Post Paris: Liberals Can’t Blame Terror Attack on Muslims, PJTV via You Tube, November 19, 2015
Posted tagged ‘Leftists’
Post Paris: Liberals Can’t Blame Terror Attack on Muslims
November 19, 2015The left’s war on Jewish self-defense
October 12, 2015The left’s war on Jewish self-defense, Front Page Magazine, Daniel Greenfield, October 12, 2015
Ben Carson’s comments that armed Jews might have saved lives in the Holocaust by resisting Nazi terror have been met with condescending mockery from the left. The Jewish establishment, a network of wealthy non-profit organizations that claim to represent Jews without ever being chosen by them and while working against their interests, has reacted in the same way as their liberal brethren.
But this establishment has forgotten that it was built on providing guns to Jews.
Historical revisionism is what the left does best. American Jewish history in the last century is a revisionist history in which the heroes are the “establishment”. The truth lies buried in old papers and lost documents. And it’s a deeply compelling truth of how the left suppressed Jewish self-defense.
The Jewish Defense Association was the first time that uptown establishment German Jews and downtown Eastern Jewish immigrants came together. The JDA’s goal had little in common with the empty rubber chicken dinner agendas of what the establishment that grew out of it would become.
Instead the Jewish Defense Association’s mission was simple. Buy guns for Jews.
Its agenda, as reported by the New York Times was, “New massacres are preparing. Our people must be possessed of arms to defend themselves and their honor.”
The year was 1905. The slow bloody beginning of the Russian Revolution was underway. Much like the Syrian Civil War, brutal militias aligned with different factions from the left to the right would arise out of the violence. Like the Christians in Syria, the Jews were an isolated minority. Xenophobia allowed both Communists and Czarists to score populist points by massacring the Jews in violent pogroms.
The Jewish Defense Association responded with a call to arms. Its motto took a part of Hillel’s credo, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me.” Its membership encompassed the left and the right, Zionists and anti-Zionists, religious and secular Jews.
A march of 200,000 Jews to Union Square included 5,000 former Russian soldiers, the volunteer Zion Guards in blue uniforms carrying rifles and the young men of the Manhattan Rifles, begun in the Lower East Side’s Educational Alliance as the Alliance Cadets, which had been formed in imitation of the Jewish Lads Brigade, a group that had put thousands of Jewish boys in the UK through military training.
The final resolutions declared that, “Eternal vigilance is the price of the Jew’s life, and that we urge our people to take up arms against their assailants, and if need be to sell their lives most dearly.”
It concluded with the ringing challenge, “We call Jews everywhere toward the defense of the Jewish people.”
In the words of the New York Times, “A ripple went through the crowd like wind rising to a hurricane which roared “Aye!”
It was undoubtedly the most heavily armed Jewish rally in American history. The sight of all those guns, not to mention early versions of the Israeli flag, would give any modern establishment leader a fit.
And yet the JDA included key establishment figures like Judah Magnes and Louis Marshall. Branches of the organization quickly emerged around the country from Los Angeles to Cincinnati showing how popular the message of Jewish self-defense was.
“In underlining the word ‘Self’ it expresses its conviction of the futility of all kinds of Jewish demonstration which appeal to others,” Rabbi Israel Friedlander, a co-founder of Young Israel who would later be murdered by Communist thugs, wrote.
“The modern Jew, who is otherwise ready to boast of his liberalism… anxiously watches every nod of a king and every smile of a prime minister. The old ‘Shtadlan’ still exists in the form of the ‘influential Hebrew’ who on the backstairs often begs what as a representative of a free nation he ought openly to demand. In times of danger the modern Jews… appeal to the Spirit of Humanity, Modern Civilization or Brotherhood of Mankind, without themselves moving a finger in their defense.”
“Attacks of bloodthirsty beasts cannot be beaten back by appeals to Humanity and Civilization,” he wrote.”Surely the Self-Defense of the Jews will not at once stop all further bloodshed. Some Jews may still be slain, be destroyed and be beaten. But they will certainly not be put to shame. They will meet violence with violence and teach their enemies the value of a Jewish life.”
But of course it was not to be.
The “Shtadlans,” the institutional establishment figures who had taken over the JDA, would abandon and dismantle it, recreating its corpse as the American Jewish Committee. The AJC would default to exactly the kind of aimless political begging that Rabbi Friedlander had condemned because that made power brokers like Marshall and Magnes feel important. Their goal was not to empower Jews, but to disempower them. The establishment robbed Jews of their power and offered them a chance to donate to a corrupt network of organizations whose only real purpose was making their leaders feel important.
Meanwhile the leftists tore apart the JDA by refusing to work with the Jewish “religious and capitalist elements” of the JDA.
Leading the charge against the JDA were the Bund, an anti-Jewish Marxist organization, and the Forward, a radical left-wing paper that continues to spread hate against Jews and Judaism today.
While the Bund and the Forward’s mendacious Abe Cahan had initially supported the JDA in order to take advantage of Jewish outrage over the pogroms, the Bund’s position firmly opposed self-defense along “national lines” as a distraction from class consciousness and class warfare. And armed Jews, especially Zionists, might end up shooting some of the Bund’s favorite “workers mobs” at a pogrom.
Jewish self-defense threatened the Marxist agenda. The Marxists were willing to exploit Jews through front groups, but were determined to deny them any ability to defend themselves. For its Communist collaboration, the Bund earned the dubious honor of being the last non-Bolshevik Jewish organization allowed to operate on Soviet soil. Eventually it was purged and its members were shot. Others found their way into the Yevsektsiya, the Communist Party’s Jewish Section, tasked with wiping out Judaism by shutting down synagogues and Jewish institutions, and organizing the murder of Rabbis and Zionists.
Despite the interference of the Marxists, Jewish self-defense groups in Russia, such as the Giborei Zion (Heroes of Zion), assembled their own weapons or smuggled them in to resist attacks.
The Communist takeover led to the end of Jewish self-defense groups in Russia. Those who stayed behind were shot or sent to gulags. Many others made their way to Israel where they helped defend Jews against Muslim terror and fought for the independence of the Jewish State. Others played a key role in the resistance to Nazi occupation during WW2 in the Warsaw Ghetto and elsewhere.
The self-defense organizations that had failed in Russia, succeeded in Israel. They did it even though the establishment continued to undermine them by entering into a shameful collaboration with the USSR.
The JDC and the establishment spent most of its money on Soviet agricultural colonies in which Russian Jews were supposed to find a “new life” and a “happy future”. Newspapers were filled with glowing accounts of how happy the resettled Jews were. The scam eventually collapsed when the Communists had gotten enough money out of their useful anti-Zionist idiots. Those Jews who had been resettled, were murdered by the Nazis. Local JDC employees were shot or imprisoned.
At a crucial period, the establishment had starved Jewish settlers of funds that could have been used to dramatically transform Israel. But the pro-Communist left had its own agenda. The eagerness of the JDC to collaborate with the Communists could be found in their cover-up of the murder of Rabbi Friedlander.
Rabbi Friedlander, who advocated Jewish self-defense, had been in the Ukraine as a JDC emissary. He and two other Jews were murdered by the Red Army. The Forward feverishly engaged in a cover-up while the JDC stayed silent to avoid offending the Bolsheviks and their fellow travelers at the Forward.
Jewish self-defense was popular with Jews, but unpopular with the establishment and the far left. The establishment wanted Jews to be dependent on their political access, but refused to use that access to protect Jews by challenging the left, whether that meant standing up to the USSR over its persecution of Jews or to FDR over the Holocaust.
The far left had done everything in its power to suppress a “national solution” to the Jewish question. That is still what it is doing today. Its fight against Israel has nothing to do with the fake nationhood of the “Palestinian” terror groups, but is part of a longstanding campaign to shut down any independent Jewish consciousness because that might interfere with its class consciousness and class warfare.
