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Allies know Obama does not care about their back. (See 1 below.)
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More hypocrisy and anti-Semitism from the ICC! (See 2 below.)
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This was sent to me by my friend who posed the idea of turning the war against Jihadist over to Backwater types.
The article points out something I too have eluded to - victimhood's siren song appeals to Liberals and Progressive guilt. Muslims resist unification then claim they are being censured for living and acting as they do.
Though the article was written years ago and does not highlight Muslim influence in America because of their then small % relative to the overall population, I would say a statistical update would include the U.S. in virtually all categories the author cites.
I know the introduction of Sharia law is a fait accompli in several urban cities in Michigan and is being sought in many judicial hearings.. I know for a fact Muslim conversion takes place in our jail systems. I know Muslim influence upon merchants is a fact and the increase in Mosque and Madrases is a structural fact. Finally, we have a president who is systematically tolerant of Jihadism, notwithstanding, his statements and protestation to the contrary.(See 3 and 3a below.)
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This from a former tennis friend and fellow memo reader who picked up and moved to Germany to get away from what is happening here in America.
I told him it was like getting out of the pan into the fire but wished him well.
"Dick: For you to use, if you wish.
Heard this on Fox news from Oliver North.
He was asked why Obama, Biden or Kerry were not at the
solidarity march in Paris Sunday.
Colonel North said the march was for 'World Leaders'.
Regards from Germany,"
Ed
===Even in the midst of tragedy it pays to laugh. (See 4 below.)
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We just attended a meeting at our Synagogue at which Ben Carter, a former Atlanta developer and now Savannah citizen and developer, spoke about what his enterprise is trying to accomplish .
Carter has purchase a large number of buildings on Broughton Street, Savannah's main shopping street, and is in the process of trying to change the face of Broughton, make it more family friendly, pedestrian accessible and improve the quality and breadth of the shopping experience.
He has big plans for Savannah's retail attractiveness and has devoted a lot of time, money and expertise in what he hopes will be a successful opportunity to make Savannah an even more destination venue.
After his presentation he opened the floor for questions and the main ones pertained to parking, local retailers and co-operation from the city.
As we drove home I told my wife Savannah , Broughton and our retail shopping reminded me of a beautiful stage coach being driven by a bunch of old nags. We have everything going for us and Carter recognizes this fact and believes Savannah can become among one of the great destination cities in the world.
After the meeting, I chatted with a dear friend, not a fellow memo reader, and a person with plenty of development expertise who has been extremely generous and involved in making Savannah a better place to live and has helped to retain Savannah's history and charm.
He thinks Carter is on the right track and what he needs is a city and county that merge into one entity and a mayor that is capable of standing up to poor city Commission governance. He cited the success Charleston has achieved with a mayor who has served for a long time and has similar racial demographics.
Though a liberal, politically speaking, he is rational and said he would love to see our former Representative, Jack Kingston, run for the office. I concur. Jack would be great for Savannah.
Stay tuned!
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Dick
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1) Allies Know They Haven’t “Got a Friend” in Obama’s America
One of the basic rules of satire is that it is virtually impossible to satirize something that is already inherently ridiculous. That axiom is brought to mind as America belatedly sought to reaffirm its friendship with France in the wake of the administration’s decision to snub the Paris unity rally that commemorated the terror attack on the Charlie Hebdo office and a kosher market. Neither the president nor the vice president or even Secretary of State John Kerry bothered to come to a gathering attended by over 40 world leaders. But to make up for this, Kerry brought folk rock singer James Taylor to Paris to serenade French officials with a version of Carol King’s classic ballad, “You’ve Got a Friend.” This is something so absurd that it isn’t clear even the cleverest minds at Saturday Night Live or even Charlie Hebdo could adequately convey the sophomoric nature of a lame attempt to make up for a gaffe. While the real problem is the administration’s lack of comfort in standing up for the rights of cartoonists to offend Islamists as evidenced by the decision to stay away from the rally, it also tells us something significant about the inadequate man who is serving as the nation’s chief diplomat.
That Kerry would think schlepping an aging rock icon from his youth to Paris to tell the French that “all you’ve got to do is just ca-aall” if they need us is the sort of thing that makes one longs for the diplomacy of an earlier era when envoys wore uniforms, swords, and feathered hats and stuck to rigid formality.
