The truth finally begins to seep through about Obama's destructive policies and lies. When he wasn't lying he had his minions, like Rice, Perry, Clinton and Lerner lie for him. (See 1 below.)
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What it means to be suckered.
More hypocrisy. (See 2 and 2a below.)
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Is our first black president involved in creating a "shadow" government? You decide. (See 3 below.)
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Ayaan Hirsi Ali has been trying to awaken America to the threat of Islamic terrorism and her meaning of 'dawa.'
I too have discussed the threat of Sharia Law ultimately making its way into our legal system and the threat if poses. You decide. (See 4 below.)
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Noonan (the WSJ's most recent Pulitzer winner) discusses what has become of The American Dream? She concludes it relates to the misinterpretation of the ability to acquire possessions.
I would also add, the efforts of anarchists on college campuses to prevent speakers from being heard is an extension of sinister efforts to destroy the dream of America's acceptance of diverse thinking and freedom of speech.
Are we producing an entire generation who will be unable to cope with the vicissitudes of life but whose overpriced education will not only fail them but the nation as a whole?
Will safe zones replace reasoning? (see 5 below.)
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Dick
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1)
The Price of Obama’s Mendacity
The consequences of his administration’s lies about Syria are becoming clear.
By Bret Stephens
Last week’s cruise-missile strike against a Syrian air base in response to Bashar Assad’s use of chemical weapons has reopened debate about the wisdom of Barack Obama’s decision to forgo a similar strike, under similar circumstances, in 2013.
But the real issue isn’t about wisdom. It’s about honesty.
On Sept. 10, 2013, President Obama delivered a televised address in which he warned of the dangers of not acting against Assad’s use of sarin gas, which had killed some 1,400 civilians in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta the previous month.
“If we fail to act, the Assad regime will see no reason to stop using chemical weapons,” Mr. Obama said. “As the ban against these weapons erodes, other tyrants will have no reason to think twice about acquiring poison gas, and using them. Over time, our troops would again face the prospect of chemical weapons on the battlefield. And it could be easier for terrorist organizations to obtain these weapons, and use them to attack civilians.”
It was a high-minded case for action that the president immediately disavowed for the least high-minded reason: It was politically unpopular. The administration punted a vote to an unwilling Congress. It punted a fix to the all-too-willing Russians. And it spent the rest of its time in office crowing about its success.
In July 2014 Secretary of State John Kerry claimed “we got 100% of the chemical weapons out.” In May 2015 Mr. Obama boasted that “Assad gave up his chemical weapons. That’s not speculation on our part. That, in fact, has been confirmed by the organization internationally that is charged with eliminating chemical weapons.” This January, then-National Security Adviser Susan Rice said “we were able to get the Syrian government to voluntarily and verifiably give up its chemical weapons stockpile.”
Today we know all this was untrue. Or, rather, now all of us know it. Anyone paying even slight attention has known it for years.
In June 2014 U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power noted “discrepancies and omissions related to the Syrian government’s declaration of its chemical weapons program.” But that hint of unease didn’t prevent her from celebrating the removal “of the final 8% of chemical weapons materials in Syria’s declaration” of its overall stockpile.
The following summer, The Wall Street Journal’s Adam Entous and Naftali Bendavid reported “U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded that the [Assad] regime didn’t give up all of the chemical weapons it was supposed to.” In February 2016, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper confirmed the Journal’s story, telling Congress “Syria has not declared all the elements of its chemical weapons program.”
Why did Mr. Obama and his senior officials stick to a script that they knew was untethered from the facts? Let’s speculate. They thought the gap between Assad’s “declared” and actual stockpile was close enough for government work. They figured a credulous press wouldn’t work up a sweat pointing out the difference. They didn’t imagine Assad would use what was left of his chemical arsenal for fear of provoking the U.S.
And they didn’t want to disturb the public narrative that multilateral diplomacy was a surer way than military action to disarm rogue Middle Eastern regimes of their illicit weapons. Two months after Mr. Obama’s climb-down with Syria, he signed on to the interim nuclear deal with Iran. The remainder of his term was spent trying not to upset the fragile beauty of his nuclear diplomacy.
Now we’re coming to grips with the human and strategic price of the Obama administration’s mendacity. The sham agreement gave Assad confidence that he could continue to murder his opponents indefinitely without fear of Western reprisal. It fostered the view that his regime was preferable to its opponents. It showed Tehran that it could drive a hard diplomatic bargain over its nuclear file, given that the administration was so plainly desperate for face-saving excuses for inaction.
And it left Mr. Obama’s successor with a lousy set of options.
