There is a poisonous and dangerous nostalgia in our political discourse, which out of the nearly two-and-one-half centuries of American history finds something close to perfection in only one period of less than 30 years, the highly unusual span from 1945 to 1973, from the end of World War II to the 1973 Arab oil embargo.
It is a strange sort of nostalgia, though, inasmuch as nobody really wants to return to a 1973 or 1950 standard of living. In 1950, most Americans did not have water heaters or simple kitchen appliances, 40 percent of families did not own a car, nearly a third of households had no running water, etc. The typical house was a little more than half the size of the typical house today. In paycheck terms, a school-bus driver in Houston with some seniority today earns around $44,000 a year, which is more in inflation-adjusted terms than the median household income in 1967 ($42,545 in 2015 dollars). There are flight attendants and long-haul truckers and librarians and subway operators who in 2015 can by themselves provide their families with a real standard of living far in excess of what the typical American family enjoyed during the so-called golden age.
If you really want a 1957 standard of living, you are welcome to it. A good charity will be happy to take your iPhone, your computer, your extra shoes, your television, and the keys to your Honda Civic. You might miss your air-conditioning, meals out, vacations, etc., but you will be living the middle-class dream.
Our standard of living in the postwar years was low, but it was rising, and rising more quickly than it had during the experience of most of the young veterans manning the assembly lines. The postwar era was not, in fact, the strongest period of economic growth in the United States, or the period with the most dramatic increase in standards of living — that happened in the years between the end of the Civil War and World War I. (If you want to pray for something, pray for an era in which mankind does not demark its history from war to war to war.) Our real standard of living is still rising, but it is not rising as dramatically as it did during the postwar era, which is the root of our current anxiety.
The United States was a manufacturing powerhouse during that era, the other great making nations — Germany, the United Kingdom, Japan — having been bombed to smithereens and their work forces literally (literally, Mr. Vice President!) decimated in some cases. The numbers are horrifying: 9 million dead Germans, 3 million dead Japanese, more than 20 million dead Soviets. There were only — “only” — a half million dead Britons, but the country’s industrial infrastructure was ruined. Without failing to appreciate the sacrifice of those who gave their lives, the position of the United States — its cities unscathed, its dead amounting to less than three-tenths of 1 percent of the population — was enviable. If you want to pray for something, pray for an era in which mankind does not demark its history from war to war to war.
One can look back at the immediate postwar era and cherry-pick whatever policy one likes, crediting it with the generally satisfactory state of affairs in those years: the relatively high tax rates and strong unions of the Eisenhower years if you’re a progressive, the relatively small public-sector footprint and stable families if you’re a conservative. The desire to return to that state of affairs is alluring for some. Writing in Salon this week, Conor Lynch is positively wistful: “The mass destruction of capital around the world created a much more even playing field than before, while also placing the United States at the forefront of the world economy.”
“Destruction of capital” is a cute way of describing the slaughter of some 80 million people and the burning of their cities. There were good policy decisions and bad policy decisions in the postwar era, but the fundamental fact of economic life on this planet during that time was that humanity was rebuilding after the single worst event in its history, a conflagration that killed more people than the Mongol conquests and the Chinese civil war combined.
When our old friend Frédéric Bastiat described the broken-window fallacy — the nonsensical belief that we can make ourselves richer by destroying wealth and thereby providing ourselves with the opportunity to replace it — he could not have imagined how many windows would be broken less than a century later. American involvement in that war was necessary, but it did not make us any better off in real terms, despite the persistent myth that the war led us out of the Depression. (Solve unemployment now — draft everybody!) Nobody understood this better than the commander of the Allied forces in Europe, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, whose subsequent presidency would be buoyed by the postwar boom. Wars do not create real wealth — they destroy it, a fact that he lamented in his famous “Cross of Iron” speech:
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. … This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
An interesting turn of phrase from a man named Eisenhower (“iron-worker”). …
A “monger” is a trader, literal or metaphorical, in a particular commodity: fishmonger, woolmonger, gossipmonger, whoremonger, warmonger. “Warmonger” is an excellent description of those who believe that wars and their attendant destruction of life and property somehow, through the transmutative property of politics, leaves people better off. They are peddlers of destruction.
We are having an interesting political moment just now, with Republicans and the White House teaming up in support of a new trade accord, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, that would liberalize the exchange of goods and services among twelve signatory nations, mainly high-income, trade-oriented countries that already do a great deal of business with one another: the United States, Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, and Vietnam. With the exception of those under White House discipline, progressives are almost uniformly hostile to TPP, as indeed the Left is generally hostile to all international trade deals. They are not trademongers — but what is it that they are selling?
The 28-year postwar boom is long gone. The Germans and the Japanese reminded the world that they are very good at building things, and the Chinese, the Indians, the Koreans, and many others have shown themselves to be capable producers. And though there is a tension in writing it while ISIS and al-Qaeda continue their depredations around the world, this has been an era of remarkable peace among nations. The result is that the world — including our little corner of it — is in material terms better off than it ever has been. The United States has not fallen behind — our manufacturing output is in real terms much higher today than it was in 1950 or 1960 — but the rest of the world has caught up. Only a monster could resent that, given the alternative — hunger, privation, misery, disease, human stagnation, and their inevitable companion: war.
