Posted tagged ‘Denial’

Our Rhineland moment

September 17, 2017

Our Rhineland moment, Israel National News, Dr. Peter Vincent Pry, September 17, 2017

Just as the Neville Chamberlains of 1939 were so paralyzed by fear of a replay of World War I that they preferred to ignore or explain away Nazi Germany’s rearmament and Imperial Japan’s naval build-up, their U.S. counterparts in 2017 are so fearful of facing a nuclear-armed North Korea that some would like to pretend a nation that has the H-Bomb cannot build a simple reentry vehicle or make an EMP attack.

Our elites cling to the fantasy that China and economic sanctions can save us, that North Korean denuclearization can be achieved peacefully.  But the evidence is now overwhelming that China and Russia have helped build the North Korean nuclear threat as part of their New Cold War to force the United States out of the Pacific and out of its role as the world policeman.

When the U.S. and its allies must seek security from North Korea by appealing for help from Beijing and Moscow, as we are doing now, the world order is already being transformed.  The Nuclear Axis seeks our acquiescence to their domination, peacefully if possible, if necessary through war.

North Korea’s nuclear Hitler has entered the technological Rhineland of H-Bombs and ICBMs.  We must strike.

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North Korea’s successful test of an H-Bomb on September 2 has been preceded by many years of denial behavior by U.S. statesmen, intelligence experts, academics and the press about the sophistication of Pyongyang’s nuclear missile program. Again?

Is the naivete and willful blindness that helped begin World War II on September 1, 1939, being repeated in the response of the U.S. and its allies to North Korea’s nuclear missile program, that apparently tested a thermonuclear H-Bomb warhead on September 2, 2017?

Parallels are striking between what psychiatrists describe as “denial behavior” by western elites that contributed to the Second World War, and “denial behavior” toward the North Korean nuclear threat.

As everyone used to know, when history was taught in schools, prior to 1939 Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan ruthlessly violated international treaties to arm themselves for a major war of conquest, that would become World War II.  Berlin and Tokyo were ineffectually opposed by the League of Nations and the western democracies, who would become their victims.

Less well known is that Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan were helped, unwittingly, by western statesmen, military experts, academics and the press, who could not believe any rational actor would risk replaying the holocaust that was World War I, still recent in many memories.  Complex rationalizations were invented to explain away the words and deeds of Adolph Hitler and Imperial Japan, including their treaty violations and aggression.

Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan’s growing military strength, when it could no longer be denied, was dismissed by confidence that the horrors of a new world war would be sufficient to deter.  Mutual Assured Destruction was an article of faith before World War II, expressed in different words, as when British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain opined, “The bomber will always get through.”

Underestimation of German and Japanese military capabilities set up the allies for near defeat when war came.

North Korea’s successful test of an H-Bomb on September 2 has been preceded by many years of denial behavior by U.S. statesmen, intelligence experts, academics and the press about the sophistication of Pyongyang’s nuclear missile program:

–Just six months ago, most experts thought North Korea’s nuclear arsenal was primitive and tiny, perhaps as few as 6 A-Bombs.  Now the intelligence community estimates North Korea has 60 nuclear weapons.

–Just six months ago, many experts thought North Korea’s ICBMs were fake missiles, only for show, and most experts thought, if they were real, they could not strike the U.S. mainland.  Now the intelligence community estimates North Korea’s ICBMs can strike at least as far as Chicago, and probably hit anywhere in the United States.

–Just six months ago, most experts thought North Korea was many years away from developing an H-Bomb.  Now the U.S. intelligence community assesses that North Korea has the H-Bomb, with a yield tested at 140 kilotons (Japan estimates160 kilotons), about 14-16 times more powerful than the A-Bomb that destroyed Hiroshima, comparable in power to sophisticated U.S. two-stage thermonuclear weapons.

–Just six months ago, most experts claimed North Korean ICBMs could not deliver a nuclear warhead, because Pyongyang had not yet “demonstrated” it could miniaturize an A-Bomb to fit inside a reentry vehicle, or design a reentry vehicle capable of penetrating the atmosphere.  Now the intelligence community assesses North Korea has miniaturized A-Bombs and H-Bombs, and reentry vehicles for missile delivery, including by ICBMs that can strike the United States.

Perhaps the most extreme denial behavior is over North Korea’s capability to make a nuclear electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack-that could destroy the United States with a single weapon.  The blue ribbon Congressional EMP Commission has warned for years that North Korea probably has Super-EMP weapons.

North Korea confirmed the EMP Commission’s assessment by testing an H-Bomb that could make a devastating EMP attack, and in a public statement: “The H-Bomb, the explosive power of which is adjustable from tens of kilotons to hundreds of kilotons, is a multi-functional thermonuclear weapon with great destructive power which can be detonated even at high altitudes for super-powerful EMP attack according to strategic goals.”

Pyongyang also released a technical report accurately describing a Super-EMP weapon.

Just six months ago, some academics dismissed EMP Commission warnings and even, literally, laughed on National Public Radio at the idea North Korea could make an EMP attack.

Amazingly, Sig Hecker, a respected scientist and former director of Los Alamos National Laboratory, is still in denial about the North Korean EMP threat, claiming it must be disinformation.  But since their H-Bomb is undeniably real, so too is North Korea’s EMP threat.

Amazingly, some academics are still bending over backwards to deny North Korea has miniaturized warheads, reentry vehicles, and ICBMs that can strike the U.S., inventing preposterous theories to escape reality, just like their brethren who paved the way to World War II with denial.

Just as the Neville Chamberlains of 1939 were so paralyzed by fear of a replay of World War I that they preferred to ignore or explain away Nazi Germany’s rearmament and Imperial Japan’s naval build-up, their U.S. counterparts in 2017 are so fearful of facing a nuclear-armed North Korea that some would like to pretend a nation that has the H-Bomb cannot build a simple reentry vehicle or make an EMP attack.

Another factor that helped bring on World War II was the western democracies were undergoing a civilizational crisis, as we are today.

Elites and peoples lost faith in themselves and their institutions as a result of the Great Depression and World War I.  Many believed the false narrative that the First World War resulted from a conspiracy by “merchants of death” among the industrial and political elites to become wealthy by war profiteering.  Nationalism was condemned by many as the root of war.  Globalists of the 1920s and 1930s fantasized that a Kellogg-Briand Pact and League of Nations could outlaw war, just as globalists today fantasize that the United Nations, international treaties and sanctions can achieve a world without nuclear weapons, while doubting the nationalist values and institutions that made the United States, and the Free World, great and free.

Indeed, economic sanctions against Imperial Japan, viewed as a peaceful way to stop Tokyo’s aggression against China and Manchuria, instead resulted in Japan’s surprise attack against the U.S. Navy at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.

Most dangerous, the Neville Chamberlains of 1939 believed that because “the bomber will always get through” they could deter World War II.  The Neville Chamberlains of 2017 are so fearful of nuclear weapons that they are ready to surrender to the fantasy that we can learn to live with a nuclear-armed North Korea.

