RUTHFULLY YOURS

In his view, the current debacle has nothing to do with his own errors and omissions.

How can we account for the apparent flip-flopping of the Obama administration about what we are doing, or might do further, to the Islamic State?

At times the secretary of defense seems at odds with the secretary of state. The administration seems not to be reacting to its own intelligence information about the Islamic State. Nor is it heeding the professional advice of the Joint Chiefs or top-ranking military officers in the field. Instead, in the run-up to the midterm elections, Obama appears to be guided largely by a stubborn adherence to his own past political truisms, and that explains the current inability to articulate a strategy or craft a coalition.

In anti-empirical fashion, the following axioms must be true — and thus the facts on the ground in Syria and Iraq must be massaged to reflect these beliefs.

1. The growth of the Islamic State has little if anything to do with the total withdrawal of all U.S. forces from Iraq in 2011. Our departure did not prompt the Maliki government to backslide into religious oppression, free the skies for foreign powers, and open the countryside to resurgent Islamists.

2. The success of the Islamic State has nothing to do with the past failure to aid anti–Bashar Assad groups in Syria that once upon a time may have also opposed the Islamic State.

3. The current ascendancy of the Islamic State has nothing to do with a sense that the credibility of the United States in the region is diminished, or that enemies in the Middle East are emboldened by past non-enforcement of loudly announced red lines, step-over lines, or deadlines. Nor does it have to do with the situation on the ground after the bombing of Libya, or with the promise to vacate Afghanistan, or with the shunning of our old allies in the Gulf and Egypt.

4. The administration’s current Middle East plan of reaching out to the Islamic world — from the euphemisms about terrorism to the proclamations of underappreciated Islamic achievement to outreach to Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Iranians — has largely worked and therefore should be continued. Hence, the statement that the Islamic State has nothing to do with Islam.

In Search of the ‘Moderate Islamists’ The Muslim Brotherhood is the best Obama can do.

It is not out of ignorance that President Obama and Secretary Kerry are denying the Islamic roots of the Islamic State jihadists. As I argued in a column here last week, we should stop scoffing as if this were a blunder and understand the destructive strategy behind it. The Obama administration is quite intentionally promoting the progressive illusion that “moderate Islamists” are the solution to the woes of the Middle East, and thus that working cooperatively with “moderate Islamists” is the solution to America’s security challenges.

I wrote a book a few years ago called The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America that addressed this partnership between Islamists and progressives. The terms “grand jihad” and “sabotage” are lifted from an internal Muslim Brotherhood memorandum that lays bare the Brotherhood’s overarching plan to destroy the West from within by having their component organizations collude with credulous Western governments and opinion elites.

The plan is going well.

As long as the news media and even conservative commentators continue to let them get away with it, the term “moderate Islamist” will remain useful to transnational progressives. It enables them to avoid admitting that the Muslim Brotherhood is what they have in mind.

As my recent column explained, the term “moderate Islamist” is an oxymoron. An Islamist is a Muslim who wants repressive sharia imposed. There is nothing moderate about sharia even if the Muslim in question does not advocate imposing it by violence.

Most people do not know what the term “Islamist” means, so the contradiction is not apparent to them. If they think about it at all, they figure “moderate Islamist” must be just another way of saying “moderate Muslim,” and since everyone acknowledges that there are millions of moderate Muslims, it seems logical enough. Yet, all Muslims are not Islamists. In particular, all Muslims who support the Western principles of liberty and reason are not Islamists.

If you want to say that some Islamists are not violent, that is certainly true. But that does not make them moderate. There is, moreover, less to their nonviolence than meets the eye. Many Islamists who do not personally participate in jihadist aggression support violent jihadists financially and morally — often while feigning objection to their methods or playing semantic games (e.g., “I oppose terrorism but I support resistance,” or “I oppose the killing of innocent people . . . but don’t press me on who is an innocent”).

