Today It Is Israel, Tomorrow It Will Be You: One Jew’s Open Letter to the World.

One Jew’s Open Letter to the World. Liberty Counsel, July 24, 2014. Also here.

Transcript:

Israel—Liberty Counsel received this from a friend in Israel: one man’s story from inside the only democracy in the Middle East.

It has taken me some days to write down something coherent… but this is how I feel tonight. I feel like I weigh 500 pounds. Everyone I know feels like they are walking through water.

And sad. We are all so very, very sad.

This is what I know right now, today: The ugliness, the venom and sheer, violent hatred you are seeing in Paris, London, Berlin, LA, Boston, Denver…. this is just the beginning.

We Jews are the canaries in the coal mine for all of humanity. Today, they are throwing bricks at synagogues and smashing chairs and saying “Kill the Jews.” Tomorrow it will be someone else.

Do the French really think these people will protect and safeguard the treasures of the Louvre? Do Londoners really think these people will cherish the symbols of the British Empire? Does anyone really think this is only about Israel and the disputed territories?

Today it is Israel, tomorrow it will be you.

Maybe that is why everyone gets so disproportionately annoyed about this conflict. Because everyone knows after us, it gets real personal…

Seeing these violent protests, hearing the sickening screams for death we Israelis understand better than ever we must fight for every square inch and with all we have. It matters not how much better our military is, how much more precise our targets can be.It only matters that when the smoke clears Hamas is disarmed, destroyed, disabled and defeated. Forever.

Hamas. NOT the people of Gaza. I feel so very sorry for them. Sorry they were misguided and elected these lunatics. Sorry that in their desperation they allowed Hamas to fill the empty bedrooms next to their children’s room with rockets. Sorry that their leaders have mansions and swimming pools and are sitting in air conditioning in another city while they are sweating and wondering where the roof over their houses went. (If not their house itself.) Sorry that they have been brought up with no inkling of who Israelis are nor what compromise is.

Defeating Hamas will be a big problem for the power brokers because shame and honor are all that matter in this part of the world.

Honor in the Middle East does not come from whether your children are literate, how successful you are, how much money you make, how civilized your community is, nor how many paved roads you have, and whether or not you have garbage collection and recycling.

Here in this part of the world – for Hamas, honor comes from getting revenge. For them revenge is everything. For them revenge is the only thing.

Remember we left Gaza. There was no blockade. They were free to build a model democracy - the first successful shining, taste of the new, proud Palestine. But they didn’t want that kind of success…

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. We will not be fooled again.

We have nowhere else to go. And the rockets won’t stop.

The folks in Ashkelon cannot shower, have a bowel movement, get more milk or walk a dog without wondering if they are taking their lives in their own hands.

There is another Gaza underneath Gaza. Hamas could have built hundreds of schools, paved thousands of roads, built hundreds of kindergartens with the cement and iron they have used to build these underground bunkers and tunnels. (and you wondered why Israel put a blockade on bringing building supplies into the Gaza strip?)

These tunnels to hell are filled with ammunition. And no women or children, not a single elderly person is brought to safety there. They want them on the street - on the roof, standing right behind – nice and close to the terrorist firing the rocket.

Hamas has refused to let journalists out of Gaza. Why? They need them to take pictures and record the carefully staged piles of bloody children and women. If the journalists leave they have lost the vehicle for distributing their bloody ad campaign.

Hamas asked for a cease-fire. And they broke it. They break every single one.

Israel is setting up a massive field hospital to treat our enemies. From 8 pm on tonight there will be a working maternity ward, an operating theater…a working hospital. For… our enemies.

We are going to lose more boys. Last night we lost 13. With each day we are going to lose more.

But everyone here now understands this is a fight to the death. It is them or us.

They cannot compromise and they don’t want peace or to share or to negotiate. They want revenge even if it means killing their own people.

So we have to go in there and do things none of us want to do, but we have to. So this is why we are all so sad. Israelis want peace so badly.

But we also desperately want to live. We love life and we are not about to let anyone, let alone a bunch of deranged thugs take it away from us.

So yes, this is a fight to the death for both sides.

Remember, if they win, you are next.

If we win, those symbols of civilization that everyone takes so for granted will remain standing and everyone will criticize and complain about disproportionate responses and war crimes and all kinds of other irrelevant nonsense, but secretly I think everyone will be heaving a sigh of relief.

Russians Are Living In an Alternate Reality. By Mark Adomanis.

It’s not just about the Malaysian flight. Russians are living in an alternate reality. By Mark Adomanis. Washington Post, July 24, 2014.

Adomanis:

MOSCOW—Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 has already shined a spotlight on the Russian public’s somewhat, um, unique views. Russian media are running with conspiracy theories: that MH17 was shot down by NATO to spark a conflict with Russia, that MH17 wasn’t full of innocent civilians but week-old corpses, or that MH17 was shot down because it was mistaken for Vladimir Putin’s personal jet (as if anti-aircraft missiles weren’t aimed with radar but with a really large pair of binoculars). The only theory missing is the right one: that Russian-backed separatists accidentally shot down the plane when they mistook it for a Ukrainian military transport.

