Progressive Elites vs. Western Civilization. By Victor Davis Hanson.

Is the West Slip, Slip, Slipping Away? By Victor Davis Hanson. National Review Online, October 26, 2015.

Hanson:

What has become of free speech, free markets, and the rule of law?

Sometimes a culture disappears with a whimper, not a bang. Institutions age and are ignored, and the complacent public insidiously lowers its expectations of state performance.

Infrastructure, the rule of law, and civility erode — and yet people are not sure why and how their own changing (and pathological) individual behavior is leading to the collective deterioration that they deplore.

There is still a “West” in the sense of the physical entities of North America, Europe, many of the former British dominions, and parts of Westernized Asia. The infrastructure of our cities and states looks about as it did in the recent past. But is it the West as we once knew it — a unique civilization predicated on free expression, human rights, self-criticism, vibrant free markets, and the rule of law?

Or, instead, is the West reduced to a wealthy but unfree leisure zone, driven on autopilot by computerized affluence, technological determinism, and a growing equality-of-result, omnipotent state?

Tens of thousands of migrants — reminiscent of the great southward and westward treks of Germanic tribes in the late fifth century, at the end of the Roman Empire — are overwhelming the borders of Europe. Such an influx should be a reminder that the West attracts people, while the non-West drives them out, and thus should spark inquiries about why that is so. But that discussion would be not only impolite, but beyond the comprehension of most present-day Westerners, who take for granted — though they cannot define, much less defend — their own institutions.

No one claims that such mass immigration into Europe is legal. No one wonders what happened to the fossilized idea of legal immigration, much less the legal immigrant who went through what has now been rendered the pretense of bureaucratic application for legal entry into Europe. Germany, which lectures others on law, is lawless.

In theory, Westerners have the power to stop the mostly young males from the Middle East from swarming their borders, but in fact they apparently lack the will. Or is it worse than that? Without confidence in their own values, much less pride in their accomplishments, are they assuaging the guilt over their privilege by symbolic acts of undermining the foundations of their own culture? Certainly, Germany, which insists on European Union laws of finance applying to its fellow European nation Greece, has no compunction about destroying, for its own particular purposes, the Union’s immigration statutes as they apply to Middle Easterners.

The same is true in the United States. Millions of foreign nationals from Latin America, and Mexico in particular, simply have crossed the border without even the pretense of legality. They assume Americans not only won’t enforce their own laws, but also will find ways to demonize any who suggest that they should. If there is now no such thing as an “illegal alien,” what in theory prevents anyone from arriving from anywhere at any time and making claims on the American state?

Again, the irony is not just that millions of Mexican nationals want into the U.S., but that, ostensibly, no one in Mexico or even the United States knows why that is so (certainly not the National Council of La Raza [“the Race”]) — much less wonders whether Mexico might learn from the U.S. about ways to make a nation’s own people become content enough to stay in their homeland. Only in the West does a migrant fault his host for insufficient hospitality while exempting his homeland, which drove him out.

Sanctuary cities illustrate how progressive doctrine can by itself nullify the rule of law. In the new West, breaking statutes is backed or ignored by the state if it is branded with race, class, or gender advocacy. By that I mean that if a solitary U.S. citizen seeks to leave and then reenter America without a passport, he will likely be either arrested or turned back, whereas if an illegal alien manages to cross our border, he is unlikely to be sent back as long as he has claims on victimhood of the type that are sanctioned by the Western liberal state.

Do we really enjoy free speech in the West any more? If you think we do, try to use vocabulary that is precise and not pejorative, but does not serve the current engine of social advocacy — terms such as “Islamic terrorist,” “illegal alien,” or “transvestite.” I doubt that a writer for a major newspaper or a politician could use those terms, which were common currency just four or five years ago, without incurring, privately or publicly, the sort of censure that we might associate with the thought police of the former Soviet Union.

It is becoming almost impossible in the West to navigate the contours of totalitarian mind control. Satirists can create cartoons mocking Christ, but not Mohammed. If a teen brings a suspicious-looking device of wires and gadgetry to school, he will be suspended — unless he can advance by his religious or ethnic background some claim on victimization.

In major news accounts, the identification of race and ethnic background of a criminal suspect is often predicated on liberal notions of social engineering. Recent graduates of journalism schools must have learned during their time there that identification by race of a white criminal suspect, but not commensurately of a suspect of color, is a social obligation, a way of avoiding a “micro-aggression,” the latest Orwellian exercise in creating a new word in hopes of inventing a new reality. Marchers with Black Lives Matter banners chant, “Dead Cops!” and also call for them to be roasted, even as to quote what they are saying is deemed racist. As the president of the United States lends his support to Black Lives Matter, a violent crime wave hits his upscale Capitol Hill neighbors, as young inner-city predators go on a rampage against the yuppie liberals living there. Liberal residents call it a “reign of terror,” yet they win as much attention from the president as does the slaughter each weekend in Chicago.

In a San Francisco middle school, recent democratic elections for student officers were massaged into nothingness, since the outcome did not result in the preferred architecture of diversity. Note that the female white principal who nullified the election should not, by her own logic and the theory of proportional representation, be principal of a school where her own race is in the minority. Bureaucratic apparatchiks, apparently aware that careers are enhanced or destroyed by the degree of adherence to diversity and political correctness, have become genteel fascists, somewhere in between those of the Soviet Union and those whom Orwell described in 1984.

When Hollywood puts out a movie called Truth, we know, also in good 1984 fashion, that it should be called Lies — a story of how the supposed noble end of electing a liberal president justifies all the sordid means necessary to achieve it, including amateurish forgery. The probable Democratic nominee for president of the United States just hours after the Benghazi attack announced in private to concerned parties that it was an al-Qaeda terrorist operation, while she was telling the world that it was a spontaneous riot in reaction to an illiberal video, confirming the Obama campaign’s old talking point that al-Qaeda was “on the run” and thus incapable of doing what it had just done. Truth? Lies? There are no such things — just operative and inoperative narratives. Ask the video maker who went to jail for his short movie, or the families of the dead Americans who were assured that it was not al-Qaeda that had killed their loved ones.

