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The ‘Islamophobia’ Scam Returns

March 6, 2015

The ‘Islamophobia’ Scam Returns, Front Page Magazine, Robert Spencer, March 6, 2015

(I hadn’t been aware that the scam had gone away. — DM)

LEISURE USA

[A]s far as the hard-Left Center for American Progress (CAP) is concerned, people aren’t suspicious of Muslims and Islam because of jihad terror and Islamic supremacism, but because of “the efforts of a small cadre of funders and misinformation experts” which were “amplified by an echo chamber of the religious right, conservative media, grassroots organizations, and politicians who sought to introduce a fringe perspective on American Muslims into the public discourse.”

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In recent weeks, the terror group calling itself the Islamic State (aka ISIS and ISIL) has beheaded journalists and social workers, burned a pilot alive, and forced hundreds of captive women into sex slavery – all while citing Islamic texts to justify their actions and appeal for new recruits. A Muslim in the latest Islamic State beheading video cited two Qur’an verses (8:12 and 47:4) to refute “those who say [beheading] is cruel.” In New York Wednesday, a Muslim was found guilty of plotting to bomb the New York subway system. The previous day in London, a woman from Nigeria pleaded for asylum, as she faces certain death if she returns to her homeland: an Islamic court has sentenced her to die for being a lesbian.

All this and a great deal more like it – a daily horror show of jihad attacks and plots, boasts of coming catastrophic attacks in the West, declarations of imminent conquest, and more, all carried out by people claiming to represent the truest and purest form of Islam – is why, according to a poll released last summer, only twenty-seven percent of Americans have a favorable view of Muslims. Yet as far as the hard-Left Center for American Progress (CAP) is concerned, people aren’t suspicious of Muslims and Islam because of jihad terror and Islamic supremacism, but because of “the efforts of a small cadre of funders and misinformation experts” which were “amplified by an echo chamber of the religious right, conservative media, grassroots organizations, and politicians who sought to introduce a fringe perspective on American Muslims into the public discourse.”

This claim appears in the CAP’s new edition of its “Islamophobia” report, “Fear, Inc. 2.0: The Islamophobia Network’s Efforts to Manufacture Hate in America,” by Matthew Duss, Yasmine Taeb, Ken Gude, and Ken Sofer. It might seem to be peculiarly tone-deaf of the CAP to release this report while the Islamic State is horrifying the world and attacks by lone jihadis (and regular threats that more are on the way) are becoming more frequent in the West, but that is most likely why they felt they had to release it now: with reality threatening to break through their fog of disinformation, they have to pour on more dry ice.

It wasn’t accidental that Hitler’s Reich had an entire Ministry of Propaganda: lying to the public is a major job, as the cleverest of propaganda constructs is always threatened by the simple facts. CAP is trying to compel non-Muslims to disregard what they see every day — Muslims committing violence against non-Muslims and justifying it by referring to Islamic texts — and instead embrace a fictional construct: Islam is the religion of peace and tolerance. This takes a relentless barrage of propaganda, and “Fear, Inc. 2.0” is just the latest in a steady stream from CAP and its allies, which are exponentially wealthier and better-funded than the groups CAP vilifies in this report.

“Fear, Inc. 2.0” is filled with assertions that white is black, and that your lying eyes are deceiving you. We’re told that I myself am “the primary driver in promoting the myth that peaceful Islam is nonexistent and that violent extremism is inherent within traditional Islam.” CAP doesn’t offer any evidence for this being a “myth” – it doesn’t have to, as its Leftist constituency takes that as self-evident.

But CAP flatters me, as it flatters all of us named in “Fear, Inc. 2.0,” simply by suggesting that we have such persuasive power that we can create a nationwide climate of hate and fear against Muslims. I cannot accept their proffered honor of being the “primary driver in promoting the myth that peaceful Islam is nonexistent.” Innumerable others have noted the same reality, including Imran Ahsan Khan Nyazee, Assistant Professor on the Faculty of Shari’ah and Law of the International Islamic University in Islamabad. In his 1994 book The Methodology of Ijtihad, he quotes the twelfth century Maliki jurist Ibn Rushd: “Muslim jurists agreed that the purpose of fighting with the People of the Book…is one of two things: it is either their conversion to Islam or the payment of jizyah.” Nyazee concludes: “This leaves no doubt that the primary goal of the Muslim community, in the eyes of its jurists, is to spread the word of Allah through jihad, and the option of poll-tax [jizya] is to be exercised only after subjugation” of non-Muslims.

But neither Nyazee nor Ibn Rushd are prominent enough to claim the role of “primary driver in promoting the myth that peaceful Islam is nonexistent.” How about the Ayatollah Khomeini, who said: “There are hundreds of other [Qur’anic] psalms and Hadiths [sayings of the Prophet] urging Muslims to value war and to fight. Does all this mean that Islam is a religion that prevents men from waging war? I spit upon those foolish souls who make such a claim.” Better yet, how about Muhammad himself, who is depicted in a hadith saying: “I have been commanded to fight against people, till they testify to the fact that there is no god but Allah, and believe in me (that) I am the messenger (from the Lord) and in all that I have brought.” (Bukhari 1.31).

Another “don’t believe your lying eyes” moment in “Fear, Inc. 2.0” occurs when the report charges the David Horowitz Freedom Center with “promoting the myth that Muslim extremists infiltrated an array of political organizations on both the left and the right.” How about the White House? In December 2012, while the Muslim Brotherhood was still in power in Egypt, the Egyptian magazine Rose El-Youssef boasted that Brotherhood infiltrators in the Obama Administration had changed American policy “from a position hostile to Islamic groups and organizations in the world to the largest and most important supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood.”

It may have been an empty boast, but that would be hard to prove in light of Barack Obama’s foreign policy. Similarly, the CAP report claims (quoting Nathan Brown, a George Washington University professor) that the notorious captured internal Muslim Brotherhood document detailing U.S. Muslim groups’ strategy to work toward “eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within, and sabotaging its miserable house” was “the daydream of one enthusiast.” Brown doesn’t explain why a copy of this “daydream” turned up in the offices of the Holy Land Foundation (once the largest Islamic charity in the United States, shut down for funding Hamas) years after it was first written, but an even more telling indication that Brown and CAP are the enthusiasts doing the daydreaming when they dismiss this report is the fact that the Council on American-Islamic Relations and other Muslim groups work indefatigably to oppose virtually every counter-terror measure that has ever been proposed or implemented. Stigmatizing defense against the jihad threat as “bigotry” isn’t trying to “sabotage its miserable house”? Pull my other leg.

I hope the next CAP report will focus on how the “Islamophobes” are so devastatingly effective that they have even been able to infiltrate mosques and Islamic schools, so as to convince young Muslims that the Islamic State is authentically Islamic and has a claim on their loyalties: over 20,000 foreign Muslims have now traveled from all over the world to join the Islamic State, indicating either that imams and other Muslim authorities are singularly failing to communicate to all too many young Muslims the true, peaceful Islam that CAP will charge you with “hatred” and “bigotry” for not believing exists, or that the “Islamophobes” have a reach far greater than Matthew Duss, Yasmine Taeb, Ken Gude, and Ken Sofer ever imagined even in their worst fever dreams.

I also hope that new CAP report will address motive. Nowhere does “Fear, Inc. 2.0” explain why these fiendish “Islamophobes” would care to devote their lives to spreading hatred and fear of a noble, oppressed minority group. Apparently they want us to believe that it’s for the money, but since CAP’s budget is so very much larger than those of all the “Islamophobic” groups combined, if money is all it’s about then the “Islamophobes” would be well-advised to run up the white flag and pick up a copy of How to Get Rich By Betraying One’s Friends and Principles, by David Brock. So is it racism? Then where are the supposedly well-organized, well-heeled groups of smear and fear merchants who are dedicating their time to vilifying Hindus, or Buddhists, or Mormons, or Hard-Shell Baptists?

The effect, intended or not, of the CAP report and others like it is clear enough. When CAP and its cohorts smear those who speak out against jihad and Islamic supremacism as “bigots” and “hatemongers,” they intimidate others into backtracking, apologizing, and looking the other way when they should instead be pressing the Muslim community to address the jihad problem realistically and back up its pro-forma condemnations of terrorism with honest work against the Islamic teachings that jihadists use to justify terror.

The perfect world for the likes of Matthew Duss, Yasmine Taeb, Ken Gude, Ken Sofer and other Islamophobia-mongers would be one in which no one speaks up against jihad violence and Islamic supremacism: they have never, ever seen a counter-jihadist for whom they had any positive words. This would render the U.S. and the West in general mute and hence defenseless before the advancing jihad. As the blood and chaos spreads, will Duss and his cohorts stand up and take a bow?

