RUTHFULLY YOURS

The pronouncement:

The real face of Islam is a peaceful religion based on the dignity of all human beings. It’s one where Muslim communities are leading the fight against poverty. It’s one where Muslim communities are providing basic healthcare and emergency assistance on the front lines of some of our most devastating humanitarian crises. And it is one where Muslim communities are advocating for universal human rights and fundamental freedoms, including the most basic freedom to practice one’s faith openly and freely.

If the likes of ISIS, Boko Haram, Al-Nusra, Al-Qaeda, Al-Shabaab, the Taliban, and Hamas are not following real Islam then what are they following? Unreal Islam?

And passages like the following from the Koran, how are they to be explained away?

Sura 2:193: “fight against them until Allah’s religion reigns supreme.”

Sura 8:39: “make war on them until idolatry is no more and Allah’s religion reigns supreme.”

Sura 3:151: “We will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve [or “infidels”] for what they have associated with Allah [reference to Christian Trinity] of which He had not sent down [any] authority. And their refuge will be the Fire, and wretched is the residence of the wrongdoers.”

Sura 8:12: “When the Lord inspired the angels [saying to them], ‘I am with you; so make those who believe stand firm. I will throw fear into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Then smite their necks and smite of them each finger’.”

It comes as no surprise to hear those who have long bemoaned Pax Americana celebrating the superpower’s shrinking presence on the world stage. There is grave cause of concern, certainly, but the real problem is Washington’s neo-isolationist refusal to lead
America in Retreat: The New Isolationism and the Coming Global Disorder

by Bret Stephens
Sentinel, 2014, 263 pages, $29.99

Since the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, there have been numerous books and articles on the purported decline of the United States as the world’s superpower. However, by defining the issue as America’s retreat rather than its decline, Wall Street Journal columnist Bret Stephens has shifted the debate in an important direction. Stephens titles his new book America in Retreat: The New Isolationism and the Coming Global Disorder.

The concept of national decline implies historical inevitability, something so deeply embedded in the scheme of things that, despite our best efforts, it is bound to happen. This version of Greek tragedy has strong appeal in the book sales market but Stephens makes a powerful case that retreat is the right word for the real world. Retreats are manmade. Sometimes they signal defeat and surrender but they can also permit regrouping and resurgence. Stephens writes:

America is not in decline. It is in retreat. Nations in retreat, as the United States was after World War I, can still be on the rise. Nations in decline, as Russia is today, can still be on the march. Decline is the product of broad civilizational forces—demography, culture, ideologies, attitudes towards authority, attitudes towards work—that are often beyond the grasp of ordinary political action. Retreat, by contrast, is often nothing more than a political choice. One president can make it; another president could reverse it. It is still within America’s reach to make different choices.

This is not to say Stephens regards the global disorder of his subtitle as an easy fix. Indeed, the problems are now more difficult than at any time since the Cold War. The inventory is daunting: the Russian annexation of Crimea and invasion of Ukraine; the aggressive maritime claims of China against Japan, Vietnam and the Philippines; the unravelling of political order in the Arab world and the emergence of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria; the revival of theocratic Islam in Iran and Turkey; the progress to nuclear weapons by Iran and their international marketing by North Korea, prompting more Middle East states to consider their own nuclear options.

With the world descending into chaos driven in no small measure by the incoherent, contradictory and frequently non-existent foreign policy of the Obama administration, it was difficult this year to narrow the field for this year’s biggest national security blunders. The task seemed so formidable, I nearly abandoned the endeavor.

But undaunted, I present to you the National Security “Not Top 10” of 2014, in no particular order.

1) Befriending “moderate Al-Qaeda” in Syria:

There are some ideas so at war with reason and reality they can only exist in the fetid Potomac fever swamps of DC think tanks and the foreign policy community. Such was the case in January when three of the best and brightest from those ranks published an article in Foreign Affairs (the same publication that in 2007 brought us the “Moderate Muslim Brotherhood”) contending that the US needed to “befriend” the Syrian jihadist group Ahrar al-Sham as some kind of counter to more extreme jihadist groups, like ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra. The precedent they cited was the US failure to designate the Taliban (!!!) after 9/11.