Rex Tillerson and Nikki Haley erred badly by announcing, just days before last week’s sarin attack, that the Trump administration had no plans to depose Assad. They gave the dictator reason to believe he had as little to fear from this U.S. president as he did from the last one.
But, unlike their predecessors, the secretary of state and U.N. ambassador deserve credit for learning from that mistake—as does the president they serve. The core of the problem in Syria isn’t Islamic State, dreadful as it is. It’s a regime whose appetite for unlimited violence is one of the main reasons ISIS has thrived. To say there is no easy cure for Syria should not obscure the fact that there won’t be any possibility of a cure until Assad falls.
Mr. Obama and his advisers will never run out of self-justifications for their policy in Syria. They can’t outrun responsibility for the consequences of their lies.
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2)Subject: To Whom does the LAND OF Israel BELONG?
An Israeli Sense of Humour at the United Nations set the record straight.
An ingenious example of speech and politics occurred recently in the United Nations Assembly and made the world community smile.
A representative from Israel began: 'Before beginning my talk I want to tell you something about Moses:
When he struck the rock and it brought forth water, he thought, "What a good opportunity to have a bath!"
Moses removed his clothes, put them aside on the rock and entered the water.
When he got out and wanted to dress, his clothes had vanished.
A Palestinian had stolen them!
The Palestinian representative at the UN jumped up furiously and shouted, "What are you talking about? The Palestinians weren't there then."
The Israeli representative smiled and said, "And now that we have made that clear, I shall begin my speech."
2a) Spicer, Bannon Critics Okay with Anti-Semitic Sharpton and Ellison
It is a rule of thumb in contemporary politics that you should not mention Hitler in any context. Democrats and liberals regularly compare Republicans and conservatives with Nazis, but for the GOP, the MSM will make sure it backfires with round-the-clock selective righteous indignation.
White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer’s inarticulate invocation of Hitler in the context of Syrian sarin gas attacks was meant to condemn the use of such weapons, the operative word here, in war against civilian or even military targets. As Spicer meant to say, even the evil Hitler never dropped sarin gas bombs on London. The Nazis feared retaliation in kind. Spicer meant to justify our cruise missile retaliation. Spicer is aware of the Holocaust and he millions who perished in the ovens and the gas chambers and in ghoulish medical experiments. He did not mean to excuse these atrocities, but to condemn the Syrian and Russian version.
Spicer’s remarks have met with calls from House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and the usual liberal suspects for Spicer’s resignation. Yet Pelosi and et al see no problem with embracing the anti-Semitic likes of Al Sharpton, an Obama adviser, or Rep. Keith Ellison, deputy chair of the DNC.
The mainstream media, having failed to derail or even anticipate Donald Trump’s victory, have now seized on attempting to discredit various Team Trump members. They started with one of the architects of his victory, calling Navy veteran, entrepreneur, and Breitbart publisher Steve Bannon a “white nationalist.” They cite as evidence some Breitbart headlines designed to provoke and attract readers as being beyond the pale. Compared to what? The New York Times, perhaps?
Publishers don’t necessarily control every jot and tittle of content in their publications, but if one concedes the point of Bannon’s critics, those who have problems with Bannon advising Trump had no problem with race-baiter Al Sharpton serving as advisor to President Obama on, of all things, race relations: As Politico magazine reported:
A few days after 18-year-old Mike Brown was gunned down in Ferguson, Missouri, White House officials enlisted an unusual source for on-the-ground intelligence amid the chaos and tear gas: the Rev. Al Sharpton, a fiery activist who became a household name by provoking rather than pacifying….
In Ferguson, Sharpton established himself as a de facto contact and conduit for a jittery White House seeking to negotiate a middle ground between meddling and disengagement. “There’s a trust factor with The Rev from the Oval Office on down,” a White House official familiar with their dealings told me. “He gets it, and he’s got credibility in the community that nobody else has got. There’s really no one else out there who does what he does.”
Let us be grateful for that. If one wanted to send a sane message about justice and peace, Al Sharpton is arguably the worst person to call. He is an instigator, not a peacemaker, someone who rose out of obscurity by propagating the false Tawana Brawley rape case in which New York law enforcement officials were accused of raping a black teenager. As Investor’s Business Daily noted, Tawana Brawley paid for her part in that big lie. Al Sharpton never has.
Sharpton embraced the “hands up, don’t shoot” mantra meant to indict racist cops and police departments after the shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri after he committed a strong-arm robbery on his way to assaulting Officer Darren Wilson. Blessed are the peacemakers, but Al Sharpton is not one of them.