Categories: Caliphate, Center for American Progress, Foreign policy, Free world, Human rights, Ideology, Iran, Iran scam, Islam, Islamic slaughter, Islamic State, Islamism, Islamophobia, Khamenei, Moral equivalence, Nazis, Obama, Sharia law, Terrorism
Tags: Caliphate, Center for American Progress, Foreign Policy, Free world, human rights, Ideology, Iran, Iran Scam, Islam, Islamic slaughter, Islamic State, Islamism, Islamophobia, Khamenei, Moral equivalence, Nazis, Sharia law, Terrorism

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The World Bows to Iranian Regional Hegemony

March 4, 2015

The World Bows to Iranian Regional Hegemony, Asia Times Online via Middle East Forum, David P. Goldman, March 4, 2015. Originally published under the title, “World Bows to Iran’s Hegemony.”

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The looming nuclear agreement is a dark cloud for countries within range of Iranian ballistic missiles.

The powers of the world hope to delay, but not deter, Iran’s eventual acquisition of nuclear weapons.

The US has tacitly accepted the guiding role of Iranian commanders in Iraq’s military operations against ISIS.

Washington destroyed the balance of power that defined the region’s politics when it pushed through majority rule in Iraq.

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The problem with Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu’s address to Congress March 3 was not the risk of offending Washington, but rather Washington’s receding relevance. President Barack Obama is not the only leader who wants to acknowledge what is already a fact in the ground, namely that “Iran has become the preeminent strategic player in West Asia to the increasing disadvantage of the US and its regional allies,” as a former Indian ambassador to Oman wrote this week.

For differing reasons, the powers of the world have elected to legitimize Iran’s dominant position, hoping to delay but not deter its eventual acquisition of nuclear weapons. Except for Israel and the Sunni Arab states, the world has no desire to confront Iran. Short of an American military strike, which is unthinkable for this administration, there may be little that Washington can do to influence the course of events. Its influence has fallen catastrophically in consequence of a chain of policy.

The best that Prime Minister Netanyahu can hope for is that the US Congress will in some way disrupt the Administration’s efforts to strike a deal with Iran by provoking the Iranians. That is what the White House fears, and that explains its rage over Netanyahu’s appearance.

Tehran may overplay its hand, but I do not think it will. The Persians are not the Palestinians, who discovered that they were a people only a generation ago and never miss an opportunity to miss and opportunity; they are ancient and crafty, and know an opportunity when it presents itself.

Most of the world wants a deal, because the alternative would be war. For 10 years I have argued that war is inevitable whatever the diplomats do, and that the question is not if, but how and when. President Obama is not British prime minister Neville Chamberlain selling out to Hitler at Munich in 1938: rather, he is Lord Halifax, that is, Halifax if he had been prime minister in 1938. Unlike the unfortunate Chamberlain, who hoped to buy time for Britain to build warplanes, Halifax liked Hitler, as Obama and his camarilla admire Iran.

China is Chamberlain, hoping to placate Iran in order to buy time. China’s dependence on Middle East oil will increase during the next decade no matter what else China might do, and a war in the Persian Gulf would ruin it.

Until early 2014, China believed that the United States would guarantee the security of the Persian Gulf. After the rise of Islamic State (ISIS), it concluded that the United States no longer cared, or perhaps intended to destabilize the region for nefarious reasons. But China does not have means to replace America’s presence in the Persian Gulf. Like Chamberlain at Munich, it seeks delay.

Obama, to be sure, portrays his policy in the language of balance of power. He told the New Yorker’s David Remnick in 2014,

It would be profoundly in the interest of citizens throughout the region if Sunnis and Shias weren’t intent on killing each other. And although it would not solve the entire problem, if we were able to get Iran to operate in a responsible fashion – not funding terrorist organizations, not trying to stir up sectarian discontent in other countries, and not developing a nuclear weapon – you could see an equilibrium developing between Sunni, or predominantly Sunni, Gulf states and Iran in which there’s competition, perhaps suspicion, but not an active or proxy warfare.

That, as the old joke goes, is the demo version.

On the ground, the US has tacitly accepted the guiding role of Iranian commanders in Iraq’s military operations against ISIS. It is courting the Iran-backed Houthi rebels who just overthrow a Saudi-backed regime in Yemen. It looks the other way while its heavy arms shipments to the Lebanese army are diverted to Hezbollah.

At almost every point at which Iran has tried to assert hegemony over its neighbors, Washington has acquiesced. “In the end, peace can be achieved only by hegemony or by balance of power,” wrote Henry Kissinger. The major powers hope for peace through Iranian hegemony, although they differ in their estimate of how long this will last.

Apart from its nuclear ambitions, the broader deal envisioned by Washington would leave Iran as a de facto suzerain in Iraq. It would also make Iran the dominant power in Lebanon (via Hezbollah), Syria (via its client regime) and Yemen (through its Houthi proxies). Although Sunni Muslims outnumber Shi’ites by 6:1, Sunni populations are concentrated in North Africa, Turkey and South Asia. Iran hopes to dominate the Levant and Mesopotamia, encircling Saudi Arabia and threatening Azerbaijan.

It is grotesque for America to talk of balance of power in the Persian Gulf, because America destroyed the balance of power that defined the region’s politics from the end of the First World War until 2006, when Washington pushed through majority rule in Iraq.

The imperialist powers in their wisdom established a power balance on two levels. First, they created a Sunni-dominated state in Iraq opposite Shi’ite Iran. The two powers fought each other to a standstill during the 1980s with the covert encouragement of the Reagan administration. Nearly a million soldiers died without troubling the world around them.

Second, the Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916 created two states, Syria and Iraq, in which minorities ruled majorities – the Alawite minority in Syria, and the Sunni minority in Iraq. Tyranny of a minority may be brutal, but a minority cannot exterminate a majority.

America’s first great blunder was to force majority rule upon Iraq. As Lt General (ret.) Daniel Bolger explained in a 2014 book,

The stark facts on the ground still sat there, oozing pus and bile. With Saddam gone, any voting would install a Shiite majority. The Sunni wouldn’t run Iraq again. That, at the bottom, caused the insurgency. Absent the genocide of Sunni Arabs, it would keep it going.

Under majority Shi’ite rule, Iraq inevitably became Iran’s ally. Iranian Revolutionary Guards are now leading its campaign against the Sunni resistance, presently dominated by ISIS, and Iranian officers are leading Iraqi army regulars.

This was the work of the George W Bush administration, not Obama. In its ideological fervor for Arab democracy, the Republicans opened the door for Iran to dominate the region. Condoleezza Rice, then Bush’s National Security Advisor, proposed offering an olive branch to Iran as early as 2003. After the Republicans got trounced in the 2006 Congressional elections, defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld got a pink slip, vice president Dick Cheney got benched, and “realist” Robert Gates – the co-chairman of the 2004 Council on Foreign Relations task force that advocated a deal with Iran – took over at Defense.

China and Russia

In the past, China has sought to strike a balance between Saudi Arabia and Iran with weapons sales, among other means. One Chinese analyst observes that although China’s weapons deliveries to Iran are larger in absolute terms than its sales to Saudi Arabia, it has given the Saudis its best medium-range missiles, which constitute a “formidable deterrent” against Iran.

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A Chinese warship arrives in Bandar Abbas, Iran in September 2014.

As China sees the matter, its overall dependency on imported oil is rising, and the proportion of that oil coming from Iran and its perceived allies is rising. Saudi Arabia may be China’s biggest provider, but Iraq and Oman account for lion’s share of the recent increase in oil imports. China doesn’t want to rock the boat with either prospective adversary.

Among the world’s powers, China is the supreme rationalist: it views the world in terms of cold self-interest and tends to assume that others also view the world this way. One of China’s most respected military strategists told me bluntly that the notion of a nuclear exchange between Israel and Iran (and by implication any regional nuclear power and Iran) was absurd: the Iranians, he argued, know that a nuclear-armed Israel could destroy them in retaliation.

Other Chinese analysts are less convinced and view Iran’s prospective acquisition of nuclear weapons with trepidation. It is not only war with Israel but with Saudi Arabia that concerns the oil-importing Chinese. For the time being, Beijing has decided to accommodate Iran. In a March 2 commentary, Xinhua explicitly rejected Israeli objections:

The US Congress will soon have a guest, Israeli Prime Minster Benjamin Netanyahu, who is expected to try to convince lawmakers that a deal with Iran on its nuclear program could threaten the very existence of the Jewish state.

Despite the upcoming pressure, policymakers in Washington should have a clear mind of the potential dangers of back-pedaling on the current promising efforts for a comprehensive deal on the Iranian nuclear issue before a March 31 deadline …

With a new round of talks in Switzerland pending, it is widely expected that the P5+1 [the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany] could succeed in reaching a deal with Iran to prevent the latter from developing a nuclear bomb, in exchange for easing sanctions on Tehran.

The momentum does not come easy and could hardly withstand any disturbances such as a surprise announcement by Washington to slap further sanctions on Tehran.

The Obama administration needs no outside reminder to know that any measures at this stage to “overwhelm” Iran will definitely cause havoc to the positive atmosphere that came after years of frustration over the issue.