The United States can, and should, and generally does embrace that. Our best companies are global, our best industries are global, and our best domestic products have been made immeasurably better through global competition. (Would you want to rely on a 1973 General Motors product to get you to work — or to get your child to an emergency room?) And we are as a nation at our best when we meet the world with generosity rather than resentment: Fighting HIV in Africa, helping to end famine in India and elsewhere, working to provide clean water to people around the world who lack that most essential commodity. Those are not the actions of a nation that cannot handle open trade with Canada or Singapore.
The Left wants to withdraw from international trade and detests globalization. Progressives lament an almost entirely mythical “race to the bottom” in global commerce. (Weird that they’re still making Mercedes in Stuttgart and not in Haiti, right?) In reality, global investment does not flow to low-wage economies, but to high-productivity economies; look at the top ten destinations for foreign direct investment and you’ll see precisely one lower-income country — China, in fourth place — while the rest are high-wage countries: the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Spain, etc. Tiny, prosperous Switzerland gets three times as much foreign direct investment as India; strangely, nobody is in a fever about losing out to the Swiss.
But if we move away from globalization, what are we moving toward? Autarky, for one thing, the belief that any given society should try to produce what it consumes and consume what it produces rather than engage in trade. That generally works out poorly — North Korea being the world’s preeminent practitioner of contemporary autarky — which makes perfect sense: If you want to discover the real value of trade, try growing your own food for a year, or ginning cotton and sewing your own clothes. The division of labor — among people and among peoples — is the essence of civilization.
The TPP fight captures in miniature a number of disturbing trends: The Left’s open hostility toward cooperative economic relations with other countries, which is accompanied by an increasingly open and nasty xenophobia, especially as regards Asians; a specifically anti-Chinese prejudice in economic questions, with anti-TPP Democrats insisting on anti-Chinese provisions in the pact — to which China is not even a party; progressives’ calls for increasing centralization and nationalization of the economy, from health care to finance; an eschaton-immanentizing desire for a playing field freshly leveled through the “destruction of capital,” etc., and all of that against a cultural backdrop of misplaced nostalgia for a postwar economic order that was predicated on the wholesale destruction of European and East Asian economies, cities, and human beings — which is to say, warmongering in search of a war.
Capitalism is cooperation, within and among nations. There are alternatives to trade among nations: A nation might declare itself the Middle Kingdom and surround itself with a wall, for one thing, historically a poor policy, or it could order its relations with the rest of the world on a hostile, narrow, zero-sum understanding of human flourishing — every time a poor Indian earns a decent paycheck, an American is a little worse off — which is always and everywhere the overture to war.
Category: International relations
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London’s Daily Mail reports on a recent Sean Hannity show on Fox News Channel:
The right-wing blogger who organized the ‘Draw Muhammad’ event that was targeted by two gunmen over the weekend has had a fierce TV confrontation with a hate preacher, who thinks she should receive capital punishment.
Extreme anti-Islam activist Pamela Geller argued with British-based cleric Anjem Choudary during Fox News’ Hannity on Wednesday night, just days after Elton Simpson, 31 and Nadir Soofi, 34, tried to storm the controversial cartoon event in Garland, Texas.
Geller, 56, who has received death threats since the anti-Islamic exhibition, began by claiming President Obama has ‘created an environment that raised the stakes’ on terror in the United States.
Host Sean Hannity then reminds his viewers what Choudary believes in – which is imposing Sharia law across all countries, including America.
The controversial imam then says: ‘Let’s be clear we are not talking about Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck. We are talking about people who deliberately had a competition to insult the messenger Muhammad.
‘If you saw the cartoons that Charlie Hebdo drew, you would understand the anger.’
Rabble rouser Choudary, who once said ‘the flag of Islam will fly over the White House’, then goes on to talk about how Geller was fully aware that many Muslims consider blasphemy a crime that is worthy of the death penalty.
Host Sean Hannuity then shouts: ‘You want her to die!’
To which Choudary replies: ‘She should be put before a Sharia court and tried and, if guilty, face capital punishment.’
Geller says: ‘To blame me and say that my cartoons are controversial… murdering cartoonists is controversial.’
The head of the American Freedom Defense Initiative then tries to get Choudary to stop interrupting her, and at one point says: ‘I know you’re used to stepping over women.’
Choudary then says Geller is worse than a ‘Khanzier’- Arabic for pig – and starts ranting about Americans murdering innocent people, prompting Hannity to intervene.
He ends the conversation by saying the cleric is ‘evil and pathetic.’ …
Geller has hinted that she held the event in response to killings in Paris over the public depiction of the Muslim prophet Muhammad, whom Islam dictates must never be drawn or painted.
Through websites, books, ad campaigns and public events, Geller has been warning for years about the ‘Islamic machine’ that she says threatens to destroy the U.S.
She famously led the campaign in 2010 — under a different group, called Stop the Islamization of America — to prevent the opening of an Islamic community center blocks from the World Trade Center site. She called it the ‘Ground Zero Mosque.’ …
The weekend contest in Garland, Texas, was offering $10,000 for the best cartoon of Muhammad.
Choudary is currently on bail in the UK for allegedly being a member of a banned terrorist group. He founded the organization Al-Muhajiroun 20 years ago and is seen as a recruiting sergeant for Britain’s radical Muslims.
He has previously called Americans ‘the biggest criminals in the world today.’
He hit U.S. headlines in 2011 after a furious exchange with Hannity on Fox News. The presenter became so enraged with his anti-American comments he ended the interview by calling him a ‘sick, miserable, evil S.O.B’.
