Hillary Clinton’s Denialism Is the Other Extreme of Trump’s Rhetoric on Islam. By Mollie Hemingway.

Hillary Clinton’s Denialism Is the Other Extreme of Trump’s Rhetoric on Islam. By Mollie Hemingway. The Federalist, November 24, 2015.

Hillary Clinton Subscribes to an Islamic Belief System. By Caleb Howe. RedState, November 19, 2015.

Hemingway:

The media are continuing their codependent obsession with Donald Trump by focusing, in this week’s edition of media-fueled Trumpmania, on comments he made regarding Muslims. You can look anywhere for evidence of this, but the first five Google hits for Donald Trump + Muslims are a good indication:

·         Donald Trump’s Muslim Database Game – The New Yorker

·         Donald Trump’s Views on the “Muslim Problem” – The Political Insider

·         Five symbols Donald Trump could use to identify the Muslims – QZ

·         First, Donald Trump Came for the Muslims – The Daily Beast

·         Donald Trump Sets Off a Furor With Call to Register Muslims – The New York Times

And on and on and on it goes. I get it. Trump is good for traffic. It’s fun to write outraged pieces about him! The media seem to have no limit for their love of covering everything he says. I was trying to find out what exactly, he’d said that had the media in such a tizzy and landed on an article headlined “The 7 Most Ridiculous Things Donald Trump Has Said In The Last 2 Weeks.” It was published in 2011. So forgive me if I opt out of this round of groupthink outrage on The Donald.

Or rather, while what Trump says (now, in 2011, in 1984, I could go on) is in fact, “ridiculous,” what other things are politicians saying that are also ridiculous?





Check out what Hillary Clinton said last week about the role Islam plays in global terrorism.

Let’s be clear, though. Islam is not our adversary. Muslims are peaceful and tolerant people and have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism.

Part of this is fine rhetoric for a politician. And obviously the majority of Muslims, particularly American Muslims, are peaceful and tolerant. But to say that Muslims have “nothing whatsoever” to do with terrorism is simply not true. The world may wish it were so, but it’s not. It’s as clownish and cartoonish and demonstrably false as anything Trump has said in the last week.

Clinton’s statement is extreme rhetoric that has no place in adult conversations in the aftermath of 9/11, which claimed the lives of 2,997. Or the attacks on U.S. embassies and consulates in Beirut, Karachi, Nairobi, Tanzania, Kenya, Sarajevo, Jeddah, Benghazi, Herat, and Erbil. Or the Moscow theater hostage situation, which killed more than 100 and injured more than 700. Or the nine synchronized bomb blasts in Jaipur that killed 80. Or the Ahmedabad bombings a year later that took the lives of 56 and injured 200. Followed two months later by the Delhi bombings that took another few dozen. Or the Islamabad Marriot hotel bombing that killed two U.S. servicemen and 52 others. The Qahtaniya bombings of the Yazidi that killed nearly 800 and wounded 1,600. The 2008 attacks on Christians in Mosul that killed more than 40. The siege of Mumbai, killing 166. The Little Rock recruitment office shooting. Fort Hood. The 2009 Marriott and Ritz-Carlton bombing in Indonesia. The Nag Hamadi massacre of Coptic Christians. The Moscow Metro bombings that killed 40. The London Underground bombings that killed 53 and injured 700. The Madrid train bombings that killed 191 people and wounded 1,800. The Mumbai train bombings that killed 209 injured more than 700. The Beslan school hostage crisis, where some 385 people — including 186 children — were killed. The murder of Theo Van Gogh. The 2005 Delhi bombings. The Amman bombings that killed more than 60 and injured 115. The Westgate shopping mall attack where 67 were killed and 175 wounded. ISIS’ beheadings of Americans, of Christians, of other enemies of the state. Paris.

Each of these attacks — and countless others — were done in the name of Islam. And while it might comfort us to issue platitudes about Islam being peaceful and having “nothing to do” with these attacks, such statements are unbecoming of serious politicians.

Anyone with a brain wave and a pulse knows that Islam and Islamist terrorism have a relationship. What’s more, refusal to acknowledge that Islam contains within it groups of people dedicated to such carnage actually does more damage to peaceful Muslims than otherwise. Would you rather have those people who are cognizant of world events understand that there is a stream of thought within Islam that lends itself to such violence or to believe that all Muslims are so inclined? Because in a world with the reality of Islamist terrorism, that’s the option its prominent deniers are giving people.

Cathy Young made this point when she noted a Daily Beast article about some group of college students saying that remembering 9/11 was offensive to Muslims, “Are you saying that all Muslims are terrorists?” she asked.

Seriously. Check out this ad that was put out by Democrats this past week. It’s mindboggling.

First off, if you told me that this was a Republican ad, I would have believed you. It was produced in a country where fully two-thirds of respondents to a recent poll used the term “radical Islam” to describe the enemy. You will of course note that there is not a drop of conflict between GOP politicians talking about Islamist terrorism or the other problems of radical Islam and George W. Bush’s statements about not being at war with Islam. That’s because both of these statements are true. Islamist terrorism is a problem, and the U.S. is not at war with Islam. It’s Democrats who come off bigoted in this ad by their implicit argument that all Muslims are indistinguishable from one other, no matter their particular political or religious views.

