Joining the Syrian Fray to Avoid Facing Iran Reported division between the United States President and his Secretary of State regarding American intervention on behalf of Syria’s Sunni opposition, will afford Obama deniability for the predictable horrific results. Most importantly, it diverts attention from the Administration’s deliberate failure to stop Iran from finalizing its nuclear weapons capabilities. The Administration’s pretense that the White House […]
http://letthemfight.blogspot.com/2013/06/why-are-president-and-members-of.html This is a good question and one that no one in the media seems willing to ask. Even Fox news seems ambivalent, rather skirting the issue in favor of more…”compassionate” questions. We have known for a long time that Al Qaida has been an integral influence within the Syrian Rebel forces in much […]
http://www.nationalreview.com/node/351880/print Even if I weren’t opposed to American intervention on the side of Sunni Islamic supremacists in Syria, I’d be inclined to agree with the bottom line of John O’Sullivan’s characteristically wise weekend column: the United States should not act unless we are willing to act decisively. There is clearly no public appetite for doing so. I believe […]
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/german-left-ramps-up-attacks-on-islam?f=puball
National parliamentarians from Die Linke, Germany’s post-communist Left Party, recently presented the federal German government with a Minor Inquiry (Kleine Anfrage or KA) concerning the government’s policy towards the conservative German website Politically Incorrect (PI). This is only the latest effort by left-wing multiculturalists to quash open discussion, and criticism on Islam by designating the discourse “anti-democratic”and “right-wing extremist.”
As the online rules of order for the German parliament or Bundestag explain, the KA in Section 104 allows the Bundestag’s president to receive questions for the federal government about “certain delineated areas.” Normally the president calls upon the government to answer the questions in writing within 14 days, although agreement with the KA authors can extend this time limit. As the German-language KA Wikipedia entry explains, this procedure serves as a means of parliamentary control over the government by calling upon it to give account of a given state of affairs.
Die Linke’s May 13, 2013, KA (document 17/13573, available in PDF format here) notes that “Islam-hostile internet portals” like PI with its “tens of thousands of visitors daily” and parties such as the Freedom Party (Die Freiheit) and Germany’s Pro movement (Pro NRW/Pro Deutschland) “warn against a supposed ‘Islamization of Europe.'” In PI reader comments, meanwhile, Muslims “are collectively humiliated and denigrated in a racist, xenophobic, insulting, hate-filled, and at times violence-glorifying manner.”
Referenced by the KA and previously reported by this author (see here and here), PI and Die Freiheit, with common members such as Michael Stürzenberger, have conducted a petition drive for a referendum to stop a proposed Center for Islam in Europe-Munich (Zentrum für Islams in Europa-München or ZIE-M). The KA references a story from the Munich-based German national newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung discussing how Stürzenberger commonly compares the Koran with Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf and Die Freiheit rallies have featured signs stating “Christ is truth, Muhammad is a lie.” Previously reported by this author as well (see here and here), the KA also notes that the Bavarian Office of Constitutional Protection (Verfassungsschutz) has recently begun monitoring Bavarian chapters of PI/Die Freiheit due to “anti-constitutional” sentiments.
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/the-anti-war-war-on-terror
Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.
And a moment before, in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Oceania had been an ally of Eastasia, and at war with Eurasia.1. It would be deemed a thought crime to know and think otherwise.
And it’s a virtual thought crime today to say that we are at war with Islam, or even to suggest that Islam is at war with us. Two presidents said so. At the very most, we’re only making “War on Terror.” We are fearful of Islam’s “extremists,” not of the ideology of Islam itself. So, once we identify (playing an intelligence version of “Pin the Tail on the Donkey”), foil and stamp out the “extremists,” we’ll be okay and safe and able to get on with our lives.
Right.
When we engaged Japan and Nazi Germany in a life or death conflict, we did not call it the “War on Kamikazes” and the “War on Blitzkrieg.” The phrase “War on Terror” makes little sense and such a “war” will make little headway if we do not remove régimes that fund and endorse attacks on this country. We defeated the Shinto régime that sent the Kamikazes against us and we defeated the Nazis who perfected Blitzkrieg. And then the Kamikazes stopped coming and so did the V2 rockets and Tiger tanks and the whole Wehrmacht. If we hadn’t destroyed our enemies’ capacity to make war, and physically, militarily refuted the efficacy of their ideologies, we’d probably still be fighting Japan and Germany. Or sued for a negotiated peace on our enemies’ terms.