Speaking of “sick, miserable [and] evil,” well, click on this for what radical Muslims also apparently believe.
If you believe Geller overstepped her free speech rights, then you are automatically defending what Choudary and his fellow S.O.B.s believe. Either that, or, as David French notes …
Let’s be clear: The great freak-out over Pamela Geller’s “draw Muhammad” contest isn’t about love for Islam or for robust and respectful religious pluralism. Indeed, many of those expressing anguish over blasphemy against Islam show no such concern over even the most vile attacks on the Christian faith. Beyond that, they’re among the leaders in movements designed to banish religious liberty — including Muslim religious liberty — to the margins of American life.
Instead, the fury against Pamela Geller is motivated mostly by fear — by the understanding that there are indeed many, many Muslims who believe that blasphemy should be punished with death, and who put that belief into practice. It’s motivated by the fear that our alliances with even “friendly” Muslim states and “allied” Muslim militias are so fragile that something so insignificant as a cartoon would drive them either to neutrality or straight into the arms of ISIS.
That’s why even the military brass will do something so unusual as call a fringe pastor of a tiny little church to beg him not to post a YouTube video. That’s why the president of the United States — ostensibly the most powerful man in the world — will personally appeal to that same pastor not to burn a Koran. They know that hundreds of millions of Muslims are not “moderate” by any reasonable definition of that word, and they will,in fact, allow themselves to be provoked by even the most insignificant and small-scale act of religious satire or defiance. After all, there are Muslim communities that will gladly burn Christians alive to punish even rumored blasphemy.
Our nation’s “elite” knows of the 88 percent support in Egypt for the death penalty for apostasy, and the 62 percent support in Pakistan. They know of the majority support for it in Malaysia, Jordan, and the Palestinian territories. They know that even when there’s not majority support for the death penalty for exercising one of the most basic of human rights — religious freedom — that large minorities still exercise considerable, and often violent, influence on their nations.
The elite also knows this bloodthirstiness extends to supporting terrorists. The following Pew Research Center numbers should sober anyone who believes in the “few extremists” model of Muslim culture:
That’s a staggering level of support for a man who not only targeted innocent men, women, and children in the West, but who allied himself with the most medieval Muslim regime in the world: the Taliban. And, ominously, his support waned only as his power waned. Islamists have a new jihadist idol — ISIS.
Further, our elites also know that while ISIS’s brutality certainly repels many Muslims, it attracts many others — that there are Muslim young people who are so captivated by images of beheadings and burnings that they’ll defy the law and their own nations to make their way to the jihadist battlefronts of Iraq and Syria.
Unable or unwilling to formulate a strategy to comprehensively defeat jihad or even to adequately defend our nation, our elites adopt a strategy of cultural appeasement that only strengthens our enemy. Millions in the Muslim world are drawn to the “strong horse” (to use Osama bin Laden’s phrase), and when jihadists intimidate the West into silence and conformity, the jihadists show themselves strong.
In a sane world, our national elites would not only rally unequivocally around free speech, they would point to the events of Garland, Texas, as perfectly symbolic of the way we handle threats against our Constitution and our culture — by defeating our enemies and defending our liberty. Instead, they express fears that provocative speech not only threatens our troops abroad but our cities here at home.
Geller’s critics should spare us all the high-minded rhetoric about tolerance and liberty and “democratic values.” In a continent-sized nation of more than 300 million souls, “offensive” speech is always happening. Geller’s speech is different not because it’s uniquely insensitive or even uniquely “hateful.” Her speech is different because it makes people afraid.
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On Sunday a group of Americans opposed to radical Islam held an art contest for depictions of the Muslim prophet Muhammad in Garland, Texas.
Two Muslims took exception to the contest — apparently Islam prohibits depictions of Muhammad — and decided to kill everyone who went to the exhibition. They got as far as two Garland police officers outside the facility.
The New York Daily News reports:
ISIS appeared to declare war on right-wing blogger Pamela Geller Tuesday in an ominous online message claiming it has fighters across America ready to attack “any target we desire.”
The threat, posted on JustPasteIt, singles out Geller, who helped plan a Prophet Muhammad cartoon contest that was attacked by two gunmen in Garland, Tex. over the weekend. ISIS claimed responsibility for the shooting early Tuesday, marking the first time the terror group called an American attack one of its own.
The chilling Tuesday post also boasts of ISIS having “71 trained soldiers in 15 different states ready at our word to attack,” specifically naming only Virginia, Maryland, Illinois, Michigan and California.
“The attack by the Islamic State in America is only the beginning of our efforts to establish a wiliyah in the heart of our enemy,” the message reads, apparently misspelling the Arabic word “wilayah,” meaning authority or governance. …
The authenticity of the post, as well as the group’s claim to the Texas shooting, have not been independently confirmed, and it is possible the threat is a hoax or a message from an ISIS sympathizer. ISIS has frequently used the anonymous message board JustPasteIt to publish propaganda, including the names and addresses of 100 U.S. service members in a call for an American jihad.
RELATED: WHO IS PAMELA GELLER, THE MUHAMMAD DRAWING CONTEST HOST?
The armed attackers who stormed the Sunday cartoon contest, Elton Simpson and Nadir Soofi, were both shot dead by an off-duty officer outside. They were the only fatalities in an attack that also gave another guard a minor injury.
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
The front page of the New York Daily News on Aug. 31, 2014.