“Strange New Respect” For George W. Bush

In the hours after Islamist terrorists carried out their attacks on American soil in 2001, President George W. Bush and his advisors agreed on a strategy for talking about the role Islam. It was difficult because the attacks were perpetrated by Muslim terrorists who based their violence in their understanding of their religion. So the Bush administration was trying to manage what they worried could be a touchy situation both domestically and globally. They wanted to make sure that American Muslims weren’t subject to retaliatory violence. And they wanted to make sure that global Muslims didn’t feel the need to pick a side against the U.S. in the coming days.

So on September 17, 2001, President Bush visited the Islamic Center of Washington, D.C., and said, “The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. That’s not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace. These terrorists don’t represent peace. They represent evil and war.”

This was a political statement, as were other similar statements. Bush was no more qualified to opine on Islamic theology than the vast majority of politicians and talking heads who have done so in the years since. What’s more, it was an emergency political statement, a measure taken to address immediate problems.

It’s been hilarious to watch the media and other progressives pull out the “strange new respect” routine for Bush’s political positioning of Islam. “Strange new respect” is the term for how the media do everything they can to demonize and tear down whichever Republican is in power or in the news. Then, a decade later, they pretend that the Republican they loathed was in fact totally reasonable all along in order to demonize and tear down whichever Republican is in power or in the news.

Many reporters are probably too young to remember, but the media treatment of Bush was so bad by 2004 that non-unhinged observers referred to it as Bush Derangement Syndrome. If there was one Republican I was sure wouldn’t get the “strange new respect” treatment — much less so quickly — it was George W. Bush. In any case, he’s getting it now.

“Islam means peace,” we’re told, but it actually means submission. Not to make a qualitative judgment, but if it did mean peace, it would have never left the Arabian Peninsula, but it did and almost immediately. The battle of Yarmuk, one of the most significant battles in human history, took place in 636, just four years after Muhammad died. In Syria, as it happens. A small band of Muslim soldiers overtook the mighty Byzantines in just six days, ending Byzantine rule there. Military historians say what was needed to defeat the Muslim invaders was a quick deployment of forces. That didn’t happen, so the Muslim army worked quickly to overpower a much larger opponent. It was one of the battles Osama bin Laden mentioned in his inspirational statements about how to overtake Westerners.

Here’s a quick and dirty animated map showing the expansion of Islam via conquest:

According to historian Will Durant:

The Islamic conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civilization is a precious good, whose delicate complex of order and freedom, culture and peace, can at any moment be overthrown by barbarians invading from without or multiplying within.

The Cost Of Denialism

Politico published a piece this week headlined, “Molenbeek broke my heart: A former resident reflects on his struggles with Brussels’ most notorious neighborhood.” How did Molenbeek become Europe’s jihadi base? Teun Voeten says:

But the most important factor is Belgium’s culture of denial. The country’s political debate has been dominated by a complacent progressive elite who firmly believes society can be designed and planned. Observers who point to unpleasant truths such as the high incidence of crime among Moroccan youth and violent tendencies in radical Islam are accused of being propagandists of the extreme-right, and are subsequently ignored and ostracized.

The debate is paralyzed by a paternalistic discourse in which radical Muslim youths are seen, above all, as victims of social and economic exclusion. They in turn internalize this frame of reference, of course, because it arouses sympathy and frees them from taking responsibility for their actions. The former Socialist mayor Philippe Moureax, who governed Molenbeek from 1992 to 2012 as his private fiefdom, perfected this culture of denial and is to a large extent responsible for the current state of affairs in the neighborhood.

Two journalists had already reported on the presence of radical Islamists in Molenbeek and the danger they posed — and both became victims of character assassination. In 2006, Hind Fraihi, a young Flemish woman of Morrocan descent published “Undercover in Little Morocco: Behind the Closed Doors of Radical Islam.” Her community called her a traitor; progressive media called her a “spy” and a “girl with personal problems.”

No, Islam isn’t synonymous with peace, and Bush was just doing politics when he claimed otherwise in the stressful aftermath of 9/11. But as much as his apologetics were amateur, they were significantly more excusable than pushing out the same false rhetoric now.

We are not children. We have read the news in the last 14 years. The attack on the Radisson hotel in Mali is simply the latest bloody demonstration that Islamist terrorism is real. We know that the terrorists are truly and genuinely motivated by their religious beliefs, however much the professors writing op-eds assert they are not. And while there may be an earnest debate about what can and should be done to deal with Islamist terrorism, no serious person can deny its existence.

So yes, Trump’s rhetoric is extreme. (Can you believe it? Donald Trump! The man known for his probity and reasonableness.) But the other extreme is also dangerous. That’s the extreme that denies the reality of Islamist terrorism, the threat it poses in Paris, London, New York, Mumbai, Madrid, Karachi, Delhi, Cairo, Jerusalem, Khobar, Washington, D.C., Moscow, Nairobi, Benghazi, and throughout the world.

It’s telling that much of the media find only one of the views extreme.

Graeme Wood: No Question ISIS Knows the Quran.

Graeme Wood: No question ISIS knows the Quran. Video. The Intelligence Report with Trish Regan. Fox Business, November 23, 2015. YouTube.

What ISIS Really Wants. By Graeme Wood. The Atlantic, March 2015. Responses.

Beating the Islamist Death Cult. By David Horovitz.

Beating the Islamist death cult. By David Horovitz. The Times of Israel, November 23, 2015.

Horovitz:

The fight needs to be physically taken to the enemy. But it also needs to be waged educationally — in the schools and the mosques and online.

