stronger now than when President Bush first launched the Global War On Terrorism (GWOT) in 2001.

The Australian David Kilcullen has been, amongst other things, senior adviser to General David Petraeus during the Surge (2007-08) and chief strategist in the Counter-Terrorism Bureau of the US State Department. He currently runs a private agency that has advised everyone from the UK and Australian governments to Nato. Blood Year is that rare thing, an insider’s knowledge of Western policy-making in the twenty-first century combined with the frankness of an independent-minded questioner. Yet even Kilcullen—a veritable expert on counter-terrorism—appears, at times, not to grasp in its entirety the genesis of Islamic militancy and the comprehensive nature of its war against modernity.

Kilcullen contrasts George W. Bush’s second term in office (2005 to 2009) with his first (2001 to 2005). Stung into action by the destruction of the Twin Towers and the strike on the Pentagon, the forty-third President launched “Operation Enduring Freedom—Afghanistan”. On the hundredth day of his GWOT—some time after the initial success in Afghanistan against the Taliban and Al Qaeda and more than a year before the commencement of the Iraq War—President Bush could not unreasonably make the claim: “We are supported by the collective will of the world.”

There were two big pieces of news out of NASA this week. NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and scientists at the Southwest Research Institute discovered a new moon, orbiting a dwarf planet named Makemake (one of the many Pluto-esque bodies that live in the far reaches of the solar system). And NASA announced that the Earth is getting greener. Literally greener. Plant growth is way up.

Why is plant growth way up? Because of all the extra carbon dioxide in the air. According to the study, which was published this week in the scientific journal Nature, the total area of the planet that’s covered by plants has increased by more than 11 million square miles in the last 33 years. For perspective: North America, including Greenland, is a little less than nine and a half million square miles. Of course, not all of this increase is due to CO2 and global warming. But 78 percent of it is. (Says the study.)

This is very good news. Plants feed the world. It is not, however, unexpected news. Wall Street Journal readers may recall a piece published in May of 2013 called “In Defense of Carbon Dioxide,” by William Happer, one of Princeton’s top-flight physicists, and Harrison Schmitt, a geologist, a former Republican senator from New Mexico, and an Apollo astronaut who walked on the moon.

“In Defense of Carbon Dioxide” criticized the “conventional wisdom” about CO2 and the “single-minded demonization of this natural and essential atmospheric gas.” “Contrary to what some would have us believe,” wrote Schmitt and Happer, “increased carbon dioxide will benefit the increasing population on the planet by increasing agricultural productivity.”

Needless to say, they were right on the money.

Here are some questions for the man-made or Anthropogenic Global Warmers. Since I have taken up the cudgels on various Facebook pages I am screamed at by numerous sycophants who declare that I am a simpleton and totally ignorant. I confess! But here are some questions for the man-made Global Warmers:

Do you deny that the Sun’s radiation causes the surfaces of the Earth to warm?

Do you deny that we are travelling round the Sun at over 66,000 miles per hour in an ellipse?

Do you deny that the Sun is one million three hundred thousand times as big as Planet Earth by volume?

Do you deny that the Sun on it corona is approximately 6,500C?

Do you deny that the Sun is between 91 to 95 million miles away?

Do you deny that the whole Solar system is within an arm of the Milky Way?

Do you deny that Outer Space is a vacuum?

Do you deny the 1st Law of Thermodynamics? That all heat has to be generated by work done?

Do you deny the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, that all heat by itself flows from hot to cold and never versa?

Do you deny that evaporation causes cooling?

Do you deny that Conduction demonstrates heat flowing from hot to cold?

Do you deny that Convection carries heat upwards and away towards Outer Space?

Do you deny that only Radiation can pass heat into or through a vacuum?

Do you deny that the Atmosphere is warmed at the bottom by conduction from the Earth’s surfaces?

Do you deny that the atmosphere cools by 2 degrees centigrade for every 1,000 feet of altitude?

Do you deny that 99% of the Atmosphere is composed of Nitrogen and Oxygen?

Do you deny that the Greenhouse Gases only occupy 1% and that Carbon Dioxide a mere 0.04%?

Do you deny that the gases of the Atmosphere do not generate heat?

Do you deny that at 10,000 feet the gases are cold, including CO2?

Sometimes we wonder if we’re still living in the land of the free. Witness the subpoena from Claude Walker, attorney general of the U.S. Virgin Islands, demanding that the Competitive Enterprise Institute cough up a decade of emails and policy work, as well as a list of private donors.

Mr. Walker is frustrated that the free-market think tank won’t join the modern church of climatology, so he has joined the rapidly expanding club of Democratic politicians and prosecutors harassing dissenters.

