The Pen is Mightier Than The Sword!!!!!
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I spent most of my brief military service in France. In fact, I lived on the French economy in two lovely little towns within a short drive (20 KM) from Orleans the home of my base - Coligny Casern!.
In the 14 months I was there, I learned a great deal about French culture and though that was 60 years ago I believe it has relevance to this day. At the time I was in France there were not a lot of Muslims and the Algerian War was going on and the French were being mauled.
It was a sad time because most of the French youth were in service and away and the young French women were dating all the unmarried American military. A French Captain lived in our garage because my French landlord could get more rent from American military personnel. This Captain outranked me , had a wife and a young daughter and when I left for work in the morning I always saluted him if he was present.
The French are very proud and allowed their nation to be over-run by Muslims who they also failed to integrate into their society. It is my understanding that if a Muslim applies for a job posting his name will block them from getting employed. Unemployment is very high among the Muslim community in France so their youth are ripe for picking and many find the appeal of radical Islamists very attractive. In part, the French have brought the problem, they now face, on themselves.
Obviously, because a young person is unemployed is no excuse for them to blow up buildings and people but their treatment by the French and the fact that right wing French politicians are passing laws that are aimed at Muslims adds fuel to the fire.
The French , once they get to know you, are warm but also still remain aloof. They do feel their culture is superior. The Muslim problem they face has deep roots and bringing French Muslims into the tent is not something likely to happen. and the recent attack makes the potential more unlikely.
As for our president, his arrogance has been his undoing. He is so thin skinned he cannot receive advice without taking it as a slight and challenge and this makes him defensive and unyielding.
He also seems to always need an enemy to attack and he answers by setting up straw responses. This week his angst was directed at reporters and then Republicans. Why? Because the former asked him questions which he could not respond to without getting testy and the latter challenged him regarding his desire to bring in Syrian refugees because he was unable to convince those opposed to the idea, at this time, they cannot be properly vetted.
There is no greater evidence of Obama's arrogance than his statement that we can adequately investigate the background of Syrians refugees. This comment has been challenged by the head of the FBI and rejected by 32 governors.
Obama has conveniently ignored the fact that the Syrian problem is mostly because of the way he fumbled the ball years ago. The ISIS problem is an outgrowth of the vacuum he created by his precipitous withdrawal from Iraq after G W finally brought stability by his gutsy double down "Surge" taken on the advice of Gen. Petraeus.
Where was Obama when Coptics were being slaughtered? Obama's hands are not clean and his self righteous stance simply makes him smaller. What did he do to stabilize Libya? Why has he not given the Kurds the heavy weapons they need and have requested?
In a few days, France and now Russia have been more effective at attacking ISIS than Obama's restrained air offense lo these past months.
Obama has proven that talent does end with speechifying. Furthermore, a president must have the suitable temperament demanded by this awesome job. He fails on every count. He remain delusional and always was incapable.
The Islamist surge we face is unlike any we have confronted and total withdrawal will not cause ISIS to stop its attacks because we and Colonial Europe soiled their land with our footprints and they hold us accountable.
The next biggest threat to our nation's security is an arrogant, unyielding president.
I have just begun reading: " Lawrence In Arabia" by Scott Anderson (See 1, 1a, 1b, 1c, 1d, 1e and 1f below.)
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Europe should label terrorists, not tomatoes
By David Suissa (See 2 below.)
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This from a very dear friend of long standing and a fellow memo reader. (See 3 below.)
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This from a very dear friend of long standing and a fellow memo reader. (See 3 below.)
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Dick
1)--"East is East and West is West"
By Major General Jerry Curry, USA, Ret.
The great British poet Rudyard Kipling, understanding today's situation in Afghanistan better than our State Department when he wrote:
"I have eaten your bread and salt. I have drunk your water and wine. The deaths ye died I’ve watched beside and the lives ye led were mine."
There are two points the President and the Secretaries of State and Defense may want to keep in mind as they evaluate future problems in the Mid-East and how to successfully address them. Both are easiest illustrated by real life happenings.
Point 1
Many years ago I attended the Infantry officer Advanced Course at Fort Benning, Georgia. Probably ten percent of the students attending that ten month course of instruction were from foreign countries. For about half of the course my table-mate was an Arab. We studied together, completed homework assignments together, got to know each other's families and generally enjoyed each other's company. Part of that time we students were immersed in reading about, researching and discussing wars and problems of the Middle East. By this time my Arab classmate and I had, I thought, become close friends. A question popped into my mind and without evaluating it I said, "I have a question to ask you, but you may find it a little impertinent, or perhaps, offensive." "That's quite alright", he replied. "We know each other well enough to be honest with each other. So go ahead and ask your question." "Well," I began, "Each time you Arabs start a war with Israel, they beat your socks off. Why don't you learn your lesson and quit making war on them?"
The words hadn't passed my lips before I felt that I shouldn't have asked that particular question. But I was wrong. My Arab officer friend didn't get angry. He didn't even think before replying. "My dear friend," he said in his British accent, "You are absolutely right. Each time we attack the Israelis they whip us. But have you noticed that with each loss we get better. We get whipped not as badly as in the war before."
Then he got a faraway look in his eyes, pounded on the table and said, "Sometime in the next thousand years, we will win!" Up until then I’d never thought in terms of a thousand years, and I don't think I'm very good at it today. But for those formulating foreign and defense policy for the nation, it is worth making the effort. For it’s difficult to think in terms of the immediate future while negotiating with a nation whose leaders are thinking in terms of hundreds or thousands of years.
