SIRC True Perspectives
-first 2015 session-
Thursday, March 26
5:00 PM - Plantation Ballroom
The Threat of ISIS and Shaira Law to State Sovereignity
Featuring David Bores
A presentation covering the threat of ISIS, the growing acceptance of various Islamic influences within America, and how both increasingly threaten our sovereignty. The presentation covers the historical roots of the Islamic State, its ideology, and how it has infiltrated its members into the United States.
In addition, the presentation will address how ISIS has recently influenced numerous lone wolf attacks against police officers and how it has promoted the social unrest and violence in Ferguson MO. Further, it will discuss the brutality of ISIS and offer comment on our current President’s comparison of their actions to the Crusades.
We know Mr. Bores, as he has spoken to us before. He has been in public service for over 45 years, having served most recently as the Chief of Police for the City of Woodstock. Other experience includes other police work and 23 years in the US Military.
Please join your friends and neighbors. Member/cash bar will be available at 4:45. Come early and mingle. Free to sustaining members, $5 for SIRC regular members. $10 to others.
For reservations:
Russ Peterson
or
Dick Miller
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Obama's foreign policy initiatives consists of three legs. Two have a collapsed and the third is beginning to wobble. (See 1 below.)
===
Prger explains why California students ban the American Flag on their campus. (See 2 below.)
===
Yesterday our JV president blamed G.W again. This time it was for ISIS which Obama
claimed was the result of unintended consequences caused by precipitous judgement. Of course Obama sees not connection with anything he has done because he has not been precipitous. In fact he's been cowering in the background afraid to make any decision. Hell, this idiot-disaster of a president cannot even define who the enemy is, articulate what policy he is following and yet, he blames everyone for his own failing. Tragic.
Meanwhile his biggest protagonist who Obama tried to defeat has won as I thought he would. Bibi now must craft a government from among a variety of parties.
I have no doubt he will able to do it but it could prove a weaker coalition government than the one he presided over before the election.
As for Obama, once again our JV president has to be licking his wounds.
===
Dick
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1)-
Obama’s Asia Policy Flounders
Thanks to some bold rhetoric and high-profile visits over the past years, Barack Obama’s Asia policy has by and large been seen as a bright spot in his foreign policy. Compared to the disastrous failure to anticipate or contain the Islamic State, the flatfooted response to Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, his Hamlet-like indecision over whether or not to intervene in the Syrian civil war, and his Pollyanna-ish belief that negotiations will really prevent Iran’s mullahs from building nuclear weapons, Obama’s Asia policy has appeared both relatively constant, if not proactive. Obama initially got kudos from the Washington policy community for announcing his so-called “pivot” to Asia, and his Department of Defense has pushed ahead on plans to increase the number of ships and planes in the region. The president visited Asia on high-profile trips to major regional gatherings, and the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement finally looks like it may actually be completed. By contrast with the rest of his foreign policy, Asia didn’t look too bad.
There always was doubt among the more skeptical, even if many of us welcomed a deeper focus on Asia. But if some recent articles are anything to go by, the bloom is off the rose for Obama’s Asia policy, and its underlying weaknesses are now becoming painfully apparent. I’ll leave aside the question of whether the “pivot” (or “rebalance,” as the administration likes to call it) was ever much more than a large dollop of rhetoric, with little substance behind it. I’ll also pass on discussing whether Obama’s overall weak foreign policy has possibly contributed to the resurgence of Chinese assertiveness, if not coerciveness. Instead, there are two specific issues that point out the stumbling of Obama’s Asia policy.
Among the greater accomplishments claimed by Obama’s administration is the “Burmese Spring” that resulted in the loosening of authoritarian military rule by Burma’s junta and the 2010 release of Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi. The U.S. lifted long-standing sanctions against the Burmese regime in 2012, and eagerly trumpeted the country’s slow move towards democracy. On Sunday, The Washington Post put paid to the idea of Obama’s Burmese success. Criticizing the White House policy as “failed engagement,” the Post headlined what many Asia-watchers already knew: that the administration was ignoring continued and blatant human rights violations, the strengthening religious discrimination, the imprisonment of journalists, and the preventing of Suu Kyi from being able legally to run for president in this year’s elections. All this has been ignored while the administration has given the Burmese junta hundreds of million of dollars in aid. The point is that, like the Russian “reset” or negotiations with Iran, Obama appears satisfied with the public relations spin that ignores reality until stubborn facts intervene. In this case, it means that the message is sent that a fake liberalization can reap enormous benefits from the credulous Americans.
The second piece of evidence on the missteps of Obama’s Asia policy is the little-known issue of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB). This is arguably a far more serious failure to understand and react to a major foreign initiative than the Burmese example. In 2014, the Chinese government proposed a $50 billion lending institution for the region. The AIIB is inescapably an alternative to the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank, both of which are guided by Western financial principles and ensure the influence of Washington or allied nations, like Japan. As the biggest shareholder, founder, and guiding spirit, China most likely will dominate the AIIB, and thereby increase its economic and political influence even more in Asia.
The founding of the AIIB might not have been such a big deal, but for the Obama administration’s ham-fisted response. In trying to pressure nations not to sign on as shareholders, Obama has revealed just how little global influence he has. Not only have most Asian nations signed on, but America’s main allies, including Great Britain, France, Germany, and Italy have joined, as well, ignoring U.S. pleas to stay out. The Financial Times charitably called Washington’s abandonment by its allies a “blow” to US foreign policy. But with the news that stalwart U.S. ally Australia has also joined, veteran and respected Australian commentator Greg Sheridan scathingly destroys the fiction of American standing in Asia, writing that Canberra’s decision represents a “colossal defeat” for Obama (the article is behind a pay wall, but excerpts are here).
