RUTHFULLY YOURS

At first, last week’s shooting in a Boston parking lot of a man wielding a knife sounded as though it would become another story of the police overreacting. On Friday federal authorities in Boston said the dead man was the ringleader of a plot to behead American citizens or kill Massachusetts cops, in solidarity with Islamic State. The risk of “lone-wolf” terror attacks in the U.S. continues.

Federal prosecutors in Boston also arrested two other men and charged them with helping the dead assailant, Usaamah Abdullah Rahim. The authorities said that Nicholas Rovinski, who calls himself Nuh Amriki, and David Wright, known as Dawud Sharif Abdul Khaliq, intended to behead Pamela Geller, who staged a Mohammed cartoon show in Texas. The plans changed when Rahim decided instead to go after the police.

House Democrats pulled off a mutiny against President Obama on Friday and absconded with his trade bill as a hostage. Republicans will launch a rescue mission next week, but this astonishing fiasco could inflict lasting economic and strategic harm on the U.S.

Mr. Obama began the day by paying a rare, unannounced visit to Capitol Hill for an emergency closed-door pep rally with House Democrats, which was in retrospect a bad omen. His talk was reportedly well received at first but then he advised the caucus that “a vote against trade is a vote against me,” while Democrat Peter DeFazio of Oregon noted that the President “tried to guilt people and impugn their integrity.” In other words, it was a vintage Obama performance.

With less than three weeks to go before the P5+1 countries are slated to finalize the framework for a nuclear deal with Iran, an examination of where things stand today is in order.

The good news is that the regime in Tehran, ruled by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is not likely to sign the agreement it ostensibly reached with the U.S., the U.K., France, Russia, China and Germany on April 2 in Lausanne.

The bad news is that U.S. President Barack Obama would rather risk having a mushroom cloud explode over the Middle East than let his fantasy of a diplomatic solution to global jihad go up in smoke.

None of this comes as a surprise. Obama’s dream of achieving a nuclear deal with the Islamic republic has been almost as great as his obsession with forcing Israel to establish a Palestinian state. And in each case, the fact that the realities on the ground make it impossible is of no consequence to him.

The UK’s Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, Sajid Javid, who as his name suggests is, incidentally, of Muslim heritage (see my earlier post about him here), has delivered a fine speech to at the awards ceremony of UK Israel Business, in which he unequivocally condemns BDS.

‘Good evening, and shalom aleichem.

It’s a great pleasure to be with you tonight to celebrate the ties between our countries, and the very best of UK and Israel business.

Golda Meir said that Israelis only have one complaint about Moses.

That he led the Jews through the desert for 40 years – then finally stopped at the one place in the Middle East that doesn’t have any oil!

But I guess necessity is the mother of invention. Because over the past 67 years, Israel really has made business bloom in the barren desert.

It’s one of the many reasons I have long admired the country. I’ve travelled there extensively, both for business and with family. And over the years I’ve taken a great interest in its affairs. Because the values that have made Israel such a success are values that matter a great deal to me.

I share Israel’s love for freedom and democracy. I admire its tenacious determination when the odds are stacked against it. [Emphasis added here and below]

And, like millions of Israelis, I have a mother who’s still waiting for me to get a proper job!

So we have a lot in common. And that’s why I’m heartened at the growth of British and Israeli trade links.

Business has always been a part of my life, not just the 20 years I spent in international banking, but the heart and soul of my childhood, growing up in a small flat above the family shop.

And throughout that time I’ve seen how business can do a great many things.

It doesn’t just provide jobs and local growth. It lifts individuals, communities and even countries up to be the best they can be.

That’s why tonight we should celebrate the ever-closer business links between Britain and Israel.

In this, his latest article, Sydney lawyer and international affairs analyst David Singer, finding inspiration in a poem, considers the topic “Beating the BDS Jew-Haters”.
He writes:

Recently, a group of 52 Harvard students – of all backgrounds and faiths – visited Israel for 10 days during the Harvard Israel Trek 2015 Sometimes the impact of such a trip cannot be expressed in prose – but can only be captured in poetry.

What follows is a poem – posted on the Harvard trek blog by Oliver Marjot – a British PhD candidate studying Medieval Latin at Harvard – that reflects his transformative experience. Oliver expected that the Trek would confirm his reasonable European certainty of Israel’s arrogant oppression. That’s not quite the way things turned out.

Oliver’s Poem eloquently answers those who continue their vicious attempts to denigrate and delegitimize Israel by exhorting the boycott and isolation of Israel, its people, products, commercial enterprises, medical breakthroughs, academics and artists:

“To my newfound Love,

I came to you, Israel, wanting to hate you. To be confirmed in my reasonable European certainty of your arrogant oppression, lounging along the Mediterranean coast, facing West in your vast carelessness and American wealth. I wanted to appreciate your history, but tut over the arrogant folly of your present. I wanted to cross my arms smugly, and shake my head over you, and then leave you to fight your unjust wars.