Point 2.
During the 1st Gulf War, US and Arab forces fought side by side and some of the officers became close friends. When the war ended in victory there was a celebration in the Officer's Club with congratulations all around. A lot of handshaking and hugging was going on. It was a time of displaying real brotherly love. Seeing this, one of the senior Arab generals felt the need to set the record straight. "Look," he said to a small cluster of American generals. "We’ve fought together and some of us have died together. I know you feel that makes us brothers. But that’s not the way it is in my world."
He looked around the circle making eye contact with all of them. "I don't want to see you hurt, so I need to share this with you. There will be no tomorrow for us jointly. No matter how much you have helped my country and you came and helped us when we desperately needed your help and no matter how friendly you feel toward us, we are still Muslims and you are still Christians. That means that in our eyes, we can never be brothers. I'm sorry, but to us, you will always be Infidels!"
Yes, we Infidels have liberated Iraq and Afghanistan, but we’ve not made their countries, nor their people, depositories of freedom and liberty. No matter how hard we work to rebuild their gov’ts, infrastructure, educational and medical institutions, and no matter how desperately they need our help-as the Arab general noted, we can never be brothers to each other.
Also, I learned what Kipling meant when he wrote: "East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet". He was pointing out to the western world that to Muslims, we Christians will always be Infidels!
1a)
In case you missed it yesterday, President Obama held a press conference during the G20 Summit in Turkey. Naturally, he was asked repeatedly by different reporters about the ISIS attack in Paris over the weekend and was pressed on his failing strategy to degrade and destroy the terror army.
Barack Obama launched a fierce attack on Republican candidates who argued that Muslim refugees must be kept out of America on Monday, saying: “We do not have religious tests for our compassion.”
Most of us may agree that the decision to invade Iraq was a mistake and there is much else to criticize about the Bush presidency. But when faced with the disaster that the insurgency created after Saddam’s fall, Bush did not pretend that all was well as Obama did today. Though he was no more eager to admit failure than anyone else, Bush did not double down on a strategy that was going nowhere. At the end of 2006 with the war at a stalemate, he faced up to facts. He sacked his secretary of defense and switched strategies allowing the troop surge that would during the course of the next two years turn the war to America’s favor. By the time that Obama came into office, he had inherited a stable situation that he could declare Iraq to be a war that had been won.
Obama threw away that victory by abandoning Iraq and opened the door for ISIS. Yet Democrats can argue, with at least a little justice that the whole thing is Bush’s fault for starting the Iraq war. The question of who is more to blame for the current mess is more one for the historians than policymakers. Instead, what we need to address today is whether the U.S. will persist in a half-hearted approach to fighting an enemy that is committed to expanding its caliphate in the Middle East while also bringing the war to the West as it just did in Paris.
“He did not take my warnings,” is how Obama expressed it, but when Obama had a golden opportunity to apply the “red lines” that he had imposed on President Assad on Syria’s use of chemical weapons, he backed down when challenged by the Syrian dictator’s use of these weapons. This was viewed by every player in the Middle East, including Iran and the regional terror organizations, as a further deterioration in
The Obama/Kerry nuclear deal with Tehran is looked on as paving the way to the bomb while gifting a radical and dangerous Iranian regime with $150 Billion for terrorism and military build-up. This is exasperating to America’s allies and a confidence boost to the malevolent actors in the region.
1a)
| NBC: Obama Sure Was Testy When Asked About His Failing ISIS Strategy, Eh? |
| Katie Pavlich |
In case you missed it yesterday, President Obama held a press conference during the G20 Summit in Turkey. Naturally, he was asked repeatedly by different reporters about the ISIS attack in Paris over the weekend and was pressed on his failing strategy to degrade and destroy the terror army.
Lets just say those questions didn't sit well with Obama, who argued his strategy is the one that will "ultimately work." Even NBC noticed Obama's anger...toward Republicans and reporters.
“I was struck by how defensive he was, how much he's paying attention to his political critics," NBC's Chuck Todd observed. "I was surprised by his tone, I was surprised by the defensiveness. He didn't channel what I think a lot of Americans are feeling right now, a little bit of anger, a little bit of resolve and a little bit of resiliency.”
“I go back to the tone of this press conference. Extremely defensive and almost not yet realizing that many of the reporters in that room, they're channeling the public in this case," Todd continued.
ABC's Jon Karl also noticed the President's defensive tone.
1b)What is ISIS? What does ISIS want? Paris Attacks 2015
After the deadly attacks on Paris, many simply want to know: What is ISIS? And, what does ISIS want?
As the deadly attacks in Paris made horrifically clear, the Islamic State group (ISIS) is determined to establish itself as the dominant jihadist movement capable of operating far beyond the limits of its self-declared "caliphate."
(ISIS stands for the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.)
Doing so achieves numerous aims for the group, not least of which could be winning it clout to attract even more recruits. Others may include sharpening divisions between Muslims and non-Muslims in Europe — and forcing the West into a difficult choice of either backing off or being drawn into what IS would see as a holy war in Syria and Iraq.
Coming soon after the Islamic State group claimed the downing of the Russian plane in Egypt and deadly suicide bombings in Lebanon and Turkey, the Paris attacks appear to signal a fundamental shift in strategy toward a more global approach that experts suggest is likely to intensify.
