A Guide to Survival In the Middle East. By Mordechai Kedar.

A guide to survival in the Middle East. By Mordechai Kedar. Elder of Ziyon, April 20, 2016. Hebrew original here.

Kedar:

To my brethren and friends, the Jews who live in Israel and abroad.

It saddens me to let you know that those attacks from which we have been suffering today, yesterday, a week, a month, a year, a decade and a century ago, are indeed the same war that our neighbors have been waging against us for over 100 years. Sometimes they fight with a great fire, with tanks and ships and airplanes, and sometimes they fight with a simmering fire, “Terror” they call it, with explosions, stabbings and shootings. This war is called “Jihad” in Arabic, and it is directed at Jews wherever they may be.

It saddens me to remind you that this war began a long, long time before Israel’s declaration of independence in 1948. The pogroms of 1920, 1921, 1929 and 1936-39 were not caused by the creation of Israel, nor by the “occupation of 1948”, as our enemies refer to it. This war is most certainly NOT waging because of the “1967 occupation”. The Hebron Jews who got massacred were not a part of the Zionist movement. The Organization for liberation of Palestine (the Fatah) was established in 1959, and the Palestinian Liberation Organization (the PLO), in 1964, years before the “1967 occupation”.

It saddens me to remind you that the calls we heard during our war of independence were “Itbah al-Yahud” - “Slaughter the Jews” - Not the Israelis or the Zionists. This is because their problem is with Jews (and for that matter, Christians as well) refusing to live under the mercies of Islam as “Ahel D’ima” or “Proteges”, as obliged by their religion. To this day, in various Arab countries around the world children sing: “Palestine Baladna wa’al-Yahud Kalabna” - “Palestine is our land and the Jews are our dogs”. The dog, according to Muslim tradition, is an impure animal, and according to Sharia law if a Muslim is praying and a dog, a pig, a donkey, a woman, a Jew or a Christian passes before him, his prayer becomes impure and he has to start over.

It saddens me to tell you that a common chant with Israel’s enemies is: “Khybar, Khybar ya yahud, Jish Muhammad siaud” - Khybar is an oasis in the Arab peninsula in which Jews used to live until Muhammad slaughtered them in 626 AD. The chant is to remind people of what happened and says “Khybar, Khybar oh Jews, Muhammad’s army will return” - to do it again. According to the Koran, Surah 5:82, Jews are “Muslims’ fiercest enemies”, and in verse 60 it states that Allah’s curse and wrath are on the Jews and he turned them into monkeys and pigs. So, who gave them the right to own a country? Since when do they have the right to sovereignty?

The Language of Power

Despite what you may think, the peace with Egypt came about only after Sadat realized that despite the Arab’s efforts to eliminate Israel in 1948’s was of independence, in 1956’s Sinai war, in 1967’s six day war, in 1970’s war of attrition and in 1973’s Yom Kippur war which started as a complete surprise, Israel not only survived but managed to move the war into enemy grounds. Realizing that Israel is unbeatable, Sadat begrudgingly turned to peace, even if the peace will be temporary and based on the Treaty of Hudaybiyyah from 628 AD, in which Muhammad gave the Mecca infidels temporary peace for 10 years, only to retract it two years later.

The Oslo accords with Arafat did not stem from his belief in peace either. They were a con, a trojan horse which Arafat himself called “Treaty of Hudaybiyyah”. The entire purpose of the Oslo accords was to create a Palestinian entity with an army and weapons, one which will eliminate Israel when the time is ripe. He said it day in and day out, and our policy makers said that it was for “internal consumption only”, and when suicide bombers exploded in our streets, they called them “victims of peace”. Since when does peace require victims? And how long before the guns we gave them are turned on us?

It saddens me to tell you that all of Israel’s efforts to appease Hamas in Gaza were for naught, and that Hamas has turned from a terrorist organization to a terrorist state. Deadly rockets, attack tunnels, suicide bombers - those are all viewed as legitimate instruments by Gaza’s Jihad government. They do not give a single hoot about the lives, health, property or prosperity of the people, the women and children in the strip. The residents of Gaza are pawns in the hands of Hamas, the Jihadists and the Salafis, who make their current lives hell while “allowing” them to be sent to heaven.

