It’s Time to Tell the Truth About the Long War Against Terrorism. By Aaron David Miller.

It’s Time to Tell the Truth About the Long War Against Terrorism. By Aaron David Miller. Foreign Policy, December 14, 2015.

Miller:

Why saying the United States can destroy the Islamic State is worse than providing false hope.

On Dec. 6, four days after the San Bernardino attacks, in an Oval Office address (only the third such address of his almost concluded eight-year presidency), President Barack Obama reassured Americans that we would prevail against the threat of terrorism. “The threat from terrorism is real, but we will overcome it,” Obama said. “We will destroy ISIL and any other organization that tries to harm us.”

The president confidently went to great lengths to tell the nation that we will draw on all aspects of American power. But Obama did not tell us the whole truth. A lie is lie only if you tell somebody something you don’t really believe yourself. And without personally straining the bounds of credulity to the breaking point, I don’t believe Obama believes that his current strategy will “destroy” the Islamic State or any other organization that tries to harm us. The fact that he omitted his customary word “ultimately” from his remarks likely reflected the urgency of the moment rather than any real conviction that the war Obama described in his address would be won easily or quickly.

The president isn’t alone in his desire to offer up definitive solutions to the war against terrorism. A number of presidential candidates, primarily on the Republican side, have likewise made super confident and even more grandiose pronouncements about winning the war against jihadi terrorism and destroying the Islamic State. Donald Trump: “I would bomb the shit out of them.” Marco Rubio: “If America does not make this [war against terrorism] our fight, the West will not win it.” Lindsey Graham: “[The United States] should lead an effort to assemble a multinational force, including up to 10,000 American troops, to clear and hold Raqqa and destroy ISIS in Syria.” And Ted Cruz: “We will utterly destroy them. We will carpet bomb them into oblivion.” Even Hillary Clinton, whose rhetoric is very much toned down, has spoken of a plan not to contain the Islamic State but to “defeat and destroy ISIS.”

The only problem with this kind of tough talk is that the goal of winning definitively the war against jihadi terrorism, including destroying and defeating the Islamic State, is about as likely as winning the war against drugs, poverty, mental illness, and banning guns in America. The president, as a self-described Niebuhrian and a pragmatist who understands that more often than not the best you can do is to come up with “proximate solutions for insoluble problems,” ought to know better. Sure, the nation needs to be reassured — jihadi terrorism isn’t an existential threat to America. But in that moment, the nation could have used — and could still use — some critically important reality therapy in what is certainly going to be a very long war against Islamist terrorism. And here’s why.

The United States isn’t Europe. But does that matter?

Terrorism experts argue that four factors make Europe much more vulnerable to jihadi attacks than the United States: 1) Paris was easily accessible; 2) there are many European nationals quite eager to kill their own countrymen; 3) there’s a euro-jihadi infrastructure; and lastly, 4) European security services just can’t handle the caseload tracking and preempting attacks by the number of homegrown, returning, or infiltrating jihadis. This rather comforting analysis makes sense up to a point.

It’s true that for the United States’ liquid assets (two oceans on either side), our better border controls, and a better integrated and less aggrieved Muslim American community, all give us an advantage. But over time, how much of one? In fact, homegrown jihadis don’t need a big support team or infrastructure for DIY terrorism; there are plenty of guns on hand, and by the looks of things, the San Bernardino shooters were impossible for law enforcement to track. Add a dose of easy access to jihadi propaganda on the web, nativist anti-Muslim backlash, and Trump’s “keep out the Muslims” campaign and you’ll easily double the size of a radicalized pool, a percentage of which will act violently. You don’t need Islamic State-directed operations or Raqqa-dispatched hit teams when inspiration will do nicely.

The terrorism epicenter

With all due respect to the solutionists, the war on jihadi terrorism — and that’s what it is — is a generational enterprise. Fourteen years after 9/11, more than twice the time it took for the allies to win World War II, the jihadis are thriving.

My FP colleague the inestimable Micah Zenko noted that terrorist-related deaths grew by more than 4,000 percent from 2002 to 2009 and by 148 percent from 2010 to 2014. And while he pointed out that last year not a single American was killed within the United States in a terrorist attack, the stats for 2015 are already much more tragic. The fact is, the Islamic State, al Qaeda affiliates, and a host of other maniacal groups slouching toward Bethlehem waiting to be born will not be extinguished anytime soon. Bad or no governance, leaving empty spaces in a Middle East that is angry, broken, and dysfunctional — as well as riven with sectarian tensions and pushed by powers such as Iran and Saudi Arabia in their own deadly proxy war — guarantees the health and well-being of the jihadi enterprise. This region will be spewing hatred, irrationality, illogic, and a vicious Islamist medieval ideology for years to come. America won’t be the only target to be sure. In the past month, the Islamic State has either directed or inspired terrorist attacks on permanent members of the U.N. Security Council. But the United States, both for what it represents and does in the world, will be high on the jihadi hit list.

You can’t defeat something big with nothing big.

