Archive for the ‘History’ category

Happy Independence from ?? Day

July 3, 2016

Happy Independence from ?? Day, Dan Miller’s Blog, July 3, 2016

(The views expressed in this post represent my views but not necessarily those of Warsclerotic or its other editors. — DM)

How will Obama tell us to celebrate Independence Day tomorrow? Will He speak of Independence from The Dead Constitution? Independence from Islamophobia, or perhaps Independence for Safe Space Demanders? Let’s get ready to celebrate our own Independence Day tomorrow and then on November 8th.

Some get it, some don’t. Oh well. What difference does it make, Now? What difference will it make as Bill Whittle’s young American Fascists become government officials and increase their authority over us? We need to keep that from happening.

As Stephen Kruiser wrote at PJ Media, our great lefty “journalists” had to get into the game. One complained about the playing of God Bless America at sporting events. Gersh Kuntzman, somewhat reminiscent of Obama’s mentor Jeremiah Wright, wrote,

It’s time for God to stop blessing America during the seventh-inning stretch. Welcome to the July 4 holiday weekend — when once again, baseball fans will be assaulted by the saccharine-sweet non-anthem “God Bless America” at stadia all over this great land. But no matter which home team you root, root, root for, “God Bless America” should be sent permanently to the bench.

Oh well. Chuck him.

In a Los Angeles Times editorial, Mark Oppenheimer wrote about the National Flag:

I come from flag-ambivalent America. My neighborhood is peopled by gays and Jews, professors and social workers, and Catholics of the Dorothy Day persuasion. Yoga practitioners and yoga teachers. Vegetarians. Bicycling enthusiasts. We love the Fourth of July, with its long weekend, its parades, its backyard barbecues (veggie burgers available). It wouldn’t be Independence Day without flag bunting on floats, flags lining our Main Streets, flags adorning houses. But we aren’t much for patriotic symbolism the rest of the year. For us, it’s an article of faith that crude patriotism quickly turns on the underdog, the minority. We know how the flag is used to impose loyalty tests, which we find un-American.

And then, of course, there’s always the danger of fireworks. As Stephen Kruiser wrote in the PJ Media piece linked above,

Modern American leftists are emotionally constipated, offense-seeking, finger-wagging shrews who are motivated solely by the desire to make everyone else as miserable as they are. The really weird thing is that they are under the impression that it is the conservatives who are like that. They’re either in the midst of the longest-running collective psychotic break ever, or they know the truth about themselves and that merely compounds their misery. Puritans in the 1600s probably smiled more in a day than a crusading twenty-something American social justice warrior media hack will in a lifetime should he or she live to 100.

Much of our past is now deemed “racist” or otherwise too distressing to study and is therefore shuttered from K1-12 and much of academia. I guess some of us old farts will be able to remember and speak about bits and pieces of the past, at least until more of it is deemed offensive and therefore politically incorrect. Can we restore the study of actual American history in place of bland and inoffensive fabrications? We had better.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCUzD5eBTNU&list=PL6yPolYMK1lq89tvN91tzRe89G93ZMexl

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ArgMK2kAjzw

But how did any of them survive without welfare, Obamacare, free stuff, affirmative action, safe spaces, multiple government regulations, political correctness and the gloriously all-embracing peace of Islam? Come to think of it, how did any of them survive without the beneficent, ever-flowing help of Dear Leader Obama?

Can we — will we —  keep her that way?

Finally, Grandpa Jones

Will we kick out ol’ Dan Tucker, I mean Barack and Hillary, and make America right again this November? Let’s make November 8th our Independence From The Leftist-Obama-Clinton Debacle Day. It may well be our last chance.

Obama-Hillary-copy

Britain’s “Routine and Commonplace” Anti-Semitism

May 2, 2016

Britain’s “Routine and Commonplace” Anti-Semitism, Gatestone Institute, Richard Kemp and Jasper Reid, May 2, 2016

♦ Each of these politicians accused of anti-Semitism was voted into power by an electorate who knew exactly what their views were. Had they not held these views, they would not have been elected.

♦ “Anti-Semitism isn’t just tolerated in some sections of the British Muslim community; it’s routine and commonplace.” — Mehdi Hasan, British Muslim political journalist.

♦ The consequences of Western politicians’ continued weakness and appeasement are far greater than encouraging anti-Semitism and undermining the State of Israel. It is the fatal and irreversible descent of their own countries.

Battle-hardened British soldiers were moved to tears by the horrors they witnessed at the Nazi charnel house of Bergen-Belsen when they liberated the concentration camp in April 1945. Yet seventy years after thousands of troops fought and died to destroy the regime that murdered six million Jews, the scourge of anti-Semitism is again on the march across Europe.

In just one week, a British student leader, a Labour Party constituency MP, a London council leader, a member of Labour’s National Executive Committee and even Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn have all been accused of being mired in Jew-hatred.

It is the tip of the iceberg. Each of these people was voted into power by an electorate that knew exactly what their views were. Had they not held these views they would not have been elected.

All are on the political left, but the problem does not stop there. The cancer of Jew-hatred today spreads from right to left throughout European nations and in all supranational bodies including the European Union and the United Nations. It is led by politicians, human rights groups and the media, whose contorted worldview has contaminated ordinary people on a scale unimaginable possibly even to the arch-propagandist Dr. Josef Goebbels himself.

1575Seventy years after thousands of British troops fought and died to destroy the regime that murdered six million Jews, the scourge of anti-Semitism is again on the march. Left: A British soldier talks to an emaciated prisoner after the liberation of Bergen-Belsen in April 1945. Right: An anti-Israel protestor in London holds up a sign saying “Hitler you were right,” in July 2014.

In the 21st Century, outside the Middle East, it is hard to express hatred of Jews publicly. So Jew-haters everywhere have adopted a proxy: the Jewish state. Israel is the acceptable target of their hate. That is why Labour MP Naz Shah’s “solution,” with chilling echoes of Reinhard Heydrich, was to “transport” all the Jews out of Israel, with the obvious implication that this would be done forcibly and violently.

It is why National Union of Students President Malia Bouattia advocated violence against Israel and accused the international media of being “Zionist-led.” It is why Muhammed Butt, a London Labour council leader, shared a Facebook post denouncing Israel as “a terrorist state like ISIS.” It is why former London Mayor and Labour National Executive member Ken Livingstone sought to discredit Zionism by his assertion that Hitler supported it.

Where does all this hatred come from? Its long lineage begins with the Muslim prophet Muhammed and its modern form pre-dates Hitler. Back in the 1920s and 30s, murderous Arab gangs attacked Jewish communities in post-Ottoman, British Mandated Palestine and tried to drive them into the sea. They were stopped by Britain’s Captain Orde Wingate, who taught the Jews to defend themselves, fighting alongside British troops.

