The decline in American Character is reflected
in our current crop of presidential candidates.
===
Rewriting history is a popular pass time for those who hate Israel and want the world to join them in their hatred but that dog does not hunt if facts still matter.
But then facts can always be twisted and among those who want to believe the worst or are dumb they can always make an impact.
David Harris sets forth his rationale. (See 1 below.)
and
Bernie the lovable Jewish anti-Semite (See 1a below.)
I am reading "In The Arena" by Pete Hegseth. He bases his book on a speech given in France by former President Teddy Roosevelt upon his return from an African Safari, after being out of office for 2 years and before he ran under The Bull Moose Banner.
He recites Roosevelt's definitions of the key attributes of what it means to be a good citizen and how that is critical to the survival of our Republic.
In pondering Roosevelt's message it set me to thinking about what leadership American Citizens have been offered by way of our Two Party System and how America's relative decline (fall from grace) is reflected in the fact that America has become a land inhabited by "small" self-centered and indulging citizens.
The Democrat Party has offered America an amazing assortment of candidates over the last 40 or so years. Carter proved to be one of the weakest presidents in all of America's history. Subsequent to his tragic presidency, we discovered Kennedy was a Lothario. Johnson was a tragic president who accomplished a great deal in a domestic sense but micro managed our defeat in Viet Nam and thus his own.
Had it not been for his common sense and gifted approach to politics, Clinton might have been a failure but he and Gingrich worked in an accommodating manner and, had Clinton been able to keep his pants zipped, his presidency would have been a total success. Gore was not only a bore but a self seeking nut case who was narrowly rejected by the voters but resoundingly so by his wife.
Then we come to Obama. A success in one sense, because he drove more Carter Nails into our nation's coffin as he said he would while mesmerizing the unwashed and mentally enslaved into believing he is/was God's blessing.
Then we come to Hillary who offers little by way of qualifications other than her self centered belief she deserves to be president because she is a woman and her opponent, Bernie, the socialist who has accomplished nothing other than his captivation of our "wussified" youth with his Socialistic nonsense.
During this same time frame The Republicans have offered us Nixon, a brilliant mind in an insecure body. Ford, a decent dull man who maintained an efficient Oval Office during a difficult period.
Then we come to a winner in Reagan. A Grade B movie actor who turned out to be an A plus President because he was comfortable in his own skin and understood the meaning of what it was to be an American.
George Bush 41, another decent man, not a particularly swift politician, but an accomplished technocrat.
Bush 43 made some mistakes which were magnified by a negative and distrusting press and media crowd and 9/11 reshaped his entire presidency taking it out of his control, to some degree, but he will rise from the ashes as history will treat him more kindly than his fellow citizens.
Candidates Goldwater, Dole, McCain and Romney were all good men who ran terrible campaigns.
Then we come to Donald Trump. He, like Reagan, is able to probe and reach the hidden and unexpressed thoughts of many voters but does so in a crude manner which may prove to be self defeating. So far he has defied the experts who are equally expert at proving their elitism places them so out of touch with their fellow citizens they come across as hopeless wretches.
Meanwhile,Hillary does not believe Trump is worthy of being president and she talks about her own vast experience. Being in office and flying all over the world does not equate with accomplishments. What did Hillary accomplish as Sec. of State, as the wife of our former president, as a Senator?
Name me a single piece of legislation that bore her name? Name something that truly was all of her own doing beyond setting up an unauthorized server and sending classified and secret information over same? Her successes? Do you consider buying into Obama's lie about what caused Benghazi and her own lying to the families of the victims she chose not to rescue, initiating a reset button with Russia and then watching Putin march into The Ukraine successes? Did her own lying set the tone for our State Department 's fibs to Reporter Rosen? What about the disaster in Libya etc.? Are these also successes? Does the fraud Obama pulled regarding the Iran Deal, and which Hillary was involved with, count as a success? Does Hillary agree with Professor Gruber and Obama's "gum shoe" lackey, Rhodes, that Americans are stupid and gullible and thus can be lied to and deceived? Is this a telling success of her questionable character.
I suspect Trump will appoint a Sec. of State who will stand head and shoulders above Hillary should he be elected.
Trump's ideas reflect what most American's agree with but the manner he uses to express them is, at the very least, childish, boorish and are turn offs.
However, Hillary's bashing of Trump does not elevate her or fill the void left by her lack of accomplishing anything truly meaningful.
Obama's pinata was GW, Hillary's are those right wing conspirators.
She remains a low life fraud from Arkansas in my book and I base that on a history of her own making and her public approval rating apparently validates my view.
===
This from a friend and fellow memo reader.
Make more and you lose free benefits. Be careful what you seek. (See 2 below.)
My former firm provided some of the salespersons with a unique opportunity. They gave us a a dinner at which Red Auerbach was the motivational speaker. A friend and fellow memo reader sent me this piece by Lou Holtz and it very much parallels the book I am currently reading which I referred to above. (See 2a below.)
===
Two interesting articles regarding France and its handling "Radicalized Islam, or Islamicized Radicalism."( See 3 and 3a below.)