Mind you, at the time they wrote this, one of Ahrar al-Sham’s top leaders was a lieutenant for Al-Qaeda head Ayman al-Zawahiri who openly declared himself a member of Al-Qaeda. After most of their leadership was wiped out in a bombing in September, they gravitated closer to the jihadist groups they were supposed to counter and their positions have been bombed by the US – much to the consternation of other “vetted moderate” rebel groups. So ridiculous was their proposition that the original subtitle of their article, “An Al-Qaeda Affiliate Worth Befriending,” was changed online to “An Al-Qaeda-Linked Group Worth Befriending” in the hopes of minimizing the absurdity of their case.

2) Obama administration deploys three hashtag divisions in response to Russian invasion of Ukraine.

As Ukrainians made their bid to free themselves from Russia’s interference, Putin responded by deploying tanks and troops into Ukraine in violation of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum. Obama’s rejoinder was to give a speech and to deploy three divisions of State Department employees all armed with a #UnitedForUkraine hashtag. Hilarity ensued as the Russian Foreign Ministry counterattacked by hijacking the hashtag, prompting State Department spox Jen Psaki to decry, “Let’s hope the Kremlin will live by the promise of hashtag,” leaving many asking: Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot.

When television showed police turning their backs on Mayor Bill de Blasio recently, many viewers instinctively rotated in their chairs along with the police.

After all, Mayor de Blasio’s pandering to race-oriented special-interest groups has appalled many voters. More than half of New Yorkers recently told Quinnipiac pollsters that they disapprove of the way the mayor handles the police department. The next move, a strike by the policemen, may already be underway informally: Summonses and arrests have dropped dramatically since the murder of two patrolmen by a man who had said he would “put wings on pigs.” And if the police formalize and escalate their strike to make their point that de Blasio is anti-police, many New Yorkers will likely back them up.

But they shouldn’t. That’s the takeaway from a similar labor action, the Boston police strike of 1919.

The stories of New York today and Boston after World War I have some similarities. In Boston in 1919, the policemen also had compelling reason to complain: Inflation had climbed wildly after World War I, but police pay was not keeping up. Strapped after the war, the authorities neglected upkeep of police-station houses, which were becoming unbearably filthy. In at least one house, vermin actually chewed on officers’ helmets. Back then, as now, authorities agreed to serious negotiations with the police. The man at the top of the chain of command, Governor Calvin Coolidge, was famous for his ability to get along with just about any ethnicity, including the mostly Irish Catholic patrolmen. One of the few differences between Boston then and New York now was that in Boston the police commissioner reported to the governor, not the mayor.

When the policemen walked out in Boston, riots ran wild, with looting and fighting all across the city. In response, Coolidge called out the National Guard. The guard did not approach the troublemakers gingerly: In a famously controversial move, soldiers rounded up gamblers on Boston Common. Coolidge was a Republican, and Mayor Andrew James Peters, a Democrat, was furious. Yet Coolidge delved into the law books and quoted chapter and verse to make clear that he, not the mayor, was in charge. Coolidge backed up Police Commissioner Edwin Curtis’s decision to fire the striking policemen.

Hollywood film producer Oliver Stone has said he wants to make a four-hour documentary telling the “dirty story” of the overthrow of former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in what he believes was a “coup” organized with the help of the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency.

“A dirty story through and through, but in the tragic aftermath of this coup, the West has maintained the dominant narrative of ‘Russia in Crimea,’ whereas the true narrative is ‘USA in Ukraine.’ The truth is not being aired in the West,” Stone wrote on his Facebook page on Tuesday.

Stone said he had already spent four hours interviewing Yanukovych in Moscow for the project, in addition to several “police officials,” all of whom believe “foreign elements” were responsible for the violent Maidan protests in Kiev that culminated in February with the overthrow of the Russia-backed president.

“Details to follow in the documentary, but it seems clear that the so-called ‘shooters’ who killed 14 policemen, wounded some 85, and killed 45 protesting civilians, were outside third party agitators,” Stone wrote.