In the same mode, today’s campus is a cross between premodern Victorianism and something postmodern out of Clockwork Orange. Never have so many undergraduates hooked up for impersonal, crass, and callous sex, often fueled by alcohol and drugs, and never have the rules of such ad hoc intercourse been so formalized.

If universities really believe that they have and should have the power of stopping males from engaging in improper sexual congress that results in post-coitus unhappy parties, it would be much simpler to go back to the 1950s paradigm of segregating dorms by gender, banning alcohol from campus, viewing possession of illegal drugs as grounds for expulsion, and formulating new rules of treating women during sexual unions according to past formality and manners. A sober and drug-free male who picks up the tab, opens doors for women, watches his language around the opposite sex, and allows a woman some privilege in entering a building might be more receptive to asking formal (written?) consent at each ascending step of love-making, the apparent objective of the new campus sexual codes.

The one constant in the more recent manifestations of the slipping away of the West is the emergence of a new privileged, mostly white progressive class of plutocrat. A Google exec, an Al Gore, a university president, a diversity czar, a Goldman Sachs progressive, a Clinton Initiative apparatchik, a pajama-boy techie — none of them ever expects the ramifications of his ideology to hit home. They assume that they have the power and influence not only to change the mentalities of the caricatured middle class, but in the process to enjoy their own privilege without either guilt or risk. Opposing charter schools usually means your children are in private schools, just as championing open borders reflects one’s own gated community, just as promoting affirmative action in the abstract suggests recourse to a countervailing old-boy network to gain admissions, internships, and jobs for one’s own offspring. Our progressive elites resemble the opportunists of the French Revolution, who rode the crest of popular revolt — hoping that their calls for enforced egalitarianism and fraternity by any means necessary allowed their ample privilege to be exempt from the disorder they had incited.

The Obama administration did not create an anti-Western Western world (indeed, if Obama didn’t exist we would have to invent him), it simply summarized the recent pathologies of late Western life, codified them, and made them institutional, as in “workplace violence,” “white Hispanic,” “micro-aggression,” “sanctuary city,” and the rest of the lexicon of misrepresentation.

In the new West, freedom is inequality, liberty selfishness, and tribalism unity.

That is all ye need to know.

The Iraq War Was a Terrible Mistake. By Fareed Zakaria.

The Iraq War was a terrible mistake. By Fareed Zakaria. CNN, October 26, 2015.

The Long Road to Hell (2nd half hour). By Fareed Zakaria. Video. Up To Speed, October 26, 2015. YouTube.





Zakaria:

In a “GPS” special Monday night, I look back on the choices made before, during and after the war in Iraq, and the consequences of those choices. But what do I make of it all?

Well, let me first be honest and tell you what I made of it all at the time: I was in favor of the Iraq War. I believed that a modern democracy in Iraq could be a new model of politics for the region, a middle ground between repressive dictatorships and Islamic fanaticism. And I never believed that Iraqis or Arabs were somehow genetically incapable of self-rule.

Now, it’s true that I did urge that the United States needed to send in many more troops than it did so that it could maintain order. I also called for a U.N. mandate to provide greater legitimacy and avoid the image of an American occupation of a Muslim, Middle Eastern country. And I worried that Iraq's sectarian divisions would pull the country apart.

But none of that changes the fact that I did support the decision to topple Saddam Hussein’s regime.

And some good certainly came of that decision. After all, Hussein was a gruesome dictator who killed hundreds of thousands and plunged his country into wars. Today, Iraq is more free and open than almost any other Arab country, despite its struggles. Kurdistan, meanwhile, is a real success story – an oasis of stability, modernity and tolerance.

But in the end, the Iraq War was a failure and a terrible mistake, causing geopolitical chaos and humanitarian tragedy.

Once the regime fell apart, the society fell apart. Millions of Iraqis were displaced and at least 150,000 civilians died. That’s in addition to the almost 4,500 brave American troops. Some argue that one can overlearn the lessons of Iraq. Sure, but my caution about a larger American intervention in Syria or elsewhere derives not just from Iraq.

Consider this: The United States replaced the regime in Iraq and gave the new one massive assistance for a decade. The result? Chaos and humanitarian tragedy. Washington toppled Moammar Gadhafi’s regime in Libya but chose not to attempt nation-building in that country. The result has been chaos and humanitarian tragedy. Washington supported a negotiated removal of Ali Abdullah Saleh’s regime in Yemen and the election that followed, but generally took a back seat. The result again was chaos and humanitarian tragedy.

The reality in that part of the world is that many of its regimes are fragile, presiding over weak institutions, little civil society, and often no sense of nationhood itself. In that situation, outside interventions, however well-meaning, might not make things better. Sometimes they can even make things worse.

Could Iraq have turned out differently and set a different pattern? If a stable, functioning democracy had been established in the heart of the Middle East, could it have been a model for the region, a third way between dictatorship and Islamic radicalism?

Well, If America had made all the right decisions, who knows. But it didn’t, and as a result, we will never truly know what Iraq’s future could have been.

Ten Reasons Why a Palestinian State (Now) Is Bad for the World. By Richard Landes.

Peace When: Ten Reasons why a Palestinian State (now) is Bad for the World. By Richard Landes. The Augean Stables, October 15, 2014.

Landes:

In (dis)honor of the Swedish and British initiatives to recognize a Palestinian state right away, and Meir Javedanfar’s announcement of a blogpost on the topic: “Writing a blog entitled: ‘Top ten reasons why I think a Palestinian state would be good for #Israel.’ Standby.”

I write the following counter-list: 10 reasons why a Palestinian State (right now) is a bad idea for everyone.

Please note: I do think a Palestinian state is by far the most desirable outcome for everyone (except the jihadis), if we’re talking about a state that behaves the way European Union nations behave: they disagree, but understand they’re on the same side. If however, as is every person with power in Palestinian culture right now, they are bent on our destruction, then trying to make a state with them will weaken us and strengthen them (good for no one but the jihadis). I am a member of Peace When, not Peace Now.

