On Friday morning, ABC-TV’s Good Morning America quoted Barack Obama as saying that ISIS had been contained.
Before the day was out, ISIS killed 150 people, including some outside a soccer match …
… and an estimated 100, executed during a death metal concert:
The world expressed solidarity with the victims …
… although as usual Obama is more indignant about American guns and alleged climate change:
As anyone old enough to remember 9/11 knows, this isn’t the first time the evil that is radical Islam has killed innocents. A few months ago, another Islamic extremist group, Al-Shahab, killed 148 people, all but six of them students, at Garissa University College in eastern Kenya, near the Somalia border. The terrorists separated Muslim students from Christian students, then executed the Christians. On Thursday, 43 people were killed and 239 wounded in Beirut. By whom? ISIS again.
It should be pointed out that radical Islam does not represent all of Islam. Muslims died on 9/11, and the death toll Friday likely included Muslims. (By one count, 6 million Muslims live in France.) Scenes of Reason lists seven times that Muslims stood up to radical Islam:
1) WHEN THE LOCAL MUSLIM HOTEL STAFF IN TUNISIA FORMED A HUMAN SHIELD TO PROTECT TOURISTS
When Sky News released this image some people commented that it looked as though the Muslims on the beach were just standing by. Killer Seifeddine Rezgui murdered 38 people in Tunisia. Islamist group Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack.
Later, a video would show locals and hotel workers chasing the killer, picking up bottles as weapons and shouting at him “Why?”
Other witness accounts confirmed the bravery of the Tunisians. They placed their own lives in danger protecting the guests.
2) THE 7/7 BOMBING SURVIVOR WHO NOW PREVENTS CHILDREN FROM BEING RADICALISED
Sajda Mughal was the only Muslim in the underground carriage targeted in the 7/7 bombings in 2005.
After the attack she quit her job in the city and now works for a charity attempting to stop young people becoming radicalised.
“Islam teaches you to respect life, not even to harm an ant – how could you harm a human being in the name of Islam?” – Sajda Mughal in an interview with the Mirror.
3) WHEN THE IMAMS RECORDED THIS VIDEO
Imams are leaders of the Mosque. They lead the prayers, teach the religion and help out in the community. In the past people have worried that Mosques were places where extremist views could be preached in secret. A group of Imams from around the UK decided to make this video, setting themselves against the actions of Islamic State.
4) WHEN YOUNG MUSLIMS DECIDED TO WAGE A “JIHAD” OF THEIR OWN AGAINST THE ISLAMIC EXTREMISM
More and more reports describe young Muslims who are radicalised by extremist messages. Many are travelling to areas like Syria and Iraq to join Jihad (holy war).
5) THE MUSLIM WOMEN WHO FORMED THE ANTI-EXTREMIST GROUP “MAKE A STAND”
The group used an image of a Muslim woman using a Union Jack flag as a headscarf. Visiting cities up and down the country, they educated many against the dangers of radicalisation.
The campaign was created by Sara Khan who also co-founded the Inspire group; which was created to empower Muslim women and work towards gender equality.
6) WHEN MUSLIMS AROUND THE WORLD TOLD ISIS “NOT IN MY NAME”
Activists and ordinary people uploaded images to social media with #NotInMyName.
Groups like ISIS have used social media to spread their message and many fear they are winning the online battle.
“After finding out that James Foley had been beheaded and David Haines was next, we decided enough was enough and that we must take action and take a stand to show the world they do not represent us Muslims. They will not kill in the name of Islam.” – Zahra Qadir from Active Change, the charity behind the campaign.
7) AND WHEN LOCAL MOSQUES OPENED THEIR DOORS AND INVITED IN MEMBERS OF THE COMMUNITY
This year, to mark the 10th anniversary of the 7/7 bombings, Mosques around the country opened their doors. They invited non-Muslims to attend a peaceful “iftar”; the meal eaten after sunset by fasting Muslims. Imams are also encouraged to mention 7/7 in their sermons.