American Jews are blamed for their apathy to the Holocaust or to Israel. But the good intentions of ordinary Jews were hijacked and continue to be hijacked by a corrupt establishment for its own political agendas. The establishment put FDR first and the left put Stalin first. Today it puts Obama first. It is a parasitic entity that hijacked Jewish self-defense and concerns while costing countless Jewish lives.
Armed Jews alone would not have stopped the Holocaust, but the awareness rising in Jewish circles in 1905 could have led to a movement that would have built a secure Israel and evacuated Jews from danger zones long before the Holocaust. Guns are only the final element of self-defense. Self-defense begins with awareness and mobilization. It’s what you do to prepare for the worst that really counts.
Very little has changed today. The establishment continues to undermine Israel, pursuing left-wing causes at Jewish expense, while pretending that it cares about the Jewish State, even as it undermines its efforts at self-defense. The left wants to destroy Israel. And the establishment helps make it happen.
The establishment ridicules the idea for which those 200,000 Jews gathered, armed and unarmed, over a century ago. Such contempt is fashionable in liberal circles. And yet that old message continues to resound today. “Our people must be possessed of arms to defend themselves and their honor.”
The mystery of Pope Francis: Was there a Vatican Coup?
September 29, 2015The mystery of Pope Francis: Was there a Vatican Coup? Power Line,
(Neither Power Line in general, nor Mr. Hayward, is a fan of “vast right-wing conspiracies.” This does not appear to be one and may help to explain several aspects of Prope Francis’ recent remarks. — DM)
One thing that that has puzzled a lot of people since the selection of Pope Francis two years ago is how a left-leaning Pope could succeed two very serious conservative Popes—John Paul II and Benedict XVI—who you would have thought had stacked the ranks of the Cardinals with clergy that would perpetuate their theological and philosophical outlook. Was Benedict hounded out of office by some kind of internal Vatican scandal perhaps? Was there some ecclesiastical version of a coup?
There’s no evidence that I’m aware of—until now. Three days ago the National Catholic Register ran a very curious article about the contents of a newly published authorized biography of retired Belgian cardinal Godfried Danneels. The Register article reports:
Further serious concerns are being raised about Cardinal Godfried Danneels, one of the papal delegates chosen to attend the upcoming Ordinary Synod on the Family, after the archbishop emeritus of Brussels confessed this week to being part of a radical “mafia” reformist group opposed to Benedict XVI. . .
At the launch of the book in Brussels this week, the cardinal said he was part of a secret club of cardinals opposed to Pope Benedict XVI.
He called it a “mafia” club that bore the name of St. Gallen. The group wanted a drastic reform of the Church, to make it “much more modern”, and for Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio to head it. The group, which also comprised Cardinal Walter Kasper and the late Jesuit Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, has been documented in Austen Ivereigh’s biography of Pope Francis, The Great Reformer.
Over at The American Conservative, Rod Dreher has gone to the trouble of translating an Italian report that is even more curious:
The Italian Vaticanist Marco Tosatti writes (in Italian; I’ve modified the Google translation):
The election of Jorge Bergoglio was the result of secret meetings that cardinals and bishops, organized by Carlo Maria Martini, held for years in St. Gallen, Switzerland. This, according to Jürgen Mettepenningen et Karim Schelkens, authors of a newly published biography of the Belgian Cardinal Godfried Danneels, who calls the group of cardinals and bishops a “Mafia club”.
Danneels according to the authors, worked for years to prepare for the election of Pope Francis, which took place in 2013. Danneels, moreover, in a video recorded during the presentation of the book in Brussels, admits that he was part of a secret club of cardinals who opposed Joseph Ratzinger. Laughing, he calls it “a Mafia club that bore the name of St. Gallen”.The group wanted a drastic reform of the Church, much more modern and current, with Jorge Bergoglio, Pope Francis, as its head. They got what they wanted. Besides Danneels and Martini, the group according to the book were part of the Dutch bishop Adriaan Van Luyn, the German cardinal Walter Kasper and Karl Lehman, the Italian Cardinal Achille Silvestrini and British Basil Hume, among others.
I underscore that this is not some secretly sourced claim, but it’s from an advance copy of Cardinal Danneels’ official biography, approved by himself.
This is the first confirmation of rumors that had been going around for years about Benedict being thwarted by a liberal conspiracy, one that eventually forced him out. These men — Danneels, Van Luyn, Kasper, Lehman, and Hume, at least — all preside over dying churches. And they killed the Benedict papacy.
This might explain a few things. . .
The Invasion of Europe
September 28, 2015Progressivism: Easing the Way to Mass Murder
September 26, 2015Progressivism: Easing the Way to Mass Murder, American Thinker, Kenneth Levin, September 26, 2015
The progressive creed as it relates to foreign policy, and as represented most notably by our Progressive-in-Chief, President Obama, holds that the impact of United States behavior in the world has largely been negative. It casts American foreign policy as a variation on European colonialism: exploitative, indifferent to the peoples subjected to American attention and intervention, and inexorably engendering anti-American sentiment among those peoples.
The translation of this comprehension of the world into a progressivism-informed foreign policy has had the effect of making the world safer for mass murder.
President Obama has offered apologies for past American policy to Europeans, to Arabs and the Muslim world more broadly, to the peoples of Central and South America. Various media outlets have noted that, according to a 2011 Wikileaks publication, only a negative response by the Japanese government prevented Mr. Obama from going to Hiroshima in September, 2009, and offering apologies for America’s atomic bomb attack on the city.
But whatever the President’s erstwhile intentions vis-a-vis Hiroshima, the broader focus of his apologetics has been on those nations and peoples that are hostile to America. His key foreign policy syllogism, and that of America’s progressive camp, is that anti-American sentiment is essentially a product of American abuses and that American self-reform and accommodation, a kinder, gentler United States, will bring an end to current hostility and engender a new comity between this nation and its long-time victims.
Most of the world’s nations offer their citizens at best very limited rights. Some authoritarian regimes have close relations with the United States; others are hostile to the United States. One might think that progressives would object to despots of whatever sort and aspire to the liberation of populations from such governments.
But that is not case. The progressivist pattern, rather, is to oppose despotic regimes with which this nation has had positive relations but to be sympathetic and accommodating towards those that have viewed us as the enemy — that view being congruent with progressive orthodoxy.
Moreover, the advocates of genuine democratic reform in closed societies of either sort, pro- or anti-American, are essentially given short shrift. Such advocates typically look to the United States as a model for their aspirations, and that is sufficient to alienate, and preclude any hoped for support from, the progressive camp. Within pro-American authoritarian regimes, American progressives reserve their sympathy primarily for anti-regime forces that likewise look to America as the source of their respective nations’ ills and seek to replace those in power with a despotism of their own, a despotism with an anti-American stamp.
In Latin America, a number of democracies have in recent decades been subverted by left-wing populists who gained power at the ballot box and then proceeded to dismantle their nations’ democratic institutions with, for example, measures against competing parties, a free media and an independent judiciary. The pattern was established by Hugo Chavez, who became president of Venezuela in 1998, and was followed by, among others, Evo Morales in Bolivia and Rafael Correa in Ecuador. The new despots commonly justified their anti-democratic measures as necessary to counter the supposed nefarious aims of parties domestic and foreign, among which the United States is commonly trotted out as key bogeyman.
Obama and his administration displayed a notable sympathy for Chavez and have likewise done so for his emulators. The victims — among media figures or political opponents — that suffered at the hands of the post-democratic strongmen have enjoyed no such sympathy. Amazingly, when President Manuel Zelaya of Honduras likewise sought to undo his nation’s democracy and consolidate his personal control of the country but had his subversion of Honduras’s constitution blocked by the nation’s parliament and courts, the Obama administration backed Zelaya, attacked the “coup” that pushed him from power, and sought his reinstatement.