The Sharptons of the world don’t want to solve the real problems of the black community, preferring to exploit back unrest with clueless race-baiting such as when Sharpton and his National Action Network organized
the “Justice for All” march in Washington, D.C. last December:
“You thought you’d sweep it under the rug. You thought there’d be no limelight,” he said. “We are going to keep the light on Michael Brown, on Eric Garner, on Tamir Rice, on all of these victims because the only way — I’m sorry, I come out of the 'hood -- the only way you make roaches run, you got to cut the light on."
As IBD notes, Al Sharpton has made career of anti-Semitic and racial agitation:
Sharpton has made a career of racial incitement. He once called Jews "diamond merchants" and described whites moving businesses into Harlem as "interlopers."
He helped incite three days of anti-Semitic rioting in 1991 in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, turning a tragic traffic accident into a riot where two people died and more than 100 were wounded.
Then there was Freddy's Fashion Mart in Harlem in 1995, subject to the Sharpton campaign to drive out "interlopers." To scare the Jewish owner away, Sharpton turned a tenant-landlord dispute into a racial conflict, resulting in arson of the store and seven deaths.
So the liberal left was okay with Sharpton, but thinks Steve Bannon is a “white nationalist” who threatens all human decency? This comes as the Democratic National Committee considers Minnesota Congressman Keith Ellison, the only Muslim in Congress who has deep ties with the Muslim Brotherhood, for the position of SNC Chairman. As the watchdog group Jihad Watch reports:
Ellison has spoken at a convention of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA). Yet ISNA has actually admitted its ties to Hamas, which styles itself the Palestinian arm of the Muslim Brotherhood. The Justice Department actually classified ISNA among entities “who are and/or were members of the US Muslim Brotherhood.”
It gets worse. In 2008, Ellison accepted $13,350 from the Muslim American Society (MAS) to go on a pilgrimage to Mecca. The Muslim American Society is a Muslim Brotherhood organization: “In recent years, the U.S. Brotherhood operated under the name Muslim American Society, according to documents and interviews. One of the nation’s major Islamic groups, it was incorporated in Illinois in 1993 after a contentious debate among Brotherhood members.” That’s from the Chicago Tribune in 2004, in an article that is now carried on the Muslim Brotherhood’s English-language website, Ikhwanweb.
Also, the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) raised large amounts of for Ellison’s first campaign, and he has spoken at numerous CAIR events. Yet CAIR is an unindicted co-conspirator in a Hamas terror funding case — so named by the Justice Department. CAIR officials have repeatedly refused to denounce Hamas and Hizballah as terrorist groups.
Nor did the liberal left and the mainstream media, forgive the redundancy, have problems with the curious pasts and associations of Hillary Clinton advisor Huma Abedin. As Investors Business Daily has editorialized:
Abedin also has some interesting family connections. Her father is said to be close with the Saudi government's Muslim World League, and her mother is said to be a member of the Muslim Sisterhood. World Trade Center bombing prosecutor Andrew McCarthy wrote in National Review: "The ties of Ms. Abedin's father, mother and brother to the Muslim Brotherhood are both specific and substantiated."
The Muslim Brotherhood took power in Egypt with the Obama administration's approval after it had all but abandoned the government of Hosni Mubarak, a long-time ally and friend. It was while Abedin was advising Hillary that State dropped its long-standing policy of having no dealings with the Muslim Brotherhood.
As Andrew McCarthy wrote in National Review, Huma Abedin’s family and work history suggested a devotion to Islamic supremacist ideology that may go a long way to explaining our imploding Middle East policy from Baghdad to Egypt:
Ms. Abedin worked for many years at a journal that promotes Islamic-supremacist ideology that was founded by a top al-Qaeda financier, Abdullah Omar Naseef. Naseef ran the Rabita Trust, a formally designated foreign terrorist organization under American law. Ms. Abedin and Naseef overlapped at the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs (JMMA) for at least seven years. Throughout that time (1996–2003), Ms. Abdein worked for Hillary Clinton in various capacities.
The Democratic Party also had no problem with venerating former KKK member Robert Byrd or with Hillary Clinton’s admiration for Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, whose objective was the extermination of the black race. They are quiet about the racism of the Orwellian-named Black Lives Matter movement or that Jim Crow laws were written by Democrats.
Steve Bannon is not a white nationalist. Sean Spicer is not an anti-Semite. They are patriotic Americans. Their only real crime is getting Donald Trump elected President of the United States.
Daniel John Sobieski is a freelance writer whose pieces have appeared in Investor’s Business Daily, Human Events, Reason Magazine and the Chicago Sun-Times among other publications.
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3)
#OBAMAGATE: EXPOSING THE OBAMA DEEP STATE
Obama’s third term has begun. Our Republic is in danger.