That list is best described as necessary, but not sufficient. Unless ordinary Muslims worldwide stop radical Islam, things like what Joel Taylor suggested four years ago may well happen …
Dr. Robert Morey has one solution to the ‘alleged ‘war on terror’. Destroy the foundations of Islam. While all will not say ‘Amen’ to that, it’s worthwhile to point out that Christianity has a foundation which cannot be destroyed … ever. Islam, on the other hand, depends on places and buildings for its continued existence.
“The terrorists and terrorist nations such as Saudi Arabia only fear one thing: the destruction of the religion of Islam.There is nothing in this life that has greater value to them than Islam. They are willing to sacrifice and even die to promote Islam. This religious motivation is the engine that drives the Jihad against us.
The path to Paradise, according to the Five Pillars of Islam, involves the city of Mecca and its stone temple called the Kabah. Muslims pray toward Mecca five times a day. What if Mecca didn’t exist anymore?
They must make a pilgrimage to Mecca and engage in an elaborate set of rituals centered around the Kabah once they arrive. What if Mecca and the Kabah were only blackened holes in the ground?
What if Medina, the burial place of Muhammad was wiped off the face of the planet?
What if the Dome Mosque on the Temple site in Jerusalem was blown up?
The greatest weakness of Islam is that it is hopelessly tied to sacred cities and buildings. If these cities and buildings were destroyed, Islam would die within a generation as it would be apparent to all that its god could not protect the three holiest sites in Islam.
With American ships stationed all around Arabia and troops on the ground within Saudi Arabia itself, it would take about 7 minutes for cruise missiles to take out Mecca and Medina. These cities could be vaporized in minutes and there is nothing the Saudis or any other Muslim country could do to stop us. The Israelis could take out the Dome Mosque at the same time. It could happen so fast that no one would have the time to respond. With these surgical strikes, few lives would be lost. And, with three strikes against them, Islam is out!
The US government and its allies must agree that this is the final solution to the Muslim problem. We must tell all terrorist groups that the next time they destroy the lives and properties of Americans at home or abroad, we will destroy Mecca, Medina and Dome Mosque. They will be responsible for destroying the three most holy sites in Islam and bringing the religion to its knees.
We must tell all the Muslim countries that are presently supporting and harboring terrorists that if they do not cease and desist at once, we will destroy the heart of their religion.
… particularly if Donald Trump becomes president.
As it is, there is little evidence the world the U.S. supposedly leads has the will to destroy radical Islam. James S. Robbins points out:
Earlier on Friday, hours before a small band of allegedly ISIS-linked jihadists took over 150 innocent lives in Paris, President Obama downplayed the terror threat. “I don’t think [the Islamic State is] gaining strength,” he said on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” “we have contained them… you don’t see this systemic march by ISILacross the terrain.” This assessment betrayed a certain type of intelligence failure, the inability to understand the transnational aspect of the threat. ISIS is an adaptive unconventional enemy that has built a potent international network of highly motivated killers. We cannot simply draw a red line on a map and hope they stay inside it.
President Obama also said “we’ve made some progress in trying to reduce the flow of foreign fighters,” referring to international jihadist recruits heading into Syria. But what about the flow of foreign fighters out of the region? It is significant that Syrian and Egyptian passports were found near the bodies of suicide bombers in Paris. Earlier this year ISIS threatened to send 500,000 refugees to Europe to sow chaos, and this year there have been over 700,000 asylum claims filed in Europe alone. It is unknown how many of these might be ISIS infiltrators, but recent experience has shown – whether in Paris, Madrid, London, Boston, or with the 9/11 attacks – that it only takes a small number of committed terrorists to wreak havoc. …
The White House is fresh out of ideas how to counter the Islamic State’s compelling ideological message. At the UN Summit on Countering Violent Extremism in September, President Obama cycled through the usual litany of supposed solutionsto the terrorism problem; confronting “economic grievances,” “creating opportunity and dignity,” spreading “more democracy in terms of free speech, and freedom of religion.” However, ISIS, al Qaeda, and other Islamist extremist movements are immune to these appeals. They don’t offer their followers a job training program, they promise an eternal afterlife in Allah’s glory. President Obama also lectured the world once again that “violent extremism is not unique to any one faith, so no one should be profiled or targeted simply because of their faith.” But the global jihadist movement is most definitely unique to Islam, and the sooner the White House confronts that fact the better.