This may seem like the entertaining sideshow to a tragedy, but actually it’s just a window into a hugely dangerous problem. I recently moved to Moscow, and it’s hard to miss the extent to which Russian society exists in an alternate universe. Even well-educated, sophisticated people who have traveled widely in Europe and North America will frequently voice opinions that, in an American context, would place them alongside people wearing tinfoil hats. Russia is not living in the reality-based community.

One particularly easy and glaring example is Russian TV reporters, filing from Eastern Ukraine, who say they are reporting from the “Lugansk People’s Republic” or the “Donetsk People’s Republic.” Regardless of your views on the worsening civil war in Ukraine, which is not a neat story of black and white or right and wrong, it is obvious that these republics are almost entirely fictitious and that their “territory” is largely confined to a handful of government buildings. Despite their extremely dubious claims to legitimacy, the non-existent states are treated with deadly earnestness by both the state media and large numbers of ordinary Russians. (Ukraine has been a problem for Russian media ever since protests there began at the end of 2013.)

On almost any other issue you can think of, Russian views differ radically from the consensus here in America. Russians have extremely different opinions about the conflict in Syria, viewing the war in that unlucky country not as a brave struggle for freedom but as a chaotic war of all against all. They have different views about the war in Libya, where they see the overthrow of Gaddafi not as a new beginning but as the start of chaos and disorder. They have different views about 9/11, with shockingly large numbers of Russians supporting “alternate” explanations of one of history’s most carefully studied and well-documented terrorist attacks. (I was recently asked what “theory” of the attacks I supported only to be told that it was “my opinion” after I noted that al-Qaeda was clearly and obviously responsible.) Even something as seemingly straightforward and non-political as a meteor strike attracted a range of bizarre theories and pseudo-scientific “explanations” like the onset of an alien invasion or the testing of a new American super weapon. These wacky ideas (“the aliens are attacking Siberia!” “The grand masons are responsible for 9/11!”) would be extremely funny if they didn’t represent such a tragic deficit of reason.

I’ve asked people about these notions. Particularly if they’re a bit bashful about the position they’re about to advocate, Russians will often highlight their country’s long track record of superstition and its history as a rural, peasant society. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve heard “we’re a superstitious people” as an explanation for some kind of seemingly nonsensical position. In contrast to Western Europe, Russia really did urbanize and become literate much later. This delayed development has left a lasting impression on popular consciousness and public attitudes.

But while there is clearly some truth to the idea that Russia’s unique cultural history renders it susceptible to conspiracies, explanations centered on the “Russian soul” strike me as a cop-out. Far more important than the legacy of peasant life or any kind of natural penchant for mysteriousness and inscrutability is the Soviet legacy of propaganda. The older generations here all grew up in an environment in which the government systematically manipulated information on a scale that is hard to fathom. Although you might expect that this would engender a healthy skepticism, it appears to have created an unhealthy over-reaction. Russians don’t just doubt the “official line.” Several expats here, like me, have observed that they seem to doubt everything.

Like many Americans, I used to think that these differences would recede with time, and that, as they traveled the world, got jobs, and got rich, Russians would eventually start to think more and more like us. After Ukraine and the Malaysia Airlines crash, I’m a lot less optimistic. Despite ditching communism and its call to world revolution, Russia appears to becoming more, not less, different from the United States. It doesn’t just have its own system; it now has its own facts.

George Patton’s Summer of 1944. By Victor Davis Hanson.

George S. Patton, Jr. Library of Congress.

George Patton’s Summer of 1944. By Victor Davis Hanson. National Review Online, July 24, 2014. Also at Real Clear Politics.

Hanson:

Nearly 70 years ago, on Aug. 1, 1944, Lieutenant General George S. Patton took command of the American Third Army in France. For the next 30 days they rolled straight toward the German border.

Patton almost did not get a chance at his summer of glory. After brilliant service in North Africa and Sicily, fellow officers — and his German enemies — considered him the most gifted American field general of his generation. But near the conclusion of his illustrious Sicilian campaign, the volatile Patton slapped two sick GIs in field hospitals, raving that they were shirkers. In truth, both were ill and at least one was suffering from malaria.

Public outrage eventually followed the shameful incidents. As a result, General Dwight D. Eisenhower was forced to put Patton on ice for eleven key months.

Tragically, Patton’s irreplaceable talents would be lost to the Allies in the soon-to-be-stagnant Italian campaign. He also played no real role in the planning of the Normandy campaign. Instead, his former subordinate, the more stable but far less gifted Omar Bradley, assumed direct command under Eisenhower of American armies in France.

In early 1944, a mythical Patton army was used as a deception to fool the Germans into thinking that “Army Group Patton” might still make another major landing at Calais. The Germans apparently found it incomprehensible that the Americans would bench their most audacious general at the very moment when his audacity was most needed.

When Patton’s Third Army finally became operational seven weeks after D-Day, it was supposed to play only a secondary role — guarding the southern flank of the armies of General Bradley and British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery while securing the Atlantic ports.

Despite having the longest route to the German border, Patton headed east. The Third Army took off in a type of American blitzkrieg not seen since Union General William Tecumseh Sherman’s rapid marches through Georgia and the Carolinas during the Civil War.

Throughout August 1944, Patton won back over the press. He was foul-mouthed, loud, and uncouth, and he led from the front in flamboyant style with a polished helmet and ivory-handled pistols.

