RUTHFULLY YOURS

Here are some names to think about: Libya. Iran. Gaza. Syria. Ukraine. Russia.

What do you think about when you ponder those places?

I think about what a disaster Barack Obama’s foreign policy has been. Obama came to office promising to hit the “reset button” with respect to Russia and now he is Putin’s fool. Libya, poor Libya: Obama went in and removed the world’s only transvestite dictator [1], and now what? Gadaffi was a comic if malevolent madman, but he was, at the end, a U.S. ally. Barack Obama has trouble distinguishing between allies and enemies. So he engineered Gaddafi’s ouster. What then? The outrage of Benghazi and, now, chaos in Libya [2]. Good going, Barack.

Everyone is waiting for Iran to acquire the nuclear weapons Obama campaigned to prevent. While waiting for that feature presentation, we have another preview in a country I didn’t mention: Iraq. Whatever you think about our invasion in Iraq under George Bush, at least he left the country with a recognizable form of government under the watchful eye of the U.S. military.

Obama withdrew our forces and, as could have been predicted, the country promptly fell prey to those Muslim fanatics that Obama went to Cairo [3] to court shortly after he was elected.

When Obama left Iraq, he assured the world that “we’re leaving behind a sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq [4].” Yes, he really said that.

How are things looking in Iraq now? Yesterday, the New York Times reported [5] that Muslim fanatics (my word: the Times preferred “rebels”) captured the country’s largest dam. ISIS, Iraq’s lovable Islamic thugs, have captured the country’s largest Christian town [6]and are busy exterminating Christians. “Even Ghengis Khan didn’t do this [7],” said one observer.

“If you want to understand the world,” my great professor of Arabic at Columbia told me, “you need only remember this:

“The British want to be respected;
The French want to be admired;
The Russians want to be feared;
And the Americans want to be liked.”

It was one of many things — Arab literature and Arabic composition and style (al-inshaa wa-al–usloob) — given me by Professor Pierre Cachia, a wise and worldly man who tells jokes in English, French and Arabic, all perfectly grammatical.

If I told my professor’s joke to Russian leader Vladimir Putin, there is a chance he might smile or give me a quick and rueful “da, konyeshno” — “yes, of course.”

If I got to tell President Barack Obama my joke at a Democratic fundraiser or on the golf course, he might respond with a smidgen of recognition, because the joke nicely sums up Putin’s world view and Obama’s “flexible” approach to world affairs.

To be fair to Putin, Russia’s desire to be feared did not start with Putin, and it is not just a Russian desire. Other states like being feared, too, and America’s yen for affection did not commence with President Obama, though he embraces it more than any other American leader in history, especially when facing the Middle East.

Once in office, Obama rushed to greet the Islamic countries, reminding everyone he was Barack HUSSEIN Obama, the man whose middle name re-emerged after the election, the man who loved the sound of the Islamic call to prayer and who was proud to tell everyone that he was born to a Muslim father.

In a spate of trips, interviews and policy initiatives, Obama flirted with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, embraced Turkey’s Islamist autocrat, courted Syria’s dictator, and “engaged” Iran’s maniacal ayatollahs. But somehow, it did not work.

In this centennial year of the Great War some things have not been said, or at least I haven’t heard them. Among them:

All the smart people knew the war would never come. The continent to which war came was on such an upward trajectory in terms of prosperity, inventiveness and political culture that it could have become—it arguably already was—a jewel of civilization. And the common man who should have wept at the war’s commencement instead cheered.

John Keegan went into these points in his classic history “The First World War,” published in 1998.

His first sentence is beautiful in its simplicity: “I grew up with men who had fought in the First World War and with women who had waited at home for news of them.” His father and uncles saw combat, his aunt was “one of the army of spinsters” the war produced.

His overall assessment is blunt: “The First World War was a tragic and unnecessary conflict.” Leaders who lacked “prudence” and “good will” failed one after another to stop an eminently stoppable train of events that produced a conflagration. That was tragic not only in terms of loss of life, and psychological, physical, emotional and even spiritual injury to survivors, but because the war destroyed a rising, bettering world: “the benevolent and optimistic culture of the European continent.” It of course also left “a legacy of political rancor and racial hatred so intense” that it guaranteed the world war that would follow 20 years later, which by Keegan’s calculation was five times as destructive of human life. Auschwitz and the other extermination camps “were as much relics of the First as the Second world war.” “They have their antecedents . . . in the fields where the trenches ran.”

The relief agency in Gaza, financed in part by the U.S., has become a patron of Palestinian grievance.