All of these populist despots were supported, of course, by Castro’s Cuba, which remains the chief example of anti-democratic leftism in Latin America both in terms of its longevity and in terms of its record of thousands murdered and myriad more imprisoned among those who have dared to take issue with the island’s dictatorship. But here, too, the progressive camp, and the Obama administration, have chosen to look upon the regime’s anti-American cant sympathetically, to see the proper way forward as American reform and cultivation of the Castros, and to close their ears and eyes to the regime’s victims.
But this progressivist cultivating of despotic forces which have only their anti-Americanism to recommend them takes on an even more sinister hue — indeed, much more sinister, in terms of the slaughters perpetrated by such forces and essentially ignored by American progressives — in the arena of the Muslim Middle East.
Virtually from its inception, the Obama administration has demonstrated support for the Muslim Brotherhood. The Brotherhood, founded in 1928 and closely linked to the Nazis during World War II, has consistently promoted an anti-American, anti-Western and anti-Semitic agenda. Its offshoot, Hamas, openly declares its dedication not only to the murder of all Israel’s Jews but of all Jews worldwide. Yet the Obama administration has appointed American Muslims associated with the Muslim Brotherhood to government posts and even as liaisons with federal law enforcement and security agencies and the military, and Brotherhood associates have been frequent guests at the White House.
Obama intervened to provide Brotherhood leaders prominent audience placement for his 2009 Cairo speech in which he apologized for America’s past role in the Middle East and sought more generally to propitiate the Arab and broader Muslim world. The President subsequently undercut pro-American Egyptian strongman Hosni Mubarak when the so-called “Arab spring” exploded in Egypt. He helped force Mubarak from office, and, as in Latin America, rather than support moderate, democratically oriented, groups in Egyptian society in the shaping of an alternative to Mubarak (including groups that consisted of Muslims and Coptic Christians working together for a democratic Egypt), threw his support behind the Brotherhood. One expression of this was the administration’s pushing for quick elections, which provided less time for challengers to the Brotherhood — the best organized political group in Egypt — to mount effective campaigns.
The election in June 2012, did bring the Brotherhood to power, with Mohamed Morsi as president and with the White House’s blessing. In the ensuing months, which saw increased murderous Brotherhood assaults on Egypt’s Coptic Christians — more than ten percent of the population and the Middle East’s largest Christian community — as well as Brotherhood cultivation of its Hamas protégés, the Obama administration continued to offer its support. (The only high profile criticism of Morsi came in the wake of the rarest of events, a New York Times front page, above-the-fold piece on Muslim anti-Semitism, in this instance a newly revealed Morsi anti-Semitic diatribe recorded some years earlier. On this occasion, the White House finally felt obliged to break from its typical indulgence of the Brotherhood and its leaders by releasing some comment condemning Morsi’s remarks.)
The Brotherhood ultimately lost popular favor, in large part because of its failure to address Egypt’s economic ills. But Egyptians were also put off by Morsi’s pursuit of the Brotherhood’s Islamist agenda. As, for example, The Economist noted
“… [I]n power the Brotherhood began to abandon its previous caution regarding its foes. Mr Morsi appeared to dismiss secular opponents and minorities as politically negligible. Instead of enacting the deeper reforms that had been a focus of popular revolutionary demands, such as choosing provincial governors by election rather than presidential appointment, or punishing corrupt Mubarak-era officials, the Brothers simply inserted themselves in key positions…
“When nearly all the non-Islamist members of a body charged with drafting a new constitution resigned in November 2012, the Brothers brushed the problem aside. Mr Morsi issued a snap decree rendering him and his constitution-writers immune from court oversight. This was when his popularity started to slide…
“The Brothers pushed through a hastily drafted constitution to a national referendum despite angry criticism from all other parties, and the referendum went Mr Morsi’s way. But his high-handedness lost him a crucial part of the electorate…”
But, again, none of this seemed to dampen Obama’s enthusiasm for Morsi and the Brotherhood, and when the Egyptian army under Abdel Fattah al-Sisi deposed Morsi in July, 2013, with wide popular support, the White House condemned the coup and dismissed its popular backing and the transgressions of the Morsi regime that generated that support. For much of the subsequent two years, the administration has given the pro-American al-Sisi the cold shoulder. Its withholding of military grants and sales to Egypt — only recently softened to some degree — has pushed al-Sisi to renew Egypt’s long dormant military links with Russia.
Before its victory in Egypt, the country where the Muslim Brotherhood had been most successful in gaining power had been Sudan, where its members made up a large part of the government following the 1989 coup d’état by General Omar Hassan al-Bashir. Bashir, who still rules Sudan, led a genocidal campaign against the black and non-Muslim — Christian and animist — population of southern Sudan over many years, until that region successfully seceded and established its independence. He currently continues a campaign of mass murder and displacement of the Muslim — but, again, black rather than Arab — population of Darfur. Bashir is under indictment by the International Criminal Court for genocide in Darfur.
President Obama, during his 2008 campaign as well as in earlier speeches, promised to act against the Darfur genocide. But he has done nothing, even as the slaughter, displacement and suffering continue. On the contrary, the Obama administration has reached out to Bashir. In addition, consistent with the Sudan government’s wishes and despite the horrible consequences for the people of Darfur, the administration appears to be supporting the downsizing of the UN peacekeeping mission in Darfur. Once again, for President Obama, appeasing anti-American entities such as the Muslim Brotherhood, an appeasement consistent with progressive orthodoxy, trumps supporting the victims of those entities.
Obama’s favorite Middle East leader has long been, according to various sources, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Turkey is, of course, a NATO member and remains so even under Erdogan’s Islamist regime. It is not openly anti-American. But Erdogan has clearly turned away from the West, has developed close ties with the Muslim Brotherhood and has sought to establish himself as the leading figure in a Middle East and broader Muslim world dominated by Islamist policies that emulate those of the Brotherhood.
Having notably described democracy as like a streetcar from which one exits upon reaching one’s destination, Erdogan has done much to undermine Turkish democracy. He has essentially dismantled the nation’s independent judiciary, closed down opposition media and arrested journalists — with Turkey having more journalists incarcerated than either China or Iran — and engineered his Islamist camp’s infiltrating and seizing control over other Turkish institutions, both public and private.
Erdogan was an enthusiastic supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood’s rise to power in Egypt, is reported to have cried over the downfall of Morsi and the Brotherhood, and some months ago declared that he still regards Morsi rather than al-Sisi as Egypt’s president. He remained silent over and apparently indifferent to the Brotherhood’s slaughter of Egyptian Christians both before and during its period in power.
Erdogan likewise supports the Brotherhood offshoot Hamas in its genocidal war against Israel and has, through statements by him and leaders of his party and through his party-controlled media, whipped up domestic anti-Israel and anti-Jewish sentiment. He has opened Turkey as a refuge for members of both Hamas and the Egyptian Brotherhood, and attacks on Israelis, such as the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teenagers last year, have been orchestrated by senior Hamas agents in Turkey.
Yet none of this seems to have shaken President Obama’s enthusiasm for the Turkish leader. On the contrary, Erdogan’s turning from the West and embracing an agenda close to that of the Brotherhood has, once more consistent with the president’s progressive world view, rendered him worthy of the administration’s propitiation.
Obama’s reaching out to the Iranian mullahs virtually from the moment of his taking office in 2009 is likewise in line with his progressivist comprehension of foreign hostility to the United States as a response to past American transgressions. Following from this, his path to ending the hostility lay in breaking from that past, offering mea culpas for it, and cultivating new policies of understanding and comity.