In fact, his theatrics masked a deeply learned and analytical military mind. Patton sought to avoid casualties by encircling German armies. In innovative fashion, he partnered with American tactical air forces to cover his flanks as his armored columns raced around static German formations.

Naturally rambunctious American GIs fought best, Patton insisted, when “rolling” forward, especially in summertime. Only then, for a brief moment, might the clear skies facilitate overwhelming American air support. In August his soldiers could camp outside, while his speeding tanks still had dry roads.

In just 30 days, Patton finished his sweep across France and neared Germany. The Third Army had exhausted its fuel supplies and ground to a halt near the border in early September.

Allied supplies had been redirected northward for the normally cautious General Montgomery’s reckless Market Garden gambit. That proved a harebrained scheme to leapfrog over the bridges of the Rhine River; it devoured Allied blood and treasure, and accomplished almost nothing in return.

Meanwhile, the cutoff of Patton’s supplies would prove disastrous. Scattered and fleeing German forces regrouped. Their resistance stiffened as the weather grew worse and as shortened supply lines began to favor the defense.

Historians still argue over Patton’s August miracle. Could a racing Third Army really have burst into Germany so far ahead of Allied lines? Could the Allies ever have adequately supplied Patton’s charging columns given the growing distance from the Normandy ports? How could a supreme commander like Eisenhower handle Patton, who at any given moment could — and would — let loose with politically incorrect bombast?

We do not know the answers to all those questions. Nor will we ever quite know the full price that America paid for having a profane Patton stewing in exile for nearly a year rather than exercising his leadership in Italy or Normandy.

We only know that 70 years ago, an authentic American genius thought he could win the war in Europe — and almost did. When his Third Army stalled, so did the Allied effort.

What lay ahead in winter were the Battle of the Bulge and the nightmare fighting of the Hürtgen Forest — followed by a half-year slog into Germany.

Patton would die tragically from injuries sustained in a freak car accident not long after the German surrender. He soon became the stuff of legend but was too often remembered for his theatrics rather than his authentic genius that saved thousands of American lives.

Seventy years ago this August, George S. Patton showed America how a democracy’s conscripted soldiers could arise out of nowhere to beat the deadly professionals of an authoritarian regime at their own game.

The New Social Divide Within the Pink Police State. By James Poulos.

The New Social Divide Within the Pink Police State. By James Poulos. The Federalist, July 23, 2014.

Welcome to the Pink Police State: Regime Change in America. By James Poulos. The Federalist, July 17, 2014.

Putin’s Deadly Doctrine. By Timothy Garton Ash.

Putin’s Deadly Doctrine. By Timothy Garton Ash. New York Times, July 18, 2014.

Garton Ash:

“Protecting” Russians in Ukraine Has Fatal Consequences.

OXFORD, England — SOMETIMES, just sometimes, you should pay attention to annoying things said by tiresome people at worthy conferences.

In 1994, I was half asleep at a round table in St. Petersburg, Russia, when a short, thickset man with a rather ratlike face — apparently a sidekick of the city’s mayor — suddenly piped up. Russia, he said, had voluntarily given up “huge territories” to the former republics of the Soviet Union, including areas “which historically have always belonged to Russia.” He was thinking “not only about Crimea and northern Kazakhstan, but also for example about the Kaliningrad area.” Russia could not simply abandon to their fate those “25 million Russians” who now lived abroad. The world had to respect the interests of the Russian state “and of the Russian people as a great nation.”

The name of this irritating little man was — you guessed it — Vladimir V. Putin, and I know exactly what he said back in 1994 because the organizers, the Körber Foundation of Hamburg, Germany, published a full transcript. For the phrase that I have translated as “the Russian people,” the German transcript uses the word “volk.” Mr. Putin seemed to have, and still has, an expansive, völkisch definition of “Russians” — or what he now refers to as the “russkiy mir” (literally “Russian world”). The transcript also records that I teased out the consequences of the then-obscure deputy mayor’s vision by saying, “If we defined British nationality to include all English-speaking people, we would have a state slightly larger than China.”

Little did we imagine that, 20 years later, the St. Petersburg deputy mayor, now uncrowned czar of all the Russians, would have seized Crimea by force, covertly stirred up violent mayhem in eastern Ukraine and be explicitly advancing his 19th-century völkisch vision as the policy of a 21st-century state. Today’s Kremlin has its own perverted version of the Western-developed and United Nations-sanctified humanitarian doctrine of the “responsibility to protect.” Russia, Mr. Putin insists, has a responsibility to protect all Russians abroad, and he gets to decide who is a Russian.

We should, of course, avoid what the philosopher Henri Bergson called the illusions of retrospective determinism. History seldom moves in straight lines. After Mr. Putin’s rise to supreme power in the Russian state, starting when he became prime minister in 1999, he experimented with other models of relations with the West and the rest of the world. For some years, he tried modernization in cooperation with the West. He embraced membership in the Group of 8 — one of several inducements that the United States and Europe offered to help Russia down its inevitably difficult post-imperial path. President George W. Bush got Mr. Putin wrong when he “looked the man in the eye” in 2001, but it would be bad history to conclude that the Putin of 2001 was already secretly planning to take back Crimea and destabilize eastern Ukraine.