The JustPasteIt post claims both men knew they would be killed, and were only testing the waters for future terror.
“We knew that the target was protected. Our intention was to show how easy we give our lives for the Sake of Allah,” the post says.
Geller‘s reaction:
This threat illustrates the savagery and barbarism of the Islamic State. They want me dead for violating Sharia blasphemy laws. What remains to be seen is whether the free world will finally wake up and stand for the freedom of speech, or instead kowtow to this evil and continue to denounce me. What’s really frightening and astonishing about this threat is that the media in denouncing me is essentially allying with and even cheering on the Islamic State. I expected this from jihadists. I never expected it from my fellow Americans in the mainstream media.
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Activist Pamela Geller is no stranger to saying things that horrify the politically correct. She protested the World Trade Center mosque and bought bus-sign ads describing what’s really written in the Quran. Last weekend, she and writer Robert Spencer’s American Freedom Defense Initiative organized a contest for the best Muhammad cartoon drawing with a $10,000 prize in Texas in response to the Islamofascist newsroom massacre of cartoonists in Paris at the French paper Charlie Hebdo earlier this year.
And to no one’s surprise in a nation whose leaders consider rising Islamofascist terror groups “junior varsity” and where extremist depravities are viewed as “workplace violence” or dismissed as reactions to bad filmmaking rather than organized terror, a couple of Islamofacists from North Phoenix, Ariz., shot up the Garland, Texas, cartoon conference, wounding a security guard before an off-duty traffic cop took the pair down and saved the country from another massacre.
Since then, it’s been Charlie Hebdo all over again, given the media’s failure to understand that this is about the threat that radical Islam poses to free speech.
Incredibly, the left wasted no time blasting Geller and Spender, blaming them for the murderous behavior of the gunmen.
CNN’s Alisyn Camerota attacked Geller as anti-Islamic, cherry-picking various news clips to make her case, despite Geller asserting that she wasn’t.
“Civilized men can disagree,” Geller told CNN. “Savages will kill you when they disagree.”
Why she should be on the hot seat instead of the would-be attackers and their enablers is beyond us.
But the finger-pointing at Geller kept coming.
“Free speech aside, why would anyone do something as provocative as hosting a ‘Muhammad drawing contest’?” tweeted New York Times’ Rukmini Callimachi.
Free speech aside? From the newspaper of record?
Callimachi didn’t seem to understand that the entire event — as Geller’s participants repeatedly said in the pre-shooting film clips of the event posted on her blog — was explicitly about free speech, which is now under attack by Islamofascists and which can be demonstrated only by extreme means, such as cartoons.
And that’s the heart of the matter. Agree with Geller or not, there can be no compromise on free speech. The attack on her event underscored the fragility of America’s free speech, the basis for all of America’s freedoms.
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“Free speech aside, why would anyone do something as provocative as hosting a ‘Muhammad drawing contest’?” asked Rukmini Callimachi, a New York Times reporter who specializes in Islamic extremism, on Twitter last night. That prompted a fair amount of criticism and mockery, but we’d like to attempt a serious answer to the question.
Callimachi was responding to last night’s events in Garland, a Dallas suburb, summed up by The Wall Street Journal:
Two men were killed Sunday in a Dallas suburb after they opened fire outside a building where an exhibit that featured cartoon drawings of Islam’s Prophet Muhammad was being held, city officials said.
The men drove up to the Curtis Culwell Center in Garland, Texas, where the American Freedom Defense Initiative was hosting an event with an award of $10,000 for the top Muhammad cartoon, and began shooting at an unarmed security officer, according to a Garland city spokeswoman.
Garland police who were helping with event security returned fire, shooting and killing the two gunmen, who weren’t immediately identified.
The victim, Bruce Joiner, is out of the hospital after treatment for an ankle wound. The New York Times reports that police identified one of the dead suspects as Elton Simpson of Phoenix, where the FBI searched “an apartment believed to be connected to him.” In 2010 federal prosecutors charged a man by that name with “plotting to travel to Somalia ‘for the purpose of engaging in violent jihad,’ and then lying to a federal agent.” A judge convicted him of the latter charge “but said the government had not proved that his plan involved terrorism.”
The Times adds that “officials did not give a motive for the attack,” which is no doubt wise of them: The job of police investigators is to gather facts first and explain theories later. In this case, however, one hypothesis seems far likelier than any others. As the Times notes, “drawings of Muhammad, considered offensive by many Muslims, have drawn violent responses in the past.” The most shocking was January’s Charlie Hebdo massacre, but also in February, as CNN reported, a gunman who “swore fidelity to ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi” opened fire on a free-speech forum in Copenhagen, and then outside a synagogue, claiming two lives before Danish police killed him.
Even without official word on Simpson and his yet-unnamed accomplice’s motive, one can say that the attack was functionally an act of jihad. Anjem Choudary — the London-based extremist imam who defended the Charlie Hebdo assassinations in a next-day USA Today op-ed — tweeted this morning: “#garlandshooting we must learn the lessons from [Salman] Rushdie, [Ayaan] Hirsi Ali, Theo Van Gogh & Chalie [sic] Hebdo not to insult the Messenger Muhammad (saw)!” He elaborated in another tweet: “#garlandshooting there are two camps in the world: those that believe sovereignty belongs to mankind & those who believe it belongs to Allah.” (“Saw” is an abbreviation for the Arabic phrase meaning “peace be upon him.”)