Which is what we are effectively doing with the Taliban in Afghanistan. Suing for peace.
The weapons and tactics employed by the Japanese and Nazis were indeed intended to strike “terror” in soldiers facing them and in civilians. But to divorce those weapons from the régimes that employed them in war is a perilously futile and foolhardy exercise in evasion. And that is precisely what we have done with the “War on Terror.”
The “War on Terror,” on one hand, is an accurate term for the self-blinding policy the U.S. has engaged in for far too long. On the other hand, it is dishonest, cowardly, and evasive. We don’t blame the ideology. Heavens, no. Islam is a “religion,” and a “religion of peace.” Never mind the historical record that it has never been a “religion of peace” in its 1,400-year existence. At least, not the “peace” as the West understands it.
No, we blame the “extremists.” The term “extremist” is a smear term intended to vilify anyone who acts on fundamental principles. The American Revolutionaries were “extremists” who fought for freedom. Islamic jihadists are “extremist” “freedom-fighters” – that is, they fight against freedom, for Islamic ideology is anti-freedom. Anti-liberty. Anti-mind.
http://frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-bawer/if-you-cant-beat-em-join-em/print/
“Don’t be stupid, be a smarty –
Come and join the Nazi Party.”
– Mel Brooks, “Springtime for Hitler”
What to do? Late last Sunday night, a 23-year-old woman in Oscarshamn, a town of 17,000 people that’s about halfway between Mecca and Medina – sorry, I mean Stockholm and Malmö – was on her way home when she was stopped by three young men of foreign origin. “Are you Swedish?” they asked her. When she said yes, they hit her so hard that she fell to the ground. Then, looking down at her, lying there at their feet, they said: “Welcome to Sweden. It’s our country now, not yours.”
The brief account I read of this incident closes with the information that the police have labeled this a “hate crime.” Gee, ya think? Presumably there’s no place on their checklists for “soft jihad.” (Although I’m sure there was nothing soft about the punch that knocked that young woman to the pavement.)
One thing these “soft” jihadists have going for them is that what they’re engaged in is, quite simply, so audacious that – unless you’re prepared to open your mind up to the immense and terrible reality of it – it can seem almost farcical. “It’s our country now, not yours”? It has the absurd ring of a pathetic claim made by some schoolyard punk. Except that those three punks in Oscarshamn aren’t alone. They’re certainly far from the first of their kind in Europe to make such an arrogant pronouncement. And as the years go by, that bold assertion, echoed increasingly in the streets of a growing number of European towns and cities, comes ever closer to being the plain and simple truth.
It may be that that 22-year-old woman would’ve known better than to walk home alone late at night if she were living in certain parts of Stockholm or Malmö, but that she assumed it was still safe in Oscarshamn. Perhaps she figured: well, it won’t be safe here in five or ten years, but for now…?
This is the current European calculus. I’m reminded of a gay guy I met in a West Hollywood bar one night in the mid 1980s. He had, he told me, recently moved to L.A. from New York. “Why?” I asked. I was stunned by the fatuity, the deadly self-deception, of his reply. He had left New York, he said, to get away from AIDS: “It’s not so bad here yet.”
I’m also brought to mind of the Australian writer Nevil Shute’s haunting 1957 novel On the Beach, which became a 1959 film starring Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner. Fallout from a nuclear war has killed almost everybody on earth, leaving alive just a few million people in the southern hemisphere – in Australia, New Zealand, and at the southern tips of South America and Africa – who can do nothing but wait for the air currents to do the inevitable job of bringing the radiation their way, too. Over the course of the novel, one by one, from north to south, the cities of Australia die out. The film is splendid, but the novel paints an even more haunting portrait of the human race helplessly facing its own extinction.
