From the April 6, 2015, issue of NR
Why on earth are you writing about Unity Mitford, I used to be asked in the course of researching her biography. All she ever did was to make an exhibition of herself as a Nazi and anti-Semite. Settling in Germany and learning German, she had picked Adolf Hitler up in February 1935 by the simple expedient of sitting day after day with a friend, Mary Wooddisse from Nottingham, in the Munich restaurant where he liked to spend time with his cronies. He sent Wilhelm Brückner, one of his adjutants, over with an invitation to join his table, and fantasy became reality. While peace lasted, these two ideological soulmates met frequently in Munich, Berlin, and the Eagle’s Nest retreat of Berchtesgaden. Eager to please and flatter him by word and deed in private and in public, she undoubtedly touched what passed as the heart of that emotionally handicapped freak.
Born in the opening week of World War I, she was christened Unity Valkyrie, both names loaded with premonition. Lord and Lady Redesdale, Farve and Muv to her, and their one son and six daughters were just in time to enjoy the privilege of the British upper classes to do as they pleased and plead eccentricity if they went off the rails. None of them ever had contact with the workaday lives of other people. Shifting alliances and enmities were the constant feature of a family so numerous and enclosed in itself; sister Nancy Mitford’s novels reduce this hothouse competition to an ongoing comedy of manners. One of Unity’s nicknames was Bobo, and photographs show her growing into a heavy blonde Valkyrie whose set expression conveys resolve to keep up with her more beautiful and more intelligent sisters. If she had any talent at all, it was for drawing. The sample of her letters and diaries that came into my hands did little or nothing to clarify how and why devotion to Hitler had come to fill her whole being or what she may have hoped would be its outcome. The language is embarrassingly childish, her writing unformed, with a line through the letter s that gives it the look of a dollar sign. She shows no powers of observation or description, and worse, no self-consciousness.
Democrats are suddenly acting as if we must either strike a bad deal or rush to war. What ever happened to the “box”? Remember what the Democrats said about Saddam Hussein? Wait . . . that’s a confusing question. One must clarify whether we’re talking about when a Democratic administration was bombing a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan because it was really a joint chemical-weapons venture between Iraq and al-Qaeda; or when that Democratic administration joined Congress in making regime change in Baghdad the national policy of the United States; or when congressional Democrats insisted on voting to show their support for the war to remove Saddam Hussein from power; or when Democrats decided Iraq had nothing to do with al-Qaeda after all; or, finally, when Democrats turned with a vengeance against the Iraq war they had enthusiastically supported.
I’m talking about that phase at the end. In obeisance to the hard-left, anti-war faction (now known as Obama’s base) that had come to dominate their party, leading Democrats scalded President Bush for his purportedly heedless rush to an unnecessary and ultimately disastrous war. In the new telling — the one that elides mention of the war drums beaten by Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Joe Biden, et al. — there was no need to invade Iraq because President Bill Clinton, as he himself recalls it, had brilliantly maneuvered Saddam Hussein into a “box.” President Clinton, we’re to understand, had methodically isolated Saddam, arranging American policy with an eye toward steadily strangling the regime through a mix of punishing economic sanctions, a no-fly zone, the threat of fierce military retaliation in the event of Iraqi aggression, and pressure on other countries to treat Saddam as a pariah.
Sure, the Iraqi government was still a menace. Not only was Saddam concealing his weapons programs and stocks, and oppressing his own people; there remained the concern that he would provide safe haven for al-Qaeda if Afghanistan became too hot for the terror network — that Osama bin Laden would “boogie to Baghdad,” as Clinton counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke had memorably put it. Still, we are now assured, Clinton had Saddam contained: He was no longer an imminent threat to American interests, yet still a barrier to Iran’s regional ambitions. There was no need to go to war, this revisionist history teaches. The regime in Baghdad was in a box, unable to ratchet up its weapons development and beset by internal strife that would eventually be its undoing. Now, there are many problems with this history as history. The point here, though, is not to argue over whether this is a faithful rendition of events. It is to highlight the Democrats’ policy prescription.
Analytical individuals keep asking how Obama can engage in talks with Iran, a country that makes no secret of its contempt for the United States.
Discerning Americans of all stripes are horrified by Iran’s never-ending screeds about wiping Israel off the face of the earth and are puzzled by Obama’s staff patently answering these threats with euphemistic double talk — knowing all along that they are merely parroting their boss’s ideology.
On “Face the Nation,” Obama admitted that “a deal with Iran would only be of 10 years’ duration.” In fact, Obama maintained that:
If we cannot verify that they are not going to obtain a nuclear weapon, that there’s a breakout period so that even if they cheated we would be able to have enough time to take action, if we don’t have that kind of deal, then we are not going to take it.
Besides not making any sense, Obama is basically acting as if he is playing in a sandbox with other children. He is seemingly oblivious to the bully in the room.
To defeat the extremists for good, Muslims must reject those aspects of their tradition that prompt some believers to resort to oppression and holy war
“Islam’s borders are bloody,” wrote the late political scientist Samuel Huntington in 1996, “and so are its innards.” Nearly 20 years later, Huntington looks more right than ever before. According to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, at least 70% of all the fatalities in armed conflicts around the world last year were in wars involving Muslims. In 2013, there were nearly 12,000 terrorist attacks world-wide. The lion’s share were in Muslim-majority countries, and many of the others were carried out by Muslims. By far the most numerous victims of Muslim violence—including executions and lynchings not captured in these statistics—are Muslims themselves.
