And my grandchildren bought home baked cookies to school which were not approved by OSHA, The CDC, The FBI and The EPA. They are now suspended until the government checks my daughter's kitchen! Meanwhile several thousand Syrian refugees entered Europe carrying food and weapons.
Comment from a wonderful and dear friend and fellow memo reader. "
Safe zones.....the answer!!!! I have no patience with my "friends" that are Liberals. Their comments on Facebook are so disingenuous. They live in their ivory castles, in many cases, two of them, and suggest to others that we are all un-christian (whoops....un-Jewish, also), for our belief that we should not bring in more Syrians at this time; so typically Kennedy Liberals."
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Orwell's "1984" should be required reading in order to apply for admission to college!
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And so it goes! (See 1 and 1a below.)
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Apparently, Putin , unlike Obama, is not afraid of putting boots on the ground in Syria. (See 2 below.)
ISIS renamed finally to reflect Obama's disconnection with reality. (See 2a below.)
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Dick
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Sorry people!
I know it's sensitive but I can't hold back anymore!
The terror attack this evening in Paris was horrible! Families have been destroyed and the devastation is horrific! I know how they feel, anyone who lives in Israel knows what it feels like to live through terror attacks.
The French government has been condemning Israel at every chance they had! While we are sending our condolences and support to France, they didn't even bother to cover the attack on Friday when a Jewish father and son were gunned down by Muslim terrorists! France took Hamas off the terrorist list and instead started marking goods produced by Jews in Judea and Samaria!
With all due respect, I will not post a French flag on my profile and quite frankly I don't understand why anyone would! It is the French government who has been condemning Israel for fighting the same radical Islamic organizations that attacked Paris!
Some may call me insensitive, I agree! it is exactly this insensitivity that is the reason I am NOT posting a French flag on my feed!
What do you call the reactions (or the lack of) from the French government when Israel has been under attack day in and day out?! Should I call for restraint? Should I give credit to the claims ISIS is using to justify this terror attack?
So instead of putting a French flag up, I will raise the Israeli one. Why? Because Israel warned France and the rest of the world of the effect of radical Islam! We tried to explain who and what we are fighting but they would not listen!
We told them this was not about land or occupation but they didn't listen! They pressured us to make deals with those who shoot us, blow us up and stab us and when we refuse to do so, they condemn us!
We warned them that this is about a radical culture that has no respect for life, but they ignored us and shook their finger at us for fighting the same radical Islamic ideology that attacked Paris. Only we fight it every day!
So here is the Israeli flag!
The one that is fighting radical Islamic terror every day!
The flag that is condemned and yelled at from every international podium for fighting the same evil that murdered over 130 of French innocent civilians.
1a)
Uncertain Leadership in Perilous Times
Paris is different, but the president can’t seem to change.
By Peggy Noonan
After great pain, a formal feeling comes—
The nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs—
I
n the days after Paris Emily Dickinson’s poem kept ringing through my mind as I tried to figure out what I felt—and, surprisingly, didn’t feel. I did not, as the facts emerged and the story took its full size, feel surprised. Nor did I feel swept by emotion, as I had in the past. The sentimental tweeting of that great moment in “Casablanca” when they stand to sing “La Marseilles” left me unmoved. I didn’t feel anger, really. I felt grave, as if something huge and terrible had shifted and come closer. Did you feel this too?
After the pain of previous terror incidents, from 9/11 straight through to Madrid 2004 (train bombings, 191 dead), London 2005 (suicide bombers, 52 dead) and Paris 10 months ago (shootings, 17 dead), the focus was always on the question: What will the leaders—the political and policy elite—think? This attack immediately carried a different question: What will the people think, Mr. and Mrs. Europe on the street, Mom and Pop watching in America? What are the thoughts and conclusions of normal people who are not blinkered by status, who can see things clear?
I feel certain that in the days after the attack people were thinking: This isn’t going to stop. These primitive, ferocious young men will not stop until we stop them. The question is how. That’s the only discussion.