===
Dick++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
1) Why History Matters: The 1967 Six-Day War
Mention history and it can trigger a roll of the eyes.
Add the Middle East to the equation and folks might start running for the hills, unwilling to get caught up in the seemingly bottomless pit of details and disputes.
But without an understanding of what happened in the past, it’s impossible to grasp where we are today — and where we are has profound relevance for the region and the world.
Forty-nine years ago this month, the Six-Day War broke out.
While some wars fade into obscurity, this one remains as relevant today as in 1967. Many of its core issues remain unresolved.
Politicians, diplomats, and journalists continue to grapple with the consequences of that war, but rarely consider, or perhaps are even unaware of, context. Yet without context, some critically important things may not make sense.
First, in June 1967, there was no state of Palestine. It didn’t exist and never had. Its creation, proposed by the UN in 1947, was rejected by the Arab world because it also meant the establishment of a Jewish state alongside.
Second, the West Bank and eastern Jerusalem were in Jordanian hands. Violating solemn agreements, Jordan denied Jews access to their holiest places in eastern Jerusalem. To make matters still worse, they desecrated and destroyed many of those sites.
Meanwhile, the Gaza Strip was under Egyptian control, with harsh military rule imposed on local residents.
And the Golan Heights, which were regularly used to shell Israeli communities far below, belonged to Syria.
Third, the Arab world could have created a Palestinian state in the West Bank, eastern Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip any day of the week. They didn’t. There wasn’t even discussion about it. And Arab leaders, who today profess such attachment to eastern Jerusalem, rarely, if ever, visited. It was viewed as an Arab backwater.
Fourth, the 1967 boundary at the time of the war, so much in the news these days, was nothing more than an armistice line dating back to 1949 — familiarly known as the Green Line. That’s after five Arab armies attacked Israel in 1948 with the aim of destroying the embryonic Jewish state. They failed. Armistice lines were drawn, but they weren’t formal borders. They couldn’t be. The Arab world, even in defeat, refused to recognize Israel’s very right to exist.
Fifth, the PLO, which supported the war effort, was established in 1964, three years before the conflict erupted. That’s important because it was created with the goal of obliterating Israel. Remember that in 1964 the only “settlements” were Israel itself.
Sixth, in the weeks leading up to the Six-Day War, Egyptian and Syrian leaders repeatedly declared that war was coming and their objective was to wipe Israel off the map. There was no ambiguity. Twenty-two years after the Holocaust, another enemy spoke about the extermination of Jews. The record is well-documented.
The record is equally clear that Israel, in the days leading up to the war, passed word to Jordan, via the UN and United States, urging Amman to stay out of any pending conflict. Jordan’s King Hussein ignored the Israeli plea and tied his fate to Egypt and Syria. His forces were defeated by Israel, and he lost control of the West Bank and eastern Jerusalem. He later acknowledged that he had made a terrible error in entering the war.
Seventh, Egypt’s President Gamal Abdel Nasser demanded that UN peacekeeping forces in the area, in place for the previous decade to prevent conflict, be removed. Shamefully, without even the courtesy of consulting Israel, the UN complied. That left no buffer between Arab armies being mobilized and deployed and Israeli forces in a country one-fiftieth, or two percent, the size of Egypt — and just nine miles wide at its narrowest point.
Eighth, Egypt blocked Israeli shipping lanes in the Red Sea, Israel’s only maritime access to trading routes with Asia and Africa. This step was understandably regarded as an act of war by Jerusalem. The United States spoke about joining with other countries to break the blockade, but, in the end, regrettably, did not act.
Ninth, France, which had been Israel’s principal arms supplier, announced a ban on the sale of weapons on the eve of the June war. That left Israel in potentially grave danger if a war were to drag on and require the resupply of arms. It was not until the next year that the U.S. stepped into the breach and sold vital weapons systems to Israel.
And finally, after winning the war of self-defense, Israel hoped that its newly-acquired territories, seized from Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, would be the basis for a land-for-peace accord. Feelers were sent out. The formal response came on September 1, 1967, when the Arab Summit Conference famously declared in Khartoum: “No peace, no recognition, no negotiations” with Israel.
More “no’s” were to follow. Underscoring the point, in 2003, the Saudi Ambassador to the U.S. was quoted in The New Yorker as saying: “It broke my heart that [PLO Chair] Arafat did not take the offer (of a two-state deal presented by Israel, with American support, in 2001). Since 1948, every time we’ve had something on the table, we say no. Then we say yes. When we say yes, it’s not on the table anymore. Then we have to deal with something less. Isn’t it about time to say yes?”
Today, there are those who wish to rewrite history.
They want the world to believe there was once a Palestinian state. There was not.
They want the world to believe there were fixed borders between that state and Israel. There was only an armistice line between Israel and the Jordanian-controlled West Bank and eastern Jerusalem.
They want the world to believe the 1967 war was a bellicose act by Israel. It was an act of self-defense in the face of blood-curdling threats to vanquish the Jewish state, not to mention the maritime blockade of the Straits of Tiran, the abrupt withdrawal of UN peacekeeping forces, and the redeployment of Egyptian and Syrian troops. All wars have consequences. This one was no exception. But the aggressors have failed to take responsibility for the actions they instigated.