"The message is that this is an open war, not restricted to the conflict zone in Iraq and Syria," said Bilal Saab, a resident senior fellow for Middle East Security at Brent Scowcroft Center on International Security. Until now, the militant Sunni group had mostly focused on its internal rivals — Bashar Assad's regime and rival Muslim Shiites, which the group considers to be heretics.
The Islamic State group claimed that Friday night's attacks, during which scores of innocent victims where methodically gunned down in the heart of Paris, was a response to France's role in U.S.-led airstrikes against IS in both Iraq and Syria. The group has also said it was responsible for bringing down a Russian jetliner over Egypt's Sinai region earlier this month, describing it as retaliation for Russian airstrikes in Syria.
On Thursday, twin powerful suicide bombings tore through a crowded Shiite neighborhood of Beirut, killing more than 40 people. That same day, a suicide bomber tore through a Shiite memorial service in Baghdad, killing 21 people.
IS activity outside its "caliphate" hub in Sunni areas of Syria and Iraq is in itself not new as a concept. The group's affiliates have carried out attacks across the Middle East and north Africa and there have been attacks beyond the region that were blamed on IS loyalists. But such high-profile successive cases of mass murder abroad — and now in the heart of Europe — do suggest the nature and scale is changing.
As the group is secretive and elusive, it remains unclear clear why IS chose this particular moment to go global.
One possibility is that they have identified an inflection point in the Russian decision to join the fray in Syria two months ago. Although most of the Russian airstrikes have targeted other militants and appeared designed mainly to bolster the beleaguered forces of President Bashar Assad, Russian President Vladimir Putin says his fight is also with IS. After a year and a half of seemingly halfhearted and largely ineffectual coalition efforts against IS, the Russian intervention, to some in the region, does have the whiff of a game-changer.
Attacks abroad help spread the message that IS is a serious and effective alternative to al-Qaida, the organization that claimed the leadership of a global jihadi movement but has seemed in eclipse in recent years.
Hassan Hassan, an associate fellow at Chatham House in London and co-author of " ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror," said the Islamic State has a twin strategy of state-building within its self-declared caliphate and establishing itself as a "global leader of jihad" in place of al-Qaida. "They wanted to show they are the new al-Qaida ... that this is going to be the new organization that everyone has to be part of. The old organization is dying."
Hassan noted that until recently, many observers did not take IS seriously as a global threat. But their own statements make clear that their ambitions extend beyond the current limits of their "caliphate." The group has urged supporters around the world to carry out attacks in the West.
In September 2014, the Islamic State group's spokesman, Abu Mohammed al-Adnani, called for lone-wolf attacks on Westerners and any "disbelievers" among countries fighting IS — a term understood to reference not only non-Muslims but anyone who is not a devout Sunni. That statement's specific targets included any "disbelieving American or European — especially the spiteful and filthy French." Other statements have threatened to topple Rome — apparently related to the location of the Vatican.
"They always speak about Iraq and Syria as the beginning of something, but with an eye on the West and conquering Rome," Hassan said.
Online, almost all commentators referred to the new IS principle of retaliating promptly to what militants say are Western attacks against Muslims that that kill hundreds of people including women and children. That taps into frustration in the region over civilian deaths in the wars of recent years — a sentiment that exceeds the ranks of core supporters of jihadism.
A well-known IS ideologue, Gharib al-Ikhwan, commented IS now follows a new strategy: "Any killing in the Islamic nation will be met with an instant, decisive and horrible reaction."
He mentioned the downing the Russian plane over Sinai, suicide bombing in southern Beirut and Paris attacks. He also considered the shooting in Jordan's police training center, which killed five people including two Americans, as punishment for America -- though there has been no mention yet of the motive of the killing.
Hussein bin Mahmoud, a leading militant ideologue, mocked those who fight Muslims in the region yet "think that we don't have the right to kill them in a Paris theater, in train stations in London or Madrid or in a building in New York."
"Sorry Paris for those evil villains who killed peaceful and civilized Parisians while your beautiful planes and your modern bombs kill the wicked Arab children," he wrote in a piece carried by IS media arm al-Battar.
Observers assess that high-profile attacks involving mass murder of perceived enemies serves multiple goals for IS that go far beyond muscle-flexing.
The group may be looking to foment tensions over Islam in Europe, which it considers to be a recruiting ground. A Syrian passport was found next to the body of one of the attackers in Paris — prompting doubts from Syrians on social media who wondered why a man going to blow himself up would bother carrying ID.
IS may perhaps also be trying to make up perhaps for recent setbacks in Syria and Iraq, although an operation like the one in Paris attacks would have had to be planned in advance. In both Syria and Iraq, the group's territory has contracted slightly in recent months.
Dealing a double blow to the group this week, Iraqi Kurdish forces seized the strategic town of Sinjar in northern Iraq, and a coalition of Arab, Christian and Kurdish rebel factions recaptured another town from the militants across the border in Syria.
Also this month, Syrian troops working under the cover of Russian airstrikes broke a siege imposed by IS on the northern military air base of Kweiras since 2013, marking the first major achievement by Assad's forces since Russia began its airstrikes on Sept. 30.
Hassan said there has been a "saturation of fighting" in areas IS is able to control Iraq and Syria and it has limited space to expand there. That gives it incentive to dedicate more time and resources to operations abroad.