That’s not just because such a gesture is jejune as well as puerile, though it is both of those things as well as a clear reflection of Kerry’s lack of seriousness as a public official. It’s that the French and the rest of Europe know very well that the last thing they can count on in a crisis is the willingness of the Obama administration to “be there” for their oldest ally or anyone else for that matter.
This is an administration that has spent six years offending and snubbing allies all the while seeking in vain to appease old foes and rivals such as Russia and Iran. Though U.S. and French policies often intersect, Paris and the rest of Europe have come to understand that Obama is as uninterested in their point of view or their needs as he is of those of congressional Republicans. In a week when French officials were rightly calling on the world to join them in the fight against Islamist terror, Washington was dithering and couldn’t even force itself to say the word “Islamist.”
As is well known, French opinion about the United States is decidedly mixed with resentment of American wealth and culture often overwhelming the basic commonality of interests shared by two great democracies. A James Taylor concert won’t make things much worse but neither will it improve the situation. What it will do is to remind Europe and those enemies once again that this is an administration that neither understands symbolism or how to reaffirm an alliance.
It is no small irony that an administration that came into office determined to work with the international community, and our allies rather than to be Bush-like unilateral cowboys, is now reduced to this sort of nonsense. What the French or any ally wants is not a touchy-feely Oldies song but a sense that the U.S. believes it is still part of the war against international terror. To the contrary, Obama’s instincts are such that allies have come to expect his contempt or disinterest in their problems.
Kerry’s cringe-inducing turn hosting his friend Taylor isn’t the dumbest thing he has done at the State Department by a long shot. Having faith in Mahmoud Abbas as a champion of peace and signing a weak nuclear deal with Iran are hard to top. But it is an iconic moment that will symbolize Obama and Kerry’s ham-handed approach to allies. A song, even a folk rock classic that allows Kerry to reminisce about his youth spent falsely testifying against his fellow Vietnam vets, can’t substitute for a strong stand against Islamists or even the ability to say the word. Prior to this, it was possible to argue that U.S. foreign policy had become a joke. But after Taylor had finished warbling, even the president and his inner White House circle must be wondering what sort of a fool they’ve unleashed on the world.
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The International Criminal Court's decision to open a preliminary investigation against Israel for alleged war crimes will not deter Israel from doing what it needs to do to defend itself, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Sunday. Netanyahu, speaking at the start of the weekly cabinet meeting, said Israel will fight against the ICC moves with full force, and will enlist others to do so as well. The issue is expected to be a major focus of Netanyahu’s discussion over the next two days with visiting Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, visiting Canadian Foreign Minister John Baird, and a visiting nine-member US Senate delegation headed by Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain. “We will defend Israel's right to defend itself, and not allow IDF soldiers to be tried by an international tribunal,” he said. Netanyahu characterized the ICC’s decision to begin a preliminary investigation as the “height of hypocrisy and the opposite of justice.” Netanyahu, who said that as a former ambassador to the United Nations and as a prime minister he has encountered hypocritical acts in the past, characterized this decision as “being in a category all its own. This gives international cover to international terror,” Intelligence Minister Yuval Steinitz was equally strident in his criticism, comparing this decision to the notorious Dreyfus Affair. “This is a kangaroo court that acts according to public opinion, according to Israel's position the international media, according to a political decision by the UN General Assembly,” he said. “It is a kangaroo court that reminds me of the Dreyfus Affair.” Steinitz said that just as the French took a Jew, Dreyfus, and cast upon him the accusation of being a traitor because the public opinion and media in France were “comfortable with the idea of a Jewish traitor,” so too, he said, was the ICC now taking the Jewish state and investigating it. “This is a modern Dreyfus trial, not against the Jewish officer Dreyfus, but rather against the State of Israel defending itself,” he said. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 3)
3a) Charlie’s Moment: Use It or Lose ItWe have one chance to make national security work.
Aquestion on everyone’s mind now is: After the Charlie Hebdo marches end, after the speeches stop, then what? What will the West’s governments do to protect their people?
Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP, has now said—via a formal, 11-minute video—that it planned and financed the Charlie Hebdo massacre.