Those like Susan Rice, former national security advisor to President Obama, who are willing to make the world, in President Kennedy’s famous words about protecting freedom, “pay any price, bear any burden” to stop Global Warming, are all too eager to surrender our children to a future of Mutual Assured Destruction with Kim Jong-Un.

The new rationalization for doing nothing militarily is it is too late, would cost too many lives, and we can learn to live with nuclear North Korea as we did with the USSR during the Cold War.  But North Korea is not the USSR, and the nuclear-armed Caligula in Pyongyang is not  Moscow’s Politburo, dangerous as it was.  And the Cold War is no good paradigm for survival.  The world barely escaped a thermonuclear holocaust at least a dozen times. (See my book “War Scare: Russia and America on the Nuclear Brink.”)

The U.S. and allied elites have so educated themselves about the horrors of nuclear war that we are self-deterred, and will not act militarily to save ourselves.

Our elites cling to the fantasy that China and economic sanctions can save us, that North Korean denuclearization can be achieved peacefully.  But the evidence is now overwhelming that China and Russia have helped build the North Korean nuclear threat as part of their New Cold War to force the United States out of the Pacific and out of its role as the world policeman.

When the U.S. and its allies must seek security from North Korea by appealing for help from Beijing and Moscow, as we are doing now, the world order is already being transformed.  The Nuclear Axis seeks our acquiescence to their domination, peacefully if possible, if necessary through war.

If Russia and China’s North Korean nuclear gambit works in the Pacific, look next to Iran going nuclear, creating another nuclear crisis for the United States and its allies in the Middle East and Europe.  Iran’s nuclear missile program has been and is being helped by Moscow, Beijing, and Pyongyang, because Tehran is part of the Nuclear Axis waging the New Cold War against the still unwitting democracies of East and West.

U.S. abject surrender to a nuclear-armed North Korea by accepting Mutual Assured Destruction with Kim Jong-Un for ourselves and our allies, after proclaiming for 25 years that this is impossible, will destroy our credibility.  Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran will see such weakness as an invitation to aggression in Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and against the United States.

Just as the Neville Chamberlains of 1939 brought World War II on themselves, the Neville Chamberlains of 2017 are on the verge of bringing on World War III.

Most historians agree that World War II could have been prevented and 60 million lives saved if the Allies had crushed Hitler when his military was still weak in 1936, but he seized the Rhineland anyway to test their political will.

Right now, North Korea has two satellites and fewer than a dozen ICBMs that could threaten the U.S. homeland.  These the U.S. could assuredly destroy in a very limited surgical strike using conventional weapons.

Kim Jong-Un would not likely retaliate massively as his regime would remain in power and retain nearly 1,000 short and medium-range missiles armed with conventional, chemical, biological, and nuclear warheads.  Nonetheless, the U.S. should be prepared to promptly launch a large-scale disarming strike against North Korea using all means necessary-including nuclear weapons.

If Kim is so aggressive that he would bring on himself a nuclear holocaust over the loss of a dozen missiles and two satellites, we had better deal with him now, before he has 100 ICBMs.

North Korea’s nuclear Hitler has entered the technological Rhineland of H-Bombs and ICBMs.  We must strike.

Sent to Arutz Sheva by the author. A version of this piece also appeared on http://www.newsmax.com/

More airports under ISIS threat after Istanbul

June 29, 2016

More airports under ISIS threat after Istanbul, DEBKAfile, June 29, 2016

istanbul-dead

The US, Europe and the Middle East are again refusing to connect the dots of the terrorist threat, recalling the denial that marked the peak period of Al Qaeda’s atrocities in the early 2000’s.

When the US Defense Secretary Ashton Carter trumpeted the Fallujah victory over the Islamic State on June 27, he neglected to disclose that the real victors were Iranians – not Iraqis. The next day, an ISIS suicide attack on Istanbul’s Ataturk airport overshadowed that success, killing at least 41 people including 13 foreign nationald and injuring more than 230.

As the Obama administration labored to conceal from the public in the West its strategy of using Shiite forces to hammer ISIS in Iraq and parts of Syria, the Sunni terrorists retaliated in Istanbul – and not just there.

Seven ISIS suicide bombers, some on motorcycles, exploded on Monday, June 27, in a Christian village in the Lebanon Valley near Baʿalbek. A week earlier, an ISIS suicide bomber blew himself up at the gates of a large Jordanian military base on the Syrian border.

The connection between the ISIS arenas and cause and event is there for anyone who wants to see it.

ISIS has a ready store of suicide bombers who are willing to blow themselves up, not just because they are ‘extreme fanatics’ or “thugs” as President Obama insists on defining them, but because they believe they are fighting a religious war: Sunnis against Shiites, Sunnis against Christians and Sunnis against Jews.

On this point, Obama is in denial.

Turkey’s Sunni President Tayyip Erdogan was swiftly punished for concluding a political-military-intelligence agreement with the Jewish state. That same day, three suicide bombers, probably waiting for months at a safe house near the Istanbul airport, were ordered from ISIS Syrian headquarters in Raqqa, to go into action.

Neither the dense US intelligence net in the region, nor Turkish and Israeli intelligence managed to intercept the order.

DEBKAfile intelligence sources point out that the highly secure Ataturk airport, the third largest in Europe, is not the only one on the continent at which ISIS suicide units are lurking ready to strike.

American-European intelligence input points to their presence near at least two or three other airports in Europe. The problem is that the intel is very general, pointing to intent, with no specifics on countries or airports.

The public in the West and Middle-East are not told either about the ‘small’ victories scored by ISIS on the battle field. For instance, ISIS forces managed to block the Syrian-Hizballah advance towards the highway leading from Palmyra to Raqqa, inflicting heavy losses despite Russian air cover.

In Israel, where security awareness is usually high, no one was told about the successful ISIS engagement at the Syria-Jordan-Israel border junction bordering on the Israeli Golan against US-trained and armed Syrian rebels, who fought under artillery cover from Jordan.

In other words, ISIS has established itself on the Israeli border, a few kilometers away from the Sea of Galilee and Tiberius.

The Islamic State is fully geared to respond to such losses as Fallujah by going for strategic gains on the ground and inflicting horrible retribution on its victims by remotely activating sleeper cells of suicide killers.

Rather than being degraded, as Obama claims, ISIS is fully equipped to target its victims across several continents.

On Tuesday Istanbul airport was its chosen target. Now, we must wait and see who is next.

Op-Ed: Self-destruct: Us or them

March 29, 2016

Op-Ed: Self-destruct: Us or them, Israel National News, Leonie Ben-Simon, March 29, 2016

Strange.  After Belgium there is a kind of silence.  Those continuous Facebook posts blaming Israel and the Jews for everything have mostly gone underground, as journalists lie low, their opinions shattered into smithereens.