Despite Obama’s pledge to destroy the Islamic State, it’s highly arguable whether the United States or any other power has the will, means, or skill to do that. Paris was less a game-changer than it was another cruel turn in the long war against jihadi terrorism. Obama even boasts of a coalition of 65 nations that have pledged to defeat the Islamic State. But how many of these really count? This presumed coalition of the willing, including of course the Brits and the French, also includes a lot of other countries whose contributions are at best marginal and too many others that are better described as the unwilling and self-interested. Just look around. Russia’s priority is keeping Bashar al-Assad afloat, Turkey is hammering the Kurds, and the Saudis are busy hitting the Houthis in Yemen. On top of this, no possible combination of local forces can stabilize Syria, and neither NATO nor the Western powers are willing to commit enough ground forces to destroy Islamic State sanctuaries in Iraq and Syria to guarantee the jihadis won’t return. More disconcerting, the Islamic State has jumped borders now and is operating with impunity in Sinai, Libya, Yemen, and in parts of Africa. The jihadi cancer has gone global, and the great powers can’t seem to stop it. And if we’re waiting for the House of Islam to reform itself and purge its own radicals and extremists, we’ll be waiting for a very long time to come.

The wild, wild West

As terrorism analysts Steven Simon and Daniel Benjamin point out, in counterterrorism and law enforcement we’ve come a long way since 9/11: “Post-9/11 visa requirements and no-fly lists weed out most bad actors, and both the Bush and Obama administrations demanded that countries in our visa waiver program provide data on extremists through information-sharing pacts called HSPD-6 agreements.” And we’re making improvements in other areas too, such as the agreement with the European Union over passenger name records in 2012.

Keeping bad guys (and girls) out is one thing. What about tracking U.S. citizens already here, particularly those who seem to live normal lives as the San Bernardino shooters seemed to have done? The FBI has 900 inquiries related to the Islamic State now open in all 50 states out of some 10,000 counterterrorism cases. And how can you intensively watch and track them all? Add the ease with which weapons and explosives can be accessed; toss in the size of the country and the ease and anonymity with which people move about; and add a pinch of the freedoms that protect us all and you have a powerful brew just waiting to boil over. Indeed, some would argue that in comparison to ordinary mass killings, jihadi terrorism is rare. As of Dec. 2, in 209 of the 336 days this year, there was at least one shooting a day that killed or injured more than four people.

None of this depressing reality therapy appeared in the president’s address to the nation. Understandably, Obama wasn’t interested in scaring Americans but unifying and reassuring them. Maybe like 9/11, what happened in San Bernardino was an anomaly, and we will be spared another jihadi attack for another 14 years.

I very much doubt it. DIY terrorism thrives where there is an abundance of soft targets: freedom, anonymity, access to guns, and aberrant human behavior motivated by ideology and religious extremism, in this case radical Islam. Indeed, in today’s world, no other kinds of religious extremists are directing and inspiring their followers to kill innocents on a global scale other than Islamist ones.

We can certainly weaken the Islamic State. We can make it harder for jihadis to operate in Syria and maybe even destroy the Islamic State’s base of operations there, if we figured out a way to fill the empty spaces with reliable local partners and better governance. But we won’t win the war against the jihadis anymore than we can win the war against crime, drugs, or mental illness. Get real, President Obama and whoever will be the next president. We’ll be fighting jihadis for years to come. Level with us and don’t infantilize us: We deserve honesty and clarity on this issue. Sure, the goal is to win the war against jihadis. But this isn’t World War II, neither in the magnitude of the threat nor in the commitment you’re prepared to make. Forget the grandiosity and grand coalitions. In the meantime, just help us survive this war over the long run, hopefully with our values and our security more or less intact.

Mandy Patinkin Pleads With Stephen Colbert’s Audience to Resist Islamophobia. By Sarah Burris.

Mandy Patinkin pleads with Colbert’s audience to resist Islamophobic fearmongering: “When you meet these women and children you will not be afraid.” By Sarah Burris. Salon, December 19, 2015.





Burris:

“This fearmongering and hatred that’s going on by people running for the President is so misguided,” Patinkin said.

When Mandy Patinkin walked out onto the “Late Show” stage Friday night, it became clear that he wasn’t just there as some Hollywood actor promoting the season finale of “Homeland” to Stephen Colbert.

Patinkin was just as serious as when he avenged his father’s death in the “Princess Bride,” which Ted Cruz keeps quoting. Right off the bat, Patinkin began addressing the nature of good and evil and the models through which we decide to go to war.

At the end of season four of “Homeland,” his character Saul was being held captive and wanted to take his own life instead of have his life mean that terrorists went free as part of an exchange. Saul realizes it’s getting harder to tell who are the good guys and who are the bad guys anymore. “He looked in the mirror and he went ‘I’m the enemy.’ The line of good and evil runs through each one of us,” Patinkin said.

Patinkin said that anyone who is prepared to take a life is placing themselves above the law and believing that they are God. While he was talking about war and peace, he could very well have been talking about the right-wing trope about “good guys with guns.”

But Patinkin was just getting started. “It is essential that we stop this paradigm of violence that Saul has learned,” he said passionately. “By that I mean, it hasn’t worked. It hasn’t worked, this violence ‘an eye for an eye.’ We have to come up with a new paradigm … and what is that new paradigm if war isn’t working? Where you spend $4 trillion on this war. What is being spent on the marginalized people in humanity? All of these wonderful Muslim men and women that have no education, no opportunity, no good schooling and so what do they do? They look for someone else who’s saying ‘will give you a better life.’ Why aren’t we talking that money that’s used for bombs, and making schools and hospitals and homes and opportunity?”

Patinkin went on to say that many people defend bombs because “bombs make a lot of money for a lot of people and education doesn’t make money.” From there he addressed fear saying that it’s normal and healthy to feel it. “This fearmongering and hatred that’s going on by people running for the President of United States, is so misguided. It is important that we open up our arms and our hearts to refugees that are fleeing a horrifying situation.” Patinkin spent time earlier this month in Lesbos with the refugees, holding a baby in his arms he feared was dead.