On Wednesday, as a truce held between Israel and the Hamas terrorist group that rules the Gaza Strip, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon briefed the U.N. General Assembly. “The senseless cycle of suffering” must end, he said, asking: “Do we have to continue like this: build, destroy, and build, and destroy?”

For answers, the secretary-general would do well to look at the U.N.’s own main agency in Gaza, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, better known as Unrwa. Bankrolled chiefly by the United States and the European Commission, with headquarters split among Gaza, Jerusalem and Amman, Jordan, the agency is one of the U.N.’s most perverse, destructive creations. In Gaza it essentially functions as Hamas’s handmaiden.

During the clashes of recent weeks as Israel sought to stop rocket attacks by Hamas and to destroy the organization’s terror tunnels, Unrwa has loomed large on the public stage—with a pronounced Palestinian tilt. Its commissioner-general, Pierre Krahenbuhl, has publicly condemned Israel, accusing the Israelis of “serious violation of international law.” On Al Jazeera television, the agency’s spokesman, Christopher Gunness, has wept for the Palestinians.

Thirteen members of the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) were trapped and in danger of freezing to death when their base, Halley VI, lost power. Power went down on July 30th and is now partially restored. The BAS waited to report the incident until power came back up, however now reports that the incident was so serious that all science activities have been suspended and emergency contingency plans to abandon some of Halley’s eight modules and attempt to shelter in a remaining few have been prepared.
The incident is particularly serious, as the station is likely completely cut off from rescue for months. The incident occurred during the height of the Antarctic winter while southern sea ice is at or near record highs (Marc Morano has details at Climate Depot).
One Survey member, Anthony Lister, managed to send a out a “tweet” when power came back up, reporting that the outage occurred while the station was experiencing record cold temperatures of -55.4° C (-67.72° F). (h/t Rai news)

It is not possible to survive for long at the station without power, placing the 13 members of the expedition in danger of freezing to death, although they remain safe while they can keep the power running.

Halley VI is located on the Brunt Ice Shelf on 150 meter thick ice, just off the coast of Antarctica. Temperature there never climbs above freezing and this time of year the sun never climbs above the horizon.
Halley VI became operational in 2012 and consists of eight modules supported by hydraulic legs on skis. The skis are designed to permit the BAS to periodically reposition the station using bulldozers in the hopes of escaping the fate of past stations which were lost when they became buried under vast accumulations of ice and snow. In the past the station was a major source of reporting on the Antarctic “ozone hole.”
The Halley VI power loss serves as a stark reminder of the incredibly harsh and dangerous cold conditions Antarctic researchers brave. It also can’t help but remind us of Chris Turney’s ill-fated Antarctic expedition which became trapped in rapidly expanding sea ice last December. Drama ensued when both the ice breaker carrying the expedition and the ice breaker initially sent to rescue it both became trapped. A third ice breaker was ultimately able to evacuate the passengers using a helicopter.

Multiculturalism – which celebrates the diversity of cultures and treats them as all equally worthy of respect – is all the rage in academia and other precincts of the Left. Yet that celebration of diversity often is little more than a cover for intellectual sloth, and a total lack of interest in the actual nature of any particular culture.

And where that sloth prevails, its corollary is likely to be an unfounded projection of one’s own culture onto others.

Nowhere is that phenomenon more evident than in American foreign policy on the Middle East.

Last month, I attended a panel in Jerusalem titled “Why Have ‘Peace Plans’ Backfired: How Honor-Shame Dynamics Affect Arab-Israel Relations.”

Anthropologists have applied the term honor- shame to societies organized around clan and tribe, in which group identity takes precedence over individual identity. Those societies are governed by elaborate codes of honor, the breach of which requires expiation in blood. If, for instance, someone outside one’s clan kills a member of the clan, it is incumbent on members of the clan to avenge that killing, regardless of who initiated the conflict or why, because the death of the clan member weakens the clan.

In honor-shame cultures, win-win thinking is absent; rival clans bear a zero-sum relationship to one another – whatever brings honor to one, of necessity brings shame to the other; honor is achieved by defeating and thereby shaming the other. Disputes tend to last forever. Harold Rhode of the Gatestone Institute, who served as a Middle East analyst in the US Defense Department for nearly 30 years, noted that in Hebrew the verb for payment comes from the same root as completeness and peace. The payment represents the end of a transaction in which ownership passes once and for all to the other party. In Arabic, the three-letter root for payment is the same as that for pushing – in other words, the transaction is never complete, what is yours today may be mine tomorrow; your possession is only temporary.

