RUTHFULLY YOURS

Voting for a Palestinian state at a time when Islamic State-level terrorists like Hamas are in the ascendancy risks making Westminster less the mother of parliaments, and more the mother of utter (pro-terror) stupidity

Monday’s vote in the House of Commons aiming at recognising a Palestinian state is certainly historic, and in several senses. It’s a historic mistake; a historic instance of ignorance and bigotry at the heart of the British political system; and a historic gift to Islamist terrorism.

The mind boggles. With opinion polls showing that Hamas — as bloodthirsty a terror group as Islamic State — would win Palestinian elections if they were held any time soon, a bunch of Labour-led buffoons in Britain think this is exactly the right time to reward terrorism.

The more you think about it, the worse it gets. Britain is sending people into battle to stop one Islamist terror state emerging in Syria/Iraq, and now wants to give its imprimatur to the creation of another one in Israel/Palestine.

Who do these people think they are helping? Certainly not peace-loving Palestinians who are terrified at the prospect of a Hamas-led state. But, as we write this article from Jerusalem, and right after a trip to the West Bank, it is perfectly clear who would feel that they have benefited from British folly.

Hamas, in the most appalling fashion, sacrificed its own children — see related articles below — in a recent war which had the sole aim of slaughtering Israeli civilians. Hamas knew they were never going to beat the Israelis.

The handbook, endorsed last week by the U.S. State Department, is an alarming joint venture between the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the National Council of Canadian Muslims, which has connections to terrorism.

The handbook recommends discontinuing the use of the words “jihad” and “terrorism,” and balks at the use of the word “moderate” to describe Muslims.

Counter-terrorism specialist and lawyer David Harris testified that “there are many individuals and groups who masquerade” as moderates, who are really “faux-moderates.”

“[T]heir [Muslims’] 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… so that God’s religion [Islam] is made victorious over all other religions.” — Mohamed Akram, Muslim Brotherhood operative.

Racism and labeling are indeed social ills, but a different issue altogether. They are not to be used to hide the face of Islamism, terrorism and jihad under a veil of trying to marginalize or silence whoever points them out as “racists” or “Islamophobes” — even as violent jihadi terrorism rampages throughout the world.

A handbook entitled United Against Terrorism, supposedly aimed at preventing youth radicalization, was endorsed last week by the U.S. Department of State, according to a report by Andrew McCarthy in National Review Online.

The handbook, however, released at a mosque in Winnipeg (Manitoba), Canada, is an alarming joint venture between the Royal Canadian Mounted Police [RCMP] and the National Council of Canadian Muslims [NCCM], formerly CAIR-CAN — now conveniently renamed — which has connections to terrorism.

In rolling out his new memoir in media appearances, former defense secretary Leon Panetta has explained that from the start of the Benghazi terrorist attack, he told President Obama it was, in fact, a terrorist attack. This conflicts with the president’s implausible account. Mr. Panetta, moreover, has acknowledged the obvious: namely, that unanswered questions about the attack, including why no meaningful effort was made to rescue Americans under siege, demand additional congressional attention.

It has been five months since the House established a select committee to investigate this act of war in which our enemies attacked a sovereign American compound, killing our Ambassador to Libya and three other Americans, and wounding many others. Yet the public continues to get more significant information about the episode from Fox News programs than from the panel created to establish what happened and ensure accountability for governmental decisions made before, during and after the attack. Consequently, I’ve joined several other concerned citizens, including several former government officials, in the following open letter to select committee chairman Trey Gowdy, calling for more energy and more expeditious inquiry.

Dear Mr. Chairman:

As you are well aware, on May 8, 2014, the House of Representatives adopted H. Res. 567 “Providing for the Establishment of the Select Committee on the Events Surrounding the 2012 Terrorist Attack in Benghazi, Libya”. With the publication this week of former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta’s book, Worthy Fights: A Memoir of Leaders in War and Peace, the need for such an inquiry has become both indisputable and even more urgent.

In particular, it is clear that there is more – and likely much more – that has yet to be established about the murderous September 11, 2012 jihadist attack on American facilities in Benghazi and those assigned to them. Indeed, former Secretary Panetta is providing an account of the Benghazi attacks that differs dramatically from what President Obama and his spokesmen presented in the hours, days and weeks after the attack.

