RUTHFULLY YOURS

Short of impeachment, there is really nothing Congress can do.

You’re not going to like this.

Our commander-in-chief is recklessly releasing jihadists from Guantanamo Bay. The president’s Bush-deranged base is buoyed by the all-out effort to fulfill his vow to shut down the detention camp. But the vast majority of Americans remain opposed, and increasingly alarmed. The pace of releases has surged since November’s midterm elections, with over two-dozen detainees sprung — aiding the enemy even as the terror threat intensifies.

But if you want it stopped, the president has to be impeached.

Yes, yes, I know you don’t want to hear that. I have the scars to prove it. A few months back, Beltway Republicans got even more annoyed than Obama Democrats when my book, Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama’s Impeachment, was published. Contrary to what you’d infer from all the shrieking, I actually argued that it would be a big mistake to impeach President Obama absent strong public support for his removal. And as I conceded, that level of public support does not exist and never will exist unless a compelling political case for impeachment is made.

The Left’s Islamophobia obsession shows the extent to which victimology dominates our politics.

Dear Reader (including my Twitter followers who are just scanning this for the hidden glottal stops),

So Charlie Hebdo is selling like hot cakes, giving new meaning to the Profit Mohammed. And, just as I suspected, the images are pissing off lots of Muslims who aren’t terrorists. And, again just as I suspected, the New York Times et al. can’t help but make that the real story. No doubt millions of people hashtagging “Je Suis Charlie” were sincere — or thought they were — but the real reason that slogan spread into nearly every ideological quarter is that sympathizing, empathizing, and leeching off the moral status of victims is the only thing that unites Western societies these days. Celebrating winners is divisive. How long did it take for the Sharptonians to leap on the Oscar nominations?

The Islamists of Boko Haram rage through northeastern Nigeria [1] with kidnappings, suicide bombings and last week’s mass murder in the town of Baga, acquiring turf in ways that some top-notch experts are comparing to ISIS [1] — with which Boko Haram has a flourishing kinship. Hashtags on Twitter have done nothing to stop this horror, and it gets ever harder to see who or what will. But if there’s one thing that is assuredly not needed, it’s the advice of Kofi Annan. You remember Kofi: former secretary-general of the United Nations from 1997-2006, and joint winner with the UN of the 2001 Nobel Peace Prize.

Annan’s public career should have ended along with his tenure at the UN (or even earlier). But, like another of the Nobel’s more dubious Peace laureates, Jimmy Carter, Annan just keeps turning up, perpetually ready to dispense terrible advice about the next crisis. Right on cue, here he is, telling the BBC [2] that politicians have to find a way to “reach out” [3] to Boko Haram.

Let’s be clear. Boko Haram is not a group of sensitive souls desperate to surrender to politicians or international bureaucrats who come bearing gifts and professing an interest in their grievances. These are terrorists who have been doing quite well for themselves with guns, bombs, abduction, invasion and slaughter. A few days ago they strapped a bomb vest to a girl who may have been as young as 10, and sent her as a suicide bomber [4] into a busy market, to die in an explosion that killed some 20 others. Like ISIS, they are carving out turf for themselves in ways that suggest ambitions unlikely to be addressed by diplomatic group therapy.

The jihadist killing spree in Paris last week (seventeen people murdered, twice as many wounded) has been described as ”France’s 9/11“ by Le Monde, the French liberal daily newspaper. Indeed, just like the American 9/11 fourteen years ago, it was a moment of truth: for France as a nation, for the French political class and — last but certainly not least — for French Jews. The question, however, is not so much whether one sees the truth or not, but rather what one is supposed to do once truth has been seen.

America’s instincts after its own 9/11 were sound: it understood that it was in a state of war and that it had to react accordingly, but it wavered about what war to wage and what strategy to follow. As a result, the War On Terror, in spite of considerable American and Western investment, pugnacity, and heroism, has been largely inconclusive and even, in many respects, a failure. Likewise, whatever the emotional or philosophical impact of the present French 9/11, either in France or abroad, it is not clear whether it will translate — or can translate — into adequate policies.

The carnage in France that left 17 people dead has Europeans rightly regarding these latest outrages by Islamic fanatics as direct assaults on their nation’s secular culture and the Western way of life. Finally, many came to recognise that hard-won freedoms – free speech and the right to offend most of all – are at grave risk. The sincerity of protesters who filled the streets in sympathy with the Charlie Hebdo martyrs cannot be doubted, but what took them so long? French Jews have endured years of escalating assaults on their synagogues, businesses, even their children, but these outrages seem not to have bothered fellow Frenchmen until the terror went mainstream.

Some three million French men and women demonstrated their outrage at the latest butchery, many carrying those small signs which read je suis Charlie. Some would have been more honest if they had hung other notifications around their necks. It would have been a single word: “Hypocrite!”

Take French President Francoise Hollande, as our first example. There he was, walking in the front row of the huge Paris rally organised in defence of liberte, egalite, fraternite. Yet he owes his election in no small measure to the country’s ten million Muslim voters, who support him overwhelmingly. And why wouldn’t they? He campaigned on promises of higher social welfare payments, also vowing to make it much easier for those of Tunisian, Algerian and Moroccan origins to settle their families in France. And just to cement the backing of Muslim voters, he pledged the right to vote for immigrants who are not yet citizens. Now what is the French word for pandering?