1. There is no serious evidence that the Palestinian leadership both “secular” (Fatah) and religious (Hamas) want a state of their own that will live in peace with an Israeli state. There is, on the contrary, ample evidence that they will treat anything they get as a staging ground for further attacks.

2. The Palestinians have, for all their opportunities, never been able to set up the infrastructure of a responsible state. The miserable career of Fayyad illustrates how far from a transparent governance, a fair juridical system, a competent administration they are. Why create a sure failure?

3. This likelihood is all the greater if they get their concessions by means that involve going around the backs of the Israelis and having things forced on the Israelis. In honor-shame cultures, any time a foe is forced to make concessions it’s a sign of weakness, and an occasion to make further (violent) claims.

4. As the withdrawal from Gaza showed, Hamas will eat Fatah within months of any power vacuum. Thus it is a near certainty that a Palestinian state will become a militant Jihadi state. Indeed, Daesh (ISIS) would probably eat Hamas as quickly as Hamas eats Fatah.

5. With 51 Muslim majority states in the world, 22 Arab states, all of them either failures or worse, none of them solid democracies, most of them consistently belligerent to neighbors whether Arab or Muslim or not, why on earth would the world community want yet another guaranteed failed, bellicose, fascist, Jihadi state? Giving the current Palestinian leadership a state is like giving a crack-addicted teenager the keys to a fully-armed tank.

6. There are people with a much greater claim on the world community’s values to have a state, peoples with their own language, in some cases their own religion, their own (real) history: Kurds, Berbers, Tibetans, Tamils, Chechens, etc. To give a state to a group with the same language, religion, and (until a generation ago) the same identity, as 22 other Arab ones sets a terrible precedent.

7. The West faces an implacable enemy in global Jihad. It would be nothing short of reckless to create another major opening for Jihadi forces to take root and use state privileges to expand operations (e.g. diplomatic immunity).

8. Israel represents the only civilizational ally the West has in the Middle East (pace Obama’s delusions about Turkey and his BFF Erdogan). To undermine her in a battle for her existence by empowering a genocidal movement with state power would be little short of insanely self-destructive. Without Israel, no Jordan, no Lebanon (however dysfunctional). No intelligence, no counter-weight to Jihadi impetus.

9. To give in to the tyranny of a democracy of tyrannies in the UN is to undermine the very principles of international democracy.

10. At this time, with an incompetent if not malevolent Palestinian leadership, with global Jihad the “strong horse,” and a Western world falling ill to the disease of anti-semitism and the outbreak of an aggressive Muslim “street,” it would be suicidal to press so foolish a policy.

Moral Equivalence in the Middle East. By Victor Davis Hanson.

Moral Equivalence in the Middle East. By Victor Davis Hanson. National Review Online, October 20, 2015.

Hanson:

The West has developed a dangerous concern for “proportionality.”

In the current epidemic of Palestinian violence, scores of Arab youths are attacking, supposedly spontaneously, Israeli citizens with knives. Apparently, edged weapons have more Koranic authority, and, in the sense of media spectacle, they provide greater splashes of blood. Thus the attacker is regularly described as “unarmed” and a victim when he is “disproportionately” stopped by bullets.

The Obama State Department has condemned the use of “excessive” Israeli force in response to Palestinian terrorism. John Kirby, the hapless State Department spokesman, blamed “both” sides for terrorism, and the president himself called on attackers and their victims to “tamp down the violence.”

In short, the present U.S. government — which is subsidizing the Palestinians to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars a year — is incapable of distinguishing those who employ terrorist violence from the victims against whom the terrorism is directed. But why is the Obama administration — which can apparently distinguish those who send out drones from those who are blown up by them on the suspicion of employing terrorist violence — morally incapable of calling out Palestinian violence? After all, in the American case, we blow away suspects whom we think are likely terrorists; in the Israeli instance, they shoot or arrest those who have clearly just committed a terrorist act.

Two reasons stand out.

One, Obama’s Middle East policies are in shambles. Phony red lines, faux deadlines, reset with Putin, surrendering all the original bargaining chips in the Iranian deal, snubbing Israel, cozying up to the Muslim Brotherhood, dismissing the threat of ISIS, allowing Iraq to collapse by abruptly pulling out all American troops, giving way to serial indecision in Afghanistan, ostracizing the moderate Sunni regimes, wrecking Libya, and setting the stage for Benghazi — all of these were the result of administration choices, not fated events. One of the results of this collapse of American power and presence in the Middle East is an emboldened Palestinian movement that has recently renounced the Oslo Accords and encouraged the offensive of edged weapons.

Mahmoud Abbas, the subsidized president of the self-proclaimed Palestinian State, and his subordinates have sanctioned the violence. Any time Palestinians sense distance between the U.S. and Israel, they seek to widen the breach. When the Obama team deliberately and often gratuitously signals its displeasure with Israel, then the Palestinians seek to harden that abstract pique into concrete estrangement.

Amid such a collapse of American power, Abbas has scanned the Middle East, surveyed the Obama pronouncements — from his initial Al Arabiya interview and Cairo speech to his current contextualizations and not-so private slapdowns of Netanyahu — and has wagered that Obama likes Israel even less than his public statements might suggest. Accordingly, Abbas assumes that there might be few consequences from America if he incites another “cycle of violence.”

The more chaos there is, the more CNN videos of Palestinian terrorists being killed by Israeli civilians or security forces, the more NBC clips of knife-wielding terrorists who are described as unarmed, and the more MSNBC faux maps of Israeli absorption of Palestine, so all the more the Abbas regime and Hamas expect the “international community” to force further Israeli concessions. The Palestinians hope that they are entering yet another stage in their endless war against Israel. But this time, given the American recessional, they have new hopes that the emerging Iran–Russia–Syria–Iraq–Hezbollah axis could offer ample power in support of the violence and could help to turn the current asymmetrical war more advantageously conventional. The Palestinians believe, whether accurately or not, that their renewed violence might be a more brutal method of aiding the administration’s own efforts to pressure the Israelis to become more socially just, without which there supposedly cannot be peace in the Middle East.