The War of Civilizations is well and truly here, right on our doorstep, for the entire world to see. These are not terror attacks.  This is World War III in its incarnation of the enemy within: an asymmetric war that if not halted has the potential to go nuclear as Iran tests its long-range missiles with their leaders proclaiming “Death to the Jews” and “Death to Israel.”

Time has a way of blunting the past. Hitler was not a madman when he marshalled his people to carry out his plans.  He had a carefully thought-out agenda which we later labelled the personification of evil.  But before the Second World War politicians, intellectuals and decision-makers world-wide did not believe that he could possibly carry out his plans.  No, appeasement was the solution until millions upon millions lay dead on the ground, burnt in ovens and even burnt and buried alive.

Then there were the genocides that the world ignored in Rwanda, Cambodia, Bosnia and Darfur. And the current war in Syria with millions dead, injured or displaced. Life is simply not valued.

Until now massive amounts of money have financed terror in all of its stages of growth.

Many madrassas are financed to promulgate a particular form of Wahhabism that teaches whole populations not to accommodate values that are not their own.

UNRWA finances millions who call themselves Palestinian refugees but are residents of Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Gaza who were mostly born there. Most of this money is used for buying military materiel, training troops for warmongering and sending rockets into Israeli civilian areas, not for resettlement.

Part of the Arab minority in Israel are also financed by UNRWA with money used to brainwash whole generations in UN schools to hate Jews and Israel.

Then there is the Iranian nuclear industry now helped by a United States agreement with financing that is increasing the risk of nuclear war. There are millions being made in so many of these corrupt societies by those in control who stir up the pot, encouraging everyone except for their own children to die for their cause.

Now that the West is paying the price, the story is quite different.  The West has the tools to stop this war in its tracks and allow the enemy to self-destruct. These tools are simply the control of money, the control of gold and the control of resources. Can large-scale murderous activities continue without money?  Of course not. Even trading oil for black money can be stopped when the buyers are nations.

The average human being in most societies, we would like to  hope, just wants to live out their life peacefully, not to be forced into a war situation.  But either way, remove the money and most of the warmongering will self-destruct.

The world’s powers have obviously forgotten the mantra after World War Two and the Holocaust – “Never Again.”  Or was it after the First World War – the Great War – The War to End All Wars?

This is the choice: Call it the War that it is, take action to cut the head off the snake by throttling its money and the resource supplies that it lives on. The alternative is that the West will be responsible for its own self-destruction.

Changing the mindset of its young resident enemy through re-education and tracking killers and their associates after events, as the West honestly believes is should do, is not the solution.

It is the weakness of the West.

The City of Light Goes Dark

November 20, 2015

The City of Light Goes Dark, The Gatestone InstituteDenis MacEoin, November 20, 2015

(Please see also, Beware of Islamic terrorism. — DM)

  • The targets in all the Paris attacks were not chosen “randomly.” Charlie Hebdo stood for the Enlightenment value of free speech, for the right to challenge, even to make fun of figures who deem themselves above criticism: politicians, religious leaders, the rich and famous. It stood for the right to be secular: for refusing to fence off religion, or award believers greater respect than non-believers.
  • Like the attempts to shut down all criticism of Islam — whether in novels such as Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, cartoons such as those of Muhammad drawn and published in Denmark, or debates between academics — the Charlie Hebdo killings were intended to instil fear and silence all honest discussion of Islam and its values.
  • Through bold criticism in a secular manner, European states have been able to create a more pluralistic, tolerant, and humane culture. For devout Muslims (not just radicals), this is blasphemy of the worst sort: democracy, made by man and not by Allah, is evil, and tolerance for all beliefs is a path to hell.
  • This ongoing failure to admit that the law of jihad is explicitly cited by spokesmen for Islamic State is the root cause of our inability to fight this war. The ancestors of today’s Europeans knew how to fight against Islamic encroachment, but today, hundreds of thousands of Muslim migrants, some of them devoted to waging jihad, are being given free access to enter Europe.

Who does not love Paris? Puritans do not love Paris. Puritans hate, music, song, dance, poetry, fun and love. Today, such people are represented above all by extremist Muslim doctrinaire fundamentalists. They seem to despise women without veils; call music Satanic; regard painted images as an insult to an angry God; consider football a sin, and a restaurant serving wine as the embodiment of evil. They do not respond to a life-affirming bustle and the ideals an open, tolerant, democratic, liberal, humanitarian, egalitarian West.

When Sir Karl Popper wrote, at the end of the Second World War in 1945, his two-volume classic, The Open Society and its Enemies, he laid bare the evils of totalitarian systems, both left and right — Communism and Fascism. He would never have guessed that soon a Third World War would be taking place between radical Islam and the West.

Last week, the City of Light went dark. In January of this year, some Islamist gunmen had attacked the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, and another had gunned down shoppers in a kosher supermarket. U.S. President Barack Obama, in an interview with Matt Yglesias, commenting on the supermarket attack, glossed over the motives behind it: “It is entirely legitimate for the American people to be deeply concerned when you’ve got a bunch of violent, vicious zealots who behead people or randomly shoot a bunch of folks in a deli in Paris.” [Emphasis added]

Two days after last week’s attacks, when reporters asked Obama if he would consider additional action against The Islamic State (IS), he declined to give a straight answer. The killings, he said, were “based on a twisted ideology.” As so many times before, Obama would not define what ideology — the belief system of radical Islam, based on violent passages from the Qur’an and Hadith, and modelled on the jihadist actions of generations of Muslims, beginning with Muhammad himself.

This ongoing failure to admit that the law of jihad is explicitly cited by spokesmen for Islamic State is the root cause of our inability to fight this war. The ancestors of today’s Europeans knew how to fight against Islamic encroachment, but today, hundreds of thousands of Muslim migrants, some of them devoted to waging jihad, are being given free access to enter Europe. At least one of last Friday’s killers in Paris appears to have travelled from Syria and entered Europe through Greece.

The targets in all the Paris attacks were not chosen “randomly.” Charlie Hebdo stood for the Enlightenment value of free speech, for the right to challenge, even to make fun of figures who deem themselves above criticism: politicians, religious leaders, the rich and famous. It stood for the right to be secular: for refusing to fence off religion, or award believers greater respect than non-believers.

Through bold criticism in a secular manner, European states have been able to create a more pluralistic, tolerant, and humane culture. For devout Muslims (not just radicals), this is blasphemy of the worst sort: democracy, made by man and not by Allah, is evil, and tolerance for all beliefs is a path to hell.

Like the attempts to shut down all criticism of Islam — whether in novels such as Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, cartoons such as those of Muhammad drawn and published in Denmark, or debates between academics — the Charlie Hebdo killings were intended to instil fear and silence all honest discussion of Islam and its values.