A few years later Amin al-Husseini, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, made a deal with Hitler to bring the final solution to the Middle East, but the German advance was halted in its tracks at El Alamein by General Montgomery’s Eighth Army. As soon as the State of Israel was established, 68 years ago this month, by resolution of the United Nations, five Arab armies fell on her with the intent of annihilation. They failed, and ever since have been trying to destroy the Jewish state by military assault and terrorism in all its forms.

Recognizing their collective inability to eliminate Jews from their historic homeland by force, the Arabs have waged a pernicious and all-pervading propaganda war to demonize the Jewish State. Their lies have included the blatant falsehoods that Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria are illegal under international law; that the Israeli government operates an oppressive apartheid state; that the IDF is strangling Gaza under an unprovoked and illegal siege; that successive Israeli administrations have been the sole obstacle to peace in the Middle East; and that Israeli security forces deliberately murder innocent Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.

Understanding that the might of the pen is magnified by the flash of the sword, the Palestinian leadership and their Iranian paymasters have frequently used violence to seize international attention. Provoking the Israelis into killing Palestinian people to ensure global condemnation was the true purpose behind the Gaza rocket wars and the recent wave of murderous knife attacks and car-rammings.

Why does the West pander to this religiously inspired hatred and bigotry? There are three fundamental reasons. First, Europe especially is consumed by imperial guilt. Those that are seen to have been historically oppressed and exploited can today do no wrong; Westerners must prostrate themselves at their feet.

Second, every European country depends on Arab oil for its continued existence and relishes the return of its petrodollars through arms sales and massive investment into their economies.

Third, Western governments understand the power of their ever-increasing Islamic populations. They fear the extremism of those who reject Western values and want to violently replace them with the ways of Islamic sharia law. And they calculate the mathematics of the Muslim vote at the ballot box.

They know that among these communities there is widespread and innate hatred of Jews and of Israel. Mehdi Hasan, a British Muslim political journalist, has confirmed: “anti-Semitism isn’t just tolerated in some sections of the British Muslim community; it’s routine and commonplace.” Our politicians believe that by appeasement they will satiate the blood lust of the jihadists and gain the support of Muslim voters.

This is why we see Western leaders condemning Israel for insufficient restraint while defending itself from lethal Hamas rockets, when they know full well Israel has done all it can to avoid civilian deaths. It is why not one single EU member state had the courage to vote against the false condemnation of Israel for war crimes in the UN Human Rights Council last year. It is why the British government unequivocally asserts that Jewish settlements in the West Bank are illegal when it knows they are not. It is why Prime Minister David Cameron, a friend and supporter of the Jewish state, accused Israel of turning the Gaza Strip into a ‘prison camp’ when he knew it had not.

These false and malicious condemnations fuel hatred of Israel and of Jewish people everywhere. They are driven and intensified by a media that is dominated by strident, virulent and unyielding anti-Israel bias.

What of the future? Imperial guilt in Europe shows no sign of diminishing. In fact, the ideology behind it is gaining strength as the EU seeks to undermine national identity in its drive for ever-closer union and the creation of a superstate.

Despite developing energy technologies, there is no prospect of significantly reduced dependence on Middle Eastern oil in the foreseeable future. And with the vast influx of refugees from Muslim countries into Europe, the urge to appease their anti-Semitic and anti-Israel attitudes can only increase dramatically.

This means Israel and the Jews are going to come under even more intolerable pressure, leading to a greater exodus of Jews from many Western nations and the increasing international isolation of the Jewish state.

But there is an alternative. It is that Western political leaders find the courage to reject the virulent anti-Israel prejudice. To speak what they know to be the truth about the situation in the Middle East. To stop encouraging Palestinian leaders to believe their campaign against Israel is going to achieve its goal of destroying the Jewish state. And rather than supporting Palestinian hate with Western dollars, to impose sanctions against their racist and destructive behaviour.

The consequences of Western politicians’ continued weakness and appeasement are far greater than encouraging anti-Semitism and undermining the State of Israel. It is the fatal and irreversible descent of their own countries. By allowing this anti-Semitic hatred, they are betraying the millions of citizens who have fought and died to oppose the sort of malevolent ideologies that are now incubating it.

How Islam Erased Christianity from History

April 26, 2016

How Islam Erased Christianity from History, Front Page MagazineRaymond Ibrahim, April 26, 2016

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Originally published by PJ Media.

Raymond Ibrahim is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.

While Christianity continues to be physically erased from the Middle East, lesser known is that its historical role and presence is also being expunged from memory.

Last month a video emerged showing Islamic State members tossing hundreds of Christian textbooks, many of them emblazoned with crosses, into a large bonfire.   As one report put it, ISIS was “burning Christian textbooks in an attempt to erase all traces of” Christianity from the ancient region of Mosul, where Christianity once thrived for centuries before the rise of Islam.

As usual, ISIS is ultimately an extreme example of Islam’s normative approach.  This was confirmed during a recent conference in Amman, Jordan hosted by the Jerusalem Center for Political Studies. While presenting, Dr. Hena al-Kaldani, a Christian, said that “there is a complete cancelation of Arab Christian history in the pre-Islamic era,” “many historical mistakes,” and “unjustifiable historic leaps in our Jordanian curriculum.”  “Tenth grade textbooks omit any mention of any Christian or church history in the region.”  Wherever Christianity is mentioned, omissions and mischaracterizations proliferate, including the portrayal of Christianity as a Western (that is, “foreign”) source of colonization, said al-Kaldani.

Of course, Christian minorities throughout the Middle East—not just in Jordan—have long maintained that the history taught in public classrooms habitually suppresses the region’s Christian heritage while magnifying (including by lying about) Islam.

“It sounds absurd, but Muslims more or less know nothing about Christians, even though they make up a large part of the population and are in fact the original Egyptians,” said Kamal Mougheeth, a retired teacher in Egypt: “Egypt was Christian for six or seven centuries [before the Muslim invasion around 640].  The sad thing is that for many years the history books skipped from Cleopatra to the Muslim conquest of Egypt.  The Christian era was gone.  Disappeared.  An enormous black whole.”[i]

This agrees perfectly with what I recall my parents, Christians from Egypt, telling me of their classroom experiences from more than half a century ago: there was virtually no mention of Hellenism, Christianity, or the Coptic Church—one thousand years of Egypt’s pre-Islamic history. History began with the pharaohs before jumping to the seventh century when Arabian Muslims “opened” Egypt to Islam. (Wherever Muslims conquer non-Muslim territories, Islamic hagiography euphemistically refers to it as an “opening,” fath, never a “conquest.”)

Sharara Yousif Zara, an influential politician involved in the Iraqi Ministry of Education agrees: “It’s the same situation in Iraq.  There’s almost nothing about us [Christians] in our history books, and what there is, is totally wrong.  There’s nothing about us being here before Islam.  The only Christians mentioned are from the West.  Many Iraqis believe we moved here.  From the West.  That we are guests in this country.”[ii]

Zara might be surprised to learn that similar ignorance and historical revisionism predominates in the West.  Although Christians are in fact the most indigenous inhabitants of most of the Arab world, I am often asked, by educated people, why Christians “choose” to go and live in the Middle East among Muslims, if the latter treat them badly.