Although historians should explore those paths not taken, it is nonetheless fascinating to see how the essentials of Mr. Putin’s resentment-fueled protector state doctrine were already there in 1994 — even if they were not then buttressed by ideological quotations from Russian thinkers like Ivan Ilyin.

Once upon a time, there was the Brezhnev Doctrine, which justified as “fraternal help” such actions as the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Mikhail S. Gorbachev replaced it with the Sinatra Doctrine — You do it your way, as Gennadi I. Gerasimov, the Foreign Ministry spokesman, put it — toward Eastern Europe. Now we have the Putin Doctrine.

It is impossible to overstate the degree to which this is a threat not just to Russia’s Eastern European and Eurasian neighbors but to the whole post-1945 international order. Across the world, countries see men and women living in other countries whom they regard as in some sense “their people.” What if, as has happened in the past, Chinese minorities in Southeast Asian countries were to be the targets of discrimination and popular anger, and China (where, on a visit this spring, I heard admiration expressed for Mr. Putin’s actions) decided to take up the mother country’s burden, exercising its völkisch responsibility to protect?

TO make clear why such actions are totally unacceptable, and a grave threat to world peace, we also have to agree on the legitimate rights and responsibilities of a mother country. My British passport still carries the resonant old formula that Her Britannic Majesty’s Secretary of State “requests and requires” foreign powers to let me pass “without let or hindrance,” and if I got into a spot of local difficulty in, say, Transnistria, I would hope (though not necessarily trust) that he would very earnestly require it. More relevant, Poland has expressed concern for the position of Polish speakers in Lithuania. Hungary has handed out both passports and voting rights in national elections to citizens of neighboring countries whom it deems to be members of the Hungarian people. To pin down what is illegitimate, we have to explain more clearly what is legitimate.

As of Friday, American and Ukrainian officials were saying it was likely that a Russian-made antiaircraft missile had brought down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, in yet another harvest of sorrow on Ukrainian fields already blood-soaked by history. It was not clear who fired it. But it is hypocrisy on an Orwellian scale for Mr. Putin to maintain, as he did on Friday, that “the government over whose territory this happened bears the responsibility for this terrible tragedy.” There is undoubtedly bitter discontent among many self-identified Russians in eastern Ukraine, but the violence of their protests has been stirred by a massively mendacious narrative on Russian television, and their paramilitaries have been supported, to put it no more strongly, by Mr. Putin’s Russia — including the presence of members or former members of Russian special forces.

It seems plausible already to suggest that a regular army (whether Ukrainian or Russian) would usually have identified the radar image of a civilian airliner flying at 33,000 feet, while a group made up solely of local militants (even ones with military experience) would not ordinarily have had the technology and skill to launch such an attack without outside help. It is precisely the ambiguous mixtures created by Mr. Putin’s völkisch version of the “responsibility to protect” that produce such disastrous possibilities. He subverts and calls into question the authority of the government of a sovereign territory, and then blames it for the result.

So if an obscure deputy mayor starts sounding off in alarming terms at some conference you are attending, my advice is, Wake up. Of course, most such ranters do not rise to the top. But when they do, their ideologies of resentment may be written out in blood.

At Last! A Hashtag for Middle East Peace. By Rush Limbaugh.

At Last! A Hashtag for Middle East Peace. By Rush Limbaugh. RushLimbaugh.com, July 23, 2014.

Hamas Nazi Compares Netanyahu to Hitler. By Rush Limbaugh. RushLimbaugh.com, July 23, 2014. 

Rush [Hamas Nazi]: 

RUSH: Here is Osama Hamdan. He is the Hamas spokesman, and was interviewed by Wolf Blitzer on CNN’s the Situation Room yesterday, and Wolf Blitzer asked the Hamas spokesman, Osama Hamdan, “Are you deliberately targeting Ben-Gurion International Airport?”

HAMDAN: What the Palestinians are supposed to do? To give their, uhhh, names for this Israelis to slaughter them or to trying to defend themselves? We were expecting that international community will protect the Palestinians from the Israelis, would protect the Palestinians from the mentality of Netanyahu, who lost his morals and his army also – and, ehh, he’s reflecting a new image for Hitler and the Nazist (sic) army. They are acting in the same way, killing the Palestinians just because they are Palestinians, like what Hitler was doing in the last century.

RUSH: Alright, now, folks, this has gone beyond absurd now. Here we have the modern-day Nazis. The Palestinians, Hamas, you name it, are the modern day Nazis where the Jews are concerned. They are the current incarnation of Adolf Hitler. It is their total hatred for Jews and their anti-Semitism that defines their existence. That’s the root of the problem! It won't even be stated as such.

You know, whenever there’s anti-Semitism in America, boy, people can’t wait to point it out! They’d love to tar and feather as many anti-Semites as they could. But here you have a whole region full of ’em, and nobody will utter the word that describes the ideology of the Islamic Jihad, which is anti-Semitism. Militant, vicious, bloodthirsty anti-Semitism. This is now beyond absurd!

Here you have the modern day incarnation of the Nazis accusing the Jewish state of being a “Nazist army,” is what he said.  He meant to say Nazi, or Nazi-ist. (You have to allow for the speaking of a foreign language.) But this is just absurd. Of course incumbent in this sound bite (impression), “The Israelis are slaughtering! The Israelis are attacking! The Israelis have lost their morals! The Israelis are reflecting a new image of Nazist!”