It saddens me to tell the gentle peace lovers in Israel and around the world that the concrete and iron we were forced to provide Gaza’s Jihadists with to rebuild the destruction, were used to build tunnels of death - death to Israelis and death to the sons of Gaza. Instead of rebuilding their hospitals, schools and infrastructure, the Jihad people have built the infrastructure for death, suffering and disaster. You made the mistake, again, of basing your policy on hopes, dreams and delusions instead of on data and facts. And even the commentators (myself included) share the blame: We all said with one voice that when Hamas will assume responsibility over food, electricity and the livelihood of Gazan population, they will moderate, and become realistic and pragmatic. Well, we were wrong: The Hamas movement, despite its evolution from an opposition organization to a governing body, has left Jihad against Israel at the top of its priority list, and did not moderate its absolute negation of “The Zionist Entity” one bit.

The Blinding Peace Vision

It saddens me to spoil the “Two peoples, two states” party. What happens today in Gaza will, with absolute accuracy, happen in the Palestinian state you are trying to create in Judea and Samaria. Hamas will win the elections to the legislative assembly in the same way they did in January of 2006, and they will win the presidential elections. If not, they will simply enact a violent revolution just like they did in Gaza in June of 2007. And when that happens, what will you say? “Oops… We didn’t realize… we didn’t think…?” So, now you know and you don’t have to think. This should be your working assumption. And if today Gaza’s Hamas digs tunnels in the sand, the tunnels in Judea and Samaria will be dug in rock, making them that much harder to find and destroy.

And for those with a particularly short memory: In July of 2014 Hamas managed to close the Ben Gurion airport for a day with rockets they sent from Gaza. If and when they control Judea and Samaria, they will be able to close the airport with even a slingshot - they will have direct view of it from Bet Arieh hills. If you don’t believe me, just take a short drive to the hills just east of the airport, those that are in the “occupied territories” (occupied from whom, exactly?). Because of the wind patterns, most planes approach the runways from the east, passing exactly above those hills. Will Hamasland allow Israeli airplanes to approach and land from above its territory? And what price will Israel have to pay after a plane was taken down with a machine gun or an RPG? Shall we give them Jerusalem to keep them quiet?

Speaking of Jerusalem, what will you do when Hamasland serves you with an ultimatum: Jerusalem or war? Temple mount, or we close Ben Gurion Airport? And when the world shows their support of those demands, appeasing extremist Islam with Israeli payments, what will you say? And when the sharpshooters are again dropping pedestrians in Jerusalem over the walls of the Old City, just like their Jordanian brethren did in 1967, where will you hide? Behind concrete walls? Or a safety fence? Will you transfer Israel’s capital to Tel Aviv?

It saddens me to inform you that the worst thing to ever happen for hope and peace is the various peace movements, those who call upon Israel to let a terror state rise in Judea and Samaria and to give east Jerusalem up. In the Middle East, those who ask for peace, those who sing about their passion for peace and those who offer their land and their country in exchange for a piece of paper which says “peace”, are perceived as those who were defeated in war and are now begging for their lives. The peace movements have painted Israel as soft, weak and defeatist - an image which, in the middle east, does NOT get you peace. In this extremist, violent corner of the world in which Israel is trying to survive, being perceived as weak will earn you a swift kick in the you know what, and get you thrown out harshly on a good day, or beheaded on a normal one. In the middle east, “Peace” means that your enemies leave you alone because you are too strong, too aggressive and too dangerous to mess with. In the middle east, peace is only for the invincible.

Those who refuse to accept these facts, those who are not ready for blood, sweat and tears, those who are anxious for “peace now”, should not be in the middle east. It is a place for the strong, the brave, the determined, who firmly believe in their way. For all others, they should probably find a different place to live. Somewhere quiet and prosperous, like Paris, Brussels, Madrid, Boston or San Bernadino.

(h/t Miki for translation)

Don’t Give Up on Young Arabs. By David Ignatius.

Don’t give up on young Arabs. By David Ignatius. Washington Post, April 19, 2016. Also at Real Clear Politics.

Ignatius:

As President Obama travels this week to Saudi Arabia, here’s a surprising snapshot of what young Arabs think: They’re scared about the Islamic State and terrorism; they yearn for more freedom and gender equality; they fear that the Arab Spring has made life worse; and they’re increasingly skeptical about the role of traditional religious values.