Madrid and London took place during the height of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and could be taken as responses to Western actions. The Charlie Hebdo massacre was in its way a story about radical Islamic antipathy to the rough Western culture of free speech. But last week’s Paris attack was different. It was about radical, violent Islam’s hatred of the West and desire to kill and terrorize its people. They will not be appeased; we won’t talk them out of it at a negotiating table or by pulling out of Iraq or staying out of Syria. They will have their caliphate, and they will hit Europe again, as they will surely hit us again, to get it.
So again, the only question: What to do?
On this issue the American president is, amazingly, barely relevant. The leaders and people of Europe and America will not be looking to him for wisdom, will, insight or resolve. No commander in chief of the U.S. armed forces can be wholly irrelevant, but to the extent one can be, Mr. Obama is. He has misjudged ISIS from the beginning—they were not, actually, the junior varsity—to the end. He claimed last week, to George Stephanopoulos, that ISIS has been “contained.” “I don’t think they’re gaining strength,” he said just before Paris blew.
After the attacks Mr. Obama went on TV, apparently to comfort us and remind us it’s OK, he’s in charge. He prattled on about violence being at odds with “universal values.” He proceeded as if unaware that there are no actually universal values, that right now the values of the West and radical Islam are clashing, violently, and we have to face it. The mainstream press saw right through him. At the news conference, CNN’s Jim Acosta referred to the “frustration” of “a lot of Americans,” who wonder: “Why can’t we take out these bastards?” The president sighed and talked down to him—to us. He has a strategy and it’s the right one and it’s sad you can’t see it.
Let him prattle on about climate change as the great threat of our time.
All he can do at this point is troll the GOP with the mischief of his refugee program. If he can’t work up a passion about radical Islamic violence, at least he can tie the Republicans in knots over whether they’re heartless bigots who want to prevent widows and children from taking refuge from the Syrian civil war.
This is a poor prioritizing of what faces us. The public is appropriately alarmed about exactly who we might be letting in. It would be easy, and commonsensical, to follow their prompting and pause the refugee program, figure out how to screen those seeking entrance more carefully, and let in only the peaceable. If that takes time, it takes time.
If Mr. Obama had wisdom as opposed to pride and a desire to smack around the GOP—a visit to Capitol Hill this week showed me he’s thinking a lot more about them than they are about him—he would recognize the refugee issue as a distraction from the most urgent priorities.
Those would include planning for and agreeing on how to deal with both the reality and the aftermath of a parade of possible horribles on which we should once again concentrate—anything from shootings in Times Square to suicide bombings in Washington to a biological device in, say, Greeley, Colo. It would include planning for any military activity that might likely follow such an event or events.
If what we are experiencing now results in an epic collision, are we ready?
Deeper attention now will go to candidates for the presidency. Hillary Clinton Thursday delivered a speech on her strategy to face the current crisis; it sounded a lot like Mr. Obama’s strategy, whatever that is.
But Paris should have impact on the Republican debate that has cropped up the past month about defense policy. It’s been approached as a question of spending. That may quickly come to look like the wrong approach.
Exactly what is needed now in terms of America’s defense, what is needed to deal with a possible parade of horribles? What might be needed down the road? There is a possible grim short term, and a possible grim long term. Who is thinking all this through? Are they getting the resources they need?
The Director of the FBI, James Comey, doesn’t feel he has the manpower to do what needs to be done to find and track bad guys.
What’s going on with intelligence, what’s their need?
There will be powerful public support now for spending—wisely, discerningly—whatever is needed for the short term, and a possible long term.
Finally, continued travels through the country show me that people continue to miss Ronald Reagan’s strength and certitude. In interviews and question-and-answer sessions, people often refer to Reagan’s “optimism.” That was his power, they say—he was optimistic.
No, I say, that wasn’t his power and isn’t what you miss. Reagan’s power was that he was confident. He was confident that whatever the problem—the economy, the Soviets, the million others—he could meet it, the American people could meet it, and our system could meet it. The people saw his confidence, and it allowed them to feel optimistic. And get the job done.
What people hunger for now from their leaders is an air of shown and felt confidence: I can do this. We can do it.
Who will provide that? Where will it come from? Isn’t it part of what we need in the next president?