They want the world to believe post-1967 Israeli settlement-building is the key obstacle to peacemaking. The Six-Day War is proof positive that the core issue is, and always has been, whether the Palestinians and larger Arab world accept the Jewish people’s right to a state of their own. If so, all other contentious issues, however difficult, have possible solutions. But, alas, if not, all bets are off.
And they want the world to believe the Arab world had nothing against Jews per se, only Israel, yet trampled with abandon on sites of sacred meaning to the Jewish people.
In other words, when it comes to the Arab-Israeli conflict, dismissing the past as if it were a minor irritant at best, irrelevant at worst, won’t work.
Can history move forward? Absolutely. Israel’s peace treaties with Egypt in 1979 and Jordan in 1994 powerfully prove the point. At the same time, though, the lessons of the Six-Day War illustrate just how tough and tortuous the path can be—and are sobering reminders that, yes, history does matter.
1a) Lovable Bernie whacks Israel
2) Seattle Employees Ask for REDUCED Hours
Seattle employees ask for REDUCED hrs. so that "jacked-up" minimum wage won't cost them subsidized housing:
Gee, who could have seen this coming...
Now this is downright funny. They scream for a higher minimum wage then when they get it they complain because they make too much money to qualify for the free stuff, go figure.
By jacking up minimum wage, Seattle has provided a valuable lesson in liberal economics. The plan has now backfired.
Nora Gibson is the executive director of Full Life Care told KIRO 7 (Seattle TV station) she saw a sudden reaction from workers when Seattle’s phased minimum-wage ordinance took effect in April, bringing minimum wage to $11 an hour. She said anecdotally, some people feared they would lose their subsidized housing so they have asked that their work hours be reduced to remain eligible for all government subsidies.
It doesn’t stop at $11/hour. The law puts it up to $15 starting January 1, 2017; they will have to reduce their work hours even more to remain eligible for handouts. Good thing the minimum wage wasn’t raised even higher, most would not work at all, they prefer to be spoon-fed and remain on the government plantation.
Remember free market capitalism? Under that system, the harder and smarter you worked, the higher your standard of living. But that was found to result in income inequality, so now we have a system where wealth is bestowed by bureaucrats, and working harder doesn’t always make sense.
Add the Middle East to the equation and folks might start running for the hills, unwilling to get caught up in the seemingly bottomless pit of details and disputes.
But without an understanding of what happened in the past, it’s impossible to grasp where we are today — and where we are has profound relevance for the region and the world.
Forty-nine years ago this month, the Six-Day War broke out.
While some wars fade into obscurity, this one remains as relevant today as in 1967. Many of its core issues remain unresolved.
Politicians, diplomats, and journalists continue to grapple with the consequences of that war, but rarely consider, or perhaps are even unaware of, context. Yet without context, some critically important things may not make sense.
First, in June 1967, there was no state of Palestine. It didn’t exist and never had. Its creation, proposed by the UN in 1947, was rejected by the Arab world because it also meant the establishment of a Jewish state alongside.
Second, the West Bank and eastern Jerusalem were in Jordanian hands. Violating solemn agreements, Jordan denied Jews access to their holiest places in eastern Jerusalem. To make matters still worse, they desecrated and destroyed many of those sites.
Meanwhile, the Gaza Strip was under Egyptian control, with harsh military rule imposed on local residents.
And the Golan Heights, which were regularly used to shell Israeli communities far below, belonged to Syria.
Third, the Arab world could have created a Palestinian state in the West Bank, eastern Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip any day of the week. They didn’t. There wasn’t even discussion about it. And Arab leaders, who today profess such attachment to eastern Jerusalem, rarely, if ever, visited. It was viewed as an Arab backwater.
Fourth, the 1967 boundary at the time of the war, so much in the news these days, was nothing more than an armistice line dating back to 1949 — familiarly known as the Green Line. That’s after five Arab armies attacked Israel in 1948 with the aim of destroying the embryonic Jewish state. They failed. Armistice lines were drawn, but they weren’t formal borders. They couldn’t be. The Arab world, even in defeat, refused to recognize Israel’s very right to exist.
Fifth, the PLO, which supported the war effort, was established in 1964, three years before the conflict erupted. That’s important because it was created with the goal of obliterating Israel. Remember that in 1964 the only “settlements” were Israel itself.
Sixth, in the weeks leading up to the Six-Day War, Egyptian and Syrian leaders repeatedly declared that war was coming and their objective was to wipe Israel off the map. There was no ambiguity. Twenty-two years after the Holocaust, another enemy spoke about the extermination of Jews. The record is well-documented.
The record is equally clear that Israel, in the days leading up to the war, passed word to Jordan, via the UN and United States, urging Amman to stay out of any pending conflict. Jordan’s King Hussein ignored the Israeli plea and tied his fate to Egypt and Syria. His forces were defeated by Israel, and he lost control of the West Bank and eastern Jerusalem. He later acknowledged that he had made a terrible error in entering the war.