At any rate, the Mideast’s pseudo historical approach to Christianity has for generations successfully indoctrinated Muslim students to suspect and hate Christianity, which is regularly seen as a non-organic parasitic remnant left by Western colonialists (though as mentioned, Christianity precedes Islam in the region by some six centuries).

This also explains one of Islam’s bitterest ironies: a great many of today’s Middle East Christians are being persecuted by Muslims — including of the ISIS variety — whose own ancestors were persecuted Christians who converted to Islam to end their suffering. In other words, Muslim descendants of persecuted Christians are today slaughtering their Christian cousins.  Christians are seen as “foreign traitors” in part because many Muslims do not know of their own Christian ancestry.

Due to such entrenched revisionism, Muslim “scholars” are also able to disseminate highly dubious and ahistorical theses, as seen in Dr. Fadel Soliman’s 2011 book, Copts: Muslims Before Muhammad.  It claims that, at the time of the Muslim conquest of Egypt, the vast majority of Egyptians were not, as Muslim and Western history has long taught, Christians, but rather prototypical Muslims, or muwahidin, who were being oppressed by European Christians: hence, the Islamic invasion of Egypt was really about “liberating” fellow Muslims.

Needless to say, no historian has ever suggested that Muslims invaded Egypt to liberate “proto-Muslims.” Rather, the Muslim chroniclers who wrote our primary sources on Islam, candidly and refreshingly present the “openings” as they were—conquests, replete with massacres, enslavement, and displacement of Christians and the destruction of thousands of churches.

In the end, of course, the Muslim world’s historical approach to Christianity should be familiar.  After all, doesn’t the West engage in the same chicanery?    In both instances, Christianity is demonized and its history distorted by its usurping enemies: in the West, by a host of “isms”—including leftism, moral relativism, and multiculturalism—and in the Middle East, by Islam.

Notes:

[i] Quote from The Last Supper: The Plight of Christians in Arab Lands by Klaus Wivel.

[ii] Ibid.

Satire | Make Trump Shut Up. It’s Patriotic!

March 18, 2016

Make Trump Shut Up. It’s Patriotic! Dan Miller’s Blog, March 18, 2016

(The views expressed in this article (aside from those espoused by my imaginary guest author, with whom no rational person agrees) are mine and do not necessarily reflect those of Warsclerotic or its other editors. — DM)

trump-assault

Editor’s note: This is a guest post by my (imaginary) guest author, the Very Honorable Ima Librul, Senator from the great State of Confusion Utopia. He is a founding member of Climate Change Causes Everything Bad, a charter member of President Obama’s Go For it Team, a senior member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and Chairman of the Meretricious Relations Subcommittee. He is also justly proud of his expertise in the care and breeding of green unicorns, for which his Save the Unicorns Foundation has received substantial Federal grants. We are honored to have a post of this caliber by a quintessential Librul such as the Senator. Without further delay, here is the Senator’s article, followed by my own observations. 

As any fool knows, saying things that upset folks is destructive to our peace and tranquility. No patriot would do that. As the Boston Globe observed on March 17th, true patriots can not and should not permit it.

Donald Trump slams protesters at his rallies as “thugs” but, as usual, the unhinged GOP presidential front-runner is dead wrong:

They’re patriots.

. . . .

With Trump nearly sweeping this week’s primaries, those rallies will become more hostile toward anyone pushing against his hideous rhetoric. Yet those patriots will still come, not just because they oppose Trump but for the love of their country which is being shoved toward the abyss. As poet Adrienne Rich wrote in “An Atlas of the Difficult World”:

A patriot is one who wrestles/ for the soul of her country/ as she wrestles for her own being.

Trump has been endorsed by Will Quigg, 48, a grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan. So has Hillary Clinton, but that’s as different as night is from day; we all know that she is not a racist. The KKK endorsement of Trump shows, beyond dispute, that he is a vile racist. That’s why he despises our President and everything for which we stand.

Trump reminds me of the hateful Britainophobes who mocked Native Americans by wearing their quaint native garb to throw precious tea, violently, into Boston Harbor. For shame!

Trump hatefully complains that Islam is not the religion of peace and that since it is a violent religion Muslims should not be permitted even to visit the United States until it can be determined which are peaceful and which are not. Hogwash! Muslims are just as peaceful as Methodists. They love little children more than Methodists, particularly little girls, and marry them at what Trump probably thinks is too early an age — often at the age of ten. It’s their culture, so there’s nothing wrong with it and we should respect it. Isn’t this a pretty little bride? She looks so happy!

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Muslims don’t occupy a country that isn’t theirs like filthy Jews do in Palestine. They don’t try to take over mosques sacred to Islam.

 

 

Palestine, unlike Israel, does not practice apartheid. Although Israel has nukes, Iran recently promised not to develop nuclear weapons. Trump, despite his claims to be a master negotiator, would never have got that deal; Obama, a very modest person, did despite obstructions put in his path by Israel and some Republicans.

Not all Jews are bad, of course: a major Jewish group warned that Trump is dangerous. As noted in the immediately linked article, the warning

came amid an impassioned debate in the American Jewish community around Trump’s plans to address an audience of over 18,000 next Monday at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s annual policy conference.

Who knows what might happen if Trump were to address that group. Might he claim, as he often does, that the peaceful Palestinians, not Jews, are to blame for Israel’s continued occupation of Palestine? Perhaps some of his antisemitic bullies might assault members of the audience. They might bring not only knives but guns as well! Remember, President Obama warned against bringing even knives to a gun fight!

Trump complains that our borders are not “secure.” He is stupid, ignorant and just plays on the fear of other racists. Hillary Clinton knows that the borders are secure.

PHOENIX — The United States has done a “really good job” of securing the border between Arizona and Mexico, Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton said in an exclusive interview Thursday.

“I think we’ve done a really good job securing the border,” she said. “I think that those who say we haven’t are not paying attention to what was done the last 15 years under President (George W.) Bush and President (Barack) Obama.”

Clinton said the federal government has added both border officers and obstructions, while the number of people attempting to cross the border has dropped.

“Immigration from Mexico has dropped considerably,” she said. ”It’s just not happening anymore.”

Clinton, the Democratic front-runner, was speaking just days before a campaign event in Phoenix.

Lies, lies, lies. It’s lies all the way down for Trump

The protestors at Trump rallies do not want to silence him, as some far-right nuts have complained. They only want to make him stop saying things that offend them; there’s a big difference, as any fool knows. Like everyone else with two brain cells, we need our safe spaces and he violates our constitutional rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness by refusing to let us have them. Even the music played at Trump rallies is authoritarian and disgusting. That’s why we attend and protest at Trump rallies.

