HISTORY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Muslim Life in 2021, as Predicted in 1921 by Daniel Pipes

Posted By on February 25th, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17096/lothrop-stoddard-muslim-life

The Muslim world “sunk to the lowest depth of its decrepitude” in the eighteenth century; “the life had apparently gone out of Islam, leaving naught but a dry husk of soulless ritual and degrading superstition behind.” Meanwhile, Europe discovered ocean routes, established economic hegemony, and exploited its power as “mistress of the world” to indulge in “recklessly imperialistic policies.” Its conquests of Muslim-majority lands prompted a massive “flood of mingled despair and rage” against the West.

The “great Mohammedan Revival” began with the Wahhabis in eighteenth-century Arabia and entailed a “profound ferment” and a “stirring to new ideas, new impulses, new aspirations. A gigantic transformation is taking place whose results must affect all mankind.” This process was well underway by 1921: “The world of Islam, mentally and spiritually quiescent for almost a thousand years, is once more astir, once more on the march.”

The “great Mohammedan Revival” began with the Wahhabis in eighteenth-century Arabia and entailed a “profound ferment” and a “stirring to new ideas, new impulses, new aspirations. A gigantic transformation is taking place whose results must affect all mankind.” This process was well underway by 1921: “The world of Islam, mentally and spiritually quiescent for almost a thousand years, is once more astir, once more on the march.”

Do not try to reduce causation to interests. Beliefs and passions count at least as much.

When Lothrop Stoddard (1883-1950) is still recalled, it is as a prominent racist who had a major but malign influence on the budding field of international relations, who acted as theoretician for the Ku Klux Klan, and who contributed the concept of Untermensch (sub-human) to the Nazis.

Stoddard, however enjoyed a high and favorable profile during the 1920s. He had earned a Ph.D. in history from Harvard University and traveled widely. President Warren Harding praised him, and F. Scott Fitzgerald obliquely referenced him in The Great Gatsby.

Stoddard also wrote a prescient 1921 study, The New World of Islam, a survey of 250 million Muslims “from Morocco to China and from Turkestan to the Congo.” Despite his consuming racism, Stoddard impressively recognized trends underway in Islam. As Ian Frazier observed in the New Yorker, “Whatever his philosophy and methods, his guesses sometimes proved out.”

His book had a substantial impact on public opinion, including on such notable figures as the German strategist Karl Haushofer, the Lebanese pan-Islamist Chekib Arslan, the Indian scholar S. Khuda Bukhsh, and Indonesia’s President Soekarno. So, despite Stoddard’s well-deserved ignominy, his New World of Islam is well worthy of scrutiny on its centenary.

MEDIA Comments turned off

Losing An American Genius We are mourning for Rush, but also for ourselves, who are going to miss—and need—him more, not less, each day that he is now silent. By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on February 25th, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/02/24/losing-an-american-genius/

Rush Limbaugh created modern national talk radio as we now know it—from nothing. For over three decades he kept at rapt attention weekdays—live from noon to three—the largest conservative audience in broadcast history. Over 15 million tuned in each week. 

Last week—32 years, and over 23,000 hours of on-air commentary after Rush went national in August 1988—he is gone, at 70 years young. 

By the 1990s he had become the voice—literally and iconically—of the conservative movement and its hot/cold liaisons with the Republican Party. Rush was hated by the Left because he was deadly effective in fighting them, and feared at times by the Republican establishment—because he could also be deadly effective in fighting them. 

Limbaugh had an uncanny sense of what conservative populism could do—such as abruptly end Barack Obama’s control of Congress after just two years, in the sweeping Tea Party midterm election of 2010.  And he also instinctively sensed what it should not do: endorse Ross Perot’s Quixotic third-party surge of 1992 that eventually would split the conservative vote and ensure Bill Clinton the presidency with just 43 percent of the popular vote. 

Rush was a master comedian. His pauses, intonations, and mock tones were far funnier than those of our contemporary regulars on late-night television comedy. He was a gifted mimic, an impersonator, with as wide a repertoire and as skilled at impressions as the masters of the past like Vaughn Meader, David Frye, and Rich Little. Yet Rush worked mostly behind the mike, without the aid of an on-stage presence. 