Seventh, Egypt’s President Gamal Abdel Nasser demanded that UN peacekeeping forces in the area, in place for the previous decade to prevent conflict, be removed. Shamefully, without even the courtesy of consulting Israel, the UN complied. That left no buffer between Arab armies being mobilized and deployed and Israeli forces in a country one-fiftieth, or two percent, the size of Egypt — and just nine miles wide at its narrowest point.
Eighth, Egypt blocked Israeli shipping lanes in the Red Sea, Israel’s only maritime access to trading routes with Asia and Africa. This step was understandably regarded as an act of war by Jerusalem. The United States spoke about joining with other countries to break the blockade, but, in the end, regrettably, did not act.
Ninth, France, which had been Israel’s principal arms supplier, announced a ban on the sale of weapons on the eve of the June war. That left Israel in potentially grave danger if a war were to drag on and require the resupply of arms. It was not until the next year that the U.S. stepped into the breach and sold vital weapons systems to Israel.
And finally, after winning the war of self-defense, Israel hoped that its newly-acquired territories, seized from Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, would be the basis for a land-for-peace accord. Feelers were sent out. The formal response came on September 1, 1967, when the Arab Summit Conference famously declared in Khartoum: “No peace, no recognition, no negotiations” with Israel.
More “no’s” were to follow. Underscoring the point, in 2003, the Saudi Ambassador to the U.S. was quoted in The New Yorker as saying: “It broke my heart that [PLO Chair] Arafat did not take the offer (of a two-state deal presented by Israel, with American support, in 2001). Since 1948, every time we’ve had something on the table, we say no. Then we say yes. When we say yes, it’s not on the table anymore. Then we have to deal with something less. Isn’t it about time to say yes?”
Today, there are those who wish to rewrite history.
They want the world to believe there was once a Palestinian state. There was not.
They want the world to believe there were fixed borders between that state and Israel. There was only an armistice line between Israel and the Jordanian-controlled West Bank and eastern Jerusalem.
They want the world to believe the 1967 war was a bellicose act by Israel. It was an act of self-defense in the face of blood-curdling threats to vanquish the Jewish state, not to mention the maritime blockade of the Straits of Tiran, the abrupt withdrawal of UN peacekeeping forces, and the redeployment of Egyptian and Syrian troops. All wars have consequences. This one was no exception. But the aggressors have failed to take responsibility for the actions they instigated.
They want the world to believe post-1967 Israeli settlement-building is the key obstacle to peacemaking. The Six-Day War is proof positive that the core issue is, and always has been, whether the Palestinians and larger Arab world accept the Jewish people’s right to a state of their own. If so, all other contentious issues, however difficult, have possible solutions. But, alas, if not, all bets are off.
And they want the world to believe the Arab world had nothing against Jews per se, only Israel, yet trampled with abandon on sites of sacred meaning to the Jewish people.
In other words, when it comes to the Arab-Israeli conflict, dismissing the past as if it were a minor irritant at best, irrelevant at worst, won’t work.
Can history move forward? Absolutely. Israel’s peace treaties with Egypt in 1979 and Jordan in 1994 powerfully prove the point. At the same time, though, the lessons of the Six-Day War illustrate just how tough and tortuous the path can be—and are sobering reminders that, yes, history does matter.
1a) Lovable Bernie whacks Israel
Part of Bernie Sanders’ charm is that for all of his arm-waving jeremiads, he appears unthreatening. He’s the weird old uncle in the attic, Larry David’s crazy Bernie. It’s almost a matter of style. Who can be afraid of a candidate so irascible, grumpy, old-fashioned and unfashionable?
After all, he’s not going to win the nomination, so what harm can he do? A major address at the party convention? A say in the vice presidential selection? And who reads party platforms anyway?
Well, platforms may not immediately affect a particular campaign. But they do express, quite literally, the party line, a written record of its ideological trajectory.
Which is why two of Sanders’ appointments to the 15-member platform committee are so stunning. Professor Cornel West not only has called the Israeli prime minister a war criminal but openly supports the BDS movement (boycott, divestment and sanctions), the most important attempt in the world to ostracize and delegitimize Israel.
West is joined on the committee by the longtime pro-Palestinian activist James Zogby. Together, reported the New York Times, they “vowed to upend what they see as the party’s lopsided support of Israel.”
This seems a gratuitous provocation. Sanders hardly made Israel central to his campaign. He did call Israel’s response in the 2014 Gaza war “disproportionate” and said “we cannot continue to be one-sided.” But now Sanders seeks to permanently alter — i.e., weaken — the relationship between the Democratic Party and Israel, which has been close and supportive since Harry Truman recognized the world’s only Jewish state when it declared independence in May 1948.
West doesn’t even pretend, as do some left-wing “peace” groups, to be opposing Israeli policy in order to save it from itself. He makes the simpler case that occupation is unconscionable oppression and that until Israel abandons it, Israel deserves to be treated like apartheid South Africa — anathematized, cut off, made to bleed morally and economically. The Sanders appointees wish to bend the Democratic platform to encourage such diminishment unless Israel redeems itself by liberating Palestine.