Understandably, the public is inclined to give the benefit of the doubt to people the government describes as “moderates” and portrays as our “allies.” If transnational progressives were grilled on these vaporous terms, though, and forced to concede, say, that the Muslim Brotherhood was the purportedly “moderate opposition” our government wants to support in Syria, the public would object. While not expert in the subject, many Americans are generally aware that the Brotherhood supports terrorism, that its ideology leads young Muslims to graduate to notorious terrorist organizations, and that it endorses oppressive Islamic law while opposing the West. Better for progressives to avoid all that by one of their dizzying, internally nonsensical word games — hence, “moderate Islamist.”

I rehearse all that because last week, right on cue, representatives of Brotherhood-tied Islamist organizations appeared with Obama-administration officials and other apologists for Islamic supremacism to ostentatiously “condemn” the Islamic State as “not Islamic.”

Klinghoffer: Pretending Art Means Never Having to Say You’re Sorry
The Klinghoffer opera transforms the Palestinian Arabs’ false, lethal narrative into truth, while wresting away the truth of the Jewish connection to the land of Israel. A relationship which predates even the creation of Islam, let alone the Palestinian Arabs, by centuries.

The most important thing to know about the Metropolitan Opera’s staging of the provocation piece “The Death of Klinghoffer,” is that the first of what should be many protests against it will be on Monday, Sept 22, starting at 4:30 p.m., at the Metropolitan Opera, which is nestled in the Lincoln Center Complex, at Broadway and West 65th Street in New York City.

The opera itself is still set to run at the Met for eight performances, starting on Monday, Oct. 20, running through mid-November. But in a concession that should serve as an admission, the Met pulled “Death” from its line-up of operas it simulcasts to theaters around the world.

Why?

Because as Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager admitted in a statement issued in mid-June, the international Jewish community is genuinely concerned that “the live transmission of The Death of Klinghoffer would be inappropriate at this time of rising anti-Semitism, particularly in Europe.”

It beggars the imagination that Gelb and his board recognized and acted in deference to genuine concern about the effect the opera could have for Jews in Europe, but shuts his ears to the genuine concern and outrage over staging it in New York City, where there is one of the largest concentration of Jews in the world.

What is wrong with this opera, you ask? Spending hours listening to scenes from the opera only undergirds the enmity expressed towards the opera by concerned ranks of the Jewish community.

AMERICAN JEWS GETTING FAT WHEREVER POOR PEOPLE ARE SUFFERING

As the House Select Committee on Benghazi prepares for its first hearing this week, a former State Department diplomat is coming forward with a startling allegation: Hillary Clinton confidants were part of an operation to “separate” damaging documents before they were turned over to the Accountability Review Board investigating security lapses surrounding the Sept. 11, 2012, terrorist attacks on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya.

New Benghazi allegation puts spotlight on Hillary Clinton confidants, alleged after-hours document review.

UPDATE: Hillary Clinton’s chief of staff allegedly present at after-hours document review.

According to former Deputy Assistant Secretary Raymond Maxwell, the after-hours session took place over a weekend in a basement operations-type center at State Department headquarters in Washington, D.C. This is the first time Maxwell has publicly come forward with the story.

At the time, Maxwell was a leader in the State Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, which was charged with collecting emails and documents relevant to the Benghazi probe.

Raymond Maxwell, former State Department deputy assistant secretary (Photo: Sharyl Attkisson)
“I was not invited to that after-hours endeavor, but I heard about it and decided to check it out on a Sunday afternoon,” Maxwell says.

He didn’t know it then, but Maxwell would ultimately become one of four State Department officials singled out for discipline—he says scapegoated—then later cleared for devastating security lapses leading up to the attacks. Four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens, were murdered during the Benghazi attacks.