For example, when shown a video clip of the former security contractors who defended the CIA Annex, who described how they were told to stand down that night by their superiors, Mr. Panetta agreed that Congress needed to investigate their story. Secretary Panetta has claimed that he set in motion a number of military units that night. Why was none of them directed to actually reach Benghazi? Who gave the ultimate order to U.S. military forces not to come to the rescue of our people in Benghazi that night? Was it the Secretary of State? The President? Or someone else? If so, on whose authority?

The newly elected Swedish government of Prime Minister Stefan Lofven began its term with a clear pro-Palestinian tilt. In his inaugural speech on October 3, 2014, PM Lofven declared that his left-center Social-Democrat party led government would recognize the state of Palestine. “The conflict between Israel and Palestine can only be solved with a two-state solution, negotiated in accordance with international law. The two-state solution requires mutual recognition and a will to co-exist peacefully. Sweden will therefore recognize the state of Palestine.”

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responded to the Swedish government’s statement the following day saying that “Unilateral steps would not advance peace, but would, rather, push it off.”

The US was also unhappy with the unilateral Swedish move. US State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki called international recognition of a Palestinian state “premature,” and said, “We believe that the process is one that has to be worked out through the parties to agree on the terms of how they will live in the future of two states living side-by-side.”

Responding to the Swedish Prime Minister’s announcement, Israel’s Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman wrote an exclusive Op Ed in the Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter. “This announcement” Lieberman wrote, “was not intended to serve as a genuine solution to a foreign problem. It was intended, so it seems, to placate a certain sector in Swedish public opinion. It is to be regretted when internal considerations determine a counterproductive and irresponsible foreign policy.”

Lieberman added, “With the entire Middle East aflame, not to mention other regions in the world experiencing strife and instability, the undue focus on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict runs counter to all logic. Beyond reflecting internal matters, it seems that this focus serves to compensate for the many failings that the organized international community has encountered in attempting to resolve the many complex problems on the global agenda. For some reason, five words are spoken of time and again as both an imperative and as a magical solution to many other problems in the region: resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”

Only thirteen years after 9/11, the Bill Maher/Ben Affleck kerfuffle has broken the media logjam preventing open discussion of whether Islam is a uniquely violent religion, and finally brought that question into the mainstream of the public discourse. The mainstream media and Leftist intelligentsia, badly rattled by Maher’s defection, is circling the wagons with a series of articles about how Maher is wrong, ignorant, bigoted, and after all just a comedian anyway – including a New York Times column by Nicholas Kristof (a bit player in the Maher/Affleck brawl), predictably entitled “The Diversity of Islam.”

Islam’s glorious diversity, of course, is something that we are all supposed to acknowledge and celebrate, on pain of charges of “Islamophobia” and “bigotry.” For Leftists and Islamic supremacists, it is a cardinal sin to essentialize Islam – that is, to dare to suggest that it actually teaches and stands for anything in particular. It is even worse to say anything that might give anyone the impression that Islam is a monolith. The political and media elites insist that we must see Islam as a marvelously diverse, multifaceted thing – as long as we don’t whisper anything to the effect that its diversity includes mass murderers and rapists acting in accord with mainstream understandings of its texts and teachings.

One irony (among many) of all this is that Islam is, in point of fact, one of the least diverse entities on the planet. A few years I came across a group photo of a summit meeting of Southeast Asian government officials. The Vietnamese, Thai, Laotian, Cambodian, Thai, Burmese and Chinese officials all had names indigenous to their nations; the Malaysian and Indonesian ministers had names like Muhammad and Abdullah – names indigenous to Arabia. Converts to Islam the world over give up a bit of their cultural diversity to take on Arabic names, and in many cases feel compelled to adopt the dress of a seventh-century Arab. This is not diversity, it’s homogeneity.

By the time World War II was over entire cities had been devastated and hundreds of thousands of civilians had been killed by the Allies in one of the last wars whose virtue we were all able to agree on. The civilians were not limited to enemy German and Japanese civilians, but included French civilians in occupied territory, Jewish prisoners and numerous others who were caught in the war zone.