This is an unusual argument for a Democratic platform committee, largely because it is logically and morally perverse. Israel did in fact follow such high-minded advice in 2005: It terminated its occupation and evacuated Gaza. That earned it (temporary) praise from the West. And from the Palestinians? Not peace, not reconciliation, not normal relations but a decade of unrelenting terrorismand war.
Israel is now being asked — pressured — to repeat that same disaster on the West Bank. That would bring the terror war, quite fatally, to the very heart of Israel — Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Ben Gurion Airport. Israel is now excoriated for declining that invitation to national suicide.
It is ironic that the most successful Jewish presidential candidate ever should be pushing the anti-Israel case. But perhaps not surprising considering Sanders’ ideological roots. He is old left — not the post-1960s, countercultural New Left. Why, the man honeymooned in the Soviet Union — not such fashionably cool communist paradises as Sandinista Nicaragua where Bill de Blasio went to work for the cause or Castro’s Cuba where de Blasio honeymooned. (Do lefties all use the same wedding planner?)
For the old left, Israel was simply an outpost of Western imperialism, Middle East division. To this day, the leftist consensus, most powerful in Europe (which remains Sanders’ ideological lodestar), holds that Israeli perfidy demands purification by Western chastisement.
Chastisement there will be at the Democratic platform committee. To be sure, Sanders didn’t create the Democrats’ drift away from Israel. It was already visible at the 2012 convention with the loud resistance to recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. But Sanders is consciously abetting it.
The millennials who worship him and pack his rallies haven’t lived through — and don’t know — the history of Israel’s half-century of peace offers. They don’t know of the multiple times Israel has offered to divide the land with an independent Palestinian state and been rebuffed.
Sanders hasn’t lifted a finger to tell them. The lovable old guy with the big crowds and no chance at the nomination is hardly taken seriously (except by Hillary Clinton, whose inability to put him away reveals daily her profound political weakness). But when he makes platform appointees that show he does take certain things quite seriously, like undermining the U.S.-Israeli relationship, you might want to reconsider your equanimity about the magical mystery tour. It looks like Woodstock, but there is steel inside the psychedelic glove.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++2) Seattle Employees Ask for REDUCED Hours
Seattle employees ask for REDUCED hrs. so that "jacked-up" minimum wage won't cost them subsidized housing:
Gee, who could have seen this coming...
Now this is downright funny. They scream for a higher minimum wage then when they get it they complain because they make too much money to qualify for the free stuff, go figure.
By jacking up minimum wage, Seattle has provided a valuable lesson in liberal economics. The plan has now backfired.
Nora Gibson is the executive director of Full Life Care told KIRO 7 (Seattle TV station) she saw a sudden reaction from workers when Seattle’s phased minimum-wage ordinance took effect in April, bringing minimum wage to $11 an hour. She said anecdotally, some people feared they would lose their subsidized housing so they have asked that their work hours be reduced to remain eligible for all government subsidies.
It doesn’t stop at $11/hour. The law puts it up to $15 starting January 1, 2017; they will have to reduce their work hours even more to remain eligible for handouts. Good thing the minimum wage wasn’t raised even higher, most would not work at all, they prefer to be spoon-fed and remain on the government plantation.
Remember free market capitalism? Under that system, the harder and smarter you worked, the higher your standard of living. But that was found to result in income inequality, so now we have a system where wealth is bestowed by bureaucrats, and working harder doesn’t always make sense.
In fact, it makes no sense at all. Apparently.
2a) Lou Holtz explains the situation we are in.
2a) Lou Holtz explains the situation we are in.
The Democrats are right, there are two Americas . The America that works and the America that doesn't. The America that contributes and the America that doesn't. It's not the haves and the have nots, it's the dos and the don'ts. Some people do their duty as Americans, obey the law, support themselves, contribute to society and others don't. That's the divide in America.It's not about income inequality, it's about civic irresponsibility. It's about a political party that preaches hatred, greed and victimization in order to win elective office. It's about a political party that loves power more than it loves its country.That's not invective, that's truth, and it's about time someone said it. The politics of envy was on proud display a couple weeks ago when President Obama pledged the rest of his term to fighting "income inequality." He noted that some people make more than other people, that some people have higher incomes than others, and he says that's not just. That is the rationale of thievery. The other guy has it, you want it, Obama will take it for you. Vote Democrat. That is the philosophy that produced Detroit .It is the electoral philosophy that is destroying America . It conceals a fundamental deviation from American values and common sense because it ends up not benefiting the people who support it, but a betrayal.