More particularly, the CIA’s involvement in the overthrow of Iranian Prime Minister Mossadegh in 1953 (which in fact at the time had the support of Iran’s religious establishment) and America’s subsequent ongoing support for Shah Reza Pahlavi are construed as the source of Iranian enmity and the history for which the President seeks to apologize and atone.
The popular uprising that followed the disputed reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in June, 2009, led to the regime’s killing of dozens of protesters and the arrest and reported torture and rape of thousands more. Protesters urged the outside world, particularly the United States and President Obama, to support them, but Obama refrained even from offering significant verbal support, apparently not wanting to do anything that might undermine his outreach to the mullahs.
In the ensuing years, torture, including rape, and murder of political prisoners, among them suspected student critics of the regime culled in raids on Iranian universities, have been an ongoing fact of life in Iran. So, too, have been the imprisonment and execution of homosexuals and individuals accused of religious crimes, and abuses targeting members of the embattled Baha’i community and elements of Iran’s ethnic minorities, who represent more than fifty percent of the nation’s population.
But on all of this the Obama administration has been essentially silent as it has pursued its policy of winning over the apocalyptic Iranian theocracy through accommodation and concessions. That policy culminated this summer in the agreement on the Iranian nuclear program, which provides Iran with a path to nuclear weapons and even offers American aid to Iran in defending its nuclear program against sabotage and attack.
Nor has the administration let Iran’s role in killing Americans in Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan and Iraq, and Iran’s assertions of never compromising in its enmity towards America, interfere with Obama’s agenda of pursuing its progressivist fantasies of peace with Iran through accommodation. Nor has the mullahs’ genocidal anti-Semitism, including their openly and repeatedly declared determination to destroy Israel, or their arming and training of Hezb’allah and Hamas to pursue Israel’s annihilation, led to the administration’s wavering from its course. On the contrary, the nuclear agreement appears to offer Iran protection against any Israeli attempt to derail the Islamo-fascist theocracy’s development of nuclear weapons. It also promises to soon provide the regime with tens of billions of dollars in previously embargoed funds, which has already translated into Iran’s embarking on a massive acquisition of advanced warplanes and other major weapons systems from China and Russia and its promising enhanced military aid to Hezb’allah and its other terrorist allies for use in pursuit of Israel’s destruction.
But the off-handedness regarding existential threats to Israel, and regarding as well myriad instances of wholesale human rights abuses, including mass slaughter by those the Obama administration has sought to propitiate, is apparently due to such matters being regarded as of no great consequence when measured against the central international dynamic as construed by progressivism. Administration indifference to the fact of some of those hostile regimes and non-state entities — the objects of American cultivation — having dismantled working democracies or having strangled incipient democratic movements derives from the same worldview. All their various crimes are mere epiphenomena, at most secondary, and potentially an unwelcome distraction, when measured against what is comprehended as the essential world-shaping dynamic: hostility towards America whose roots lie in past American abuses, and an end to hostility and creation of a more peaceful world through American contrition and accommodation.
In this way, Obama’s, and the progressive camp’s, comprehension of reality and playing out of that delusional “reality” on the world stage inexorably makes the world safer for the crimes, including mass murder, of the anti-American forces that are the object of progressivist propitiation.
The Holocaust Museum defends Muslim Brotherhood Nazis
September 25, 2015The Holocaust Museum defends Muslim Brotherhood Nazis, Front Page Magazine, Daniel Greenfield, September 25, 2015
Despite the constant threats to destroy the Jewish State, Iran is also rated at low risk. Instead the Holocaust Museum claims that the real threat of genocide is in Egypt which is “experiencing a mass killing episode perpetrated by the current regime against the Muslim Brotherhood and oppositionists.”
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The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum was tainted from the start.
Carter created the President’s Commission on the Holocaust to pander to the Jews after endorsing a PLO state. Then Carter complained that there were too many Jews on the Commission. One of the Jews he was complaining about was a Presbyterian with a German last name, but he was too bigoted to care.
The Museum hit a new low when the Clinton administration pressured its chairman to invite Arafat, a protégé of Hitler’s Mufti who had been trained to kill Jews by a former Nazi officer. It hit an even lower low when it brought in John K. Roth who had compared Israel to the Nazis.
Now the Holocaust Memorial Museum has rolled out an “Early Warning Project” to warn of the risk of mass killings and genocide.
According to the “Project,” Israel is not at risk of genocide. Its risk assessment is lower than the UK or Panama. If another Holocaust happens, it’s more likely to take place in London or Brazil. (But the EWP also claims that America and New Zealand are at a higher risk of mass killings than Cuba even though the Castro regime, unlike New Zealand Prime Minister John Key, actually engaged in mass killings.)
Despite the constant threats to destroy the Jewish State, Iran is also rated at low risk. Instead the Holocaust Museum claims that the real threat of genocide is in Egypt which is “experiencing a mass killing episode perpetrated by the current regime against the Muslim Brotherhood and oppositionists.”
Jews don’t face genocide in the Middle East. The Nazi-influenced Muslim Brotherhood does. Muslim Nazis are the real victims of a new Holocaust.
The Muslim Brotherhood was allied with Hitler. It distributed Arabic translations of Mein Kampf. Hitler’s Mufti, Haj Amin al-Husseini, who headed the Muslim Brotherhood’s affiliate in Israel, had personally met with Hitler, encouraged the extermination of the Jews and visited the gas chambers at Auschwitz.
The Mufti had preached genocide, encouraging Muslims to “get rid of this dirty race… Kill the Jews, burn their property, destroy their stores” making him one of the earlier promoters of BDS.
Five years after the Holocaust, Sayyid Qutb, the Muslim Brotherhood’s leading thinker, wrote a pamphlet titled, “Our Struggle with the Jews”. Qutb’s Muslim Brotherhood had been heavily influenced by Nazi Germany and the title and theme were deliberate echoes of Hitler’s Mein Kampf.
Qutb claimed that the Jews were the source of all evil. Like Hitler, he insisted that there was a struggle for world domination, except instead of a struggle between Aryans and Jews, it was a struggle between Muslims and Jews. He echoed Hitler’s claims that the Jews had invented sex and materialism and blamed them for everything from the Sunni-Shiite split to the fall of the Ottoman Empire.
The intellectual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood even insisted that Hitler had been an instrument of Allah to punish the Jews. The claim was recently repeated by Sheikh Qaradawi, the Brotherhood’s current Qutb, who said, “Throughout history, Allah has imposed upon the [Jews] people who would punish them for their corruption. The last punishment was carried out by Hitler. By means of all the things he did to them – even though they exaggerated this issue – he managed to put them in their place. This was divine punishment for them. Allah willing, the next time will be at the hands of the believers.”
The “believers” are the Muslims. As opposed to the unbelievers who are everyone else. The Muslim Brotherhood likes what Hitler did to the Jews, but it wants to carry out the next Holocaust on its own.
Or as Qaradawi put it, “count their numbers and kill them down to the very last one.”
If the Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Early Warning Project were really concerned about “genocide” in Egypt, it might have noted the Muslim Brotherhood attacks on Christians and churches.
It might have spoken up when video emerged of the Muslim Brotherhood’s former Egyptian president, Mohammed Morsi, urging his followers “to nurse our children and our grandchildren on hatred for them: for Zionists, for Jews.”
Egyptian children, “must feed on hatred; hatred must continue,” he said. “The hatred must go on for Allah and as a form of worshiping him.”
The Early Warning Project might have noted that the charter of the Muslim Brotherhood affiliate in Gaza, the terrorist group Hamas, states, “The Day of Judgment will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews”. And Hamas is doing its best to advance that date.