Trump is Hitler. All Republican candidates for president have been Hitlers for many, many years. Hitlerism is the foul soup in which they are conceived, born and raised. It’s high time to throw out the soup and Republicans along with it. Hillary will do that, and more.

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Editor’s comments

 

 

 

As a courtesy to Senator Librul, I inserted all of the links in his article. The presence of supporting links is about the only difference between his screed and those of Democrats and the Republican elite (but I repeat myself) disparaging Trump for stuff he has not done and does not do; for what they claim he is and not for what he is.

It’s high time for us to take America back from those who have been trying to destroy her. She belongs to We the People, not to the Democrat or Publican party bosses. Never forget.

 

 

Obama did not build our nation. Our ancestors did and it’s our inheritance.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ArgMK2kAjzw

 

For whom would the pioneers in the video vote were they alive now? Our “leaders” who sit in Washington, D.C., break their promises and take our money to finance their reelection campaigns so they can continue the process? Those who have weakened our nation and made her a second class world power? Those who elevate political correctness and multiculturalism above reality? Those who rewrite our history so that they can condemn it? I don’t think so. Which candidates do you think they would support?

crazed

 

Persia, Putin and the Pansy

October 3, 2015

Persia, Putin and the Pansy, Times of Israel, Irwin G. Blank, October 3, 2015

(Guess the name of the Pansy. But please see, The Moscow-Washington-Tehran Axis of Evil. — DM)

Putin, a product of the Soviet Communist system is well acquainted with the dictum of the father of the Bolshevik revolution that gave birth to the regime that he so faithfully served. V. I. Lenin’s famous quote-” Probe with a bayonet. If you meet steel, stop. If you meet mush, then push.”

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In ancient times there was no greater empire than that of Persia. This imperial power stretched from the mountains of Afghanistan all the way to the islands of Greece and the deserts of North Africa and the Middle East. Against the Greeks of Alexander the Great, it could field armies of millions of troops arrayed with the most modern weapons of war at the time. Until the rise of the Roman Empire, no power on Earth, made nations tremble as did the rulers of Persia.

Today the fanatic Ayatollahs in Teheran, with a megalomaniacal apocalyptic dream of Islamist imperialism and world conquest under their banner of jihad are hell bent on the recreation of their ancient empire and the destruction of all they see as infidels and unbelievers. Their conception of faith is a political and social fanaticism that goes even further than the hysterical rantings and horrendous nightmare that Nazi Germany once attempted to foist on mankind. Indeed, the very Nazi terminology for its origin, the word “Aryan” is associated with the nation whose name is a derivative of that racist term-Iran.

However, other than employing proxy allies in Lebanon, Syria and Yemen, the mad mullahs knew that their military, for all its goose stepping soldiers and bombast that they would require the tools necessary to fulfill their wicked aims. Firstly, it was able to build up a nuclear industry with the aim of developing the most lethal weapons of mass destruction. Through deception, deliberate obfuscation and diligent denial, it succeeded in the implantation of this atomic framework under the blindness of the international agency whose responsibility is to curtail the spread of nuclear weapons.

Furthermore, when its nefarious production methods and its open evidence of ballistic missile technology became apparent, Iran successfully parried the efforts to curtail its march toward nuclear weaponry by undertaking a Potemkin village of diplomacy whereby even the most seemingly astute diplomatically experienced national leaders, succumbed to the meanderings and sweetheart deal that Iranian negotiators engineered. The secrets of the Ayatollahs were swept under a Persian rug.

However, in the meantime, the Persian imperialist war mongers still were in great need of the assistance of a powerful ally in order to accomplish their more conventional aims in their desire to continue their conquest throughout the Middle East. What better place to seek this help than to another former empire builder than a nation which was chomping on the bit to return to an area of the globe from which it had been so unceremoniously evicted.

The former Soviet Union, now the Russian Federation, has had dreams of installing its imperial presence in the Mediterranean Sea since the days of the Czars. Until 1972 when the late Egyptian president, Anwar Sadat, evicted ( for the most part as a political move, not a military one) most of the Soviet personnel from his country, the USSR had been ensconced throughout Egypt and the Arab world. Indeed, it was the humiliating defeat of the Egyptian and Syrian forces by the Israel Defense Forces during the Yom Kippur War that demonstrated at that time, the weakness of the Soviet response to American supported Israel which was demonstrating the vapidness of the Soviet promise to come to the aid of its Arab allies. The US response to Soviet threats to directly intervene on behalf of its Egyptian and Syrian clients, by moving the US Navy’s Sixth Fleet towards the Syrian coast and the declaration of a higher war footing by all US forces, made the Soviets back down.

The political and military supported victory of American arms and diplomacy demonstrated the resolve of that world power to face down the threat of Soviet dominance in such a strategic region of Western interests. Not only did the diplomacy of Henry Kissinger and the Nixon White House make a shambles of the massive Soviet involvement in the Arab world, but it brought about the first true demarche of Soviet (Russian) imperial chicanery since the Berlin blockade of 1948 and the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.

But the Russian Federation today is led by a president whose demonstration of the old Russian imperial nightmare is alive and well. Vladimir Putin, a former high official of the dreaded KGB,( Soviet Secret Service) has no qualms about restoring the dreams of the Czars and the re-entrenchment of his nation’s appearance in the Middle East. As a significant power player on the world scene and a massive supplier of sophisticated arms to anyone who opposes Western influence anywhere on the planet, the situation in the Levant and the hysterical anti-American paranoia in Teheran led the Ayatollahs to the road towards Moscow.

Sending one of their highest ranking military official to Moscow was a masterstroke of diplomatic skullduggery in presenting Putin with a challenge and an opportunity he could not ignore, For here, he was presented with a silver platter with which to serve up a poisonous dish to his arch-rivals, America and NATO. After witnessing their weakness to confront his military in the Ukraine and the Crimea, as well as his bloody campaign in Chechnya, all Putin had to do was experience orgasmic delight in sending his sea and air forces into a disintegrating Syria and pour weapons by the shipload onto the docks of Bandar Abbas in Iran. In full sight of Western intelligence and American spy satellites, crate after crate of Soviet munitions were soon trundling off the piers of the Syrian port of Latakia.

Iran was facing a significant threat to its allies in that disintegrating country and witnessing the probable demise of its Syrian puppet, Bashar al-Assad. The forces of ISIS (an Iranian rival for control of the Islamic world)  were on the march and its debilitating of the Syrian military as well as its capture of large swaths of Alawite controlled territory would put an end to the mullah’s plans for conquest. The entire northern tier of the Middle East would collapse and the Persian dream of conquering all the Sunni dominated lands of the region would go up in smoke. Iran had invested heavily in its subterfuge of the regimes of Iraq, Yemen and its military adventures in those countries. It required a strong ally and it looked to its northern neighbor with which its shares a common enmity for the West, and Putin, licked his chops and dove onto the plate presented to him.