The Democrats have not empowered their followers, they have enslaved them in a culture of dependence and entitlement, of victim-hood and anger instead of ability and hope. The president's premise “ that you reduce income inequality by debasing the successful“ seeks to deny the successful the consequences of their choices and spare the unsuccessful the consequences of their choices. Because, by and large, income variations in society are a result of different choices leading to different consequences. Those who choose wisely and responsibly have a far greater likelihood of success, while those who choose foolishly and irresponsibly have a far greater likelihood of failure.Success and failure usually manifest themselves in personal and family income. You choose to drop out of high school or to skip college “and you are apt to have a different outcome than someone who gets a diploma and pushes on with purposeful education. You have your children out of wedlock and life is apt to take one course; you have them within a marriage and life is apt to take another course. Most often in life our destination is determined by the course we take.My doctor, for example, makes far more than I do. There is significant income inequality between us. Our lives have had an inequality of outcome, but, our lives also have had an inequality of effort. While my doctor went to college and then devoted his young adulthood to medical school and residency, I got a job in a restaurant. He made a choice, I made a choice, and our choices led us to different outcomes. His outcome pays a lot better than mine. Does that mean he cheated and Barack Obama needs to take away his wealth? No, it means we are both free men in a free society where free choices lead to different outcomes.It is not inequality Barack Obama intends to take away, it is freedom. The freedom to succeed, and the freedom to fail. There is no true option for success if there is no true option for failure. The pursuit of happiness means a whole lot less when you face the punitive hand of government if your pursuit brings you more happiness than the other guy. Even if the other guy sat on his arse and did nothing. Even if the other guy made a lifetime's worth of asinine and short sighted decisions.Barack Obama and the Democrats preach equality of outcome as a right, while completely ignoring inequality of effort. The simple Law of the Harvest “ as ye sow, so shall ye reap“ is sometimes applied as, "The harder you work, the more you get."Obama would turn that upside down. Those who achieve are to be punished as enemies of society and those who fail are to be rewarded as wards of society.Entitlement will replace effort as the key to upward mobility in American society if Barack Obama gets his way. He seeks a lowest common denominator society in which the government besieges the successful and productive to foster equality through mediocrity. He and his party speak of two Americas , and their grip on power is based on using the votes of one to sap the productivity of the other. America is not divided by the differences in our outcomes, it is divided by the differences in our efforts.It is a false philosophy to say one man's success comes about unavoidably as the result of another man's victimization.What Obama offered was not a solution, but a separatism. He fomented division and strife, pitted one set of Americans against another for his own political benefit. That's what socialists offer. Marxist class warfare wrapped up with a bow. Two Americas , coming closer each day to proving the truth to Lincoln 's maxim that a house divided against itself cannot stand."Life is ten percent what happens to you and ninety percent how you respond to it."Lou HoltzLeo "Lou" Holtz (born January 6, 1937) is a retired American football coach, and active sportscaster, author, and motivational speaker.
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3) Radicalized Islam, or Islamicized Radicalism?
According to Roy’s school of thought, the ISIS militants of today are no different from, say, the members of the Red Brigade in Italy or Red Army Faction in West Germany during the 1970s. Change the color from red to black and, voilà, you find the same rebellion, the same rupture, the same rapture with violence. For Kepel, this is utter nonsense. Deafened by the mantra of "radicalization" — which, for Kepel, signifies "the absence of analysis" — Roy did not hear the actual words pronounced by Salafist preachers in the suburbs, just as he had failed to read the tweets and tracts they were broadcasting.
3a) FRANCE TO SHUT DOWN UP TO 160 MOSQUES
Meanwhile, several of these mosques have been raided, revealing a " staggering " number of weapons and ammunition. Sunday, authorities conducted a raid on a mosque in Lagny-sur-Marne, 18 miles east of Paris , and  uncovered 334 weapons and a large quantity of 7.62mm Kalashnikov ammunition, along with ISIS propaganda videos.
3) Radicalized Islam, or Islamicized Radicalism?
Kenzo Tribouillard, AFP, Getty Images
French police officers raided an apartment in suburban Paris last fall in their search for those behind the terrorist attacks in the city.
Shortly after the November terrorist attacks in Paris, the government declared that France was at war. But who, exactly, was the enemy? The answer — "terrorism" — satisfied no one and sparked a different kind of war in France, this time fought among its intellectuals. Unlike other Left Bank slugfests, however, this melee has far-reaching implications, ones that may help us better understand what took place not just in Paris and Brussels, but also in Fort Hood and San Bernardino.
The leading antagonists in this battle are Gilles Kepel and Olivier Roy, renowned scholars of political Islam. Little more than a week after Islamic State jihadists massacred 130 people in Paris, Roy published an op-ed in the newspaper Le Monde. Titled "Jihadism Is a Generational and Nihilist Revolution," the piece argued that the young French Muslims who committed these acts did so less because they were Muslim than because they were young. ISIS, he declared, recruited French youths who, already radicalized, "seek a cause, a label, a grand narrative on which to slap the blood-stained signature of their personal revolt."
The threat facing France, Roy argued, was not the caliphate that ISIS seeks to resurrect. That nightmarish notion, he insisted, "will sooner or later evaporate like an old mirage." The real threats to France and the rest of the West are the nihilistic and revolutionary reflexes of a certain cross-section of alienated youths. Were they, Roy wondered, "the avant-garde of a coming war or, instead, the detritus of history’s intestinal rumblings"?
Roy plumped for the latter explanation. Ultimately, the ISIS recruits who carried out the November attacks were rebels seeking a cause, any cause, with which to garb their murderous impulses. Think Marlon Brando wearing a beard, not a leather jacket, and riding a gun-mounted pickup, not a Triumph. In a well-chiseled phrase, Roy concluded that the challenge confronting France and the rest of the West was not "the radicalization of Islam, but the Islamization of radicalism."