If these Arab reactions seem similar to what people would say in the West, maybe that’s the real takeaway. Despite all the violence and extremism that plague the region, most young Arabs have sensible modern reactions. This isn’t a world apart: Arab youths hate the turmoil that’s wrecking their countries and want a better, more stable life.

This portrait of the Arab world emerges in a remarkable survey by the public relations company ASDA’A Burson-Marsteller and the polling firm Penn Schoen Berland. It’s actually a time-lapse photo, because this “Arab Youth Survey” has been conducted annually for the past eight years. By reading the back issues, you can see hopes rising with the Arab Spring in 2011, and then crashing against the reality of violence and disarray.

Let’s start with this year’s headlines: In face-to-face interviews with 3,500 young people ages 18 to 24 in 16 countries, 77 percent of participants said they were concerned about the rise of the Islamic State and 76 percent said the group would fail in its ultimate goal of establishing a caliphate. Asked to explain why young people were attracted to the group, 24 percent cited lack of jobs, but a larger 25 percent chose the answer: “I can’t explain it — I don’t understand why anybody would want to join.”

One intriguing finding of this study is that Arab youths are increasingly dubious about the role of religion and traditional values. Asked if they agreed with the statement “Religion plays too big of a role in the Middle East,” 52 percent said yes this year, with 61 percent of those in Arab Gulf countries, including Saudi Arabia, sharing that view.

Women’s rights also get strong support: 67 percent of young Arabs said their leaders should improve the personal freedom and human rights of women. This progressive view had roughly equal support from young Arab men (66 percent) as women (68 percent). By the way, an even number of men and women were surveyed.

What kind of country do these young Arabs want to live in? The overwhelming answer in 2016, for the fifth year running, was the United Arab Emirates — a Muslim country that is increasingly open, tolerant, prosperous and adapting to the modern world.

The previous installments show how far the region has traveled over the past decade. In the 2009 and 2010 surveys, there was a yearning for democracy, with at least 90 percent of the respondents in most countries saying that living in a democratic country was important to them. But they still embraced a traditional world: 68 percent said their religion defined them as a person in 2010, and men were far less likely than women to support equal opportunity in the workplace. This Arab conservatism had eroded by 2014, when the percentage who agreed that “traditional values mean a lot to me” had fallen to just 54 percent from 83 percent in 2011.

The hurricane of the Tahrir Square uprising that toppled Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in February 2011 was vividly captured by the survey. In January that year, 82 percent of Arab youth supported “traditional values.” A month later, that number had fallen 11 points. Those describing their political views as liberal jumped from 20 percent in January to 51 percent the next month. Young people overwhelmingly supported the overthrow of Mubarak in Egypt and the autocratic rulers of Libya and Yemen.

The optimism and idealism of the Arab Spring were real. But so was the disillusionment that followed. The share who agreed that “Following the Arab Spring, I feel the Arab world is better off” collapsed from 72 percent in 2012 to just 36 percent in 2016. Egyptians bucked that pessimistic trend, with 61 percent still positive this year about their revolution.

Here’s what I draw from this survey: Young Arabs are sadder but wiser; they want a freer, more modern life; and they’re skeptical about easy answers from religion or democratic elections. They know they’re in a long transition, and they’ve become more pessimistic, but they still affirm in each survey, “Our best days are ahead of us.”

A simple summary: Don’t give up on the Arabs. They’re living through hell, but they want the same modern, secure world that most people do.

Sebastian Gorka: We Will Lose a “Winnable” War Against Jihad If We Refuse to “Talk About the Enemy as They Are.”

Dr. Sebastian Gorka: We Will Lose a “Winnable” War Against Jihad If We Refuse to “Talk About the Enemy as They Are.” By John Hayward. Breitbart, April 11, 2016.

Dr. Sebastian Gorka. Interviewed by Stephen K. Bannon. Audio. Breitbart News Sunday, April 10, 2016. Soundcloud.

Hayward:

Breitbart News National Security Editor Dr. Sebastian Gorka, author of Defeating Jihad: The Winnable War, appeared on Breitbart News Sunday to answer host Stephen K. Bannon’s challenge that, contrary to the title, his book doesn’t make the war against jihad sound very “winnable” at all.