But instead the front page of the Holocaust Museum focuses on Syrian refugees. The piece on the Muslim migrants invading Hungary begins with the statement that, “In the 1930s, the world watched as Nazi Germany forced its beleaguered Jewish population to leave their homes.”
The piece is written by a Syrian who served as the Holocaust Museum’s Director of Special Events.
The Holocaust Museum has spent a good deal of time on Syria. It even hosts a paper describing the Muslim Brotherhood’s Sheik Moaz al-Khatib as “a well-respected, moderate Sunni cleric”. It leaves out his statement that Saddam Hussein’s positive legacy was “terrifying the Jews”.
The Museum obsesses over false Muslim claims that they are being persecuted by Buddhists in Burma and Hindus in India. It takes the time to visit Syria, but not Sderot. It puts up photos of Syrians, but not Jewish families murdered by members of genocidal Islamofascist terrorist organizations.
Despite all the propaganda, the Muslim Rohingya illegal aliens in Burma are not being exterminated. Muslim terror against Jews in Israel however is part of an ongoing campaign of genocide.
Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, warned, “If the Jewish state becomes a fact, and this is realized by the Arab peoples, they will drive the Jews who live in their midst into the sea.”
“Kill the Jews wherever you find them,” the Mufti of Jerusalem had proclaimed. “Allah is with you.” Hamas declares that, “Killing Jews is worship that draws us close to Allah”.
There was a reason why Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the Holocaust, turned for sympathy to the Muslim world. “You 360 million Mohammedans to whom I have had a strong inner connection since the days of my association with your Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. You, who have a greater truth in the surahs of your Koran. I call upon you to pass judgment on me.”
The Holocaust Museum’s Early Warning Project is ignoring Muslim genocide aimed at Jews while promoting the bizarre myth that the Muslim Brotherhood is at risk of genocide. It couldn’t be any stranger if the Holocaust Museum had begun insisting that Neo-Nazis face genocide in Germany.
“Either this place will be a sanctuary, or it will be an abomination,” Elie Wiesel had said of the museum.
It did not take long for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum to become an abomination. From its early days, a museum dedicated to teaching about the evil of the Final Solution instead became a platform for promoting the newest attempt to solve the “Jewish problem” with the Two-State Solution.
Now it approaches the final phase of the left’s Post-Holocaust Anti-Semitism where Muslims are transformed into Jews so that Jews may be transformed into Nazis to justify another Holocaust.
After all this time, the Holocaust Museum has decided that the Nazis were the real victims.
A New Age of Theory
August 6, 2015http://www.jewishmediaresources.com/1768/a-new-age-of-theory, August 7, 2015
The recently signed p5+1 nuclear deal with Iran is based on another beautiful theory: The nicer the United States is to the Iranian mullahs, the more she caves into their demands and acknowledges their valid reasons for hating America, the more they will seek to be like us and want to be good citizens of the world. President Obama has literally bet the fate of the world on that conjecture.
The theory that the Iranian theocracy will be transformed by kindness betrays another failure of progressive theorists from the French Revolution to the present: They view religion as “irrational,” and cannot fathom that anyone else takes its claims seriously. That Iran’s Islamic Revolution really seeks world conquest for Islam is too absurd to countenance as an explanation of regime behavior.
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Alexis de Tocqueville’s explanation of the descent of the French Revolution into the Terror, in The Old Regime and the Revolution, emphasized the outsized role that men of letters played in French political discourse prior to the Revolution. These writers, as described by de Tocqueville, had a decided preference for “general and abstract theories of government” and a tendency “to trust in them blindly.” Since they dwelt at “an almost infinite distance from practice . . . no experience tempered the ardors of their natures; nothing warned them of the obstacles that existing facts might place before them.”
With the passage of time, “they . . . became much bolder in their innovations, fonder of general ideas and systems, more contemptuous of old wisdom, and still more confident of their individual reason. . . ,” writes de Tocqueville.
We live in another such age of theory, writes Alain Finkelkraut. Take for example the lunatic claim that Jews are committing genocide against the Palestinians. Under Israeli rule of the West Bank from 1967 to 1992, life expectancy leaped by 50% — from 48 to 72; infant mortality dropped by 75%; seven universities were built where none had existed, and Palestinian illiteracy was reduced to a fraction of that in neighboring Egypt and Syria; and the West Bank, as of 1992, had the fourth fastest growing economy in the world. If that be genocide, it was genocide of a decidedly peculiar sort.
But, explains Finkelkraut, Europeans have theory according to which Jews are uniquely capable of genocide today. And in an age of theory, a beautiful theory trumps a thousand unruly facts. What’s the theory? Because Jews were the victims of the Holocaust, not its perpetrators, they never learned of the danger of turning one’s fellow human beings into the dehumanized “Other.” From which it follows that Jews dehumanize Palestinians and are committing genocide against them. Never mind the facts.
The recently signed p5+1 nuclear deal with Iran is based on another beautiful theory: The nicer the United States is to the Iranian mullahs, the more she caves into their demands and acknowledges their valid reasons for hating America, the more they will seek to be like us and want to be good citizens of the world. President Obama has literally bet the fate of the world on that conjecture.
Neither tens of thousands chanting “Death to America” nor Supreme Leader Khameini’s insistence that Iran will continue to fight American arrogance even after the deal because hatred of America is the very raison d’etre of the regime register with supporters of the theory.
The theory that the Iranian theocracy will be transformed by kindness betrays another failure of progressive theorists from the French Revolution to the present: They view religion as “irrational,” and cannot fathom that anyone else takes its claims seriously. That Iran’s Islamic Revolution really seeks world conquest for Islam is too absurd to countenance as an explanation of regime behavior.
Another Obama theory holds that even rabid anti-Semites, like the Iranian mullahs, will not act upon their hatreds to the harm of their “rational” interests. But history proves the opposite: The Nazis diverted vital war material in an effort to wipe out Hungarian Jewry in Auschwitz.
The attachment to theory over empirical evidence is evidenced in the way that Left policy prescriptions remain constant despite their repeated failures. What Walter Russell Mead calls the Blue Model of governance – high taxes, high regulation, and generous public union pensions – is failing everywhere. From mid-size California cities to Detroit, Chicago, and most recently, Puerto Rico, it has led to literal bankruptcy.
A vicious cycle sets in of higher taxes to pay pensions based on fantastical assumptions followed by the flight of business and jobs to lower tax states followed by yet higher taxes on those remaining to compensate for the lost business and jobs. Eventually, Blue Model cities and states experience the highest income inequality, as the population divides between extremely high earners, on the one hand, and the menial workers who serve them and welfare recipients, on the other.
The Obama administration has now set out to increase Muslim immigration, despite Europe’s dystopian experience, which has left it poised to become an extension of the Maghreb by the end the century, with an increasingly radicalized and unassimilated Muslim population taking over.
The theories of the Left are unmoored from reality because they have less to do with seeking to make life better than with the emotional reaffirmation they offer their proponents. Every Democratic candidate, for instance, will call for universal pre-school education, despite 50 years of evidence that Head Start early intervention has no lasting impact.
Similarly, every Democratic candidate will advocate heavy government investment in abundant, renewable “green” energy – such as ethanol, the production of which actually creates more pollution than it saves – even though “green energy” consistently proves to be economically unviable and a drag on economic productivity in the form of higher energy costs. Billions of dollars of taxpayer money, however, will inevitably find their way into the pockets of “green energy” crony capitalists.
The attraction of “renewables” is primarily the feeling of moral virtue they confer on proponents. And the same is true of Head Start and calls for a $15/and hour minimum wage, which would only ensure that orders at McDonald’s will be taken by a machine and not by some striving high-school kid eager to earn money for college or a poor, single-mother with no marketable skills. Estimates of the American jobs likely lost if the minimum wage were to rise to $15/hour range from 3,000,000 to 6,000,000, most of them to low-wage earners. But how deliciously virtuous must legislators feel enacting minimum wage laws.