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| Russian T-90A main battle tanks drive during the Victory Day parade at Red Square in Moscow.(Photo by: REUTERS) |
| Report: Russian ground troops arrive in Syria in unprecedented military action |
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| The Kuwaiti report adds that Russian forces have already taken over multiple strategic positions and have forced numerous rebels battalions to retreat. |
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In an unprecedented move, Russia has sent ground-troops into the Syrian battlefield in support of Bashar Assad as the dictator struggles to maintain his power in the continuous four-year-long civil war, according to a report by Kuwaiti Daily al-Rai.
The report, which has not been substantiated by other sources, claims Russian military forces have been providing cover for T-90 tanks along with military air support which have attacked multiple strategic targets held by rebel forces in Idlib and Latakia.
In September, multiple US officials claimed that Russia had positioned about a half dozen tanks at a Syrian airfield at the center of a military buildup.
One US official said seven Russian T-90 tanks were observed at the airfield near Latakia, a stronghold of Syrian President Bashar Assad.
The Kuwaiti report adds that Russian forces have already taken over multiple strategic positions and have forced numerous rebels battalions to retreat. The report did not disclose whether there were Russian army casualties.
For over the last three months, Russia has steadily increased its participation in the Syrian domestic conflict, launching airstrikes from its bases in western Syria as it drops thousands of sorties on enemy targets.
Along with airstrikes, Russia has also increased its naval presence in the Mediterranean Sea along the Syrian coast while it coordinates with Iranian military forces and Hezbollah.
Russian President Vladimir Putin stated on several past occasions that his country had no intention of sending boots on the ground to participate in the Syrian civil war.
If the report is correct, it could signify a dramatic shift in Russian policy, or merely be a one-time specific action.
2a)
ISIS Renamed 'Climate Change'
The recent ISIS-inspired attacks in Paris, which the naïve may have hoped would awaken the left to the seriousness of the global Islamic threat, have, predictably, had exactly the opposite effect. The West’s mainstream political establishments, faced with yet another stark reminder that many Muslims are eager to engage in a war to the death for Allah, have joined hands in the fight -- not to defeat Islamic fanaticism, but to improve the rhetorical efforts to bury any connection between the world’s hordes of jihadists and the faith in whose name they are acting.
Thus today, when the need to name, expose, and combat Islamic radicalism seems more urgent than ever, John Kerry, François Hollande, and our other progressive betters are attempting to banish the word “Islamic” from future public discussion of the threat of radical Is… um, radical stuff. They have determined that we should henceforth refer to the artists formerly known as Islamic State by the name “Daesh.”
This rebranding, in traditional propaganda style, has been issued with its own press releases from the Ministry of Truth (i.e., the mainstream media). One version is delivered to us under the headline:
If You Hear President Obama and John Kerry call ISIS “Daesh,” Here’s Why.
In the accompanying article, our dutiful messenger assures us that the sudden shift away from “ISIS” and into “Daesh” is not what it appears to be -- a pathetic attempt to avoid using the word “Islamic” in connection with terrorism -- but rather a brilliant rhetorical stab at the Islamic… er, I mean the bad guys. “Daesh,” you see, is an acronym derived (though not quite acronymically) from the transliteration of the terrorist group’s Arabic name, al-Dawla al-Islamiya fi al-Iraq wa al-Sham. And when pronounced a certain way (though not the way any of our leftist geniuses are pronouncing it) “Daesh” sounds a little like a couple of Arabic expressions that might seem slightly derogatory. Thus, we are told that hearing this acronym really ticks the bad guys off, so we should use it just to show them we are not afraid of their Daesh-ic radicalism. Levine even concludes his fawning delivery of the official message with this benighted injunction: “Daesh. Use it -- annoy a terrorist.”
Yeah, that’ll show ‘em.
As another mouthpiece from the Ministry tells us, “With Obama, Hollande and other leaders using this verbal jab while holding the world’s attention [in the past week], Daesh just might be the new ISIS.” In other words, certain leading progressives have, in the wake of the Paris attacks, instigated a strategy to replace Islamic State -- a name which clearly identifies the radical group by motive and aspiration -- with a meaningless bureaucratic catchword that “annoys” them.