The Hollywood director’s interpretation of events echoes the Russian government’s suggestions that the regime change was a “color revolution” funded by foreign governments.

President Vladimir Putin in a security council meeting earlier this year said that the situation in Ukraine was partly the work of “outside forces” and warned that Russia must do all it can to prevent a similar uprising on its own turf.

France is a country where so-called “anti-racist” organizations, heavily subsidized by the government, fight for the most part only a single “racism”: “Islamophobia.”

It is now a country where the only people allowed to speak freely of Islam to large audiences are those who describe it as a religion of peace and unlimited love.

People prosecuted and fined for uttering critical remarks on Islam, such as Christine Tasin, say out loud what thousands think without daring to speak.

Polls show that French citizens in ever-increasing numbers are concerned about the rising proportion of unintegrated Muslims in the country, the endless expansion of no-go zones, the increasing number of Islamic converts, and the “replacement” of the French people.

“Mental patients,” screaming “Allahu Akbar,” are storming France.

France is now a country where critical remarks on Islam are systematically banned from mainstream media and where any negative sentence about the Muslim religion leads to fines, payment of damages, and censorship.

And it is a country where so-called “anti-racist” organizations, heavily subsidized by the government, fight for the most part only a single “racism”: “Islamophobia.”

Words such as “Islamism” or “radical Islam” have disappeared from the vocabulary of journalists and politicians, and are replaced by fuzzy words: “radicalism” and “extremism”.

The only people apparently allowed to speak freely of Islam to large audiences are those who describe it as a religion of peace and unlimited love.

(The posting of this article has become an annual tradition of historical proportion at this blog.)

The next year sweeps around the earth like the hand of a clock, from Australia to Europe and across the great stretch of the Atlantic it rides the darkness to America. And then around and around again, each passing day marking another sweep of the hours.

In Times Square crowds of tourists gather in clumps behind police barricades, clutching their corporate swag beneath video billboards shifting and humming in the cool air. And the same scene repeats in other squares and other places even if it doesn’t feel like there is a great deal to celebrate.

While the year makes its first pass around the world, let us leave it behind, open a door in time and step back to another year, a century past.

December 31, 1912.

The crowds are just as large, though the men wear hats. The word gay is employed with no touch of irony. Liquor is harder to come by because the end of the year, one hundred and two years ago, has fallen on a Sunday.

There are more dances and fewer corporate brands. Horns are blown, and the occasional revolver fired into the air, a sight unimaginable in the controlled celebrations of today’s urban metropolis.

The Hotel Workers Union strike fizzled out on Broadway though a volley of bricks was hurled at the Hotel Astor during the celebrations. New York’s finest spent the evening outside the Rockefeller mansion waiting to subpoena the tycoon in the money trust investigation. And the Postmaster General inaugurated the new parcel service by shipping a silver loving cup from Washington to New York.

One hundred years ago today, a lethal jihad attack was staged against New Year’s Day picnickers in Broken Hill, Australia. This attack and the recent Martin Place siege, events separated by almost exactly a century, show striking similarities.

For Australians, the anxious question about the Martin Place attack, which has grabbed the attention of everyone, is whether this atrocity is but harbinger of a further series of deadly attacks on Australian soil, or whether it will pass into memory as an exceptional one-off event, much as the 1915 New Year’s day massacre in Broken Hill did.

Alma Cowie, killed in Broken Hill 1915, and Katrina Dawson, killed in Sydney 2014
On New Year’s Day, 1915, two Muslim men, Bashda Mahommed Gool and Mullah Abdullah, shot and killed four people and wounded several others before finally being killed by police. They had both come to Australia more than a decade previously.

Beginning in 1860, many Muslim cameleers came to Australia to help open up the arid outback. Today a famous train from Adelaide to Darwin is known as ‘The Ghan’ to commemorate the contribution to the ‘Afghans’ – as they were known (although they came from many different places across the Middle East and South Asia) – to the development of Australia.