Not only have Russian military forces seized control of the vital Syrian port of Latakia on the Mediterranean, but it has constructed revetments for air forces and ground personnel unseen in this region since the 1970s. His air forces have conducted bombing raids, not on ISIS, which was a planned political prevarication, but on US backed components of the anti-Assad coalition. Of course, Putin has no conflict with conducting airstrikes on civilians. After all, the West has been all but silent on the massive slaughter of approximately 300,000 civilians by the butcher of Damascus. Even when presented with irrefutable evidence of the use of internationally banned chemical weapons on his own countrymen, the US and NATO have been reticent (cowardly) in confronting this evil practice. Why not? The current leader of Syria’s father dropped poison gas on his own people in Homs when they revolted against his tyrannical rule and the world stood silent.

When the president of the United States declared that the Assad administration’s use of chemical weapons would cross a “red line” and force his hand – well, the red line turned into a yellow streak. The insipid and relatively weak assistance that this erstwhile leader of the world’s greatest superpower has shown to be the denigration and degradation of a once trusted and worthy ally. America’s allies no longer trust her and her enemies no longer fear her. It is not the American people who have lost their courage, it is their incompetently dangerous president and his minions that are responsible.

Not only for the rise of Russian/Iranian imperialism, but for its effect as daily demonstrated by the thousands, if not future hundreds of thousands, of men, women and children, fleeing from the murderous genocide of the Assad aided and abetted by this new Axis of evil-Islamic radicalism and Russian imperialism.

Iran seeks to conquer the Middle East and destroy the Sunni dominated Arab states of the region. With Russian assistance it will expand its imperial power behind Russian bayonets and the threat of its own nuclear umbrella to come. It is biding its time while innocents are being slaughtered and the threats against Israel, Jordan and Lebanon are unrelenting through public declarations and political oratory.

Putin, a product of the Soviet Communist system is well acquainted with the dictum of the father of the Bolshevik revolution that gave birth to the regime that he so faithfully served. V. I. Lenin’s famous quote-” Probe with a bayonet. If you meet steel, stop. If you meet mush, then push.”

The American president, who through Constitutional authority commands the most expansive and well trained military in the history of the world, who purports to be the defender of international human rights, has proven himself to be, in the face of wanton aggression and slaughter, in the abrogation of his country’s duty to defend its most vital and established interests, in his tepid response to evil and his recalcitrance to even identify the greatest threat to Western civilization since the rise of Nazi Germany, has without a doubt, at least in this writer’s estimate, become akin to an ostrich-a bird that buries its head in the sand and presents its foes with an irresistible target.

The Dictionary of American Slang has a word for such a person-a weakling and a wimp-the word is “pansy.” The pansy of the United States will bring the most terrible war upon us all-including by beloved tiny Jewish country.

The Most Dangerous Man In the World

October 2, 2015

The Most Dangerous Man In the World, American ThinkerAndrew Logar, October 2, 2015

…is neither Russia’s Vladimir Putin nor China’s Xi Jinping, nor at this time, Ayatollah Khamenei – it’s none other than America’s Barack Hussein Obama.  This is not because of any aggressive, risk-laden actions he has taken, far from it.  It is because of those he has failed to take at critical times to credibly dissuade strategic competitors and potential aggressors, such as Russia and China, from actions that may suddenly compound into  destabilizing confrontations, even war.  When the Middle East cauldron spawned the barbaric ISIS, Obama’s indecisive, pusillanimous response allowed this Islamic malignancy to rapidly metastasize, compounding and accelerating an existing refugee problem that will involve America.  Additionally, throughout his tenure, overt actions Obama has taken served to steadily and materially, degrade American military capabilities, while enemies grow stronger.

In retrospect, divining Obama’s foreign policy should have been relatively easy given his background – a world seen through the eyes of someone whose father was a Muslim, as was his step-father, whose early education was in a Muslim madrassa, followed by mentoring from the known communist Frank Marshall Davis, associations with Columbia University’s Palestinian activist Edward Said and later, Harvard’s leftist Brazilian socialist Roberto Unger, later close association with admitted communist and Weatherman terrorist Bill Ayers, then followed by 20 years of anti-American and anti- Semitic sermons by Reverend Jeremiah Wright who, placing much of the world’s ills at America’s doorstep, culminated a post 9-11 sermon sententiously intoning, “…America’s chickens have come home to roost.”

Ironically, other chickens have indeed come home to roost.   American liberalism’s pernicious obsession to eradicate the odium of slavery long gone and any vestiges of remaining discrimination in one fell swoop, blindly promoted the candidacy of the first black president, propelling a relatively unknown, unvetted and remarkably unqualified candidate to two electoral victories.  That most unfortunate occurrence followed by resultant deleterious fallout at home and abroad, are liberalism’s chickens coming home to roost – in the White House – where they’ll cluck away until January 20, 2017.

After winning the 2008 election, Obama launched his now infamous “Apology Tour,” covering three continents in some 100 days, during which the Heritage Foundation identified 10 major apologies Obama made for America’s past behavior.  Mitt Romney, in his book, “No Apology,” correctly criticized Obama’s gratuitous apologies.  Indeed, unnecessary apologies by our president projected a weakness in resolve, confidence and appreciation of our nation’s accomplishments, our beliefs and values.  While in Europe, when asked if he believed in American “exceptionalism,” he said yes – in the same way that, “ …the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks in Greek exceptionalism.”

This was an arresting, if not downright stupefying statement – coming from the head of state of the world’s most powerful nation, with a manifestly unrivaled history.  This is a nation which in 239 years since the Declaration of Independence, grew from 13 colonies and 3 million people to 50 states and 320 million people, a nation victorious in its Revolutionary War, the War of 1812 and which fought its bloodiest of wars, the Civil War, to expunge slavery; this is a nation victorious in the Mexican-American War, the Spanish-American War, WWI and WWII, that introduced the incontestably successful Marshall Plan critical in European post war recovery, that sent men to the moon and back, 6 times – and the nation that won the Cold War – a nation that has consistently led the world in Nobel prizes in medicine, science and technology. This is unequivocally a nation like none other, a nation of unparalleled achievements and sadly, one whose president does not consider particularly exceptional.

The historical record now shows global competitors and enemies have taken their measure of Obama: the Russians have acted with impunity in Crimea, Ukraine and Syria, the Chinese are establishing a stranglehold on the South China Sea while Russians, Chinese and Iranians are engaged in flagrant cyber-espionage against America, ISIS is growing, while Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan are all in play.

Barack Obama’s sophomoric efforts at geopolitics derived from his warped, kaleidoscopic misreading of 20th century history have now spiraled into a veritable tragicomedy of incompetence.  Witness his administration’s $500 million program to train Syrian rebels to fight ISIS: not only didn’t that produce the projected 5,000 trained fighters, or even 500, but only, according to General Lloyd Austin, “…four or five.” This is grist for a Marx Brothers movie and attributable to abysmally poor leadership, planning and organization which can only be placed at the doorstep of the White House.

