Below are the posted notes by Michael Walters and editing by Robbie Friedmann's of his comments at yesterday True Perspective meeting.
The audience was captivated by his remarks and were still asking questions some 2 hours after he began. Robbie stayed with us and thoroughly enjoyed the time spent here as we did in hosting him.
Robbie and I share the same view of the Middle East, being Obama's failure to understand how his policies and personal behaviour has nurtured the nefarious goal of radical Islamists and lowered the respect America once enjoyed as a super power.
Robbie believes the foundation for the next war is being laid. Readers of my memos know I concur and might remember I reviewed Norman Podhoretz's book "World War 4" in the past
True Perspectives – July 12
Dr. Robert R. Friedman, director of the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange and Professor Emeritus of Criminal Justice at Georgia State University, shared his views on the Middle East to a full house of members and guests at the Plantation Ballroom on July 12. His theme was “Connecting the Dots” and the “Zebra Syndrome.”Michael (and ladies and gentlemen),
It was a privilege to share with you my thoughts on the situation in the Middle East and beyond and I enjoyed the lively interaction and until Jack came up on stage I must say I did not even realize it was 7:00 p.m. Thank you for your patience, questions, and friendship. The hospitality was great and I thank Dick and Lynn for inviting and hosting me.
I truly appreciate the opportunity to comment on the draft below. For your convenience I am attaching a WORD file with yellow highlights of the changes I have made. The text also appears below. The wide majority are changes that offer greater precision in what was said and I added a concluding statement that captures the essence of the talk. I sincerely hope you will find this helpful and in no way an attempt to change what you have captured so well.
Again, thank you for the opportunity to interact with you on this crucial subject.
With all best wishes
Robbie
Connecting the Dots
As early as September 2000, it was evident from the “spontaneous” riots over Ariel Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount controlled by Islamic Waqf that trouble was brewing in the Middle East portended by growing danger to the existence of the State of Israel.
Part of the problem was the now evident media bias favoring Palestinians and against Israelis. For example, there was a subsequent debate held at London's Intelligence Squared entitled:" Zionism today is the real enemy of the Jews." Instead of listing it as a question, the promoters insisted on using the declarative form to hype attendance, as if giving credence to the assertion.
It is now clear Hezbollah was planning and actively beginning to tunnel into northern Israel, for what purpose one can only guess.
Charges were made by the Iranian vice president and by the Palestinian Authority that Zionists are responsible for global drug trafficking to undermine Arab populations. Another absurd charge by Egyptians had a shark attack on south Sinai beach resort as engineered by Israel’s CIA counterpart – the Mossad.
Yasser Arafat’s wife Suha now accuses the Israelis of poisoning her late husband using a nuclear residue called polonium whose reactive shelf life is only a few months even though he died 8 years ago.
Even Thomas Friedman now calls on Israel to endorse the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt characterizing it as a movement towards peace" Turkey style."
Another respected Middle East expert also calls upon Israel and the U.S. to accept Iranian nuclear ambitions as a force for stability in the region. This expert equates Iranian ambitions with Russian deterrence which was never used while failing to recognize Russian leaders knew when to stop because they had no intention of self-destruction while the Iranians do not have that inhibition.
The “Zebra Syndrome”
Is a zebra black with white stripes or white with black stripes? The analogy is: Does peace exist as an interlude between wars, or is war the norm, with outbreaks of peace in between, for the world and for the Middle East in particular?
Is Iran for real when it says it plans to restore Islam to its rightful place as the only religion allowed in the region and beyond? What about its desire to take over the entire world, and patiently waiting years and even millennia until it achieves this one-world religion?
Middle East expert Bernard Lewis refers to the U.S. strategy of democracy in the Middle East as an artificial solution. In the Q&A session, Lewis’s pessimism was brought up, as the Imams can’t seem to accept Western progress versus former Islamic dominance a thousand years ago. Hence their theocratic view of the world is that God would not double cross Islam by allowing Western success. Therefore it must be the devil that has taken hold of the West, epitomized now by the Islamic view of the U.S. as the “Great Satan”.
