RUTHFULLY YOURS

Should Americans uphold the Judeo-Christian values, which have governed Western civilization until now? Or should they quietly allow the defeat of those values by a false liberalism — false, because it is anything but liberal — which will allow values, such as that of Islamic sharia religious law to settle over the United States? Will people willingly surrender their own culture in order to avoid becoming victims of intimidation?

Worse, these policies often come in the seemingly benign-sounding terms of “diversity”, “multiculturalism”, “peace”, “anti-racism”, and “human rights”; but are often used in an Orwellian way to mean their own opposites. “Diversity” means, “it is great to look different so long as you think the same way I do”. “Anti-racism” often means, in a racist way, anti-white or anti-Jew. “Human rights” now means a political agenda. “Peace” is used to mean the destruction of Israel. “Multiculturalism” means any culture except the Judeo-Christian one — regardless of whether that culture supports denigrating women, slavery, flogging, amputating limbs, murdering gays and the intolerance of all other religions and cultures. These inversions of language are having devastating consequences not only on university campuses, but also throughout the U.S. and abroad.

“The process of settlement is a ‘Civilization-Jihadist Process’ with all [that] the word means. The Ikhwan [Muslim Brotherhood] must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers…” — Muslim Brotherhood, 1991.

The question of whether to submit to these policies, as Europe is doing, or to uphold freedom, as Israel is doing, has arrived in the United States. The choice Americans make will immeasurably affect not just the US, but, despite sounding melodramatic, the future of Western civilization.

For the American voter, issues of immense urgency to the survival of the free world — such as individual freedom, dispassionate enquiry and freedom of speech and thought, which we dangerously have come to take for granted — are being derailed by crude language and behavior, when Americans need to be paying attention to serious threats to the United States, its allies and to the values of the West.

Internationally, these threats come from Iran, Russia, China, North Korea, and countless terrorist groups.

Domestically, they appear in the form of massive corruption — financial and otherwise — that is visibly hollowing out American institutions, such as the FBI (the failure to follow investigative procedure, followed by calls for FBI Director James Comey’s resignation); the Department of Justice (the “Fast and Furious” gun-walking scandal, and the Attorney General meeting with a former president whose wife is under investigation); the State Department (email leaks are still yielding up evidence of collusion between the Clinton Global Initiative and the State Department under Hillary Clinton); the IRS (targeting conservative non-profits, and raiding the businesses of private citizens, who disagree with policy); the Environmental Protection Agency’s attempt to acquire power over every puddle in America) and the Executive branch in the “I have a pen and I have a phone” president’s dealings with Iran.

Many people believe that the more you understand another culture or religion, the more you will appreciate it.

That seemed to be the assumption of a Massachusetts district court judge when he ordered the Reverend Daisy Obi, age 73, to learn about the Islamic faith as part of her probation. Reverend Obi was found guilty of pushing her Muslim tenant down a flight of stairs and was sentenced to 6 months in jail, and 18 months suspended provided she take a course on Islam.

In sentencing her, Judge Paul Yee Jr. said, “I want you to learn about the Muslim faith. I want you to enroll and attend an introductory course on Islam. I do want you to understand people of the Muslim faith, and they need to be respected.”

There is no evidence that the Reverend Obi was prejudiced against Muslims. She had other Muslim tenants with whom she had no quarrel. And ironically, she had, in a sense, already had her introductory course on Islam. Since she comes from Nigeria, a country near a Muslim majority, she probably knows more about Islam than does Judge Yee.

Nevertheless, his ruling was upheld last month by the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts. Reverend Obi, they agreed, needed to be educated about Islam — presumably on the assumption that once she learned about Islam, her “prejudice” would melt away.

Meanwhile, about the same time that the Massachusetts court was deliberating Obi’s case, in Turkey another court was deciding another case. Before them stood a 35 year-old man who was accused of assaulting a young nurse and kicking her in the face because she was wearing shorts.

Did the court sentence him to six months in jail, and admonish him for misunderstanding Islam? Er, no. They released him on the grounds that he had done nothing wrong. The man argued that the shorts were inappropriate, and apparently, the court agreed.