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Why did the Biden administration approve a pipeline for Russia to Germany but not from Canada to the US? By Jack Hellner

Posted By on February 25th, 2021

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/02/why_did_the_biden_administration_approve_a_pipeline_for_russia_to_germany_but_not_from_canada_to_the_us.html

President Biden blocked the Keystone pipeline from Canada to the U.S., ostensibly due to environmental concerns and claims about global warming, even though the long planned project had cleared all environmental hurdles.

Yet the Biden State department just effectively approved an energy pipeline from Russia to Germany.

According to the Wall Street Journal:

The State Department in a report to Congress didn’t name new companies as targets for sanctions related to an $11 billion pipeline designed to transmit Russian natural gas to Germany, allowing work on the pipeline to continue unabated for now.

Some Republican lawmakers criticized the State Department over the Nord Stream 2 report, which was required by Congress, and both Republicans and a key Democrat requested an explanation of the administration’s position.

Count that as a win for pipelines — for others, just not us.  The rest of the press is focusing on Biden making his “decisions,” but with this news, the direction of this administration is clear.

It is clear that jobs in Europe and Russia are more important to Biden than jobs in the United States.  Energy from fossil fuels is also OK in Europe, just not here.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Brexit Diary: As BoJo Waffles, Tory ‘Dinosaurs’ Turn on His Fiancée By Stephen MacLean

Posted By on February 25th, 2021

https://www.nysun.com/foreign/brexit-diary-as-bojo-waffles-on-policy-critics/91429/

Not since the days of Benjamin Disraeli has a prime minister’s wife been cause for such conversation as has Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s fiancée. “Is Carry Symonds really a Downing Street manipulator — or a shrewd supportive partner?” asks the headline in the Times, though the Mirror suggests merely that she has become the prime ministerial hair-dresser who finally tamed the PM’s unruly mop.

I offer the comparison to Mary Anne Disraeli because Dizzy’s wife was quite the story in her day. In her case it was more bemusement — as with, say, Denis Thatcher, husband to Margaret — than hostility. Dizzy declared of his own wife, “She is an excellent creature,” with one of his few complaints being that “she never can remember which came first, the Greeks or the Romans.”

Mrs. Disraeli, accompanying her husband to Westminster on the eve of a great debate, managed to get her finger caught in the carriage door and, though the pain was great, “went on chatting and laughing as if nothing had happened, lest his concern for her should prevent him from doing his best.” Assessed Dizzy at another point: “We have been married thirty-three years, and she has never given me a dull moment.”

The current controversy concerning BoJo’s fiancée, Carrie Symonds, is far less comical — or dull. One leading Tory think tank, the Bow Group, is calling for a “judicial review and inquiry” to look into the influence wielded by Ms. Symonds in affairs at Downing Street. “Symonds is unelected, unappointed, and unaccountable,” the Group asserted in a statement, and “has no constitutional powers to hold any role in governing the UK.”

Among the issues raised by the Bow Group, according to Breitbart London, is Ms. Symonds’ role in hirings and firings of officials and in forming Government policy. “The public take a very dim view of cronyism,” Bow’s chairman, Ben Harris-Quinney, contends; “democracy in Britain is and must always be sacred, and no one should be involved in running our country without accountability to the people.”

FOREIGN POLICY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Pompeo: China’s Reckless Labs Put the World at Risk By Jim Geraghty

Posted By on February 25th, 2021

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/pompeo-chinas-reckless-labs-put-the-world-at-risk/

In today’s Wall Street Journal op-ed page, former secretary of state Mike Pompeo, along with Miles Yu, his top China policy adviser write that “China’s Reckless Labs Put the World at Risk,” and come right up to the line of outright declaring that the coronavirus pandemic is the result of an accident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Pompeo and Yu don’t point to any new or smoking-gun evidence, but they do point to a few pieces of circumstantial evidence that haven’t gotten much attention. Perhaps most notably, the op-ed column declares, “in January 2021, the State Department confirmed that people had fallen mysteriously ill at WIV in fall 2019, and that WIV conducts secret bioweapons research with the PLA.”

This echoes the fact sheet issued by the department that began with the cautionary note that the U.S government did not know how the virus first jumped into humans, but then continued, “The U.S. government has reason to believe that several researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses.”