And there’s Wolf Blitzer just standing there listening to this? Nodding his head? I didn’t see it, so I don’t know what his reaction was. But that’s how ridiculous this is. Ladies and gentlemen, ancient Islamic Jihad liters such as the old Grand Mufti himself met with the Nazis in World War II. They knew they held something major in common.

Yet they automatically are granted victim status!

It’s just absurd.

It’s beyond absurd.  It’s incomprehensibly stupid! It ought not be given any recognition. It ought not be given any cognizance. It ought not given time of day, this assertion. But that’s the Hamas spokesman. So we get a hashtag (sniveling): "#JewsAndArabsRefuseToBeEnemies, please! #JewsAndArabsRefuseToBeEnemies. “Man, I really, I’m a good person. Do you see my hashtag? I care. I wish they would all just get along.” 

 

Putin May Have Killed Russia’s Brand. By Leonid Bershidsky.

Putin May Have Killed Russia’s Brand. By Leonid Bershidsky. Bloomberg, July 21, 2014.

No Russian. By Max Skibinsky. The Vault of the Future, July 20, 2014.
 

Bershidsky:

Is the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 the end of Russia as a brand? That’s what one of the most successful Russian professionals in the tech industry, Max Skibinsky, thinks. He has a point: Whoever is really responsible for the tragedy, it’s the perception that matters.

A Moscow-trained physicist, Skibinsky is a serial entrepreneur associated with the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz LLC. Although he has spent the last two decades in the U.S., people in Silicon Valley still see him as a Russian – an identity he worries may turn into a stigma. As he put it in a lengthy blog post:

Personally, I’m thinking to start calling myself Euro-Slavic instead of “Russian.” It’s a flimsy defense, yet Russian brand, after already being tainted with gulag and the rest of its toxic legacy, is now synonymous with mass murder of innocent civilians. There is nothing of value left to recover.

Skibinsky wouldn’t be the first Russian tech guru to give up on his native country. Sergei Brin, the Google Inc. co-founder, famously called Russia “Nigeria with snow” in a 2003 interview with Red Herring magazine, adding that Russia’s rulers were “a bunch of criminal cowboys” trying to control the world's energy supply.

Skibinsky’s remarks, though, have deeper implications. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s attempts to shift blame for MH17 are not going to fly in the court of Western public opinion. U.S. President Barack Obama was simply reflecting public perception when, in a speech today, he asserted that Putin has “extraordinary” and “direct” influence on the separatists in eastern Ukraine. In the public mind, Russia is already at fault for the tragic death of 298 innocent people.

“This situation will get worse before it gets better,” wrote Skibinsky. The Kremlin “will fight to the last: we will yet see the massive flood of lies and deceit they will unleash to mitigate the anger of their recent mass murder. Very unfortunately everything they do will be branded with the words Russia or Russian.”

To Russians plugged into Western banking or technology, two industries in which they have a large presence, this means dealing with disapproval by extension. There will be nothing rational about it, just an emotional undertone, forcing them to explain without being asked that they do not support Putin and have nothing to do with his treatment of Ukraine. In Russia itself – where, according to a recent Gallup poll, 83 percent of people are in favor of Putin – only a minority gets the uncomfortable urge to dissociate themselves from leader and country. To those of us living in the West, it’s going to be a fact of daily life.

Skibinsky wrote that Silicon Valley should expect a lot of Russian resumes soon. He wants tech firms to consider these applicants seriously: “They are not just looking for a job, they looking to save themselves and their families.” He also called on the tech industry to help Ukraine by sending work to its outsourcing shops and by boycotting firms associated with the Russian government and state-owned companies (some of them, such as venture capital firm Russian Venture Co. OJSC and VTB Bank OJSC, have been looking to invest in Silicon Valley startups lately).

The industry is quite likely to follow Skibinsky’s advice, even without reading his post. Russia is getting more than unfashionable. It's on its way to taking on the Soviet Union’s onetime status as an object of fear and hatred.

The World Is Returning to Normal. By Michael Ledeen.

The World Is Returning to Normal. By Michael Ledeen. PJ Media, July 21, 2014.

Ledeen: 

Of all the popular myths about “how the world works,” the most dangerous to us at this moment is the one that goes “peace is normal, war is an aberration.”  Truth is, war is normal and peace very unusual.  We’ve lived through a happy time, ever since the Second World War.  Thanks to American superpower, and the destruction of the totalitarian regimes in Rome, Berlin and Moscow, we’ve had a happy period of relative peace.  Very few big wars.  Little genocides (China is exceptional, but they changed to accommodate the global pattern).  Deterrence (as in “mutual assured destruction”) mostly worked.

That was a rare time.  Now we’re getting back to normal.  There’s a good reason for that old Roman wisdom “if you want peace, prepare for war.”  It’s because “peace” most always happens when somebody wins a war, and then imposes conditions on the losers.  That’s what “peace conferences” are all about.  Our recent happy time was the result of war, and our adoption of the Roman wisdom.  We smashed our enemies, we created military alliances to deter our new enemies (NATO, etcetera), we built and maintained a big arsenal on land, air and sea.

We prepared for war to make peace possible.