By Daniel Greenfield
After Trump secured the nomination, Obama’s people filed a wiretapping request. As he was on the verge of winning, they did it again. After he won, they are doing everything they can to bring him down.
It was always going to come down to this.
One is the elected President of the United States. The other is the Anti-President who commands a vast network that encompasses the organizers of OFA, the official infrastructure of the DNC and Obama Anonymous, a shadow government of loyalists embedded in key positions across the government.
A few weeks after the election, I warned that Obama was planning to run the country from outside the White House. And that the “Obama Anonymous” network of staffers embedded in the government was the real threat. Since then Obama’s Kalorama mansion has become a shadow White House. And the Obama Anonymous network is doing everything it can to bring down an elected government.
Valerie Jarrett has moved into the shadow White House to plot operations against Trump. Meanwhile Tom Perez has given him control of the corpse of the DNC after fending off a Sandernista bid from Keith Ellison. Obama had hollowed out the Democrat Party by diverting money to his own Organizing for America. Then Hillary Clinton had cannibalized it for her presidential bid through Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and Donna Brazile. Now Obama owns the activist, OFA, and organizational, DNC, infrastructure.
But that’s just half the picture.
Obama controls the opposition. He will have a great deal of power to choose future members of Congress and the 2020 candidate. But he could have done much of that from Chicago or New York. The reason he didn’t decide to move on from D.C. is that the nation’s capital contains the infrastructure of the national government. He doesn’t just want to run the Democrats. He wants to run America.
The other half of the picture is the Obama Deep State. This network of political appointees, bureaucrats and personnel scattered across numerous government agencies is known only as Obama Anonymous.
Obama Inc. had targeted Trump from the very beginning when it was clear he would be the nominee.
Trump had locked down the GOP nomination in May. Next month there was a FISA request targeting him. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court denied the request, and it is still unknown whether the request targeted Trump, or only his associates, but it’s silly to pretend that the submission of such a request a month after he became the presumptive GOP nominee was apolitical.
The second, narrower, FISA request came through in October. This one was approved. The reason for getting a FISA request in October was even more obvious than June. October is the crucial month in presidential elections. It’s the month of the “October Surprise” when the worst hit pieces based on the keenest opposition research is unleashed. Obama’s opposition research on Trump involved eavesdropping on a server in Trump Tower. Nixon would have been very jealous.
After the election, Obama Inc. began to spread out its bets. Some of his people migrated into his network of political organizations. Others remained embedded in the government. While the former would organize the opposition, the latter would sabotage, undermine and try to bring down Trump.
An unprecedented campaign for full spectrum dominance was being waged in domestic politics.
Political opposition wasn’t a new phenomenon; even if a past president centralizing control of the organizational and activist arms of his party to wage war on his successor was unprecedented. But weaponizing unelected government officials to wage war on an elected government was a coup.
Obama Anonymous conducted its coup in layers. The first layer partnered congressional Democrats with OA personnel to retain control of as much of the government as possible by the Obama Deep State. They did it by blocking Trump’s nominees with endless hearings and protests. The second layer partnered congressional Democrats with the deeper layer of Obama operatives embedded in law enforcement and intelligence agencies who were continuing the Obama investigations of Trump.
This second layer sought to use the investigation to force out Trump people who threatened their control over national security, law enforcement and intelligence. It is no coincidence that their targets, Flynn and Sessions, were in that arena. Or that their views on Islamic terror and immigration are outside the consensus making them easy targets for Obama Anonymous and its darker allies.
These darker allies predate Obama. The tactics being deployed against Trump were last used by them in a previous coup during President Bush’s second term. The targets back then had included Bush officials, an Iran skeptic, pro-Israel activists and a Democrat congresswoman. The tactics, eavesdropping, leaks, false investigations, dubious charges and smear campaigns against officials, were exactly the same.
Anyone who remembers the cases of Larry Franklin, Jane Harman and some others will recognize them. Before that they were used to protect the CIA underestimates of Soviet capabilities that were broken through by Rumsfeld’s Halloween Massacre and Team B which helped clear the way for Reagan’s defeat of the Soviet Union.
Under Bush, the Deep State was fighting against any effort to stop Iran’s nuclear program. It did so by eliminating and silencing opposition within the national security establishment and Congress through investigations of supposed foreign agents. That left the field clear for it to force a false National Intelligence Estimate on President Bush which claimed that Iran had halted its nuclear program.
Obama broke out the same tactics when he went after Iran Deal opponents. Once again members of Congress were spied on and the results were leaked to friendly media outlets. Before the wiretapping of Trump’s people, the NSA was passing along conversations of Iran Deal opponents to the White House which were used to coordinate strategy in defense of the illegal arrangement with Islamic terrorists.