This past Sunday, President Trump’s former deputy national-security adviser, Matt Pottinger, said on CBS News’ Face the Nation:

We have very strong reason to believe that the Chinese military was doing secret classified animal experiments in that same laboratory, going all the way back to at least 2017. We have good reason to believe that there was an outbreak of flu-like illness among researchers working in the Wuhan Institute of Virology in the fall of 2019, but right — immediately before the first documented cases came to light.

China signed the Biological Weapons Convention in 1984, which outlaws the development, production, acquisition, transfer, stockpiling, and use of biological weapons.

China claims that it is in complete compliance with the BWC; the U.S. government disagrees. In 2019, the U.S. State Department’s updated report on compliance with arms-control agreements concluded,

the People’s Republic of China engaged during the reporting period in biological activities with potential dual-use applications, which raises concerns regarding its compliance with the BWC. In addition, the United States does not have sufficient information to determine whether China eliminated its assessed biological warfare program, as required under Article II of the Convention.

EDUCATION, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Equity = Inequality, Discrimination and Mediocrity The fixation on equity is a loser for all concerned. By Larry Sand

Posted By on February 25th, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/02/24/equity-inequality-discrimination-and-mediocrity/

At the same time that the indoctrination of American students continues to work its way through the schools, its evil twin “equity” is advancing right along with it. As the race-obsessed Ibram X. Kendi explains, equity exists when “two or more racial groups are standing on a relatively equal footing.” In other words, if 10 percent of white kids are in a school’s gifted program, equity demands that 10 percent of black kids are also included. Kendi also claims, “There is no such thing as a nonracist or race-neutral policy.” The terms “equality” and “quality” are nowhere to be found in the equity playbook.

The gaslighting here is palpable. What Kendi is apparently saying is that we must discriminate to put an end to (alleged) discrimination. But, insane or not, this is what is happening throughout much of the country. In reliably woke San Francisco, the top-rated Lowell High School will no longer admit students based on their academic performance. Instead, the school will use a lottery to admit its students. This will, of course, discriminate against Asian students who make up 50.6 percent of its student body.

Similarly, in New York City, the gifted and talented program has been deemed unfair. Mayor Bill de Blasio and his equally reprehensible schools chancellor Richard Carranza insist that the testing program is unjust because the students who wind up in the program “don’t reflect the diversity of the city’s population.”

HISTORY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Denial of Evil Why it’s a moral obligation to know what communism did – and does. Dennis Prager

Posted By on February 25th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/denial-evil-dennis-prager/

One of the most highly regarded books of the 20th century was Ernest Becker’s “The Denial of Death.” Winner of the 1974 Pulitzer Prize, the book is regarded as a classic for its analysis of how human beings deny their mortality.

But there is something people deny more than mortality: evil. Someone should write a book on the denial of evil; that would be much more important because while we cannot prevent death, we can prevent evil.

The most glaring example of the denial of evil is communism, an ideology that, within a period of only 60 years, created modern totalitarianism and deprived of human rights, tortured, starved and killed more people than any other ideology in history.

Why people ignore, or even deny, communist evil is the subject of a previous column as well as a Prager University video, “Why Isn’t Communism as Hated as Nazism?” I will, therefore, not address that question here.

I will simply lay out the facts.

But before I do, I need to address another question: Why is it important that everyone know what communism did?

Here are three reasons:

First, we have a moral obligation to the victims not to forget them. Just as Americans have a moral obligation to remember the victims of American slavery, we have the same obligation to the billion victims of communism, especially the 100 million who were murdered.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Democrats Turn the Thumbscrews to Make Us Suffer Tormenting us with our perpetual imaginary sins. Don Feder

Posted By on February 25th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/democrats-turn-thumbscrews-make-us-suffer-don-feder/

Everything the Democrat Party does should be seen not from an economic or a political perspective, but one of sin and suffering — the suffering it imposes on us to expiate our imagery sins.

It came to me in a flash of insight when I heard of a now-disgraced bureaucrat (“an undersecretary of climate change” in Massachusetts) who told a gathering of his colleagues that to fight melting ice caps and rising sea levels  they would have to “break the will” of ordinary Americans, by “turning the screws” — raising energy costs so high that they would have to “stop emitting.” Admirable candor from a functionary of the state with the soul of a Medieval torturer.