While it is impossible for Washington to insulate itself from the powerful pro-Israel lobbyist this time, the US policymakers should heed that by deviating from the ongoing endeavor on Iran they may squander a hard-earned opportunity by the international community to move closer to a solution to the Iran nuclear issue, for several years to come if not forever.

Russia has taken Iran’s side explicitly, for several reasons.

First, Russia has stated bluntly that it would help Iran in retaliation for Western policy in Ukraine, as I wrote in this space January 28. Second, Russia’s own Muslim problem is Sunni rather than Shi’ite. It has reason to fear the influence of ISIS among its own Muslims. If Iran fights ISIS, it serves Russian interests. Russia, to be sure, does not like the idea of a nuclear power on its southern border, but its priorities place it squarely in Iran’s camp.

Demographic Time Bomb

The Israeli prime minister asserted that the alternative to a bad deal is not war, but a better deal. I do not think he believes that, but Americans cannot wrap their minds around the notion that West Asia will remain at war indefinitely, especially because the war arises from their own stupidity.

Balance of power in the Middle East is inherently impossible today for the same reason it failed in Europe in 1914, namely a grand demographic disequilibrium: Iran is on a course to demographic disaster, and must assert its hegemony while it still has time.

Game theorists might argue that Iran has a rational self-interest to trade its nuclear ambitions for the removal of sanctions. The solution to a multi-period game – one that takes into account Iran’s worsening demographic weakness – would have a solution in which Iran takes great risks to acquire nuclear weapons.

Between 30% and 40% of Iranians will be older than 60 by mid-century (using the UN Population Prospect’s Constant Fertility and “Low” Variants). Meanwhile, its military-age population will fall by a third to a half.

Belated efforts to promote fertility are unlikely to make a difference. The causes of Iranian infertility are baked into the cake – higher levels of female literacy, an officially-sanctioned culture of sexual license administered by the Shi’ite clergy as “temporary marriage,” epidemic levels of sexually-transmitted disease and inbreeding. Iran, in short, has an apocalyptic regime with a lot to be apocalyptic about.

Henry Kissinger is right: peace can be founded on either hegemony or balance of power. Iran cannot be a hegemon for long because it will implode economically and demographically within a generation. In the absence of either, the result is war. For the past 10 years I have argued in this space that when war is inevitable, preemption is the least damaging course of action. I had hoped that George W Bush would have the gumption to de-fang Iran, and was disappointed when he came under the influence of Condoleezza Rice and Robert Gates. Now we are back in 1938, but with Lord Halifax rather than Neville Chamberlain in charge.

Categories: Appeasement, China, Combat troops, Foreign policy, Free world, Ideology, Iran, Iran military, Iran scam, Iranian missiles, Iranian nukes, Iraq, Iraqi military, Islam, Islamic State, Islamism, Israel, Middle East, Netanyahu, Obama, Oil, P5+1, Russia, Shia, Sunni, U.S. Military
Tags: Appeasement, China, Combat troops, Foreign Policy, Free world, Ideology, Iran, Iran Scam, Iranian military, Iranian missiles, Iranian nukes, Iraq, Iraqi military, Islam, Islamic State, Islamism, Israel, Middle East, Netanyahu, Oil, Russia, Shia, Sunni, U.S. military

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Bad Ideas Breed Bad Foreign Policy

March 4, 2015

Bad Ideas Breed Bad Foreign Policy, Front Page Magazine, Bruce Thornton, March 4, 2015

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The triumph of secularization has disarmed us in the fight against modern jihadism. No matter how often jihadists evoke the religious foundations of their actions, no matter how many Koranic verses and Hadith they quote, we cannot imagine a people for whom the spiritual realm is more real than the material world. We cannot imagine a life permeated with the divine and directed by submission––what “Islam” literally means––to Allah and the model of Mohammed. We ignore, as Bernard Lewis has written, the fact that “in most Islamic countries, religion remains a major political factor,” for “most Muslim countries are still profoundly Muslim, in a way and a sense that most Christian countries are no longer Christian.” Hence the worldwide Muslim support for shari’a law and its codified sexism, intolerance, and penal cruelty.

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Barack Obama’s foreign policy will go down in U.S. history as one of the most dangerously inept ever. Created by equal amounts of ignorance, arrogance, and partisan politics, the president’s policies have left behind a world in which rivals and enemies are on the march, while allies and friends are endangered and alienated. He deserves the opprobrium with which future history should load him.

But focusing on individuals and their personal flaws can prevent us from seeing the larger bad ideas that transcend any one person or party. We justly remember British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain as the architect of the 1938 Munich conference that paved the way for Hitler’s aggression. And indeed, Chamberlain’s flaws of character––most important a vanity about his personal powers of persuasion that blinded him to Hitler’s brilliant diplomatic misdirection about his true intentions––contributed to that debacle. But we should also remember the delirious public joy that greeted Chamberlain when he returned to England, and the global acclaim he received for avoiding war with Germany. Millions of people thought Chamberlain had heroically succeeded because many shared the assumptions and ideas that drove his decisions.

So too today, Obama’s vanity and self-regard have from the beginning led to dangerous foreign policy decisions. His belief that he was a global “transformational” and “world-historical” figure drove him to court inveterate enemies like Iran, the Taliban, and the Muslim Brothers, who he mistakenly believed would be seduced by his brilliance and sympathy for their grievances. His fatuous Cairo speech in 2009 and his numerous groveling letters to Iran honcho Ayatollah Khamenei were predicated on Obama’s notion that as a person “of color,” who had spent a few childhood years in a Muslim country and was ashamed of America’s global sins, he had an instant rapport with hard, cruel men who despise the West as “Crusaders,” godless infidels to be conquered, converted, or killed. Indeed, Obama’s delusional self-estimation recalls Chamberlain’s comments to his cabinet that in the negotiations over Czechoslovakia “Hitler was speaking the truth,” and that “he had established some degree of personal influence over Herr Hitler.” Herr Hitler, in fact, considered Chamberlain “a little worm.”

But beyond these failures of character and self-knowledge, larger cultural ideas have contributed to this country’s mistakes in dealing with a resurgent Islamic jihad. Most important has been the triumph of secularism in the West, the marginalization of religion in our politics and culture. Anyone who believes the received wisdom that the U.S. is a religious country should ignore the polling data on churchgoing and look instead at our public culture. Sordid sexual content in movies, television shows, and popular music; 58 million abortions since 1973; the legitimization of same-sex marriage; the incessant demonization of any participation of religion in schools or politics––all bespeak a culture in which religion has been reduced to a private life-style choice and comforting holiday rituals, as Obama suggested when he reduced the First Amendment’s protection of religion to the “freedom to worship.” Anyone who does take Christianity or Judaism more seriously than that is considered, to quote Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, “shamans or witch doctors from savage tribes whom one humors until one can dress them in trousers and send them to school.”

More important, the animus against faith has contributed to the fashionable self-loathing and dislike of their home country on the part of many progressives and leftists, who have implicated Christianity in the crimes of capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism. Hence Obama’s bringing up and distorting the history of the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition in a speech about religious violence. Meanwhile, a noble-savage multiculturalism masquerading as tolerance for the oppressed “other” considers Islam an exotic “religion of peace,” despite its 14 centuries of slaughter, invasion, pillage, slaving, occupation, and colonization. Those tolerant Muslims of Granada in 1066 killed as many Jews in one day as the Spanish Inquisition did in its 3 centuries of existence.

The triumph of secularization has disarmed us in the fight against modern jihadism. No matter how often jihadists evoke the religious foundations of their actions, no matter how many Koranic verses and Hadith they quote, we cannot imagine a people for whom the spiritual realm is more real than the material world. We cannot imagine a life permeated with the divine and directed by submission––what “Islam” literally means––to Allah and the model of Mohammed. We ignore, as Bernard Lewis has written, the fact that “in most Islamic countries, religion remains a major political factor,” for “most Muslim countries are still profoundly Muslim, in a way and a sense that most Christian countries are no longer Christian.” Hence the worldwide Muslim support for shari’a law and its codified sexism, intolerance, and penal cruelty.

Given this failure of imagination, we have misunderstood jihadism ever since it burst onto the global scene in 1979 with the Iranian Revolution, when our foreign policy establishment ignored or dismissed its religious roots. Thirty-five years later, Obama continues the same mistake, refusing to identify ISIS as an expression of Islamic doctrine, or to use the adjective “Islamic” to describe the numerous jihadist movements active today, or to recognize the apocalyptic messianism and genocidal aims of the Iranian mullahcracy. This blindness reflects widespread delusions like the long mischaracterization of Islam as the “religion of peace,” the reinterpretation of jihad to mean a self-improving “inner struggle,” or the historical fantasies of Islamic “tolerance” in Ottoman Turkey or Andalusian Spain.