So what about Rukmini Callimachi’s question? Let’s first dispense with the “Free speech aside …” preface, which some on Twitter found especially neuralgic: “The #NYT should change its slogan to ‘Free Speech Aside,’” snarked Gavin McInnes. It was certainly an unfortunate choice of words, but sometimes Twitter encourages brevity at the expense of clarity. We’d suggest a charitable interpretation. Perhaps Callimachi didn’t mean to disparage free speech but to concede it. That is, perhaps by “Free speech aside …,” she meant something like “Stipulating that the event was an exercise in constitutionally protected free speech …”
Proceeding on that assumption, the answer seems obvious. The purpose of the event was to make a point, in part a point about free speech. The event’s message was something like this: This is America, where the right of free speech is nearly absolute and includes the right to say things others find offensive or otherwise provocative.
Of course the event provoked not just indignation or anger but violence, a consequence whose possibility the authorities evidently anticipated — hence the strong police presence — and that was reasonable to anticipate given the European events described above. If we assume the organizers were cognizant of the possibility as well, then the event is best understood as an exercise in nonviolent resistance.
In a Salon apologia for the Baltimore riots, political philosopher Musa al-Gharbi observes that Martin Luther King “often staged episodes of civil disobedience in the most hostile or dangerous areas, with the implicit intent of generating a heavy-handed response from the authorities or local community in a highly public and well-publicized setting — thereby advancing sympathy for, and awareness of, the cause. Pacifists gain moral high ground precisely by refusing to return violence in kind — a feat that is impossible unless and until they are confronted with unreasonable force.”
It would be inaccurate to describe the Garland event as civil disobedience, since the organizers’ adversaries were not the civil authorities. (Indeed, the Garland police appear to have acted exemplarily in employing deadly force to protect citizens from violence.) But if Choudary’s understanding of the attack is correct, Simpson and his accomplice were acting on behalf of what they saw as a higher authority — the laws of Shariah, ordained by God. That such authority has no formal standing in the U.S. does not make it either benign or unworthy of resistance.
Five years ago this column criticized “Everybody Draw Mohammad Day,” a similar effort that grew out of a whimsical cartoon, because it struck us as a gratuitous effort to offend. A few months later the cartoonist, Molly Norris, was reported to have gone into hiding in the face of death threats. In 2008, we interviewed Dutch politician Geert Wilders and argued that some of his anti-Islam rhetoric was overwrought and wrongheaded:
He insists that his antagonism toward Islam reflects no antipathy toward Muslims: “I make a distinction between the ideology . . . and the people. . . . There are people who call themselves Muslims and don’t subscribe to the full part of the Quran. And those people, of course, we should invest [in], we should talk to.” He says he would end Muslim immigration to the Netherlands but work to assimilate those already there.
His idea of how to do so, however, seems unlikely to win many converts: “You have to give up this stupid, fascist book”—the Quran. “This is what you have to do. You have to give up that book.”
Mr. Wilders is right to call for a vigilant defense of liberal principles. A society has a right, indeed a duty, to require that religious minorities comply with secular rules of civilized behavior. But to demand that they renounce their religious identity and holy books is itself an affront to liberal principles.
Wilders was among the organizers of last night’s event in Garland. As far as we know, he has not softened his problematic views. But he’s still right to call for a vigilant defense of liberal principles. Sometimes that justifies being provocative. Sometimes it even requires it.
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Politics USA reports:
47 GOP Senators signed an open letter to Iran’s leaders, warning them that Republicans were prepared to undermine any nuclear agreement reached between Iran and the United States. The letter was the brainchild of freshman Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), and presidential hopefuls Ted Cruz (R-TX), Rand Paul (R-KY) and Marco Rubio (R-FL) also signed the letter. The letter basically argues that Iran should not trust any agreement with the United States because that deal could be undone at any time.
The letter concludes with the warning:
…we will consider any agreement regarding your nuclear-weapons program that is not approved by the Congress as nothing more than an executive agreement between President Obama and Ayatollah Khamenei. The next president could revoke such an executive agreement with the stroke of a pen and future Congresses could modify the terms of an agreement at any time.
We hope this letter enriches your knowledge of our constitutional system and promotes mutual understanding and clarity as nuclear negotiations progress.
The horror! Except that Reason reports about the traitorous Joe Biden:
The letter, Biden charged, is “expressly designed to undercut a sitting President in the midst of sensitive international negotiations,” and “beneath the dignity of an institution I revere.” It also “threatens to undermine the ability of any future American President, whether Democrat or Republican, to negotiate with other nations on behalf of the United States.”
You would think from the tenor of his criticism that Biden had been deferential to presidential prerogatives on foreign policy during his many decades in the United States Senate. And you would be dead wrong.
On July 22, 1986, after a season of nationwide anti-apartheid protests on college campuses and serial debate over economic sanctions in Washington, Reagan gave a speech that both condemned South Africa’s institutional racism (“Apartheid must be dismantled,” was one of many such quotes), and rejected sanctions as “immoral and utterly repugnant” because they would hurt the people most in need of help. The next day, Secretary of State George Shulz testified in front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Subsequent newspaper accounts of the ensuing verbal carnage would be given headlines such as “Shultz couldn’t duck ‘Fiery Joe’ Biden.”