The same wall between government and factional political agendas that Nixon’s “White House Plumbers” had broken through on the way to Watergate had been torn down. NSA eavesdropping was just another way to win domestic political battles. All it took was accusing the other side of treason.
And worse was to come.
During the Iran Deal battle, the NSA was supposedly filtering the eavesdropped data it passed along.
In its last days, Obama Inc. made it easier to pass along unfiltered personal information to the other agencies where Obama loyalists were working on their investigation targeting Trump. The NSA pipeline now makes it possible for the shadow White House to still gain intelligence on its domestic enemies.
And the target of the shadow White House is the President of the United States.
There is now a President and an Anti-President. A government and a shadow government. The anti-President controls more of the government through his shadow government than the real President.
The Obama network is an illegal shadow government. Even its “light side” as an opposition group is very legally dubious. Its “shadow side” is not only illegal, but a criminal attack on our democracy.
When he was in power, Obama hacked reporters like FOX News’ James Rosen and CBS News’ Sharyl Attkisson. He eavesdropped on members of Congress opposed to the Iran Deal. Two men who made movies he disliked ended up in jail. But what he is doing now is even more deeply disturbing.
Obama no longer legally holds power. His Deep State network is attempting to overturn the results of a presidential election using government employees whose allegiance is to a shadow White House. Tactics that were illegal when he was in office are no longer just unconstitutional, they are treasonous.
Obama Inc. has become a state within a state. It is a compartmentalized network of organizations, inside and outside the government, that claim that they are doing nothing illegal as individual groups because they are technically following the rules within each compartment, but the sheer scope of the illegality lies in the covert coordination between these “revolutionary cells” infecting our country.
It is a criminal conspiracy of unprecedented scope. Above all else, it is the most direct attack yet on a country in which governments are elected by the people, not by powerful forces within the government.
“We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain,” President Lincoln declared at Gettysburg. “That this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
Obama’s shadow government is not just a war on President Trump. It is a war on that government of the people, by the people and for the people. If he succeeds, then at his touch, it will perish from the earth.
Obama’s third term has begun. Our Republic is in danger.!!!
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4)
The woman sitting opposite me, dressed in a charcoal pantsuit and a duck-egg-blue turtleneck, can’t go anywhere, at any time of day, without a bodyguard. She is soft-spoken and irrepressibly sane, but also—in the eyes of those who would rather cut her throat than listen to what she says—the most dangerous foe of Islamist extremism in the Western world. We are in a secure room at a sprawling university, but the queasiness in my chest takes a while to go away. I’m talking to a woman with multiple fatwas on her head, someone who has a greater chance of meeting a violent end than anyone I’ve met (Salman Rushdie included). And yet she’s wholly poised, spectacles pushed back to rest atop her head like a crown, dignified and smiling under siege.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, born in Somalia in 1969, is Islam’s most eloquent apostate. She has just published a slim book that seeks to add a new four-letter word—dawa—to the West’s vocabulary. It describes the ceaseless, world-wide ideological campaign waged by Islamists as a complement to jihad. It is, she says, the greatest threat facing the West and “could well bring about the end of the European Union as we know it.” America is far from immune, and her book, “The Challenge of Dawa,” is an explicit attempt to persuade the Trump administration to adopt “a comprehensive anti-dawa strategy before it is too late.”
Ms. Hirsi Ali has come a long way from the days when she—“then a bit of a hothead”—declared Islam to be incapable of reform, while also calling on Muslims to convert or abandon religion altogether. That was a contentious decade ago. Today she believes that Islam can indeed be reformed, that it must be reformed, and that it can be reformed only by Muslims themselves—by those whom she calls “Mecca Muslims.” These are the faithful who prefer the gentler version of Islam that she says was “originally promoted by Muhammad” before 622. That was the year he migrated to Medina and the religion took a militant and unlovely ideological turn.
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Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Islam’s Most Eloquent Apostate
The West’s obsession with ‘terror’ has been a mistake, she argues. Dawa, the ideology behind it, is a broader threat.
The woman sitting opposite me, dressed in a charcoal pantsuit and a duck-egg-blue turtleneck, can’t go anywhere, at any time of day, without a bodyguard. She is soft-spoken and irrepressibly sane, but also—in the eyes of those who would rather cut her throat than listen to what she says—the most dangerous foe of Islamist extremism in the Western world. We are in a secure room at a sprawling university, but the queasiness in my chest takes a while to go away. I’m talking to a woman with multiple fatwas on her head, someone who has a greater chance of meeting a violent end than anyone I’ve met (Salman Rushdie included). And yet she’s wholly poised, spectacles pushed back to rest atop her head like a crown, dignified and smiling under siege.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, born in Somalia in 1969, is Islam’s most eloquent apostate. She has just published a slim book that seeks to add a new four-letter word—dawa—to the West’s vocabulary. It describes the ceaseless, world-wide ideological campaign waged by Islamists as a complement to jihad. It is, she says, the greatest threat facing the West and “could well bring about the end of the European Union as we know it.” America is far from immune, and her book, “The Challenge of Dawa,” is an explicit attempt to persuade the Trump administration to adopt “a comprehensive anti-dawa strategy before it is too late.”