THOSE WHO PREFER THEORY over history and facts do not just produce bad policy: They are subject to a profoundly illiberal, even totalitarian, temptation. That was De Tocqueville’s subject. Their theory of government is that “smart” people – i.e., theoreticians like themselves — ought to run the show. A corollary is that all smart people will reach similar “rational” conclusions, and that those who don’t are either fools or evil. Not surprisingly, when human beings and reality fail to conform to their theories, they turn ornery. Think Pol Pot.
Hostility to free markets and a profound ambivalence towards representative democracy are part and parcel of the preference for abstractions. The former are too irrational and chaotic. Markets give equal value to the desires of the not-so-bright. Central planning, by contrast, is much more rational, or so it seems, until one considers its unbroken record of failure. Just think of resource rich Venezuela, where years of socialist rule have made both food and toilet paper scarce.
Similarly the flaw of representative democracy is that fools and geniuses alike have one vote. The preferred form of municipal government for early American Progressives was unelected city managers, above the fray of partisan politics. And those same early Progressives created the modern administrative state, whose rule-making by unelected bureaucratic “experts,” has become virtually indistinguishable from the law-making power conferred exclusively upon Congress by the Constitution.
Self-styled progressive Barack Obama is perfectly comfortable ruling by executive decree and through administrative agencies, like the Environmental Protection Agency, which seeks to impose by rule-making what could never pass in Congress.
Obama’s progressive ancestor, President Woodrow Wilson, famously declared the U.S. Constitution, with its federal system and checks and balances between the three branches, to be an outmoded document for the modern age, and called for a much more powerful unitary executive.
Progressive thinkers have little patience for the rules of procedure of representative democracy or its allocation of decision-making authority. Only results matter and that the smart people make the decisions – be they judges, agency bureaucrats, or the president himself. Neither Court President Aharon Barak in his heyday nor Justice Anthony Kennedy more recently showed the slightest concern over whom appointed them philosopher-king to determine the nature of human dignity.
The assumption that those who disagree are either stupid or evil undercuts the fundamental democratic value of tolerance. On issues like anthropogenic climate change, modern progressive are ever eager to declare the debate over, and even advocate criminal penalties for global warming deniers. (This at a time when many climate scientists are forecasting a mini-Ice Age based on lower solar activity.)
Anyone who follows nutrition and health reports knows how wildly fluctuating the best scientific advice is. How much more unlikely is the discussion to be over in the vastly more complex area of climate, involving up to twenty different scientific disciplines and in which controlled experiments are impossible.
Not by accident are the most progressive institutions in American society – the universities – those with the most restrictive speech codes designed to regulate various and sundry “micro-aggressions” in speech.
The Orwellian argument of the late Brandeis philosopher Herbert Marcuse that “new and rigid restrictions” on certain teachings that protect the oppressive status quo are required for true freedom of thought to flourish only represents the outer limit of where the preference for abstractions over human reality can lead.
Pulling down the slaver flags of Islam and Africa
July 2, 2015Pulling down the slaver flags of Islam and Africa, Front Page Magazine, Daniel Greenfield, July 2, 2015
In our incredibly tolerant culture, it has become politically incorrect to watch the General Lee jump a fence or a barn, but paying tribute to the culture that sent the slaves here and that still practices slavery is the culturally sensitive thing to do.
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The return of the Confederacy was averted in the summer of 2015 when major retailers frantically scoured through their vast offerings to purge any images of a car from the Dukes of Hazzard. If not for their quick thinking, armies of men in gray might have come marching down the streets of New York and San Francisco to stop off for an Iced Mocha Frappucino ™ at a local Starbucks before restoring slavery.
History will little note nor long remember the tired wage slaves making $7.25 an hour while checking Amazon and eBay databases for tin models of an orange car with a Confederate flag on top. During this courageous defense of the homeland from the scourge of a mildly politically incorrect 80s show, Hillary Clinton committed her own unpardonable racist hate crime by saying, “All lives matter”.
The politically correct term is, “Black lives matter.”
Even while our own Boss Hoggs in DC and SF are locking up the Duke boys as a symbol of racism, they are loudly arguing that black lives matter, all lives don’t. The proportion that the weight of a life should be measured by race is the sort of idea that we might have associated with slavery. Today it’s an idea that we associate with racial tolerance as we heal our nation’s racial wounds one race riot at a time.
Romanticizing the South means a whipping from our cultural elite. Instead of romanticizing the culture that bought slaves, they romanticize the Middle Eastern and African cultures that sold them the slaves.
When Obama condemned Christianity for the Crusades, only a thousand years too late, in attendance was the Foreign Minister of Sudan; a country that practices slavery and genocide. Obama could have taken time out from his rigorous denunciation of the Middle Ages to speak truth to the emissary of a Muslim Brotherhood regime whose leader is wanted by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity. But our moral liberals spend too much time romanticizing actual slaver cultures.
It’s a lot easier for Obama to get in his million dollar Cadillac with its 5-inch thick bulletproof windows, a ride Boss Hogg could only envy, and chase down a couple of good ole boys than it is to condemn a culture that committed genocide in our own time, not in 1099, and that keeps slaves today, not in 1815.
Even while the Duke boys were being chased through Georgia, Obama appeared at an Iftar dinner; an event at which Muslims emulate Mohammed, who had more slaves than Robert E. Lee. There are no slaves in Arlington House today, but in the heartlands of Islam, from Saudi mansions to ISIS dungeons, there are still slaves, laboring, beaten, bought, sold, raped and disposed of in Mohammed’s name.
Slavery does not exist under the Confederate flag eagerly being pulled down. It does exist under the black and green flags of Islam rising over mosques in Iraq, Saudi Arabia and America today.
In our incredibly tolerant culture, it has become politically incorrect to watch the General Lee jump a fence or a barn, but paying tribute to the culture that sent the slaves here and that still practices slavery is the culturally sensitive thing to do. In 2015, slavery is no longer freedom, but it certainly is tolerance.
And it’s not just about Islam.
If romanticizing Dixie is wrong, so is romanticizing those ancient African cultures so beloved by amateur anthropologists and professional sociologists with more plastic tribal jewelry than sense. Slavery was an indigenous African and Middle Eastern practice. Not to mention an indigenous practice in America among indigenous cultures.
If justice demands that we pull down the Confederate flag everywhere, even from the top of the orange car sailing through the air in the freeze frame of an old television show, then what possible justification is there for all the faux Aztec knickknacks? Even the worst Southern plantation owners didn’t tear out the hearts of their slaves on top of pyramids. The romanticization of Aztec brutality plays a crucial role in the mythology of Mexican nationalist groups like La Raza promoting the Reconquista of America today.
Black nationalists romanticize the slave-holding civilization of Egypt despite the fact that the narrative of the liberation of the Hebrew slaves from bondage played a crucial role in the end of slavery in America. The endless stories about the “Amazons” of the African kingdom of Dahomey neatly fit into the leftist myth of a peaceful matriarchal Africa disrupted by European colonialism, but Dahomey ran on slavery.
The “Amazons” helped capture slaves for the Atlantic slave trade. White and black liberals are romanticizing the very culture that captured and sold their forefathers into slavery. “In Dahomey,” the first major mainstream black musical was about African-Americans moving to Dahomey. By then the French had taken over old Dahomey and together with the British had put an end to the slave trade.
The French dismantled the “Amazons” and freed many of Dahomey’s slaves only for the idiot descendants of both groups to romanticize the noble last stand of Dahomey fighting for the right to export black slaves to Cuba and condemn the European liberators who put a stop to that atrocity.