I can’t find video of Sen. Biden’s table-pounding performance, but here are some quotes as recorded by the political journalist Jules Witcover:
“We ask them to put up a timetable,” he thundered, waiving a fist. “What is our timetable? Where do we stand morally? I hate to hear an administration and a secretary of state refusing to act on a morally abhorrent point. I’m ashamed of this country that puts out a policy like this that says nothing, nothing. I’m ashamed of the lack of moral backbone to this policy.”
More reported quotes from the harangue here and here. The New York Times used the occasion of Biden’s angry foreign-policy dissent to write a feature on how the Delawarian “has emerged as an aggressive presence on the Washington stage.”
Newsbusters adds:
On Monday, The New York Times pointed out three such instances:
Jim Wright, the Democratic House speaker during Ronald Reagan’s presidency, was accused of interfering when he met with opposing leaders in Nicaragua’s contra war. Three House Democrats went to Iraq in 2002 before President George W. Bush’s invasion to try to head off war. And Nancy Pelosi, the House Democratic leader, went to Syria in 2007 to meet with President Bashar al-Assad against the wishes of the Bush administration, which was trying to isolate him.
In 1984, congressional Democrats sent a letter to Nicaraguan leader Daniel Ortego Saavedra.
Perhaps the most outlandish incident of a congressional Democrat reaching out to a foreign power was Senator Ted Kennedy’s 1983 letter to the Soviet Union in an attempt to undermine President Ronald Reagan’s nuclear arms negotiations with the Communist regime.
Perhaps it is unprecedented for Republicans to circumvent a Democratic president’s wrongheaded foreign policy approach. It is not unprecedented for Democrats to try to subvert a Republican president’s foreign policy.
Cotton, meanwhile, has this response, reported by the Washington Examiner:
Sen. Tom Cotton challenged Vice President Joe Biden’s criticism of the GOP’s letter to Iran, questioning his foreign policy expertise.
“Joe Biden, as [President] Barack Obama’s own secretary of defense has said, has been wrong about nearly every foreign policy and national security decision in the last 40 years,” the Arkansas Republican said Tuesday on MSNBC.
“Moreover, if Joe Biden respects the dignity of the institution of the Senate he should be insisting that the president submit any deal to approval of the Senate, which is exactly what he did on numerous deals during his time in Senate,” Cotton said.
Similar to the supposed breach of protocol when Republicans invited Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to speak to Congress, there is only one important question: Who is correct? It is certainly not Obama, who appears ready to sell both Israel and this country down the river for his eagerness to make a bad deal with one of our enemies.
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Dennis Prager explains the enmity of Barack Obama for Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu:
And the answer is due to an important rule of life that too few people are aware of:
Those who do not confront evil resent those who do.
Take the case at hand. The prime minister of Israel is at the forefront of the greatest battle against evil in our time — the battle against violent Muslims. No country other than Israel is threatened with extinction, and it is Iran and the many Islamic terror organizations that pose that threat.
It only makes sense, then, that no other country feels the need to warn the world about Iran and Islamic terror as much as Israel. That’s why when Benjamin Netanyahu speaks to the United Nations about the threat Iran poses to his country’s survival and about the metastasizing cancer of Islamist violence, he, unfortunately, stands alone.
Virtually everyone listening knows he is telling the truth. And most dislike him for it.
Appeasers hate those who confront evil.
Given that this president is the least likely of any president in American history to confront evil — or even identify it — while Benjamin Netanyahu is particularly vocal and eloquent about both identifying and confronting evil, it is inevitable that the former will resent the latter.
The negotiations with Iran over its nuclear weapons program are today’s quintessential example. Those who will not confront a tyranny engaged in terror from Argentina to the Middle East, and which is committed to annihilating another country, will deeply resent Israel and its leader.
For those who doubt the truth of this rule of life, there are plenty of other examples.
Take the Cold War.
Those who lived through it well recall that those who refused to confront communism vilified those who did. Indeed, they vilified anyone who merely labeled communism evil. When President Ronald Reagan declared the Soviet Union an “evil empire,” he was excoriated by those who refused to do so. Yet, if the words “evil” and “empire” have any meaning, they perfectly applied to the Soviet Union.
But to those who opposed Reagan, these words could not be applied to the Soviet Union.
New York Times columnists lambasted the president for using such language. The newspaper’s most prestigious columnist at the time, James Reston, condemned Reagan for his “violent criticism of Russians as an evil society.”
Anthony Lewis accused Reagan of using “simplistic theology.” Reagan was using “a black and white standard to something that is much more complex.”
Tom Wicker wrote that “the greater danger” than the spread of communism “lies in Mr. Reagan’s vision of the superpower relationship as Good versus Evil.”
Columnist Russell Baker added his contempt for Reagan’s characterization of the Soviet Union. And, in a long Times article under the headline, “Reagan’s Gaffe,” an unnamed “strategist” for former Vice-President Walter Mondale told the newspaper that “Mr. Reagan had undercut diplomatic efforts of recent months” — exactly as the Times and the Obama administration now describe Benjamin Netanyahu doing to the negotiations with Iran.
(For a detailed description of the reactions to Ronald Reagan’s anti-communism, see Ann Coulter’s book, “Treason.”)
Some 20 years later, when President George W. Bush characterized the regimes of North Korea, Iraq and Iran as an “Axis of Evil,” he was likewise lampooned — as if those mass murderous tyrannies were not evil.
In short, those who refused to characterize the Soviet Union as evil loathed Ronald Reagan and other anti-communists for doing so; and those who objected to the “Axis of Evil” label placed on North Korea, Iran, and Iraq loathed George W. Bush and his supporters. The loathing of Benjamin Netanyahu is simply the latest example of the rule that those who will not confront evil will instead confront those who do. (It’s much safer, after all.)