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman started the assault last autumn with a subpoena barrage on Exxon Mobil. His demand for documents followed reports by Inside Climate News and the Los Angeles Times that claimed Exxon scientists had known for years that greenhouse gases cause global warming but hid the truth from the public and shareholders.

Those reports selectively quoted from Exxon documents, which in any case were publicly available and often peer-reviewed in academic journals. Some Exxon scientists changed their views over the years, and several years ago the company even endorsed a carbon tax. CONTINUE AT SITE

As a young boy, I used to think my grandma very strange. In her bedroom she kept a suitcase, packed and ready for use at a moment’s notice. “Just in case,” she’d tell me when I asked where it was that she was always waiting to go to. “You never know when they’ll turn on the Jews.”

Her house in Northwood was epitome of suburban comfort, and I couldn’t understand what on earth she meant. Until, that is, I learned some history – including the history of the Jews. Which is, in short, that pretty much everywhere, they have turned on the Jews.

From my teens through my twenties and thirties, the fact that I am Jewish meant little to me beyond the Jonathan Miller sense of being Jew-ish. I adored beigels, matzoh balls, Seinfeld and Woody Allen more than your average gentile would think they deserved. And that was about it. If you’d asked me, I’d have told you that after the Holocaust, real, serious anti-Semitism – the sort where Jews were killed for being Jews, rather than the odd nasty comment – was a thing of the past, in civilised Europe, at least.
Then something happened. 9/11, to be specific. I realised something was up that I didn’t really understand. So I read and read and read. And then read some more – especially the words of the terrorists and their fellow Islamists. They were explicit and open. Jews were the enemy. All their “issues” with the West pivoted, in the end, on their Jew hate. So I immersed myself even more in the issues around terrorism and Islamism. Because, you see, it mattered.

It matters, of course, to all of us, because – as we have seen both on 9/11 and ever since, Islamist terrorism is not specific in its targeting. But it matters to me more, I would say, than anything else I can think of. Because although these maniacs will happily kill anyone, they say, andtheir subsequent murders show, that – quite specifically – they want to kill me. A Jew. So on level I am not in the least bit shocked, or even surprised, by the reemergence of Jew hatred as a thing in recent years. By what arrogance would we think that our generation, alone in history, would be free of the oldest hatred?
But on another, more visceral level, it chills me to the bone. And it’s not the terrorists. They threaten me, of course, as they threaten us all. Yet to me, the real chill comes from their fellow travelers – the useful idiots of the terrorists and Jew-murderers who say they do not have a racist bone in their body, but when it comes to Jews, a blind spot emerges. The likes, to be blunt, of the now suspended Ken Livingstone, who claims never to have come across a single example of Anti-semitism in the Labour Party. He clearly has never looked in the mirror. Much has been written – especially by the brilliant Nick Cohen – on the “Red/Green Alliance”; the phenomenon by which a swathe of the Left has linked up with radical Islam, leading to the bizarre spectacle of Leftist feminists supporting Islamists who would cut off the hands of women who read books.

Why does the Left hate the Jews?

The Labour party in the United Kingdom is being convulsed at the moment with a public reckoning of the anti-Semitism of some of its most prominent members, including the former mayor of London, “Red” Ken Livingstone, who has just been suspended from the party for arguing that Adolf Hitler was, effectively, a Zionist. He was trying to explain away the anti-Semitic remarks of MP Naz Shah, who suggested that Israel be liquidated and its population forcibly resettled in the United States.

In the United States, the Harvard Law Record went to some lengths to conceal the identity of a law student who attacked a visiting Israeli dignitary as — in the classic anti-Semitic formulation — “smelly.” That student was Husam El-Qoulaq, a Palestinian leftist. The campus Left has, to no one’s surprise, rallied to his defense. Among those defending him were a number of Jewish law students, who insisted that El-Qoulaq couldn’t possibly have known the anti-Semitic history of “smelly Jew” rhetoric, in spite of his having been reared at the world center of such nonsense.

Others insisted that the Harvard case and the Labour cases are — this, too, will be familiar — not at all about anti-Semitism but about anti-Zionism.

That argument does not stand up to two seconds’ scrutiny, and never has. One of the fundamental stories of history is that people move around and bump into each other. It is true that most of the current Jewish population of Israel descends from people who were not precisely sons of the soil they now inhabit. But then, neither are the so-called Palestinians, who are Arabs. Arabs famously come from Arabia, but they are located all over the world. No one talks about the need to get the Arabs out of Egypt or Libya — or Palestine, for that matter — any more than anybody seriously thinks about returning the Americas to the descendants of the aboriginal population, which, of course, wasn’t aboriginal, either, but merely the first to emigrate. The Irish are descended of people not native to Ireland, as indeed ultimately is every population in the world, including those in the African cradle of humanity.

