The Reality of Sectarian Conflict. By Walter Russell Mead. The American Interest, October 14, 2015. Mead: Amnesty
International has accused Kurdish forces fighting in northeast Syria of war
crimes, charging the Kurdish YPG militia of targeting civilians in Hasakah and
Raqqa provinces. The human rights watchdog spoke with residents of Syria’s
Kurdish-controlled Rojava region and heard consistent tales of forced eviction
at gunpoint. One woman’s representative story recalls the destruction of her
village in the north of Syria:
They
[the YPG] said, “Stay in your homes. We won’t bother you. We have come to
liberate you [from Isis]. We just want the names of the people that are wanted.”
But then they wouldn’t even let us take our clothes out of the house. They
pulled us out of our homes and began burning them. Then they brought the
bulldozers.
Ethnic
(and religious) cleansing is an inevitable element of identity wars like the
ones raging in Syria today. Tens of millions in Europe and Turkey went through
the anguish and agony of being driven from their homes—or fleeing in panic from
them—over the last 150 years. The only way to stop these terrible cruelties and
crimes is to prevent them: to maintain international order and to prevent the
state meltdowns that leave ethnic and religious communities in a state of
nature. The so-called “international community” and the world’s community
organizer-in-chief have failed in that; now the grim consequences are appearing
one by one.
Syria
and Iraq are becoming Greater Lebanon as their inhabitants turn on one another.
The law of the jungle is the only law left when communities are fighting, or
believe they are fighting, for their survival. Shi’a against Sunni, Kurd against
Arab, perhaps soon Kurd against Turk…once these wars get going, they rarely end
quickly. The bitterness and above all the fear—existential fear for the
survival of your kind—remain, ready to flare into new rounds of hideous
violence. These
are the demons that have been unleashed in the Middle East; it is hard to see
now how they can be tamed.
We, the Terrified. By Kevin D. Williamson. National Review Online, October 13, 2015. Williamson: Have a
little sympathy for the Sanders set.
Following Bernie Sanders around Iowa earlier in the season, I got a pretty good idea of
who he is and what he is about: He is a man with a palpable desire to punish,
to make them pay, a fellow who read Discipline
and Punish back in the 1970s and cheered for the jailers at the Mettray
Penal Colony. He calls himself a “democratic socialist,” but we know the kind
of socialist he is: Stefan Löfven on the stump, Mao Zedong in his heart. You
can see that from a mile away, and his performance on the stage tonight only
confirms that. His politics are driven by hatred.
Senator
Sanders I get, and I got in a minute, in that anybody who knows a little
history knows the type. But the Sandersnistas mystified me. I think I’m
starting to understand them.
Outside
the Democratic debate tonight, on the Vegas Strip in front of the Wynn (perfect
venue for the Democrats’ presidential debate, incidentally, full of daft old
decrepit white people in thrall to base fantasies and willfully ignorant of the
fact that the numbers are always against them) my personal two-minute survey
found the Sanders signs outnumbering the signs for Herself 53 to 19. Most of
the people I spoke with were (you will not be surprised) unionized government
and health-care workers, but Vegas’s big kahuna, Culinary Union Local 226, was
not to be seen. (Culinary historically has no love for Herself, and endorsed
the other guy last time around, but hasn’t endorsed yet in this primary.)
Sanders already has won the endorsement of National Nurses United, and there
was a big nurses-for-Sanders to-do before the debate.
The
nurses all told basically the same story: They are doing fine for the moment,
with a good union that secures for them good paychecks and good benefits. But
they worry that the day after tomorrow something could suddenly change, that
their hospitals and clinics will go under or be sold to evil hedge funds and
that the terms of their employment will change radically for the worse, that
their houses will for some reason be foreclosed on even though they’re current
on all their payments, that college tuition will triple between now and the
time their kids finish up at UNLV, that something bad is going to happen.
That’s
the Sanders voter, and, I think, the Democrat at large: terrified.
It
isn’t just them. I was speaking with Sanders supporters almost literally in the
shadow of a giant gold tower bearing the name “TRUMP” on the side—it is
something of an achievement to create one of the tackiest things in Las Vegas—and the Trumpkins, like the
Sandersnistas, are terrified: The big Mexican is gonna come and get them, the
scheming Chinaman is gonna take their jobs, the surly Negro is leering at the
white women. At both ends of the spectrum, we see terrified—terrified—Americans
praying that Big Daddy will provide for them and smite their enemies. With
sometime messiah Barack Obama having failed to deliver the goods, they’re
turning to Government As God the Father Himself.