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The Daily Caller reports:
In a shocking report, a Kuwaiti newspaper is claiming that President Barack Obama once threatened to shoot down Israeli jets if they went through with a plan to target Iranian nuclear sites.
Citing “well-placed sources,” Al-Jarida claims that sometime in 2014, the Israeli government made plans to attack Iran when they heard that the United States and Iran were on the cusp of striking a secret nuclear deal behind Israeli’s back. The decision was made after Israel learned the terms of the deal were supposedly “a threat to Israel’s security.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu allegedly came to the decision after four nights of deliberation with commanders, and Israeli jets even managed experimental test flights in Iranian airspace after evading Iranian radars. But when an Israeli official with good ties to the Obama administration revealed the planned airstrikes, Obama allegedly threatened to shoot down the Israeli jets.
Israeli media network Arutz Sheva points out that at least one veteran Democratic statesman has been open in their opinion that the U.S. should shoot down any Iran-bound Israeli jets. “They have to fly over our airspace in Iraq,” former diplomat Zbigniew Brzezinski said in 2008, “Are we just going to sit there and watch?”
At least some are skeptical of Al-Jarida’s report. One reporter for the conservative Jewish Press notes the story “appears at first glance to be an invention of an imaginative editor.” But the same writer notes that “Al-Jarida is considered to be a relatively liberal publication whose editor Mohammed al-Sager previously won the International Press Freedom Award of the Committee to Protect Journalists.”
The opposing view comes from Secretary of State Lurch — I mean John Kerry; the Addams Family butler was never stupid — who actually claimed Sunday “We have a closer relationship with Israel right now, in terms of security, than at anytime in history.” The evidence suggests the opposite.
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In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.
The group seized Mosul, Iraq, last June, and already rules an area larger than the United Kingdom. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has been its leader since May 2010, but until last summer, his most recent known appearance on film was a grainy mug shot from a stay in U.S. captivity at Camp Bucca during the occupation of Iraq. Then, on July 5 of last year, he stepped into the pulpit of the Great Mosque of al-Nuri in Mosul, to deliver a Ramadan sermon as the first caliph in generations—upgrading his resolution from grainy to high-definition, and his position from hunted guerrilla to commander of all Muslims. The inflow of jihadists that followed, from around the world, was unprecedented in its pace and volume, and is continuing.
Our ignorance of the Islamic State is in some ways understandable: It is a hermit kingdom; few have gone there and returned. Baghdadi has spoken on camera only once. But his address, and the Islamic State’s countless other propaganda videos and encyclicals, are online, and the caliphate’s supporters have toiled mightily to make their project knowable. We can gather that their state rejects peace as a matter of principle; that it hungers for genocide; that its religious views make it constitutionally incapable of certain types of change, even if that change might ensure its survival; and that it considers itself a harbinger of—and headline player in—the imminent end of the world.
The Islamic State, also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), follows a distinctive variety of Islam whose beliefs about the path to the Day of Judgment matter to its strategy, and can help the West know its enemy and predict its behavior. Its rise to power is less like the triumph of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt (a group whose leaders the Islamic State considers apostates) than like the realization of a dystopian alternate reality in which David Koresh or Jim Jones survived to wield absolute power over not just a few hundred people, but some 8 million.
We have misunderstood the nature of the Islamic State in at least two ways. First, we tend to see jihadism as monolithic, and to apply the logic of al‑Qaeda to an organization that has decisively eclipsed it. The Islamic State supporters I spoke with still refer to Osama bin Laden as “Sheikh Osama,” a title of honor. But jihadism has evolved since al-Qaeda’s heyday, from about 1998 to 2003, and many jihadists disdain the group’s priorities and current leadership.
Bin Laden viewed his terrorism as a prologue to a caliphate he did not expect to see in his lifetime. His organization was flexible, operating as a geographically diffuse network of autonomous cells. The Islamic State, by contrast, requires territory to remain legitimate, and a top-down structure to rule it. (Its bureaucracy is divided into civil and military arms, and its territory into provinces.)
We are misled in a second way, by a well-intentioned but dishonest campaign to deny the Islamic State’s medieval religious nature. Peter Bergen, who produced the first interview with bin Laden in 1997, titled his first book Holy War, Inc. in part to acknowledge bin Laden as a creature of the modern secular world. Bin Laden corporatized terror and franchised it out. He requested specific political concessions, such as the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Saudi Arabia. His foot soldiers navigated the modern world confidently. On Mohammad Atta’s last full day of life, he shopped at Walmart and ate dinner at Pizza Hut.
Nearly all the Islamic State’s decisions adhere to what it calls, on its billboards, license plates, and coins, “the Prophetic methodology.”There is a temptation to rehearse this observation—that jihadists are modern secular people, with modern political concerns, wearing medieval religious disguise—and make it fit the Islamic State. In fact, much of what the group does looks nonsensical except in light of a sincere, carefully considered commitment to returning civilization to a seventh-century legal environment, and ultimately to bringing about the apocalypse.
The most-articulate spokesmen for that position are the Islamic State’s officials and supporters themselves. They refer derisively to “moderns.” In conversation, they insist that they will not—cannot—waver from governing precepts that were embedded in Islam by the Prophet Muhammad and his earliest followers. They often speak in codes and allusions that sound odd or old-fashioned to non-Muslims, but refer to specific traditions and texts of early Islam.
