RUTHFULLY YOURS

Wake Up: It’s War By Quin Hillyer

The Islamic State has chemical weapons. And its leaders are furious — and determined, in their fury, to use those murderous weapons to huge effect.

The reason they are furious is not that Israel continues to (allegedly) mistreat Palestinians. Instead, the Islamic State is angry because Israel and the Palestinians are finally about to announce a lasting peace. The Islamic State doesn’t want Arabs to make peace with Israel; it wants Israel, and all Jews, to cease to exist. And it wants to kill anybody and everybody who enables peace, and anybody and everybody who stands in the way of a widespread, eventually global, caliphate.

The conflagration is about to begin.

No, this isn’t some investigative news report. It’s the scenario in the latest book by bestselling novelist Joel Rosenberg, an American Evangelical Christian of Jewish heritage who is a former campaign consultant for Steve Forbes and Benjamin Netanyahu. Rosenberg was part of a delegation in Israel, headed by former U.S. senator Rick Santorum, that I joined last summer during the series of Palestinian rocket attacks. During the trip, Rosenberg impressed me with his broad and deep knowledge of Middle East affairs; to an uncanny degree, his novels seem to be ripped from current headlines even though he writes them well in advance of the events that warrant such headlines.

From the murder of the Israeli athletes in the Munich Olympics in 1972, through the murder of 5 rabbis at prayer in 2014, the Palestinian cause has been driven by TERROR. In his latest Firewall Bill Whittle discusses their domestic front — Students for Justice in Palestine. See the video and transcript below:

TRANSCRIPT:

Hi everybody. I’m Bill Whittle and this is the Firewall.

I remember the first time I heard the world “Palestinian.” I was thirteen years old. The 1972 Munich Olympics were coming to an end, and I had been fascinated by American swimmer Mark Spitz and his seven gold medals, and had a big crush, for some reason, on Russia Gymnast Olga Korbut.

You’re still a boy at 13 – or I was, anyway. And when the first reports came in that Israeli athletes had been taken hostage by a Palestinian Group called Black September, I remember clearly having what seemed like a very adult idea at the time: namely, that I had thought the entire idea of the Olympics was based on the ancient idea of a truce; that enemies could take two weeks off and come together and compete at sports instead of hacking each other to death. It seemed a good an honorable thing to do. Who breaks a truce held under a burning flame? Wasn’t that the entire purpose of lighting and then extinguishing the flame – that was the duration of the cease-fire? Wasn’t the burning fire symbolic of sanctuary from violence, if only for a few days?

The jihadist murderers are dead, after killing five more Parisians, but many Westerners, long drugged by bad ideas and received wisdom, continue to sleepwalk through the war against jihadism. This means that after all the brave words and feel-good marches, little significant action will be taken to prevent such atrocities from happening again.

In the absence of clear thinking and recognition of fact, responses to this latest example of Muslim violence reflect ideological fever dreams. “Nothing to do with the Muslim religion,” as French president François Holland said of the attacks, is a perennial favorite. Such apologists invoke shopworn Marxist bromides like colonialism, or postmodern magical thinking like “Orientalism,” the two-bit Foucauldian invention of Egyptian-American literary critic and fabulist Edward Said. This was the tack taken by an American historian of Egypt who told a New York Times reporter that Islam was “’just a veneer’” for [jihadist] anger at the dysfunctional Arab states left behind by colonial powers and the ‘Orientalist’ condescension many Arabs still feel from the West.”

For many apologists, though, it’s just easier to call the jihadists “crazy.” Here’s Vox’s Ezra Klein, long-time purveyor of progressive orthodoxy, opining on the Paris murders. He fingers “the madness of the perpetrators, who did something horrible and evil that almost no human beings anywhere ever do, and the condemnation doesn’t need to be any more complex than saying unprovoked mass slaughter is wrong.”

PROTESTERS around the West, horrified by the massacre in Paris, have held up pens and chanted “Je suis Charlie” — I am Charlie.

They lie. The Islamist terrorists are winning, and the coordinated attacks on the Charlie Hebdo magazine and kosher shop will be just one more success. One more step to our gutless surrender.

Al-Qaeda in Yemen didn’t attack Charlie Hebdo because we are all Charlie Hebdo.

The opposite. It sent in the brothers Cherif and Said Kouachi because Charlie Hebdo was almost alone.

Unlike most politicians, journalists, lawyers and other members of our ruling classes, this fearless magazine dared to mock Islam in the way the Left routinely mocks Christianity. Unlike much of our ruling class, it refused to sell out our freedom to speak.

Its greatest sin — to the Islamists — was to republish the infamous cartoons of Denmark’s Jyllands-Posten which mocked Mohammed, and then to publish even more of its own, including one showing the Muslim prophet naked.

Are we really all Charlie? No, no and shamefully no.

No Australian newspaper dared published those pictures, too, bar one which did so in error.

The Obama administration three years ago even attacked Charlie Hebdo for publishing the naked Mohammed cartoon, saying it was “deeply offensive”.

President Barack Obama even told the United Nations “the future must not belong to those who slander the Prophet of Islam” and damned a YouTube clip “Innocence of Muslims” which did just that. The filmmaker was thrown in jail.

We are all Charlie?