Soon after 9/11, I wrote a column about Immanuel Kant’s connection to that act of war against the U.S., against the West. I cannot recall when or where it was first published; it was long before I began penning articles for Rule of Reason; it was certainly before I had finished writing Sparrowhawk, which is also the subject of the essay. That essay and this one share the same title.

At any rate, I wish to thank John Webb in Britain for jarring my memory about the essay here and about the source of this column’s title by referring his correspondents to a site called, Counting Cats in Zanzibar and “Nick M’s” column on the 100th anniversary of the beginning of World War I, a conflict which heralded the self-destructive decline of the West. As John points out in his comments on the article, the chief culprit was a German (or Prussian) philosopher, Kant. He quotes Heinrich Heine’s response to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, aided and abetted by David Hume, who sustained a “philosophical mutual admiration” society of two with Kant. John noted:

“Hume’s principle contribution to philosophy was to invalidate the conceptual faculty…. In the process he reduced man to the level of an animal dependent on instincts.

He denied the validity of the senses, undermined our awareness of entities, he destroyed the the law of cause and effect, made reality unknowable, volition unsustainable, abstraction impossible. and turned all necessary truths into mere conventions…..

Kant just took the very worst of Hume and combined it with the very worst Plato – destroying the Enlightenment and setting the future Germany on its inevitable crusade against mankind.

Heine was no hero either but when he described Kant as “world-annihilating” he wasn’t wrong.”

I couldn’t have put it better. I can always count on John to synthesize essentials.

I’m writing this also on the occasion of the “ceasefire” between Israel and its mortal enemy, Islam, this time in the person of Hamas, the terrorist gang, and because the Foreign Policy article by former President Jimmy Carter and former president of Ireland Mary Robinson is a perfect example of the lunacy rampant in today’s political climate. Read the article. I would say that their article not only incorporates Kant’s and Hume’s principal tenets, but goes them one better by believing that a Hegelian melding of “thesis and antithesis” is possible, workable and in the interests of world “peace.” (I dramatize the essentials of this Ouija board philosophy in my detective novel, Presence of Mind., available on Kindle, as a print book, and on audio.)

A senior Hamas official and spokesman for the terrorist organization has once again rehashed a medieval, hate-filled, anti-Semitic blood libel. Speaking in Arabic to an Arabic audience on the Lebanese Al-Quds TV channel on July 28, Osama Hamdan stated the following; “We all remember how the Jews used to slaughter Christians, in order to mix their blood in their holy matzos. This is not a figment of imagination or something taken from a film. It is a fact, acknowledged by their own books and by historical evidence.”

Hamdan subsequently appeared on CNN and in an extraordinary exchange, was directly challenged by Wolf Blitzer who asked Hamadan if he really subscribed to these odious views. Hamadan punted and would not directly address the question instead claiming that his words were taken out of context and then predictably changed the subject. Blitzer then played a recording of Hamadan’s interview to reinforce the point and again Hamadan responded evasively prompting Blitzer to state derisively, “I was hoping to get a flat denial from you that you would utter such ridiculous words… that is an awful smear.”

Hamdan was clearly shocked by Blitzer’s query. He made his comments in Arabic and addressed them to an Arabic audience and did not expect or anticipate Western scrutiny. Arab officials routinely speak in forked tongues tailoring their narratives to the specific audiences being addressed. When speaking in Western forums, they appear polished and substantially moderate their tone. It becomes an entirely different affair when they are addressing Arab audiences, when the guard is down and full blown hatred and xenophobia excitedly come to fore.

Blood libels spewed forth by senior members of the Hamas organization should come as no surprise. After all, article 7 of the Hamas charter speaks of Jews hiding behind rocks and trees with the rocks and trees calling out, “0 Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him!” Anyone capable of believing and indoctrinating themselves in such insanity is certainly quite capable of regurgitating blood libels.

But if you think that such outrageous talk is limited to Hamas or its cousin, Islamic Jihad, you are sadly mistaken. In fact, senior members of the Palestinian Authority, the group that the Obama administration considers to be “moderate,” have expressed similar views.

Dinner With Saba

Another Ramadan has past, but not without personal opportunity to examine a recent Muslim media darling, Saba Ahmed. The 9/11 Truther and other radical beliefs expressed by Ahmed and her associates during a recent interview make her aspirations of being the “head of the Muslim peace movement” not worthy of further consideration.