Gorka said he was motivated to write the book because he has seen “sixteen years of right-wing Administrations and left-wing Administrations punt the ball, or completely drop the ball, on this war.”

“But we can win it, if we have the leadership,” he contended, saying his book contains “the recipe to win this war rapidly.”

Gorka argued that the “history of modern jihad” began in 1979.  “If you want to understand September the 11th, if you want to understand the Boston bombing, the Ft. Hood massacre, the recent massacre in San Bernardino, the recent attack in Brussels, it all begins in 1979,” he said.

“It begins with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan that triggers the first organization that predates al-Qaeda, which was the Arab Services Bureau, the mujahadeen.  That’s where al-Qaeda begins in 1979.  Then we have the Iranian revolution, hugely important because we have one nation-state that says Islam can be re-integrated into politics.  It’s the Shia, yes, but this is a model for all Muslims: we can create theocracies, and be successful, and reject the Western model of politics,” Gorka continued.

He added a third highly significant event from that era, which most Americans haven’t heard of: “Three hundred jihadis, in 1979, armed with automatic weapons, sieged and captured the most important site in all of Islam, the Grand Mosque at Mecca.  And it is the consequences of that siege, in which the Saudi regime signed a pact with the devil, if you will, with the extremist fundamentalist clerics in Saudi Arabia — that’s where it all begins.”

The understanding between the Saudi regime and jihadis had the effect of turning both violent terrorism and Islamist ideology outward, buying peace for the Saudis at the rest of the world’s expense.  As Bannon noted, the siege was also a huge media event across the Muslim world, giving the radicals who captured the Grand Mosque a platform to express their beliefs and win converts.

Gorka proposed two reasons why the Western media has never assigned the proper historical significance to the siege of Mecca: it’s too complicated to explain for a mainstream press interested primarily in quick sound bites, and it reflects poorly on America’s nominal ally, Saudi Arabia.

“We made a strategic decision after World War II that Saudi Arabia would be our partner, would be our so-called ally, so we don’t want to talk about the fact that Saudi Arabia is, in part, responsible for the export of the most totalitarian ideology active today, which is global jihadism,” he said.

“During the siege, the King managed to identify the fact that these aren’t just a bunch of Koran-beating yahoos.  These 300 jihadis had the blessing, had the support, of key members of the Saudi clerical class, the ulamaa, the wise theologians – who said, ‘yep, Islam’s lost its way, we’re surrounded by apostates, the King is a puppet of the West, and we need a holy war to cleanse Islam,’” Gorka explained.  “When the King found that out, he invited these clerics to the palace for a little chat, and he said to them, ‘Gentlemen, I know who you are, and I know your connection to these jihadis.  Let me offer you a deal.  If you guarantee for me that my nation — my country, Saudi Arabia, and my family — will never, ever be threatened again by this kind of extremist violence, this jihadism, you will become the court ulamaa.  You will become the clerics to the House of Saud. You, your sons, and your grandsons will have jobs for life.’”

Crucially, the Saudi monarchy also offered the help finance the export of jihad ideology around the world, “and for the last 25 years, we have been paying the price for that deal,” Gorka said, counting among those toxic imports Salafism, Wahabbi Islam, and the Deobandi sect, which is far more influential in European and American mosques than most outsiders realize.

Gorka said it was crucial for Western leaders to “jettison this fantasy that you hear all the time, after 9/11, that Islam needs a ‘Reformation.’”  As he explained, the Christian Reformation was driven by the urge to “get back to basics,” such as studying the Bible and developing a fundamental understanding of the faith.  That is precisely the message of the Islamic “extremists” and jihadis of today. In their eyes, they are the Reformation.

The “dirty little secret that nobody wants to tell you,” as Gorka put it, is that the Islamist ideology of al-Qaeda or ISIS “is not fundamentally un-Islamic because it is the Seventh Century interpretation of Islam that comes straight from the Koran.” 

“The second half of the Koran is uber-violent.  It’s about killing infidels,” he explained.  “As a result, we don’t need more reformation to get back to basics because then we will empower the jihadis.”

In order to cut through political correctness and Washington static, Gorka had a provocative request for listeners: “Every American citizen who cares about the republic, after 9/11, you don’t have an excuse.  Buy a Koran.  Don’t listen to the conventional wisdoms that are being spewed out by the mainstream media.  Go to the primary source, and make a judgment for yourself about this religion.”