Behind this Orwellian rhetoric lies the assumption that all religions are basically the same and preach the same doctrines of “love thy neighbor” and “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” This reduction of religion to Hallmark-card sentimentalism is yet another instance of the refusal to take spirituality seriously, and to acknowledge that all spiritual aims are not the same or compatible. How much easier it is to indulge a flabby ecumenicalism and dismiss the jihadists as “evil” or “barbaric,” as though we are dealing with psychopathic serial killers rather than fervent believers in a worldwide faith with doctrines and practices dating back to the 7^th century.

Finally, the dismissal of spiritual causes leads us to focus on material ones, which in turn creates the preposterous analyses of jihadism as a reflection of material conditions or psychological dysfunctions created by them. Hence this administration recently has talked about “root causes” like “lack of opportunity for jobs” (State Department spokesman Marie Harf); the need for “peaceful democratic change” and “economic growth and devoting more resources on education, including for girls and women” (Barack Obama); “alienation, poverty, thrill-seeking, and other factors” (John Kerry); and “the perceived effect of U.S. foreign policy in the Muslim world” (Rashad Hussain, recently named Obama’s Special Envoy and Coordinator for Strategic Counter-terrorism Communications), to name a few.

Yet even some Christian and observant Jewish conservatives have ignored the power of spiritual imperatives and religious differences, particularly in their focus on democracy promotion as the cure for jihadist terror. George W. Bush, in his 2002 National Security Strategy, focused U.S. foreign policy on promoting a “single sustainable model for national success: freedom, democracy, and free enterprise,” for “these values of freedom are right and true for every person, every society.” These dubious ideals became strategic aims during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And for all he styles himself the anti-Bush, Barack Obama has made the same claims, as in his 2012 remarks at the U.N. “Freedom and self-determination,” he said, “are not unique to one culture. These are not simply American values or Western values—they are universal values.”

But no matter how potentially true these claims may be, to those pious Muslims who consider themselves the “slaves of Allah,” freedom and democracy as we understand them are incompatible with shari’a law, and “national success” will be achieved by restoring Islam to its original purity, and following the “model” that empowered Allah’s warriors to create a global empire stretching from the Atlantic to China. If we take seriously Islam’s spiritual aims––the necessity of obeying Allah’s precepts in order to create for Muslims a totalizing political-social order of justice, piety, and equality, and to ensure an eternity of bliss in paradise––then we will see that our notions of earthly freedom, leisure, confessional tolerance, and prosperity are to millions of Muslims mere temptations to abandon their faith and risk their eternal souls. And we will understand that waging jihad against those responsible for those temptations, especially a rich and powerful infidel West, is the communal duty of the Islamic ummah, and death in that battle the key to paradise.

Trapped in our own secularist and materialist assumptions, we mistake the nature of the enemy and thus create policies––most important the appeasement of Iran through negotiations and concessions that will end with the world’s foremost terrorist state in possession of nuclear weapons––doomed to fail and damage our security and interests. But Barack Obama will not be the only father of that failure.

Categories: Christianity, Foreign policy, Iran, Iran scam, Islam, Islamic jihad, Islamic slaughter, Islamic State, Jihad, Jobs for jihadists, Judiasm, Moral equivalence, Obama, Religion, Secularism, Terrorism
Tags: Christianity, Foreign Policy, Iran, Iran Scam, Islam, Islamic Jihad, Islamic slaughter, Islamic State, Jihad, Jobs for jihadists, Judiasm, Moral equivalence, Religion, Secularism, Terrorism

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Off topic? Free speech on campus

March 4, 2015

Free speech on campus, Pat Condell via You Tube, March 2, 2015

(Many “highly educated” leftists believe that they should vent their views freely but that others not only should not but should be prevented from doing so. Might the objections of Obama and his cohorts to PM Netanyahu’s address to the Congress have been motivated by substantially the same sort of nonsense Mr. Condell ascribes to academia: If you don’t agree with Obama, know your place, sit down and shut up?– DM)

Categories: Colleges in U.S., Domestic policy, Foreign policy, Iran scam, Iranian nukes, Islam, Israel, Multiculturalism, Netanyahu, Obama, P5+1, Pat Condell, U.S. Congress
Tags: Colleges in US, Domestic policy, Foreign Policy, Iran Scam, Iranian nukes, Islam, Israel, Multiculturalism, Netanyahu, Pat Condell, U.S. Congress

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Netanyahu, Churchill and Congress

March 2, 2015

Netanyahu, Churchill and Congress, The Gatestone Institute, Richard Kemp, March 1, 2015

There are striking similarities between the objectives of Churchill’s speech nearly 75 years ago and Netanyahu’s today; both with no less purpose than to avert global conflagration. And, like Churchill’s in the 1930s, Netanyahu’s is the lone voice among world leaders today.

There is no doubt abut Iran’s intent. It has been described as a nuclear Auschwitz. Israel is not the only target of Iranian violence. Iran has long been making good on its promises to mobilize Islamic forces against the US, as well as the UK and other American allies. Attacks directed and supported by Iran have killed an estimated 1,100 American troops in Iraq in recent years. Iran provided direct support to Al Qaeda in the 9/11 attacks.

Between 2010 and 2013, Iran either ordered or allowed at least three major terrorist plots against the US and Europe to be planned from its soil. Fortunately, all were foiled.

Iran’s ballistic missile program, inexplicably outside the scope of current P5+1 negotiations, brings Europe into Iran’s range, and future development will extend Tehran’s reach to the US.

It is not yet too late to prevent Iran from arming itself with nuclear weapons. In his 1941 speech to Congress, Churchill reminded the American people that five or six years previously it would have been easy to prevent Germany from rearming without bloodshed. But by then it was too late.

This vengeful and volatile regime must not in any circumstances be allowed to gain a nuclear weapons capability, whatever the P5+1 states might consider the short-term economic, political or strategic benefits to themselves of a deal with Tehran.

In a few days, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will address the US Congress for the third time. The only other foreign leader to have had that privilege was Winston Churchill. Like Churchill when he first spoke to Congress in December 1941, Netanyahu is taking a risk.

For Churchill the risk was to his life — he had to make a hazardous transatlantic voyage aboard the battleship HMS Duke of York through stormy, U-boat infested waters. For Netanyahu the risk is to his own political life and to his country’s relationship with the United States, given the intense presidential opposition to his speech.

But like Churchill was, Netanyahu is a fighting soldier and, like Churchill, a tough political leader, unafraid to shoulder such risks when so much is at stake. And in both cases, the stakes could not be higher, greater than their own lives, political fortunes or rivalries and affecting not just their own countries and the United States, but the whole of the world.

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Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addresses a joint session of U.S. Congress on May 24, 2011. (Image source: PBS video screenshot)

There are striking similarities between the objectives of Churchill’s speech nearly 75 years ago and Netanyahu’s today: both with no less a purpose than to avert global conflagration.

Speaking days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Churchill summarized the course of the war thus far but then concluded with a dramatic appeal to the American people for Anglo-American unity to prevent conflict in the future, reminding them that “twice in a single generation, the catastrophe of world war has fallen upon us.”

“Do we not owe it to ourselves, to our children, and to mankind,” he asked, “to make sure that these catastrophes do not engulf us for the third time?”

No less profound, and no less far-reaching, will be Netanyahu’s appeal for American-Israeli unity in the face of a new danger. A danger perhaps even greater than Churchill was able to comprehend in pre-nuclear 1941. Whereas Churchill spoke of a future, as yet unknown peril, Netanyahu will focus on the clear and present threat to world peace if Iran is allowed to produce nuclear weapons.

And like Churchill in the 1930s, Netanyahu’s is a lone voice among world leaders today.

In pursuit of both uranium and plutonium tracks to a bomb, as well as the development of long-range ballistic missiles, there is no doubt about Iran’s intent. It has been described as a nuclear Auschwitz.

It is Netanyahu’s duty to sound the alarm against such a prospect. It is Israel’s survival that is at stake. It is Israel that will have to conduct military intervention if the US will not. And it is Israelis who will die in any subsequent regional conflagration.

But this is not only an existential threat to Israel — it is a danger to other states in the Middle East and to us all. Doubtful of Western resolve, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Turkey are already investigating the development of their own nuclear capabilities.

An agreement that leaves Iran with the potential to achieve nuclear breakout will trigger a Middle East arms race that will exponentially increase the risks of global nuclear war, a risk multiplied by the vulnerability of regional governments to overthrow by extremists.

Iran’s ballistic missile program, inexplicably outside the scope of current P5+1 negotiations, brings Europe into Iran’s range, and future development will extend Tehran’s nuclear reach to the US. The world’s number one sponsor of terrorism, the regime of the ayatollahs would have no qualms about supplying their terrorist proxies with nuclear weapons.

This is the greatest threat the world faces today. Yet all the signals suggest that the P5+1, driven by President Obama’s apparent desperation for détente with Tehran, is already set on a path towards 1930s-style appeasement that will end with Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons.

The view that Cold War style containment and mutual deterrence could prevent this apocalyptic, fanatical regime from using its nuclear weapons is dangerously naïve. Yet the Western leaders who seem to be on the verge of reaching an agreement are not naïve. Lacking the moral strength to face down Iran, they see deception and appeasement as the only way out of their dilemma.