And yes there was an offensive Youtube video involved, but it was a warning, not a provocation. Last July ISIS released a video in which a French jihadist vowed to “fill the streets of Paris with dead bodies,” then shot a bound Syrian soldier in the head and kicked him off a cliff. Like most such threats it passed with little notice. But the Islamic State has shown a disturbing propensity to at least try to make good on its promises. The Paris massacre shows that half-hearted attempts to degrade, contain, or diminish the jihadist threat are failing. What we need is a strategy to defeat and destroy them. There is no substitute for victory, but unfortunately only ISIS seems to understand that.
This was on the Classic Rock Lovers Facebook page, which doesn’t exactly have to do with Friday’s events, except that it does:
Mitch Daniels went from being the governor of Indiana to the president of Purdue University. Unlike others in academia, Daniels, not a career academic, values intellectual diversity:
Purdue University President Mitch Daniels released a statement on Wednesday to remind the Purdue community of school’s commitment to free speech.
“Events this week at the University of Missouri and Yale University should remind us all of the importance of absolute fidelity to our shared values,” Daniels began. “First, that we strive constantly to be, without exception, a welcoming, inclusive and discrimination-free community, where each person is respected and treated with dignity. Second, to be steadfast in preserving academic freedom and individual liberty.”
Daniels applauded Purdue’s Statement of Values and a recent student government joint resolution embracing free speech.
The Purdue Statement of Values explicitly mentions “embracing diversity, promoting inclusion, and encouraging freedom of thought and speech.”
The student government joint resolution 14-01 calls for the university to revise some of its policies to “protect and ensure the students’ and faculty’s moral and legal right to freedom of speech guaranteed under the United States Constitution.”
Daniels called this commitment to free speech a “proud contrast to the environments that appear to prevail at places like Missouri and Yale.”
So far, no similar statement has come from anyone from the UW System.
Daniel Strohl tells this story about America’s sports car:
By the mid-1990s, Russ McLean had already worked for GM for many years – including stints in Spain and in Mexico – and developed a reputation as a cost-cutter and turnaround champ. That reputation led to his appointment as manager of the Corvette platform at a time when the fourth-generation Corvette was losing about $1,000 per car. At the time, McLean noted, GM suffered from a one-two punch of financial difficulties and continuous reorganization, so he decided to isolate the Corvette team from “all that noise.” By maintaining one stable organizational structure independent from the overall GM structure, he said he was able to make necessary changes – improving the Corvette’s quality and reducing overall costs – that in turn led to Corvette making a profit within McLean’s first year.
With the fourth-generation Corvette’s stability ensured, McLean believed his next task was to focus on developing the C5, which GM had already approved. However, a management change brought with it a new order from GM’s board of directors: Stop development on the Corvette and let it sunset. For somebody like McLean, who had bought a 1960 Corvette in 1962 and who believed in the Corvette, he couldn’t accept that order. So he ignored it.
“As a manager, I believed in doing the right things rather than doing things right,” McLean said. “The Corvette was always the innovation leader for General Motors and for the world, and that innovation flowed into so many other cars. So when somebody told me to let that icon die, I just couldn’t let that happen – it was not the right thing to do.”
He decided then and there not to tell his staff – or anybody else in the world, save for his wife – what his boss had ordered him to do. He kept the Corvette platform team running in silence, not asking permission for anything they did, and he avoided contact and communication with his boss and GM management. He continued the C5’s development as if nothing had happened and was able to launch it for the 1997 model year.