Over
and over again: Sanders is on our side, Sanders will make them pay. Sanders
hates who we hate.
The
United States isn’t really a winner-take-all society. Life’s actually pretty
easy in the middle here, and nobody is sleeping in the street or going hungry
because of economic failure. (Failure of the mental health care system, yes,
economic failure, no.) But, as I have been arguing for a while now, not
everybody is temperamentally cut out to be a clever, constantly adapting player
in the 21st century economy. Those old factory jobs in the 1950s that everybody
is so nostalgic about paid crap in real terms and were dreary and
soul-crushing. But they were—or they seemed—stable. Those nurses for Bernie are
living well. But they’re afraid that their good times will come to a sudden
end.
The
conservative who can figure out a way to address that without unnecessarily
impoverishing the United States (which is what trade restrictions do) or
creating new classes of public wards will have a real weapon in his hands. It
won’t get these Vegas union drones to pull the “R” lever—they’ll vote as
they’re told to vote—but it’s a big country.
Clueless About a Religious War. By Jonathan S. Tobin. Commentary, October 12, 2015. Tobin: After
another day of stabbings and other attacks of Israelis by Palestinians is
making it harder to pretend that a third intifada has not broken out. As the Times of Israel notes, Palestinians are calling this surge of terrorism the “hibat al-Quds” or the “Jerusalem
awakening.” That is significant and not just because it recalls the way
Palestinians referred to the second intifada as being about the “al-Aqsa”
mosque on the Temple Mount. While the narrative about this latest outbreak of
violence from critics of Israel is that it is all about the sins of the
“occupation” and Israel denying hope to the Palestinians, what we hearing from
them is a very different story. Read any of the accounts of the motivations of
the people going into the streets to stab random Jews they encounter or the
mobs in the West Bank who are seeking to set off confrontations with Israeli
troops, and you don’t hear much about frustration about the peace process. The
same applies to clips from Palestinian television that Palestine Media Watch
provides. What you do see are accounts of Muslim religious fervor that is
drenched in the fever of martyrdom and faith-based hate.
This is
significant and not just because most of the popular notion that the violence
is caused by the failure of Israel to make enough concessions in negotiations
to bring peace. If Palestinians are engaged in an intifada that is, at its
core, a religious war rather than a protest movement about Israeli policies or
a desire for a Palestinian state, then everything that the Obama administration
and even many of Israel’s American supporters think they know about the
conflict is just plain wrong.
This
is, after all, the same administration that is engaged in a war against
Islamist terrorists that it claims has nothing to do with religion. Even though
jihadis throughout the Middle East are driven to try to kill Americans and
their allies by their faith, the president, and his foreign policy team have
been consistent in refusing to admit that there is any conflict with the form
of Islam that has produced these enemies.
Part of
that stubborn denial of reality is rooted in common sense. The U.S. doesn’t want
or need a war against all Muslims. It is only fighting adherents of a variant
of Islam that we have come to call Islamism. So differentiating between
ordinary peace-loving Muslims in the United States or elsewhere and those who
wanted to wage an unending war of annihilation on the West is smart. But
pretending that those people that we are fighting have nothing to do with Islam
is stupid. They may not represent all Muslims, but backers of ISIS, al-Qaeda,
and other terror groups are not a tiny minority in the Middle East. In fact,
though the number of active fighters is relatively small, those who sympathize
with them make up a significant proportion of the Muslim population. The reason
for that is that, although President Obama poses at times as an expert about
what is and is not Islam, large numbers of Muslims disagree with his rulings on
that question.
This
failure to acknowledge reality is a major obstacle to the faltering U.S.
efforts to deal with the rise of ISIS and other terror groups. It stands to
reason that if you don’t know what you are fighting or why your opponents are
so dedicated to your destruction, you’re not likely to defeat them.
The
same rule applies to evaluations of the conflict between Israel and the
Palestinians and hopes for renewed peace talks.
If the
struggle between Jews and Arabs over the same small country were merely about
whether it could be split to grant both peoples a share of sovereignty, then
the century-long war between them would have ended many decades ago. Though partition
plans were offered before World War II and then again prior to Israel achieving
independence, the Arab answer was always “no.” Since the 1967 Six Day War in
which Israel came into possession of the West Bank and unified Jerusalem, the
conventional wisdom was that if only the Jews gave up the “occupied
territories,” peace would come. This ignores the fact that the “occupied
territories” before June 1967 was Israel itself. Even today, Hamas and most
other Palestinian groups, and at times the supposed moderates of Fatah, refer
to all of Israel as “occupied.”