It’s a common cliché among liberals that the more we learn about a belief system, the less we will fear it. That’s true some of the time, but in some instances it’s not. The more that Jews in Germany learned about the Nazis, the more they justifiably feared them. The ones who fully understood the Nazi mentality left Germany while there was still time. Jews are again leaving Europe to escape the threat of anti-Semitism. This time they are faced with Islamic anti-Semitism — an anti-Semitism that is rooted in Islamic scripture and tradition. Will Reverend Obi learn about that tradition in her introductory course on Islam? It seems doubtful.

The Islamic notion of peace is somewhat different than the one we are generally familiar with. We think of peace as the end of violence. Islam thinks of peace as the triumph of violence.

This tragic misunderstanding has sabotaged the peaceful visit of a Muslim cleric to Australia.

A Pakistani scholar visiting Australia for a speaking tour has been ordered home after a video sermon surfaced of him saying the world will be purified when every Jew is wiped out.

Muhammad Raza Saqib Mustafai, who has a Facebook fan base of almost a million people, spoke at the Ghausia Masjid in Blacktown and the Al-Madinah Masjid in Liverpool over the long weekend.

Ghausia Masjid’s imam Hafiz Raza, who organised the tour, didn’t respond to questions about the visit or the 2012 video titled “Jews are the enemies of Islam and the real peace”.

What does the “real peace” consist of? Killing all the Jews. Also destroying Christianity.

“And a time is about to come when Allah would bestow such a success on Islam that there would not be a single Jew left on the face of the earth… and the symbol of cross would be broken.”

“And when the last Jew will be killed from this world, then peace would be established in the world… As long as there are Jews in this world, peace cannot be established in the whole world… Muslims are being called terrorists… Muslims are not terrorists; they are the lovers of peace and preachers of peace.”

And this is what Muslim peace looks like.

But remember the real problem is Islamophobia. And it’s all a misunderstanding.

“Association president Abbas Khan said Pakistani Australians are deeply committed to harmony in Australia and he was shocked by the video.

He said he met Mr Mustafai on Wednesday and the scholar said the video didn’t reflect his opinions and was a quote from a book.

Know Before Whom You Stand. These words, inscribed above the ark holding the Torah scrolls in many synagogues, assume added significance between Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. During these Days of Awe, Jews of faith take the measure of themselves before the Almighty. The term “penitential prayers” does not begin to convey the range and intensity of the accounting that worshippers give of themselves about every aspect of their lives.

To lay bare one’s deeds before the ultimate Seat of Judgment is very different from the practice of individual introspection or meditation. Here each person stands within the community in a public attestation to dozens of wrongdoings. In the extensive Yom Kippur confessions, worshippers recount sins committed willfully or involuntarily, “by idle talk or by lustful behavior . . . violence or by defaming Thy Name.” All the verbs for transgression are in the first-person plural, we rather than I, making the individual an organic part of the nation. I used to marvel at how young college students, hardly past adolescence, passionately assumed moral responsibility for wrongs they had never committed.

Jews rightly take pride in their culture of self-accountability—before the Ultimate Judge and justly established human authorities. This culture has created and sustained a remarkably resilient people. Lamenting the excesses of the current American electoral cycle, the columnist Ira Stoll imagines how much richer the country’s politics would be if “this spirit of self-examination were exported from the Jewish religion into the rest of American culture.” If democracy requires the patient improvement of life in a community, nothing furthers that goal better than the practice of individual and collective self-scrutiny.

But the millennial-long history of Jewish self-restraint also stands as a warning. It is all very well to focus on overcoming your failings. Yet the search for moral perfection can also render individuals, and nations, prey to those who believe in conquest rather than self-conquest and who join in holding you accountable for their misdeeds. The same confessional posture, praiseworthy when standing before the Perfect Judge, becomes blameworthy when adopted before an enemy that has you before a rigged tribunal.

In the 20th century, some modern European thinkers and political leaders began singling out the Jews for their alleged racial or religious or social culpabilities. Many Jews felt obliged to answer apologetically for these supposed failings, instead of exposing the evil ideology that had chosen them for its target. Jewish Marxists, for example, blamed Jewish capitalists and bourgeoisie, even though defamation was leveled equally at Jewish professionals, artisans, journalists and paupers. CONTINUE AT SITE

Apparently it is universal. Here is a quote from Australia’s premier conservative journal QUADRANT….