Israel on Monday is enduring yet another day of incessant terror attacks. The death of an 18-year-old Israeli, stabbed in the stomach as he stood with friends at a gas station on Road 443 between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, has just been confirmed. A few hours ago, two teenage Palestinian girls pulled out scissors in an attempt to kill Israelis in Jerusalem’s main Mahane Yehuda fruit and vegetable market, and wound up injuring a 70-year-old Palestinian man from Bethlehem.

And those were only the two worst attacks so far today — on a day that also saw the funeral of yesterday’s terror fatality, Hadar Buchris, 21, a young Israeli woman who was murdered at the Gush Etzion junction south of Jerusalem just hours before yet another terror fatality from the self-same spot, American yeshiva student Ezra Schwartz, 18, was laid to rest in Boston. 

The national mood is grim. The fear of attack is relentless.

Critics say the government, the army, should be doing a better job of preventing the attacks. There’s some basis to the complaint that the Gush Etzion junction should be more effectively protected; it’s been the site of numerous attacks, and the IDF is again now looking at ways to safeguard those who use it.

But the fact is that Jews and Arabs, Israelis and Palestinians live in intimate proximity in our part of the world. And when much of the Palestinians’ political leadership, spiritual leadership, educational system, mainstream media and social media relentlessly preach the hatred of Jews, the fundamental illegitimacy of the Jewish state, and the ostensible religious requirement to kill and be killed, the murderous consequences are difficult to defend against hermetically.

This latest terror surge is unlikely to pass quickly. A whole new generation has been filled with loathing for Jews, for Israel. Not all young Palestinians are going out stabbing; not all of them have been recruited to the killing fields. But the purported religious imperative is pushing more and more of them to act — several times a day, of late.

While foolish outsiders bend over backwards to supply legitimacy for the terrorism, bemoaning the suffering of Palestinians under Israeli control, it should not need stressing that this new systematic incitement of violence — just like the evil Second Intifada suicide bombing onslaught of more than a decade ago — is both utterly unjustifiable and entirely counterproductive. It can only render the prospect of Palestinian statehood more remote. As we mourn our daily dead, Israelis are well aware that the toll would be far higher were the suicide bomb factories of Jenin, Nablus and other West Bank cities still manufacturing explosive belts and indoctrinating their wearers. The new stabbing surge is an immense deterrent to any notion of again relinquishing security control of the West Bank, as Israel had done in the years before the Second Intifada erupted in 2000.

As we watch all those Palestinian kids’ TV shows urging Jew-killing, read the Fatah and Hamas calls to murder, see the mothers and fathers of the daily murderers hailing their “martyred” children, the last thing we’re saying is, Let’s entrust these people with full sovereignty, so that they can more easily fulfill their stated ambition of pushing us into the sea. As we guard against them, all our differences — the arguments over settlements, over how to maintain a Jewish-democratic Israel, over what more we can do to create an environment more likely to encourage moderation — are simply overwhelmed and rendered irrelevant.

For now, Israelis are having to adjust their daily lives, to minimize their vulnerability, to guard against the banal norm of relaxing when out and about. More security forces are being deployed. The intelligence hierarchies are working overtime.

None of which constitutes a means of defanging Islamist terrorism at its source. For that — precisely as with the mass terror onslaught in Paris 10 days ago, and the dire ongoing threat of further Islamist terror coming West — what’s needed is concerted action at the grassroots.

When people come at you with a gun or a knife or scissors or bombs or their car, you had better stop them first. Ideally, you’ll identify and thwart them before they set out. The fight needs to be physically taken to the enemy. But it also needs to be waged educationally — in the schools and the mosques and online. The advocates and apologists must be afforded no tolerance.

We’ll not beat the many-headed Islamist terror monster until that ostensible religious imperative is shattered — until radical Islam, that is, is exposed, marginalized and ultimately defeated as the murderous death cult it is.

The Pitfalls of Good Guy/Bad Guy Foreign Policy. By Daniel L. Davis.

The Pitfalls of Good Guy/Bad Guy Foreign Policy. By Daniel L. Davis. The National Interest, November 23, 2015.

Davis:

What if the battle isn't between good and evil, but rather between bloody and bloodier?

Americans have always loved the classic battles between good and evil: minutemen vs. Redcoats, the Greatest Generation vs. Hitler, Darth Vader vs. Luke Skywalker, Redskins vs. Cowboys (I won’t say who’s good and who’s evil). We like the clean lines that allow us to love and support the good guy while hating and opposing the bad guy. No complications, no difficult moral decisions to make. Such is the case in Syria today: we support the “moderate” rebels—the good guys; we oppose ISIS and Assad—the bad guys. What would happen, however, if we discovered the battle wasn’t between good and evil, but rather between one group with bloody hands and another with really bloody hands?

Since Syria’s civil war began major media outlets have routinely reported on the barbaric atrocities committed by Assad’s forces against the civil population. Only rarely, however, do these same outlets report on the war crimes frequently committed by the opposition groups we support. But these crimes are neither minor nor isolated. A few examples:

- Human Rights Watch reported that in August 2013 rebel forces killed sixty-seven civilians during a key battle. These deaths were no collateral damage, however, as the report stated “evidence strongly suggests that the killings, hostage taking, and other abuses committed by opposition forces on and after August 4 rise to the level of crimes against humanity”

- Amnesty International claimed that in 2014 rebels killed over 600 civilians. “Some of these attacks,” the report asserted, “may have also constituted deliberate attacks on civilians or civilian objects, which are also war crimes.”

- And just two months ago, a pro-rebel human rights group reported that opposition forces committed war crimes by murdering seventy-one Syrian regime soldiers and civilian loyalists.