Ms. Hirsi Ali has come a long way from the days when she—“then a bit of a hothead”—declared Islam to be incapable of reform, while also calling on Muslims to convert or abandon religion altogether. That was a contentious decade ago. Today she believes that Islam can indeed be reformed, that it must be reformed, and that it can be reformed only by Muslims themselves—by those whom she calls “Mecca Muslims.” These are the faithful who prefer the gentler version of Islam that she says was “originally promoted by Muhammad” before 622. That was the year he migrated to Medina and the religion took a militant and unlovely ideological turn.
At the same time, Ms. Hirsi Ali—now a research fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, where I also work—is urging the West to look at Islam with new eyes. She says it must be viewed “not just as a religion, but also as a political ideology.” To regard Islam merely as a faith, “as we would Christianity or Buddhism, is to run the risk of ignoring dawa, the activities carried out by Islamists to keep Muslims energized by a campaign to impose Shariah law on all societies—including countries of the West.”
Dawa, Ms. Hirsi Ali explains, is “conducted right under our noses in Europe, and in America. It aims to convert non-Muslims to political Islam and also to push existing Muslims in a more extreme direction.” The ultimate goal is “to destroy the political institutions of a free society and replace them with Shariah.” It is a “never-ending process,” she says, and then checks herself: “It ends when an Islamic utopia is achieved. Shariah everywhere!”
Ms. Hirsi Ali contends that the West has made a colossal mistake by its obsession with “terror” in the years since 9/11. “In focusing only on acts of violence,” she says, “we’ve ignored the Islamist ideology underlying those acts. By not fighting a war of ideas against political Islam—or ‘Islamism’—and against those who spread that ideology in our midst, we’ve committed a blunder.”
There is a knock on the door. I hear hushed voices outside, presumably her bodyguard telling someone to come back later. To add to the mildly dramatic effect, a siren is audible somewhere in the distance, unusual for the serene Stanford campus. Ms. Hirsi Ali is unfazed. “What the Islamists call jihad,” she continues, “is what we call terrorism, and our preoccupation with it is, I think, a form of overconfidence. ‘Terrorism is the way of the weak,’ we tell ourselves, ‘and if we can just take out the leaders and bring down al Qaeda or ISIS, then surely the followers will stop their jihad.’ But we’re wrong. Every time Western leaders take down a particular organization, you see a different one emerge, or the same one take on a different shape. And that’s because we’ve been ignoring dawa.”
Ms. Hirsi Ali wants us to get away from this game of jihadi Whac-A-Mole and confront “the enemy that is in plain sight—the activists, the Islamists, who have access to all the Western institutions of socialization.” She chuckles here: “That’s a horrible phrase . . . ‘institutions of socialization’ . . . but they’re there, in families, in schools, in universities, prisons, in the military as chaplains. And we can’t allow them to pursue their aims unchecked.”
America needs to be on full alert against political Islam because “its program is fundamentally incompatible with the U.S. Constitution”—with religious pluralism, the equality of men and women, and other fundamental rights, including the toleration of different sexual orientations. “When we say the Islamists are homophobic,” she observes, “we don’t mean that they don’t like gay marriage. We mean that they want gays put to death.”
Islam the religion, in Ms. Hirsi Ali’s view, is a Trojan horse that conceals Islamism the political movement. Since dawa is, ostensibly, a religious missionary activity, its proponents “enjoy a much greater protection by the law in free societies than Marxists or fascists did in the past.” Ms. Hirsi Ali is not afraid to call these groups out. Her book names five including the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which asserts—and in turn receives in the mainstream media—the status of a moderate Muslim organization. But groups like CAIR, Ms. Hirsi Ali says, “take advantage of the focus on ‘inclusiveness’ by progressive political bodies in democratic societies, and then force these societies to bow to Islamist demands in the name of peaceful coexistence.”