And he did indeed face repercussions for what he did. “I wasn’t considered a team player, I didn’t follow directions,” McLean said of his later evaluations. “Yes, I lost out on promotions after that.” In 1996, he left the Corvette team and in the fall of 2001 he left GM entirely. He bought a couple vintage Corvettes – a 1963 split-window fuelie and a 1958 airbox car – and settled into taking care of his aging parents and the family farm.
The definitive book on the creation of the fifth-generation Corvette is James Schefter’s All Corvettes Are Red. Schefter’s book covers the entire eight-year process that included repeated murder attempts. (To put it mildly, GM was a mess in the 1980s and 1990s, which differs from the 2000s and now … not much.) I don’t recall how much McLean was mentioned in Schefter’s book, which tells as much about the people who developed the C5 (including Corvette chief engineer Dave Hill and stylist Wayne Cherry and others) as the car itself.
What’s crazy to me is that GM would even momentarily consider killing a car that (1) brought people into dealerships and (2) made money for the company. (The Corvette has also for years introduced technologies that made their way to lesser GM models, but that’s less important to the bean-counters than the first two points.)
Of course, if there was no C5 Corvette …
VetteFacts.com
… there wouldn’t have been (probably, anyway) a C6 …
VetteFacts.com
… or (given what happened to GM in the late 2000s) a C7 today:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;Unless we’re talking about a white chocolate-paneled cake for a gay wedding or perpetual funding for ‘women’s health’ clinics, because it’s the ‘right thing to do.’
That’s pretty much the state of the First Amendment today. Climate change. Abortion. Gay marriage. Race. Taxes. What have you. Even in mainstream political debate, these interests outweigh your piddling concerns about the First Amendment. So the notion that a bunch of students and leftist professors would agitate to shut down free expression in a public space in Missouri because they feel their special issue trumps your antiquated list of rules is not particularly surprising.
Now, we shouldn’t overstate the problem. Most of us are able to freely engage in arguments and express ourselves without worrying about the state interfering. This will not end tomorrow. But it is difficult to ignore how creeping illiberalism has infected our discourse, and how not many people seem to care.
The thousands of other University of Missouri students, for example, could have held a counter-protest against dimwitted fascists cloistered in safe spaces. Where are those student groups? Why was there no pushback from those kids — and really there was none as far as I can tell, either at Missouri or Yale — against the bullies who want administrators fired for thought crimes? It can mean that students are either too intimidated, too uninterested, or not very idealistic about these freedoms. None of those things bode well for the future.
And where is the faculty, those brave souls who value the freedom to debate and champion sometimes-controversial ideas when mobs of student are making wildaccusations against their school without any real evidence? Where are they when students shut down conservative, libertarian, or not-progressive-enough Democrats from speaking at their schools?
In fact, the campus police — not the hissy-fitting communications professor or the would-be authoritarian student — asked students to call authorities and report “incidents of hateful and/or hurtful speech” in detail. A school, the place where young people supposedly ponder challenging ideas, now has students reporting any instances of unsavory speech. What does “hurtful speech” entail, anyway? Is it enough for someone to challenge your priggish worldview? Is it enough for them to hurt your brittle feelings? And what is the consequence?
It’s not just the snowflakes — your future neighbors, who will soon be joining the workforce as journalists, congressional aides, and various other marginally useful jobs — who are busy rationalizing the chilling of speech. (There are still many liberals, genuine liberals, dismayed by the behavior of these students and prevailing PC culture that has transformed from something laughable to something deeply concerning.) But there are plenty of pundits, academics, and politicians who offer excuses or justify these assaults on free expression. They did it after Charlie Hebdo. They do it now.
You might also remember when Chris Cuomo of CNN, a lawyer, tweeting (since deleted) that “hate speech is excluded from protection” under the First Amendment. He wasn’t alone.