If, even into the next administration, the U.S. continues to support the opposition groups and they should happen to cumulatively overthrow Assad, what happens next? Will these groups work together to form an effective interim government, leading to fair and free elections and an end to the violence? The likelier scenario is that once Assad is out of power, the strongest of these groups will turn on each other in a new fight for control of the new government. We’ve seen just this dynamic play out in recent years.

In 2011, the U.S. supported rebel groups in Libya against Qaddafi by conducting hundreds of cruise missile and airstrikes. After the Libyan leader was killed by rebels, President Barack Obama optimistically said to the Libyan people: “You have won your revolution. And now, we will be a partner as you forge a future that provides dignity, freedom and opportunity.” Mere months later, however, the once-unified opposition fragmented and turned on itself. Now four years after we succeeded in removing a tyrant from power, Libya remains one of the most unstable, violent and ungoverned areas in the world.

In light of the fact that all participants of the war in Syria have committed war crimes, American policymakers have to face some hard questions with no good answers: if there aren’t any good guys, who do we support—or do we support anyone? If we don’t take one side over the other, what happens to the violence in that nation and the millions of innocent civilians who will continue to live in fear? Can America, the land of the free and home of the brave, stand idly by while militias wage war in which tens of thousands die?

It may be that none of the warring sides represent or would support our values and thus, regardless of which side ultimately prevails, American interests will not be served. The best we could hope for might be to use U.S. diplomatic and humanitarian resources to encourage the combatants to resolve their differences, while trying to contain the violence and leading humanitarian efforts to lessen the suffering of the innocents.

Such a policy would likely be attacked as “defeatist” or as a failure to lead. But the hard facts are that despite our attempts to resolve civil wars in other countries in recent years, the result has been a worsening of the violence, an increase in the suffering of those we’ve sought to help, and ultimately the establishment of regimes that neither represent American values nor provide peace and democracy to their people.

As we near Presidential primary season, we can only hope that the ultimate winner—whether Republican or Democrat or Independent, male or female—will show the wisdom, moral courage and leadership necessary to preserve American values and interests.

A Ten Point Plan to Defeat ISIS. By K.T. McFarland.

A ten point plan to defeat ISIS. By K.T. McFarland. FoxNews.com, November 17, 2015.

McFarland:

While Paris was still reeling under a state of emergency, President Obama took to the stage at the G-20 conference in Turkey to declare his policy to defeat ISIS a success. He had no plans to change course and no time to deal with critics who disagreed. Just days after ISIS ratcheted up their ambitions to conduct mass casualty attacks against the West, the president persisted in claiming his policy was working. President Obama continues to show a stunning and willful blindness to the tragedies all around him.

Meanwhile, the Russians and the French have started fighting back, launching airstrikes against the ISIS capital. As the days go on, more and more nations feel radical Islam’s sting and struggle with how to respond. The world is screaming out for U.S. leadership, but the president just isn’t up to the job.

It is slowly dawning on the West that radical Islam is the existential threat of our times, as fascism was in World War II, as communism was in the Cold War. We can’t cooperate with it, we can’t convert it and we can’t contain it. We must defeat it.

But so far we have no Churchill or FDR, no Reagan or Thatcher or Pope John Paul II. Obama has made it abundantly clear that he’s not budging. He says the U.S. will not send troops into the region, and he uses that as an excuse to do nothing. He says critics have suggested things he’s already doing. He says if anybody has a better plan, he hasn’t seen it.

Mr. President, here is what a better plan looks like. It’s the same plan that won World War II and the Cold War. The U.S. led in both victories, and the U.S. is the only country than can lead this time.  Those victories were multifaceted and multinational.

To defeat radical Islam, the United States should bring together all of Western civilization, combining our economic, political, ideological and diplomatic weapons, our intelligence and cyber capabilities, and our armed forces. No one country acting alone can defeat radical Islam. Everyone has his own role to play. But it won’t happen without America taking the lead.

First, assemble an alliance of nations that are threatened by radical Islam. We may have to hold our noses and work with leaders and countries we have differences with, as we did with the USSR during World War II. But we can put aside those differences temporarily to deal with the immediate threat. Putin, Assad, even the hacktivist group Anonymous could play a role.

The president insists the U.S. won’t send ground forces back to the Middle East. But this is still a military campaign. There is collateral damage in war.  We can try to minimize it, but not at the expense of losing this war.

Second, cut off ISIS’ funding. Bomb their oil fields and refineries. Destroy the pipelines, trucks and tankers taking ISIS oil to market. Use the U.S. banking system to track and freeze ISIS’ assets and sanction any country and company doing business with them.

Third, get tough with our Arab allies. Many Gulf Arab states have wealthy citizens who support radical Islamist groups. Tell those leaders they should police their own and shut down the funding streams. If they don’t, we won’t lift a finger to help them when radical Islamist groups bring the fight to their lands.

Fourth, launch a propaganda war to win the hearts and minds of those whose minds are still open. Use social media for disinformation campaigns. Counter every ISIS video of beheadings with videos showing jihadists blown to bits. – Showing terrorists committing unspeakable acts of violence doesn’t turn recruits off, it attracts them. The only way to discourage new followers is to show ISIS as weak, confused and in decline.

Fifth, encourage Islam’s leading clerics to speak out against the extremists.  Two of the most respected and important leaders in Islam, the Grand Imam of Al Azhar University and Cairo’s Grand Mutfi, have taken strong stands. We can help spread their messages.