Here then, stated without the cheerleading, is the actual story: a small number of prominent politicians, mainly socialists who empathize with the anti-Western aspect of the Islamist cause, and who are struggling to defend the mass importation of unvetted Muslims into their own respective countries, are engaged in a concerted effort to detach Islamic radicalism from Islam itself in the public consciousness, by phasing the group’s descriptively accurate name out of the discussion. This is a classic instance of political correctness in its proper sense -- the calculated distortion of language aimed at suppressing nonprogressive thought.
We sometimes speak of political correctness these days as though it were merely a superficial, relatively unimportant outgrowth of progressive ideology. The word “political,” which ought to highlight the seriousness of the problem, tends to be obscured by “correctness,” a word which evokes thoughts of prissy etiquette mavens and other fussbudgets. We therefore mistakenly dismiss the directives of political correctness as we might dismiss those of a prudish grade-school teacher, as though being “politically incorrect” were simply a matter of being crassly provocative in the manner of a blowhard like Bill Maher, e.g., of cursing in front of that prudish grade-school teacher.
But political correctness has nothing to do with prudishness or excessive politeness. It is an assault on the proper and accurate use of language, undertaken with specific political aims. Change a society’s language, and you change the range of possible meaning. Limit meanings, and you alter thought. Alter thought, and you can fundamentally transform the society, simply by circumscribing what people can meaningfully discuss -- not what they wish to discuss, but literally what can be expressed -- with the shared vocabulary available to them.
In other words, politically correct speech, which in every case results directly from a politically motivated, deliberately imposed alteration of the existing lexicon, is nothing less than a species of propaganda. In our modern progressive-democratic world, it has become the single most common and insidious form of propaganda.
I distinctly remember the day John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, and other Democrats emerged from a Senate hearing on the issue we all knew as “global warming,” but were suddenly speaking to the reporters on hand about a peculiar new idea, “climate change.” In a classic Soviet-style propaganda shift, the theory’s original name, which was beginning to provoke skepticism and even mockery, was abruptly and unilaterally dumped in favor of a deliberately non-specific phrase. Unlike “anthropogenic global warming” -- a clear name that defined its theory in such a way that the issue would explode if evidence of warming dried up or came into question -- “climate change” was brilliantly unfalsifiable: climate will inevitably change, so the new name provided cover for a theory that had always been as much political ploy as scientific investigation.
Today, uncountable thousands of Muslims are pursuing an open strategy of violent assault against the civilized world. They call their actions “jihad,” an Islamic term denoting a crusade in Allah’s name. They seek to recruit young people from around the world, including non-Muslims willing to convert to Islam, to join them in committing violence against civilized populations. They and their brethren use beheadings and mass slaughter to flaunt their lack of any restraint, or any respect for human dignity, in the fight to achieve a global caliphate. They advocate levels of subjugation for women that extend to mass genital mutilation, and license for male family members to murder a female relation for perceived slights against a notion of “family honor” straight out of Kafka -- to be accused is to be guilty. They destroy historical monuments with impunity, indicating that they are a doomsday cult -- a faction devoid of concern for any human achievement before their jihad, because they perceive no future for this world, only death.
They pursue this path of terror and decivilization, heeding what they believe to be Muhammad’s call, because they think they are the true and pure representatives of Islam. And their connection to their religion is not merely rhetorical. Their cause has long been promoted in mosques around the world, proclaimed and defended by Islamic clergymen. The term “radicalization,” used in reference to Muslims who veer onto this path, describes a fundamentally religious process, the evolution of a practicing or non-practicing Muslim into a fanatical jihadist willing to kill (and die) to achieve world domination for Islam.
The first Ministry of Truth article mentioned above justifies dropping the name Islamic State down the memory hole with this ridiculous argument:
The Islamic State, of course, is not actually a state, but rather of [sic] collection of terrorists operating from seized territory in Mesopotamia. No "Islamic State" in that territory has ever been recognized by any government as representing any actual country.