After achieving national notoriety with Brigitte Gabriel at the Heritage Foundation and in two subsequent Fox News appearances, further attention for Ahmed, such as a Nation interview, followed. Her lobbying firm “monitor[s] all congressional hearings related to national security,” Ahmed explained, “primarily targeting” everything thereby that “has to do with Islamists.” According to Ahmed, using this word “to define ‘terrorist’” contradicts Qur’an 2:256’s message that “there is no compulsion in religion.”

Ahmed’s recurring requests for interaction with me resulted in a July 17 invitation to an Iftar hosted by Make Space mosque, a “non-judgmental community” with a “strong focus on youth and young professionals.” Make Space emphasizes “universal as well as Islamic values of compassion, cooperation and service” as opposed to a “counter-productive focus on controversial issues” in Islam. At Alexandria, Virginia’s Dunya Restaurant I removed my shoes and entered to be met by mosque volunteers, including a South Asian-looking, unveiled American woman wearing business slacks and blazer.

Literature for Guidance Residential, the “Leader in Islamic home financing” for American interest-free “Home Ownership the Sharia Way,” filled a table near the entrance. A postcard featuring Justice Muhammad Taqi Usmani, Guidance Residential’s Sharia Board Chairman, caught the eye. A member of Pakistan’s Supreme Court since 1982, Usami played a key role in introducing sharia laws on blasphemy, corporal punishments, and other matters during Zia al-Haq’s dictatorship. The Muslim 500: The World’s 500 Most Influential Muslims 2013-2014 edition ranks Usami 25th, a “leading scholar of Islamic jurisprudence” and “intellectual leader” of the Deobandi movement that gave rise to the Taliban.

Contrasting with laywoman Ahmed, Usami’s 2002 book Islam and Modernism does “not make excuses” for saying that the “command of jihad remains till the last day” and “killing is to continue until the unbelievers pay Jizyah after they are humbled.” During jihad the “clear manifest truth is that taking slaves is permissible,” Usami’s Islamic slavery apologetic argues. “Fiercely anti-American” according to Investor’s Business Daily, Usmani has urged Muslim support for fighting American forces in Afghanistan and Iraq. Islamic teaching, however, “proves the impermissibility of playing backgammon,” another Usami article declares.

President Obama has been rightly chastised for his proposed cuts to our military budget. Critics have gone after his Quadrennial Defense Review and its plan to shrink the armed forces, not to mention the clumsy optics of issuing pink slips to thousands of officers still serving in Afghanistan. More troublesome is the reduction of the military’s global mission from its traditional purpose of being able to fight and defeat two enemies at once, to only defeating one while keeping a second from “achieving its objectives,” a conveniently fuzzy criterion.

Worse yet, these cuts are coming just as China and Russia are flexing their geopolitical muscles, the Middle East is exploding in sectarian violence, and Iran is creeping ever closer to nuclear weaponry. As a bipartisan panel created by the Pentagon and Congress concludes of these latest reductions, “Not only have they caused significant investment shortfalls in U.S. military readiness and both present and future capabilities, they have prompted our current and potential allies and adversaries to question our commitment and resolve. Unless reversed, these shortfalls will lead to a high-risk force in the near future. That in turn will lead to an America that is not only less secure but also far less prosperous. In this sense, these cuts are ultimately self-defeating.”

As the national leader and Commander in Chief, Obama deserves much of the blame for this strategic blunder. But let’s not forget the role of us voters in these decisions. Historically democracies have had a bad habit of preferring butter to guns, privileging shortsighted interests over long-term security.

Consider ancient Athens, the first democracy. In the 4th century BC, the Athenians created a public fund to pay poorer citizens to attend the theater and religious festivals, which were celebrated on over 130 days a year. Soon a law was passed to divert surplus money into that fund instead of the military fund, and a bit later another law made transference of surpluses to the military fund a capital crime. Unfortunately, during this same period Philip II of Macedon embarked upon a program of aggression against the southern Greek city-states. With his defeat of Athens and Thebes at Chaeronea in 338 BC, Philip achieved his aim, and the Athenians lost their political freedom. Ancient critics linked Athens’ defeat to the decision to starve the military in order to finance “entitlement spending.” Three centuries after Chaeronea, the historian Pompeius Trogus wrote of the Athenians, “The state revenues they had once spent on the army and the fleet were devoted instead to holidays and festivals,” and public money “began to be divided among the people in the city. In this way it happened that in a Greece preoccupied with entertainment the previously lowly and obscure name of Macedon was able to emerge.”