Sixth, launch cyberwarfare against ISIS. Invade their safe havens on the Internet. Disrupt their networks. Radical Islam has dominated this space while we play catch-up.  Even worse, we have tried to conduct our efforts with one hand tied behind our back.

Seventh, arm our allies. We should give anyone willing to stand up and fight ISIS whatever he needs. Arm the Kurds and the Anbar Sunni tribes directly. Give weapons and aid to Jordan, Egypt and Israel.

Eighth, discard political correctness. We reacted to September 11 by treating everyone alike. The grandmother traveling with her grandkids to Disney World was given the same level of scrutiny as the young man with multiple visits to North Waziristan who traveled without luggage on a one-way ticket he paid for in cash. A better way to use our resources efficiently is to profile for terrorist behavior patterns. If we focus on everyone, we focus on no one.

Ninth, Don’t accept refugees we can’t vet. ISIS has already announced it will hide terrorists among the hordes of refugees flooding Europe and hoping to enter the U.S. The directors of the FBI, the CIA and the National Intelligence Agency have all issued warnings about the difficulty of vetting refugees headed for the U.S. Americans can help best by offering humanitarian assistance to keep refugees in the region, helping those of fighting age to stand and fight ISIS.

And finally, 10th, accept that we will constantly need to adapt our strategies and tactics to deal with radical Islamists. President George W. Bush tried to destroy radical Islam by sending in hundreds of thousands of troops to fight in Iraq, and failed. Obama tried withdrawing from the region, and that failed, too.

Yet the threat continues to grow. It has taken different forms over the years – Al Qaeda, ISIS, Boko Haram, al Nusra front – and it will no doubt wear other faces in the years ahead. But it’s the same enemy: religious fanatics driven by the core belief that they have been chosen by Allah to establish a caliphate that rules the world. They will kill any and all who stand in their way – Christians, Jews, Muslims – in the Middle East and worldwide.

Since they’re convinced they will prevail in the inevitable clash of civilizations, they’re not worried about the scope of the battle, or the levels of destruction, or even dying in the process. In fact, they are eager to bring on the end times, since they believe their triumph over the infidels is preordained.

We can laugh at the absurdity of their goals, or dismiss them as the “JV team,” or try to win their hearts and minds, or divert their anger with a jobs summit.

This is an enemy we can defeat. But our efforts need a leader. It can’t be Putin, and it can’t be Hollande. America is the only nation with the bandwidth, clout and power to assemble Western civilization and unite us in this long war.

Now all we need is a leader who is up to the task.

The GOP-ISIS Nightmare Coalition. By Andrew O’Hehir.

The GOP-ISIS nightmare coalition: Islamic extremists and the anti-immigrant right have the same goal — the death of democracy. By Andrew O’Hehir. Salon, November 21, 2015.

O’Hehir:

Terrorists and the far right both see democracy as a decadent failure; at least ISIS admits they want to destroy it.

Amid all the terror and panic and xenophobic hysteria of the Paris aftermath — which seems to have set the dial on the political Way-Back Machine to about 2002, at least for now — Republicans actually have a point. Maybe it’s half a point, because when Donald Trump or Ted Cruz (or Marine Le Pen) raise the contested question of whether Islam is compatible with democracy, they don’t really understand the basic terms of the question, let alone where it leads.

I will jump ahead here and suggest that you don’t get to ask that leading question about Islam and democracy, which has been the subject of considerable scholarly debate, without asking a number of corollary questions. What do we mean by Islam, and what do we mean by democracy? Is “democracy,” as we currently understand it and experience it, actually compatible with the idea of democracy as it was handed down from antiquity and reconceived by the Enlightenment? But it does no good for people on the left who claim to stand for democracy, and for its associated values of human rights and civil liberties, to pretend that the questions about Islam and democracy do not exist or do not matter, or that they have been settled. The killings in the 11th arrondissement, and the reaction throughout the West, should be enough to tell us that isn’t so.

It gives me absolutely no pleasure to insist that on this question, as on others, the Islamist militants of ISIS and the anti-Islamic Western right have reached the same conclusion. To put it more bluntly, every major Republican presidential candidate (excepting one or two of Jeb Bush’s multiple personalities) largely subscribes to the political and philosophical worldview of ISIS, except when it comes to final eschatological questions about who ends up in Paradise.

Indeed, in both cases the idea that Islam and democracy are incompatible is more like an essential premise than a conclusion, and the kinship goes much deeper than that. Both sides begin with the same diagnosis, which is that Western civilization faces a fundamental, existential crisis, and arrive at closely allied prescriptions aimed at producing closely related outcomes. In one case, Western democracy is seen as a corrupt and decadent sham that will simply be destroyed (and perhaps, in some fantasy future, subjugated to Islamic rule). In the other, Western democracy is corrupt and decadent and so on, and it must be destroyed in order to save it.

This meeting of minds and convergence of interests is not good news for the future of Islam or the future of Western democracy or the future of the human species. Personally, I’m not interested in the left-liberal tendency to use this for partisan political purposes: There are more important things at stake here than winning the next election, and in any event this issue feels like a lose-lose for everyone. It’s definitely not good news for those who want to resist both militant Islam and right-wing bigotry, as witness the political gymnastics performed in recent days by French President François Hollande and Hillary Clinton and even Bernie Sanders.