It worked so well and lasted so long that we forgot why we were doing it. Over time, the “peace is normal” myth took hold and its attendant policies — “future wars will be economic, not military” and “guns to butter” — came to define our strategic thinking.

Moreover, Americans have always been conflicted over foreign policy.  We have always wanted two incompatible things at once:  we want to export the American model, and we want to stay out of other countries’ affairs.  We have invariably waited until the eleventh hour before fighting.  In the last century, we were torpedoed into the First World War by the Germans, bombed into the Second World War by the Japanese, and frightened into the Cold War by Stalin.

Then came 9/11 and we were reminded that there are (always) enemies out there.  In time, we forgot that, too, and now, having deceived ourselves into believing that peace is normal, we are trying to talk our way out of the global war.  It won’t work.  It never has.

So we’re back to normal.  War, and the runup to more war, is the order of the day, as it has been for most of human history.  Our real options are the same as they have always been:  win or lose.  Both lead to “peace,” but the one is a happy peace while the other is an extended humiliation.

If we accept that war, and the preparation for war, is the basic leitmotif of human history, we might also overcome the parallel myth:  that all men are basically the same, and all men want the same (good) things.  Not so.  Just ask Vladimir Putin, Ali Khamenei, and their friends, proxies, and agents.  They want bad things for us, namely death and domination.  And they’re not likely to change, which is why it’s very dangerous to give Khamenei more money, and try to make Putin more “reasonable.”  They’re going to continue the war.

“Man is more inclined to do evil than to do good,” Machiavelli wrote, and he knew whereof he spoke.  Which is why war is normal, and peace so rare.  And why we’d better get used to it.

That happy time is done and gone, at least for now.  We’d better stop whining and get about the business of winning.

Palestinians Chose Hamas and the Mass-Murder of Civilians—Including Their Own. By Andrew C. McCarthy.

Palestinians Chose Hamas and the Mass-Murder of Civilians—Including Their Own. By Andrew C. McCarthy. PJ Media, July 22, 2014.

McCarthy: 

I argued in Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy that the illusion’s signature feature is a fantasy: By holding free elections, a people is choosing freedom: joining modernity, adopting pluralism and tolerance, rejecting revolutionary violence and totalitarianism.

Today, we are yet again being inundated with tales of Palestinian woe after Hamas’s familiar barbarism has provoked an Israeli military response. It thus bears remembering that the Palestinian people chose Hamas. What ever happened to all those Democracy Project paeans to self-determination? Hamas is Palestinian self-determination. Hamas was not forced on Palestinians. Hamas did not militarily conquer Gaza. No, Hamas swept parliamentary elections freely held in the Palestinian territories in 2006 – thrashing its rival, Fatah, which is only marginally less committed to the destruction of Israel.

Hamas did not suddenly become a terrorist organization after it was elected. Hamas was elected because it was a jihadist organization. It was elected because, by its own declaration, Hamas connects Palestinians to something they find attractive: the global Islamic-supremacist movement. Palestinians widely reject Israel’s right to exist. They regard not just Gaza, Judea and Samaria but all of Israel as “occupied Palestine.” Even those Palestinians who purport to accept the “two-state solution” see it as a way-station on the march to a one-state solution in which the Jewish state eventually ceases to be. Palestinians chose Hamas precisely because Hamas was seen as more dedicated than Fatah to the achievement of that goal—not to mention, more brutally competent.

At the time of its election, Hamas was well known to be the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestinian terrorist wing. It has been formally designated as a terrorist organization by the United States since the mid-nineties. Indeed, shortly before Palestinians endorsed Hamas at the ballot box, the U.S. Department of Justice indicted several Hamas operatives in the Holy Land Foundation case, a multi-million dollar terrorism financing conspiracy orchestrated by the Muslim Brotherhood in which several of the Brotherhood’s American affiliates—CAIR, the Islamic Society of North America, the North American Islamic Trust, among others—were proved to be complicit in the promotion of Hamas and thus designated as unindicted co-conspirators.

The Wall Street Journal gets close to the heart of the matter in its fine editorial this morning about Hamas’s “civilian death strategy”:

The people of Gaza overwhelmingly elected Hamas, a terrorist outfit dedicated to the destruction of Israel, as their designated representatives. Almost instantly Hamas began stockpiling weapons and using them against a more powerful foe with a solid track record of retaliation.

What did Gazans think was going to happen? Surely they must have understood on election night that their lives would now be suspended in a state of utter chaos. Life expectancy would be miserably low; children would be without a future. Staying alive would be a challenge, if staying alive even mattered anymore.

To make matters worse, Gazans sheltered terrorists and their weapons in their homes, right beside ottoman sofas and dirty diapers. When Israel warned them of impending attacks, the inhabitants defiantly refused to leave.

On some basic level, you forfeit your right to be called civilians when you freely elect members of a terrorist organization as statesmen, invite them to dinner with blood on their hands and allow them to set up shop in your living room as their base of operations. At that point you begin to look a lot more like conscripted soldiers than innocent civilians. And you have wittingly made yourself targets.

It also calls your parenting skills into serious question. In the U.S. if a parent is found to have locked his or her child in a parked car on a summer day with the windows closed, a social worker takes the children away from the demonstrably unfit parent. In Gaza, parents who place their children in the direct line of fire are rewarded with an interview on MSNBC where they can call Israel a genocidal murderer.