To gauge their intentions, we do not need to rely just on frequent Iranian threats, such as those of General Hossein Salami, who said recently, with negotiations still under way: “As long as the US continue to use the Islamic world as the scene for their regional policies, all the forces of the Islamic world will undoubtedly be mobilized against them.” In the same interview, he threatened Israel too: “The very existence of the Zionist entity and its collapse are of crucial importance.”

Iran’s determination to bring about the violent collapse of the “Zionist entity” is continuously manifested in its directing and funding of armed attacks against Israeli soldiers and civilians at home and overseas, by proxies including Hizballah, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The Gaza conflict last summer, for example, owed much to Iranian funding and weaponry.

Just a few weeks ago, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps General Mohammad Allahadi was operating with senior Hizballah commanders to set up a new front on Syrian territory in the Golan, from which to launch attacks against Israel. He was killed by an Israeli air strike while visiting his planned area of operations.

Israel is not the only target of Iranian violence. Iran has long been making good on its promises to mobilize Islamic forces against the US, as well as the UK and other American allies. Attacks directed and supplied from Tehran killed an estimated 1,100 American troops in Iraq in recent years. Strikes have been facilitated in Afghanistan, killing US, British and other Coalition soldiers.

Iran provided direct support to Al Qaeda in the 9/11 attacks and continues to harbor Al Qaeda terrorists. Between 2010 and 2013, Tehran either ordered or allowed at least three major terrorist plots against the US and Europe to be planned from its soil. Fortunately, all were foiled. Direction, support and facilitation to both Sunni and Shia terrorist groups in planning attacks against the US and its allies continues today.

This vengeful and volatile regime must not in any circumstances be allowed to gain a nuclear weapons capability, whatever the P5+1 states might consider the short-term economic, political or strategic benefits to themselves of a deal with Tehran.

Even before the world’s first experience of nuclear bombing in August 1945, Churchill and Roosevelt both understood the dangers of allowing their enemies and potential enemies to acquire such capability. When Allied intelligence identified a Nazi uranium production plant in Oranienburg in eastern Germany, 612 bombers destroyed it in a single raid in March 1945 with 1,506 tons of high explosives and 178 tons of incendiary bombs, to prevent it falling into the hands of advancing Russian troops.

Only a strong stand by the West, and rejection of an agreement that allows development of nuclear weapons, will ensure that such action does not in the future become necessary against Iran. In his 1941 speech to Congress, Churchill reminded the American people that five or six years previously it would have been easy to prevent Germany from rearming without bloodshed. But by then it was too late, and the world was engulfed in unprecedented violence.

It is not yet too late to prevent Iran from arming itself with nuclear weapons. The American people, the American government and the West as a whole must heed Netanyahu’s clear warning not to reach a deal that will allow the mendacious and malevolent Iranian regime to acquire nuclear weapons. Instead, sanctions that stand a chance of compelling Tehran to abandon its world-threatening ambitions must be maintained, and if necessary, increased.

Categories: Caliphate, Churchill, Foreign policy, Free world, International Community, Iran, Iran scam, Iranian missiles, Iranian nukes, Islam, Islamism, Israel, Leftists, Middle East, Netanyahu, Obama, P5+1, U.S. Congress
Tags: Caliphate, Churchill, Foreign Policy, Free world, International Community, Iran, Iran Scam, Iranian missiles, Iranian nukes, Islam, Israel, Leftists, Middle East, Netanyahu, U.S. Congress

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Netanyahu tries to head off Iran’s machinations after Obama empowers Tehran as favored Mid East ally

March 2, 2015

Netanyahu tries to head off Iran’s machinations after Obama empowers Tehran as favored Mid East ally, DEBKAfile, March 1, 2015

Iran's Shite crescent

Netanyahu’s political rivals, while slamming him day by day, turn their gaze away from the encroaching Iranian forces taking up forward positions in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, where they are busy fashioning a Shiite Crescent that encircles Sunni Arab states as well as Israel.

It must be obvious that to bolster its rising status as the leading regional power, Iran must be reach the nuclear threshold – at the very least – if not nuclear armaments proper, or else how will Tehran be able to expand its territorial holdings and defend its lebensraum.

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Almost the last words Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu heard Sunday, March 1, as he took off for Washington to address Congress on Iran, was in effect “Don’t do it!” They came from a group of 180 senior ex-IDF military officers. After the personal abuse is weeded out of their message, what remains is that Netanyahu’s speech to a joint session of the US Congress Tuesday, March 3, was not worth making because it would damage relations with the US.

Maj. Gen. Amiram Levin, former Northern Command chief and ex-Deputy Director of the Mossad, put it this way: “Bibi, you are making an error in navigation; the target is Tehran not Washington.” He went on to say: “[Instead] of working hand in hand with the president,,, you go there and poke a finger in his eye.”

DEBKAfile’s analysts maintain that the navigation error is the general’s. Before shooting his slings and arrows at the Israeli prime minister’s office, he should long ago have taken note of President Barack Obama’s Middle East record in relation to Israel’s during his six years in the White House.

It took time to catch on to Obama’s two-faced policy towards Israel because it was handled with subtlety.

On the one hand, he made sure Israel was well supplied with all its material security needs. This enabled him to boast that no US president or administration before him had done as much to safeguard Israel’s security.

But behind this façade, Obama made sure that Israel’s security stayed firmly in the technical-material-financial realm and never crossed the line into a strategic relationship.

That was because he needed to keep his hands free for the objective of transferring the role of foremost US ally in the Middle East from Israel to Iran, a process that took into account the ayatollahs’ nuclear aspirations.

This process unfolding over recent years has left Israel face to face with a nakedly hostile Iran empowered by the United States.

Tehran is not letting its oft-repeated threat to wipe Israel off the map hang fire until its nuclear aspirations are assured of consummation under the negotiations continuing later this week in the Swiss town of Montreux between US Secretary John Kerry and Iranian Foreign Minsiter Mohammed Javad Zarif. In the meantime, without President Obama lifting a finger in defense of “Israel’s security,” Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps officers are drawing Israel into a military stranglehold on the ground.

Netanyahu’s political rivals, while slamming him day by day, turn their gaze away from the encroaching Iranian forces taking up forward positions in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, where they are busy fashioning a Shiite Crescent that encircles Sunni Arab states as well as Israel.

It must be obvious that to bolster its rising status as the leading regional power, Iran must be reach the nuclear threshold – at the very least – if not nuclear armaments proper, or else how will Tehran be able to expand its territorial holdings and defend its lebensraum.

This is not something that Barack Obama or his National Security Adviser Susan Rice are prepared to admit. They are not about to confirm intelligence reports, which expose the military collaboration between the Obama administration and Iran’s supreme leader Aytatollah Ali Khamenei as being piped through the office of Iraq’s Shiite Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi.

Washington denies that there is any such collaboration – or any suggestion that the White House had reviewed recommendations and assessments of an option for the Iranian Revolutionary Guards’ Al Qods Brigades to take over the ground war on the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria as American contractors.

Al Qods chief Gen. Qassem Soleimani is frequently spotted these days flitting between Baghdad, Damascus and Beirut, while his intelligence and liaison officers file reports to the Obama administration, through the Iraqi prime minister’s office, on their forthcoming military steps and wait for Washington’s approval.

America understandably lacks the will to have its ground forces embroiled in another Middle East war. Washington is therefore not about to turn away a regional power offering to undertake this task – even though it may be unleasing a bloody conflagration between Shiite and Sunni Muslims that would be hard to extinguish

Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the rest of the Gulf are as dismayed as Israel by Obama’s regional strategy, which, stripped of its diplomatic veneer, boils down to a straight trade: The US will allow Iran to reach the status of a pre-nuclear power and regional hegemon, while Tehran, in return, will send its officers and ground troops to fight in Iraq, Syria and even Afghanistan.

The 180 ex-IDF officers and Israel’s opposition leaders, Yitzhak Herzog and Tzipi Livni, were right when they argued that Israel’s bond with the US presidency is too valuable to jeopardize. But it is the Obama White House which is trifling with that bond – not Netanyahu, whose mission in Washington is no more than a tardy attempt to check Iran’s malignant machinations which go forward without restraint.

Categories: Elections in Israel, Foreign policy, Free world, Funding terrorism, Iran, Iran scam, Iraq, Islam, Islamic slaughter, Israel, Israeli elections, Kerry, Netanyahu, Nukes, Obama, P5+1, Shiite crescent, Syria, Terrorism, Terrorists, U.S. Congress
Tags: Elections in Israel, Foreign Policy, Free world, Funding terrorism, Iran, Iran Scam, Iraq, Islam, Islamic slaughter, Israel, Israeli elections, Netanyahu, Nukes, Shiite crescent, Syria, Terrorism, Terrorists, U.S. Congress

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Bring Back the Bush Doctrine—with One Addition

March 1, 2015

Bring Back the Bush Doctrine—with One Addition, National Review Online, Andrew C. McCarthy, February 28, 2015

Our enemies are not driven by American foreign policy, our friendship with Israel, our detention of jihadists at Gitmo, or the supposed “arrogance” our current president likes to apologize for. Those are all pretexts for aggression.