Clinton’s post-Parisian lurch to the right is obviously a strategic maneuver designed to fend off charges that she’s a terrorist-coddling crypto-Muslim in the mold of Barack Hussein Obama. It should also serve to remind both Clinton’s fans and detractors who she really is: a classic “Cold War liberal,” progressive on domestic social issues (at least within the frame of neoliberal economic and fiscal policy) but supremely hawkish when it comes to foreign policy and national security. Whether that combination reflects genuine principle or sheer political calculation I couldn’t say, and with Hillary Clinton I’m not sure there’s a difference. In her best possible incarnation, she might be President Hubert Humphrey, albeit imprisoned by a political climate HHH could never have imagined.

This point about the ideological marriage of ISIS and the Republicans has been made in various ways by various commentators since the Paris attacks — I made it myself in the immediate aftermath, even if I “buried the lede” — but I don’t think it can be restated often enough. Strategists of the Islamic State want Western regimes to persecute and marginalize Muslim citizens, crack down on immigration and squander their financial and political capital on a military response that is unlikely to produce a clear-cut victory and highly likely to harden anti-Western attitudes in the Islamic world. A similar approach worked brilliantly for Osama bin Laden in 2001 — better than he expected, I would guess — and ISIS possesses a far more sophisticated understanding of Western politics and culture than Osama and the old-school al-Qaida leadership ever did.

ISIS has repeatedly made clear, in its own English-language publications, that it seeks to divide the world between the infidel Crusader West and the purifying force of radical Islam, and to destroy any “gray zone” of accommodation or détente that lies between those stereotypical extremes. As scholar Bernard Lewis explained in an extended discourse on this subject back in 1993 (long before he suckered himself into becoming a war cheerleader), the most important target of Islamic fundamentalism was not the West itself but “pseudo-Muslim apostates” who had abandoned the true faith and become corrupted by secular foreign ideologies like liberalism or socialism or nationalism. This also could not possibly be clearer in the case of ISIS, which has murdered many times more Muslims than Westerners and whose ideological outreach is all about providing unemployed and disaffected Muslim youth in Europe and North America (many from secular families) a renewed sense of identity and community.

Some Republicans and European right-wingers are intelligent enough to understand all this, one must assume. It’s not some breathtaking new analysis to assert that the conflict between the West and violent Islamic extremism — and the conflict within the Muslim world itself — has more to do with ideology and economic conditions than with bombing sorties and “boots on the ground.” Either the leaders of the xenophobic right do not agree that they are doing exactly what ISIS wants them to do or they don’t care, and both possibilities are equally puzzling. My conclusion is that some don’t know and others don’t care, and that none of them can help themselves. They are driven forward by larger forces they cannot resist or control — by the populist upsurge of fear and animosity that is driving the No Syrian Grandmas movement, and by their not-so-secret conviction that the Islamist militants are right about the decrepit condition of Western civilization and democracy.

For at least the last 20 years and arguably closer to the last 50, the Republican Party has bet its future on appealing to a constantly shrinking electoral quadrant of exurban whites, largely in the South and Southwest. Throughout that period, the basis of that appeal has been the idea that America and Americanism (as core Republican voters understood those things) were in critical danger and under constant attack from within, from feminism and multiculturalism and the P.C. thought police, from Adam-and-Steve wedding cakes and the “war on Christmas” and white people who drove Volvos and wore funny glasses and drank chai lattes. Drive through any rural region of the United States — in my case, the impoverished hinterlands of central New York State, barely three hours from Manhattan — and you’ll encounter those “Take Back Our Country” lawn signs. No one on any side of the question needs to ask from whom.

It’s glaringly obvious, or at least it should be, that those are exactly the same tendencies that the leaders of ISIS and Osama bin Laden and the Taliban perceive and despise in the West. Much of that derives from Sayyid Qutb, the intellectual godfather of modern Islamic extremism, who published his influential critique “The America That I Have Seen” after spending two years in various parts of the U.S. in the late 1940s. Qutb excoriated America for its “deviant chaos” and its focus on “animalistic desires, pleasures, and awful sins.” He probably never imagined the prospect of same-sex weddings, gender-neutral bathrooms or Kardashian-centric reality TV, but would have perceived such outrageous developments as logical results of America’s fundamental depravity.

Some of Qutb’s complaints about materialism, consumerism and economic inequality, in fairness, are more redolent of left-wing moralizing, and those elements too can be found in contemporary Islamist rhetoric. But he was especially obsessed with the widespread secularism of American life, with the growing cultural influence of black people (whom he described as “bestial” and “noisy”) and with the sexual and intellectual freedom of women. Remember, this was 1949! He sounds like a horndog Baptist preacher out of some overcooked satirical novel when he inveighs against the “seductive capacity” of the American female, found in her “expressive eyes, and thirsty lips … in the round breasts, the full buttocks, and in the shapely thighs.” Whatever research Qutb may have undertaken on that subject during his time in Colorado and California was for the benefit of Islam, to be sure.

My point is not merely that puritanism of all stripes has common roots and common goals, and always calls for a return to some bygone era of virtue that almost certainly never existed. That’s a point worth making, but here’s the real secret sauce that binds the insane doctrines of ISIS to the Republican Party madhouse of Donald Trump and Ted Cruz: They both perceive all this decadence and moral relativism and loss of faith as the consequence of 200-odd years of democratic malpractice. One side has the decency to say openly that the legacy of 1776 and 1789 was complete bullshit from the get-go, nothing more than a high-minded pretext for imperial conquest and endless self-indulgence. The other side — and I think you know the one I mean — must pretend that democracy is or was a good idea, at least until it was distorted by Communist mind control or the Black Panthers or the 14th Amendment, while doing everything possible to undermine it.