In Britain, Conservative Muslim MP Rehman Chishti spelled out this argument officially last June, as well as revealing the real purpose behind the name change. In a letter to the BBC, Chishti (once an aide to Benazir Bhutto) “requested” that the public broadcaster use Daesh rather than ISIS, noting that the French government has already urged its own press to do the same:
The use of the titles Islamic State, ISIL and ISIS gives legitimacy to a terrorist organization that is not Islamic nor has it been recognized as a state and which a vast majority of Muslims around the world [evidence for that “majority”?] finds despicable and insulting to their peaceful religion.
But, to state the obvious, Islamic State is not a name designed to fool unsuspecting governments into thinking the organization represents a “recognized” nation-state. It is a name proclaiming the group’s purpose, much like Islamic Jihad, Ḥarakat al-Muqāwamah al-ʾIslāmiyyah -- in English “Islamic Resistance Movement,” aka Hamas – Hizb’allah (“Party of Allah”), and so on. Their aim is to achieve a universal Islamic state, i.e., a global caliphate. Hence the name.
And what of the British MP’s claim, standard among Islamic denialists, that ISIS “is not Islamic”? The identification of such organizations with Islam is uncomfortable for peaceful Muslims to be sure. And it should be, because the identification is real in the sense of having substantial support, ranging from very active to disturbingly passive, within Islam’s worldwide religious hierarchy. To pretend the actions, threats, and goals of Islamic radicals “do not represent Islam” is to tell oneself (and the world) a dangerous lie. Muslims, faced with the doomsday cult element within their faith, have to make some very painful choices, and take some potentially dangerous stands, in the manner of Ayaan Hirsi Ali. To avoid this reality is, in the long run, to cede all Islam to a fanatical current that grows in strength and reach each day.
Meanwhile, modern civilization itself faces a similar set of choices. We have, for generations, been under siege by progressive authoritarians, a faction that openly rejects the notions of liberty and self-determination that were once the great promise and hope of modernity. Their numbers grow, their boldness deepens, as generation after generation of “normal, decent people” tell themselves the tyrannical spirit doesn’t represent who we really are. Yes, unfortunately, it does. We have ceded our identity to a political philosophy that despises liberty, abhors self-determination, and sees the individual human being and his aspirations as at best tools to be manipulated for the benefit of the ruling class, at worst disposable obstacles to the dream of a unified castelike social hierarchy. We have stood by passively (or worse), as our fanatics have effectively ended the institution of private property in the name of justice, entrenched greed and mutual disrespect under the guise of a social safety net, and used the levers of legislative compulsion to ensconce themselves and their fellow travelers as a systemically protected ruling elite in the name of equality.
So far, late modern humanity has handled its displacement by this tyrannical coup about as maturely as those Western Muslims whose instinctive reaction to events like the Paris attacks is to demand an end to “Islamophobia.”
Now the West’s leadership is seeking to undermine the last hold-outs for freedom and civilization by importing substantial numbers of ill-documented people from a part of the world increasingly dominated by radical Islam. Knowing that at this critical moment, terrorist attacks on Western soil -- committed by people associated with that same refugee population -- might jeopardize their plans to further weaken the tattered fiber of modernity, the progressives have turned to their favorite weapon, propaganda, to obscure the connection between their schemes and the spread of Islamic radicalism. They are once again hoping to change the optics by changing the language, in this case by replacing the clear name Islamic State with the deliberately nondescript name Daesh.
What’s in a name? Meaning, and hence thought. Our ability to communicate directly about our current predicament is weakened every time we accept the left’s propagandizing lexical shifts. When abortion becomes “reproductive choice,” an issue of life or death is shifted into a question of women’s rights. When child-rearing becomes “socialization,” we tacitly accept the state’s usurpation of the private family’s authority in education and moral development. When jihad against the foundations of Western society becomes “senseless violence” or generic “extremism” -- when Islamic State becomes “Daesh” -- the first step in defeating a threat, namely identifying it correctly, is sacrificed. In each of these cases, like so many others in our progressively deconstructed political vocabulary,the loss of clarity is both intentional and socially transformative. That is the essence of political correctness.
Turn off the transmissions from your Ministry of Truth, if that is still permitted. Reject the systematic gutting of politically meaningful speech.
Islamic State. Use it -- annoy a socialist.
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