But there is a second, more general explanation for the moral equivalence and anemic response from the White House. The Obama “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for” administration is the first postmodern government in American history, and it has adopted almost all the general culture’s flawed relativist assumptions about human nature.

Affluent and leisured Western culture in the 21st century assumes that it has reached a stage of psychological nirvana, in which the Westernized world is no longer threatened in any existential fashion as it often was in the past. That allows Westerners to believe that they no longer have limbic brains, and so are no longer bound by Neanderthal ideas like deterrence, balance of power, military alliances, and the use of force to settle disagreements. Their wealth and technology assure them that they are free, then, to enter a brave new world of zero culpability, zero competition, and zero hostility that will ensure perpetual tranquility and thus perpetual enjoyment of our present material bounty.

Our children today play tee-ball, where there are no winners and losers — and thus they are schooled that competition is not just detrimental but also can, by such training, be eliminated entirely. Our adolescents are treated according to the philosophy of “zero tolerance,” in which the hero who stops the punk from bullying a weaker victim is likewise suspended from school. Under the pretense of such smug moral superiority, our schools have abdicated the hard and ancient task of distinguishing bad behavior from good and then proceeding with the necessary rewards and punishments. Our universities have junked military history, which schooled generations on how wars start, proceed, and end. Instead, “conflict resolution and peace studies” programs proliferate, in which empathy and dialogue are supposed to contextualize the aggressor and thus persuade him to desist and seek help — as if aggression, greed, and the desire for intimidation were treatable syndromes rather than ancient evils that have remained dangerous throughout history.

Human nature is not so easily transcended, just because a new therapeutic generation has confused its iPhone apps and Priuses with commensurate moral and ethical advancement. Under the canons of the last 2,500 years of Western warfare, disproportionality was the method by which aggressors were either deterred or stopped. Deterrence — which alone prevented wars — was predicated on the shared assumption that starting a conflict would bring more violence down upon the aggressor than he could ever inflict on his victim. Once lost, deterrence was restored usually by disproportionate responses that led to victory over and humiliation of the aggressive party.

The wreckage of Berlin trumped anything inflicted by the Luftwaffe on London. The Japanese killed fewer than 3,000 Americans at Pearl Harbor; the Americans killed 30 times that number of Japanese in a single March 10, 1945, incendiary raid on Tokyo. “They have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind” was the standard philosophy by which aggressive powers were taught never again to start hostilities. Defeat and humiliation led to peace and reconciliation.

The tragic but necessary resort to disproportionate force by the attacked not only taught an aggressor that he could not win the fight he had started, but also reminded him that his targeted enemy might not be completely sane, and thus could be capable of any and all retaliation.

Unpredictability and the fear sown by the unknown also help to restore deterrence, and with it calm and peace. In contrast, predictable, proportionate responses can reassure the aggressor that he is in control of the tempo of the war that he in fact started. And worse still, the doctrine of proportionality suggests that the victim does not seek victory and resolution, but will do almost anything to return to the status quo antebellum — which, of course, was disadvantageous and shaped by the constant threat of unexpected attack by its enemies.

Applying this to the Middle East, the Palestinians believe that the new American indifference to the region and Washington’s slapdowns of Netanyahu have reshuffled relative power. They now hope that there is no deterrent to violence and that, if it should break out, there will be only a proportionate and modest response from predictable Westerners.

Under the related doctrine of moral equivalence, Westerners are either unwilling or unable to distinguish the more culpable from the more innocent. Instead, because the world more often divides by 55 to 45 percent rather than 99 to 1 percent certainty, Westerners lack the confidence to make moral judgments — afraid that too many critics might question their liberal sensitivities, a charge that in the absence of dearth, hunger, and disease is considered the worst catastrophe facing an affluent Western elite.

The question is not only whether the Obama administration, in private, favors the cause of the radical Palestinians over a Western ally like Israel, but also whether it is even intellectually and morally capable of distinguishing a democratic state that protects human rights from a non-democratic, authoritarian, and terrorist regime that historically has hated the West, and the United States in particular — and is currently engaged in clear-cut aggression.

The One-State Solution, Cont’d. By Andrew C. McCarthy.

The One-State Solution, Cont’d. By Andrew C. McCarthy. National Review Online, October 17, 2015.

The Obama Intifada. By Matthew Continetti. National Review Online, October 17, 2015. Also at the Washington Free Beacon.

McCarthy:

Palestinian terrorism and Israeli self-defense are not the same thing.

The next intifada is on, and the Obama administration, as one would expect, is on the wrong side.

There has been a spike in Palestinian terrorism over the past few weeks. One has to call it a spike because Palestinian terrorism is always thrumming — there’s never a real stop. About 70 Israelis have recently been mauled, and some killed, in over two dozen sneak attacks, mostly by stabbing.

The ultimate cause of the rampage is the Palestinian determination to eradicate Israel’s existence as a Jewish state by a two-track campaign of internal violence and international political pressure. As I’ve previously detailed, this is the “one-state solution” preferred by Islamists and Leftists. It is abetted, wittingly or not, by the “two-state solution,” a bipartisan Beltway obsession that entails pressuring Israel to accommodate next-door neighbors who will be satisfied with nothing less than burning its house down.

The proximate cause for the current bloodletting is incitement by Palestinian political leadership, particularly Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas (also known as “Abu Mazen”).

Abbas is a longtime terrorism enabler, the right hand of Yasser Arafat, by whose intercession he rose to the top rank of the PLO and, ultimately, the Palestinian Authority. Naturally, the Obama administration has hallucinated him into a “moderate” Muslim “peacemaker” — just as the Bush administration did.

The ugly reality is that Islamists and the radical pan-Arab Left — those in the Nasser-Arafat mold — are in competition to prove who is the most anti-Semitic, a coveted distinction in their culture. Abbas and his Fatah party must compete with Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestinian terror branch, whose charter explicitly frames the destruction of Israel and the killing of Jews as dictates of Allah. As Caroline Glick perceptively explains, Abbas has more to gain from the perversely named “peace process,” which keeps the West invested in him, than from a peace settlement, in which an influx of Hamas sympathizers would likely drive him from power. Thus, he does his bit to stoke the violence.