I don’t suspect I need to lay out here all the ways that the American right, faced with an evident demographic disadvantage, has sought to disenfranchise its opponents, poison the political and legislative process and transfer power to the super-rich. As I and others have repeatedly observed, the great victory of the Koch brothers and the Republican brain trust in the 2014 midterm election lay not just in the GOP’s huge congressional majority but in the shocking 36.6 percent turnout, the lowest in any national election since World War II. The American right cannot return to a system where only property-owning white men are allowed to vote, at least not without visibly ripping up the Constitution. But it has gone a long way toward creating an environment that discourages and disheartens everyone else, and where the Angry White Male vote is coddled and inflamed and privileged in numerous ways.

As strange as this may sound, I do not doubt the faith that lies behind the right-wing distaste for democracy, or at least no more than I doubt the conflicted zealotry that lies behind militant Islam. Both sides correctly observe that the various strains of post-Jeffersonian democracy in the Western world have been plagued with problems from the beginning, and now face a dire crisis. Both the Western right and fundamentalist Islam yearn to pull their societies back toward a purer distillation of faith and a collective sense of purpose, and what could serve that purpose better than an apocalyptic “clash of civilizations”? They see the salvation of their respective societies in the rejection of the flabby ideal of democracy, explicitly or otherwise, and its replacement with a more virile, more godly and more effective system.

Is Islam compatible with democracy? Scholars have batted that one around for decades without arriving at a clear yes-or-no answer. Roughly 40 percent of the world’s Muslims live in nominal democracies now, for whatever that’s worth, and the popular appetite for democracy demonstrated by the Arab Spring was unmistakable, if also unfulfillable. But it strikes me as the wrong question. We might as well ask whether capitalism is compatible with democracy, or whether human nature is. As Justice Louis Brandeis may have said (like so many famous quotations, this one is tough to pin down), we can have democracy or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both. By that standard we have never had democracy, and quite likely never will.

Dealing With the Islamic State Demands Patience, Not Panic. By Fareed Zakaria.

Dealing with the Islamic State demands patience, not panic. By Fareed Zakaria. Washington Post, November 19, 2015.

Zakaria:

Henry Kissinger has noted that in his adult lifetime, the United States has fought five major wars and began each one with great enthusiasm and public support. But in each of them, Americans soon began to ask, “How quickly can you withdraw?” In three of these conflicts, he says, the United States withdrew its forces unilaterally. Today we are watching a similarly powerful, and understandable, enthusiasm for an expanded war against the Islamic State. Let us make sure we understand what it would entail not just to start it but also to end it.

One place to learn some lessons might be from a strategy that has been relatively successful: the war against al-Qaeda. As Peter Bergen noted in 2012, a year after Osama bin Laden’s death, the group’s leadership had been destroyed, its resources had disappeared and its support among the Arab public had plummeted. It has not launched an attack on Western soil since the London bombings 10 years ago.

The picture did not always look like that. After 9/11, officials and experts spoke of al-Qaeda with the awe and fear they now reserve for the Islamic State. Once the United States and its allies began battling the group, it inspired or directed several attacks across the globe, including the bloodiest in the West since 9/11, the 2004 Madrid train bombings, which killed 191 people. But those attacks did not mean al-Qaeda was “winning” the war on terrorism any more than the attacks in Paris last week mean that the Islamic State is winning. In fact, it’s possible that as the Islamic State loses territory on the ground, it is resorting to terrorism abroad.

What explains the success against al-Qaeda? Many experts point to the genuinely global counterterrorism operations, especially the sharing of intelligence. Others note that the group overplayed its hand in Iraq.

In one of the best books on the topic, “Hunting in the Shadows,” Seth Jones concludes that whenever the United States adopted a “light-footprint strategy” — Special Operations forces, covert intelligence and law enforcement — it did well. Whenever the United States and its allies sent troops into Muslim countries, he notes, “al-Qaeda has benefited through increased radicalization and additional recruits.” This is why from the start, the Islamic State has sought to bait Western countries into sending troops to Syria.

Defeating the group militarily would not be difficult. But to keep it defeated, someone would have to rule its territories or else it, or a variant, would just come back. The Islamic State draws its support from Sunnis in Iraq and Syria who feel persecuted by the non-Sunni governments in both countries. In addition, the group has created a functioning state that provides some measure of stability for a population that has been battered over the past decade.

In this sense, the Islamic State is more akin to the Taliban than al-Qaeda, which was a gang of foreigners lodged in Afghanistan as guests of the Taliban. But the Taliban itself is a local group, with support in the Pashtun communities of Afghanistan and Pakistan. This explains why the United States has not defeated it, after 14 years of warfare and tens of thousands of American soldiers and now many more Afghan troops. Keep in mind that in Afghanistan, the United States has a decent local ally that has considerable legitimacy. In Syria, it has none. The Kurds are a crucial ally and should become even more important in the months ahead. Still, as an ethnic minority, they cannot govern Arab lands.

Politicians call on the United States to build up an army of moderate Syrians. It is a worthwhile endeavor. But historically, when foreigners have helped put together local forces, those forces have usually lacked legitimacy and staying power — think of the Cubans who landed at the Bay of Pigs, the South Vietnamese regime or Washington’s favored Iraqi exiles. This essential problem — the lack of a credible local ally — makes ground operations in Syria harder than in Iraq, Afghanistan or Vietnam.