Why has Washington fallen on hard times in Asia? In Sheridan’s view, Obama is reaping the results of years of “incompetent, distracted” diplomacy that has left his administration with “neither the continuous presence, nor the tactical wherewithal, nor the store of goodwill or personal relationships” to carry anyone along with it. As if to underscore Sheridan’s analysis of Obama’s diplomatic crudeness, which includes a reminder that Obama personally insulted Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott with a “rogue” climate change speech at the G-20 in Brisbane last year, Washington accused London, its closest global ally, of “constant accommodation” of China, after its decision to join the AIIB. Such is the petulant, panicked response of an administration that has failed to understand, anticipate, analyze, and respond to changes that will reshape Asia’s financial landscape.
Now with South Korea considering joining the AIIB, Washington will be left isolated only with its ally Japan as new regional financial relationships are created. Ultimately, either Obama or his successor will likely bow to reality, and find a face-saving way to join the AIIB. Yet it will be clear to everyone in Asia, as well as Europe, that the United States was outplayed by China and forced into an impotent, reactive role.
The changes roiling through Asia may seem less dramatic than those occurring in Europe or the Middle East. Yet they are just as transformative, and their effects will unfold for years. Whether Washington wakes up to its diminishing role in Asia, and acts materially to reverse the decline, will be but one test of its ability to maintain its global role in the coming decades.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2) Why UC Students Voted to Remove American Flag
Two weeks ago, a group of students at the University of California at Irvine removed a U.S. flag from a common area of the student government suite.
Shortly afterwards, six undergraduate members of the Associated Students Council of UCI passed a resolution banning the display of the flags of any nation in the office lobby. The resolution was authored by student Matthew Guevara of the School of Social Ecology.
Among the reasons the legislative council objected to the American flag were:
--"The American flag has been flown in instances of colonialism and imperialism."
--"A common ideological understanding of the United States includes American exceptionalism and superiority."
--"Designing a culturally inclusive space is taken seriously by ASUCI."
--"The removal of barriers is the best option at promoting an inclusive space."
--"It is a psychological effect for individuals to identify negative aspects of a space rather than positive ones."
--"Freedom of speech, in a space that aims to be as inclusive as possible can be interpreted as hate speech."
Two days later a higher ranking student panel, the executive cabinet of ASUCI, vetoed the ban.
But the issue did not end there.
The hostility that the original legislative council vote engendered -- including, reportedly, death threats -- was used by over a thousand students and dozens of professors as a reason to sign a petition supporting the original ban on the flag.
In the words of the petition:
"The resolution recognized that nationalism, including U.S. nationalism, often contributes to racism and xenophobia, and that the paraphernalia of nationalism is in fact often used to intimidate. This is a more or less uncontroversial scholarly point. ...
"We admire the courage of the resolution's supporters amid this environment of political immaturity and threat, and support them unequivocally."
These are the facts. Now to what I believe is the most important question regarding the resolution to ban the flag and the petition on behalf of the resolution: Why were they supported?
Here are three reasons:
1. Outside of the natural sciences, math, and a few other departments, our universities are essentially seminaries -- teaching what has been the most dynamic religion of the Western world over the past hundred years, leftism. Every -- frequently incoherent -- idea expressed by the resolution and the petition represents years of left-wing indoctrination. Respect for the American flag comes naturally; reasons to hold it in contempt have to be learned.
It is not surprising that the author of the resolution is a student at UC Irvine's School of Social Ecology. Visit its website and you will see leftism in one of its purest forms.
2. The students and the professors see themselves as citizens of the world. Leftism rejects nationalism, and the most nationalistic of the industrialized Western democracies is America. The left regards nationalism -- as symbolized by hanging or waving the American flag -- as primitive and ultimately fascistic.
3. Many professors and students are bored. Compared to the past anywhere and compared to the present almost anywhere, life in America is remarkably easy for the vast majority of college students and college professors.
This ease, however, presents them with another problem -- a lack of meaning in life. For nearly all people there has never been a problem with finding meaning. Even putting aside religion -- humanity's greatest supplier of meaning -- life's difficulties have always given people meaning: How will I feed myself and my family? How will I provide myself and my family with a home?
But these problems exist for almost no American college student and they do not exist for any American professor. And since so few professors, and increasingly few students, derive meaning from America's traditional Judeo-Christian religions, meaning must be sought and found elsewhere.
Thus the left generally and the universities in particular manufacture crises that give the secular middle and upper classes great meaning: fight American sexism, intolerance, xenophobia, homophobia, Islamophobia, racism, material inequality, capitalism and nationalism.
That America is in fact the most open, opportunity-giving and tolerant country in world history is irrelevant to these people. To acknowledge this would be to deprive themselves of the greatest human need after food -- meaning and purpose.
These are the reasons they want to ban the American flag. That hundreds of thousands of Americans died for what this flag represents -- the American trinity of liberty, In God We Trust and E Pluribus Unum -- means nothing to these students and professors. Thanks to leftism, when they see the American flag they see imperialism and bigotry.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
No comments:
Post a Comment