Not long ago, 51 percent of Democrats in a recent YouGov poll claimed to support criminalizing “hate speech” (a third of Republicans did so as well). Another study by the First Amendment Center a few years back found that nearly 40 percent of Americans said the First Amendment “goes too far” guaranteeing rights — a record high. But Americans aren’t equally as sensitive to all insults.
And in 2010 the survey found that while a majority of Americans — 53 percent — said people should be allowed to say things in public that are offensive to religious groups, fewer (44 percent) said the same about speech that is offensive to racial groups.
People are scared. They’re scared to be accused of bigotry or racism, an ugly accusation that is easy to level but impossible to disprove. It’s a lazy but effective method of intimidation.
So we can laugh at the confused Millennial J-school major, but he is not alone. When the mayors of Chicago and Boston used their positions of power to keep Chick-fil-A out of their cities because of the CEO’s thoughts on same-sex marriage, they were working under the same notion as kids who want to be in safe spaces where their worldviews remain unchallenged. (Using the state to punish a person or company for its beliefs is even worse.) When Bill Nye argues that climate change skeptics are nuts who hate science and should be ignored by any right-thinking person, he is attempting to convince you of something. When Nye contends that America needs to drum climate change skeptics completely “out of our discourse,” he’s no longer a liberal.
What’s happening on college campuses hasn’t happened in a vacuum.
On 16 June 1941, as Hitler readied his forces for Operation Barbarossa, Josef Goebbels looked forward to the new order that the Nazis would impose on a conquered Russia. There would be no come-back, he wrote, for capitalists nor priests nor Tsars. Rather, in the place of debased, Jewish Bolshevism, the Wehrmacht would deliver “der echte Sozialismus”: real socialism.
Goebbels never doubted that he was a socialist. He understood Nazism to be a better and more plausible form of socialism than that propagated by Lenin. Instead of spreading itself across different nations, it would operate within the unit of the Volk.
So total is the cultural victory of the modern Left that the merely to recount this fact is jarring. But few at the time would have found it especially contentious. As George Watson put it in The Lost Literature of Socialism:
It is now clear beyond all reasonable doubt that Hitler and his associates believed they were socialists, and that others, including democratic socialists, thought so too.
The clue is in the name. Subsequent generations of Leftists have tried to explain away the awkward nomenclature of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party as either a cynical PR stunt or an embarrassing coincidence. In fact, the name meant what it said.
Hitler told Hermann Rauschning, a Prussian who briefly worked for the Nazis before rejecting them and fleeing the country, that he had admired much of the thinking of the revolutionaries he had known as a young man; but he felt that they had been talkers, not doers. “I have put into practice what these peddlers and pen pushers have timidly begun,” he boasted, adding that “the whole of National Socialism” was “based on Marx”.
Marx’s error, Hitler believed, had been to foster class war instead of national unity – to set workers against industrialists instead of conscripting both groups into a corporatist order. His aim, he told his economic adviser, Otto Wagener, was to “convert the German Volk to socialism without simply killing off the old individualists” – by which he meant the bankers and factory owners who could, he thought, serve socialism better by generating revenue for the state. “What Marxism, Leninism and Stalinism failed to accomplish,” he told Wagener, “we shall be in a position to achieve.”
Leftist readers may by now be seething. Whenever I touch on this subject, it elicits an almost berserk reaction from people who think of themselves as progressives and see anti-fascism as part of their ideology. Well, chaps, maybe now you know how we conservatives feel when you loosely associate Nazism with “the Right”.
To be absolutely clear, I don’t believe that modern Leftists have subliminal Nazi leanings, or that their loathing of Hitler is in any way feigned. That’s not my argument. What I want to do, by holding up the mirror, is to take on the equally false idea that there is an ideological continuum between free-marketers and fascists.
