RUTHFULLY YOURS

Editor’s Note: This past Saturday, renowned Lincoln scholar and conservative academic Harry Jaffa passed away at the age of 96. The following article is adapted from John J. Miller’s profile of Jaffa that ran in the July 1, 2013 issue of NR.

When Harry V. Jaffa learned of the Boston Marathon bombing on April 15, he phoned a 36-year-old high-school teacher in Ashland, Ohio, named Sara Whitis. “I just want to be sure you’re okay,” he said in a voice mail. Whitis listened to the message when she arrived home from work. “It stirred me to tears,” she says. Two years earlier, Whitis had completed a master’s thesis about Jaffa’s scholarship on Abraham Lincoln and the politics of freedom. The paper had come to the attention of the 94-year-old professor, who liked it so much that he reached out to Whitis and took a grandfatherly interest in her career. He also knew that Whitis was a marathoner who had raced in Boston seven times — and was relieved to learn, when Whitis called back, that she was safely at home.

Preventing a Paris-style attack is, in part, a numbers game. Americans don’t seem to be paying attention.

A major Islamist terror attack in France was only a matter of time. For several decades, the country has invited immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa en masse – first to bolster the labor force in the rebuilding years that followed World War II, then out of multicultural impulses that prevailed over prudential considerations. That radical Islam was transplanted to France, grew in strength and extent, and bore this week’s hideous fruit was not difficult to predict. The same is not unlikely in Sweden, Belgium, Germany, and elsewhere.

Demographics may not be the whole of destiny, but they are certainly a good part, and across the Atlantic, the United States seems increasingly to be turning toward Western Europe’s most undesirable demographic trends.

For a number of years into the Cold War, American presidents were occasionally troubled by the paradox that a democratic United States was supporting right-wing anti-Communist dictatorships abroad. Either Harry Truman, John Kennedy, or Lyndon Johnson — or all of them — was supposed to have scoffed, in response to objections, something like the following, “He may be a bastard, but at least he’s our bastard.”

That realist cynicism has more or less remained the same. But now the ideology has flipped. Currently, the more that authoritarian thugs abroad position themselves as anti-American, the more that we seem to glamorize them. The new presidential sarcasm is, in effect, “He may be a bastard, but at least he’s an anti-American bastard.”

One of the most peculiar pathologies of Western elites is carrying on this apparent romance with non-Westerners who dislike the West, while spurning those who admire it. The feminist pro-Western critic of Islam, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, was recently disinvited from speaking at Brandeis University. Earlier, Columbia University had welcomed the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, an unhinged anti-Jewish and anti-American theocrat. Apparently hating America made Ahmadinejad the more interesting speaker; liking America made Hirsi Ali suspect and certainly less romantically revolutionary. How odd that for campus communities, being the victim of forced genital mutilation makes one less sympathetic than a man who had ordered the deaths of female supposed adulteresses.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2015/01/uthman-badar-squares-circle/
The Islamic firebrand invited by Festival of Dangerous Ideas — then rapidly dis-invited — to put the killing of troublesome women in a cultural context has weighed in on the Charlie Hebdo massacre. He disapproves, sort of, while awaiting the day when just deserts are meted out by the law of the land, not “counterproductive” vigilantes

In the aftermath of events like the massacres in Paris, world leaders, religious spokesmen and op-ed columnists dictate the appropriate standard of behaviour: first, Islam and the latest killings must not be mentioned in the same breath; and second, that Muslims should not be asked whether an act of terror deserves condemnation. An all-too-mushy multiculturalism planted the first, and the political left has fertilised the second. Of course every Muslim condemns terrorism! How offensive that mere enquiry!

A serious interrogation of Hizb ut-Tahrir, Australia’s most prominent Islamist movement, can only begin if we break these rules of engagement. Anthony Klan of The Australian noted the group’s uncharacteristic silence in the wake of the incidents in Martin Place and Paris. Don’t think, however, that this means quiet soul-searching and a change of heart. Klan would do well to pay attention to the social media pages of media representative Uthman Badar, best known for his ambiguous views on honour killings, and his more positive ones on the murder of Australian soldiers in Afghanistan.

From Wittenberg to Mosque Doors: Peter Smith
If Islam is not reformed – root and branch – the very notion of moderate Islam becomes an even more glaring contradiction in terms. If you belong to a club whose very rules condone bad behaviour, the only moral and logical option must be to change the rules or get out.

Memories are short. Charles Lane of the Washington Post said that the events in Paris were ‘a wake-up call’. Weren’t we already well awake before 9/11, never mind since? Charles Krauthammer said that the events reflected a new ‘third phase’ of internally planned and executed attacks, following the externally planned attack of 9/11 and the recent ‘lone-wolf’ attacks. He must have been snoozing when, as just one example among many, the London Underground was bombed.

No doubt the killings in Paris will also fade from mind as Islamic terrorists continue their murderous rampages. One reason memories are so short is that immediately the dust has settled each terrorist event is dealt with discretely, as though it were a law and order problem. The backgrounds of the murderers are analysed. One or more are bound to be identified as alienated, disadvantaged, or as having a prison record.

Then there is the subsequent soul-searching about why the perpetrators in question weren’t kept under observation as putative murderous terrorists. As if, for example, it is remotely possible to keep tabs on so-called ‘disenfranchised’ young people in a Muslim population of around 6 million-plus in France, many of whom live in no-go ghettos. Talk about fanciful.