Saab pointed to another possible goal: To encourage the deployment of Western ground troops. Although many in the West argue that this would be the only way to dislodge them, many would welcome such an apocalyptic, man-to-man scenario. "ISIS would cherish that because it's the fight they've been seeking," he said.
Some have suggested that IS is worried about the recent diplomatic activity to end the Syria war, a conflict that has allowed the extremists to flourish.
Muwaffak al-Rubaie, Iraq's former national security adviser, said the expansion of IS is because of the lack of effective response by the West. "If we don't have a comprehensive multi-faceted plan to combat this threat then we will see more of these," he said.
Experts said the group is now learning how to bypass various international security measures and expect such attacks to increase dramatically.
"We will see their tactics improving and their targets getting bigger. They see 9/11 as the example," said Hisham al-Hashimi, a Baghdad-based expert on IS. "They want an attack that is so dramatic and large scale that it impacts every area of life," he added.
"What we see in Paris is really a turning point," Hassan said. "I think it's just the beginning. ... The worst is still to come in the sophistication of ISIS."
1c)
Obama sees no difference between Christian and Islamic refugees
Barack Obama launched a fierce attack on Republican candidates who argued that Muslim refugees must be kept out of America on Monday, saying: “We do not have religious tests for our compassion.”
The proposals that Christians should be prioritized as refugees from Syria were shameful and un-American, the president told a G20 press conference in southern Turkey.
“When I hear political leaders suggesting that there should be a religious test for admitting which person fleeing which country,” Obama said, “when some of these folks themselves come from other countries, that’s shameful.
“That’s not America. That’s not who we are. We don’t have religious tests to our compassion.”
Republicans, including former Florida governor Jeb Bush and Texas senator Ted Cruz, called at the weekend for Christians to be given priority in the Syrian refugee crisis, following the attacks in Paris on Friday that killed 129 people and were claimed by the Islamic State group.
Obama did not name any candidates in his appearance on Monday in Turkey.
“We should focus our efforts as it relates to refugees on the Christians that are being slaughtered,” Bush, the brother of former president George W Bush and the son of former president George HW Bush, said on Sunday in an appearance on CNN. “I think our focus ought to be on the Christians who have no place in Syria any more.”
“There is no meaningful risk of Christians committing acts of terror,” Cruz, whose father arrived in the United States via Canada as a refugee from Cuba, said in a speech in South Carolina on Sunday. “But it is precisely the Obama administration’s unwillingness to recognize that or ask those questions that makes them so unable to fight this enemy. Because they pretend as if there is no religious aspect to this.”
Addressing a ballroom full of the international press in Turkey, Obama argued sharply that there should be no religious aspect to US policy on admitting refugees.
“I think it is very important for us right now, particularly those who are in leadership, particularly those who have a platform and can be heard, not to fall into that trap,” Obama said. “Not to feed that dark impulse inside of us.
“I have a lot of disagreements with George W Bush on policy. But I was very proud after 9/11, when he was very adamant and clear that this is not a war on Islam.
“And the notion that some of those who have taken on leadership in his party would ignore all of that – that’s not who we are. On this, they should follow his example. It’s the right one. It’s the right impulse, it’s the better impulse.”
Florida senator and presidential hopeful Marco Rubio, whose parents emigrated from Cuba, also departed from George W Bush’s framework in a video released by his campaign after the Paris attacks. “This is not a grievance-based conflict,” Rubio said. “This is a clash of civilizations. And either they win, or we win.”
Obama implied that Republicans had lost sight of Christian teaching, by recalling an address to a joint session of Congress earlier this year by Pope Francis.
“When Pope Francis came to visit … he didn’t just speak about Christians who were being persecuted,” Obama said. “He said protect people who are vulnerable.
“The people who are fleeing Syria are the most harmed by terrorists, they are the most vulnerable as a consequence of civil war and strife.”
In a news conference in Nevada following the president’s remarks, Republican presidential hopeful Ben Carson said that Syrian refugees being resettled in the United States should be closely monitored.
“Congress, I think, should defund all the programs that allow these people to be brought here immediately, today,” Carson added, according to Reuters.
Praising the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, for showing compassion and leadership on the issue of refugees, Obama urged the world to remember the biggest victims of violence in Syria were Muslims.
Obama said: “The people who are fleeing Syria are the most harmed by terrorism. They are the most vulnerable as a consequence of civil war and strife. They are parents. They are children. They are orphans and it is very important … that we do not close our hearts to these victims of such violence and somehow start equating the issue of refugees with the issue of terrorism.”
In September, Obama directed his administration to prepare to accept 10,000 new refugees from Syria in the next fiscal year. An estimated half a million refugees from the Syrian conflict have arrived in Europe this year, about 51% of them women and children.
“It is good to remember that the United States does not have a religious test, and we are a nation of many people of many faiths,” Obama concluded. “Those are the universal values that we stand for.”
Copyright © 2015 theguardian.com. All rights reserved.
1d)
How Obama Became Worse Than Bush
At a press conference held today in Turkey where he is attending the Group of 20 summit, President Obama was not in a mood to answer questions about the efficacy of his anti-terrorism strategy. Though the very day that Obama had said ISIS was “contained,” the group pulled off a series of coordinated terror attacks in Paris that took the lives of 129 people, in his first press availability since then the president showed no signs of being chastened by events. If anything, he was annoyed. Annoyed at ISIS for demonstrating how ineffectual his efforts at defeating them have been. And he was clearly annoyed, as he often is when pressed about his failures, at the press for continuing to probe for any sign that he is willing to re-evaluate his approach to the issue.