Prophecy was not one of the then-Beatle’s gifts, but he might well have been thinking of Russell Brand when he sang of “making all his nowhere plans for nobody”. Two pop-culture icons — one who found his feet, after a fashion, versus another lost in the incoherence of an egomaniacal self-esteem
Russell Brand has chosen the red pill. Few, though, have imbibed more blue pills than Russell – celebrity sex, celebrity drugs, celebrity performances, celebrity morals, celebrity worship, celebrity hubris, celebrity wealth and celebrity marriage to Katy Perry. But the blissful ignorance of illusion is now behind him. The red pill has “awoken” him, and in his post-delirium state Brand is Neo, modern-day messiah on a mission to rescue humanity from the Matrix (or Late Capitalism).

The last celebrity with such an overweening messianic complex was John Lennon (1940-80). According to Pete Shotton and Nicholas Schaffner’s bio In My Life (1983), in the early hours of Saturday, May 18, 1968, a cross-legged, elegantly wasted Lennon experienced an epiphany. “I think I’m Jesus Christ. I’m…back again,” announced Lennon, waving both arms in the air and making slow, swirling actions with his outspread hands. Pete Shotton, boyhood friend and constant companion in the brief interlude between the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and Yoko Ono, had just shared a piece of LSD and smoked some joints with the famous Beatle, but his rejoinder was pithy enough: “Don’t you think being John Lennon is enough?”

Most of all, we failed to extend our hand of solidarity to those brave Muslim men and women who dared to defy the radical elements within their own communities.

The Western school systems have brought forth a generation that that, by taking the gifts of these freedoms for granted, has failed to learn how irregular in history they are, that the heavy price that was paid by generations gone by to secure them.

Instead of passing on this flame of enlightenment and freedom to the Muslim world, we have undermined it at home.

If we fail to stand up for our values, nobody else will.

More hearts of Western civilization have been targeted and hit. First, armed gunmen entered the Paris office of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo last week and killed 12 people, to impose their understanding of Sharia on the French. Then, the German newspaper Hamburger Morgenpost, which had the courage to reprint the cartoons, was firebombed on January 10.

According to the Washington Post, weapons and ammunition are in such short supply at the centers where Iraqi army units receive training to fight ISIS that the trainees are yelling “bang-bang” instead of shooting.

Last August, when President Obama announced that the U.S. would undertake a mostly proxy war against ISIS, I would have said that yelling “bang-bang” is the perfect metaphor for his anti-terrorism campaign. Today, whispering “bang-bang” is more like it.

Iraq, where trainees lack weapons and ammunition, is the site of America’s most robust anti-terrorist activity. Elsewhere, our efforts are even more pathetic. The Post’s editors write:

In Libya, the job of stemming an incipient civil war has been left to a feckless U.N. mediator, even though the Islamic State is known to be operating at least one training camp with hundreds of recruits.

In Nigeria, where a new offensive by the Boko Haram movement has overrun much of one northeastern state, a U.S. military training program was recently canceled by the government following a dispute over arms sales.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2015/01/strangest-diplomatic-initiative-ever-youve-got-a-friend.php
Let’s cut Kerry a little slack. In Vietnam he was apparently shot in the butt…and in esoteric cases that injury could result in brain damage….rsk
Strangest Diplomatic Initiative Ever: You’ve Got a Friend!

The administration has acknowledged that it erred by not participating in a meaningful way in the giant pro-free speech demonstration in Paris, so it has tried to make amends by sending John Kerry to France. Apparently thinking that he needed reinforcements to convey a full sense of the administration’s symbolic support, Kerry brought along…James Taylor.

For you youngsters, Taylor is a folk musician whom people our age listened to in 1970–a mere 45 years ago. Here is Taylor performing “You’ve Got a Friend” while Kerry looks on in a state of acute discomfort. Don’t feel obliged to watch to the end; I didn’t:

God only knows what the French made of this. Maybe James Taylor is still popular there, like Jerry Lewis. Before we mercifully draw down the curtain on this episode, let’s turn the floor over to the genius of Iowahawk, on Twitter:

During this week’s Golden Globes ceremony, Hollywood made numerous gestures in support of our freedom of expression. Referencing the computer hack of Sony Pictures in response to the film “The Interview” and the horrific murders at the French magazine, Charlie Hebdo, Hollywood voiced support for fearlessly standing up for the right to insult. It is now time for Hollywood to act courageously by creating films that authentically portray the life of Islam’s Prophet Mohammad.

Opinion leaders need not get lost in balancing rights to criticize, satirize and insult with our natural calls for civility and responsible dialogue. No civilized Westerner can argue against truth and its pursuit. U.S. defamation law generally holds truth as a complete defense. It is a noble cause in itself and justice is intended to flow from it.

With Islam’s Sharia law, however, truth, like non-Muslims themselves, is subordinate to the primacy of Islam and Mohammad. Defending Mohammad’s pre-eminence at all costs has deeply implanted “war is deceit,” taqiyya and other forms of dissimulation throughout Islam; avenging the Prophet, as seen in the Hebdo murders, is Sharia’s justice.

There simply is no way to understand Islam without full comprehension of Mohammad’s life. Islam declares Mohammad the best of all Muslims; therefore a seriously engaged Muslim looks to Mohammad’s life for the best guidance on how to be a “good” Muslim. And because Mohammad is also the self-declared final prophet, no one can come after him to change, reform, or revolutionize Islam. The Quran, unlike the Bible, is not made up of stories. Rather, it comprises the words of Allah, and its verses are presented non-chronologically based on length. The Hadith, the vast collections of sayings and acts of Mohammad, also lack any context. Neither can be meaningfully understood except against the background of Mohammad’s life.