Guy Millière – I would rejoice at huge demonstrations that took place all over France Sunday, January 11.
I would think that momentum has emerged which will enable a general fraternity, erasing hatreds and divisions, a resolution of all the problems this country has. I do not doubt that France has millions of good people who have been deeply struck by terrorist acts that have marked these days.
I have to assume that everything is not so simple. Sunday I had the sensation of attending a huge political operation.François Hollande, the man who has not been living up to its functions and showed a thousand times he had punctured his level of incompetence by becoming president, found himself master of a planetary ceremony doubt it will benefit in future polls, and no doubt he was not campaigning. The great French media have struggled for years to tone and extend to all the politically correct have contributed to a large communication operation in the service of sweetening and political correctness.
I must say that having seen several members of the government, including Christiane Taubira, come Saturday night in front of the supermarket hide from the Porte de Vincennes seemed particularly sickening if the despicable murderer entrenched in the supermarket had not been released by appropriate judicial decisions by Mrs Taubira, he would not have murdered and he was in prison. I got an instant whether arsonists were to see the damage caused by fire they helped to turn.

The phrases above are in descending order. And Abbas flying to Paris to march against terror is just another instance of takiyyah.

here is an old saying that, “promises, like pie crust, are meant to be broken.”

This may be somewhat cynical but when it refers to the promises made to Israel by the Arabs who call themselves Palestinians, it is utterly apt.

Never in the history of international diplomacy has so much dissimilitude been perpetrated for so long by one side – the PLO and it’s grotesque offspring, the so-called Palestinian Authority. It’s congenital untruthfulness and corresponding Israeli gullibility has resulted in disastrous and horrendous consequences for the embattled State of Israel.

Nidra, is a superb journalist and novelist and dear friend who lives in the belly of the beast known as Paris. We usually agree on all critical issues so This is her take…… I said:

“The Parisian show of shows will accomplish no more than a five minute “warm feeling”…..rsk

Nidra’s response

I don’t think so, amiga. And I am certainly not gushing.The Arab” spring” showed its face immediately. There was no mystery, just mystification. This unprecedented show of hands and feet in Paris yesterday shows a face that was not visible over the past fourteen years.

When you witness an event like this, an expression of collective opinion and determination on a scale never seen in the nation’s history, you can’t simply dismiss it. Of course you can, you are free to dismiss it. But I don’t. And that’s based on what I saw and heard.

The Je Suis Charlie slogan is not a simple trendy message. It’s the slogan around which the movement developed, so people expressed it in those terms. If they held up posters saying “Je suis contre le jihad” it might have been closer to the truth of what sent them into the streets. For 14 years I have been puzzling over what seemed like passive or willing acceptance of Islamization. For 14 years I have been wondering how a nation could resist if there were no press freedom, no reliable reporting.

The answer was given yesterday. There would be a tipping point. Now the cards are on the table.

In the early hours of the Charlie massacre, journalists and commentators were saying that Marine Le Pen would reap the benefits. As it turns out, she didn’t. The most unpopular François Hollande pulled off something that switched attention from a major security failure to a spectacular popular demonstration of force.It can go either way. But it can’t go the same way it has been going.

I’m following it in detail, in all its nuance. I’ll report as always honestly and carefully.

Nidra

It wouldn’t be surprising, if polled, that many United States citizens would feel disenfranchised when it comes to politics. Though the right to vote and petition the government is supposed to make sure the people’s interests are considered, we the people are not given standing to question the constitutionality of laws, i.e. The Affordable Care Act. Political parties are no longer able to moderate the positions of the most extreme members of our society, who feel compelled to take law into their own hands, i.e. exhibiting anarchy against the rule of law in response to the Grand Jury’s decision not to indict in the events surrounding Ferguson. Extremism, lack of understanding, apathy, an agenda driven 4th Estate, all work against the citizenry in exercising their rights and responsibilities with fidelity in today’s society. How did it come to this?

One of the earliest Supreme Court cases to set precedent (A decided case which is cited or used as an example to justify a judgment in a subsequent case—ninja words) for our rule of law was Marbury v Madison. What happened is this. Before leaving office at the end of his term, 2nd President John Adams appointed a slew of judges to the federal courts to maintain an ongoing Federalist Party influence during upcoming Democratic-Republican President Thomas Jefferson’s tenure in office. John Marshall was unable to deliver all the commissions before our 3rd President began his term of office and Jefferson refused to have the remainder of the commissions delivered. William Marbury, who was to receive a commission, was not pleased with this turn of events and applied to the Supreme Court for a writ of mandamus, to force delivery of the commissions.

The warm feelings on display in Paris and elsewhere around the world Sunday in response to the horrors of the past week, unfortunately, will do next to nothing to change the tide against Islamist terrorism. That explains why world leaders who support terrorism have no problem supporting Paris.

Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, now entering the eleventh year of what was originally billed as a four-year term, turned up to represent a would-be Judenrein state, where terrorism and the absence of the rule of law are the order of the day.

Turkey’s Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu flew into Paris to glad-hand with free expression enthusiasts, notwithstanding recent arrests of teenagers in his country for “insulting” President Erdogan.

The terrorist organization Hamas even issued a press release claiming that it “condemns the attack against Charlie Hebdo magazine and insists on the fact that differences of opinion and thought cannot justify murder.” Setting aside the fact that Palestinians living under Palestinian authority do not have freedom of opinion and thought, gunning down Jews while shopping for food wasn’t mentioned in the statement.