Our enemies are driven by an ideology, Islamic supremacism, that is rooted in a classical interpretation of sharia — Islamic law. Islamic supremacism is rabidly anti-American, anti-Western, and anti-Semitic. It rejects the fundamental premise of our liberty: that people are free to govern themselves, rather than be ruled by a totalitarian legal code that suffocates liberty and brutally discriminates against non-Muslims and apostates. And sharia is an actual war on women — denying them equal rights under the law, subjecting them to unthinkable abuse, and reducing them in many ways to chattel.

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There is a path to victory in the fight against radical Islam, and our next president should embrace it.

What should be our strategy against ISIS? We ask the question without ever considering Iran. What concessions about centrifuges and spent fuel should we demand to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power? We ask the question never linking the mullahs’ weapons ambitions with its sponsorship of the global jihad . . . the only reason we dread a nuclear Iran. What should be the national-defense strategy of the United States against radical Islam, the most immediate and thoroughgoing security and cultural threat we face today?

I had the good fortune to be asked to participate in a CPAC panel Friday on defending America against rogue states. With 2016 hopefuls crowding the halls, it got me to thinking: What should we hope to hear from Republicans who want to be the party’s standard-bearer?

It is often said that we lack a strategy for defeating our enemies. Actually, we have had a strategy for 14 years, ever since the fleeting moment of clarity right after the 9/11 attacks.

That strategy is called the Bush Doctrine, and it remains the only one that has any chance of working . . . at least if we add a small but crucial addendum — one that should have been obvious enough back in 2001, and that hard lessons of history have now made inescapable.

The Bush Doctrine has become the source of copious rebuke. On the left, that’s because of that four-letter word (hint: It’s not “Doctrine”). On the right, there have been plenty of catcalls, too. The reaction, however, has been against what the Bush Doctrine evolved into, not against the Bush Doctrine as it was first announced.

The unadorned Bush Doctrine had two straightforward parts. First, because violent jihadists launch attacks against the United States when they have safe havens from which to plot and train, we must hunt down those terrorists wherever on earth they operate. Second, the nations of the world must be put to a choice: You are with us or you are with the terrorists. Period — no middle ground. If you are with the terrorists, you will be regarded, as they are regarded, as an enemy of the United States.

Before we get to that aforementioned addendum, it is important to remember why the Bush Doctrine was so necessary. For the nine years before it, we were living with the Clinton Doctrine.

That is the doctrine President Obama came to office promising to move us back to — and has he ever. It is the doctrine under which the enemy strikes us with bombs and weaponized jumbo jets, and we respond with subpoenas and indictments. It is the doctrine under which our enemies say, “allahu akbar! Death to America!” and we respond, “Gee, you know America has been arrogant. We can see why you’re so upset.”

The Clinton Doctrine — the one the Democrats will be running on in 2016, perhaps with its namesake leading the way — is the one that gave us a series of ever more audacious attacks through the 1990s: the 1993 World Trade Center bombing; a plot to bomb New York City landmarks such as the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels; a plot to blow American airliners out of the sky over the Pacific; the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing, in which Iran and al-Qaeda teamed up to kill 19 American airmen; the 1998 bombings of our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that killed over 200 innocent people; detonating a bomb next to our destroyer, the U.S.S. Cole, in October 2000, killing 17 members of the U.S. Navy; and finally, the 9/11 atrocities, killing nearly 3,000 of our citizens.

And what has gradually restoring the Clinton Doctrine gotten us? While President Obama pleads for a deal that will inevitably make Iran a nuclear power, the mullahs continue to back anti-American terrorists and conduct military exercises in which they practice blowing up American ships. The Iraq so many Americans gave their lives for is now an extension of Iran. Afghanistan is being returned to the Taliban, which the president empowers by releasing its commanders. Libya is now a failed state where jihadists murder Americans with impunity and frolic in the former American embassy. Al-Qaeda is expanding through northern Africa, now a bigger, more potent threat than it was on the eve of 9/11. And yet it may pale compared with its breakaway faction, the Islamic State, which now controls more territory than Great Britain, as it decapitates, incinerates, and rapes its way to a global caliphate.

But Obama tells us there’s good news: Yemen is a success . . . or at least it was until it was recently overrun by an Iran-backed militia — oops. Well, we have indicted exactly one of the scores of terrorists who attacked our embassy at Benghazi. He got his Miranda warnings, of course, and he’ll be getting his civilian trial any month now. Hopefully, we’ll do better than Obama’s civilian trial of Ahmed Ghailani, the bomber of our embassies who was acquitted on 284 out of 285 counts.

Is it any wonder we’re losing?

Largely, it is because we’re worried about the wrong things — like whether we can sweep the enemy off its feet with enough Islamophilic, blame-America-first rhetoric. In reality, our enemies could not care less whether we — the infidel West — think their literalist, scripturally based belief system is a “perversion” of Islam. Radical Islam hears only one message from America: strength or weakness. The Clinton Doctrine is weakness cubed.

The Bush Doctrine, by contrast, is the path to victory — if we get that one addendum right.

It is this: Our enemies are not driven by American foreign policy, our friendship with Israel, our detention of jihadists at Gitmo, or the supposed “arrogance” our current president likes to apologize for. Those are all pretexts for aggression.

Our enemies are driven by an ideology, Islamic supremacism, that is rooted in a classical interpretation of sharia — Islamic law. Islamic supremacism is rabidly anti-American, anti-Western, and anti-Semitic. It rejects the fundamental premise of our liberty: that people are free to govern themselves, rather than be ruled by a totalitarian legal code that suffocates liberty and brutally discriminates against non-Muslims and apostates. And sharia is an actual war on women — denying them equal rights under the law, subjecting them to unthinkable abuse, and reducing them in many ways to chattel.

In the “you are with us or you are with the terrorists” view of national security, any Muslim nation, organization, or individual that adheres to Islamic supremacism is on the wrong side. Failing to come to terms with that brute fact is where the Bush Doctrine went awry.

Sharia and Western democracy cannot coexist. They are antithetical to each other. So insists Sheikh Yussuf Qaradawi, the Muslim Brotherhood jurist who is the world’s most influential Islamic scholar. It may be the only thing we should agree with him about.

The Bush Doctrine was allowed to evolve from an American national-security strategy to an illusion that our national security would be strengthened by promoting a chimera — sharia democracy. We put the lives of our best young men and women in harm’s way in the service of a dubious experiment: that we could build stable Islamic democracies that would be reliable American allies against jihadist terror.

Perhaps the worst thing about this experiment is not its inevitable failure. It is the sapping of America’s will that it has caused. Defeating our jihadist enemies is going to require a will to win, because the enemy’s will is strong — the jihadists truly believe Allah has already helped them vanquish the Soviet empire, and that we are next.

The American people vigorously support military operations that are essential to our defense. They support a vigorous war to defeat violent jihadists and their support networks. They understand that we cannot cede our enemies safe havens and nuclear weapons.

They do not support the notion that promoting our national security obliges us to move into hostile Islamic countries for a decade or three to civilize them. That’s not our job. Worse, when Americans become convinced that Washington — ever more remote from the public — thinks it is our job, they will not support military action, even action that is vital to protecting our nation. They will not trust the government to defeat our enemies without becoming entangled in Islam’s endless internal strife.

Understanding Islamic supremacism so we can distinguish allies from those hostile to us will restore the Bush Doctrine. And let’s not be cowed by the critics: Nothing I’ve said means endless war, or that we have to invade or occupy every country. But it does mean we should be using all our assets — not just military but intelligence, law-enforcement, financial, and diplomatic — to undermine regimes that support sharia supremacism. Cutting off that jihadist life-line is the path to victory — just as maintaining a strong military that is allowed to show it means business, that is not hamstrung by irresponsible rules of engagement, is the best way to ensure we won’t have to use it too often.

In Iran, where sharia is the law of the land, they persecute non-Muslims and apostates just like ISIS does. In Saudi Arabia, where sharia is the law of the land, they behead their prisoners just like ISIS does. A candidate who cannot tell liberty’s friends from liberty’s enemies is not fit to be commander-in-chief.