This is not to counsel despair but to suggest “strategic patience,” as President Obama rightly says. The Islamic State is not nearly as strong as the hysteria of the moment suggests. It is surrounded by deadly foes. Many countries are fighting it — Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shiite Iran, the United States and Vladimir Putin’s Russia, neighboring Jordan and faraway France. Its territory is shrinking, and its message is deeply unpopular to most in its supposed “caliphate” — witness the hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees fleeing its barbarism.

Counterterrorism, intelligence, airstrikes, drones and Special Operations are arenas where the West has the advantage — it has the money, technology, know-how and international cooperation. And it can hammer away for months, even years. If instead, panicked by terrorism, we were to send American soldiers into the deserts of Syria, we would enter the one arena where the Islamic State has the decisive advantage. And after a few inconclusive years, people would start asking, “How quickly can you withdraw?”

The End of Obamaworld: A Failed President. By Patrick J. Buchanan.

The End of Obamaworld: A Failed President. By Patrick J. Buchanan. Human Events, November 20, 2015. Also at Townhall, WND, Buchanan.org.

Malzberg | Patrick J. Buchanan discusses the terror attacks in Paris and Obama’s response. Video. The Steve Malzberg Show. NewsmaxTV, November 18, 2015. YouTube.






Buchanan:

Nations have a right to preserve their own unique identity.

In denouncing Republicans as “scared of widows and orphans,” and castigating those who prefer Christian refugees to Muslims coming to America, Barack Obama has come off as petulant and unpresidential.

Clearly, he is upset. And with good reason.

He grossly, transparently underestimated the ability of ISIS, the “JV” team, to strike outside the caliphate into the heart of the West, and has egg all over his face. More critically, the liberal world order he has been preaching and predicting is receding before our eyes.

Suddenly, his rhetoric is discordantly out of touch with reality. And, for his time on the global stage, the phrase “failed president” comes to mind.

What happened in Paris, said President Obama, “was an attack on all of humanity and the universal values that we share.”

And just what might those “universal values” be?

At a soccer game between Turkey and Greece in Istanbul, Turks booed during the moment of silence for the Paris dead and chanted “Allahu Akbar.” Among 1.6 billion Muslims, hundreds of millions do not share our values regarding women’s rights, abortion, homosexuality, free speech, or the equality of all religious faiths.

Set aside the fanatics of ISIS. Does Saudi Arabia share Obama’s views and values regarding sexual freedom and the equality of Christianity, Judaism and Islam? Is anything like the First Amendment operative across the Sunni or Shiite world, or in China?

In their belief in the innate superiority of their Islamic faith and the culture and civilization it created, Muslims have more in common with our confident Christian ancestors who conquered them than with gauzy global egalitarians like Barack Obama.

“Liberte, egalite, fraternite” the values of secular France, are no more shared by the Islamic world than is France’s affection for Charlie Hebdo.

Across both Europe and the United States, the lurch away from liberalism, on immigration, borders and security, fairly astonishes.

But again, understandably so.

Many of the Muslim immigrants in Britain, France and Germany have never assimilated. Within these countries are huge enclaves of the alienated and their militant offspring.

Consider the Belgium capital of Brussels. Belgium’s home affairs minister Jan Jambon said his government does not “have control of the situation in Molenbeek.”

Brice De Ruyver, a security adviser to a former Belgian prime minister says, “We don’t officially have no-go zones in Brussels, but in reality, there are, and they are in Molenbeek.”

According to The Wall Street Journal, after the Paris attacks, “French security forces … conducted hundreds of antiterror raids and placed more than 100 suspects under arrest. … France has some 11,500 names on government watch lists.”

How many of those 11,500 are of Arab descent or the Muslim faith?

The nations of the EU are beginning to look again at their borders, and who is crossing them, who is coming in, and who is already there.

And the world is reawakening to truths long suppressed. Race and religion matter. To some they are life-and-death matters. Not all creeds, cultures and tribes are equally or easily assimilated into a Western nation. And First World nations have a right to preserve their own unique identity and character.

When Obama says that to prefer Christian to Muslim refugees is “un-American,” he is saying that all the U.S. immigration laws enacted before 1965 were un-American. And, so, too, were presidents like Calvin Coolidge who signed laws that virtually restricted immigration to Europeans.

Barack Obama may be our president, but who is this man of the left to dictate to us what is “un-American”?

Were presidents Harry Truman and Woodrow Wilson, who called ours a “Christian nation,” un-American? Did the Supreme Court uphold our “universal values” with Roe v. Wade in 1973 and the Obergefell decision on same-sex marriage last June?

The race issue, too, has returned to divide us.

Half a century after Selma bridge, we have “Black Lives Matter!” on college campuses claiming that universities like Missouri, Princeton, Yale and Dartmouth are riddled with institutional racism.

Attention must be paid, and reparations made, by white America. And a new generation of academic appeasers advances to grovel and ask how the university might make amends.

In Europe, tribalism and nationalism are on the march. Peoples and nations wish to preserve who they are. Some have begun to establish checkpoints and ignore the Schengen Agreement mandating open borders. Eastern Europeans have had all the diversity they can stand.

With Syrian passports missing, with ISIS besieged in its Syria-Iraq laager and urging suicide attacks in New York and Washington, we may be witness to more terrorist massacres and murders in the States.

The time may be at hand for a moratorium on all immigration, and a rewriting of the immigration laws to reflect the views and values of Middle Americans, rather than those of a morally arrogant multicultural elite.

Obamaworld is gone. We live again in an us-versus-them country in an us-versus-them world. And we shall likely never know another.