“When you meet these women and children you will not be afraid!” Patinkin pleaded with the audience to help the refugees. “Humanity is a good thing when exercised… Use your imagination about how you can make the world a better place, and bomb all of these marginalized people with opportunity.”

Watch the captivating and emotional video [at top].

Saying “Radical Islam” Has Nothing to Do With Defeating Terrorism. By Fareed Zakaria.

Saying “radical Islam” has nothing to do with defeating terrorism. By Fareed Zakaria. Washington Post, December 17, 2015.

Zakaria:

“Radical Islamic terrorism.” Apparently, the phrase — if you can actually say it — has mystical powers. At Tuesday’s Republican debate, the candidates once more took pains to point out that they would speak the dreaded words that President Obama and Hillary Clinton dare not. “We have a president who is unwilling to utter its name,” Ted Cruz said in his opening statement.

As it turns out, the first time I described the enemy as “radical Islam” was in a column I wrote days after 9/11. I used the phrase “radical Islamic terrorism” in another column later that month. So, having established my credentials, I can honestly say that it gives absolutely nothing in the way of an answer or strategy to deal with terrorist attacks.

It’s not just Republicans who have decided that Obama’s and Clinton’s unwillingness to use this phrase is a sign of weakness and strategic incoherence. There is a cottage industry of writers who boast that they are brave enough to name the enemy.

In fact, Obama has often spoken about the problems of extremism in Islam. His speech last year to the U.N. General Assembly focused significantly on that topic: “Today, it is violence within Muslim communities that has become the source of so much human misery. . . . It is time for the world — especially Muslim communities — to explicitly, forcefully, and consistently reject the ideology of organizations like al-Qaeda and ISIL [the Islamic State].”

In his speech after the San Bernardino, Calif., shootings, Obama again made some of these points, leading late-night comic Seth Meyers to quip: “So he used the words ‘radical,’ ‘Islam,’ and ‘terrorism,’ he just didn’t use them in the right order. Which would be a problem if it was a spell and he was Harry Potter, but he’s not, so it isn’t.”

Obama and Clinton have chosen not to describe the enemy as “radical Islam” out of deference to the many Muslim countries and leaders who feel it gives the terrorists legitimacy. President George W. Bush was similarly careful in his rhetoric. For this reason, throughout the Middle East, the Islamic State is called Daesh , an acronym with derogatory connotations.

Conservatives have discovered a newfound love for France after its president declared war following the Paris attacks. They might not have realized that François Hollande purposely declared war not on the Islamic State but on Daesh. His foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, explained: “I do not recommend using the term Islamic State because it blurs the lines between Islam, Muslims and Islamists. The Arabs call it ‘Daesh,’ and I will be calling them the ‘Daesh cutthroats.’”

The best proof that calling radical Islam by its name provides no solutions is that the Republican candidates had none at Tuesday’s debate. After all the huffing and puffing, the most aggressive among them proposed more bombing, no-fly zones and arming the Kurds.

These are modest additions to Obama’s current strategy, each with its own problems. More bombing has proved hard because there are many innocent civilians in Islamic State strongholds. Administration sources tell me that a no-fly zone would require at least 200 U.S. aircraft and would do little to stop the violence, which is mostly conducted on land, with some via helicopters). Arming the Kurds directly would enrage the Iraqi and Turkish governments, as well as many of the Sunni tribes that would have to eventually occupy the lands that are liberated. These are judgment calls, not no-brainers.

Most important, however, fighting this terrorist group is not the same as fighting radical Islam. Strangely, after the GOP candidates boldly and correctly described the enemy as an ideology — which is much broader than one group — they spoke almost entirely about fighting that one group. Even if the Islamic State were defeated tomorrow, would that stop the next lone-wolf jihadist in New York or Paris or London? The San Bernardino killers appear to have been radicalized when the terrorist group barely existed.

In fact, the enemy is radical Islam, an ideology that has spread over the past four decades — for a variety of reasons — and now infects alienated young men and women across the Muslim world. The fight against it must at its core be against the ideology itself. And that can be done only by Muslims — they alone can purge their faith of this extremism. After a slow start, several important efforts are underway, perhaps more than people realize. The West can help by encouraging these forces of reform, allying with them and partnering in efforts to modernize their societies. But that is much less satisfying than hurling invectives, calling for bans on Muslims and advocating carpet-bombing.

The Left’s Muslim Replacement Theology for Jews. By Daniel Greenfield.

The Left’s Muslim Replacement Theology for Jews. By Daniel Greenfield. FrontPage Magazine, December 18, 2015.

Greenfield:

Muslims are the new Jews; time to get rid of the old Jews.

Muslims are the new Jews. You can find this offensive claim repeated everywhere in the media. The Jews, a small ethnic minority of millions that was stateless for thousands of years, are a terrible analogy for a global Muslim population of 1.6 billion and around 50 countries that do not comprise a single ethnicity or race. Comparing the two makes as much sense as comparing the Finns to all of Asia.

The only thing the Muslims and the Jews have ever had in common is that the former conquered, persecuted and enslaved the latter. Any religious similarities are the product of Muslim cultural appropriation of Jewish beliefs and any cultural similarities are the result of Muslim colonization.

Comparing Jews to Muslims makes as much sense as comparing Jews to Nazis. But the media began making the argument that the Jews are the new Nazis from the very moment that the stateless Jews got their first state since Rome and its allied Arab invaders had destroyed the last one.