Her strategy to fight dawa evokes several parallels with the Western historical experience of radical Marxism and the Cold War. Islamism has the help of “useful idiots”—Lenin’s phrase—such as the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has denounced Ms. Hirsi Ali as an “extremist.” She sees that smear as a success for dawa: “They go to people like the SPLC and say, ‘Can we partner with you, because we also want to talk about what you guys talk about, which is civil rights. And Muslims are a minority, just like you.’ So, they play this victim card, and the SPLC swallows it. And it’s not just them, it’s also the ACLU. The Islamists are infiltrating all these institutions that were historic and fought for rights. It’s a liberal blind spot.”
Western liberals, she says, are also complicit in an Islamist cultural segregation. She recalls a multiculturalist catchphrase from her years as a Somali refugee in Amsterdam in the early 1990s: “ ‘Integrate with your own identity,’ they used to tell us—Integratie met eigen identiteit. Of course, that resulted in no integration at all.”
Ms. Hirsi Ali wants the Trump administration—and the West more broadly—to counter the dawa brigade “just as we countered both the Red Army and the ideology of communism in the Cold War.” She is alarmed by the ease with which, as she sees it, “the agents of dawa hide behind constitutional protections they themselves would dismantle were they in power.” She invokes Karl Popper, the great Austrian-British philosopher who wrote of “the paradox of tolerance.” Her book quotes Popper writing in 1945: “If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.”
I ask Ms. Hirsi Ali what her solution might be, and she leans once more on Popper, who proposed a right not to tolerate the intolerant. “Congress must give the president—this year, because there’s no time to lose—the tools he needs to dismantle the infrastructure of dawa in the U.S.” Dawa has become an existential menace to the West, she adds, because its practitioners are “working overtime to prevent the assimilation of Muslims into Western societies. It is assimilation versus dawa. There is a notion of ‘cocooning,’ by which Islamists tell Muslim families to cocoon their children from Western society. This can’t be allowed to happen.”
Is Ms. Hirsi Ali proposing to give Washington enhanced powers to supervise parenting? “Yes,” she says. “We want these children to be exposed to critical thinking, freedom, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the rights of women.” She also suggests subjecting immigrants and refugees to ideological scrutiny, so as to deny entry, residence and naturalization to those “involved with, or supportive of, Islamism.”
In effect, Ms. Hirsi Ali would modernize the “communism test” that still applies to those seeking naturalization. “I had to answer questions when I applied for citizenship in 2013: ‘Are you, or have you ever been, a communist?’ And I remember thinking, ‘God, that was the war back then. We’re supposed to update this stuff!’ Potential immigrants from Pakistan or Bangladesh, for instance, should have to answer questions—‘Are you a member of the Jamat?’ and so on. If they’re from the Middle East you ask them about the Muslim Brotherhood, ‘or any other similar group,’ so there’s no loophole.”
Might critics deride this as 21st-century McCarthyism? “That’s just a display of intellectual laziness,” Ms. Hirsi Ali replies. “We’re dealing here with a lethal ideological movement and all we are using is surveillance and military means? We have to grasp the gravity of dawa. Jihad is an extension of dawa. For some, in fact, it is dawa by other means.”
The U.S., she believes, is in a “much weaker position to combat the various forms of nonviolent extremism known as dawa because of the way that the courts have interpreted the First Amendment”—a situation where American exceptionalism turns into what she calls an “exceptional handicap.” Convincing Americans of this may be the hardest part of Ms. Hirsi Ali’s campaign, and she knows it. Yet she asks whether the judicial attitudes of the 1960s and 1970s—themselves a reaction to the excesses of Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s—might have left the U.S. ill-equipped to suppress threats from groups that act in the name of religion.
I ask Ms. Hirsi Ali if there’s any one thing she would wish for. “I would like to be present at a conversation between Popper and Muhammad,” she says. “Popper wrote about open society and its enemies, and subjected everyone from Plato to Marx to his critical scrutiny. I’d have liked him to subject Muhammad’s legacy to the same analysis.
“But he skipped Muhammad, alas. He skipped Muhammad.”
Mr. Varadarajan is a research fellow in journalism at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.
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5)What’s Become of the American Dream?
Part of the problem is definitional. It isn’t just about houses, cars and material prosperity.
By Peggy Noonan
I want to think aloud about the American dream. People have been saying for a while that it’s dead. It’s not, but it needs strengthening. We should start by saying what it means, which is something we’ve gotten mixed up about. I know its definition because I grew up in the heart of it and remember how people had long understood it. The American dream is the belief, held by generation after generation since our beginning and reanimated over the decades by waves of immigrants, that here you can start from anywhere and become anything. In America you can rise to the heights no matter where and in what circumstances you began. You can go from the bottom to the top.