Over the past few weeks, he has incited rioting at the Temple Mount in the Old City of Jerusalem, falsely accusing Jews of defiling and attempting to seize the site. Among his gems is the admonition that Jews “have no right to desecrate [the al-Aqsa Mosque and other Temple Mount sites] with their filthy feet.” The purported secular moderate went on to out-Hamas Hamas, lauding Muslims who physically attack Jews attempting to tour the area:

Each drop of blood that was spilled in Jerusalem is pure blood as long as it’s for the sake of Allah. Every shahid [i.e., martyr] will be in heaven and every wounded person will be rewarded by Allah’s will.

For good measure, Abbas libelously accused Israel of “executing” a 13-year-old Palestinian boy, Ahmad Mansara, “in cold blood.” In fact, Mansara and his older brother were caught on video stabbing Jews, including a child riding a bicycle. When they tried to slice and dice the Israeli police who responded to the crime scene, Mansara was shot. But he was not “executed in cold blood”; he is alive and well and recuperating thanks to Israeli doctors and nurses who immediately gave him medical care.

Abbas’s diatribe can have had no purpose but to ignite yet another round of attacks — not a “cycle of violence,” as the State Department describes it, but a unilateral terror campaign. Indeed, Abbas is merely repeating his performance of a year ago, when he exhorted Palestinians to prevent Jews “from entering the holy site in every way possible” — a summons to jihad that was broadcast repeatedly on Palestinian television and, Ms. Glick recounts, led to a similar spate of attacks on Israeli civilians.

To describe as utter nonsense the claim that Israel is trying to seize the Temple Mount would be an insult to utter nonsense.

Jordan invaded East Jerusalem in 1948. During the 19 years of Jordanian occupation that followed, the world did not seem to mind that Palestinians were not given their own state. Nor did it much notice the enforcement of sharia: thousands of Jews and Christians driven from their homes, Jews denied access to holy sites, centuries-old synagogues destroyed, and severe restrictions placed on Christians — including limits on visits to holy sites and a requirement that the Koran be taught in Christian schools.

In 1967, against Israel’s warnings, Jordan joined the Six-Day War of aggression waged by Arab-Islamic states, to disastrous effect for themselves. Their goal then, like the Islamist-Leftist goal now, was to annihilate the Jewish state — as Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser put it about a week before the war, “Our basic objective will be the destruction of Israel,” with which, he later added, “we will not accept any . . . coexistence.” It was the Arab-Islamic states, though, that were routed. Jordan’s foolish decision to attack West Jerusalem resulted in its being throttled and pushed out of East Jerusalem by the Israeli Defense Forces.

The Old City’s iconic edifices are among the world’s holiest sites for Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Under Israeli control, the sites have been opened to tourists of all faiths. Yet, in deference to Islam’s notoriously hair-trigger sensitivities, Israel placed the Temple Mount under the management of a Muslim waqf (a Jordanian trust). Furthermore, the Israeli government prohibits Jews from praying at the Temple Mount, notwithstanding that it is widely regarded as Judaism’s most sacred site. Even a hint that this status quo may be altered suffices to trigger Palestinian terror attacks, so Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly and emphatically committed to maintaining it.

So what did the Obama administration do? As the violence raged, a top State Department spokesman, retired Navy admiral John Kirby, addressed the situation. “Well, certainly,” he claimed (the word is a verbal tic for this highly uncertain man), “the status quo has not been observed, which has led to a lot of the violence.”

This statement was patently untrue and, under the circumstances, recklessly irresponsible — so much so that Kirby ended up retracting his “certainly” statement on Twitter, burbling about how he “did not intend to suggest” what he had so clearly said — and what, as John Hinderaker notes, an Israeli security official described as the U.S. State Department’s “crazy, deceitful and baseless” comments.

Kirby’s retraction came only after he had poured more fuel on the fire by rolling out the moral-equivalence canard that State has honed through 20 years of blood-soaked “peace process.” Asked if he would assess blame for the violence, the spokesman responded, “certainly [uh-oh] individuals on both sides of this divide are — have proven capable of and in our view are guilty of acts of terror.”

Yup, those Israeli terrorists have only themselves to blame.

Keep in mind: This is the administration that labels blatant anti-American terrorism “violent extremism” and “workplace violence” because it cannot bring itself to attach the T-word to jihadist mass murderers. Yet Obama’s minions blithely applied the “terrorist” label to Israelis — thus echoing Abbas, Hamas, Iran, the Muslim Brotherhood, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, al-Qaeda, ISIS, and Hezbollah.

Not surprisingly, Kirby declined to specify what Israeli “terrorist” attacks he had in mind. Perhaps he was referring to an apparent revenge attack by an Israeli who injured four men in stabbings last week — two Palestinians and two Israeli Bedouins it seems he mistook for Palestinians. Maybe Admiral Kirby preferred not to elaborate because, at a certain point, disgracefully drawn moral equivalency embarrasses even the shameless Obama administration. The Israeli government vigorously condemns and prosecutes criminals who attack civilians. By contrast, the Palestinian Authority willfully incites terrorism, sings paeans to terrorists in government-controlled media, and even names streets after them. In fact, the PA has joined a unity government with Hamas, a formally designated terrorist organization under American law. It is in the terrorism business.

Well, if moral equivalence is the order of the day, we should add that Kirby’s boss, John Kerry, was just as reprehensible as Kirby. In a speech at Harvard University, our redoubtable secretary of state opined that the Palestinian rampage was catalyzed by . . . wait for it . . . “a massive increase in settlements” purportedly built by Israelis over the past two years. This, he says, threatens — all together now — the “two-state solution.”

Of course, Israel is not massively increasing settlements; it is constructing additional housing on existing settlements for growing communities. Moreover, the fact that the settlements are unrelated to the ongoing violence is open and notorious: Abbas incited the attacks, he is quite proud of having done so, and he continues to lionize the attackers.