In this twisted historical revisionism, the Jews, a beleaguered minority hanging on to a country slightly bigger than Fiji, who have spent the last 40 years cutting pieces off their small slice of the world to hand over to the region’s massive Muslim majority in the hopes of being left alone, are the new Nazis.

And the Muslim billion ruling over vast territories where human rights for non-Muslims are rarer than hen’s teeth, where non-Muslim populations decline year after year as they are forcibly converted or are forced to flee their Muslim oppressors, are somehow the new Jews. Orwell would have wept.

The new Nazis are the Jews, who freed hundreds of terrorists to try and restart negotiations with Muslim terrorists. And the new Jews are the Muslims who behead, enslave, rape and bomb their way across the region. The Jewish Nazis have killed about 4 or 5 Muslim terrorists a month on average this year. The new Muslim Jews in Syria alone account for a death toll of over 100 every day.

The analogy makes no sense. But that hasn’t stopped the media from embracing it anyway.

The media compared the Syrian migrants to Joseph and Mary at the inn. When that social media meme got old after about 5 minutes, it was time to compare them to Holocaust survivors fleeing the Nazis.

One analogy made as much sense as the other.

The media had already made it an annual tradition to break out the Joseph and Mary analogy every Christmas to attack Israel.  Now it doubled down on it to attack Americans. But Joseph and Mary were Jewish natives of Israel. They weren’t foreigners. And today it’s the media that insists Jews shouldn’t be allowed to stay in Bethlehem or any part of the West Bank. The innkeeper in this analogy is Obama.

Herod was the foreigner ruling over Israel, the son of an Idumean father and a Nabatean Arab mother, you might think of him as the Obama of the day, while driving the Jews out of their own country. Herod’s father had allied with an Arab ruler who controlled what is today Syria and Saudi Arabia, in an alliance against the next-to-last Jewish king of Israel. Herod had the last Jewish king of Israel killed.  The Jews persecuted by the Arab Herod aren’t the Muslims of today. The Muslims of today are Herod.

The Nabateans and Idumeans (according to the Greek historian Strabo they were both Arabic peoples) had been expanding westward into Israel much the way that their descendants are expanding into the West today. The Idumeans promised to integrate into the Jewish nation, but instead massacred its people and eventually took over the country through treachery and terrorism, and destroyed it.

There may be an analogy there for Muslim migration to the West, but the media wouldn’t touch it with a pole the length of the Atlantic Ocean.

Today, Joseph and Mary might be a Jewish couple who are told by the European Union that they aren’t allowed to live in Givat Hamatos, near Bethlehem, because there is no room for Jews in the West Bank. Or a German couple in a small rural town forced out of their home by the local authorities to accommodate the flood of Syrian Muslim migrants who are beginning their colonization of the country.

There’s always “room at the inn” for Muslim invaders who have colonized and displaced the local population. But there’s never any room available for their indigenous non-Muslim victims.

The media howls that the Syrian Muslim migrants are just like the Jews fleeing the Holocaust. But the Jews were a stateless people who were suffering genocide at the hands of the majority. The Syrian Muslims are not stateless, they’re Syrians, they’re not a minority, they’re the majority, and they’re not suffering genocide, they’re the ones perpetrating it.

The worst actors in the Syrian Civil War are Sunni Muslims. Some Sunni Muslim groups, such as ISIS, are fighting other Sunni Muslims for power and territory. But Sunni Muslims as a group do not face genocide. They’re the majority. It’s Yazidis and Christians facing genocide at the hands of Sunni Muslims.

The Jews had no Jewish State to go to during the Holocaust. Sunni Muslims have over forty countries to choose from. If they want land area, they have over 30 million square miles to pick from. That’s a territory that is ten times the size of the United States. There’s plenty of room for them all.

The only valid historical analogy involving Arab Muslims, Jews and the Holocaust is the one that Netanyahu was shouted down for making. The Arab Muslims sympathized with the Nazis. Not only did the Mufti of Jerusalem play a vital role in encouraging Hitler’s genocidal plans for the Jews, but after the war Nazi butchers found safe harbor in Muslim countries. Many converted to Islam.

The one thing that both sides in the Syrian Civil War agree on is that the Nazis had the right idea about the Jews. The Muslim Brotherhood’s Sheikh Qaradawi spoke approvingly of Hitler and hoped for a Muslim Holocaust of the Jews, "The last punishment was carried out by Hitler. By means of all the things he did to them - even though they exaggerated this issue - he managed to put them in their place. This was divine punishment for them. Allah willing, the next time will be at the hands of the believers."

But that didn’t stop the White House from rolling out the red carpet for his deputy a few years later.

On the Shiite side, Assad Sr. had threatened to wreak the “apex of the Israeli Holocaust”. Hezbollah boss Nasrallah had boasted that, “If they (Jews) all gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide.”

In a pre-war poll, 77% of Syrians had expressed support for Hamas whose goal is the extermination of the Jews. Hating Jews and wanting to kill them is the one thing that brings Shiites and Sunnis together.

But hate doesn’t have to be as obvious as Assad or Qaradawi. The constant claims that Muslims are the new Jews carry with them a whiff of progressive replacement theology. The old Jews have been found wanting. Setting up a country and defending it against Muslim terrorism made them bad victims. The Muslims are superior replacement victims. They have the right to Israel and to Jewish history.

Ishaan Tharoor at the Washington Post, whose meme popularized the obnoxious appropriation of Jewish history by claiming that Muslim migrants are just like the Jews fleeing the Holocaust, lectures Jews that Muslim threats to kill all the Jews are “not like the Holocaust.”