To the professional pacifist these numbers appear to disprove the morality of war, any war, but they were the blood price that had to be paid to stop two war machines once they had been allowed to seize the strategic high ground. There was no other way to stop the genocide that Germany and Japan had been inflicting on Europe and Asia except through a way of war that would kill countless civilians.

A refusal to fight that war would not have been the moral course. It would have meant that the Allies would have continued to serve as the silent partners in genocide. The same thing is true today.

War is ugly. It is made moral by why it is fought, not by how it is fought. If we are fighting a war to prevent mass murder, our moral obligation is to win it as quickly as possible. Not as cleanly.

Our attempt to streamline the ugly parts into a drone taking out a terrorist target with no collateral damage is a moral fiction. Civilians die in drone strikes as in any other form of attack and believing that we can have our moral cake and eat it too has convinced some that any other kind of war is immoral.

If we had set out to win World War II as cleanly as possible the price for our morality would have been paid by our own soldiers as well as by the countless victims of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.

As we can see the way that American soldiers and Afghan civilians paid the price for Obama’s morality.

As I wrote in The Great Betrayal, “the number of Afghan civilian casualties caused by American forces had dropped between 2009 and 2011, but civilian casualties caused by the Taliban steadily increased… 2009 proved to be the deadliest year for Afghan civilians with over 2,400 killed… with the Taliban accounting for two-thirds of the total. While the percentage of casualties caused by US forces fell 28 percent, the percentage caused by the Taliban increased by 40 percent making up for American restraint. This fell into line with the increase in NATO combat deaths which rose from 295 to 520.”

Of course, we’re pretending that the money will go to rebuild homes and businesses. But everyone above the age 5 knows what the money is really buying.

Reuters:

Out of this conference must come not just money but a renewed commitment from everybody to work for peace that meets the aspirations of all, for Israelis, for Palestinians for all people of this region,” Kerry told the conference.

“And I promise you the full commitment of President Obama, myself and the United States to try to do that,” he said.

At the conference Kerry also announced an additional $212 million in U.S. aid to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, which was badly damaged during a conflict with Israel in July and August in which 2,100 Palestinians died, most of them civilians.

An estimated 18,000 homes and vital infrastructure were destroyed in the seven-week war. The Palestinians have put the cost of reconstruction at about $4 billion over three years.

Qatar said it would provide $1 billion in reconstruction assistance for Gaza, while fellow Gulf Arab states Kuwait and United Arab Emirates promised $200 million each.

Germany on Sunday also announced it would contribute 50 million euros ($63 million) to reconstruction efforts in Gaza.

“We can’t allow the people in Gaza to sink into despair,” German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said in a statement. The British ambassador to Egypt, John Casson, told Reuters London would provide $32 million for reconstruction.

Wall Street has always been divided between producers and overhead. The same is true in every for-profit profession and business. When “overhead” overwhelms production, profits collapse and the business fails. Technology has allowed for-profit and not-for-profit businesses to reduce overhead staff, thereby increasing the ratio of producers to staff.

That is not true in government where profit is not necessary for viability. Government does not manufacture goods or produce services to sell. The purpose of government is to secure and protect the rights of its citizens – to protect the people against loss of life, liberty and the unlawful seizure of property. Obviously, government’s role has become far more complex, which is one reason bureaucracies have grown, but it does not explain why they have become bloated.

Over the past eighty years government’s role in the economy has become increasingly intrusive. When state and local governments are included, total government spending exceeds 41% of GDP. A hundred years ago, that number was 7%. At that time, state and local spending exceeded that of the federal government. Today, the latter has the lion’s share.

As insidious as burgeoning bureaucracies (and related to it) is cronyism, which exists between government, big business, favored industries and public sector unions. Banks too big to fail are protected against failure, giving them a cost advantage versus their smaller, regional competitors. Industries are favored because of long term relationships or because products and services coincide with an Administration’s agenda. Unions are interested in expanding their reach. Big bureaucracies are in their wheelhouse. With private sector unions in decline, the public sector represents their only growth opportunity. Taxpayers, small businesses and fans of small government stand on the outside and ogle the party to which they were not invited.

Wall Street has always been divided between producers and overhead. The same is true in every for-profit profession and business. When “overhead” overwhelms production, profits collapse and the business fails. Technology has allowed for-profit and not-for-profit businesses to reduce overhead staff, thereby increasing the ratio of producers to staff.