An objective review of the Obama administration’s policies reveals they have consistently posed a direct or indirect threat to national security:

– The unilateral cancellation of the Easter Europe ABM deployment without securing a tangible quid pro quo from Moscow and no counter to Russia’s recent decision to sell the potent S-300 anti-aircraft system to Iran.

– The ill-advised support for the overthrow of long-term ally of the West, Egypt’s Mubarak and the inexplicable enthusiastic White House support of the Muslim Brotherhood.

– The equally ill-advised and ill-planned toppling of Libya’s Gaddafi, resulting in a country without a functional government now overrun with Islamists, where at Benghazi four Americans died needlessly.

– The withholding of vital intelligence from the Senate that Russia had been flagrantly cheating on the existing INF treaty to advance ratification of New START in 2010. Seventy-one Senators voted for ratification without full background knowledge.

– The 2011 withdrawal of all American troops from Iraq by Obama while blaming the Bush administration for inadequacies of the 2008 Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA).  This allowed Iraq to descend back into sectarian chaos, giving rise to ISIS and advantage to Iran.  A war won at high cost in blood and treasure was thus lost.

– The military drawdown in Afghanistan – mindlessly pre-announced to the enemy – may lose that war as well if continued.

– The release of five dangerous Taliban in exchange for Sgt. Bergdahl is beyond rational justification and/or discussion.

– The manifest dereliction of duty in not taking strong measures to protect America from devastating EMP attack – which can be done at very affordable cost.

– The lack resolute policy has turned Syria into a graveyard of American credibility. Nothing substantive has been achieved to slow, let alone destroy, rapidly metastasizing ISIS, unconscionably leaving a compounding problem to future administrations.

– The opening of our southern border to a tsunami of illegal immigration, arguably to permanently bias future voter demographics toward a one-party (Democratic) state. That many of those gaining easy entry may wish us harm is apparently of no concern to Obama.

– The continuing undermining of America’s military superiority is increasing the likelihood of confrontation with adversaries. According to the Heritage Foundation Index of Military Strength, our Commander-In-Chief has allowed our military power to degrade to “Marginal,” leaving the US Army at its relatively weakest level since the end of WWII, while our antagonists pour money into their armed forces.

– Finally (but Obama is not through yet!) – during recent post-summit remarks, China’s Xi Jinping suggested tough U.S. response to Chinese hacking would bring retaliation; obligingly, Obama affirmed sanctions wouldn’t be directed against governments. Essentially, Xi stepped forward, Obama blinked and stepped back – signaling a major geopolitical sea change. Cyberespionage by Russia and Iran haven’t been addressed.

Before winning the 2008 election and still a senator, during the Bush administration’s then ongoing nuclear negotiations with Iran, Obama, in a brazen and historically unprecedented move, secretly sent a personal emissary to Iran, William G. Miller, a former Ambassador to Ukraine, essentially conveying this message: Obama will very likely to be elected president, after which time Iran will find negotiating with him far easier.  The Bush negotiations reportedly then reached a stalemate.  Fast-forward to 2015, through Obama’s and Kerry’s “hard” bargaining, we’ve reached an agreement with Iran whereby monitoring Iran’s programs will be left to the Iranians as they now have the right to self-inspect” and so as to take the sting away from such an onerous deal, we’ll give them $100 billion of frozen assets  – with which to do as they please – while America agrees to protect Iran’s nuclear facilities from cyber warfare.

Though Red China, Russia and Iran increasingly challenge America, the Middle East bloodshed continues and ISIS grows stronger, President Obama has declared “…no challenge–poses a greater threat to future generations than climate change.” This extraordinarily vacuous statement is from either a hopelessly delusional ideologue, woefully untutored in world history, geopolitics and the unequaled greatness of America, or a brilliant Manchurian Candidate marching to his own drumbeat.  In any case, Obama is a president like none other – and may we never see the likes of him again.

 

Army is breaking, let down by Washington

August 3, 2015

Army is breaking, let down by Washington, Stars and Stripes, Robert H. Scales, August 2, 2015

(Last year I also wrote a depressing article on the lamentable combat readiness of our military. It’s here at my blog and here at Warsclerotic. The situation has continued to deteriorate. How could Obama’s America help to protect freedom, particularly against an enemy whose name must not be mentioned, without a combat effective military — even if Obama wanted to do it? — DM)

image militaryU.S. paratroopers with the 173rd Airborne Brigade load a M119A2 howitzer at the 7th Army Joint Multinational Training Command’s Grafenwoehr Training Area, Germany, July 28, 2015.
GERTRUD ZACH/U.S. ARMY

Last month, Gen. Ray Odierno, outgoing Army chief of staff, and Gen. Mark Milley, his successor, testified to the difficulties faced by the Army. I’d like to make the same points by telling a story.

When I was a boy, tonsillitis was a dangerous illness. In 1952, it kept me in Tokyo General Hospital for weeks. I shared a cramped ward with dozens of soldiers horribly maimed in Korea. The hospital had only one movie theater. I remember watching a Western sandwiched between bandage- and plaster-wrapped bodies. I remember the antiseptic smells, the cloud of cigarette smoke and the whispers of young men still traumatized by the horrors of the war they had just left.

My dad came from Korea to visit me, and I recall our conversations vividly. At the time he was operations officer for the 2nd Engineer Battalion. He told me how poorly his men were prepared for war. Many had been killed or captured by the North Koreans. During the retreat from the Yalu River, some of his soldiers were in such bad physical shape that they dropped exhausted along the road to wait to be taken captive.

“We have no sergeants, son,” he told me, shaking his head, “and without them we are no longer an Army.”

In the early ’70s, I was the same age as my Korean-era dad. I had just left Vietnam only to face another broken Army. My barracks were at war. I carried a pistol to protect myself from my own soldiers. Many of the soldiers were on hard drugs. The barracks were racial battlegrounds pitting black against white. Again, the Army had broken because the sergeants were gone. By 1971, most were either dead, wounded or had voted with their feet to get away from such a devastated institution.

I visited Baghdad in 2007 as a guest of Gen. David Petraeus. Before the trip I had written a column forecasting another broken Army, but it was clear from what Petraeus showed me that the Army was holding on and fighting well in the dangerous streets of Baghdad. Such a small and overcommitted force should have broken after so many serial deployments to that hateful place. But Petraeus said that his Army was different. It held together because junior leaders were still dedicated to the fight. To this day, I don’t know how they did it.

Sadly, the Army that stayed cohesive in Iraq and Afghanistan even after losing 5,000 dead is now being broken again by an ungrateful, ahistorical and strategically tone-deaf leadership in Washington.