The kosher supermarket attack was clearly anti-Semitic. Like the multitude of such attacks on Jewish schools, museums, synagogues, and individuals, it celebrated the rise of a new anti-Semitism in Europe, an anti-Semitism (often expressed through anti-Zionism) that has been carried out by the political left, hand-in-hand with Muslim radical groups.

Jews on European streets are the one people most intensely hated by many Muslims (again, not just radicals). The freedom French Jews have for a long time enjoyed (despite high levels of indigenous anti-Semitism) is an affront to Islam, in which Jews especially must be converted, rendered submissive, or killed. Unfortunately, many Europeans have gone out of their way to be helpful. Just the day before the Paris attacks, the EU had singled out Israel, as usual, to label goods to help anti-Semitic, racist Europeans hurt Palestinians and Israelis with an unjust, sanctimonious boycott.

A leader of a British Islamic educational institute writes that, “One should abstain from evil audacities such as listening to music.” Another graduate speaks of the “evils of music;” calls London’s Royal College of Music “satanic,” and claims that music is the way in which Jews spread “the Satanic web” to corrupt young Muslims. Is it, then, surprising that a handful of fanatics gunned down more than 80 innocent young people who had gone to enjoy a rock concert in the Bataclan Theatre?

As sports (apart from archery and horseback riding) are also activities much disliked by fundamentalist imams, three jihadis, in an apparent rebuke to such games and frivolity, went to a football stadium in Paris last Friday night and, although they could not get in, they blew themselves up outside it.[1]

The Nazis hated jazz and modern art (even as they stole it), but not even they rejected all music and all art. Hitler luxuriated in the operas of Wagner and fancied himself no mean painter, even if the art world may not have agreed with him. But today’s fascists care for nothing but their own increasingly expansionist beliefs.

As Hamas members have said more than once to Israelis, with whom the Europeans have more in common now than they would like to admit, the extremist Muslims will conquer in the end because “we love death more than you love life.” Nothing could better sum up the bitter reality of the Paris attacks.

In a television interview on BBC News at Ten on Sunday night, a singer, Maude Hacheb, expressed her response to the killings: “If they want to break the country, they have to break young people. I think for them, music is no good, fun is no good, love is no good. So I guess it was really significant they go to the Bataclan.”

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[1] Cricket has been condemned by a Pakistani imam as a sacrilegious “waste of time,” playing chess has been compared to dipping one’s hands in the blood of pigs, and ultra-conservative Muslim clerics have condemned football as a Jewish and Christian tool to undermine Islamic culture. Saudi Sheikh Abdel Rahman al-Barrak has warned in a fatwa that football “played according to [accepted international rules] has caused Muslims to adopt some of the customs of the enemies of Islam, who are [preoccupied with] games and frivolity.”

Op-Ed: The US president’s migrant darlings

November 19, 2015

Op-Ed: The US president’s migrant darlings, Israel National News, Jack Engelhard, November 19, 2015

(Please see also, Attkisson: Obama won’t read intelligence on groups he doesn’t consider terrorists. — DM)

There is no accounting for the suicidal stupidity that afflicts our leaders whose enlightenment is bringing us all down together in one heap. Obama did nothing for Christians who were being beheaded by ISIS but he is all in for Muslims. People are starting to ask whose side is he on? Does he care about us, or does he care mostly about them?

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Incoming migrants mean incoming anti-Semites, but Obama’s migrant darlings imperil all Americans.

The man on CNN (or maybe Fox?) says that we should welcome Obama’s 10,000 Syrian migrants. They’re harmless.

After all, there’ve been no signs of terrorism from the thousands, Syrians and otherwise, who have already encamped within the United States over the years, meaning that aside from the Fort Hood slaughter, the Boston Marathon massacre and other such displays of affection – heck, what’s the problem?

The problem is — what do we mean by terrorism?

Islamic terrorism (just about the only flavor we’ve got nowadays) does not always go boom, as it did in Paris and as it does so often in Israel.

Every time a Jewish kid or speaker gets bullied on campus by Islamic delinquents who’ve infiltrated our schools – that’s terrorism.

I hate to be so blunt about this, but 10,000 new Islamic Syrian migrants automatically means 10,000 new anti-Semites. You read it here first. Nobody else says this because saying something so brutally obvious is politically incorrect and impolite. But that’s the math.

On what day did the plight of the hordes come before the safety of dutiful tax-paying citizens? Hollande is still inviting them in, 30,000 over the next two years, and when it happens again he’ll wonder again why…and why French Jews are packing fast for Israel.

Ditto Merkel, who started it all – and we shall see what her politeness soon brings to Germany and throughout rape-capital Europe.

There is no accounting for the suicidal stupidity that afflicts our leaders whose enlightenment is bringing us all down together in one heap. Obama did nothing for Christians who were being beheaded by ISIS but he is all in for Muslims. People are starting to ask whose side is he on? Does he care about us, or does he care mostly about them?

He has it that we must be true to our values. That’s who we are, he says. We are also dead ducks.

His lame response to Paris — you expected Churchill? You were expecting “we shall fight on the beaches?”

Instead, a confederacy of nomad towel-heads has the entire Western World in fear and trembling.

Our politicians. Our leaders. Their choices are failing us. Their stupid mistakes are killing us.

On stupidity, can anyone beat John Kerry? This fool, just yesterday he explained that the Paris bloodbath was inexcusable.

But of the Charlie Hebdo butchery – well, of that, he, John Kerry can find justification, “rationale.”

That was real blood, John. Not ketchup. Married into the Heinz fortune, he can’t be that stupid.

Defeat ISIS with this leadership?

As if once we bomb them to smithereens we can go back to worrying about the Kardashians again.

Sorry, not so simple. The pestilence we face may live next door without an ISIS shingle or dashboard ID. We don’t know what they’re thinking. Sometimes we do. Last week here in Manhattan a Pakistani cabbie beat up a passenger for being Jewish. That too is ISIS and that too is terrorism.

As I’ve said before, people who don’t know Sinatra are taking over the town…town by town…and as a majority of governors say no to the migrants, de Blasio has already raised his hand to bring in more. He wants the 10,000, or as many as Obama is willing to ship and import of these “widows and orphans,” to quote the president.

The facts and the pictures show otherwise. Most are big strong able-bodied men who ran from the fight – deserters.

I’ve been saying this clearly in my columns and in this book, and finally even uber-leftist Chris Matthews agrees that Obama has it wrong.

Our Liberal Leftists, leaders and followers, are not merely an inconvenient irritation. They are imperiling our kids and our grandkids.

The migrant jihad has begun in Paris

November 14, 2015

The migrant jihad has begun in Paris, Front Page MagazineRobert Spencer, November 14, 2015

paris-jihad-attack

Barack Obama was true to form, not mentioning Islam or Muslims in his statement on the Paris attacks, and not giving a hint that it was his precipitous and politically motivated withdrawal from Iraq that created the vacuum that allowed for the rise of the Islamic State. Indeed, the Islamic State could end up being the most significant legacy of the Obama Administration.