The question about what is the smartest way to respond to the ISIS overseas offensive as well as how to rout them out of their stronghold in Iraq and Syria that is the size of a small country is both difficult and contentious. But the main takeaway from Obama’s presser is not so much that he is unwilling to consider alternatives to an American strategy that offers little hope of defeating ISIS. Just as important is his dogged refusal to admit that he has failed in spite of the manifest evidence that American policy is an ongoing disaster. That’s a terrible failing in any man, let alone a commander-in-chief. But it is particularly bad for Obama because, at least when viewed from this perspective, because it proves that the keynote of his entire presidency is a falsehood. Throughout the last seven years, Democrats have justified everything that Obama has done, good or bad, on the basis of the contrast with the supposedly failed administration of George W. Bush.
The president continued to insist today that his effort to “degrade and destroy” ISIS is working. While conceding that the Paris attacks were a “terrible and sickening setback,” he claims, “we have the right strategy and we’re going to see it through.”
But you don’t have to be a security expert to understand that the U.S. doesn’t have the right strategy. In the 15 months since the president was forced to declare his intention to fight ISIS, the group has more than held its own in the field in Iraq and Syria while repeatedly demonstrating the ability to inflict terror on Western targets. Wars are either being won or lost, and ISIS’s cadres can’t be blamed for thinking that they are currently winning. Rather than inspiring Americans to do what is necessary to achieve victory, Obama’s stand projects both weakness and defeatism to a world that has a right to look to the United States for leadership.
Obama came into office determined never to fight any more wars in the Middle East and that has colored his desultory effort against ISIS. The pinprick bombing attacks and the resolute refusal to apply the sort of massive force that only the U.S. can deploy makes it clear that the president’s only real objective is to maintain the status quo until he is safely out of office. That’s why the president sees the Paris attacks, criticism from Republican opponents and questions from the press about the obvious disconnect between his rhetoric and reality, as annoyances rather than a potent challenge to reassess his preconceptions.
For all of his manifold talents, President Obama’s chief shortcoming remains a dogged refusal to ever consider the possibility that he might be mistaken. To an objective observer, the course of the war in Iraq and Syria, as well as the spread of Islamist terror on his watch, would at the very least call into question the president’s strategy. Yet everything that has happened in the last seven years has only served to deepen Obama’s conviction that he was right about everything in the first place. As much as it is hard for Bush to shake the reputation of a failed president, he had one characteristic that Obama lacks: the ability to admit error and change his mind to adapt to circumstances. Unless President Obama stops sniping at the press and develops the ability to emulate Bush in that respect, ISIS will continue to win placing the entire world and not just Iraq and Syria in jeopardy. That he is willing to stick to his preconceptions about the war in spite of the mounting evidence that he is not living up to his responsibilities to the American people is nothing short of a disgrace.
It is President Obama’s great misfortune that the wars he wanted so much to end cannot be concluded by an executive order. The enemy has its own ideas and they have prospered as his focus abroad has been on appeasing Iran and picking fights with Israel. Like it or not, he must now concentrate on the war on ISIS that is obviously going badly. But if he persists in conducting a phony war against ISIS, the world that his successor will inherit will be far less safe than the one he was handed by Bush.
1e)
The Islamist Tantrum
People are dead in Paris because Europe decided to make a fetish of its tolerance for intolerance.
by Bret Stephens
We live in the age of the sanctified tantrum—the political and religious furies we dare not name or shame, much less confront.
Students bully college administrators with contrived political demands. The administrators plead they can do better, then capitulate. Incompetent writers pen trite racial screeds aimed at the very society that lifts them above their ability. They are hailed as geniuses. Donald Trump’s bid for the Republican presidential nomination epitomizes the politics of the tantrum. He’s angry as hell, and so is his base. We’re supposed to respect this.
And then there is the tantrum of Islam, another eruption of rage that feeds off our astonishing willingness to indulge it.
Before Friday’s carnage in the City of Light, the world was treated to the hideous spectacle of Palestinians knifing Jews in Israel. The supposed motive of these stabbings was a rumor among Palestinians—fanned by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas—that the Israeli government intended to allow Jews to pray on the Temple Mount.
This was a story the Israeli government adamantly denied and every serious person knew was false. Yet no senior Western leader dared call out Mr. Abbas to correct the record. Palestinian tantrums are sanctified tantrums. The violence they breed might be condemned, but the narrative on which they rest has the status of holy writ. It is no more to be questioned than the Quran is to be burned.
“To counteract the radicalization [in Europe],” Swedish Foreign Minister Margot Wallström said in a televised interview only hours after the Paris attacks, “we must go back to the situation such as the one in the Middle East in which . . . the Palestinians see that there is no future; we must either accept a desperate situation or resort to violence.”
Here was the sanctified tantrum par excellence: People murder and maim because they have been put (by Israel) to a bleak choice. Rage is not to be condemned but understood, mitigated and mollified.
Later that day, at the Democratic debate, Hillary Clinton and the two noncontenders for the Democratic presidential nomination each refused to use the term “radical Islam” in referring to the ideological force behind the Paris killings. The furthest Mrs. Clinton would go to naming the enemy was to say “you can talk about Islamists who also are clearly jihadists.”