The jihad attack was staged against a picnic train which was taking 1200 picnickers out on a New Year’s Day in open ore trucks. Bashda Mahommed Gool and Mullah Abdullah first made inquiries at the station beforehand to make sure they would be in the right place at the right time to attack this particular train. They then positioned themselves on the side of hill around 30 meters from the tracks, and opened fire as the trucks passed. Among the victims was Alma Cowie, aged 17, shot dead. By the end of the incident the jihadi cameleers had themselves been killed by police.

What seems like staggering hypocrisy is actually remarkably consistent from liberals’ perspective.
Many conservatives finished the year angry about the same thing they were angry about at the beginning of the year: liberal double standards.

As I write this, GOP House whip Steve Scalise is in hot water over reports that he spoke to a group of racist poltroons in Louisiana twelve years ago. Whether it was an honest mistake, as Scalise plausibly claims, or a sign of something more nefarious, as his detractors hope, remains to be seen.

But one common response on social media is instructive. Countless conservatives want to know: Why the double standard? Barack Obama was friends with a domestic terrorist, Bill Ayers. His spiritual mentor was a vitriolic racist, Jeremiah Wright. One of his administration’s closest advisers and allies is Al Sharpton, a man who has inspired enough racial violence to make a grand dragon’s white sheets turn green with envy.

Meanwhile, the Democratic party venerated the late senator Robert Byrd, a former Klansmen himself. He was one of 19 senators (all Democrats) to sign the Southern Manifesto opposing integration. One of his co-signers was William Fulbright, Bill Clinton’s mentor.

When Republicans are in power, “dissent is the highest form of patriotism.” When Democrats are in power, dissent is the racist fuming of “angry white men.”

Peaceful, law-abiding tea-party groups who cleaned up after their protests — and got legal permits for them — were signs of nascent fascism lurking in the American soul. Violent, anarchic, and illegal protests by Occupy Wall Street a few years ago or, more recently, in Ferguson, Mo., were proof that a new idealistic generation was renewing its commitment to idealism.

When rich conservatives give money to Republicans, it is a sign that the whole system has been corrupted by fat cats. When it is revealed that liberal billionaires and left-wing super PACs outspent conservative groups in 2014: crickets.

When Republicans invoke God or religious faith as an inspiration for their political views, it’s threatening and creepy. When Democrats do it, it’s a sign they believe in social justice.

The first time I ever spoke to Steve Scalise, it was in the context of his helping me and his cousin, state senator Ben Bagert, block the political career of David Duke. In the quarter-century since that 1989 phone conversation, Scalise has given no indication that he holds any views anywhere near as odious as Duke’s racist and anti-Semitic garbage, and plenty of indications directly to the contrary — indeed, compellingly so.

Scalise, the House majority whip now under fire for having spoken back in 2002 to a white-supremacist group tied to the former Klansman Duke, says he did not know the nature of the group to which he spoke. The Duke lieutenant who invited him confirms that account, as does another attendee. Indeed, he says that technically Scalise spoke not at the supremacist group at all, but to a civic-association meeting just before the supremacist conference began.

By all accounts, Scalise spoke not on racial issues, but on taxes and spending.

In short, the more we find out about that event, and about Scalise, the more this whole “scandal” looks like a case of guilt not just by association, but by unintentional, second-degree association — a guilt wrongly assessed against a man with a long record of working not to divide the races but to bridge the differences between them.

Scalise deserves the benefit of the doubt.

I take very seriously the moral imperative to “give no quarter” to Duke and his ilk. I was a founding board member of the Louisiana Coalition Against Racism and Nazism, a group formed specifically to block Duke’s political rise. I fought him tooth-and-nail within the Republican party. Later, as a journalist, I broke award-winning stories demonstrating Duke’s continuing Nazi ties.

And I’ve watched Scalise’s whole career since that phone conversation in 1989 – which was even before it was clear Scalise would enter politics. (He had just finished college at LSU, where he was speaker of the student assembly. I was organizing Republican caucuses against Duke’s coming bid for the U.S Senate.) If a whole career spent without racial taint doesn’t earn someone the benefit of the doubt about an event of some confusion and dispute, there’s no hope for any of us.