Behind the dream was another belief: America was uniquely free, egalitarian and arranged so as to welcome talent. Lincoln was elected president in part because his supporters brought lengths of crude split-rails to the Republican National Convention in Chicago in 1860. They held the rails high and paraded them in a floor demonstration to tell everyone: This guy was nothing but a frontier rail splitter, a laborer, a backwoods nobody. Now he will be president. What a country. What a dream.
This distinguished America from old Europe, from which it had kicked away. There titles, families and inherited wealth dictated standing: If you had them, you’d always be at the top. If you didn’t, you’d always be at the bottom. That static system bred resentment. We would have a dynamic one that bred hope.
You can give a dozen examples, and perhaps you are one, of Americans who turned a brilliant system into a lived-out triumph. Thomas Edison, the seventh child of modest folk in Michigan and half-deaf to boot, filled the greatest cities in the world with electric light. Barbara Stanwyck was from working-class Brooklyn. Her mother died, her father skipped town, and she was raised by relatives and foster parents. She went on to a half-century career as a magnetic actress of stage and screen; in 1944 she was the highest-paid woman in America. Jonas Salk was a hero of my childhood. His parents were Jewish immigrants from Poland who settled in East Harlem—again, working-class nobodies. Naturally young Jonas, an American, scoped out the true facts of his time and place and thought: I’ll be a great lawyer. His mother is reported to have said no, a doctor. He went on to cure polio. We used to talk about him at the public school when we waited in line for the vaccine.
In America so many paths were offered! But then a big nation that is a great one literally has a lot of paths.
The American dream was about aspiration and the possibility that, with dedication and focus, it could be fulfilled. But the American dream was not about material things—houses, cars, a guarantee of future increase. That’s the construction we put on it now. It’s wrong. A big house could be the product of the dream, if that’s what you wanted, but the house itself was not the dream. You could, acting on your vision of the dream, read, learn, hold a modest job and rent a home, but at town council meetings you could stand, lead with wisdom and knowledge, and become a figure of local respect. Maybe the respect was your dream.
Stanwyck became rich, Salk revered. Both realized the dream.
How did we get the definition mixed up?
I think part of the answer is: Grandpa. He’d sit on the front stoop in Levittown in the 1950s. A sunny day, the kids are tripping by, there’s a tree in the yard and bikes on the street and a car in the front. He was born in Sicily or Donegal or Dubrovnik, he came here with one change of clothes tied in a cloth and slung on his back, he didn’t even speak English, and now look—his grandkids with the bikes. “This is the American dream,” he says. And the kids, listening, looked around, saw the houses and the car, and thought: He means the American dream is things. By inference, the healthier and more enduring the dream, the bigger the houses get, the more expensive the cars. (They went on to become sociologists and journalists.)
But that of course is not what Grandpa meant. He meant: I started with nothing and this place let me and mine rise. The American dream was not only about materialism, but material things could be, and often were, its fruits.
The American dream was never fully realized, not by a long shot, and we all know this. The original sin of America, slavery, meant some of the oldest Americans were brutally excluded from it. The dream is best understood as a continuing project requiring constant repair and expansion, with an eye to removing barriers and roadblocks for all.
Many reasons are put forward in the argument over whether the American Dream is over (no) or ailing (yes) or was always divisive (no—dreams keep nations together). We see income inequality, as the wealthy prosper while the middle class grinds away and the working class slips away. There is a widening distance, literally, between the rich and the poor. Once the richest man in town lived nearby, on the nicest street on the right side of the tracks. Now he’s decamped to a loft in SoHo. “The big sort” has become sociocultural apartheid. It’s globalization, it’s the decline in the power of private-sector unions and the brakes they applied.
What ails the dream is a worthy debate. I’d include this: The dream requires adults who can launch kids sturdily into Dream-land.
When kids have one or two parents who are functioning, reliable, affectionate—who will stand in line for the charter-school lottery, who will fill out the forms, who will see that the football uniform gets washed and is folded on the stairs in the morning—there’s a good chance they’ll be OK. If you come from that now, it’s like being born on third base and being able to hit a triple. You’ll be able to pursue the dream.
But I see kids who don’t have that person, who are from families or arrangements that didn’t cohere, who have no one to stand in line for them or get them up in the morning. What I see more and more in America is damaged or absent parents. We all know what’s said in this part—drugs, family breakup. Poor parenting is not a new story in human history, and has never been new in America. But insufficient parents used to be able to tell their kids to go out, go play in America, go play in its culture. And the old aspirational culture, the one of the American dream, could counter a lot. Now we have stressed kids operating within a nihilistic popular culture that can harm them. So these kids have nothing—not the example of a functioning family and not the comfort of a culture into which they can safely escape.
This is not a failure of policy but a failure of love. And it’s hard to change national policy on a problem like that.
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