Not all of this violence is explicitly motivated by religion, but a great deal of it is. I believe that it is foolish to insist, as Western leaders habitually do, that the violent acts committed in the name of Islam can somehow be divorced from the religion itself. For more than a decade, my message has been simple: Islam is not a religion of peace.
Evidently, Sweden’s Foreign Minister was unaware that that by criticizing Islamic sharia customs, such as flogging a blogger a thousand times and the ill-treatment of women, she was, in fact, seen as turning against Islam itself.
There appears to be a genuine but concerning lack of knowledge in the Swedish government about Islam and Islamic affairs.
“It makes no difference what she says. In Islam, it is for Muslims to determine whether or not one has criticized their religion.” — Johannes J.G. Jansen, author and historian of Islam.
From a Muslim perspective, any criticism or infringement of sharia law and Muslims’ obligation to wage jihad [war in the service of Islam] is a violation of their freedom of religion.
In other words, it is incumbent on Muslims to “terrify” non-Muslims (referring to the Koran 8:60). But when they succeed, Muslim spokesmen accuse their frightened victims of suffering from “Islamophobia,” and demand that Western authorities denounce and persecute people beset by the psychiatric malady.
Israel’s March 17, 2015 general election shed light on the increasingly local – rather than national/regional – order of priorities of the 1.7 million Israeli Arabs; the intensifying Israelization/localization of their self-determination; the widening cultural/ideological gap between Israeli Arabs and the Arabs of Judea, Samaria and Gaza; the deep fragmentation within Israeli Arabs (despite the current Joint Arab Slate); their growing appreciation of Israel’s civil liberties and expanded trust in Israel’s political system; and the gap between the worldview of a growing number of Israeli Arabs on the one hand and most Arab Knesset Members on the other hand.
According to a February, 17, 2015 public opinion survey, conducted by Tel Aviv University’s researcher Arik Rudnitzky, a project manager at the Konrad Adenauer Program for Jewish-Arab Cooperation, the top priorities of Israeli Arabs are employment, education, healthcare, neighborhood crime and women’s rights (43%), ahead of enhancing the status of the Arab community in Israel (28.1%) and the Israel-Palestinian conflict/negotiation (19%).
Oily Mr. Baker is a hard core antagonist of Israel…. In his 1952 senior thesis at Princeton University Baker defended the 1940’s anti-Zionist policies of British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin and lambasted “the irrational and extreme behavior of American Zionists [in the 1940’s]” and dismissed U.S. support for Jewish statehood in 1947 as nothing more than a case of “the vote-conscious American Government back[ing] its Zionists.”In more recent years, Baker reportedly referred to pro-Israel members of Congress as “the little Knesset,” according to the Los Angeles Times…..rsk
Former Secretary of State James A. Baker III is to deliver the keynote at this weekend’s J Street conference, a gathering of left-wing activists opposed to the Israeli government and to recently re-elected Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Baker, who served under President George H.W. Bush, is also advising Gov. Jeb Bush on foreign policy in his presidential effort–at Bush’s invitation. Baker is considered hostile to Israel and is controversial among Jewish voters.As the Algemeiner notes:
Baker is of course infamous for reportedly saying in private conversation, while George HW Bush’s secretary of state, “F**k the Jews, they didn’t vote for us anyway.”
On Thursday, the press announced that the Obama administration would fully consider abandoning Israel in international bodies like the United Nations.
According to reports, President Obama finally called Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to congratulate him – but the “congratulations” was actually a lecture directed at forcing Netanyahu to surrender to the terrorist Palestinian regime.
For some odd reason, many in the media and Congress reacted with surprise to Obama’s supposedly sudden turn on Israel. The media, in an attempt to defend Obama’s radicalism, pretend that Netanyahu’s comments in the late stages of his campaign prompted Obama’s anti-Israel action.
But, in truth, this is the culmination of a longtime Obama policy of destroying the US-Israel relationship; Obama has spent his entire life surrounded by haters of Israel, from former Palestine Liberation Organization spokesman Rashid Khalidi to former Jimmy Carter National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, pro-Hamas negotiator Robert Malley to UN Ambassador Samantha Power (who once suggested using American troops to guard Palestinians from Israelis), Jeremiah Wright (who said “Them Jews ain’t going to let him talk to me”) to Professor Derrick Bell (“Jewish neoconservative racists…are undermining blacks in every way they can”). Here is a concise timeline, with credit to Dan Senor and the editors of Commentary:
http://www.c-span.org/video/?c4531910/senators-marco-rubio-tom-cotton-us-israel-relations
They said he couldn’t do it.
“They” being the mainstream media mouthpieces in the United States, Europe and Israel. According to our enlightened scribes and talking heads, Benjamin Netanyahu was a goner and Israel was about to welcome in a new left-wing government that would be more pliable to the Obama administration’s relentless demands on the Jewish State.
Only things didn’t work according to the global Left’s script–in fact, it was quite the opposite. Netanyahu’s Likud party won a resounding victory over Isaac Herzog’s Zionist Union that left no doubt that Bibi would be the man to lead Israel through the very rough waters ahead: from ISIS to Hamas to Hezbollah to the global “BDS” movement to a rise in anti-Semitism worldwide to a hostile “international community”–led by the Obama administration–demanding the quick establishment of a Palestinian state, to of course, Iran’s nuclear weapons program.
That’s a tall order, to say the least–yet Netanyahu is the right man for this particularly perilous period in Israel’s history.