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2016/09/better-book-burning/

Tim Wilms : Better Than a Book-Burning

“However, we are no longer living in a country where both sides of an argument enjoy equal access to the pulpit of public opinion,…… Conservatives tend to believe that those who disagree are most likely ill-informed and that a civil conversation might change their minds. Those on the left, by contrast, tend to view all who differ as evil and give their arguments no more than a contemptuous dismissal. Rather than argue the point, in this instance they have pitched a narrative that paints opponents as gay-bashing bigots and jackbooted homophobes, further insisting that mass outbreaks of suicide and mental collapse must surely follow if such views are allowed to be freely expressed. When the vocal left turns out in force to oppose something — well, anything, really — respect for free speech becomes an also-ran.”

The sort of people who set off class wars as a hobby have very particular classless societies in mind. The average left-wing revolutionary is not poor. He is a homicidal dilettante from the upper classes with a burning conviction of his own importance that he is unwilling to realize through disciplined labor. His revolution climaxes with a classless society in which he is at the very top.

Not near the top, not adjacent to the top, as he usually was before, but at the very top.

Utopia has a class system. At the top are the thinkers, the philosopher kings who develop plans based on how things ought to be and then turn them over to lesser men to actually implement. They are the priestly class of an ideological movement whose deity is politics and whose priests are politicians.

In a planned economy, they are the titans of industry and finance, they are the heads of banks and the men who move millions and billions around the board, and they are utterly unfit for the job. But they also make decisions in matters of war and science. And in all things. They measure political heresy in all things and all the activities of man are measured against their dogma and rewarded or punished.

This is the way it was in the Soviet Union or Communist China. But take a closer glance at the White House and see if you don’t spot the occasional similarity.

In the middle of Utopia’s class system is the middle class. This is not the middle class you are familiar with. There are no small business owners here. No one striving to make it up the ladder. Utopia’s middle class is the bureaucracy, the interlinked hive mind of government and non-profits.

At the top of Utopia’s class system are the philosopher-planners who issue the regulations. Or rather they offer objectives. The bureaucracy filters them through successive layers, transforming grandiose ideas into stultifying regulations and each successive layers expands them into further microcosms of unnecessary detail. This expansion of regulations also expands the bureaucracy. One feeds off the other.

Utopia has no lower class. That would be dystopian. Instead it has a client class. The client class is what used to be known as the working class. Utopia however transforms it into the welfare class.

Clienture transforms the working class into the welfare class. The destruction of the conditions under which the working class can exist forces its members either upward into the bureaucracy, a feat that is only possible for the younger generation willing to undergo the educational process, or downward into the welfare class.

I am grateful to R.R. Reno, Walter Russell Mead, and Peter Berkowitz for their careful comments on my essay, “Nationalism and the Future of Western Freedom.” Here I offer some thoughts relating to their most salient points. http://mosaicmagazine.com/response/2016/09/in-defense-of-our-national-and-religious-traditions/

The fundamental question in political philosophy is the choice between an order of independent national states and one seeking to bring all nations under a single international regime. These are perhaps not the only options—the biblical book of Judges, for example, examines the possibility of a life without any central government at all, “each doing what is right in his own eyes.” But if we accept the biblical conclusion that, in large numbers, men cannot live without a government to rule them, then a choice must be made: either free nations or empire.

In his response to my essay, Walter Russell Mead emphasizes that neither order can be the answer to the human condition. “Both have important capacities. Both are subject to terrible temptations,” he writes. “The real task of politics and statecraft is to determine what—in a particular situation, in a particular circumstance, at a particular time—is the right blend.”

I agree with Mead that real-world circumstances are messy things, and that what may be desirable as a matter of general principle can prove ruinous in practice. For instance, one need only read Michael Doran’s excellent new book, Ike’s Gamble, for a detailed indictment of President Eisenhower’s misguided support for Arab nationalism and self-determination in the Middle East. This was a policy that helped to demolish the British empire and end Winston Churchill’s career, only to give rise to the pan-Arab dictatorship of Gamal Abdel Nasser—who repaid America’s kindness by taking Egypt into the Soviet imperial orbit. Examples of this sort make it clear that, in practice, a blind support of national self-determination against empire may be self-defeating.