This AQAP video is properly understood as a recruitment commercial for the Yemen-based organization. The terror group is advertising itself to young recruits in Europe and America, essentially the way the Marine Corps does with TV commercials during football games. AQAP is looking for a few good murderers.
Al Qaeda is in competition with ISIS for market dominance in the terror space. Which means both groups are likely to compete on the basis of bragging rights for more acts of terror in Western cities, that is, more Charlie Hebdos will be planned and financed on both sides of the Atlantic.
So what are we going to do?
What will happen is this: François Hollande, David Cameron and Angela Merkel will convene meetings at large mahogany tables with their ministers and secretaries, and each of them will say out loud that more must be done.
These senior officials will go back to their departments, and they will hold the same meeting with another set of officials. This process—meet, announce, commit—will be repeated until the thousands of occupants in each office in every hallway in all the world’s relevant agencies have heard that something must be done.
It won’t be enough.
No amount of meetings, speeches or white papers on the terrorist threat, no matter how sincere, will change the fact that all these governments will hand responsibility for the execution of any antiterror strategies to their bureaucracies.
“Bureaucracy,” a satirist might point out, is a French word. “Bureau” means “desk.” In all the photos published of al Qaeda, Islamic State or any other terror groups, have you ever seen them sitting at desks?
The 9/11 Commission Report, published in 2004, said: “Imagination is not a gift usually associated with bureaucracies.” The 9/11 Report urged, however, that we should try to make the “exercise of imagination” routine inside the bureaucracies.
Instead, the French admitted after the Hebdo slaughter that their security services had dropped surveillance of the Kouachi brothers for lack of “resources.”
At the security meetings U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder attended in Paris the weekend of the marches, officials discussed a proposal that would require airlines to share the names of passengers with the governments of the European Union. But that plan needs to be adopted not only by the EU’s 28 member states but by the European Parliament, which has 751 elected members. The EU parliament’s civil-liberties committees voted the idea down in 2013.
Rather than rally and lead the U.S. security bureaucracies, the contribution of the Obama White House after Charlie Hebdo was to announce it would revive an already canceled summit meeting on something called Combating Violent Extremism, or CVE. A Politico story on the CVE summit said some specialists think the proposal “is distributed across too many government agencies, none of whom are accountable for its success.”
Meanwhile, the AQAP and ISIS recruits in Europe or the U.S. hop a plane to Turkey, transit to a terrorist training camp, pick up some killing techniques and fly back home to do it. Whatever else, their terror system is efficient.
Bureaucracies are unavoidable. But unless we focus on making our national-security bureaucracies function, as the 9/11 Commission described a decade ago, the West will slide into a depressing accommodation with Hebdo-like death. In turn that will produce—indeed, it already has produced—an increasingly intense, desperate, chaotic and demagogic politics in the liberal democracies. That, too, may be counted a victory for radical Islam.
Security bureaucracies fail when they are confused about their mission or lack confidence in the support of their political leadership, or even of the citizens of the country they are supposed to protect.
Do they have that support now? The millions in Paris who chanted, “Je suis Charlie” suggest the possibility of solidarity for an effective, coordinated response to Islamic terror.
Against that, though, one can cite the political rancor and doubts in 2013 over the U.S. National Security Agency’s metadata collections and the Feinstein committee’s recent jeremiad on the CIA’s enhanced interrogations after 9/11. Europe’s elites, meanwhile, allowed the idea of tolerance to be transformed over many years from a liberal value into a dangerous fetish.
Then when a Charlie Hebdo happens, the political and intellectual elites who were carping yesterday assume that their national-security bureaucracies will catch terrorists tomorrow. That is a false, dangerous assumption.
There is little mention here of the American president or his “no show” because it is pointless. He inhabits his own cloud. The Paris slaughter is a psychological turning point and strategic opportunity for the rest of us. Use it or lose it.
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I was sound asleep when the phone rang and so I cannot be absolutely sure the conversation was not a dream, but it seemed real enough.
“Hello,” the caller began. “My name is Mr. Mensch, I am president of the Parodists of the World, professional comedy writers, and we want to engage you in a suit against the administration for tortious interference with our livelihood.”
“What exactly are you alleging, I mean specifics?” I responded.
He then launched into a litany of grievances against the administration which the Parodists claimed had made it impossible for them to continue making a living.