If we crack down on romanticizing Dixie, how can we possibly justify romanticizing Dahomey or the Aztecs or Mohammed? If slavery and racism are wrong, then they are wrong across the board.
Even by the miserably racist standard under which all lives don’t matter, only black lives matter, Dahomey and Mohammed had bought, sold and killed enough black lives to be frowned upon.
If we go back far enough in time, most cultures kept slaves. The Romans and Greeks certainly did. That’s why the meaningful standard is not whether a culture ever had slaves, but whether it has slaves today. If we are going to eradicate the symbols of every culture that ever traded in slaves, there will be few cultural symbols that will escape unscathed. But the academics who insist on cultural relativism in 19th century Africa, reject it in 19th century South Carolina thereby revealing their own racism.
And so instead of fighting actual modern day slavery in Africa and the Middle East, social justice warriors are swarming to invade Hazzard County.
As Ben Carson pointed out, we will not get rid of racism by banning the Confederate flag. Even when it is used at its worst, by the likes of Dylann Storm Roof, it is a symptom, not the problem. Roof was not radicalized by the dead Confederacy, but by the racial tensions kicked off by the Trayvon Martin case.
The same racial tensions that led to the murder of two police officers by a #BlackLivesMatter protester in New York City led to the massacre of nine black congregants in a church in Charleston. This surge of violence has its roots in racist activism by Obama and his supporters seeking power and political gain, but feeding racial tensions for political purposes eventually risks leading to actual violence.
The Confederate flag is a matter of history. The racial tensions stirred up by Obama have actually gotten people killed. Slavery is not making a comeback and Robert E. Lee will not come riding into San Francisco any time soon. The Civil War ended long ago. The country would be a better place if modern racists who believe that some lives, whether black or white, matter more than others would stop trying to start one.
The Myth of Muslim Radicalization
June 18, 2015The Myth of Muslim Radicalization, Front Page Magazine, Daniel Greenfield, June 18, 2015
Usaama Rahim
Mainstreaming extremism is . . . Obama’s policy. It’s the logic behind nearly every Western diplomatic move in the Middle East from the Israel-PLO peace process to the Brotherhood’s Arab Spring. And these disasters only created more Islamic terrorism.
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After some of its quarter of a million Muslims headed to join ISIS, Quebec decided the answer was a $2 million anti-radicalization center headed by a specialist in cultural sensitivity. But if you’re about to be beheaded by a masked ISIS Jihadist, a specialist in cultural sensitivity isn’t going to help you much.
Western governments nevertheless keep rolling out their culturally sensitive approaches to fighting ISIS.
The key element in Obama’s strategy for fighting ISIS isn’t the F-15E Strike Eagle, it’s a Twitter account run by a Muslim Brotherhood sympathizer which claims to “Counter Violent Extremism” by presenting moderate Islamists like Al Qaeda as positive role models for the Islamic State’s social media supporters.
So far 75% of planes flown on combat missions against ISIS return without engaging the enemy, but the culturally sensitive State Department Twitter account has racked up over 5,000 tweets and zero kills.
Cultural sensitivity hasn’t exactly set Iraq on fire in fighting ISIS and deradicalization programs here start from the false premise that there is a wide gap between a moderate and extremist Islam. Smiling news anchors daily recite new stories about a teenager from Kentucky, Boston or Manchester getting “radicalized” and joining ISIS to the bafflement of his parents, mosque and community.
And who is to blame for all this mysterious radicalization? It’s not the parents. It certainly can’t be the moderate local mosque with its stock of Jihadist CDs and DVDs being dispensed from under the table.
The attorney for the family of Usaama Rahim, the Muslim terrorist who plotted to behead Pamela Geller, claims that his radicalization came as a “complete shock” to them.
It must have come as a truly great shock to his brother Imam Ibrahim Rahim who claimed that his brother was shot in the back and that the Garland cartoon attack had been staged by the government.
It must have come as an even bigger shock to Imam Abdullah Faaruuq, the Imam linked to Usaama Rahim and his fellow terrorist conspirators, as well as the Tsarnaev brothers, who had urged Muslims to “grab onto the gun and the sword.”
The culturally insensitive truth about Islamic ‘radicalization’ is that it is incremental.
There is no peaceful Islam. Instead of two sharply divided groups, peaceful Islam and extremist Islam, there is a spectrum of acceptable terrorism.
Muslim institutions have different places on that spectrum depending on their allegiances and tactics, but the process of radicalization is rarely a sharp break from the past for any except converts to Islam.
The latest tragic victim of radicalization is Munther Omar Saleh; a Muslim man living in New York City who allegedly plotted to use a Tsarnaev-style pressure cooker bomb in a major landmark such as the Statue of Liberty or the Empire State Building. Saleh claimed to be following orders from ISIS.
Media coverage of the Saleh arrest drags out the old clichés about how unexpected this sudden radicalization was, but what appears to be his father’s social media account shows support for Hamas.
Likewise one of Usaama Rahim’s fellow mosque attendees said that Rahim and another conspirator had initially followed the “teachings of the Muslim Brotherhood” but that he had been forced to cut ties with them when they moved past the Brotherhood and became “extreme”.
Despite the media’s insistence on describing the Muslim Brotherhood as a moderate organization, it has multiple terrorist arms, including Hamas, and its views on non-Muslims run the gamut from the violent to the genocidal.
A year after Obama’s Cairo speech and his outreach to the Muslim Brotherhood, its Supreme Guide announced that the United States will soon be destroyed, urged violent terrorist attacks against the United States and “raising a jihadi generation that pursues death just as the enemies pursue life.”
Despite this, Obama continued backing the Muslim Brotherhood’s rise to power across the region.
There are distinctions between the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda, but the latter is a splinter group of the former. Al Qaeda’s current leader came out of the Muslim Brotherhood. A move from one to the other is a minor transition between two groups that have far more in common than their differences.
And since the Brotherhood controls much of the Islamic infrastructure in the United States, the idea that Munther Omar Saleh or Usaama Rahim became radicalized because they went from a Jihadist group that takes the long view in the struggle against the infidel, putting political structures into place to make a violent struggle tactically feasible, to a Jihadist group that focuses more on short term violence, is silly.
Radicalization isn’t transformational; it’s incremental.
It’s the Pakistani kid down the block deciding that instead of joining the Muslim Students Association and then CAIR to build Islamist political structures in America, he should just cut to the chase and kill a few cops to begin taking over America now.
Radicalization is the moderate Imam who stops putting on an act for PBS and the local politicians and moves to Yemen where he openly recruits terrorists to attack America instead of doing it covertly at his mosque in Virginia.
Radicalization is the teenage Muslim girl who forgets about marrying her Egyptian third cousin and bringing him and his fifty relatives to America and goes to join ISIS as a Caliphate brood mare instead.
It’s not pacifism giving way to violence. Instead it’s an impatient shift from tactical actions meant to eventually make Islam supreme in America over many generations to immediate bloody gratification. ISIS is promising the apocalypse now. No more waiting. No more lying. You can have it tomorrow.
Radicalization does not go from zero to sixty. It speeds up from sixty to seventy-five.
It builds on elements that are already there in the mosque and the household. The term “extremism” implicitly admits that what we are talking about is not a complete transformation, but the logical extension of existing Islamic beliefs.
Omar Saleh seemed cheerful enough about Hamas dropping Kassam rockets on Israeli towns and cities. Would he have supported his son setting off a bomb in the Statue of Liberty? Who knows, but his son was already starting from a family position that Muslim terrorism against non-Muslims was acceptable.
Everything else is the fine print.
When Usaama Rahim followed the way of the Muslim Brotherhood, he was with a moderate group whose spiritual guide, the genocidal Qaradawi was the godfather of cartoon outrage and had endorsed the murderous Iranian fatwa against Salman Rushdie.