This view explains most of the strife as religious not political, and so the solutions cannot be viewed from a Western prism. Robbie Friedmann’s view is, therefore, that simplistic attempts at educating young Islamists in western ideas of freedom and democracy won’t readily work. Furthermore, Obama's policies of apologizing for perceived past U.S. examples of domination and aggression is exactly the wrong medicine. This portrays the U.S. as weak, and emboldens Islamic zealots to further step up the attacks to obtain total Western surrender. Feed a bully and increase his appetite.
Instead, the West should establish rules that cannot be broken, and do not make idle threats that are empty. An example is Hillary Clinton’s recent demand that Russia and China “behave or they will have to pay a price.” No one believes the current U.S. administration has any plans to use strong force to back up any demands. And another weak back down only reinforces the notion of a feckless U.S. with no overall plan it is willing to sustain.
Friedmann clearly believes Iran means what it says and says what it means vis a vis destroying Israel, and dominating the rest of West, even if it takes a thousand years. This is hard to deal with, even if there is a threat of nuclear retaliation after a nuclear strike on Israel. After 50 years or so, with Israel gone, and the dead of Iran buried, there will be many more Muslims to move into the devastated territory in both countries.
The fatal and wrong assumption of Western nation states is that Iran and similar intense Islamic cultures care about nation states. They don’t. Islam is a tribal culture, not a national culture. What is important is the Islamic takeover of the world and the destruction of Western culture and thought – even if it takes a millennium.
Of significance was the attempt to build a mosque near the site of the World Trade Center destruction – with the code name, the Cordoba House. Cordoba was the site of a large mosque constructed on the site of a church overrun in the Middle Ages by conquering Muslims in Spain. Symbolic was the mosque being built on the very site of a church. The recent Ground Zero mosque, if built, would have signified an Islamic “victory” over the West by destroying the West’s symbol of success – the NYC World Trade Towers.
And once Islam conquers a country it is now considered Islamic. So Islamists won’t rest until Spain again falls into Islamic domination. Where does that put New York City?
Western leaders need not only rely on intelligence. Facts alone are not enough. There should be guiding
working assumptions. In this case the working assumption should be that Iran is determined to acquire/produce
nuclear weapons no matter what. With that assumption serving as a guide to interpret intelligence facts the U.S.
and the West should do EVERYTHING to stop Iran from acquring nuclear capability. (See 1 below.)
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In my humble opinion, the possible selection of Condi Rice by Romney, will be the equivalent of McCain's, Sara Palin disaster.
Rice may be a Soviet expert, overall brilliant and an outstanding pianist but as GW's Secretary of State I thought she was an unmitigated disaster.
If this is Romney's sop to black Americans and women in general, I deem it a big mistake because there are so many qualified men that would make better candidates.
Selection of his running mate is evidence of Romney's first critical decision. Rice would be, again in my humble opinion, a big whoop mistake. (See 3 below.)
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Dick
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1)Syria takes WMD out of storage: US: Situation incredibly dangerous
Syrian missile drill
As part of its ongoing war maneuver, Syria Thursday, July 12, this week drilled the firing of advanced Scud D ballistic missiles capable of carrying chemical weapons and nerve gas – a clear message from Bashar Assad that weapons of mass destruction are now in play to save his regime.
American officials, alarmed by the movement out of storage of parts of his vast arsenal of sarin nerve agent, mustard gas and cyanide, warned it could escalate the Syrian conflict and expand it to other parts of the region. "This could set the precedent of WMD [weapons of mass destruction] being used under our watch," one U.S. official said. "This is incredibly dangerous to our national security." The Obama administration has begun to hold classified briefings about the new intelligence.