The Obama administration just announced a 40,000 reduction in the Army’s ranks. But the numbers don’t begin to tell the tale. Soldiers stay in the Army because they love to go into the field and train; Defense Secretary Ash Carter recently said that the Army will not have enough money for most soldiers to train above the squad level this year. Soldiers need to fight with new weapons; in the past four years, the Army has canceled 20 major programs, postponed 125 and restructured 124. The Army will not replace its Reagan-era tanks, infantry carriers, artillery and aircraft for at least a generation. Soldiers stay in the ranks because they serve in a unit ready for combat; fewer than a third of the Army’s combat brigades are combat-ready.

And this initial 40,000-soldier reduction is just a start. Most estimates from Congress anticipate that without lifting the budget sequestration that is driving this across-the-board decline, another 40,000 troops will be gone in about two years.

But it’s soldiers who tell the story. After 13 years of war, young leaders are voting with their feet again. As sergeants and young officers depart, the institution is breaking for a third time in my lifetime. The personal tragedies that attended the collapse of a soldier’s spirit in past wars are with us again. Suicide, family abuse, alcohol and drug abuse are becoming increasingly more common.

To be sure, the nation always reduces its military as wars wind down. Other services suffer reductions and shortages. But only the Army breaks. Someone please tell those of us who served why the service that does virtually all the dying and killing in war is the one least rewarded.

My grandson is a great kid. He’s about the same age I was when I was recovering at Tokyo General. Both of his parents served as Army officers, so it’s no wonder that in school he draws pictures of tanks and planes while his second-grade classmates draw pictures of flowers and animals. The other day he drew a tank just for me and labeled it proudly “Abrams Tank!”

Well, sadly, if he follows in our footsteps, one day he may be fighting in an Abrams tank. His tank will be 60 years old by then.

At the moment I’d rather he go to law school.

Robert H. Scales, a retired Army major general, is a former commandant of the U.S. Army War College.

Humor| A real Grand Unification Theory: Christianity, Islam and Paganism

July 1, 2015

A real Grand Unification Theory: Christianity, Islam and Paganism, Dan Miller’s Blog, June 30,2015

(I refuse to acknowledge that the views expressed in this article are or are not mine. However, they do not necessarily reflect the views of Warsclerotic or any of its (other) editors. — DM)

Einstein tried but failed to develop a Grand Unification Theory. Perhaps he should have selected a name without the acronym GUT. Hope remains, and I developed one in less than an hour. It explains life, the universe and everything.

Einstein

I. posits:

1. An infinite number of universes exist, all of which have infinite numbers of galaxies.

2. Some universes and some galaxies are Christian (whatever that may mean there), some are Islamic (whatever that may mean there) and some are Pagan (whatever that may mean there). Pagan refers to all religions other than Christianity and Islam.

3. The allegedly Christian, Islamic and Pagan galaxies generally, but with exceptions, despise each other and, in some cases, themselves.

4. Each of the universes, and accordingly each of the galaxies, is controlled by a god of its own religion.

5. The multiple gods are, in reality, high-level laboratory technicians who enjoy damaging each other’s lab experiments.

II. Proofs:

1. The Islamic gods forbid alcohol, while the Christian and Pagan gods relish it.

2. Not many years ago, Haiti had developed the best rum in any universe — a fifteen year old nectar of the Christian and Pagan gods. Horrified, the Islamic gods conspired to ruin it and Haiti as well. To that end, they dispatched

a. Earthquakes,

b. Droughts,

c. United Nations peace keeping forces to spread disease, death, instability, poverty and

d. Clinton charities to take whatever Haiti still had.

e. In consequence, Haitian rum ceased to be palatable.

3. Since Dear Leader Osama Obama took office, the Islamic gods have encouraged The Islamic Republic of Iran to increase its nuclear energy weaponization program while pretending not to. By inducing Obama to ignore their efforts and to pretend that the Islamic Republic is as peaceful as He pretends the rest of Islam is, the Islamic gods inspired Him to give the Islamic Republic everything it wants and more. The Islamic gods also promised Him a great foreign policy legacy, akin to nothing ever accomplished by any former or future (if any) president.

Shaken by their defeat on alcohol, the Christian and Pagan gods abstained from interfering with the Islamic gods’ efforts. Some may even have converted to Islam, just to be on the winning side. Conversion — which no Islamic god would even consider — may have caused Christian gods little difficulty.

In the fourteenth century Pope Pius II, having given up on starting another crusade against the Islamist Turks because he could garner little support, wrote a letter to the Turkish ruler, Mehmed. It was distributed throughout Christendom. He

proposed not only to recognize Mehmed’s claim to be the ruler of the Eastern Roman Empire but also to transfer to him the imperium of the West, just as six and a half centuries earlier his predecessor Leo III, by the coronation of Charlemagne, had transferred (or “translated,” to use the technical term) it from the Greeks to the Franks. All the sultan had to do was to convert to Christianity. What, after all, asked the pope in somewhat unpapal terms, were “a few drops of baptismal water” in exchange for the right to rule over the entire Roman world?  It was an empty gesture, as he must have known. [Emphasis added,]

Some Christian and Pagan gods may be more amenable to conversion to Islam than Islamic gods are to Christianity.

Dedication

This otherwise incomparably short essay is dedicated to our Supreme Leader, Barack Humble Osama Obama who, by virtue of His equally incomparable empathy, insight, humility and intellect, has managed to come up even shorter.

barack-bicycle

I am not insane

If I were insane, that’s exactly what I would write. Go figure.

The Failed Tactic of Flattering Islam Won’t Go Away

May 11, 2015

The Failed Tactic of Flattering Islam Won’t Go Away, Front Page Magazine, May 11, 2015

Palestinian_militant_with_rifle-450x338

The recent attack in Texas against a “draw Mohammed” event ended up with two dead jihadis and widespread criticism of event organizer Pamela Geller for “inciting” or “provoking” the assault on our First Amendment right to free speech. The hypocrisies and ignorance behind such criticism have been amply documented, including by some on the left. But there’s another argument against actions and events like Geller’s that needs dismantling. This is the received wisdom that we should avoid criticizing Islamic doctrine or Mohammed because it will alienate moderate Muslims who otherwise would help us against the so-called “extremist” jihadists.

Geraldo Rivera on Fox News invoked this rationale in his hysterical attack on Geller for “spewing her hatred and making us all look like the intolerant jerks they are saying we are in the Middle East and elsewhere.” In other words, most Muslims dislike the jihadis, who have “hijacked” and “distorted” their faith, and want to support our efforts against them. But they are put off by our “insults” of Mohammed and our “intolerance” of the wonderful “religion of peace,” all of which serve to “recruit” new jihadists. Even Bill O’Reilly and Laura Ingraham skirted this notion, advising against making any image of Mohammed, and thus in effect ratifying the legitimacy of the shari’a law against any representation of Mohammed, good or bad.