What
those who keep saying that more concessions from Israel that will give hope to
Palestinians don’t understand is that for those who go into the streets to seek
martyrdom while killing Jews, the location of a future border between Israel
and a state of Palestine is irrelevant. After all, Israel offered the
Palestinians independence and statehood in almost all of the West Bank, Gaza,
and a share of Jerusalem in 2000, 2001 and 2008. And even Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu offered them the West Bank in 2010.
But if
the goal of the Palestinian leadership and the angry mobs with knives, rocks
and gasoline bombs in the streets don’t care so much about statehood as they do
about destroying Jewish rule in any part of the country, then this conflict is
about religion and not land. That’s not a message most Israelis, who would like
nothing better than a compromise that would bring them peace, want to hear. But
that is the message of the hibat al-Quds that is coming through loud and clear.
The
focus on saving the mosques on the Temple Mount from a mythical Jewish threat
or the notion that, in the words of PA leader Mahmoud Abbas, “filthy Jewish
feet” are present at holy sites in Jerusalem is a clear sign that faith is what
is driving Palestinian anger. Unfortunately, that faith is not so much one of
peace, as we would like to believe, as it is one that regards a Jewish state,
no matter how much land it possesses, as anathema.
Those
who blame Israel for what is happening aren’t merely wrong about the nature of
the conflict. They are blaming the victims and mistaking jihadist intentions
for a desire for peace. Protests about land and negotiations can be met with
diplomacy. Religious wars that seek to spill the blood of infidel Jews must be
with decisive force, not talk. Those Americans who don’t understand this are
part of Israel’s problems, not advocates for a viable solution.
The Consequences of Mayhem. By Jonathan S. Tobin. Commentary, October 13, 2015. Tobin: As bad
as the situation in Israel seemed yesterday, Tuesday began with even more Palestinian terror that sent shock waves through the country. A pair of
terrorists entered a Jerusalem bus and stabbed and shot passengers, killing two
and wounding many more until police stopped them. Elsewhere in the city another
Jew was killed by a Palestinian terror attack that drove a car onto a crowded
sidewalk and then attempted to finish his victims off with a knife. There were
also more stabbings in the city of Ra’anana. But while the details of the
attacks vary, the dynamic is clear. These are for all intents and purposes
suicide attacks that are motivated by religious fervor. The Palestinian
Authority leadership’s false charges about Israel — broadcast on their official
media — about Israel’s supposed intent to harm the mosques on the Temple Mount
has set off a wave of religiously-inspired terror attacks that it can’t
control. The question now is what comes next? Will the Palestinians eventually
come to their senses and stop the madness? Or will this situation continue to
spiral out of control with lives lost? Yet whatever the answers to these
questions turn out to be, there is no question which side in the conflict will
come out the loser from this disastrous turn of events.
What PA
leader Mahmoud Abbas may be about to learn is the same hard lesson his
predecessor Yasir Arafat absorbed during the second intifada. While it is
clearly in the interests of Abbas interests to keep a lid on the violence lest
he lose complete control of the situation, it’s a lot easier to start a holy
war than to stop one. Abbas sought to compete with his Hamas rivals by sounding
bellicose against Israel and seized on a perennial favorite of Palestinian
leaders: inciting hate and fear about Jerusalem. But having convinced ordinary
Palestinians that Israel intended to interfere with the Temple Mount mosques or
to desecrate them with their “filthy Jewish feet,” Abbas can’t be surprised
that many of them are undertaking personal terror attacks on Jews.
What
Abbas wanted was to bolster his image among ordinary Palestinians as a tough
opponent of the Jews. An ineffectual and corrupt leader of kleptocracy serving
the 10th year of the four-year term as president of the PA to which he was once
elected, Abbas has little credibility with Arabs or Jews left. Yet even now
that he sees the disaster that is unfolding that could threaten his rule, Abbas
can’t stop the incitement. He doubled down on it by speaking today of some of the terrorist assailants of Jews as innocent victims who were gunned down by
Israeli oppression. Nor has he stopped the talk about the danger to the
mosques.
But
while this new wave of terror has shocked Israelis and made ordinary life
difficult in areas with mixed populations such as Jerusalem, it is the
Palestinians who will be the big losers here just as they were during the
second intifada. The loss of life and the sense of fear inspired by these
horrifying incidents have shaken Israelis. But they know that if their nation
could survive the horror of the second intifada, which took the lives of over
1,000 Israelis and far more Palestinians, this episode won’t defeat their
country.
On the
other hand, the consequences of this mayhem for Palestinians will be terrible.