The idea that Nazism is a more extreme form of conservatism has insinuated its way into popular culture. You hear it, not only when spotty students yell “fascist” at Tories, but when pundits talk of revolutionary anti-capitalist parties, such as the BNP and Golden Dawn, as “far Right”.
What is it based on, this connection? Little beyond a jejune sense that Left-wing means compassionate and Right-wing means nasty and fascists are nasty. When written down like that, the notion sounds idiotic, but think of the groups around the world that the BBC, for example, calls “Right-wing”: the Taliban, who want communal ownership of goods; the Iranian revolutionaries, who abolished the monarchy, seized industries and destroyed the middle class; Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who pined for Stalinism. The “Nazis-were-far-Right” shtick is a symptom of the wider notion that “Right-wing” is a synonym for “baddie”.
One of my constituents once complained to the Beeb about a report on the repression of Mexico’s indigenous peoples, in which the government was labelled Right-wing. The governing party, he pointed out, was a member of the Socialist International and, again, the give-away was in its name: Institutional Revolutionary Party. The BBC’s response was priceless. Yes, it accepted that the party was socialist, “but what our correspondent was trying to get across was that it is authoritarian”.
In fact, authoritarianism was the common feature of socialists of both National and Leninist varieties, who rushed to stick each other in prison camps or before firing squads. Each faction loathed the other as heretical, but both scorned free-market individualists as beyond redemption. Their battle was all the fiercer, as Hayek pointed out in 1944, because it was a battle between brothers.
Authoritarianism – or, to give it a less loaded name, the belief that state compulsion is justified in pursuit of a higher goal, such as scientific progress or greater equality – was traditionally a characteristic of the social democrats as much as of the revolutionaries.
Jonah Goldberg has chronicled the phenomenon at length in his magnum opus, Liberal Fascism. Lots of people take offence at his title, evidently without reading the book since, in the first few pages, Jonah reveals that the phrase is not his own. He is quoting that impeccable progressive H.G. Wells who, in 1932, told the Young Liberals that they must become “liberal fascists” and “enlightened Nazis”.
In those days, most prominent Leftists intellectuals, including Wells, Jack London, Havelock Ellis and the Webbs, tended to favour eugenics, convinced that only religious hang-ups were holding back the development of a healthier species. The unapologetic way in which they spelt out the consequences have, like Hitler’s actual words, been largely edited from our discourse. Here, for example, is George Bernard Shaw in 1933:
Extermination must be put on a scientific basis if it is ever to be carried out humanely and apologetically as well as thoroughly… If we desire a certain type of civilisation and culture we must exterminate the sort of people who do not fit into it.
Eugenics, of course, topples easily into racism. Engels himself wrote of the “racial trash” – the groups who would necessarily be supplanted as scientific socialism came into its own. Season this outlook with a sprinkling of anti-capitalism and you often got Leftist anti-Semitism – something else we have edited from our memory, but which once went without saying. “How, as a socialist, can you not be an anti-Semite?” Hitler had asked his party members in 1920.
Are contemporary Leftist critics of Israel secretly anti-Semitic? No, not in the vast majority of cases. Are modern socialists inwardly yearning to put global warming sceptics in prison camps? Nope. Do Keynesians want the whole apparatus of corporatism, expressed by Mussolini as “everything in the state, nothing outside the state”? Again, no. There are idiots who discredit every cause, of course, but most people on the Left are sincere in their stated commitment to human rights, personal dignity and pluralism.
My beef with many (not all) Leftists is a simpler one. By refusing to return the compliment, by assuming a moral superiority, they make political dialogue almost impossible. Using the soubriquet “Right-wing” to mean “something undesirable” is a small but important example.
Next time you hear Leftists use the word fascist as a general insult, gently point out the difference between what they like to imagine the NSDAP stood for and what it actually proclaimed.
“The National Socialist German worker stands against capitalism.”A Dutch Nazi Party poster: “With Germany Against Capitalism”
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 