Apparently two developments drove Syrian president Bashar Assad to this extreme threat:
1. The rebels were discovered to have procured roadside bombs capable of crippling the T-72 tank units he has just tried injecting into the battle for the first time this week. Tanks sent in long convoys into Aleppo and the suburbs of Damascus were blown up.
2. The balance of war has reached the point that the government controls only those parts of the country where heavy military or security forces contingents with massive fire power are deployed; elsewhere, the rebels have the upper hand.
In the course of its war exercise, the Syrians fired a selection of ground-to-ground missiles which they described as capable of “hitting targets deep within enemy territory.” Military sources say all the Scuds, the M-600, Fateh-110 and Zelzal can reach any point in Israel. They also tested upgraded C-802 shore-to-ship rockets.
American officials revealed Thursday in Washington that “Syria has begun moving parts of its vast arsenal of chemical weapons out of storage facilities.” They didn’t say to where they were moved.
Military sources report missile warheads and shells containing poisonous weapons such as sarin, mustard gas and cyanide are being moved to specific Syrian units ahead of field operations.
Some US officials are quoted by The Wall Street Journal as fearing “Damascus intends to use the weapons against the rebels or civilians, potentially as part of a targeted ethnic cleansing campaign.” Others hope it is a feint to inspire fear. Whatever the case, the alarmed US official said in Washington: This could set the precedent of WMD [weapons of mass destruction] being used under our watch" and is "incredibly dangerous to our national security."
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By Jack Kerwick
Last Friday, while on Michel Martin's NPR show, "Tell Me More," Hollywood titan Morgan Freeman informed his host that, contrary to the prevailing wisdom, Barack Hussein Obama is not America's first black president.
He is the country's "first mixed-race president." The first black president, Freeman continued, has not as yet "arisen."
So, one wonders, whence stems the popular misconception that Obama is black? Freeman has an answer ready at hand: the president's opponents.
Obama's rivals want to fuel the flames of racial bigotry by emphasizing his African ancestry while ignoring his white background. Yet they conveniently "forget that Barack had a mama" who "was white, very white American, Kansas, middle of America."
Some commentators, particularly those on the right, think that Freeman's remarks should have been met with more outrage. I personally think that incredulity is a more fitting response.
At the 2009 White House Correspondents' Association dinner, the black comedian Wanda Sykes quipped that while she was "proud" that she could characterize Obama as "the first black president," her pride would endure only as long as he didn't "screw up." Once that happened, however, then she would be asking: "What's up with the half-white guy?"
It is difficult indeed not to think that Freeman -- a long-time Democrat and supporter of the president -- isn't animated by the same impulse over which Sykes joked.
Obama, after all, long ago fell hard -- and fast -- from the peaks at which he stood in November of 2008. His unpopularity continues to increase as more and more Americans come to understand the disastrous toll that his policies are taking on the nation. This consideration in and of itself should suffice to legitimize the theory that Freeman is now revising Obama's racial identity so that "the first black president" isn't remembered by his contemporaries and history as an abject failure.
But there are other considerations that make this thesis that much more plausible.
First, it stretches credibility to the snapping point to suggest that it is Obama's opponents who are alone, or even primarily, responsible for accentuating his blackness. If anything, the president's critics twist themselves into proverbial pretzels doing their best to avoid invoking race to any extent. Their dread over being accused of "racism" dictates this as the safest course of action (or so they think).
Moreover, if they really wanted to play the racial angle, as Freeman claims, then there is an abundant supply of resources in the way of Obama's own utterances (for one, his own memoir, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance), deeds (his "community organizing," as well as his intercession in the cases of Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Trayvon Martin, to say nothing of his massive redistributive schemes within which blacks and non-whites benefit at the expense of whites), and alliances (Jeremiah Wright, Van Jones, and a host of other notorious anti-Americans).
Yet Republicans avoid like the plague touching upon these topics.
There are other reasons not to take Freeman seriously.
If anyone can be said to be ultimately responsible for identifying Obama as black, it is the president himself.