[A]s the Western intelligentsia fell into familiar patterns of response, it only ensured that there would be many, many more attacks, in Europe and the U.S., like the one in Paris Friday. It seems as if no amount of disconfirming evidence will move the establishment Left to remove its blinkers, discard its politically correct fantasies, and face the jihad threat realistically. The Leftists in the corridors of power are today ensuring that there will be much, much more bloodshed.

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That didn’t take long: one of the Islamic State (ISIS) jihadis who murdered at least 160 people in Paris on Friday held a Syrian passport and passed through Greece in October. In October, he was a “refugee” seeking asylum in Europe from the Syrian war zone; in November, he was murdering French civilians for the Islamic caliphate. The Migrant Jihad has begun.

French and European authorities can’t say they weren’t warned. Last February, the Islamic State boasted it would soon flood Europe with as many as 500,000 refugees. And the Lebanese Education Minister recently said that there were 20,000 jihadis among the refugees in camps in his country. Meanwhile, 80% of migrants who have recently come to Europe claiming to be fleeing the war in Syria aren’t really from Syria at all.

So why are they claiming to be Syrian and streaming into Europe? An Islamic State operative gave the answer when he boasted in September, shortly after the migrant influx began, that among the flood of refugees, 4,000 Islamic State jihadis had already entered Europe. He explained their purpose: “It’s our dream that there should be a caliphate not only in Syria but in all the world, and we will have it soon, inshallah.” These Muslims were going to Europe in the service of that caliphate: “They are going like refugees,” he said, but they were going with the plan of sowing blood and mayhem on European streets. As he told this to journalists, he smiled and said, “Just wait.”

A year before that the Islamic State issued a call for jihad murders of French civilians: “If you can kill a disbelieving American or European – especially the spiteful and filthy French – or an Australian, or a Canadian, or any other disbeliever from the disbelievers waging war, including the citizens of the countries that entered into a coalition against the Islamic State, then rely upon Allah, and kill him in any manner or way however it may be.”

Then after the attacks the Islamic State issued a statement claiming responsibility for them, and warning: “Let France and all nations following its path know that they will continue to be at the top of the target list for the Islamic State and that the scent of death will not leave their nostrils as long as they partake in the crusader campaign, as long as they dare to curse our Prophet (blessings and peace be upon him), and as long as they boast about their war against Islam in France and their strikes against Muslims in the land of the Caliphate with their jets, which were of no avail to them in the filthy streets and alleys of Paris. Indeed, this is just the beginning. It is also a warning for any who wish to take heed.”

So war was declared, and acts of war carried out – and the response has been drearily predictable. German Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere was swift to try to dissociate the Paris attacks from the migrant influx into Europe: “I would like to make this urgent plea to avoid drawing such swift links to the situation surrounding refugees.” Alas for de Maiziere, there was the inconvenient fact of that Syrian “refugee” who pass through Greece on his way to jihad in Paris.

Meanwhile, Barack Obama was true to form, not mentioning Islam or Muslims in his statement on the Paris attacks, and not giving a hint that it was his precipitous and politically motivated withdrawal from Iraq that created the vacuum that allowed for the rise of the Islamic State. Indeed, the Islamic State could end up being the most significant legacy of the Obama Administration. Obviously American troops couldn’t have stayed in Iraq forever, and the Iraq project from its beginnings was based on false assumptions about Islam, ignoring its political, supremacist and violent aspects; but Obama’s hasty and ill-thought out withdrawal took into account none of the realities on the ground: the Sunni/Shi’ite divide, the Iranian influence in Baghdad, the Sunnis’ unwillingness to participate in the Baghdad government and the Shi’ites’ refusal to allow them to do so in any significant way, and more. France today is paying the price for the willful ignorance and short-sightedness of Obama and his administration.

The Leftist media is firmly stuck in willful ignorance mode as well. Salon published a piece entitled, “Our terrorism double standard: After Paris, let’s stop blaming Muslims and take a hard look at ourselves,” and another entitled, “And so the hate speech begins: Let Paris be the end of the right’s violent language toward activists.” The Guardian worried that after the Paris jihad murders Friday, “far-right groups may well fuel more hatred.” Neither Salon nor the Guardian, nor any other mainstream media outlet, published any realistic assessment of the advancing jihad threat in France and the West in general.

And so as the Western intelligentsia fell into familiar patterns of response, it only ensured that there would be many, many more attacks, in Europe and the U.S., like the one in Paris Friday. It seems as if no amount of disconfirming evidence will move the establishment Left to remove its blinkers, discard its politically correct fantasies, and face the jihad threat realistically. The Leftists in the corridors of power are today ensuring that there will be much, much more bloodshed.

Diplomacy: Looking for ways to douse the spark

October 23, 2015

Diplomacy: Looking for ways to douse the spark, Jerusalem PostHerb Keinon, October 23, 2015

(They “dance around in a ring and suppose, but the secret sits in the middle and knows,” with apologies to Robert Frost. — DM)

ShowImage (15)Netanyahu and Kerry meeting in Berlin. (photo credit:AMOS BEN-GERSHOM/GPO)

And now the diplomatic dance begins, again.

After three weeks of runaway terrorism on the streets, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon arrived for a quick visit midweek; US Secretary of State John Kerry – after meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday in Berlin – is expected to meet on Saturday with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in Amman, along with Jordan’s King Hussein; EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini is doing the same; and the French are floating various proposals to take to the UN Security Council.

All predictable, all the traditional steps taken in a time of Mideast crisis.

Ban did what Ban does in these situations – he comes, meets with both sides, issues platitudes about the need for both sides to show restraint, and declares how important it is to keep that light of hope burning.

The UN secretary-general dutifully fulfilled his role in the script. Netanyahu obliged by meeting politely with Ban, who then went on to meet politely with Abbas, to what appears to be absolutely no effect. It’s a dance whose steps – and way of ending – are known far in advance.

Jerusalem does not take Ban’s efforts overseriously, as the organization that he heads is seen as a big part of the problem rather than the solution.

Witness Wednesday’s one-sided resolution adopted by UNESCO, the UN’s cultural heritage agency, condemning “Israeli aggression” on the Temple Mount and declaring that the Jewish holy sites of Rachel’s Tomb and the Cave of the Patriarchs are an “integral part of Palestine.”

Similar disdain, to a certain extent, characterizes Israel’s view of the EU’s efforts. Netanyahu will listen to Mogherini, and lament both Abbas’s incitement and the EU’s acceptance of it, but will place little stock in the EU’s ability to play a constructive role in calming down the situation.

Brussels is not seen in Jerusalem as a particularly honest broker on all things Palestinian but, rather, as the institution that nurtures – perhaps more than any other – the hope among the Palestinians that if they press long enough and hard enough, the international community will deliver to them what they publicly say they want: a Palestinian state along the pre-1967 borders with east Jerusalem as its capital, and some kind of “fair and just” accommodation for the refugees.