Consistent with this notion that flattery and respect can change Muslim behavior, many in the foreign policy establishment, including conservatives, have for decades counseled flattering “outreach” to Muslims as a tactic in winning the “hearts and minds” of the supposed large majority of Muslims angry at the jihadists’ “distortions” of their faith. Even before 9/11, Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, called Islam “a faith that honors consultation, cherishes peace, and has as one of its fundamental principles the inherent equality of all who embrace it.” Even after 9/11 confirmed Islam’s traditional theologized violence and intolerance, George Bush claimed in his first address after 9/11 that Islam’s “teachings are good and peaceful, and those who commit evil in the name of Allah blaspheme the name of Allah.” In 2005, administration officials encouraged this tactic of false flattery as a way “to support the courageous Muslims who are speaking the truth about their proud religion and history, and seizing it back from those who would hijack it for evil ends.”

Of course Obama, who has serially groveled before Muslims and praised Islam, has continued this sorry practice. After his administration blamed the Benghazi murders on an obscure Internet video, he lectured that “the future must not belong to those who slander the Prophet of Islam.” The 2 gunmen in Garland Texas obviously agreed.  His quondam Secretary of State and now presidential candidate Hillary Clinton is on record extolling Islam’s “deepest yearning of all––to live in peace.” How is that going in Nigeria, Yemen, Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan? Worse of all, training materials used by our military and security services have excised any mention of jihad, which Western infidels have redefined as “a quest to find one’s faith in an external fight for justice,” as the New York Times put it in 2008. So Obama identifies the 13 slaughtered at Fort Hood to the traditional jihadist cry of “Allahu Akbar” as victims of “workplace violence.” Never mind the Koranic command to “slay the idolaters wherever you find them, and take them captives and besiege them and lie in wait for them in every ambush”––exactly what various jihadi outfits are doing today across the Middle East, and tried to do in Garland Texas.

Two decades of such flattery and admiration have failed to prevent nearly 26,000 violent jihadist attacks since 9/11, for they are based on Western bad ideas rather than on an accurate understanding of Islamic doctrine and the Muslim mentality. Behind our delusions is the peculiarly arrogant assumption that traditionalist Muslims––by which I mean those who take seriously the doctrines and precepts of their faith has practiced for 14 centuries––do not have their own motives and aims, but can only react to our bad behavior. Besotted by our own materialist superstitions and failure to take religion seriously, we reduce jihadist behavior to material and psychological causes: wounded self-esteem, resentment of “colonial” and “imperial” crimes, disrespect of Islam, or the lack of jobs, political freedom, or even sexual access to women.

Thus despite consistent polling data showing widespread Muslim support of illiberal shari’a law and its draconian penalties like death for blasphemy, we won’t accept that millions of Muslims actually believe what the Koran, Hadith, and 14 centuries of jurisprudence teach about the superiority of Islam and their right to use violence in order to bring the whole world under the sway of the superior social, economic, and political order that shari’a represents. In the guise of “respecting” Muslims, then, we patronize them as little more than children who can only “act out” violently in the face of injustice instead of “using their words.” Having reduced our own faith to holidays and comforting slogans, we simply can’t believe that Islam endorses violence and cruelty in the name of Allah, or that otherwise loving and kind people, as bin Laden was said to have been by all who knew him, can at the same time slaughter and brutalize innocents in pursuit of spiritual aims. No, either they are “crazy” or “evil,” or they are traumatized by our bad behavior.

This dubious pop-psychological assumption is usually accompanied by a catalogue of the historical crimes against Muslims perpetrated by the West, from the Crusades to the wars against the Taliban and Saddam Hussein. These depredations, so the story goes, also fuel anger and resentment, and help to incentivize otherwise peaceful Muslims into turning jihadist. But this narrative is belied by the facts of history. For what history tells us is that the record of Muslim conquest, occupation, colonizing, slaving, raiding, and killing of Christians far surpasses the alleged crimes of the West against Islam. We recently marked the centenary of the Ottoman genocide against the Christian Armenians, Assyrians, and Chaldeans, a crime being duplicated today by ISIS in northern Iraq. Recently our historically challenged president whined about the Crusades and the Inquisition, with nary a word about the centuries of Muslim invasion, occupation, colonization, and brutal suppression in Christian Spain, Sicily, the Balkans, and Greece.

Or what about the 1066 pogrom in Granada, the alleged paradise of “pan-confessional humanism,” as an ignorant Wall Street Journal editorial claimed a few years back. Those tolerant, humanist Muslims slaughtered 5000 Jews, equaling the toll of dead during the whole existence of the Inquisition. But can anyone name one Muslim religious leader in the Middle East who has publicly and consistently apologized in Obama fashion for these 14 centuries of slaughter? Who has justified our defensive wars in the region as an understandable reaction to that history? Who has chastised Muslims for destroying and desecrating churches, and blamed them for inviting violent reactions? Muslim Turkey won’t even own up to its copiously documented slaughter of 1.5 million Armenians. If anyone has a historical grievance that justifies payback, it is Christians and Jews.

Finally, if Western insults and crimes against Muslims are really the reason jihadists want to kill us, why do they let Russia off the hook? No Christian power has killed more Muslims or occupied more Muslim lands than has Russia, from the siege of Izmail in 1790, when 40,000 Muslim men, women, and children were slaughtered, to the invasion of Afghanistan, which killed a million, to the brutal wars against Muslim Chechnyans, which killed at least 100,000. Or how about the 10 million Muslim Uighurs oppressed by China and forbidden to fully practice their faith?  Is Russia or China the “Great Satan”? Are they the constant targets of jihadist attack and thundering denunciations by the mullahs of Iran? Are “moderate” Muslims “alienated” by their behavior and rushing to join the jihad against them?

The obvious answer is no, for the simple reason that Russia and China are contemptuous of such juvenile psychological blackmail, pursue their national interests without regard for criticism by the “Muslim community,” and respond with brutal force to violent attacks. Meanwhile the U.S. has rescued millions of Muslims in the Balkans, Kuwait, Iraq, and Afghanistan from brutal dictators, ethnic cleansing, and psychotic autocrats, yet is deemed “Islamophobic” because we exercise our Constitutional rights in our own country. Worse yet, we grovel and apologize and demonize those like Pamela Geller who practice their right to free expression at a private function, and we vainly believe despite all evidence that if we just act nice to Muslims and join them in demonizing their critics, they’ll ignore their spiritual beliefs, the traditions of their faith, and the model of Mohammed and his credo to “fight all men until they say there is no god but Allah.”

To paraphrase Cicero and Orwell, there are some things so stupid that only rich, arrogant Westerners will believe them. If we let this president continue to predicate his dealings with Iran on this same delusional belief in the power of flattering engagement and “mutual respect,” we will soon find out the high cost of this stupidity.

Take Them At Their Word: Iran Might Destroy Us | Bill Whittle

April 9, 2015

Take Them At Their Word: Iran Might Destroy Us | Bill Whittle via You Tube, April 9, 2015