Obama was abandoned at a very young age by his Kenyan father. It is his white family -- his mother and his grandparents, and particularly his grandmother -- who provided him with the life of privilege that he enjoyed. Obama spent much of his young life in Hawaii surrounded by mostly white friends while attending the top prep school in the state, followed by one prestigious private educational institution after the other.
He lived a life that, as far as safety and material comfort is concerned, would be the envy of most of the world. If the leftist drivel of "white privilege" had any meaning at all, Obama could be said to have enjoyed it.
And yet he insists upon identifying himself as black.
Shortly before his election, Obama said: "I identify as African-American -- that's how I am treated and that's how I'm viewed. I'm proud of it." As recently as 2010, while filling out the census, the president identified himself as "Black, African Am., or Negro" -- in spite of the fact that he had other options.
Finally, and most decisively, Morgan Freeman had regarded Obama as the first black president up until this most recent discussion on NPR.
Just last September Freeman told Piers Morgan that Obama's nemeses, specifically the Tea Party, were motivated by sheer "racism."
"Their stated policy, publicly stated, is ... Screw the country. We're going to do whatever we can to get this black man out of here" (emphasis added).
Whether Freeman, Wanda Sykes, or any other one-time Obama admirer secretly wishes to deny his blackness now or not is ultimately irrelevant. They are stuck with him. They wanted the first black president, and they got him. Any attempt to wish his racial self-identification away now must be seen for the piece of disingenuousness that it is.
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3)-Romney's Condi Rice Trial Balloon
The political world was abuzz last night after the Drudge Report reported that former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was a frontrunner for Romney's running mate spot. The leak was immediately treated with a healthy dose of skepticism from the political class: Rice has said she's not interested in the job, she has no political experience, she supports abortion rights in a party that regards that as a near-litmus test, and hawks don't have fond memories of her foreign policy record in the Bush administration. Many went a stop further, mocking Drudge's track record in predicting the veepstakes (he hyped Frank Keating in 2000, Dick Gephardt in 2004, and Evan Bayh in 2008). And pundits noted the suspicious timing of the leaked news, right after Romney faced tough new questions about the timing of his tenure at Bain Capital.
3)-Romney's Condi Rice Trial Balloon
The political world was abuzz last night after the Drudge Report reported that former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was a frontrunner for Romney's running mate spot. The leak was immediately treated with a healthy dose of skepticism from the political class: Rice has said she's not interested in the job, she has no political experience, she supports abortion rights in a party that regards that as a near-litmus test, and hawks don't have fond memories of her foreign policy record in the Bush administration. Many went a stop further, mocking Drudge's track record in predicting the veepstakes (he hyped Frank Keating in 2000, Dick Gephardt in 2004, and Evan Bayh in 2008). And pundits noted the suspicious timing of the leaked news, right after Romney faced tough new questions about the timing of his tenure at Bain Capital.
But the floating of Rice sounds a lot more like a trial balloon from the Romney campaign than deliberately bad information that Drudge cooked up. Romney campaign manager Matt Rhoades is famously close to Drudge, suggesting there's a deliberate strategy at play here for the campaign.
And there are reasons why Romney would consider Rice, if she was interested, for the position. She drew rave reviews for her in-depth foreign policy speech at Romney's Park City retreat last month, where offered up a lot of red meat rhetoric against the president. Politically speaking, she could win over enough female voters, and perhaps cut a little into the African-American vote -- which could put Romney over the top. The conservative base is already so steamed with President Obama that a little apostasy from certain conservative corners might not make a big difference.
Make no mistake: Rice is still a long-shot for the spot. She would add an awful lot of risk for a candidate whose political career has spent avoiding it. But the leak sounded a lot like a deliberate test for how conservatives would react, rather than bad information from an overexuberant source outside Romneyland. If she generated some favorable buzz, that could indeed suggest she'd be in the running. But with many conservative opinion leaders expressing their displeasure and the media not buying it, it's hard to see a realistic path for Rice on the Romney ticket.
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