The left insists that Jews have no right to their own history. Like Bethlehem and Jerusalem, it belongs to the Muslims. The Holocaust may not be invoked to protest the Muslim murder of Jews, but must instead be invoked to enable the Muslim murder of Jews by bringing millions of supremacist bigots who think that the Holocaust was one of the best things that ever happened to Europe and the United States.

The ADL’s anti-Semitic poll ratings for Muslim refugee countries are 92% for Iraq and 87% for Libya. Those numbers somehow manage to be even worse than those of Saudi Arabia which only scores 74%.

The final act of one people replacing another is genocide. Just ask Herod or Mohammed, whose final deathbed wish was that Jews and Christians should be purged from Arabia. Or ask the latest pundit explaining why Jews can’t live near Bethlehem, but Muslims must be brought to live in New York.

Muslims are not the new Jews. And the idea that Muslims have replaced the Jews and are entitled to appropriate their land and history for their own use is not only anti-Semitic, it’s genocidal.

Islam Isn’t the Problem. Islamophobia Is. By Hafsa Kanjwal.

Islam isn’t the problem: American Muslims should be on the front lines of questioning U.S. policies that have contributed to destabilization, sectarianism and bloodshed in the Middle East. By Hafsa Kanjwal. Salon, December 17, 2015.

Islamophobic bullying of teachers, students on the rise. Imraan Siddiqi (Executive Director, CAIR-Arizona) interviewed by Anya Parampil. Video. RT America, December 9, 2015. YouTube.

Islamophobic attacks on the rise. By Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian. Video. The Young Turks, December 10, 2015. YouTube.

Kanjwal:

As a community we’ve internalized Islamophobia in a desperate attempt to prove we belong. We need a new approach.

The American Muslim community is beleaguered. It seems we’re all trying to understand how — despite our monumental efforts to combat Islamophobia in the years since 9/11 — the discourse on Muslims has only gotten worse, reaching the fascist-like levels seen today, with violent, often fatal results.

After 9/11, Muslim leaders and institutions across the country faced greater scrutiny and marginalization, making them less likely to be at the forefront of critiquing U.S. domestic and foreign policy in the political aftermath. Seeing themselves as underrepresented in the political establishment, they made combating Islamophobia and representing the American Muslim narrative in the corridors of power and influence their top priority.

Be it in media, entertainment, business or public policy, there have been innumerable initiatives to ensure Muslim representation at the highest levels of government, and special effort has been made to highlight the contributions of Muslims to American society. We have endured the indignity of having to humanize our identity, even having numerous anthologies dedicated to showing how we love, and make love, like everyone else.  At this critical juncture, when hate crimes against Muslims are at an all-time high, the question must be asked: Where has this approach taken us? And are we partly responsible for the cumulative bigotry that has now peaked against us?

The time for American Muslim self-reflection at the community level  is long overdue.

Internalized Islamophobia

It should be clear that in our response to accusations of terrorism and the like, we have internalized Islamophobia. By this I mean that we as a community have uncannily accepted a direct link between Islam and violence, and the narrative that there is a “problem” with our religion, or rather an interpretation of it. So, when Paris or Boston happens, we scream at the top of our lungs that “our” Islam is a religion of peace, that not all Muslims are terrorists, etc. We make feel-good videos, holding up signs that say #notinourname, and write article after article talking about our normal aspirations of taking long walks on the beach and how ISIS’ Islam doesn’t represent us. An unopened Coke can on a United flight gets us more riled up than secret agents parading through our mosques. We “understand” that “surveillance” is for our own “good,” thereby agreeing that this is an issue borne within our communities, and not a symptom of a larger cancer that is not of our making. It should come as no surprise, then, that when Trump calls for special registrations for Muslims, we make our own Muslim IDs showcasing our many privileged accolades. We are desperate to prove that we belong. “Look, I am a lawyer, a father, a connoisseur of potato chips, and an avid Broncos fan!” This ensures that the conversation always remains superficial; the debate is sidetracked into one of a clash of values and whether we belong in this society, the exact discussion that Islamophobes want us to have.    

We are at our lowest point in this country, and this approach has not worked. The rhetoric has deepened, its supporters only multiplied.

It has not worked because we fundamentally misunderstand the root causes of the issue that we are dealing with.

We have bought into the state narrative that Islam is the problem. This is despite the fact that since 9/11, there has been even greater American and Western interference in Muslim-majority countries. From Afghanistan to Yemen, to Libya and Iraq, American policies have contributed to destabilization, sectarianism and bloodshed. American Muslims should have been at the front line of questioning these destructive state policies and imperialistic economic interests that have led to the emergence of groups like ISIS.

American exceptionalism

For too long, American Muslims have been led to believe that we are the most privileged Muslim community on the planet, i.e., American exceptionalism. This, in turn, has led to a belief that “we” have a responsibility to dictate true Islam to the rest of the world. As a result, our engagement with international issues has been haphazard, and deeply schizophrenic. At one level, being an American Muslim has meant that issues affecting Muslims elsewhere are of little concern to us unless and until they have an impact on us—take the shocking silence on Yemen or drones in Pakistan—as we try to build our utopia here. The domestication of the American Muslim agenda is seen as a source of empowerment, but is in fact an attempt to dictate the terms of what the community can and cannot advocate for. Nothing exemplifies this arrogance more than the Muslim Leadership Initiative (MLI), a program that displaces Palestinian voices and situates an issue of Israeli occupation of land, illegal invasions and colonization as one that can be resolved by “inter-religious dialogue” and not as one that addresses the question of justice.