And it isn’t because the establishment of Israel is, relatively speaking, fresh in the historical memory, and therefore an open wound. Before the end of World War II, there was no Pakistan, and to the extent that there was an “India,” it was a geographical rather than a political term, much like “Palestine.” There was no independent Ireland until the 1920s and no Republic of Ireland until 1948. There was no People’s Republic of China until 1949. There was no Zimbabwe until 1980, no Czech Republic until 1993, and no modern Democratic Republic of the Congo until 1997. Israel is an ancient state compared with geopolitical newcomers such as the 30-odd countries created since 1990.

Yet it is the Jewish state, and the Jewish state alone, that is permanently marked for extermination. No one is throwing a fit about Timor-Leste or Serbia. The old saw about American racial politics was that in the South whites accepted blacks individually but rejected them corporately, whereas in the North it was the opposite, with the Yankees embracing integration and equality in theory while ensuring that they rarely encountered a black American in person. (Senator Bernie Sanders, proud son of diverse Brooklyn, now represents the whitest state in the Union.) And that’s the best that the Left can say for itself: “We don’t hate the Jews individually, just as a nation.”

That’s not much of a defense.

Harvard employs Gestapo tactics to track right-wing bloggers while shielding leftist hate group leader.

Unless you’ve been in hibernation for the last few days, you’ve almost certainly come across the name Husam El Qoulaq, the rabidly anti-Israeli, third-year Harvard Law School student who hurled an anti-Semitic trope at an Israeli parliamentarian during a question and answer session. What most of you may not be familiar with is the Orwellian-like hypocrisy employed by Harvard Law School to protect the identities of anti-Semitic agitators while at the same time utilizing all tools at their disposal to unmask the identities of bloggers, whose only crime was to expose a hoax committed by self-proclaimed “social justice warriors.”

On April 14, Husam El Qoulaq, whose name is also spelled El-Coolaq and El-Quolaq, asked Israel’s former minister of justice and current co-leader of the Zionist Union party, Tzipy Livni, why she was a “smelly” Jew. He went on to inquire about her “odor” and again referred to her as “very smelly.” The stereotype of the Jew as smelly or filthy is as old and banal as anti-Semitism itself and was also employed by the Nazis as a means to further demean and denigrate the Jewish people. His antics were performed in a packed hall filled with fellow Harvard colleagues. Also present and sitting beside Livni was U.S. diplomat Dennis Ross and Harvard Law professor, Robert Mnookin.

El Qoulaq represents the modern face of campus hate and fascism and embodies all that is wrong with the present state of academia. He is a leader in the hate group, Students for Justice in Palestine and a supporter of the Irvine 11, the group of hooligans and convicted criminals who, in 2010, disrupted a talk given by Israel’s then ambassador, Michael Oren. He is also a defender of Steven Salaita, the disgraced Judeophobic “academic” who was given the boot by the University of Illinois for posting rabidly anti-Semitic rants on Twitter.

El Qoulaq’a April 14 antics were unsurprising given his sordid past and current BDS-SJP affiliations. What is in fact surprising is the length to which Harvard Law School went to protect his identity, shielding it from any form of well-deserved scrutiny. HLS condemned his comments but then inexplicably censored that portion of the video featuring the disgraceful exchange. What’s more, the Harvard Law Record, a student newspaper, joined in this despicable charade, violating basic norms of journalistic integrity. They even went so far as to allow El Qoulaq to submit an anonymous and rather insincere “apology.”

The question on the minds of most rational thinking people is how Harvard Law School would have acted if such a hateful comment were directed at an African American dignitary. Of course, that is a rhetorical question. There would have been an indignant outcry with the culprit publicly shamed, humiliated and disciplined and rightfully so. Xenophobia and racism have no place in institutions of higher learning but at Harvard (as well as other institutions) there is an apparent exception for those who hurl vitriol at Jews.

By now everyone knows that the three letters BDS stand for an economic boycott of Israel. Some have encountered BDS protesters howling and raging outside Jewish stores and synagogues. The tactic of an anti-Jewish boycott, originally developed by Nazi Germany and then deployed by the Arab League, is controversial outside the grimier corners of the anti-Israel left. And so BDS can never go mainstream.

The next stage of BDS is a stealth boycott. Stealth BDS is BDS without the nasty label and the negative associations that go with it. It’s BDS without the stigma, the three bad letters or the bad aftertaste.