If, as happened during the last intifada, Israel is forced to close the borders
with the West Bank in order to stem the violence, it is the already shaky
Palestinian economy that will collapse, not Israel’s. As much as doomsayers
continue to tell Israelis that they can’t go on with the status quo, Israel has
gotten economically stronger in the last generation while the Palestinians,
mired in corruption and still refusing to make peace, lag far behind. War,
especially the kind of low-level terror that Palestinian society has embraced,
will do to them what the second intifada did, and erase years of economic
progress while also making cooperation with more prosperous Israel — the key to
any hope for their advancement — simply impossible.
Abbas
and many of his people may be counting on the usual dynamic of the conflict to
work to their advantage abroad and in international forums. The current strife
may deepen Israel’s diplomatic isolation. The more Palestinians embrace
terrorism, the more likely much of the world will be to condemn all Israeli
measures of self-defense. They will likely also buy into the false notion that
Palestinians are acting out of hopelessness rather than as part of a religious
holy war that is inextricably tied to their century-long struggle against
Zionism.
UN
resolutions, even those unfairly condemning Israeli self-defense, won’t change
the status quo on the Temple Mount that is defended by the Israeli government
that already discriminates against Jews. Yet more condemnations of Israel won’t
do a thing for the Palestinians. If we are to assume that Palestinians really
do want a two-state solution (and based on the PA’s consistent refusal to
accept the legitimacy of a Jewish state no matter where its borders are drawn,
there is no reason to believe that they do) this new terror surge is exactly
the wrong way to go about it. Israelis already were worried that a withdrawal
from much of the West Bank (something that every Israeli government has offered
to do — including Netanyahu’s — in the last 15 years) would duplicate Ariel
Sharon’s disastrous experiment in the pullout from Gaza. But now that Abbas has
whipped up the kind of hate that has Palestinians seeking to slaughter Jews
they see on the street or on buses, further withdrawals seem utter madness.
By
embracing terror, Palestinians have deepened the divide with Israelis while
making even left-wingers less likely to trust them. Stern measures intended to
prevent more terror attacks will have widespread support from right to left.
Nor will many Israelis, even those most likely to want to believe in the idea
that Abbas is a man of peace, soon forget the way he stoked hatred and
needlessly caused so much loss of life. If
Palestinians want prosperity and peace, they need to drop the hate and start
learning to accept Israel as a fact of life that will continue even if they
attained statehood. But so long as their quest for sovereignty is bound up with
holy war, they’ll get neither. As with past unnecessary conflicts they started,
the Palestinians will be the ones who will suffer most from this one.
A
spokesman for the Obama administration Tuesday refused to identify Palestinians
as the perpetrators of a wave of Palestinian terrorist attacks that have left
dozens of Israelis dead and wounded in the past weeks.
Associated
Press reporter Matt Lee pressed the State Department spokesman to explain why
the administration says it delivers the same message to both Israeli and
Palestinian leaders when only Palestinians are carrying out terrorist attacks.
“Does the United States believe–does the administration believe–that Israel is
inciting or not condemning violence?” Lee asked.
Spokesman
Mark Toner replied, “I think what we’ve been very clear about saying is that we
want to see both sides take affirmative steps.”
“So the
U.S. – the administration sees both sides at fault here, is that correct?” Lee
asked.
“Both
sides need to, as their leaders need to express the fact that both sides need
to decrease the tensions that are leading to ongoing incidence of violence. But
you know, you’re asking me to assign blame and I don’t think that’s the case,”
Toner said.
“Well,
I mean, if the secretary is calling up both Abbas and Netanyahu and has the
same message for both of them, it would suggest that you think that both of
them need to do more to that,” Lee said. “I’m just trying to figure out what is
it you would want the Israelis to do more in condemning the violence.”
“For
one thing, upholding–for one thing, as I said upholding the status quo in Haram
al-Sharif and Temple Mount,” Toner said.
“But
has there been suggestion that the status quo is going to be changed?” Lee
asked.
Toner
then changed the subject. There has been no change in the status quo on the
Temple Mount, nor any consideration given by the Israeli government to changing
the status quo there. Palestinian leaders have spread the unfounded claim that
Jews are threatening the Al Aqsa mosque on the Temple Mount, sparking
Palestinian rioting there.
Lee
then pressed from a different angle.
“Do you
think the Palestinian Authority, President Abbas, needs to do more to combat
incitement and condemn violence?” he asked.
Toner
replied, “I think that both leaders need to – need to convey that message.” Toner
later called the past month’s wave of unprovoked Palestinian terrorism “the
cycle of violence that’s currently taking place.”