Apparently, however, you cannot mention Islamists who are not yet “clearly jihadists,” lest some other invisible line be transgressed. To do so might set off another tantrum among people who tend toward violence whenever they are accused of violent tendencies.
Nowhere are Islamist tantrums so richly indulged as in Europe.
Take the Brussels neighborhood of Molenbeek, which turns out to have been home to at least one mastermind of Friday’s attacks. “In Molenbeek, the newspaper Het Volk published a study of the local Muslim population,” I noted in this column in August 2006. “The editor, Gunther Vanpraet, described the commune as a ‘breeding ground for thousands of Jihad candidates.’ ”
For many years the mayor of Molenbeek was a man named Philippe Moureaux, a Socialist best known as the author of the 1981 Law Against Racism and Xenophobia. In 2004 he helped pass a law allowing noncitizens to vote in municipal elections. Roughly a quarter of Molenbeek’s 96,000 residents are not Belgian citizens.
Mr. Moureaux was also instrumental in engineering the political marriage of his Socialist Party with Muslim arrivals from Turkey and North Africa—a Europe-wide phenomenon that accounts for left-wing sympathies for Islamists whose views on subjects such as gay rights or the equality of women are less than progressive.
It was under Mr. Moureaux’s indulgent eye that Molenbeek became what it is. For years, a group called Sharia4Belgium—no prizes for guessing its goals—was active in the neighborhood until a Belgian judge shut it down in February. The Muslim fanatic who last year opened fire on the Jewish museum in Brussels, killing four, also once lived in Molenbeek, as had the man who tried to open fire on a high-speed train in August. “I notice that each time [there is a jihadist attack] there is a link with Molenbeek,” Charles Michel, Belgium’s prime minister, admitted Sunday. Nice of him to connect the dots.
I lived near Molenbeek for two years when I worked for this newspaper’s European edition and used to jog along the canal that cuts through the neighborhood. It took no special insight to see what was likely to come out of the place.
Now 129 people are dead in Paris because Europe decided to make a fetish of its tolerance for intolerance and allow the religious distempers of its Islamist communities to fester over many years. That’s what happens when you sanctify political tantrums, explain and appease them, refuse to name them, try to look away.
1f)
By Cathy Burke
Mitt Romney is calling for the West to stop the "insanity" of accepting refugees from the Middle East — particularly young men — and for the United States to wage war on the Islamic State to "eradicate it once and for all."
In a commentary in The Washington Post, the former governor of Massachusetts charges ISIS is "a cancer that metastasized" on President Barack Obama's watch.
"We must wage the war to defeat the enemy, not merely to harass it," Romney writes.
"For over a year, the president has clung to the hope that an air campaign is sufficient. It demonstrably is not. He must call in the best military minds from the United States and NATO, actually listen to what they have to say and finally construct a comprehensive strategy that integrates our effort with the Kurds, Turks, Saudis, Egyptians and Jordanians."
But in the meantime, he argues, the flood of refugees from the war-torn Middle East must be stemmed.
"The West must stop the insanity of welcoming hundreds of thousands of people from the Middle East without knowing who exactly they are," he writes. "Women, children and the elderly, perhaps, but not thousands upon thousands of single young men."
The call comes as authorities confirm the holder of a Syrian passport found near the body of one of the Paris gunmen in the Friday night attacks in the city was registered as a refugee in several European countries last month.
"Only America can lead this war, and that leadership means being willing to devote whatever resources are required to win — even boots on the ground," Romney writes.
"We have the best-equipped and most dedicated military for good reason. The president must stop trying to placate his political base by saying what he won't do and tell Americans what he will do. We must do what it takes."
Romney also blasted Obama's pre-strike assertion, that the advance of the jihadists had been "contained," as clearly proven wrong.
"It's time the president stopped hedging and took meaningful steps to defend us and our allies," he writes, adding it's time to "secure the safety of our homeland and preserve our democratic values. Now is the time, not merely to contain the Islamic State, but to eradicate it once and for all."
Romney says the job must begin "by identifying the enemy."
"We will not defeat it if we are afraid to call it by its name," he writes. "These heinous acts of terror are waged by radical Islamists: jihadists. And the Islamic State represents the branch of this ideology that currently poses the greatest threat. Islam is not the enemy, but the enemy lives within Islam. Accordingly, the broader Islamic world will play a critical role in this war."
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Romney: Stop 'Insanity' of Welcoming Refugees
By Cathy Burke
Mitt Romney is calling for the West to stop the "insanity" of accepting refugees from the Middle East — particularly young men — and for the United States to wage war on the Islamic State to "eradicate it once and for all."
In a commentary in The Washington Post, the former governor of Massachusetts charges ISIS is "a cancer that metastasized" on President Barack Obama's watch.
"We must wage the war to defeat the enemy, not merely to harass it," Romney writes.
"For over a year, the president has clung to the hope that an air campaign is sufficient. It demonstrably is not. He must call in the best military minds from the United States and NATO, actually listen to what they have to say and finally construct a comprehensive strategy that integrates our effort with the Kurds, Turks, Saudis, Egyptians and Jordanians."
But in the meantime, he argues, the flood of refugees from the war-torn Middle East must be stemmed.