Meanwhile, critical Muslim voices that question the impact of destructive imperial, military and economic policies abroad and our own community’s complicity in it are drowned out by voices that are far more palatable to the mainstream American audience.

If American Muslims have to bear responsibility for one thing, it is not terrorism; it is for contributing to the problematic narrative that allows the political establishment to evade responsibility for its destructive policies.

To solutions

In these terrifying times, the P.R. campaigns to humanize our existence might very well be needed for basic survival. Yet, this cannot exist in a vacuum. If we are to think long-term, we must speak truth to power and align ourselves with marginalized and oppressed groups both here and abroad. American Muslims can’t expect Muslim bodies in the U.S. to be treated with dignity and respect when they are being decimated abroad.

Islamophobia is not exceptional; it exists in the same political hell as anti-immigrant racism and the atrocities being committed against black and brown bodies. There can be no freedom or equality for Muslims if other bodies are not treated equally.

Hafsa Kanjwal is a Ph.D. candidate in history and women’s studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Can Palestinians Pay War’s Price? By Jonathan S. Tobin.

Can Palestinians Pay War’s Price? By Jonathan S. Tobin. Commentary, December 17, 2015.

Tobin:

More than two months into the so-called “stabbing intifada,” Palestinian violence against Israelis continues. But as the toll of casualties mounts, two things are becoming clear. One is that the decision of so many Palestinians to risk their lives in order to inflict violence on any Jew may be rooted in the failures of their own society and leadership that has little or nothing to do with Israeli policies. The other is that Palestinians are going to have to make a choice about whether they really want to pay the price for launching a new war that will hurt them more than Israel.

As Ben Caspit noted in Al Monitor, the questions of figuring who the individual terrorists are in this wave of violence and why they are doing it is puzzling Israeli authorities:

According to Israeli security experts, Israel is now “paying” for things that it is not even guilty of, such as Arab society restricting women and depriving them of equal rights. Also, the economies of the Arab states in general have long been weak, and the Palestinian economy in particular cannot give its youths any real hope of improvement to their standard of living, economic security and employment. 

The new Palestinian is unaware that compared to the other Arabs in the Middle East today, his situation is relatively better than theirs. The only Arab region in which electricity is available 24/7 is in Judea and Samaria. The same is true regarding infant mortality, the standard of medical care and many other statistical facts.

The fault for the Palestinians’ woes is widely attributed to Israel, but complaints about the “occupation” only go so far. It’s true the Palestinians want to be free of Israeli rule. But as Daniel Polisar wrote last month in Mosaic magazine in his study of Palestinian public opinion, their goal isn’t so much a two-state solution as it is the elimination of the Jewish state. Their dissatisfaction is wrongly attributed to the failure of the peace process. Their real problem is not so much with negotiations that always end with Palestinian refusals of Israeli statehood offers (as Arafat did in 2000 and 2001 and Mahmoud Abbas did in 2008) or an unwillingness to negotiate seriously (as Abbas has done for the last seven years despite U.S. support for his demands) but rather with the failure of the Palestinian Authority to wage an effective war against the Jews.

That’s why Abbas resorted to inciting violence over mythical Israeli plots to harm the Temple Mount mosques. Starting what amounts to a religious holy war wouldn’t seem to be in his interests, but since he needs to compete with his Hamas rivals, it was the best tactic he could come up with.

Of course, in the absence of a satisfying conflict, Abbas and the PA could have spent the last decade trying to improve the lives of Palestinians but that was never their priority. While we’ve been hearing predictions of the PA’s collapse for years, it remains to be seen how long a bankrupt kleptocracy that survives on a vast patronage scheme that runs on foreign cash will last.

In the meantime, the Palestinians complain about both Abbas and Israel. As the New York Times reports in an article today, many in East Jerusalem and the territories are unhappy about the efforts that Israel has made to clamp down on areas that are producing daily terror attacks. Some of it involves small measures like crackdowns on minor illegal activity that usually goes unnoticed in Arab neighborhoods of the capital. They are also setting up more checkpoints around the capital to make it more difficult for terrorists to move easily or freely around the country.

About this, we are hearing the usual litany of complaints about Israeli beastliness and about how such measures are fomenting more terrorism. But such arguments are risible.

Whatever one may think about Israeli settlements, this latest surge in terror has to prove again that the conflict has little or nothing to do with the presence of Israelis in the West Bank or the country’s negotiating positions. Palestinians are seeking to murder any Israeli they meet on the street, not because of some abstract argument about borders since even the supposedly incorrigible right-winger Netanyahu has offered to withdraw from almost all of the West Bank in exchange for peace. The Palestinians are raging about “stinking Jewish feet” polluting holy places sacred to both peoples, not a state alongside Israel they’ve shown no interest in building.

Or course, these facts are old news, but many on the left still refuse to accept the truth. Today the Times’ Roger Cohen recycled the same myths about Netanyahu killing peace today in a piece that was as out of touch with the reality of the Middle East as most things the paper has published. It is barely worth the effort to refute his argument that Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination was the turning point that ended hope in the region. That misunderstands Rabin’s own skepticism about the Palestinians as well as the fact that the collapse of Oslo was completely the work of Arafat and his belief in terror and refusal to make peace. It was Arafat who elected Netanyahu in 1996 after Rabin’s death. And it was Arafat who killed the peace movement as a viable political force in Israel with the second intifada. At this point, the vast majority of Israelis have no faith in peace because they know the political culture of the Palestinians make it impossible no matter what they might offer in return. The complete withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 that led to the creation of the current Hamas-ruled terrorist state in the strip stands as a warning to any Israeli politician that another such experiment in the West Bank would be madness. And no amount of foreign pressure from a world that is growing bored with Palestinian intransigence regardless of its antipathy for the Jewish state can make Israel make such a mistake. The fault with Cohen’s absurd writing isn’t so much his blindness as it is the way it shows how Western elites refuse to put the blame for the standoff where it belongs: on a Palestinian culture that won’t allow its people to end the conflict.