“First, our country sent no one to the important anti-terrorism demonstration in Paris, and then there’s Valerie Jarrett calling the march against the slaughter of innocents in Paris a ‘Parade’, as if this were some sort of celebration.‘ Certainly We Would Have Loved To Participate In The Parade," But We "Got The Substance Right"’.” She said and then proceeded to claim that Holder couldn’t attend because he was in a very important terrorism conference at the time, forgetting that we knew everyone else at the conference made it to the march except Holder. So at the time of the march he was meeting with himself, it seems.”
“Well, that was silly, “I agreed. “And?” I waited for the next item.
“Then our secretary of state, John Kerry, whose entire life has been fashioned around his self-imagined superior diplomatic skills and international affairs expertise, shows up speaking execrable high school level French, accompanied by an aging ex-druggie who sings to the grieving French ‘You’ve Got a Friend’”
“I have to agree that was preposterous and really embarrassing. One wag suggested the French ought to respond by having Carly Simon sing, ‘You’re so Vain’ to the President and his Secretary of State. ‘Send in the Clowns’ comes to mind.”
“It’s all of a piece you know. It’s cutting substantially into our employment prospects. Let me read this to you,” Mensch said:
“Sounds like a bad joke to me,” I replied. “With the world’s attention focused on Moslem extremists. New jihadi groups showing up all through Europe, and Palestinians continuing to attack our ally Israel and we train and arm Palestinian guards to protect us in Jerusalem in violation of our agreement with Israel?”
“Even the liberal foreign policy pundit Leslie Gelb is concerned that the administration is absolutely clueless,” sputtered Mensch.“And he keeps releasing men from Gitmo who then return to fight against us. He released Mullah Abdul Rauf and immediately on his return he’s recruiting for the Taliban in Afghanistan.”
By this time Mensch was on a roll.
“The White House spokesman, Josh Earnest is tripping over his own tongue trying not to say the magic words ’Moslem extremist’. Listen to this circumlocution of his: ‘We want to describe exactly what happened. These are individuals who carried out an act of terrorism. And they later tried to justify that act of terrorism by invoking the religion of Islam and their own deviant view of it.’”
“Then there’s the nonsensical negotiations with Iran,” I interjected.
Mensch sputtered, “Thursday Obama announced he would not tighten sanctions on Iran which is violating the sanctions already in place because if we tighten the reins it will only drive them to war. Think about that! If we impose stricter sanctions on them, they’ll go to war, and if we don’t, they’ll go to war with nuclear weapons.”
“That’s nothing to joke about,” I said.
“Precisely! Obama‘s leaving us nothing to parody. We can’t make a living in comedy. He and his administration are themselves the joke. We might as well just send in news clippings to our editors as try to dream up anything wackier than what they’re doing. And, look, it’s not just foreign affairs. Take the Keystone Pipeline -- I mean it should be clear to everyone that we are hurting Iran and Russia financially each time we and others increase the supply of gas and oil on the world market and we need jobs badly, so why is he still sitting on this? George Will captured this bit of nuttiness,” he added and I heard the rustle of newspaper as he read this to me.
Actually, there no longer is any reason to think he has ever reasoned about this. He said he would not make up his mind until the Nebraska Supreme Court ruled. It ruled to permit construction, so he promptly vowed to veto authorization of construction.
The more Obama has talked about Keystone, the less economic understanding he has demonstrated. On Nov. 14, he said Keystone is merely about “providing the ability of Canada to pump their oil, send it through our land, down to the gulf, where it will be sold everywhere else. That doesn’t have an impact on U.S. gas prices.” By Dec. 19, someone with remarkable patience had explained to him that there is a world market price for oil, so he said, correctly, that Keystone would have a “nominal” impact on oil prices but then went on to disparage job creation by Keystone. He said it would create “a couple thousand” jobs (the State Department study says approximately 42,100 “direct, indirect, and induced”) and said, unintelligibly, “Those are temporary jobs until the construction actually happens.” Well.
“I understand your distress,” I sympathized, “but to make your case you have to prove that Obama intended to harm your business, and as Will notes it’s just that he isn’t that smart.”
“C’mon,” the parodist, countered, “Almost every professor in America supported and voted for him. Are you calling them all stupid?”
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