The very skeptical Israeli view of the EU in any diplomatic process is reinforced by steps taken by France, which this week considered bringing a resolution to the UN Security Council to place international observers on the Temple Mount.

This idea, which Israel would never accept, and which even Jordan and the Palestinians have apparently rejected, is born of a burning French diplomatic desire to always do something, anything, in the Mideast – especially when there seems to be a stalemate or vacuum.

It is also the product of sour relations currently prevailing between Paris and Jerusalem, as well as a lingering French hope for the internationalization of Jerusalem – for the establishment of a corpus separatum in Jerusalem under a special international regime – which France hopes to be a part of.

So with the UN out, the EU out, and France out, that leaves the US.

But it is not as if Jerusalem is harboring any hopes that Kerry will be able to ride in and save the day.

From Jerusalem’s perspective the US track record in the region is not sterling, and though it appreciates Washington’s desire to help, there is little illusion that high-profile, high-level meetings will have any immediate effect on the ground.

And while Jerusalem is not waiting for Kerry with baited breath, it was clear from the beginning that he would get involved. An uptick in terrorism and violence leads to a well-worn pattern in Washington: condemnations of the terrorism, then statements that anger Israel about proportionality or settlements, followed by calls for restraint on both sides, and then meetings with the leaders.

But this current spurt of terrorism and violence is different from previous rounds, in that there is no identifiable organization – such as Hamas and Fatah’s Tanzim militia – to hold directly responsible for the bloodshed. This time it is more amorphous, individual terrorists incited by calls for Jewish blood on Facebook and from various leaders, going out to kill Jews.

The lack of a clear organizational structure behind the terrorism makes it more difficult for the security services to stop, because it is much more difficult to gather intelligence on an individual who grabs a knife and goes out to kill than on attacks directed by an organization.

Also, there is not one person seemingly in control who may be pressured to cease the violence.

It is not as if Kerry can talk to Abbas and convince him to issue a call to his people to “hold your horses,” and the horses will obediently be held. Abbas does not have anything near that type of control – many of the horses simply do not heed him.

This time around, thankfully, neither the State Department nor Kerry are inflating expectations; they are not talking about Kerry’s separate meeting with the leaders as a potential breakthrough for restarting the diplomatic talks and bringing a peace deal in a number of months.

Washington, it should be remembered, is still engaged in its own Mideast policy reassessment, a policy reassessment brought about after the breakdown of the Kerry-led peace talks in April 2014, and re-announced after Netanyahu’s preelection statement – which he later retracted – of less than full fealty to the notion of a two-state solution.

Rather, this time the bar has been set low, with the goals very limited.

State Department spokesman John Kirby said on Wednesday that the meetings would deal with “practical ways in which political breathing space can be had to help end the violence.”

No overreaching there, just looking for breathing space. The breathing space that Kirby mentioned but did not elaborate upon is likely to be an attempt – in discussions with Netanyahu, Abbas and especially Jordan’s King Abdullah – to come up with a clear set of procedures for governing the Temple Mount.

The Temple Mount has – like so many times over the last century – been the spark to violence against Jews. To douse the fire, there will be some need to deal with the spark, but this has to be done in a way where both Israel and the Palestinians can say that they have not given in.

In recent days Kerry has spoken about the need for clarity. Everyone talks about the status quo on the Temple Mount, but there is little understanding of what that entails.

“Israel understands the importance of the status quo and… our objective is to make sure that everyone understands what that means,” Kerry said at press conference on Monday in Madrid, adding that “we are not seeking a new change or outsiders to come in; I don’t think Israel or Jordan wants that, and we’re not proposing it. What we need is clarity.”

The new “clarity” is expected to involve enhanced coordination and cooperation with Jordan, possibly even more Jordanian representatives on the site, in such a way as to undercut the spurious charge that Israel is somehow threatening al-Aksa Mosque.

Former National Security Council head Yaakov Amidror said in an Israel Radio interview this week that he had little expectation regarding Kerry’s meeting with Netanyahu or Abbas, because the US has little impact on the Palestinians – which is true.

But the US does have leverage on Jordan, and this leverage may now be needed to get Abdullah to take a greater role in day-to- day administration and involvement at the site – if only as a way to suck the oxygen out of the lie propelling the current round of terrorism: that Israel is endangering al-Aksa.

Curfews and Internet restrictions can’t be avoided for reining in Palestinian street terror

October 10, 2015

Curfews and Internet restrictions can’t be avoided for reining in Palestinian street terror, DEBKAfile, October 10, 2015

Nablus_Gate10.10.15Holding the line at Nablus Gate, Jerusalem

After nearly a month of rampant Palestinian violence and murder, Israel’s leaders and its forces of law and order were Saturday, Oct. 10, fast approaching an unavoidable decision to impose a curfew on the Old City of Jerusalem – both to bring the stabbing attacks at every corner under control, and to isolate this source of contagion from the disorders spreading in the West Bank and across Israeli Arab coummunities.

Once a curfew is in place, the security authorities – whose forces are stretched to the limit by the multiple outbreaks proliferating across the country – will be able to deal quietly and systematically with the disorders.

A major hindrance until now has the refusal of the heads of government, especially Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon, to realistically appreciate the dynamic of the wave of terror, and their insistence on playing down its eruption in one place after another as random and uncontrolled.

They keep on harping on the incitement and lies spread by Mahmoud Abbas and radical Israeli Muslim leaders, although the street has since taken over.

Friday night, Ya’alon commented in a television interview that terrorists had committed “only” four fatal stabbings out of a population of four million.

This challenge was taken up with a vengeance. That night, Israeli Arabs staged riotous disturbances from northern Israel to the south, attacking security forces and blocking highway traffic on Routes 6, 444 and 65, with rocks and burning tires.

The following morning, the focus of violence switched back to Jerusalem and the Palestinians: A 16-year old Palestinian stabbed and badly injured two elderly religious Jews wrapped in prayer shawls.

He was shot dead when he brandished the knife against approaching police officers. A second Palestinian was killed after stabbing three police officers at Damascus Gate.

This sequence of events indicates that, while there is no single controlling hand behind them, they are nonetheless orchestrated in a way that keeps every Israeli constantly looking over his or her shoulder for fear of being taken off guard by the next attack – whether on an Israeli highway or town like Afula or Petach Tikva, or in Judea and Samaria. But Jerusalem remains the constant focal point because it is a powerful unifier.

Official Israeli spokesmen have tried relaying messages to Abbas and putting out reports that he has responded favorably to appeals. Saturday, Netanyahu asked US Secretary of State John Kerry to intercede with the Palestinian leader for help to quieten things down. However, none of the three, any more than Jordan’s Abdullah, holds the levers for controlling current events.

That is because they are being orchestrated to a large extent through messages of incitement and false inflammatory information which bounce back and forth between the cell phones and social media networks of young Palestinian and Israeli Arabs hungry for trouble.