Categories: Bush doctrine, Caliphate, Clinton, Foreign policy, Funding terrorism, Human rights, Iran, Iran scam, Islam, Islamic slaughter, Islamic State, Islamism, Islamophobia, Israel, Moral equivalence, Nukes, Obama, P5+1, Sharia law, Terrorism, Terrorists, Violent extremism
Tags: Bush doctrine, Caliphate, Clinton, Foreign Policy, Funding terrorism, human rights, Iran, Iran Scam, Islam, Islamic slaughter, Islamic State, Islamism, Islamophobia, Israel, Moral equivalence, Nukes, Sharia law, Terrorism, Terrorists, Violent extremism

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Obama Must Explain Why the Iran Deal Isn’t North Korea Redux

March 1, 2015

Obama Must Explain Why the Iran Deal Isn’t North Korea Redux, Commentary Magazine, Michael Rubin, March 1, 2015

(There are additional parallels. North Korea and Iran have comparable views of human rights, both make loud and frequent noises about obliterating their perceived enemies and both have allies willing if not anxious to sneak around sanctions. There are also differences. Iran is far more powerful than North Korea was or is and Iran’s intention to dominate the Middle East transcends North Korea’s desire to “unify” with South Korea on North Korea’s terms. Iranian governance is based on Islam, an unfortunately powerful world religion seeking world domination. North Korean governance is based on the “religion of Kim,” supreme internally but otherwise of little significance elsewhere. Iran also presents a greater danger to the U.S. than North Korea did. However, Obama won’t explain why the Iran deal isn’t “North Korea redux” because he quite likely neither knows nor cares and because it is. — DM)

The State Department has never conducted a lessons learned exercise about what went wrong with the North Korea deal. Perhaps it’s time. Diplomatic responsibility and national security demand it.

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As the Obama administration rushes into a nuclear deal with Iran, it pays to remember the last time the United States struck a deal with a rogue regime in order to constrain that state’s nuclear program and the aftermath of that supposed success.

Bill Clinton had been president barely a month when North Korea announced that it would no longer allow International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspections, followed shortly thereafter by an announcement that it would withdraw from the NPT altogether within a matter of months. If Kim Il-sung expected Washington to flinch, he was right. The State Department aimed to keep North Korea within the NPT at almost any price. Chief U.S. negotiator Robert Gallucci and his aides explained in their book Going Critical, “If North Korea could walk away from the treaty’s obligations with impunity at the very moment its nuclear program appeared poised for weapons production, it would have dealt a devastating blow from which the treaty might never recover.” Unwilling to take any path that could lead to military action, Clinton’s team sought to talk Pyongyang away from nuclear defiance, no matter that talking and the inevitable concessions that followed legitimized Pyongyang’s brinkmanship.

As with President Obama relieving Iran of the burden of six United Nations Security Council resolutions which demanded a complete cessation of enrichment, Clinton’s willingness to negotiate North Korea’s nuclear compliance was itself a concession. After all, the 1953 Armistice required Pyongyang to reveal all military facilities and, in case of dispute, enable the Military Armistice Commission to determine the purpose of suspect facilities. By making weaker frameworks the new baseline, Clinton let North Korea off the hook before talks even began.

Just as Israeli (and Saudi and Emirati and Egyptian and Kuwaiti and Bahraini) leaders express frustration with the Obama administration regarding its naiveté and unwillingness to consult, so too did South Korea at the time chafe at Clinton’s arrogance. South Korean President Kim Young Sam complained to journalists that North Korea was leading America on and manipulating negotiators “to buy time.” And in a pattern that repeats today with regard to Iran, the IAEA held firmer to the demand that North Korea submit to real inspections than did Washington. The issue came to a head in September 1993 after the State Department pressured the IAEA to compromise on limited inspections.

In the face of Pyongyang’s defiance, Clinton was also wary that coercion could be a slippery slope to war. Just as President Obama and Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel instructed U.S. forces in the Persian Gulf not to stand firm but rather to retreat if probed or pushed by Iran, Clinton sought to mollify Pyongyang, for example cancelling the joint U.S.–South Korea military exercise in 1994. Adding insult to injury, the Clinton administration criticized the South Korean government for being unwilling to compromise. Indeed, everything the Obama administration has done with regard to Israel over the past year—with the exception, perhaps, of the classless chickensh-t comment—was ripped right from the Clinton playbook two decades before when the White House sought to silence Seoul.

There followed months of baseless optimism in Washington, followed by disappointment quickly supplanted by denial. At one point, when it looked like Kim Il-sung’s intransigence might actually lead to war, former President Jimmy Carter visited Pyongyang and, whether cleared to or not, made concessions which diffused the situation. It was the diplomatic equivalent of Obama’s voided redlines. Nightlinehost Ted Koppel observed on May 18, 1994, “this administration is becoming notorious … for making threats and then backing down.”

On July 8, 1994, a heart attack felled Kim Il-sung. Kim Jong-il, his eldest son, took over. Negotiations progressed quickly. Gallucci and his team promised an escalating series of incentives—reactors, fuel oil, and other economic assistance. They kicked inspections of North Korea’s suspect plutonium sites years down the line.

What had begun as North Korean intransigence had netted Pyongyang billions of dollars in aid; it would go down in history as the largest reward for cheating and reneging on agreements until Obama granted Iran $11 billion in sanctions relief just for coming to the table. Columnist William Safire traced the steps of concessions on North Korea. “Mr. Clinton’s opening position was that untrustworthy North Korea must not be allowed to become a nuclear power,” he observed, but Clinton “soon trimmed that to say it must not possess nuclear bombs, and stoutly threatened sanctions if North Korea did not permit inspections of nuclear facilities at Yongbyon, where the CIA and KGB agree nuclear devices have been developed. But as a result of Clinton’s Very Good Deal Indeed, IAEA inspectors are denied entry to those plants for five years.” And Sen. John McCain, for his part, lamented that Clinton “has extended carrot after carrot, concession after concession, and pursued a policy of appeasement based … on the ill-founded belief that North Koreans really just wanted to be part of the community of nations.” Again, the parallels between Clinton’s and Obama’s assumptions about the desire of enemies to reform were consistent.

Clinton wasn’t going to broker any criticism of what he believed was a legacy-defining diplomatic triumph, all the more so when the criticism came from abroad. On October 7, 1994, South Korean President Kim Young Sam blasted Clinton’s deal with the North, saying, “If the United States wants to settle with a half-baked compromise and the media wants to describe it as a good agreement, they can. But I think it would bring more danger and peril.” There was nothing wrong with trying to resolve the problem through dialogue, he acknowledged, but the South Koreans knew very well how the North operated. “We have spoken with North Korea more than 400 times. It didn’t get us anywhere. They are not sincere,” Kim said. His outburst drew Clinton’s ire. He became the Netanyahu of his day. Meanwhile, the U.S. and North Korea signed the Agreed Framework. Gallucci and his team were “exhilarated.” They later bragged they “had overcome numerous obstacles in the negotiations with the North; survived the intense, sometimes strained collaboration with Seoul and the International Atomic Energy Agency; and marshaled and sustained an often unwieldy international coalition in opposition to the nuclear challenge, all under close and often critical scrutiny at home.”

Today, by some estimates, North Korea is well on its way to having 100 nuclear weapons and is steadily developing the ballistic capability to deliver them. Iran’s nuclear negotiators have cited North Korea’s negotiating strategy as a model to emulate rather than an example to condemn. Meanwhile, Obama has relied on many of the same negotiators to advance his deal with Iran.

The State Department has never conducted a lessons learned exercise about what went wrong with the North Korea deal. Perhaps it’s time. Diplomatic responsibility and national security demand it.

Categories: Carter, Clinton, Foreign policy, Human rights, IAEA, Iran scam, Iranian missiles, Iranian nukes, Islam, Israel, Kerry, North Korea, Nukes, Obama, P5+1, South Korea, State Department
Tags: Carter, Clinton, Foreign Policy, human rights, IAEA, Iran, Iran Scam, Iranian missiles, Iranian nukes, Islam, Israel, North Korea, Nukes, South Korea, State Department

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Humor: Obama to preempt all programming to address Climate change: March 3

February 28, 2015

Obama to preempt all programming to address Climate change: March 3, Dan Miller’s Blog, The Most Reverend Mohamed Allah-scimitar, February 28, 2015

(The views expressed in this article are mine and those of my (imaginary) guest author, the Most Reverend Mohamed Allah-Scimitar. They do not necessarily reflect the views of Warsclerotic or any of its other editors.– DM)

This is a guest post by my (imaginary) guest author, the Most Reverend Mohamed Allah-scimitar, President Obama’s chief adviser on Islamic relations with Christians and Jews.

The Most Revereddd Mohamed Allah-scimitar

The Most Revereddd Mohamed Allah-scimitar

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The worst crisis ever to face The Obama Nation — man-caused ~~global warming~~ climate change — continues to immobilize the country. It does so contemptuously despite the decades-long warming trend recognized by all reputable scientists. Therefore, President Obama will use the emergency broadcast system to preempt all other programming, including the internet, to address the nation on March 3.

Hell Niagara Falls freezes over

~~Hell~~ Niagara Falls freezes over

Violent right-wing Christian and Jewish extremist Islamophobes have contended that, by virtue of its timing, President Obama’s address is intended to preempt media coverage of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s remarks to the Congress on the alleged “existential threat” of a nuclear deal with Iran.