In the end, the choice remains with the Palestinians. If they don’t like the price of war as they suffer the ill effects of measures intended to prevent more terrorist attacks, they can stop killing Jews and condemn rather than honor — as Abbas and the PA does — those who engage in such wanton slaughter. If they don’t like being governed by Abbas and Hamas (and they shouldn’t), they can try their own Arab spring and try new leaders that might work to better their existence and seek peace rather than wasting their time in futile if atrocious attacks on Israelis.

But what they must understand is that its no good waiting for the world to pressure Israel into appeasing them or for their leaders to come up with a war plan against the Jews that might work after a century of failure. If they want peace, they can have it along with statehood provided they are prepared to be reconciled with the permanence of a Jewish state. But if they persist in wanting war and being satisfied with leaders that can offer them only suffering, then that is exactly what they’ll continue to get regardless of how much the rest of the world sympathizes with their plight.

“Winners Aren’t Losers”: The Donald Trump Children’s Book. As Read by Jimmy Kimmel.

The Donald Trump Children’s Book. Video. Jimmy Kimmel Live, December 17, 2015. YouTube. Also at The Blaze, Rolling Stone, Fortune, Business Insider.

Donald Trump Says Muslims Support His Plan. Video. Jimmy Kimmel Live, December 17, 2015. YouTube. Also at New York Daily News, Salon.

Rubio, Cruz, and U.S. Global Leadership. By Caroline B. Glick.

Rubio, Cruz, and U.S. global leadership. By Caroline B. Glick. Jerusalem Post, December 17, 2015. Also at Real Clear Politics.

Glick:

For the first time in a decade, Americans are beginning to think seriously about foreign policy; But are they too late?

At some point between 2006 and 2008, the American people decided to turn their backs on the world. Between the seeming futility of the war in Iraq and the financial collapse of 2008, Americans decided they’d had enough.

In Barack Obama, they found a leader who could channel their frustration. Obama’s foreign policy, based on denying the existence of radical Islam and projecting the responsibility for Islamic aggression on the US and its allies, suited their mood just fine. If America is responsible, then America can walk away. Once it is gone, so the thinking has gone, the Muslims will forget their anger and leave America alone.

Sadly, Obama’s foreign policy assumptions are utter nonsense. America’s abandonment of global leadership has not made things better. Over the past seven years, the legions of radical Islam have expanded and grown more powerful than ever before. And now in the aftermath of the jihadist massacres in Paris and San Bernadino, the threats have grown so abundant that even Obama cannot pretend them away.

As a consequence, for the first time in a decade, Americans are beginning to think seriously about foreign policy. But are they too late? Can the next president repair the damage Obama has caused? The Democrats give no cause for optimism. Led by former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential hopefuls stubbornly insist that there is nothing wrong with Obama’s foreign policy. If they are elected to succeed him, they pledge to follow in his footsteps.

On the Republican side, things are more encouraging, but also more complicated.

Republican presidential hopefuls are united in their rejection of Obama’s policy of ignoring the Islamic supremacist nature of the enemy. All reject the failed assumptions of Obama’s foreign policy.

All have pledged to abandon them on their first day in office. Yet for all their unity in rejecting Obama’s positions, Republicans are deeply divided over what alternative foreign policy they would adopt.

This divide has been seething under the surface throughout the Obama presidency. It burst into the open at the Republican presidential debate Wednesday night.

The importance of the dispute cannot be overstated.

Given the Democrats’ allegiance to Obama’s disastrous policies, the only hope for a restoration of American leadership is that a Republican wins the next election. But if Republicans nominate a candidate who fails to reconcile with the realities of the world as it is, then the chance for a reassertion of American leadership will diminish significantly.

To understand just how high the stakes are, you need to look no further than two events that occurred just before the Wednesday’s Republican presidential debate.

On Tuesday, the International Atomic Energy Agency voted to close its investigation of Iran’s nuclear program. As far as the UN’s nuclear watchdog is concerned, Iran is good to go.

The move is a scandal. Its consequences will be disastrous.

The IAEA acknowledges that Iran continued to advance its illicit military nuclear program at least until 2009. Tehran refuses to divulge its nuclear activities to IAEA investigators as it is required to do under binding UN Security Council resolutions.

Iran refuses to allow IAEA inspectors access to its illicit nuclear sites. As a consequence, the IAEA lacks a clear understanding of what Iran’s nuclear status is today and therefore has no capacity to prevent it from maintaining or expanding its nuclear capabilities. This means that the inspection regime Iran supposedly accepted under Obama’s nuclear deal is worthless.

The IAEA also accepts that since Iran concluded its nuclear accord with the world powers, it has conducted two tests of ballistic missiles capable of carrying nuclear weapons, despite the fact that it is barred from doing so under binding Security Council resolutions.

But really, who cares? Certainly the Obama administration doesn’t. The sighs of relief emanating from the White House and the State Department after the IAEA decision were audible from Jerusalem to Tehran.

The IAEA’s decision has two direct consequences.

First, as Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said Wednesday, it paves the way for the cancellation of the UN’s economic sanctions against Iran within the month.