‘Basement Operation’

The Bathsheba Deadline
An Original Novel
by Jack Engelhard
©2014

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The book they tried to ban…
reveals the truth behind the headlines…
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Bestselling novelist Jack Engelhard (Indecent Proposal) has produced a heroic work of literature. This is a superb, gutsy novel. The Bathsheba Deadline is a newsroom thriller ripped from the headlines. The present day action takes place in a Manhattan newsroom where three leading journalists find themselves caught in a sizzling three-way love triangle that may lead to murder in the Middle East (Israel). You will never forget Jay Garfield and you absolutely will never forget Lyla. Politics and sex mixed in with the war on terror provoke life-and-death rifts within the editorial staff. Journalists with the power to influence public opinion have lost their neutrality and have taken sides. Readers are taken behind the scenes and into the newsrooms where they are shown how headlines are made and often manipulated to favor one side over another. Media bias usually against Israel? Read all about it in Engelhard’s stirring pages. The war for survival in a New York City newsroom mirrors the clash of civilizations here, in the Middle East, and around the world.

“The fate of the Jews of France is like the canary in the coal mine: it announces a much larger conflagration”.

This is what a great French intellectual told me this week.He is the historian of the Sorbonne University, Georges Bensoussan, the director of the Mémorial de la Shoah in Paris and of its Revue d’Histoire.

In the first eight months of 2014, France is leading the list of the world’s countries whose Jewish population is emigrating to Israel, with 5,000 Jews who chose to abandon the République to live in the Jewish State.

“It is a real novelty, a real turning point in the history of the aliyah of Jews from France since 1945”, says Bensoussan. “It is one per cent of the entire Jewish population of France. The French aliyah will be two and half times larger than the aliyah from the United States for a community ten times smaller”.

While French Jews are leaving for Israel, French Muslims are leaving for jihad in Iraq and Syria.

“France has the largest contingent of European volunteers for jihad in Syria. 900 French Muslims according to the police. This reflects the demographic upheaval and the non-integration and severe dissimulation of the Muslim population.

There is a surprising fact: the choice of name. The Arab immigration in France is the only one in the history of this country that continues to give children the names of the parent’s world of origin

This process of concealment is the result of historical factors such as colonization and decolonization in a background that everyone has forgotten, “‘History weighs on the minds of the living’ said Karl Marx”. The French model of integration is imploding.

“French multiculturalism is nonsense. France is a nation united around a language, literature, history. Communitarianism is antithetical to French history. Multiculturalism does not work anywhere”.

Several weeks ago a former Israeli ambassador spoke up to offer his prescription for “peace in the Middle East” and I was amazed all over again. They always amaze me, these dreamers. They never learn, so, as if the folly of abandoning Jewish Gaza weren’t enough, once again they’re back to a “two-state-solution.”

I won’t mention his name because we’re entering our High Holy Days and I prefer not to do lashon hara (slander, ed.). I’m being watched. For the same reason I won’t mention another Israeli “expert” who came along only yesterday to insist that for the sake of peace, Israel must dismantle itself immediately. Same deal, and the disease keeps spreading among our peaceniks.

King David, by the way, prayed for the utter annihilation of all his enemies – but that’s another column.

There was no “two-state-solution” and there were no “peace processes” when King David ran the show. That ought to be a hint.

So once Israel does this, shares the land, the Arabs will be astonished by these sweet gestures. They will start dancing with us at our Bar Mitzvahs.

Do you remember when it was the very religious among our people who were damned for being “messianic?”

So how about these “Liberals” from inside and outside the faith? Their dream is that the minute Israel and the rest of the West go groveling, capitulate and surrender, everything that ails Fevered Islam will be cured overnight. Islamists who’ve been drinking from intoxicating waters will sober up in a flash the instant we renounce ourselves and submit. So goes their messiah.

American oil companies used to sponsor a lot of cultural programming. As the Saudis nationalized and began to take control, that has shifted.

The Saudis are not big opera buffs, but their regime spreads anti-Semitism around the world. And the Metropolitan Opera’s current decision to mount The Death of Klinghoffer, a widely denounced anti-Semitic modern opera in a season packed with productions that are rarely less than a century old, is a curious aberration.