An outraged Netanyahu sized up the situation this way:

As far as settlements are concerned — this is not a result of a massive wave of settlements because there’s not been a massive wave of settlements. . . . And second, . . . the facts count. It is the very killers themselves who explain why they’re doing what they’re doing. They leave behind Facebook pages in which they cite and repeat Palestinian incitement about the al-Aqsa Mosque. All the lies that are said about us trying to bring down the mosque or change the status quo, they cite that as the reason for their activity. And you can’t fit a false template on reality. . . .

This is what is driving this current wave. I’m sorry. The old models don’t apply. There’s a Palestinian attempt to inflame violence based on the false allegations that we are changing the Temple Mount, now on the false allegations that we’re executing innocent civilians. It doesn’t wash. And I expect our friends around the world to look at these facts, recognize them for what they are and, I think, to condemn these Palestinian attacks and to demand from Abu Mazen to stop the incitement and to restore calm.

Dream on, Mr. Prime Minister.

As to Kerry’s claim that settlement building provoked the violence, it was left to Kirby to rationalize that the secretary did not really mean what he said — an occupational hazard for Kerry spokesmen, but one Kirby “certainly” is the perfect guy to handle. The problem, alas, is that Abbas means exactly what he says: What Israel’s enemies want is the one-state solution.

Palestinian Leaders Have Created a Culture of Death. By Tzipi Hotovely.

Abbas: “We Welcome Every Drop of Blood Spilled in Jerusalem.” By Tzipi Hotovely. Wall Street Journal, October 18, 2015.

Hotovely:

Palestinian leaders have created a culture of death that is motivating the latest violent terrorism.

The latest surge of Palestinian terror attacks against Israelis has come in the immediate wake of explicit calls by the Palestinian leadership to “spill blood.” This well-orchestrated campaign of violence follows many years in which Palestinian children have been taught to idolize the murder of Jews as a sacred value and to regard their own death in this “jihad” as the pinnacle of their aspirations.

Such violence has deep roots. It goes back to the rampages at the behest of Haj Amin al-Husseini, a Muslim activist and at one point grand mufti of Jerusalem, in the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s. It continued with the fedayeen Palestinian militants in the 1950s and ’60s, and evolved into the terrorism of the Palestine Liberation Organization and Fatah under Yasser Arafat and now Mahmoud Abbas. Anyone who claims that Palestinian terror against Jews dates only to 1967, or is a response to Israeli settlements, should become more informed of the conflict’s history.

Yet the apathy shown by the international community to the death-culture fostered by Palestinian elites, and the unbalanced manner in which subsequent violence is often treated by the international media—as if there is any kind of symmetry between terrorists and their victims—is doing long-term, and possibly irrevocable, harm to generations of Palestinians.

A few recent examples underscore the depth of the problem.

Mr. Abbas, the Palestinian Authority president, said the following on Palestinian television on Sept. 16: “We welcome every drop of blood spilled in Jerusalem. This is pure blood, clean blood, blood on its way to Allah. With the help of Allah, every martyr will be in heaven, and every wounded will get his reward.”

Two weeks later, on Oct. 1, Palestinian terrorists murdered an Israeli couple, Eitam and Naama Henkin, in cold blood in front of their four children, who ranged from 9 years old to 4 months.

Days later, with the Henkin children still in mourning, PLO official Mahmoud Ismail went on official Palestinian television, PBC, and proclaimed their parents’ murder to be a fulfillment of Palestinian “national duty.” He was one of several Palestinian officials who condoned the murder.

Such statements strike a resonant chord among generations of Palestinian children who have been taught that Jews are the descendants of “barbaric monkeys” and “wretched pigs” (a phrase from a poem repeatedly recited on PBC television, to the applause of children.) They have been taught that “armed conflict” (a common Palestinian euphemism for the murder of Jews) against “the so-called State of Israel” is both a religious duty and an act purportedly legitimized by the United Nations—a falsehood repeated in a number of 12th-grade Palestinian textbooks.

The Palestinian Authority also pays handsome stipends to terrorists and their families, which serve as a powerful incentive to carry out acts of terror.

Is it surprising, then, that Mr. Abbas’s explicit call for “blood on its way to Allah” has resulted in a surge of stabbings and other attacks against Israelis? Is it any wonder that viewers of official television recently were treated to the sight of a Palestinian boy, dressed up in battle fatigues, telling a smiling talk-show host of his wish to become an engineer “so that I can build bombs to blow up all the Jews.”

The unending stream of blood-drenched caricatures and video clips that circulate virally through Palestinian social media is a telling indication of how profoundly the worship of violence is entrenched in Palestinian society. So are the many schools, city squares and sports tournaments named for arch-terrorists.

The cultivation of this culture of death is having devastating effects. As Palestinian terror touches more Jewish families, Israelis, especially of the younger generation, are increasingly resigning themselves to the fact that Palestinian society is guided by a dramatically different set of values.

Israeli society and Jewish tradition sanctify life. Palestinian society glorifies death. Israeli children grow up on songs of peace and the biblical vision of “nation shall not lift up sword against nation.” Palestinian children are taught to hate.

Yet there is no international outcry. No indignation at the exploitation of Palestinian children from all the nongovernmental organizations and U.N. agencies that profess to monitor human-rights abuses.

This is tragic because the international community could make a practical difference. About a third of the Palestinian Authority’s budget is financed by foreign aid. This money is intended to develop Palestinian infrastructure and foster economic growth, but it is being misused by the Palestinian Authority to promote the murder of Jews and to sow destruction within Israel. The international community can wield its influence toward a cessation of incitement.

Turning a blind eye to the enormous harm that the Palestinian leadership is doing to its own people—by raising successive generations of children on blind hatred of the Jews and Israel—is dooming these children to a bleak future. This ought to be a compelling reason for the international community to seriously rethink the strange tolerance it exhibits toward the Palestinian death-culture.

Changing this culture of death is no less important for the Palestinians than for Israel.