However, White House press secretary Josh Earnest vigorously denied their racist and therefore specious claims. He pointed out that Obama is extraordinarily busy fulfilling His duties as the President of all of His people. He has, therefore, made — and continues to make — historic efforts to help potential non-Islamic Islamic State recruits find jobs and hence to feel good about themselves. Do we want more of this non-Islamic violence? No? Then you should not watch Netanyahu’s address, even if you could.

President Obama also owes it to His people to continue His Herculean efforts to prevent the Republican Congress from destroying His country by passing legislation which He has to waste time vetoing, thereby attempting to impede His noble efforts to give His people — American citizens and American citizens in waiting — everything they need and want by executive ~~decree~~ action.

Unfortunately, the only time He has available coincides, unexpectedly, with PM Netanyahu’s frivolous speech — which nobody in his right mind would watch anyway because Netanyahu is an untrustworthy nattering nabob of negativism and a war criminal to boot.

Moreover, as explained by Robert Kagan in a February 27th Washington Post article, there is no need for anyone to hear Netanyahu’s meddlesome nonsense:

Do we really need the Israeli prime minister to appear before Congress to explain the dangers and pitfalls of certain prospective deals on Iran’s nuclear weapons programs? Would we not know otherwise? Have the U.S. critics of those prospective deals lost their voice? Are they shy about expressing their concerns? Are they inarticulate or incompetent? Do they lack the wherewithal to get their message out?

Not exactly. Every day a new report or analysis warns of the consequences of various concessions that the Obama administration may or may not be making. Some think tanks in Washington devote themselves almost entirely to the subject of Iran’s nuclear program. Congress has held numerous hearings on the subject. Every week, perhaps every day, high-ranking members of the House and Senate, from both parties, lay out the dangers they see. The Post, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and others publish countless stories on the talks in which experts weigh in to express their doubts. If all the articles, statements and analyses produced in the United States on this subject could be traded for centrifuges, the Iranian nuclear program would be eliminated in a week.

. . . .

Given all this, can it really be the case that the American people will not know what to think about any prospective Iran deal until one man, and only one man, gets up to speak in one venue, and only one venue, and does so in the first week of March, and only in that week? That is what those who insist it is vital that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speak before a joint meeting of Congress next week would have us believe. [Emphasis added.]

President Obama is greatly, and perfectly understandably, distressed that Netanyahu will offer nothing new in support of His legacy achievement of world peace in His time and that his address will therefore force Him to create insuperable problems for Israel. Indeed, He has already asked Iran, under the auspices of the United Nations, to mediate a binding peace agreement among Israel, the Palestinian Authority and Hamas. President Obama did not want to do it, because He loves Israel just as He would His only begotten son if He had one. However, in the circumstances Netanyahu has created, He has has no alternative. Only a vile Islamophobic Jew-hater like Netanyahu would destroy his own country by opposing President Obama’s grand plan for world peace.

As the world’s second greatest authority — second only to Obama — on Islam and its profoundly helpful relations with Jews and Christians everywhere, I call upon everyone in Israel and elsewhere to ignore whatever nonsense the soon-to-be-former Prime Minister of that ~~insignificant~~ beautiful little country may try to spew.

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Editor’s comment:

All citizens of the World with half a brain — and even less — should pay heed to The Most Reverend Mohamed Allah-scimitar’s profound words and trust only Dear Leader Obama. He, and only He, can and will do all that needs to be done to keep them warm, safe and content. Should they place unwarranted trust elsewhere, their Dear Leader may well be unable to achieve ~~world peace~~ whirled peas in His time.

Categories: Caliphate, Christians, Executions, Foreign policy, Humor, Internet, Iran, Iran scam, Iranian nukes, Islam, Islamic slaughter, Islamism, Islamophobia, Israel, Israel, Palestinians, Israeli elections, Jews, Jobs for jihadists, Kerry, Leftists, Media, Netanyahu, Nukes, Obama, P5+1, Terrorists, Two state solution, U.S. Congress
Tags: Caliphate, Christians, Executions, Foreign Policy, Humor, Internet, Iran, Iran Scam, Iranian nukes, Islam, Islamic slaughter, Islamophobia, Israel, Israel and Palestinians, Israeli elections, Jews, Jobs for jihadists, Leftists, Media, Netanyahu, Nukes, Terrorists, Two state solution, U.S. Congress

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Muslims Trump All Other Minorities Because of the Victim Value Index

February 27, 2015

Muslims Trump All Other Minorities Because of the Victim Value Index, Front Page Magazine, Daniel Greenfield, February 27, 2015

(The Islamic State is not valued like Hamas because, as all good Obamabots know, the Islamic State is “not Islamic” and merely engages in random, senseless violence. Perhaps if “real” Jews, Christians and other victims of “real” Islamic and other violence (the Holocaust, for example) were, and had in the past been, more violent they would have higher rankings on the Victim Value Index. Much of the world is insane.– DM)

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SJW code assumes that the angrier you are, the more oppressed you are. (Unless you’re a straight white male who isn’t pretending to be a woman and isn’t angry on behalf of an oppressed minority group.) But your anger is only useful if it serves the left.

The angriest groups, the ones with the newest rawest edge make the cut. A propensity for violence helps.

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James Kirchick has written an extensive piece on the Victimhood Olympics replete with examples and references. He notes that…

Trans beats gay and Muslim beats black. As someone who writes frequently on the topic of homosexuality, I have learned the hard way what happens to those who challenge the orthodoxy of transgender activists…

This is because in the progressive imagination, the perceived plight of Muslims now trumps the sufferings of all other groups. It is this conceit that goes the furthest in explaining President Obama’s remark to Vox earlier this month that the murder of four Jews at a kosher supermarket in Paris last month was “random,”…

But he fails to explain what the basis for this hierarchy is. Why do Muslims trump Jews and why do trannies trump gay men?

There is a clear Victim Value Index. It’s not random. It has a definitive basis. That basis is the value of a victim identity to the left.

The first thing to understand is the dirty little secret of the Victim Value Index. While loud vocal assertions of suffering are very important, the substance of such suffering is unimportant when moving up the ladder of the Victim Value Index…

Actual suffering doesn’t matter. Neither does historical justice. Both of those are easy to make up, and in a dogma-ridden environment no one will look past the politically correct line anyway.

The Victim Value Index is calculated based on one overriding factor: Disruptiveness. Those who are most disruptive go to the head of the line.

This is the most obvious thing that people have noted about the Social Justice Warrior twitter mobs. They’re angry. They’re disruptive. This is also their virtue.

SJW code assumes that the angrier you are, the more oppressed you are. (Unless you’re a straight white male who isn’t pretending to be a woman and isn’t angry on behalf of an oppressed minority group.) But your anger is only useful if it serves the left.

The angriest groups, the ones with the newest rawest edge make the cut. A propensity for violence helps. Ergo, Muslims win.

Progressivism is a revolution in slow motion, and revolutions need revolutionaries. Disruption is more than just grievance, it’s violence. Those who are willing to ruthlessly attack the status quo clearing the ground for revolution are the ones who go to the head of the line and the dais of honor on top. A little murder and mayhem, and progressives will trot out “moderate” versions of the murderers and mayhemists, usually linked to them, and offer to represent them and tamp down the violence in exchange for meeting their demands.

September 11 and its aftermath is why Muslims have gone to the top of the Victim Value Index. The left may swear up and down that they are interested in Muslim civil rights, but if the Muslims were Sikhs, they would merit a place somewhere in the back. Before Muslims began prominently blowing things up in the United States, the left barely paid any attention to them. Once they did, they began outweighing every other group in the country because killing 3,000 people is the gold standard of revolutionary mayhem.

The Victim Value Index places the most disruptive groups at the front, the somewhat disruptive groups in the middle and the least disruptive groups at the back. The status of groups within the Index can change with their behavior. Muslims used to be shelved in the back with Asians, Indians and Jews. The War on Terror dramatically upgraded their status. The other groups are stuck there because they are relatively successful and aren’t rioting or blowing things up.

Latinos are still somewhere in the middle. Native Americans are in the back along with most unclassified minorities. Homosexuals are somewhere near the front, but behind African-Americans. Their status tends to drift wildly depending on current events, but they cannot overtake African-Americans or fall behind Latinos. Not unless some drastic events take place that change their status. Women are, and have always been, in the back.

The hierarchy can and does change. If Muslim violence were to suddenly disappear, the left’s interest in them in the US would go away. That’s a simple fact. The left values violent groups over non-violent ones. In the social media era, that can be virtual violence, cyberbullying and social media mobs. All that counts as activism and the left is keen to recruit activists for its cause.

Categories: Culture, Executions, Free world, Holocaust, Human rights, Ideology, Insanity, Islam, Islamic slaughter, Islamic State, Multiculturalism, Muslims, Victims
Tags: Culture, Executions, Free world, Holocaust, human rights, Ideology, Insanity, Islam, Islamic slaughter, Multiculturalism, Muslims, Victims

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