The Metropolitan Opera’s manager Peter Gelb is predicting bankruptcy in two years as the Met has blown through a fortune, for example spending $169,000 on a poppy field used as opera scenery.

The Met is incapable of budgeting and its needs money badly.

Saudi Petroleum International is a local arm of Saudi Aramco and a significant donor to the Metropolitan Opera. The Saudi Minister of Petroleum, Ibrahim Al-Naimi, has even been listed on occasion as a principal sponsor.

The Met has increasingly been making its money from digital broadcasts, rather than theater performances, making it more reliant on international audiences. Its “Live in HD” digital broadcasts go out to countries such as Lebanon, Morocco, as well as to Dubai.

The HD business has become the Met’s bread and butter and like a lot of the luxury trade, it’s looking for a cut of the gushing wells of oil money from nouveau riche sheiks and princes.

Catering to their bigotry is not the classiest way to get it, but it certainly has a history of working.

This is not just offensive. It’s dangerous.

The month after we observed the 13th anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks, the Metropolitan Opera, one of the world’s most prestigious cultural institutions, will bow to forces of anti-Semitism and pro-terrorist sentiment. The Met is to present an obscene opera titled “The Death of Klinghoffer” — a musical celebration of the senseless murder by Palestinian monsters of a defenseless, elderly Jewish New Yorker.

People of good conscience are not taking this artistic assault lying down.

“Are we in hell?” veteran actor Tony Lo Bianco asked me.

“I don’t know who we are anymore,” he said. “Our values have been destroyed. We’ve gone politically correct, and we’ve destroyed ourselves.”

Since it was first produced at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1991, “The Death of Klinghoffer” has outraged some audiences. But it also has inspired hatred among people of all religions with its romantic portrayal of an act of violence committed by creatures who don’t deserve to breathe air.

The opera, by American composer John Adams with a libretto by his countrywoman Alice Goodman, dramatizes the murder — not merely the “death,” as the title implies — of Leon Klinghoffer.

Conventional economic theory does a poor job of explaining the growth eruptions that transformed Western Europe during the 19th century and parts of Asia during the late 20th century, the Nobel Laureate Edmund Phelps argued in his 2013 book Mass Flourishing (Princeton, £19.95). Phelps’s book drew positive reviews but not enough thoughtful consideration. It challenges many of our prized assumptions about what makes economies succeed.

It is not scientific discovery, nor engineering skill, nor education, nor the astuteness of entrepreneurs that generates economic transformation, Phelps observed, although all of these elements are important. Rather, it is the willingness of the whole of society to plunge into “the topsy-turvy of creation, the frenzy of development” — to pull up stakes and move, to abandon old ways of doing things and try new ones, to abandon the safe harbor of the familiar and embrace novelty.

Phelps is closer in spirit to Paul Johnson’s 1991 study The Birth of the Modern than to any of the economic theorists. What he calls “mass flourishing” in contrast to ordinary economic growth stems from a radical change in attitudes and ideas through the whole of society.

“The advent of the modern economy,” Phelps writes, “brought a metamorphosis: a modern economy turns people who are close to the economy, where they are apt to be struck by new commercial ideas, into the investigators and experimenters who manage the innovation process from development and, in many cases, adoption as well. In a role reversal, scientists and engineers are called in to assist on technical matters. In fact, it turns all sorts of people into ‘idea-men,’ financiers into thinkers, producers into marketers, and end-users into pioneers.”

Like Paul Johnson, Phelps dates Europe’s growth take-off from 1815. The scientific revolution and the Age of Navigation produced no dividends for ordinary folk until modernity enveloped Europe and turned whole societies into innovators. “The modern economies were not the old mercantile economies,” Phelps writes, “but something new under the sun.”

The living standards of ordinary Europeans in 1800 were not much different from those of Roman or medieval times. But modernity brought “a cornucopia of material benefits”, Phelps observes. “By 1870, total domestic output per capita in Western Europe as a whole had risen 63 per cent above its 1820 level. By 1913, there was a further rise of 76 per cent.”