I say this “gets close to the heart of the matter” because it pulls up just short. The problem in the Palestinian territories is not Hamas; it is the Palestinians. Hamas is a natural outgrowth of the Islamic supremacist ideology that is dominant among Palestinians. It is not just that the Palestinians chose Hamas with eyes open. It is that the Palestinians are Hamas. That Hamas Charter speaks for Palestinians, particularly in its scripturally-based Jew hatred. “[O]ur struggle against the Jews is extremely wide-ranging and grave,” its Introduction proclaims, “so much so that it will need all the loyal efforts we can wield, to be followed by further steps and reinforced by successive battalions from the multifarious Arab and Islamic world, until the enemies are defeated and Allah’s victory prevails.”

That is just a warm-up for Jew-hatred that pervades the Charter’s Article Seven:

Hamas is one of the links in the Chain of Jihad in the confrontation with the Zionist invasion. It links up with the setting out of the Martyr Izz a-din al-Qassam and his brothers in the Muslim Brotherhood who fought the Holy War in 1936; it further relates to another link of the Palestinian Jihad and the Jihad and efforts of the Muslim Brothers during the 1948 War, and to the Jihad operations of the Muslim Brothers in 1968 and thereafter. But even if the links have become distant from each other, and even if the obstacles erected by those who revolve in the Zionist orbit, aiming at obstructing the road before the Jihad fighters, have rendered the pursuance of Jihad impossible; nevertheless, the Hamas has been looking forward to implement Allah’s promise whatever time it might take. The prophet, prayer and peace be upon him, said: The time will not come until Muslims will fight the Jews (and kill them); until the Jews hide behind rocks and trees, which will cry: O Muslim! there is a Jew hiding behind me, come on and kill him! This will not apply to the Gharqad, which is a Jewish tree.

This is what Palestinians voted for. The highlighted section of Article Seven comes straight from Islamic scripture, from the authoritative Bukhari and Muslim collections of hadith (the sayings and doings of the prophet Mohammed). It foretells an eternal struggle until the end of time, when, with Allah’s intercession, the rocks and trees will help Muslim battalions find and kill every remaining Jew.

Tellingly, as I recounted in The Grand Jihad, other than the Hamas charter, the place where you are most likely to find repetition of the doctrinally-based call to jihad against Jews is in the sermons of Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi. He is the chief sharia jurist of the Muslim Brotherhood and, perhaps, the most influential Sunni Islamic-supremacist figure in the world. He is also a staunch champion of Hamas, having issued fatwas that enthusiastically authorize suicide attacks against Israeli civilians. “They are not suicide operations,” he claimed in April 2001. “These are heroic martyrdom operations, and the heroes who carry them out don’t embark on this action out of hopelessness and despair but are driven by an overwhelming desire to cast terror and fear into the hearts of the oppressors.”

But what about the fact that these indiscriminate “martyrdom operations” kill Israeli civilians? Qaradawi rejects the premise – there are, he maintains, no Israeli civilians. “Israeli society is a military society, and every person is either a soldier in the Israeli Army or a reserve soldier,” he told al-Jazeera that same spring – repeating a theme that, for him, is a constant. Israelis, therefore, “must be intimidated, until they return to the countries from which they came.” This, it should be noted, is substantially indistinguishable from al Qaeda’s rationale for mass-murdering American civilians. As Osama bin Laden explained, Americans choose and arm their government and should thus be attacked the same way a jihadist would attack their government.

To its great credit, Israel does not target Palestinian civilians even though, in the Palestinian terrorist jihad, there are few real civilians among a population that chose Hamas as its leader and provides Hamas’s atrocious campaigns with material support and encouragement. Like any competent military fighting a defensive war for its nation’s survival, Israel’s defense forces kill some Palestinian non-combatants collaterally, in the pursuit of necessary and wholly legitimate military objectives. The killings of non-combatants are inflated by the Palestinian practice of using “civilians” as human shields, the better to wage the all-important propaganda part of the jihad that is so effective in swaying Western progressives.

The war will not end unless Israel is allowed to fight until victory is achieved and the Palestinians, with their will having been broken, abandon the jihad and accept peaceful coexistence. As we all know, it is a peaceful coexistence they could have right now if they weren’t hell-bent on killing every Jew. In any event, people who claim a right to kill every enemy civilian, whose savage way of war is to target enemy civilians and deny them civilian status, should not be heard to complain about civilian casualties.

Can Vladimir Putin Survive? By George Friedman.

Can Vladimir Putin Survive? By George Friedman. Real Clear World, July 22, 2014.

Ten Reasons Why I Am No Longer a Leftist. By Danusha V. Goska.

Ten Reasons Why I Am No Longer a Leftist. By Danusha V. Goska. American Thinker, July 20, 2014.

My Generation Needs to be Proactive for Israel. By Laura Elizabeth Adkins.

My Generation Needs to be Proactive for Israel. By Laura Elizabeth Adkins. Legal Insurrection, April 10, 2014.

Does NYU have a Jewish problem? By Tammi Rossman-Benjamin and Leila Beckwith. New York Daily News, June 1, 2014.

Articles about Lisa Duggan at Legal Insurrection.