"The West must stop the insanity of welcoming hundreds of thousands of people from the Middle East without knowing who exactly they are," he writes. "Women, children and the elderly, perhaps, but not thousands upon thousands of single young men."
The call comes as authorities confirm the holder of a Syrian passport found near the body of one of the Paris gunmen in the Friday night attacks in the city was registered as a refugee in several European countries last month.
"Only America can lead this war, and that leadership means being willing to devote whatever resources are required to win — even boots on the ground," Romney writes.
Romney also blasted Obama's pre-strike assertion, that the advance of the jihadists had been "contained," as clearly proven wrong.
"It's time the president stopped hedging and took meaningful steps to defend us and our allies," he writes, adding it's time to "secure the safety of our homeland and preserve our democratic values. Now is the time, not merely to contain the Islamic State, but to eradicate it once and for all."
Romney says the job must begin "by identifying the enemy."
"We will not defeat it if we are afraid to call it by its name," he writes. "These heinous acts of terror are waged by radical Islamists: jihadists. And the Islamic State represents the branch of this ideology that currently poses the greatest threat. Islam is not the enemy, but the enemy lives within Islam. Accordingly, the broader Islamic world will play a critical role in this war."
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Op-Ed: J'accuse Obama
Obama is a leftist who is out of synch with harsh reality. World chaos can be traced to his feckless foreign policy.
By Barry Shaw
Historically, the President of the United States wears the title “leader of the free world.”
Obama, in his presidency, has relinquished that role almost gleefully. As a result, the world is a far more dangerous place.
Charles Crawford, former British ambassador to Sarajavo, Belgrade and Warsaw, said in an articlein PunditWire on 16 June, 2013, that Obama’s Cairo speech “set the stage for Egypt’s disaster,”meaning the overthrow of President Mubarak and the election of the Muslim Brotherhood.
President Obama is the personification of leftist progressive ideology totally out of step with harsh reality. It is a faulted policy of denial, of cover up. Making nice doesn’t make it nice.
President George Bush said in the aftermath of 9/11 that “if America shows weakness and uncertainty there will be a drift towards tragedy. This will not happen on my watch.” It did happen on Obama’s watch.
What is happening with ISIS in Syria and Iraq, with the spread of Hezbollah, with the confidence of Hamas and the rejection of Israel by the Palestinian Authority, are all consequences of Obama’s feckless foreign policy.
Obama called ISIS “a JV team” earlier this year. As we see the spread of ISIS into Africa and Europe, Iran celebrating the death of sanctions and boasting about their intercontinental ballistic developments, and Russia encroaching into the Ukraine and picking up the Syrian thread dropped by Obama, it appears to an outside observer that it is the Obama Administration that is the JV team.
Let me make it clear to Americans. What you see in Syria, Iraq, with Russia and Iran are not local games. This violence gets exported to Western soft targets as it was in Paris and, to its enemies, America is the grand prize, and the enemy is playing the long game.
In his own JV moment, Secretary of State, John Kerry, said of the alleged death of ISIS English speaking beheader, known as Jihadi John, “with the death of Jihadi John we are winning and ISIS is losing.”
The slaughter of over a hundred people in Paris just two days later emphasized the pathetic dream world of the US Administration.
The denial that America and the West are at war with Islamic jihad is the prime cause of the weakness of confronting a brutal and determined enemy with a global goal of Shariah law and an Islamic caliphate. This war in nothing new, as a forgotten chapter in American history has been retold in
Brian Kilmeade’s new book “Thomas Jefferson and the Tripoli Pirates”which reminds all who will listen that America waged a war against jihad two hundred years ago and that war, despite the White Housewhitewash, is being waged even more strongly today.
Brian Kilmeade’s new book “Thomas Jefferson and the Tripoli Pirates”which reminds all who will listen that America waged a war against jihad two hundred years ago and that war, despite the White Housewhitewash, is being waged even more strongly today.
When Putin announced he was sending troops and equipment to back up Syria’s Assad, he did it the day after he met with Obama – without telling him in advance that this was his operational plan. At a town hall meeting at Fort Meade, Maryland, on September 11, 2015, Obama talked of a conversation he had with Putin “ four or five years before” in which he advised the Russian leader that is was wrong to provide financial support and arms to Assad. He complained that Putin didn’t listen to him.
“He did not take my warnings,” is how Obama expressed it, but when Obama had a golden opportunity to apply the “red lines” that he had imposed on President Assad on Syria’s use of chemical weapons, he backed down when challenged by the Syrian dictator’s use of these weapons. This was viewed by every player in the Middle East, including Iran and the regional terror organizations, as a further deterioration in
American strength and a lack of political will to stand by its word.
The Obama/Kerry nuclear deal with Tehran is looked on as paving the way to the bomb while gifting a radical and dangerous Iranian regime with $150 Billion for terrorism and military build-up. This is exasperating to America’s allies and a confidence boost to the malevolent actors in the region.
To be sure, the US has played a very short losing game in its fight against ISIS. After stubbornly refusing to “put boots on the ground” in Syria, Obama recently agreed to allow fifty soldiers to play an advisory role there in a weak effort to put facts on the ground. To military and security experts this number is a joke. It’s hardly a number that would make ISIS quiver in fear.
When Israel was forced to respond to thousands of missiles and rockets fired by Hamas last year, they flew 5500 air sorties over Gaza during the fifty five days of the conflict. US planes have barely flown 1500 sorties in over a year against ISIS. This, to any military chief, is not serious.