Hamas Cleric and TV Host Abu Funun: We Will Not Leave a Single Jew, Dead or Alive, on Our Land.

Hamas Cleric and TV Host Abu Funun: We Will Not Leave a Single Jew, Dead or Alive, on Our Land. MEMRI TV. Video Clip No. 5115, October 13, 2015. YouTube.

Transcript:

Hamas cleric and TV host Sheikh Iyad Abu Funun recently said that he would swear on the Quran “that not a single Jew will remain on this land.” He further said: “We will not leave a single one of you, alive or dead, on this land. By Allah, we will dig up your bones from your graves and get them out of this country.” He was speaking on Al-Aqsa TV on October 13, 2015.

Following are excerpts

Iyad Abu Funun: Let me say something clearly to the Zionists, something that should reach all those enemies – whether left-wing, right-wing, secular, religious, or extremist. Regardless of their appearance or the color of their skin, they are on the land of Islam, and the Muslims, on the land of the Prophet’s nocturnal journey. Any of our enemies living on this land must understand that they have no place on this land.

Brother, could you bring me a copy of the Quran? I want to swear on the Quran that not a single Jew will remain on this land. Not a single settler will remain on this land. Absolutely not. The sheikhs who preceded me swore on the Quran [a producer hands Abu Funun a Quran] that not a single Jew would remain on this land and that you would not win any battle. I too swear on the Quran that by Allah the Almighty, who created the skies above and all creatures, who sent us the Quran and the messengers, who created Paradise and Hell, life and death, we will not leave a single Jew on our Islamic land – no child, no adult, no settler, no soldier, nobody of Eastern or Western origin. No Jew will remain on the land of Islam and the Muslims.

This is my vow on behalf of the entire Palestinian people, and of the Arab and Islamic nation in its entirety, from East to West. If the enemies do not understand this, they are stupid. They have not read the books of history. Go and read them, and learn what happened between us. In the days when the Prophet Muhammad was in Medina, the Jews of Bani Qaynuqa’, of Bani Nazir, and Bani Qurayza were there. What did you do? You betrayed the Prophet once and did not learn your lesson. You betrayed him a second, third, and fourth time, and did not learn your lesson. We trampled on you time and again.

Our nation is invincible. We are killed, martyred, wounded… When a thousand are killed, thousands come in their place. When one commander is killed, a thousand take his place. We are nation that cannot come to an end.

Read the books of history carefully, and learn who were the men who were educated by the Prophet Muhammad. Go back to the history books. When we set out to fight the Byzantines in the battle of Mu’tah, we had 3,000 fighters, while the Byzantine numbered 200,000. We, the men educated by the Prophet Muhammad, are invincible. Don’t talk to me about security forces, airplanes, tanks, intelligence agencies, about detentions, deportations, destruction of homes, missiles… This is all meaningless. The Quran is in our hearts, and you and all your forces cannot rip it out.

Therefore, you should study the books of history because history repeats itself. Our tragedies will not repeat themselves. This is where the equation ends. We and you are on the same land, but we have our complete faith in Allah and in the strength of the mujahideen, and will not leave a single one of you, alive or dead, on this land. By Allah, we will dig up your bones from the graves and get them out of this country. We will not leave any trace of you on this land.

[…]

Jibril Rajoub: We Are Proud of Heroic Palestinian Attackers.

Jibril Rajoub: We Are Proud of Heroic Palestinian Attackers; We Won’t Pay the Price for the Holocaust. MEMRI TV. Video Clip No. 5116, October 17, 2015. YouTube.

Breathing down Abbas’s neck, Fatah leaders want Israeli blood. By Elhanan Miller. The Times of Israel, October 19, 2015.

Transcript:

Fatah Central Committee Deputy Secretary Jibril Rajoub recently lauded the Palestinian attackers, saying: “These are individual acts of heroism, of which I am proud.” In the interview, which aired on the official TV channel of the Palestinian Authority on October 17, 2015, Rajoub further said: “We refuse to pay the bill for the Holocaust. What is being done to us is exactly the same as what was done to the Jews in Europe.”

Following are excerpts:

Jibril Rajoub: These are clearly individual operations, but they require heroism, courage, and a value system, which forces the Palestinian elite and the Palestinian national forces to see in the final words of one of those heroes, written in a blog, a document that could be taught in schools in a lesson about the meaning of martyrdom…

Interviewer: You are referring to Fadi Alwan…

Jibril Rajoub: ...and about the meaning of patriotism. This is not about factions or about personal agendas. Today, we are at a crossroads. The Palestinian conduct on the ground, which is characterized by a readiness for self-sacrifice… You see a soldier with his gun fleeing a guy with a knife, or even someone empty-handed. You see a soldier terrified by a Palestinian, merely because he is a Palestinian… The self-confidence of this racist soldier has clearly been shaken. We should rise to the level of that understanding, and translate it into a strategy with goals. I believe that the confrontation between the Palestinian people and the occupation has reached the point where coexistence is impossible.

[…]

I am telling you that these are individual acts of heroism, of which I am proud. I am proud of these [attacks] and I salute all the people who carried them out. We are proud of them. We must view this in an objective and accurate way. The various factions have greater capabilities. They are capable of carrying out huge military operations, which would shake the whatchamcallit… But I think that politically speaking, we do not want these operations, because our goal is liberation and independence. We fight the occupation, but we want the international community to be on our side.

[…]

For the international community, it is unacceptable for a bus to explode in Tel Aviv, but it does not care what happens to a settler or a soldier who finds himself in the wrong place at the wrong time in the occupied land. Therefore, we must fight in a manner that keeps the world on our side. I believe that there is a consensus about this.

[…]

We are 4.5 million Palestinians who have been living under this racist occupation since 1967. We refuse to pay the bill for the Holocaust. What is being done to us is exactly the same as what was done to the Jews in Europe. We will not pay the price. We will not be a scapegoat. But our conduct must also rise to the occasion.

[…]

Palestinian-Jordanian Preschool Girl Holds Knife, Says: “I Want to Stab a Jew.”