This having been said, however, I cannot accept Mead’s conclusion that since both nationalism and empire have their flaws, we have no choice but to strike an ad-hoc balance between them. Monarchical and republican forms of government each have their characteristic flaws as well; nevertheless, we recognize that republican government is preferable in principle, and believe this remains the case even if circumstances force us to compromise and accept one-man rule in a given time and place.

Similarly, we must choose whether it is better to live in a world in which power is distributed among many different, competing nations than in one in which power is concentrated in the hands of a single international regime. There should be no doubt as to which better serves the cause of human freedom, which is truly possible only where power is distributed so that persons encumbered or persecuted under one government may seek relief and support from another. Nor is there any doubt that such an order of national states is as difficult to maintain internationally as is republican government domestically. Like republican government, it too must be vigilantly and constantly defended or else it will slip from our grasp.

On this point, I believe R. R. Reno and Peter Berkowitz are largely in agreement with me, even as each also raises important issues concerning the particulars of my case.

Berkowitz, for his part, questions my emphasis on the Protestant character of the order of national states, and my grounding of this order in an intellectual tradition built upon the teachings of the Hebrew Bible (or “Old Testament”). Without denying the biblical basis of modern nationalism, Berkowitz fears that for contemporary men and women the Bible will be controversial, lacking in authority, and theoretically insufficient to the task of defending the principles of a free national state. Better, he writes, to build a broad-tent conservative coalition around the liberal tradition descended from such modern philosophers as John Locke.

Before turning to questions of tactics, it is necessary to ask whether such a liberal interpretation of history accords with what actually happened The truth is that the modern world was overwhelmingly a construct of Protestant Christianity (albeit with important contributions, as Reno points out, from medieval Catholicism). “The American Constitution has many intellectual fathers,” Irving Kristol wrote, “but only one spiritual mother. That mother is Protestant religion. . . . The [American] Revolution . . . had been conceived out of the wedding of the Protestant ethos with American circumstances.”

Why should Kristol, a Jew, dwell on this point? Why not simply say that while Western freedoms were originally of Protestant and biblical provenance, the liberties we enjoy today have long since been detached from those parochial origins? One reason to remain alert to the Protestant character of modern freedom is this: for 400 years, the Western institution of the national state and many of its familiar rights and liberties flourished principally and reliably in Protestant nations: Britain, the Netherlands, the United States, and elsewhere. By contrast, non-Protestant countries like Mexico and Nigeria that attempted to import versions of the American constitution failed miserably.

The Sunday New York Times for September 18 carried a story by Eric Lichtblau about a “study” by “researchers” at the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at the San Bernardino campus of California State University, purporting to show that “hate crimes against US Muslims are not just “on the rise” but have “soared to their highest levels since the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.” While the FBI’s hate-crime statistics are not going to be released until November, data from this center, which is compiled from police reports, suggest that “hate crimes” against Muslims have risen 78% in one year. Some “scholars” of the subject believe that the anti-Muslim animus cannot be linked to the attacks all over the place, in Europe and America, by Muslim terrorists, nor to the attacks carried out in the Middle East – in Syria, Iraq, and Libya – by members of the Islamic State, nor to the aggressive, often criminal, behavior, of so many Muslim migrants in Europe, with the constant stream of news about gang rapes, mob violence, property crimes large and small. No, it’s all the fault of some remarks of Donald Trump about the need to keep out, or at least vet more thoroughly, Muslim migrants. It’s not what Muslims do, it’s not what anyone can read in the Qur’an and Hadith, it’s what people like Trump say that supposedly explains the rise in these “hate crimes” against Muslims.

The Times article never mentions the scandal surrounding reports of “hate crimes” against Muslims, which is that more than a few such reports have later turned out to be false. And even were we to accept at face value every one of those claimed to be an anti-Muslim “hate crime,” for 2015 it amounts to 260, that is, five a week, less than one a day, in a country with 325 million people. Does this really constitute a “soaring” rate? And the evidence suggests that we have a right to be doubtful about some of those counted as “hate crimes.”