Adkins: 

Despite the torrential downpour that unleashed itself over downtown Manhattan Monday evening, nearly 100 students and members of the general public gathered at New York University for an inspiring event that brought together business experts, disruptive artists, media revolutionaries, journalists and jazz musicians.

Innovation Israel, a project spearheaded by TorchPAC at NYU and the Stern Political Economy Exchange (SPEX), proved to be a tremendous opportunity for those in attendance unfamiliar with Israel to experience the incredible spirit and passion of a tiny country in the Middle East, but was also a chance for pro-Israel activists to engage in conversation face-to-face about the challenges facing the pro-Israel community today.

The Innovation Israel showcase was one of the more visible efforts of NYU’s Pro-Israel community this year, but readily visible relationship building and showcasing of Israeli innovation is only one small, small part of the important work being done to defend Israel on US campuses.

Far too often in recent times, extreme voices have made a presence for themselves in the intellectual (or often, pseudo-intellectual) arena; earlier this year, NYU faced strongly anti-semitic activities from NYU professor Lisa Duggan culminating in the form of an Anti-Israel Conference.

Much has been written, most notably by Forbes Contributing Editor of Investigations Richard Behar, that more than adequately elucidates the troubling event and hijacking of the American Studies Association by Duggan and her extreme colleagues in painstaking detail.

Notable Israel detractors Max Blumenthal and Ali Abunimah also spoke at NYU earlier this year, at an event brimming with hatred and rife with factual inaccuracy, including repulsive allusions to the Holocaust.

In his speech, Blumenthal described a place called “Saharonim,” a facility on the border of Israel and Egypt where African refugees seeking refuge in Israel first live, and painted a tale of holocaust-esque roundups and mass starvation. As Josh Voss, NYU Freshman and former IDF soldier who attended the Blumenthal speech recounted:

I’ve seen the facility; my unit prevented smuggling on the the exact border where it is located. I’ve met with Africans who lived there, as they walked into the nearby village Kadesh Barnea to buy groceries, the same grocery store where I used to buy hummus and apples. If Israel was starving them, it was definitely doing a horrible job. No one, especially not the Sudanese and Rwandans that live there will tell you they’re being rounded up and starved to death.

How does one even begin to counter these foul distortions of reality?

Organizations such as CAMERA (Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America) do an incredible job of countering bias in the mass media, though this fight is one that unfortunately requires vast resources as well as constant vigilance.

In order to counter the smear campaign against Israel taking place through Duggan at NYU, TorchPAC organized meetings with the NYU administration and authored an open letter to NYU President John Sexton that called for the administration to “begin to take a serious look at… the policies and practices of the ASA.”

Pro-Israel organizations can be generally divided into two camps: those that primarily work towards relationship building and promoting Israel’s modernity as well as strategic importance, and those that primarily work to correct historically and factually inaccurate depictions of Israel in the public narrative. These different arenas are traditionally thought to require very distinct strategies. But what if we were to question the narrative that these aims could not be accomplished concurrently? What if Pro-Israel groups formulated their 5-year plans around making strides in both vital arenas?

Let me be frank: ideas being used in the battle raging on our campuses and across the world concerning the legitimacy of the state of Israel, as well as the outright lies perpetrated by the likes of Duggan and Blumenthal with the express purpose of delegitimizing the state of Israel, are laced with far-too-much emotional venom to be effectively countered with either relationship building or sterile cerebral arguments alone.

Our movement is stuck in the defensive, with no fully coherent strategy; today’s consumer is assailed by misinformation and hard-hitting emotional arguments from the anti-Israel camp in too many arenas for disjointed efforts be adequate.

This generation’s challenges will require a reinvigorated effort in the Jewish community that results in a revamped strategy which many people on either side will be uncomfortable with, but which represents our only hope of defeating anti-Israel sentiment on today’s campuses. If we are to expect people to take Israel seriously, we have to show them that Israel is serious; with such an uneven playing field, we need to step up our game and pull ourselves into the real world, where facts are always considered along with feelings.

A campus charm offensive where we avoid facts will be futile, but as much as it pains me as an intellectual and truth-seeker to say, so too will even the most meticulously executed correction of the anti-Israel movement’s distortions of fact if anything beyond the purely “factify-able” is ignored. In the words of Jackie Retig, NYU Senior and Co-Chair of Campus Relations for TorchPAC:

Torchpac strives to find a balance between political activities, such as meeting with members of Congress to discuss issues pertaining to the U.S.-Israel relationship, with events that reach a broader student body through showcasing Israel’s unique opportunities and innovation. In this way we hope to strengthen our ties with Israel across different communities and through new avenues.

As a Pro-Israel community, we have allowed ourselves to become complacent and self-polarized; many of us choose to treat our Israel either as a doting mother would her child, ignoring the flaws while showcasing every success, or as an aloof professor would treat a sloppy essay, shaking his head as he slashes through inaccuracies with his red pen and adds painstaking commentary, never realizing that his pupil will take one look at the returned assignment and toss it into the trashcan.

This is my generation’s task: not only to redefine the narrative on campus, but to revamp and revitalize our Pro-Israel organization and way of thought. We will only be remembered as a compelling and proactive generation of advocates for Israel if we are able to reunite facts with feelings and execute a strategy which always considers both.