Second, with the IAEA’s decision, the last obstacle impeding Iran’s completion of its nuclear weapons program has been removed. Inspections are a thing of the past. Iran is in the clear.

As Iran struts across the nuclear finish line, the Sunni jihadists are closing their ranks.

Hours after the IAEA vote, Turkey and Qatar announced that Turkey is setting up a permanent military base in the Persian Gulf emirate for the first time since the fall of the Ottoman Empire a century ago. Their announcement indicates that the informal partnership between Turkey and Qatar on the one side, and Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood and Islamic State on the other hand, which first came to the fore last year during Operation Protective Edge, is now becoming a more formal alliance.

Just as the Obama administration has no problem with Iran going nuclear, so it has no problem with this new jihadist alliance.

During Operation Protective Edge, the administration supported this jihadist alliance against the Israeli-Egyptian partnership. Throughout Hamas’s war against Israel, Obama demanded that Israel and Egypt accept Hamas’s cease-fire terms, as they were presented by Turkey and Qatar.

Since Operation Protective Edge, the Americans have continued to insist that Israel and Egypt bow to Hamas’s demands and open Gaza’s international borders. The Americans have kept up their pressure on Israel and Egypt despite Hamas’s open alliance with ISIS in the Sinai Peninsula.

So, too, the Americans have kept Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi at arm’s length, and continue to insist that the Muslim Brotherhood is a legitimate political force despite Sisi’s war against ISIS. Washington continues to embrace Qatar as a “moderate” force despite the emirate’s open support for the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas and ISIS.

As for Turkey, it appears there is nothing Ankara can do that will dispel the US notion that it is a credible partner in the war on terror. Since 2011, Turkey has served as Hamas’s chief state sponsor, and as ISIS’s chief sponsor. It is waging war against the Kurds – the US’s strongest ally in its campaign against ISIS.

In other words, with the US’s blessing, the forces of both Shi’ite and Sunni jihad are on the march.

And the next president will have no grace period for repairing the damage.

Although the Republican debate Wednesday night was focused mainly on the war in Syria, its significance is far greater than one specific battlefield.

And while there were nine candidates on the stage, there were only two participants in this critical discussion.

Sens. Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz faced off after weeks of rising contention between their campaigns.

In so doing, they brought the dispute that has been seething through their party since the Bush presidency into the open.

Rubio argued that in Syria, the US needs to both defeat ISIS and overthrow President Bashar Assad.

Cruz countered that the US should ignore Assad and concentrate on utterly destroying ISIS. America’s national interest, he said, is not advanced by overthrowing Assad, because in all likelihood, Assad will be replaced by ISIS.

Cruz added that America’s experience in overthrowing Middle Eastern leaders has shown that it is a mistake to overthrow dictators. Things only got worse after America overthrew Saddam Hussein and supported the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi and Hosni Mubarak.

For his part, Rubio explained that since Assad is Iran’s puppet, leaving him in power empowers Iran. The longer he remains in power, the more control Iran will wield over Syria and Lebanon.

The two candidates’ dispute is far greater than the question of who rules Syria. Their disagreement on Syria isn’t a tactical argument. It goes to the core question of what is the proper role of American foreign policy.

Rubio’s commitment to overthrowing Assad is one component of a wider strategic commitment to fostering democratic governance in Syria. By embracing the cause of democratization through regime change, Rubio has become the standard bearer of George W. Bush’s foreign policy.

Bush’s foreign policy had two seemingly contradictory anchors – a belief that liberal values are universal, and cultural meekness.

Bush’s belief that open elections would serve as a panacea for the pathologies of the Islamic world was not supported by empirical data. Survey after survey showed that if left to their own devices, the people of Muslim world would choose to be led by Islamic supremacists. But Bush rejected the data and embraced the fantasy that free elections lead a society to embrace liberal norms of peace and human rights.

As to cultural meekness, since the end of the Cold War and with the rise of political correctness, the notion that America could call for other people to adopt American values fell into disrepute. For American foreign policy practitioners, the idea that American values and norms are superior to Islamic supremacist values smacked of cultural chauvinism.

Consequently, rather than urge the Islamic world to abandon Islamic supremacism in favor of liberal democracy, in their public diplomacy efforts, Americans sufficed with vapid pronouncements of love and respect for Islam.

Islamic supremacists, for their part stepped into the ideological void without hesitation. In Iraq, the Iranian regime spent hundreds of millions of dollars training Iranian-controlled militias, building Iranian-controlled political parties and publishing pro-Iranian newspapers as the US did nothing to support pro-American Iraqis.

Although many Republicans opposed Bush’s policies, few dared make their disagreement with the head of their party public. As a result, for many, Wednesday’s debate was the first time the foundations of Bush’s foreign policy were coherently and forcefully rejected before a national audience.

If Rubio is the heir to Bush, Cruz is the spokesman for Bush’s until now silent opposition. In their longheld view, democratization is not a proper aim of American foreign policy. Defeating America’s enemies is the proper aim of American foreign policy.

Rubio’s people claim that carpet bombing ISIS is not a strategy. They are right. There are parts missing from in Cruz’s position on Syria.

But then again, although still not comprehensive, Cruz’s foreign policy trajectory has much to recommend it. First and foremost, it is based on the world as it is, rather than a vision of how the world should be. It makes a clear distinction between America’s allies and America’s enemies and calls for the US to side with the former and fight the latter.

It is far from clear which side will win this fight for the heart of the Republican Party. And it is impossible to know who the next US president will be.

But whatever happens, the fact that after their seven-year vacation, the Americans are returning the real world is a cause for cautious celebration.