Stealth BDS is targeted at the Jewish community because that is where BDS is most controversial. Its organizations operate by appropriating Jewish names, such as If Not Now, T’ruah or J Street U in order to Jew-wash their tactics by making their hatred appear to be Jewish. They avoid openly endorsing BDS, occasionally they will even claim to oppose it while arguing that their opposition to Israel is the best way to beat BDS.

Their way however is just BDS without the label.

Rather than talking about BDS, Stealth BDS groups will claim that they are just “fighting the occupation”. They recruit young left-wing activists with Jewish last names and claim that they are the “voice of a new generation” being marginalized by the Jewish establishment who would otherwise leave the community and go full BDS. They will insist that by meeting their demands, the Jewish community will defang BDS.

But their demands, when they actually get around to them, usually sound a whole lot like BDS. And these groups, even when they claim to be anti-BDS, have a history of providing platforms to BDS supporters, endorsing them, signing on to their demands and fighting their battles for them.

This recent panel pulled out all the well-known arguments about “Islamophobia,” but people seem to be losing interest. A good sign.

In Europe and the United States, “Islamophobia has grown exponentially in 2015. In fact it is pretty much at its highest point,” stated Professor John Esposito on April 14 at his academic home, Georgetown University. His comments typified thepanel, “Race, Religion and U.S. Presidential Politics,” and its hackneyed attribution of growing global concerns about Islam to irrational “Islamophobia.”

Esposito criticized largely negative global media coverage of Islamic issues “with very little coverage of the broader context, the mainstream communities of Muslims around the world.” He referenced Media Tenor, a think tank directed byRoland Schatz, a frequent speaker at Georgetown’s Saudi-funded Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (ACMCU) headed by Esposito. Yet Media Tenor’s 2013 study on Islam in the global media showed the esteemed Wall Street Journal’s reporting on Islam as heavily negative, indicating a dearth of worldwide good news concerning Islam.

Schatz, who has previously suggested that the media refrain from reporting bad news about Islam in the absence of countervailing good news, has questionable objectivity. He has dubiously asserted that the “hurting of innocents is absolutely not in keeping with the Koran” and described Egypt’s former Grand Mufti, Ali Gomaa, as “remarkably challenging and funny.” Less humorously, Schatz’s collaborator in the C1 World Dialogue has endorsed Islamic doctrines concerning wife-beating and genocidal apocalyptic predictions concerning Jews. Gomaa also supported bizarre ideas about the companions of Islam’s prophet Muhammad drinking his urine.

Early into fall semester at the University of Missouri, a student wrote to the chancellor complaining about the logo for Sunshine Sushi, a restaurant in the Student Center.

The e-mail, entitled “Racism at Mizzou,” said that the logo closely resembled the Imperial Japanese flag used during World War II, and thus “has the same meaning as the Nazi’s Hakenkreuz [also known as the swastika], which was the symbol of the Nazi.” The student, whose name was redacted, added, “I wish to have this logo changed.”

The logo did somewhat resemble the Rising Sun flag, which has a controversial history but is also symbolically significant well beyond wartime Japan.

The flag dates as far back as the 17th century and is still flown today by the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force. It’s also used commercially, adorning everything from touristy T-shirts to Japanese beer cans to the Asahi Shimbun newspaper company. Some Japanese sports fans have also adopted the symbol to root for their favorite teams. A black version of the logo emblazoned character Danny LaRusso’s headband in the classic 1984 American film The Karate Kid.

E-mails reviewed exclusively by Heat Street and National Review show that soon after receiving an e-mail complaining about the Sunshine Sushi logo, Mizzou’s administrators promptly met with twelve students from different Asian organizations on campus, facilitating a meeting with the restaurant’s owners.

“The owners . . . have agreed to consider changing their logo if our students come up with something equal or better than their current logo,” wrote Jeff Zeilenga, the university’s assistant vice chancellor. He said they were “very willing to work with our students in good faith to find a better image” even though they “are under no obligation to change their registered logo of 15 years.”

The owners of Sunshine Sushi say they chose their original logo as a symbol of American freedom, not Japanese aggression.

Oo Min Aung, the sushi restaurant’s co-owner, was born in Myanmar and marched in pro-democracy protests before immigrating to the United States. He says that he chose a shining sun because he “wanted something that would symbolize the meaning of freedom, liberation.”

“I didn’t see any problems with my own logo,” Aung says. He says he met with students and tried to explain what the logo meant to him. But, he adds, “For people who came from Korea or China, I didn’t understand how much my old logo reminded them of their dark days with Japan. . . . [So I changed it] when I found out these people were not very happy with my logo — and they were students, too, and without them, I wouldn’t be here.”