http://frontpagemag.com/2013/davidhornik/kerrys-push-to-release-palestinian-terrorists/print/ Two months ago I reported here that Secretary of State John Kerry was—in the immediate aftermath of the Boston Marathon terror attack—pressuring Israel to release heinous terrorists from prison. The rationale: such a release was being demanded by Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas, and would get him to resume peace negotiations with Israel after […]
http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/obamnesty/print/ Marco Rubio has become the public face of amnesty, but the fate of Senator Cormyn’s border security amendment is a warning that it is the private face of amnesty that matters more than its public face. Cormyn’s amendment might have held up legalization until border security was in, though it probably wouldn’t even have […]
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/World/WOR-01-240613.html
The bicentennial of Soren Kierkegaard’s birth passed on May 5 unremarked by the political caste, although a dozen scholarly festivals quietly honored his anniversary. That is a hallmark of our intellectual poverty. The casual reader knows the Danish philosopher as the midnight reading of angst-ridden undergraduates and the stuff of existential pop psychology.
That is a sad outcome, for Kierkegaard is one of most rigorous philosophers, despite his exhortative style. He asserted the primary of passion, not in the vulgar sense of aroused emotions, but as the primary ontological substance from which our world is built. In a passion-torn world, we should ignore the pop versions and read him more closely.
If asked, “Who is your favorite political philosopher?,” as were the Republican candidates in the 1980 presidential primary, I would have answered, “Kierkegaard.” (Actually, it’s Franz Rosenzweig, but no-one has heard of him).
Of course, I would have lost. Passion is passé. Kierkegaard’s outlook is close to that of the radical Protestants who fought the American Revolution and the Civil War, but at odds with the main currents of modern conservative thought, that is, classical political rationalism and Catholic natural law theory. Kierkegaard still has a redoubt at St Olaf’s College in Minnesota, which sponsors translations and maintains a library of scholarly materials, and a few other Protestant institutions. But one never hears his name in a political context.
Closer to the conservative mainstream is my friend Peter Berkowitz in his 2012 book Constitutional Conservatism: Liberty, Self-Government, and Political Moderation. As Stanley Kurtz summarized his view at National Review, “By moderation Berkowitz means something a bit different than the everyday use of the word, otherwise Buckley and Reagan wouldn’t qualify. Political moderation, says Berkowitz, “doesn’t mean selling out causes or making a principle of pragmatism.” A true understanding of moderation can even dictate strong stances and bold opposition to popular movements. Real political moderation, Berkowitz explains, means balancing worthy yet competing principles and putting them effectively into practice.” As a matter of practice, Berkowitz “calls on conservatives to make a peace of sorts with both the sexual revolution and the fundamentals of the New Deal welfare state, without, on the other hand, surrendering either their fundamental principles or their core battles.”
There is much wisdom in Berkowitz’s view. Still, I disagree with him on two grounds.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/351808/little-country-could-deroy-murdock
Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple, has generated headlines lately by urging singer Alicia Keys to avoid “soul danger” and cancel her July 4 concert in Tel Aviv. Keys and other celebrities should ignore Walker and visit Israel. They may be amazed at what they discover.
I was fortunate to see Israel for the first time last week, thanks to the America-Israel Friendship League. Five of the eleven journalists on AIFL’s fact-finding trip were new here. Keys and other artists likely would find Israel at least as surprising as we did.
First and foremost, Israel’s omnipresence in the U.S. media makes it sound like a superpower. But as much as anything, Israel is impressively compact. At just 7,992 square miles, it is slightly larger than Clark County, Nevada (greater Las Vegas), but smaller than New Hampshire.
Israel is not just small. It’s svelte. At its thinnest point, near Netanya — just north of Tel Aviv — Israel spans just nine miles. The land separating Israel’s Mediterranean beaches from its border with the Palestinian Authority covers roughly the same distance as does Manhattan between Battery Park and the Apollo Theater on 125th Street, or Los Angeles from the Santa Monica Pier to the La Brea Tar Pits. Conquer those nine miles, and you chop Israel in two. Given this existential danger, the late foreign minister Abba Eban called this and the rest of Israel’s narrow waistline its “Auschwitz boundaries.”
Nevertheless, Israel is the little country that could. Within a desert that is hostile in every sense, Israel has become a prosperous nation with a per capita income of $29,512, its Central Bureau of Statistics reports. In 2012, Israel’s GDP expanded by 2.7 percent, while America’s grew just 2.2 percent. Israel’s unemployment rate is 6.9 percent, vs. 7.6 percent in the U.S.