In the latest example, the networks were flooded all day with calls to torpedo the international soccer match between Israel and Cyprus taking place Saturday night at the Teddy stadium in Jerusalem – even to setting the arena on fire.

This move had two objects: to dilute police strength in the Old City in order to reinforce security at the stadium and to terrify the public into staying away from the game.

Israel’s security authorities are finding they can no longer avoid stepped up measures, such as a curfew on the Old City of Jerusalem and blocking selected Palestinian cell phone networks and Internet connections and IPs of known inciters. This method was used by Turkish President Erdogan to stem the rising tide of opposition against him in 2014.

These measures are far from pleasant and will be frowned on by many people including Israelis. But they may possibly calm the turbulence and save Israeli and Palestinian lives.

Time is running out. Wednesday, Oct. 14, members of the Middle East Quartet are due to arrive in Israel. The Netanyahu government can’t afford to be found at a loss in the face of a major threat to its authority in Jerusalem. The ineffectual measures applied till now no longer serve.

Right Turn Opinion Our ‘Baghdad Bob’ president

October 7, 2015

Right Turn Opinion Our ‘Baghdad Bob’ president, Washington PostJennifer Rubin, October 7, 2015

(Ms. Rubin is WaPo’s token conservative. Do go to the link and read the generally unfavorable comments about her article. — DM). 

So it has come to this: We now can recognize that Carter was not malicious or indifferent to American influence; he was simply slow to catch on. If Carter, widely regarded as the weakest foreign policy president of the second half of the 20th century, looks good in comparison, you can understand how daft is Obama’s worldview. Had he been in Carter’s shoes, I suppose he would have cheered rather than take steps to mitigate imperialistic aggression. Umm, thank goodness Carter was in the White House and not Obama? Yes, it has come to that.

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Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, better known as “Baghdad Bob,” was the unintentionally hilarious Iraqi information minister who, no matter what evidence to the contrary, emphatically predicted evisceration of U.S. forces during the Iraq war and denied any news suggesting otherwise. As NBC News recalled, “His last public appearance as information minister was on April 8, 2003, the day before the fall of Baghdad, when he said that the Americans ‘are going to surrender or be burned in their tanks. They will surrender, it is they who will surrender.’ ”

Baghdad Bob now seems to be the model for the Obama White House. Ramadi falls to the Islamic State? No bother, we are winning! Russia invades Ukraine? Russian President Vladimir Putin — take this! — is on the “wrong side of history,” is only going to “wreck his country’s economy and continue Russia’s isolation,” was “desperate” to talk to Obama (and the next day commenced bombing U.S.-backed rebels in Syria) and is about to get “stuck in a quagmire” in Syria. Russia moves more forces into Syria, changing the dynamic in the Middle East? President Obama brushes it aside. Putin is acting out of “weakness,” you see. Next thing you know, the Russians will have to “surrender or be burned in their tanks.”

One is tempted to assume, is hopeful even, that the president and his spokesmen don’t believe what they are saying. It is less frightening to imagine this is ham-handed excuse-mongering for a failed foreign policy than to imagine Obama thinks things are going swimmingly. If Obama actually believes we have Putin just where we want him, why not concede all of Ukraine — or the rest of the former Soviet Union, even. If it’s to our advantage to have Russia prop up Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and destroy the U.S.-backed rebels, then we should be thrilled Russia is now being invited into Iraq to bomb the Islamic State. For that matter, why not welcome Iranian domination of Iraq and a new Shiite-Russian-Iranian crescent?

This is the bizarre parallel universe in which U.S. marginalization is good, chaos is nothing to worry about, the worst human rights offenders are our partners and traditional U.S. allies (Israel, Sunni states, even Turkey) will just have to lump it. It’s a world in which the system of nation-state sovereignty is subsumed to zones of influence — without the United States getting a zone. About the only politician willing to buy into such insanity is Donald Trump, who thinks it is a swell idea to have Putin fighting the Islamic State (except he is not fighting the Islamic State).

You can see why conservatives consider Obama a sharp departure from decades of American foreign policy under Democratic and Republican presidents. Instead of acting as a guarantor of the West’s security, the friend of free peoples and a check against rogue states, we rationalize weakness and abandon innocents. We tend to describe the president’s foreign policy as “feckless,” but it is worse: It is monstrous.

Even Jimmy Carter woke up, it is said, when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. He did not think it was a good thing that the Soviets were invading an independent nation or that the West should huff and puff but take no action.

To the contrary, in what was surely the best speech of his presidency, Carter told the country: “This invasion is an extremely serious threat to peace because of the threat of further Soviet expansion into neighboring countries in Southwest Asia and also because such an aggressive military policy is unsettling to other peoples throughout the world. This is a callous violation of international law and the United Nations Charter. It is a deliberate effort of a powerful atheistic government to subjugate an independent Islamic people.” Unlike Obama, Carter grasped the danger in letting aggressors succeed: “The United States wants all nations in the region to be free and to be independent. If the Soviets are encouraged in this invasion by eventual success, and if they maintain their dominance over Afghanistan and then extend their control to adjacent countries, the stable, strategic, and peaceful balance of the entire world will be changed. This would threaten the security of all nations including, of course, the United States, our allies, and our friends.” He went on to announce a series of concrete steps — “defer further consideration of the SALT II treaty,” “delay opening of any new American or Soviet consular facilities, and most of the cultural and economic exchanges,” “halt or to reduce exports to the Soviet Union,” suspend licensing of “high technology or other strategic items,” end grain sales, pull out of the Olympics and “provide military equipment, food, and other assistance to help Pakistan defend its independence and its national security against the seriously increased threat it now faces from the north.”

More important, unlike Obama, who is emphatic that we stay on the path of slashing our military, Carter began repairing our military and extending covert efforts, as historian Arthur Herman recalls:

The first was pledging that US defense spending would rise by 4.6 percent per year, every year for five years, starting in 1980. This shocked and infuriated his fellow Democrats — and greased the wheels for President Ronald Reagan’s military buildup. (In the event, Reagan wound up increasing defense outlays less than Carter had planned.)

The second step came in the 1980 State of the Union Address, with announcement of the Carter Doctrine: The United States would use military force if necessary to defend our interests in the Persian Gulf.

To back this up, the president authorized the creation of the first Rapid Deployment Force — the ancestor of US Central Command or CENTCOM, the wheelhouse from which the United States would direct Desert Storm in 1991 and the fall of Saddam Hussein a decade later, and which keeps the Straits of Hormuz, vital to global energy markets, safe and open today.

The last step was authorizing the first covert military aid to Afghan guerrillas fighting their Soviet occupiers. That marked the start of the Soviet quagmire in Afghanistan — a major landmark in the ultimate undoing of the Soviet Union.

You see, a “quagmire” happens only when a power is confronted, stalls and undergoes unjustified losses. Otherwise, it is called a successful invasion.