The slope that leads from Qaradawi’s cartoon rage to trying to behead Pamela Geller isn’t a slippery one; it’s a vertical waterfall. And this is what radicalization really looks like. It doesn’t mean moderates turning extreme. It means extremists becoming more extreme. And there’s always room for extremists to become more extreme which turns old extremists into moderates while mainstreaming their beliefs.
In the UK, Baroness Warsi, Cameron’s biggest mistake, blamed Muslim radicalization on the government’s refusal to engage with… radicals. Or as she put it, “It is incredibly odd and incredibly worrying that over time more and more individuals, more and more organisations are considered by the government to be beyond the pale and therefore not to be engaged with.”
The reason why the government is refusing to “engage” with these organizations is that they support terrorism in one form or another. Warsi is proposing that the UK fight radicalization by mainstreaming it.
Mainstreaming extremism is also Obama’s policy. It’s the logic behind nearly every Western diplomatic move in the Middle East from the Israel-PLO peace process to the Brotherhood’s Arab Spring. And these disasters only created more Islamic terrorism.
The Muslim teenagers headed to join ISIS did not come out of a vacuum. They came from mosques and families that normalized some degree of Islamic Supremacism and viewed some Muslim terrorists as heroes and role models. It’s time for Western governments to admit that the ISIS Jihadist is more the product of his parents and his teachers than of social media Jihadis on YouTube and Twitter.
Radicalization doesn’t begin with a sheikh on social media. It begins at home. It begins in the mosque. It just ends with ISIS.
The Postcolonial Rot Spreads Beyond Middle East Studies
June 15, 2015The Postcolonial Rot Spreads Beyond Middle East Studies, Front Page Magazine,
Middle East Studies programs, Kramer writes, “came under a take-no-prisoners assault, which rejected the idea of objective standards, disguised the vice of politicization as the virtue of commitment, and replaced proficiency with ideology.” The ideology, of course, comprised the old Marxist narrative of Western colonial and imperial crimes, a Third Worldism that idealizes the dark-skinned, innocent “other” victimized by Western depredations, and the juvenile romance of revolutionary violence.
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In theory, Middle East Studies programs are a good idea. One of the biggest impediments to countering modern jihadism has been the lack of historical knowledge about the region and Islam. But even the attention and urgency that followed the terrorist attacks on 9/11 have not led to such knowledge. The result has been policies pursued both by Republicans and Democrats that are doomed to fail, as the current chaos in the region attests.
Rather than enlightening citizens and policy-makers, Middle Eastern Studies programs have darkened our understanding. As Martin Kramer documented in his important 2002 study Ivory Towers on Sand, most programs have become purveyors not of knowledge but of ideology. Under the influence of literary critic Edward Said’s historically challenged book Orientalism––“a work,” historian Robert Irwin has written, “of malignant charlatanry, in which it is hard to distinguish honest mistakes from willful misrepresentations”––Middle East Studies programs, Kramer writes, “came under a take-no-prisoners assault, which rejected the idea of objective standards, disguised the vice of politicization as the virtue of commitment, and replaced proficiency with ideology.” The ideology, of course, comprised the old Marxist narrative of Western colonial and imperial crimes, a Third Worldism that idealizes the dark-skinned, innocent “other” victimized by Western depredations, and the juvenile romance of revolutionary violence.
Yet Said’s baleful influence has not been limited to Middle East Studies programs, one of which has been created at my campus of the California State University, replete with the problems Kramer catalogues. It has insidiously corrupted much of the humanities and social sciences, operating under the innocuous rubric of “postcolonial” studies, which to the unwary suggests a historical rather than an ideological category. Through General Education courses that serve students across the university, and in departments like English that train primary and secondary school teachers, Saidian postcolonial ideology has been shaping the attitudes and presumed knowledge of Islam and the Middle East far beyond the reach of Middle East Studies programs.
Said’s dubious argument in Orientalism is that the work of Western scholars on the Middle East embodied “a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient,” thus creating the intellectual infrastructure for justifying colonialism and imperialism. As such, every European scholar perforce was “a racist, an imperialist, and totally ethnocentric.” For social science and humanities departments committed totally to the multiculturalist melodrama of white racism and oppression of the dark-skinned “other,” Said’s work seemingly provides scholarly bona fides to ideas that are in fact expressive of illiberal grievance politics.
English departments have been particularly vulnerable to Said’s work, for he overlaid his bad history with watered down Foucauldian ideas about the relationship of power to discourse. Thus English professors seduced by the poststructuralist theory ascendant in 1978 when Orientalism was published found in that book a seemingly sophisticated theoretical paradigm that shared both poststructuralism’s disdain for objectivity and truth, and its “hermeneutics of suspicion,” the notion that the apparent meaning of a discourse is a mask for the sinister machinations of power at the expense of the excluded “other.”
More important, postcolonialism is a politically activist theory, bound up as it is in the politics of the Middle East, especially the Arab-Israeli conflict. Now English professors could avoid the legitimate charge that poststructuralism, despite its patina of leftist ideology, was in fact an evasion of politics, a “symbolic politics,” as historian Russell Jacoby put it, “a replacement for, and a diversion from, the gritty politics of the community and the street.” On the contrary, the purveyors of postcolonialism were on the barricades, struggling to liberate Palestinians and other Muslims oppressed by a neo-imperialist America and its puppet Israel. Rather than pampered elitists guaranteed jobs for life, now the professors could fancy themselves freedom fighters and champions of the ex-colonial brown peoples still exploited and oppressed by the capitalist, racist West.
Finally, the dogma of multicultural “diversity” now firmly enshrined in American universities likewise has found Saidian postcolonialism a useful tool for interpreting and teaching literature, one that exposes the Western literary canon’s hidden racism and oppression. Moreover, in a university like Fresno State, half of whose students are minorities, a postcolonial perspective can establish a rapport with minority students who are encouraged to interpret their own experiences through the same lens of unjust exclusion and hurtful distortions of their culture and identity. At the same time white students are schooled in their privilege and guilt, minorities can be comforted by a narrative that privileges them as victims of historical oppression, one masked by the unearned prestige of the classics written by “dead white males.” Now minority students learn that Shakespeare’s Caliban is the true hero the Tempest with whom they should identify, the displaced victim of rapacious colonialists and slavers like Prospero who unjustly define the indigenous peoples as savages and cannibals in order to justify the brutal appropriation of their lands and labor.
Over the thirty years I have taught in the California State University, I have seen this transformation of the English department. Reading lists dominated by contemporary ethnic writers are increasingly displacing the classics of English literature, and even when traditional works are on the list, the books are often taught from the postcolonial perspective. New hires more and more comprise those Ph.D.’s whose specialties lie in ethnic or “world” literature, replacing the Shakespeare scholars and others trained to teach the traditional English and American literary canon. The traditional content of a liberal education––“the best which has been thought and said in the world,” as Matthew Arnold wrote––is disappearing, replaced by multicultural melodramas of Western crime and guilt.
More important for the culture at large, many of these students will go on to earn teaching credentials and staff public schools. They will carry the postcolonial ideology into their own classrooms, influencing yet another generation and reinforcing a received wisdom that will shape their students’ understanding of the important threats to our national security and interests emanating from the Middle East, especially jihadism. And it will encourage ordinary citizens to assent to the demonization of our most valuable regional ally, Israel, currently battling the Boycott, Divest, and Sanction movement that can more easily gain traction among those who from grade school to university have been exposed to the postcolonial ideology.
The damage done to our foreign policy by Middle East Studies is obvious. The influence of the godfather of such programs, Edward Said, on the social sciences and humanities departments like English is more insidious and subtle. But it is no less dangerous.
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