That is not true in government where profit is not necessary for viability. Government does not manufacture goods or produce services to sell. The purpose of government is to secure and protect the rights of its citizens – to protect the people against loss of life, liberty and the unlawful seizure of property. Obviously, government’s role has become far more complex, which is one reason bureaucracies have grown, but it does not explain why they have become bloated.

Over the past eighty years government’s role in the economy has become increasingly intrusive. When state and local governments are included, total government spending exceeds 41% of GDP. A hundred years ago, that number was 7%. At that time, state and local spending exceeded that of the federal government. Today, the latter has the lion’s share.

As insidious as burgeoning bureaucracies (and related to it) is cronyism, which exists between government, big business, favored industries and public sector unions. Banks too big to fail are protected against failure, giving them a cost advantage versus their smaller, regional competitors. Industries are favored because of long term relationships or because products and services coincide with an Administration’s agenda. Unions are interested in expanding their reach. Big bureaucracies are in their wheelhouse. With private sector unions in decline, the public sector represents their only growth opportunity. Taxpayers, small businesses and fans of small government stand on the outside and ogle the party to which they were not invited.

It was tragically comical that the commander in chief in just a few weeks could go from referring to ISIS as “jayvee” and a manageable problem to declaring it an existential threat, in the same manner he upgraded the Free Syrian Army from amateurs and a fantasy to our ground linchpin in the new air war. All that tragic comedy was a continuance of his previous untruths, such as the assurance that existing health plans and doctors would not change under the Affordable Care Act or that there was not a smidgeon of corruption at the IRS.

But lately the Obama confusion has descended into the territory not of tragedy or even tragic comedy, but rather of outright farce.

Last week we learned from the Washington Post that an investigator looking into the Secret Service prostitution scandal [1] was ordered by the inspector general “to withhold and alter certain information in the report of investigation because it was potentially embarrassing to the administration.” The “embarrassing” information was the allegation that a member of the White House staff advance team had solicited a prostitute while prepping Obama’s Colombia visit [2] — a fact denied by then-White House Press Secretary Jay Carney [3] in April 2012, when he assured the press that no one from the White House was involved in the scandal that brought down lots of Secret Service and military personnel.

But here is where the farcical kicks in. The squelched investigation was focused on White House staffer Jonathan Dach. And who is Dach? He was at the time a young Yale law student and White House staffer, and is now a State Department activist working on — what else? — “Global Women’s Issues.”

It’s hard to tell what’s happening in the battle against the Islamic State or ISIL, as the administration insists on calling it. (They seem to have spent as much time deciding which acronym to use as how to fight the terror organization/state.) As I write, the Daily Mail [1] reports ISIS toe-to-toe with Kurdish fighters in Kobane with Turkey (not surprisingly) refusing to step in. U.S. — or should I say coalition — bombings continue.

But we don’t know much — hardly anything about the bombing, who was hit, how much damage, collateral or otherwise, occurred. Have there been civilian casualties? How many?

Compare this to a few weeks ago and the non-stop coverage of the Gaza War. Almost every day we had reports on the supposedly huge civilian toll from Israeli attacks coupled with admonishment from State Department porte-paroles Jen Psaki and Marie Harf that Israel should restrain itself, implying, of course, that the Jewish state was being excessive in defending itself against Hamas. Psaki, Harf and others repeatedly warned Israel that they were harming too many “innocent” civilians even though those civilians had been put there as human shields by their terrorist adversaries. Death and wounded statistics provided by Hamas and then parroted by the UN were almost always accepted at face value by the mouth pieces of our government.

Barack Obama gets no such treatment. Weeks into the bombing of ISIL, we know next to nothing. The reportage is vague at best. Some, like the left-wing UK Independent [2], say Obama’s strategy has been a fiasco. [2] Who knows? Unlike Hamas, which has always exploited human shields to the hilt for propaganda purposes, ISIL prefers to keep reporters out (or slice their heads off) and employ social media for publicity and recruitment purposes. But still the bombs fall and innocents and not-so-innocents die or get maimed for life.

So why does the State Department blame Israel for using excessive force, even though the IDF appears to make even more effort than the U.S. Army or Air Force to avoid civilian casualties? Why does it judge Israel by a different standard from the U.S. — or anybody, for that matter?