To take one example: In September, Sheikh Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, the Islamic State’s chief spokesman, called on Muslims in Western countries such as France and Canada to find an infidel and “smash his head with a rock,” poison him, run him over with a car, or “destroy his crops.” To Western ears, the biblical-sounding punishments—the stoning and crop destruction—juxtaposed strangely with his more modern-sounding call to vehicular homicide. (As if to show that he could terrorize by imagery alone, Adnani also referred to Secretary of State John Kerry as an “uncircumcised geezer.”)
But Adnani was not merely talking trash. His speech was laced with theological and legal discussion, and his exhortation to attack crops directly echoed orders from Muhammad to leave well water and crops alone—unless the armies of Islam were in a defensive position, in which case Muslims in the lands of kuffar, or infidels, should be unmerciful, and poison away.
The reality is that the Islamic State is Islamic. Very Islamic. Yes, it has attracted psychopaths and adventure seekers, drawn largely from the disaffected populations of the Middle East and Europe. But the religion preached by its most ardent followers derives from coherent and even learned interpretations of Islam.
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The Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin:
President Obama and the White House were content for a couple days to let it be known that the president did not consider a jihadist attack on a kosher market in France to be directed at Jews. The president’s jaw-dropping assertion had actually been made when the interview was pre-recorded some time ago. But neither he nor the White House, until a Twitter storm descended, realized he had said something remarkably stupid, and yet revealing. Both the State Department and White House spokespeople, after vigorously defending the president’s original remarks, late Tuesday eventually gave way and started to insist the president knew all along the motive of the kosher market killings was anti-Semitism. That’s about as believable as the notion the killing of four Jews in a kosher market was “random.” We now know what the president really thinks, and to many, it is horrifying.
Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, a longtime and staunch supporter of Israel, got it. “I am appalled that President Obama has chosen to deny the vicious anti-Semitic motivation of the attack on a kosher Jewish grocery in Paris on January 9th. What he called a ‘random’ attack was obviously meant to kill Jews — which is precisely what happened,” he said in an email. “The individual victims may have been those unlucky enough to be in the grocery that day, but it was far from random. In Paris and throughout Europe, anti-Semitism is once again growing and constitutes a daily menace for many Jews.” He summed up: “While there is no easy solution to this terrible problem, our response must begin with acknowledging exactly what’s going on– and that is the test Mr. Obama failed. It’s time to tell the truth.”
And that really is what is so disturbing about the whole incident. The president and a number of advisers were willing to convince themselves of an absurdity rather than recognize the horrible reality that Islamic terrorists want to kill Jews because they are Jews (and Christians because they are Christians). Unfortunately the thinking is part of a pattern; it’s anecessity if you want to maintain a foreign policy entirely at odds with reality.
Listen, convincing oneself that Jews were not the target of the kosher market attack is to be expected once you have said the Islamist State isn’t Islamist; once you’ve told Americans the Islamic State’s progress has been halted; once you have declared the reversal on the red line to be a triumph (and ignored Bashar al-Assad’s continued use of chemical weapons); once you’ve decided you can reach accommodation with the mullahs who have sworn to obliterate the Jewish state; and once you’ve decided the biggest problem is the Israeli prime minister wanting to talk to the American people and Congress. The latter might in fact be a problem for Obama, given that the prime minister is likely to shred the premises, assumptions and prevarications the president has adopted. Someone with a loud microphone and huge credibility is coming to tell Americans the president’s policies are dangerous and misguided. No wonder Obama is in a funk.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s statement (released while the president was under siege for his “random” comment), explaining his visit underscored the dilemma Israel faces: Just like the Jews of Europe, Israel is dealing with a president who won’t see the murderous ideology that targets Jews (and Christians and other Muslims), posing the threat that if the jihadists got their hands on WMD’s they would leap at the chance to incinerate Israel and its inhabitants. …
In other words, the president is clueless and it’s up to Israel to take the lead, rallying rational people in the West or, if need be, taking action on its own. It is an oft-repeated mantra born out of the Holocaust experience that Israel must be strong enough to defend itself since it can never rely for Jews’ survival on others. It’s why Netanyahu extends the offer for European Jews to seek refuge in Israel and why he must bring his message to the U.S.
In the same bizarre interview that set the fiasco in motion Obama repeated the falsehood he has told many times, namely that the Iranians’ religion prohibits them from getting a bomb. He is willing to accept at face a phony fatwa story but not the targeting of Jews. And all of this after the president has lectured us not to “get on our high horses” because of sins in the West’spast.
One suspects that at this point Obama’s desperation for a deal with Iran and obvious animosity toward Netanyahu — the leader of the country that dares to disturb his delusions and refuses to go quietly into the night — have overtaken the president. He struggles to downplay or dismiss reality and frankly no longer acts in rational ways. He threatens Congress, not Iran. He lashes out at Democrats and Republicans who agree with Israel that the president is giving too much away to Iran; he ignores Iran’s aggression in the Middle East. His view of events, interests and nations is no longer reliable.
Netanyahu’s visit — which would be totally unnecessary were any other president in the White House — and Perry’s insightful remarks speak to an unavoidable truth: The president’s judgment cannot be trusted. For that reason alone Congress must step forward to confront the common threat to Israel and the West. Obama simply is not going to do it in any serious fashion. Ever.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 