I wanted to take from you. To steal away some spiritual satisfaction, and sigh and pray, and shake my head over your spiritual folly as well. To see the sad spectacle of the Western wall, and bitterly laugh at your backward-looking notion that God sits high on Moriah Mount, distant and approachable. I wanted to smirk in my Protestant confidence, knowing that God is with me, even if you refuse to turn to him, standing instead starting blankly at a wall of cold stone, pushing scribbled slips of paper into the Holy mountain, not daring to raise your face, and ask with words.

The West faces a coordinated attack on a global scale. If its governments are to confront and defeat the external and domestic enemy, the first step must be to recognise that Islamic terror adheres to the same means and methods as those embraced and perfected by earlier generations of revolutionaries
Is there a Jihadist International? Is there a co-ordinating agency behind the relentless campaign of terror being waged against Western societies? Governments resist this conclusion, frightened by its implications and the thought that they might actually have to do something about it, standing up to the entrenched hegemony of the Left in the ALP, the Greens, academia, the judiciary, and the media.

Its bloodthirsty fanatics had a better business model than the other bloodthirsty fanatics.

First, the good news: It turns out that President Obama was right. Al-Qaeda is being destroyed. One could even say he deserves some credit for this happy turn of events.

Which brings us to the bad news: Al-Qaeda is dying out because it’s being replaced by something far worse.

According to a fascinating report in the Guardian, two of al-Qaeda’s leading clerics say that the Islamic State has all but destroyed its parent organization. Basically, people in the market for jihad think the Islamic State offers the best product on the market.

It’s ironic. For a decade, terror analysts marveled about how creative al-Qaeda was. Lawrence Wright, in his gripping account of the rise of al-Qaeda, The Looming Tower, writes that Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri deliberately set out to bring the best practices of the business world to religiously fueled terror and carnage. Al-Qaeda’s jihadis got paid vacations, round-trip tickets home to visit family, health care, etc. They saved huge money on retirement gifts, since Allah promised to provide 72 virgins at the end of a productive career in lieu of a gold watch.

In the foreword to his classic book Amusing Ourselves to Death, the cultural critic Neil Postman proposed that it was Aldous Huxley, and not George Orwell, who had more accurately foreseen the tribulations of the future. “Orwell,” Postman reflected, “feared those who would deprive us of information.” Huxley, by contrast, “feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism.” The likely consequences of these prognostications were, necessarily, divergent. “Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us,” Postman submitted. But “Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.” In the early years of the 21st century, it is tough to mount a solid counterargument against Huxley’s supposition. 1984 may be often cited by critics of linguistic corruption and security theater, but it ultimately forecast a landscape that is ascetic and austere and, in truth, wholly unfamiliar to us. In fact, our present arrangement is quite the inverse of that imagined by Orwell. In 2015, stimulation is quotidian and ubiquitous. Information is cheap. Choice is the happy norm. And the truth is a luxury not of the well connected, but of the astute.

As Wisconsin governor, Scott Walker has demonstrated solid leadership qualities.

As Scott Walker appears to be preparing a bid for the 2016 Republican nomination, he has been suggesting that his time spent as governor of Wisconsin demonstrates some leadership qualities that would be useful in a commander-in-chief. Critics reply that Walker’s gubernatorial experience is irrelevant to the presidency. President Obama himself has chimed in, saying that Walker needs to “bone up” on foreign policy.

But Walker has a point. Here’s why.

Obviously, any plausible candidate for president needs to familiarize himself with a broad range of international issues. And that is exactly what Walker has been doing over the past few months. But while issue familiarity is necessary, it is not sufficient. Other indispensable qualities include a right sense of current international challenges and a demonstrated readiness to exercise strong leadership. And here, Obama is in no position to criticize the Republican governor.

President Obama has now spent more than six years retrenching American power overseas, trying to accommodate multiple international adversaries, and focusing above all on the achievement of a sweeping domestic liberal legacy. It hasn’t worked. The main result has been an even more bloated and dysfunctional welfare state, combined with an expansion of international security challenges for the United States. Russia, China, Iran, al-Qaeda affiliates, and the Islamic State have all advanced in dramatic ways against American allies. Far from questioning his own foreign-policy premises, however, Obama seems annoyed by any suggestion that something might be wrong with them.

Australia’s Prime Minister Tony Abbott has warned a regional counter terrorism summit that Islamic State terrorists are coming with a “simple message, submit or die.”

Speaking in the New South Wales state capital Sydney, he said: “Daesh [IS] is coming, if it can, for every person and for every government with a simple message: ‘Submit or die’. You can’t negotiate with an entity like this, you can only fight it.

“This is not terrorism for a local grievance, this is terrorism with global ambitions.”