“Incredibly, included in this list of august personages is Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who serves as chairman of the Palestinian Liberation Organization — one of the most notorious terrorist groups in the world.I thought it was a sick joke until I watched coverage of the march and there he was, grinning like a cat, marching in the first row.”

Forty world leaders, including British Prime Minister David Cameron, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu, marched with more than 700,000 Frenchman to remember the victims of the terrorist attacks on the newspaper Charlie Hebdo and the Jewish grocery store and “rise up” against Islamic extremism.

Incredibly, included in this list of august personages is Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who serves as chairman of the Palestinian Liberation Organization — one of the most notorious terrorist groups in the world.

I thought it was a sick joke until I watched coverage of the march and there he was, grinning like a cat, marching in the first row.

The White House didn’t send a representative higher than the U.S. ambassador to the massive unity march in Paris today, but did announce it would hold a summit on violent extremism.

There was no reason given for why President Obama or Vice President Biden weren’t sent to the rally. Neither had anything on their schedules. Secretary of State John Kerry went ahead with a previously planned India trip.

The only thing on Obama’s Monday schedule is welcoming the San Antonio Spurs to the White House.

Attorney General Eric Holder was in Paris for security meetings, but didn’t attend the march. Ambassador Jane Hartley went.

Fueling the Western paralysis in dealing with radical Islam is the late 20th century doctrine of multiculturalism.

Multiculturalism is one of those buzzwords that does not mean what it should. The ancient and generic Western study of many cultures is not multiculturalism. Rather, the trendy term promotes non-Western cultures to a status equal with or superior to Western culture largely to fulfill contemporary political agendas.

On college campuses, multiculturalism not so much manifests itself in the worthy interest in Chinese literature, Persian history, or hieroglyphics, but rather has become more a therapeutic exercise of exaggerating Western sins while ignoring non-Western pathologies to attract those who see themselves in some way as not part of the dominant culture.

Mosaic Magazine opened an important dimension in the old debate about Wagner’s anti-Semitism with Nathan Shields’ January essay, “Wagner and the Jews.” Shields argues that Wagner’s music itself has anti-Jewish implications, an important riposte to the usual excuse that Wagner harbored Jew-hatred despite his great artistry. Shields argues rather that Wagner’s anti-Semitism and his music are of the same ilk. That is a breakthrough, but only that: Shields, whose own music offers the sort of atonality that most modern listeners abhor, knows that something is amiss in Wagner’s music but does not know what it is. Now Edward Rothstein, a New York Times critic, has responded to Shields’ essay with a claim that Wagner’s anti-Semitism is “metaphysical.” That gets rather far afield. Wagner’s anti-Semitism is not “metaphysical” at all. It is musical, and must be understood in musical terms.

According to Vox’s Max Fisher, French celebrity intellectual Bernard-Henri Levy is a bigot who has an intellectual kinship with violent criminals. This columnist is not BHL’s most ardent admirer, but we’d nonetheless like to defend him against Fisher’s calumny.Fisher doesn’t mention Levy by name, but his is a broad indictment that certainly includes the Frenchman in its sweep. Fisher’s headline: “Stop Asking Muslims to Condemn Terrorism. It’s Bigoted and Islamophobic.” In today’s Wall Street Journal, Levy does just that:

Those whose faith is Islam must proclaim very loudly, very often and in great numbers their rejection of this corrupt and abject form of theocratic passion. Too often have we heard that France’s Muslims should be summoned to explain themselves. They don’t need to explain themselves, but they should feel called to express their tangible brotherhood with their massacred fellow citizens. In so doing, they would put to rest once and for all the lie of a spiritual commonality between their faith as they know it and that of the murderers.

They have the responsibility—the opportunity—before history and their own conscience to echo the “Not in our name!” with which Britain’s Muslims dissociated themselves last year from the Islamic State killers of journalist James Foley. But they also have the even more urgent duty to define their identity as sons and daughters of an Islam of tolerance and peace.

Here is Fisher’s objection:

This expectation we place on Muslims, to be absolutely clear, is Islamophobic and bigoted. The denunciation is a form of apology: an apology for Islam and for Muslims. The implication is that every Muslim is under suspicion of being sympathetic to terrorism unless he or she explicitly says otherwise. The implication is also that any crime committed by a Muslim is the responsibility of all Muslims simply by virtue of their shared religion.

This sort of thinking—blaming an entire group for the actions of a few individuals, assuming the worst about a person just because of their [sic] identity—is the very definition of bigotry. It is also, by the way, the very same logic that leads French non-Muslims, outraged by the Charlie Hebdo murders, to attack French mosques in hateful and misguided retaliation.

We’d agree that attacks on mosques are hateful and misguided. Apart from that, every word of the quoted passage is wrong.

On the fifth anniversary of the 7.0 magnitude earthquake in Port-au-Prince, Haiti remains a poster child for waste, fraud and corruption in the handling of aid. Nowhere is the bureaucratic ineptitude and greed harder to accept than at the 607-acre Caracol Industrial Park, a project launched by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton with U.S. taxpayer money, under the supervision of her husband Bill and his Clinton Foundation.

Between the State Department and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), which hands out grants to very poor countries thanks to U.S. generosity, hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent on this park in an attempt to attract apparel manufacturers. But the park is falling far short of the promises made to provide investors with necessary infrastructure. If things continue this way, frustrated investors will look for greener pastures.