So it has come to this: We now can recognize that Carter was not malicious or indifferent to American influence; he was simply slow to catch on. If Carter, widely regarded as the weakest foreign policy president of the second half of the 20th century, looks good in comparison, you can understand how daft is Obama’s worldview. Had he been in Carter’s shoes, I suppose he would have cheered rather than take steps to mitigate imperialistic aggression. Umm, thank goodness Carter was in the White House and not Obama? Yes, it has come to that.

At the U.N., Obama refuses to see the chaotic world he has made,

September 29, 2015

At the U.N., Obama refuses to see the chaotic world he has made, BreitbartJohn Hayward, September 28, 2015

ISIS-beheading-Christians-Libya-ap-640x480

President Obama’s address to the U.N. General Assembly on Monday morning was a rambling journey through a fantasy world where his foreign policy hasn’t been an unmitigated disaster.

Perhaps the most bizarre moment came when he tried to tout his Libyan adventure as a success.

There was plenty of tough-guy posturing that intimidated absolutely no one.  The Russian and Iranian delegations were especially good at looking bored and unimpressed when he called upon them to do this-or-that because The World supposedly demanded it. Obama hasn’t figured out he’s the only leader at the U.N. eager to sacrifice his nation’s interests to please The World.

Obama made the weird decision to vaguely threaten Russia over its invasion of Ukraine by claiming that The World would not stand idly by and allow it… when that’s exactly what The World, and especially First Citizen of the World Barack Obama, has been doing.  He essentially pleaded with Iran to stop supporting terrorist proxies and pursuing its aggressive regional ambitions, and focus on their economy instead.  (Of course, in Obama’s vigorous imagination, the U.S. has been enjoying an economic boom under his stewardship, instead of an endless grinding non-recovery and limp, sporadic growth, after Obama’s spending doubled the national debt in a single presidency.)

It was bad enough that the President talked about American troops coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan as the triumphant conclusion of an effective policy, rather than the hideous blunder that allowed ISIS to create a terror state, al-Qaeda to rise from the ashes, and the Taliban to begin planning its return to power.  At the same moment Obama was speaking, the Taliban was conducting a major offensive in Afghanistan, on par with the importance of ISIS taking Mosul in Iraq.  Obama’s pitifully small “New Syrian Force” of U.S.-backed rebels just handed a good deal of its American equipment over to al-Qaeda, and no one really knows what became of the unit itself.  Their predecessors were destroyed by al-Qaeda’s Nusra Front in Syria, with less than half a dozen survivors still on the field.

When Obama boasted of the Libyan operation as the successful removal of a tyrant, jaws must have hit the floor around the room.  Libya is an unholy disaster, a wasteland of warlords fighting to keep ISIS off their turf.  It’s a key gateway for the incredible migratory tide blasting out of Africa and the Middle East and now surging across Europe.  And yet, Obama portrays it as [a] laudable example of tyrant removal… while modestly admitting that “our coalition could have, and should have, done more to fill a vacuum left behind.”

Of course he blamed everyone else in the “coalition” for the disaster in Libya. He’s Barack Obama.  The day may come when he takes responsibility for something, but today is not that day, and tomorrow isn’t looking good either.

The scary thing about Obama is that he believes so completely in the power of his own rhetoric.

He thinks he can reshape reality with his words.  When he scolds the Iranians for their “Death to America!” rhetoric by saying bloodthirsty chants don’t create jobs, he’s asking Iran to live up to the silly talking points he foisted off on the American people to cover the Iranian nuclear deal.  He’s commanding Iran to act like the enlightened, responsible nation-state he gambled the future of Israel, America, and much of the Western world on.

The Iranians, on the other hand, see no reason to knock off the “Death to America!” chants, disband their theocracy, and begin spending their days arguing about stimulus bills.  Belligerence has gotten them everything so far.  They’ve been rewarded for it… by Barack Obama.  They’ve got $150 billion in sanctions relief coming their way.  They can afford to send a few guys to sit in the U.N. General Assembly with pissy expressions on their faces while Obama rambles on about how geo-political crime does not pay.  They know for a fact it pays, quite handsomely.  The Iranians are already using their Obama loot to reinforce terror proxies like Hamas and Hezbollah, and secure Bashar Assad in power.

Ah, yes, Bashar Assad… the dictator Obama still blathers on about removing from power, even as his own diplomatic apparatus gets used to the idea Assad is not going anywhere.  The only really good part of Obama’s speech was when he spent five seconds glaring at the Syrian ambassador before launching into his denunciation of barrel bombs and chemical weapons.  But you know what?  That Syrian ambassador gets paid enough to take a few seconds of hairy eyeball from the ineffectual American president.  The Russians are smoothly replacing American influence across the Middle East, in partnership with Iran.  The new order is taking shape.  Obama isn’t going to reverse that process by telling aggressive, bare-knuckle conquerors they should be ashamed of themselves.

The other dangerous thing about this delusional President is his belief in the “judgment of history.”

He’s constantly hitting on the idea that all of the world’s villains are on the wrong side of history, and will find themselves buried in the sands of time any day now.  It’s a dodge, a way of Obama evading responsibility.  Bashar Assad is going to remerge from the Wrong Side of History in pretty good shape.  ISIS is very comfortable there, as is Iran.  Qaddafi didn’t assume room temperature because History caught up with him. Vladimir Putin has a lovely view of Crimea from the wrong side of history.  The history of Europe is being reshaped by the tramping of a million “refugee” feet.

In every example, Obama clings to the idea that he can change the world by talking and scoring debate points, while his adversaries seize territory and control the course of events.  It’s not as though Obama has some deep-seated reluctance to use deadly force – there have been a lot of deaths by drone strike since he won that Nobel Peace Prize.  What Obama lacks is commitment.  His foreign policy is all about gestures and distractions.  He cooks up half-baked plans that will blow up a terrorist here and there, so he can’t be accused of doing “nothing,” but he won’t do anything that could cost him political capital at home.  Even Libya was half-hearted and calculated for minimum risk, which is why the place went to an even deeper Hell after Qaddafi was overthrown.

Obama talks as if he’s taken action against numerous crises, but all he ever did was talk about them.  The men of action are stacking up bodies, and raising flags over conquered cities, while this President is writing speeches and trying to win applause from editorial boards.  The men of action know that Obama’s promises all have expiration dates, his vows of action always have escape clauses, and no matter how he loves to boast that he heads up the most powerful military the world has ever seen, he’s done everything he can to make it weaker.

President Obama is still clinging to a romantic vision of the “Arab Spring” as a flourishing of democracy, despite all evidence to the contrary.  He’s giving the same foreign policy speeches he gave in 2009 because he can’t bear to live in the world he made.  He talks about filling vacuums and voids… but those voids are already filled, by hard characters with plans to make the most of the extraordinary opportunity Barack Obama afforded them.

(Video of Obama’s UN address — DM):