But it goes beyond the need to make us obey. Progressives believe Americans must be made to atone for our sins (environmental, racial, economic and national) with higher taxes and energy costs, a lower standard of living, crime, open borders, racial humiliation and national dissolution.

It’s not a power-grab as much as an attempt to force a sort of secular Calvinism on the nation.

Global Warming – Our sins here include the internal combustion engine and reliance on fossil fuel, leading to CO2 emissions said to cause depletion of the earth’s ozone layer.

FOREIGN POLICY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

As Iran plays chicken with Biden, it also moves closer to the bomb By Lazar Berman

Posted By on February 25th, 2021

https://www.timesofisrael.com/as-iran-plays-chicken-with-biden-it-also-moves-closer-to-the-bomb/

Tehran appears to be jockeying for position ahead of nuke deal talks by blackballing inspectors and threatening to increase enrichment, but the posturing carries dangerous risks.

With each step Iran takes to advance its nuclear program, a path out of the dangerous quagmire becomes even more murky.

On Tuesday, Tehran officially suspended its implementation of the Non-Proliferation Treaty Additional Protocol, which gave nuclear inspectors increased access to Iran’s nuclear program, including the ability to carry out snap inspections at undeclared sites.

“As of midnight tonight, we will not have… commitments beyond safeguards. Necessary orders have been issued to the nuclear facilities,” said Kazem Gharibabadi, Iran’s envoy to international organizations in Vienna.

A day earlier Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei said that Tehran could enrich uranium to 60% purity if it so desired. US State Department spokesman Ned Price said the comment “sounds like a threat” and referred to it as “posturing.”

Analysts believe both the move to limit inspections and the enrichment threat are aimed at bolstering Iran’s negotiating position as it and US President Joe Biden’s administration maneuver ahead of expected talks aimed at bringing Washington back into the 2015 nuclear deal. But even if intended as bargaining chips, they carry the risk of moving Iran significantly closer to nuclear weapons capabilities.

FOREIGN POLICY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Iranian Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi Speaks A sobering caution to Biden on his path with Iran. Thu Feb 25, 2021 Joseph Puder

Posted By on February 25th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/iranian-crown-prince-reza-pahlavi-speaks-joseph-puder/

Iranian Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi isn’t likely to return to his homeland anytime soon. Nor, for that matter, is he likely to succeed his deposed father Mohammad Reza as Shah of Iran in the foreseeable future. Nevertheless, if Iran is to be liberated from its oppressive, radical, and messianic Ayatollahs regime, Reza Pahlavi would be considered a natural contender to serve as a future Iranian head of state. With a large supportive Iranian expatriate constituency in Los Angeles and in Europe, he is the obvious leader of the Iranian exile opposition to the Islamic Republic of the Ayatollahs.  

Reza Pahlavi was born on October 31, 1960, and married Yasmine Etemad-Amini in 1986. They have three daughters and reside in Bethesda, Maryland. In 1980, shortly after his father’s death and on his 20th birthday, Reza Pahlavi, declared himself to be the new Shah of Iran – Reza Shah II. The Jimmy Carter administration declined to recognize him, and instead recognized the Islamic Republic led by Ayatollah Khomeini.

In his address to the International Society of Human Rights, on March 27, 2010, Reza Pahlavi declared: “Since the establishment of the clerical regime in Iran, both democracy and human rights have been grossly compromised. Not only did the people not gain political freedom, which some may have thought would be attained as a result of the ‘Islamic Revolution,’ but sadly they ended up losing practically all of the social freedoms which have been attained and enjoyed for a long time, particularly since the advent of the Constitutional Revolution at the turn of the 20th Century.”

Honored with the Champion of Jewish Values International Awards Gala in New York on May 5th, 2016, Reza Pahlavi stated: “But while Iran has this proud history, my own compatriots have been held hostage for 37 years by a clerical regime that abuses the very notion of freedom. Since I left my beloved Iran, I have dedicated my life to fighting for my compatriots’ freedom and their human rights. I do appreciate the fact that, by recognizing my efforts, you have demonstrated your care and concern about the plight of the millions of Iranians who have suffered under the repression of the clerical regime ruling my homeland.”