With Russia and Iran displaying muscle, with nefarious Islamic terror armies marching over the Middle East, Africa, Yemen, and attacking and killing European and American targets, the United States and the world is in worse shape today than it was after 9/11.
America has had the blessing of time, that is, has not suffered the same slaughter we have seen in Paris. It is time to kick political correctness into touch and call it for what it is.
It is certain that what we saw in the French capital is coming to America. It is predictable. You do not deflect the aims of the enemy by being nice. You do not stop them by surrendering to their demands.
America withdrew from Iraq, and ISIS rolled in to grab major tracts of territory, stole assets, killed, raped, and turned hundreds into slaves. America visibly refused to meddle in Syria, and ISIS lay down its headquarters there to metastasize into a global Islamic network of evil and death.
France’s President Hollande said, “We will lead a war without pity.” This is the new PC for democracy. It’s a pity he said it the day after Paris and not the months before.
It is a pity that the American president hasn’t said it at all.
Barry Shaw is a Senior Associate at the Israeli Institute for Strategic Studies.
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2) Europe should label terrorists, not tomatoes
On Nov. 11, while Islamic terrorists were preparing for their Friday night massacre in Paris that would leave 129 people dead and 352 injured, one of the big news items was the European initiative to put special labels on Israeli goods that originate from disputed Israeli-occupied territory.
By David Suissa
On Nov. 11, while Islamic terrorists were preparing for their Friday night massacre in Paris that would leave 129 people dead and 352 injured, one of the big news items was the European initiative to put special labels on Israeli goods that originate from disputed Israeli-occupied territory.
As the European Commission explained in a fact sheet, this is not new legislation but a clarification of existing legislation dating back to 2012. In other words, the European obsession with singling out Israel for punishment didn't just start last week. It's been an ongoing affair.
While Islamic terrorists have been scheming to terrorize the European continent, bigwigs in Europe have been laboring over how to "protect" European consumers from Israeli goods produced in the West Bank, such as vegetables, olive oil, honey, eggs, poultry, wine, organic products and cosmetics.
Well, that ought to keep Europeans safe!
As much as I'm disgusted by the sight of religious fanatics rampaging through Paris murdering people who just want to enjoy life, these murderers are simply doing what they believe their prophet or God wants them to do. It may violate every standard of decency known to humanity, but that's what fanatics do.
Author and Islam critic Ayaan Hirsi Ali calls this group of Muslim fundamentalists "Medina Muslims," in that they see the forcible imposition of sharia as their religious duty, following the example of the Prophet Mohammed when he was based in Medina. As she wrote recently in Foreign Policy, this group argues for "an Islam largely or completely unchanged from its original seventh-century version and take it as a requirement of their faith that they impose it on everyone else."
Now, you can be repulsed by this religious ideology. You can believe it is vile, indecent and inhuman. But you can't tell me it's not a religious ideology. You can't tell me that the fanatics of ISIS and other radical Islamic groups are fighting for human rights, jobs and better health care.
The one European leader who seems to have understood this is British Prime Minister David Cameron, who said in an address last July: "What we are fighting, in Islamic extremism, is an ideology. It is an extreme doctrine. And like any extreme doctrine, it is subversive. At its furthest end it seeks to destroy nation-states to invent its own barbaric realm."
So, while religious fanatics have an ideological explanation for their barbaric acts, what is the explanation for those self-righteous European bureaucrats who spend so much of their time maligning Israel?
Now that they've just witnessed the barbarians crashing the gates of the City of Lights, will their priorities finally change? Or will they continue to single out Israel and treat the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as the mother of all global conflicts -- as if its resolution could somehow stop the rampant Islamic violence now threatening Europe and much of the world?
I wonder if those European honchos ever ask themselves what kind of message they are sending to terrorists when they labor so publicly over the labeling of Israeli tomatoes. That they mean business in their fight against terror?
Here's my suggestion for all European leaders who really do mean business in this war against religious fanaticism: Stop your obsession with Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And stop thinking that beating up Israel in public will win you Muslim friends. It won't, especially not with those who are out to kill.
Yes, Israel needs to resolve its conflict with the Palestinians -- for its own sake. The majority of Israelis would love nothing better than to get a divorce from the Palestinians. They've seen how the word "occupation" has become a big, sharp blade that enemies conveniently use to bludgeon the Jewish state. At the same time, they worry that if Israel leaves the West Bank, that blade would only get bigger and sharper as groups like ISIS and Hamas take over and unleash barbarians of their own. For now, Israel is stuck, and its enemies know it.
In any event, regardless of its challenges and problems, Israel should be the least of Europe's concerns. For one thing, you don't hear reports of Israeli terrorists and refugees trying to enter Europe to wreak havoc on European cities. Maybe Israeli tourists and high tech firms, but no murderers.
If the leaders of Europe are serious about winning this war, they should ask Israel to become its #1 partner in fighting the scourge of Islamic terror. God knows the Jewish state has plenty of experience in this area.
But first, Europe will need a lesson in the priorities of labeling. Label the terrorists, yes. Label their ideology, yes. Label the allies who can help you fight them, yes.
Just stop labeling Israeli tomatoes.
David Suissa is President of Tribe Media Corp and Jewish Journal. He can be reached atdavids@jewishjournal.com.
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(Newsweek Columnist - Opinion Writer)
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