Here are a few examples: a fire supposedly set at a Texas Islamic Center in February 2015 turned out to have been set near the mosque, by a homeless man, Quba Ferguson, just trying to keep warm. In New Jersey, a Muslim man, Kashif Parvaiz, exploited the willingness of people to believe that there is murderous and rampant Islamophobia, claiming that an anti-Muslim killer had shot his wife in front of their son, screaming “terrorist” as he did so. It turned out that the man’s mistress was the killer, put up to it by him so he could rid himself of his wife and marry her. Nothing “anti-Islamic” about it.

Qur’ans were burned at an Islamic Center, and the Center’s imam, calling for restrictions on “free speech” (meaning anti-Islam speech), was joined by the media, all in a frenzied state about this supposed “hate crime.” Eventually it turned out that the book-burner was one Ali Hassan Al-Assadi, a Muslim angry with people at the local mosques, who said he burned the Qur’ans in retribution.

Want more? There’s the University of Texas Muslimah who claimed that “a gunman followed her to the campus and threatened her.” She finally admitted to making up the whole story.

Or yet another story of mosque vandalism, this time in Fresno where, after CAIR went wild with claims of yet another “hate crimes,” it turned out to have been prompted by a private grievance by one Asiuf Mohammad Khan against a Muslim woman and her family.

Google away, and you’ll find many more examples of crimes first reported as anti-Muslim “hate crimes” that turn out to have been the work of Muslims, or of non-Muslims whose motive had nothing to do with Islam.

And sometimes the original false story of a “hate crime” refuses to die, and for many becomes the accepted version of what happened, even if the investigators long ago concluded otherwise.

During the last days of the Ancien Régime, French Queen Marie Antoinette frolicked in a fake rural village not far from the Versailles Palace—the Hameau de la Reine (“the Queen’s hamlet”). “Peasant” farmers and herdsmen were imported to interact, albeit carefully, with the royal retinue in an idyllic amusement park. The Queen would sometimes dress up as a milkmaid and with her royal train do a few chores on the “farm” to emulate the romanticized masses, but in safe, apartheid seclusion from them.

The French Revolution was already on the horizon and true peasants were shortly to march on Versailles, but the Queen had no desire to visit the real French countryside to learn of the crushing poverty of those who actually milked cows and herded sheep for a living. It is hard to know what motivated the queen to visit the Hameau—was it simply to relax in her own convenient and sanitized Arcadia, or was it some sort of pathetic attempt to better understand the daily lives of the increasing restive French masses?

The American coastal royalty does not build fake farms outside of its estates. But these elites, too, can grow just as bored with their privileged lives as Marie Antoinette did. Instead of hanging out with milk maids in ornamental villages, our progressive elites, at the same safe distance from the peasantry, prefer to show their solidarity with the dispossessed through angry rhetoric.

Take the case of Colin Kaepernick, the back-up quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers who makes $19 million a year (or about $20,000 per minute of regular season play). He has been cited by National Football League officials in the past for his use of the N-word, yet he refuses to stand for the pregame singing of the national anthem because he believes that his country is racist and does not warrant his respect. His stunt gained a lot of publicity and he now sees himself as a man of the revolutionary barricades. A number of other NFL athletes, as well as those in other sports, have likewise refused to stand for the national anthem to express solidarity with what they see as modern versions of the oppressed peasantry. But Kaepernick and his peers make more in one month than many Americans make in an entire lifetime. Still, for these members of the twenty-first-century Versailles crowd, the easiest way of understanding the lives of the underclass is expressing empathy for them for no more than a minute or two.

Lately, the entire Clinton clan has created a sort of Hameau de la Reine of the mind. Chelsea Clinton, for example, is married to hedge-fund operator Marc Mezvinsky (whose suspect Greek fund just went broke), and she once made over $600,000 for her part-time job as an NBC correspondent. She serves in a prominent role and is on the board of the non-profit billion-dollar Clinton Foundation, which has been cited for donating an inordinately small amount of its annual budget (often less than 15 percent) to charity work, while providing free jet travel for the Clinton family and offering sinecures for Clinton political operatives in between various Clinton campaigns. Explaining why she works at the Clinton Foundation and for other non-profits, Chelsea confessed, in Marie Antoinette style, that “I was curious if I could care about [money] on some fundamental level, and I couldn’t.” She cared enough, though, to purchase a $10.5 million Manhattan apartment not long ago rather than, say, rent a flat in the Bronx.