Roy’s bon mot caught the attention not just of the French media, but also of Gilles Kepel. Author of several works on Islam in France, especially on the grim suburbs that have become hothouses for Salafism, the ultra-conservative sect that rejects secularism and more-moderate interpretations of Islam, Kepel lambasted Roy. In a bravura piece published by the newspaper Libération, Kepel suggested that Roy should visit the suburbs that have hatched these terrorists rather than "rehashing Wikipedia entries and newspaper accounts." Repeatedly punning on his antagonist’s name — his piece was titled "Le Roi Est Nu" (The King Is Naked) — Kepel blasted Roy for echoing the glib analysis first proposed by American specialists who, knowing neither Arabic nor Arabs, nevertheless declared that these acts of terrorism were the product of ruptures with their dominant societies.
Alberto Conti, Contrasto, Redux
Olivier Roy
Salafism, Kepel argued, must be taken seriously — even if this leads to accusations of "Islamophobia." One of the seminal texts ignored by Roy and his followers, Kepel declared, is The Global Islamic Resistance Call. Written by Abu Musab al-Suri, a Syrian engineer turned jihadist, the text appeared online in late 2004 or early 2005 and, Kepel believes, frames the worldview of ISIS militants in France. In his most recent book, Terror in the Hexagon, he argues that al-Suri offers a kind of "third-generation jihadism." From the 1970s to 1990s, the mujahedin in Afghanistan and Armed Islamic Group of Algeria formed the first generation of jihadists, who were then superseded by Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda at the turn of the millennium. Turning the Al Qaeda model upside down, al-Suri dismissed centrally planned attacks against large and symbolic targets. Instead he urged a bottom-up strategy privileging the actions of independent and isolated groups already embedded in the West. The attacks in Paris and Brussels might well reflect al-Suri’s malign influence.
Predictably, the French media have been taken more by the sparks than by the substance of Roy and Kepel’s very public quarrel. But the substance is crucial because it forces us to reflect on the roots of jihadist terrorism. Does it find its sustenance in the soil of a politicized form of Islam, or instead in the secularized forms of society in the West? Is religion at the source of these awful events, or is it merely a justification — a convenient hostage, really — for acting on impulses that have little if anything to do with faith?
When I raised these questions with Kepel in a telephone interview, he renewed, in impeccable
English, his emphasis on religion.
At times, Kepel, asking about the significance of certain dates, made me feel like a contestant on Jeopardy. "Why is the year 2005 important?" Was it the online appearance of al-Suri’s Global Islamic Resistance Call? The explosion of the suburban riots in France? Those answers were right, but not right enough. Kepel interrupted my stabs at an answer: "It was the year that YouTube was born." That event, he declared, was as pivotal as al-Suri’s manifesto or the riots in France. With YouTube, not only did ISIS find an invaluable platform, but Salafism found an audience far greater than that of the largest mosque.
The growing presence of Salafism in certain urban enclaves also preoccupies Kepel. In his books, he traces the "halalization" of these neighborhoods. Increasingly, everyday life in places like Saint Denis, in Paris’s northern suburbs, is governed by what is halal (permitted) and haram (forbidden). These categories extend well beyond food, encompassing sartorial, sexual, and social mores.
RGA, REA, Redux
Gilles Kepel
Kepel worries that this trend is not limited to the borders of these suburbs. "Have you heard," he asked, "about Hijab Day at Sciences Po?" In fact, I had read that morning an account of it in Le Monde. Sponsored by a few Muslim students at the university — one of France’s most prestigious institutions of higher learning — they encouraged fellow students to don a headscarf for a day in order to give them an idea of daily life for some Muslims in Paris. While a few students accepted the invitation, many others demurred.
Teaching at a public university where I regularly encounter students passing out material about Hinduism and Sufism, Pentecostalism and Buddhism, and where on occasion a young man, waving a Bible outside our library, tells me I am damned, I found Hijab Day both unexceptional and well-intentioned. But here, too, I was wrong. For Kepel, it instead carried the whiff of proselytization and made yet another dent in the rusting carapace of laïcité, France’s robust separation of church and state.
But it is less the hijab that threatens higher education in France than the country’s successive governments. Excoriating the deep cuts made in Arabic and Middle Eastern studies, Kepel reminded me of a fundamental difference between French and American universities. Unlike our country, in France there is little public pressure and few interest groups to finance these fields. He suggested that the Israel-Palestine conflict has largely driven the founding of chairs and departments in the United States devoted to the Middle East.
I asked Kepel what advice he would give France’s leaders if he had their ear. "I have their ears," he replied. The problem was that the ears were hard of hearing.
As it turned out, here was an issue where he and Roy agreed. In a long email exchange, Roy told me he also had spoken into powerful ears, including the French president’s. In particular, he had warned François Hollande against his efforts to "expel religion from the public sphere," as with Hollande’s backing of headscarf bans, but to little avail. "There is a political logic," he wrote, "that has little to do with good politics and good logic."