Palestinian-Jordanian Preschool Girl Holds Knife, Says: “I Want to Stab a Jew.” MEMRI TV. Video Clip No. 5118, October 16, 2015. YouTube.

WATCH: “I want to stab a Jew,” young girl tells her teacher father. Times of Israel, October 20, 2015.

Abdulhaleem Abueshah Facebook.

Times of Israel Staff:

A video posted by a Jordanian-Palestinian teacher on Facebook shows his young daughter holding a large knife and declaring, “I want to stab a Jew,” the watchdog group MEMRI reported, amid an ongoing surge of stabbings and other terror attacks by Palestinians on Israelis.

Abdulhaleem Abuesha, a teacher in the Madaba refugee camp in Jordan, posted the clip on Friday. MEMRI translated and highlighted it on Tuesday.

After his daughter Rahf, standing in front of the refrigerator in the kitchen, declares her desire to stab a Jew, Abuesha asks, “Why do you want to stab the Jew?”

“Because he stole our land,” she replies.

Her father confirms approvingly: “They stole our land.” He then asks, “With what do you want to stab them?”

“With a knife,” she says.

Abuesha is then heard encouraging her, saying, “Oh, you’re so strong! Allah willing, my dear.”

MEMRI said Abuesha’s Facebook account “also features a picture of a little boy – presumably his son – holding a large knife and smiling at the camera.”

Palestinians Resent the Status Quo. By Jonathan S. Tobin.

Palestinians Resent the Status Quo. By Jonathan S. Tobin. Commentary, October 19, 2015.

Tobin:

After more than a week of studied neutrality about the surge of terrorism against Israel, Secretary of State John Kerry finally said something useful to the cause of restoring calm. Though he and other administration officials have at times blamed the Israelis for provoking the spate of bloody terror attacks by building homes or by shooting terrorists, Kerry got to the core of the problem when he noted that the alleged threats to the al-Aqsa mosque are not real. By noting that Israel was opposed to changing the status quo on the Temple Mount, Kerry implicitly backed the Netanyahu government’s assertion that the violence was the result of incitement by Palestinian leaders who have circulated that false charge. He said what was needed was “clarity” about the situation in Jerusalem that would make it clear to Muslims that there was no truth to the blood libel circulated by Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas about the Temple Mount. Moreover, Kerry noted that the key point was to make sure Palestinians understood that Israel was supportive of the status quo. But the notion that what Palestinians want on the Temple Mount or anywhere else is the status quo is a misnomer. As has been the case with each stage of fighting during the recent history of the region, both the Palestinians and much of the American foreign policy establishment hopes the growing pile of corpses will serve to increase the pressure on Israel to give up more territory.

It’s taken what is now being called the “stabbing intifada” for even a staunch supporter of the Obama administration’s foreign policy like the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg to recognize that disagreements about settlements and territory haven’t caused the violence. Goldberg correctly links Abbas’s incitement about the Temple Mount to the blood libels circulated by Palestinian leaders in the 1920s. The reason why Israel’s maintenance of a status quo on the Temple Mount that actually discriminates against Jews (they are forbidden to pray at what is the holiest site in Judaism), is that Palestinians see all of Israel, including everything inside the 1967 lines, as an illegal settlement populated by foreign colonists. As occasional COMMENTARY contributor Daniel Gordis also noted in an insightful if depressing column in the New York Daily News, even educated Palestinians who engage in daily friendly interaction with Jewish Israelis view them as usurpers who will be thrown out sooner or later.

But unfortunately, this insight hasn’t penetrated into the consciousness of most of those who comment about foreign policy. A good example came in Monday’s New York Times when the International Crisis Group’s Nathan Thrall wrote that the problem was that there was no sign that Israel would relax the occupation of Palestinians. So long as Palestinian thought that only violence would force Israel to make concessions on land and settlements, terrorism would be seen as a legitimate, even necessary, political tool for an otherwise powerless Palestinian people. He believes if Israel and the United States merely seek to “manage” the conflict rather than solving it, the result will only be more violence since the Palestinians will keep shedding blood until their grievances are addressed.

Thrall is right when he notes that many Israelis dream about being able to completely separate from Palestinians and thus be rid of the nightmare of stabbings, shootings and other mayhem. He says support for separation was also at its highest during the second intifada as Israelis reeled from suicide bombings.

But what he and many other establishment think tank voices fail to understand is that the tumult about al-Aqsa betrays what is at the root of the violence. The talk about the mosque isn’t really so much about a fear that the Israelis will harm it but an ideological/religious commitment to ensuring that this site is made a Muslims only enclave where Jews have no rights. That’s why the PA is also seeking to get UNESCO to recognize the Western Wall as part of the al-Aqsa compound.

Thrall says Palestinians believe a “cost-free occupation” will only serve Israel’s interests and that a sign that the Jewish state will withdraw from more territory would give them reason to stop stabbing Jews. But the only status quo the Palestinians are interested in preserving is the one that existed before the modern Zionist movement began the return of the Jewish people to their land. Palestinian national identity remains inextricably tied to the war against that return, and as far as the Palestinians are concerned it makes no difference whether the “occupied” land under discussion is the West Bank or pre-1967 Israel.

A peace deal that would separate the two people sounds like a good idea in theory, but the results of Ariel Sharon’s Gaza withdrawal remain the object lesson in what happens when Israel undertakes such a retreat. The notion of replicating it in the West Bank still strikes the overwhelming majority of Israelis as madness even if they would like to separate from the Palestinians. Nor do they harbor any illusions about such a gesture satisfying the territorial aspirations of the Palestinians.

Israel has repeatedly demonstrated a willingness to grant the Palestinians a state in exchange for real peace. But as Gordis and Goldberg both correctly observe, peace will be impossible so long as the Palestinians aren’t prepared to recognize the religious and national rights of the Jews. Those who wish to promote a solution to the conflict would do better to stop talking about settlements (most of which would remain inside Israel in a peace deal) and start telling Palestinians the hard truth about giving up their century-long war. Until they grasp this, managing the conflict is all Israel or anyone else should be trying to do.