The greatest danger to laïcité, for Roy, is its fiercest defenders. When I asked him about the role the schools and universities have played — or failed to play — in the rise of Islamist fundamentalism, Roy cited the recent metamorphosis of laïcité. Once it was a term defining the legal separation of church and state, but now there is "a growing trend to turn laïcité from the neutrality of the State into an ideological system of its own." This mirrors distrust concerning laïcité among the youths living in the devastated suburbs. "These so-called valeurs laïques," secular values of the republic that reflect its revolutionary origins, he wrote me, "are met with suspicion by young schoolchildren who feel ‘cheated’ by the system and do not find ‘égalité, liberté, fraternité’ in their relationship with the police, the labor market, and the school system."
This explains, for Roy, why Salafism is the consequence, not the cause, of youthful radicalization. Insisting that we cannot make sense of the suicide bombers according to "any kind of traditional, religious, and fundamentalist approach," he instead points to the attraction that violence holds for this particular demographic. "ISIS fishes in an existing pond," he insisted, "and it is useless to understand radicalization as part either of a religious trajectory or of great global strategy."
Radicalism versus Islamism: Is the choice truly so stark? Or, instead, has this debate’s sound and fury obscured the shared traits of equally compelling analyses? Might we not instead compare Roy and Kepel’s approaches to a theoretical double helix? Doesn’t each of these thinkers offer a discrete strand of interpretation, which in turn coils around a shared axis?
Marc Hecker shares this impression. A respected, widely published terrorism specialist at the French Institute of International Relations who also teaches at Sciences Po, Hecker observed that the spat between Kepel and Roy in part reflects the confrontational nature of French academe, based on "chapels," or schools of thought, fueled by personal or institutional animosity.
Roy’s and Kepel’s approaches are in fact complementary, Hecker wrote. In his own research on the motivations of jihadist terrorists, Hecker has been impressed by their great diversity. "Some of these profiles correspond to Kepel’s analytical framework, while others correspond to Roy’s," he says. "At times the two frameworks simply overlap."
Since the 2015 attacks, Hecker has also had the ear of government officials. While he has emphasized the reinforcement of France’s system of human intelligence, Hecker allows that much more must be done at a national level. Like Roy and Kepel, he worries about France’s fraying social fabric and the growing divide between well-to-do urban centers and impoverished peripheries. As one potential way to ameliorate the situation, Kepel cited the current debate in France concerning the re-establishment of compulsory military service, and pointed out that it would allow the young from different social milieus to mingle and mature together.
One of France’s greatest political observers, the late Raymond Aron, wrote several decades ago that those who "believe that people will follow their interests instead of their passions have understood nothing of the 20th century." Both Kepel and Roy can shed light on the jihadist particulars of that insight. They’d do well to listen patiently to each other, and we’d do well to listen to both of them.
Robert Zaretsky is a professor of world cultures and literatures in the department of modern and classical languages and the Honors College at the University of Houston. He is the author, most recently, of Boswell’s Enlightenment (Harvard University Press, 2015).
3a) FRANCE TO SHUT DOWN UP TO 160 MOSQUES
Tres bon, La France! Laissez les bons temps rouler.PARIS In the wake of the November 13 Paris terrorist attacks that claimed more than 130 lives, the French government is ordering up to 160 mosques to be shut down in the coming months. Raids have revealed large stashes of weapons and ammunition.
The government's emergency powers grant it the right to take this extraordinary measure, and mosques that are unlicensed or have a history of "preaching hatred" are being singled out.
One of France 's chief imams, Hassan El Alaoui, said last Wednesday, "According to official figures and our discussions with the interior ministry, between 100 and 160 more mosques will be closed because they are run illegally without proper licenses, they preach hatred, or use takfiri speech.
"Takfiri speech involves sectarian slurs leveled by one Muslim against fellow Muslims.
"This kind of speech shouldn't even be allowed in Islamic countries, let alone secure countries like France ," El Alaoui said.
Meanwhile, several of these mosques have been raided, revealing a " staggering " number of weapons and ammunition. Sunday, authorities conducted a raid on a mosque in Lagny-sur-Marne, 18 miles east of Paris , and  uncovered 334 weapons and a large quantity of 7.62mm Kalashnikov ammunition, along with ISIS propaganda videos.
Police also turned up recordings of chants "glorifying the martyrs of jihad linked to the terrorist organization Jabhat al-Nusra," the Syrian branch of Al-Qaeda. The chants were found among teaching materials for youth in a madrassa, or private religious school for boys, connected to the mosque.According to the prefecture of police, "No request was made to open a private school."
Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said , "In 15 days we have seized one third of the quantity of war-grade weapons that are normally seized in a year."
As a result, 232 Muslims have been taken into custody and nine placed on house arrest. It's the third mosque since the November 13 attacks to be shut down, Â with many more expected in the future. Muslim-owned businesses and homes are also being searched, with 2,235 raided so far.
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France currently has the largest Muslim population in Western Europe , with about 2,600 mosques total in the country. The Schengen Agreement, which abolished border checks among the 26 member states, allows residents of the European Union more than 400 million to travel freely throughout Europe without showing identification or being screened. The border policy may be reconsidered, as it gives easy access to undocumented migrants including radical Muslims to infiltrate the country and stage future terrorist attacks.
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