He also stressed the importance of understanding that, unlike the Bible and most other religious texts, the Koran is meant to be the unchallengeable word of God, dictated to Mohammed by the archangel Gabriel, rather than a series of stories and prophetic revelations that might be subject to reinterpretation by later authorities.  Gorka suggested it might be helpful to think of the entire Koran as if it were the Ten Commandments — except, of course, that the Koran is much more comprehensive, detailed, and particular than the rather terse Commandments.

In a similar vein, he challenged the common talking point that “jihad” refers to constructive, non-violent internal struggles against temptation by noting that on “twelve times as many occasions in the Koran, when the word ‘jihad’ is used, it’s not about peaceful inner striving,” but instead describes “martial war, kinetic war, defeating and suppressing the enemy until they convert to the One True Faith, or until you have successfully destroyed them.”

He noted that jihad is certainly understood that way by terrorists and Islamist leaders, such as ISIS, which waged an aggressive war of conquest to re-establish the Islamic “caliphate” abolished by Turkish leader Kemal Ataturk a century ago.

“The Islamic State now holds territory in multiple countries of the Middle East and Africa,” Gorka observed.  “This is stunning.  They hold territory in Iraq, in Libya, in Syria, and now Boko Haram has become part of the caliphate, which means anything that belongs to Boko Haram in Nigeria is part of the new caliphate.  That means we have more than six million people living on the territory of the new Islamic empire.”  He further noted that empire boasts some 76,000 fighters, many of them foreign recruits, and is making between $2 million and $4 million per day, with income streams ranging from banditry to legal taxation.

In Gorka’s estimation, the refusal of Western political leaders to understand the unique nature of Islam, and the significance of such historic events as the Grand Mosque siege, lies at the heart of the leadership vacuum that might cause us to lose the war against jihad, despite our enormous military, technological, and economic advantages.

For example, Western leaders have deliberately blinded themselves to the penetration of Western mosques by radical imams, refusing to ask critical questions about where immigrant clerics were educated.  Gorka said the Obama Administration is also politically aligned against one of the few successful examples of de-radicalization in the Middle East, the “coup” conducted against the Muslim Brotherhood by President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi in Egypt.

“We have to support those regimes, whether it’s Egypt or whether it’s King Abdullah in Jordan, who have a different understanding of Islam and modernity,” Gorka urged.  “We need more people like Ataturk — people who say, ‘Look, I’m the democratically elected head of this country, and I don’t care what the Koran says about killing infidels right now.  We don’t do that because we like America, we like the West, and I’m going to tell you what Islam is.’  The State Department doesn’t like to hear that because they want to have freedom of religion, but if you’re dealing with Islam that has a Seventh Century original version that is violent, we cannot do that.”

The Department of Homeland Security doesn’t like to hear that, either.  Gorka related an astonishing story of being approached by a DHS official, after he delivered an eight-hour presentation on jihad to law-enforcement officials, who told him the real threat facing America was not Islamist terror but “right-wing extremists” and offered the 21-year-old Oklahoma City bombing as evidence of this imminent threat.

“I doubt the average law-enforcement officer, or American taxpayer, would agree with the government line in Washington,” he observed.

Gorka compared that government line on Islamism to the authorities informing American troops to avoid potentially offensive terms like “Nazi” as they were preparing to storm the beaches of Normandy on D-Day, or the authorities in the Fifties telling law enforcement to avoid terms like “white supremacist” when dealing with the Ku Klux Klan because they were really just “misguided Democrats.”

“Today we can’t use the world ‘jihad.’  We can’t talk about religion.  It is banned.  And if you can’t talk about the enemy, you will not win,” he warned.

It’s no laughing matter that the enemy shares no such reticence when it comes to discussing us.  Gorka discusses Islamist godfather Sayyid Qutb and his landmark book Milestones, which can be downloaded in its entirety from The Gorka Briefing.  He remarked on how Qutb offered a savage critique of America as a land of decadence that had to be destroyed by the jihad –and he was writing in the 1950s, after visiting idyllic, wholesome small towns in the West.  Qutb’s work is almost universally read by jihadis, who, he noted, tend to be far better educated and deliberate in their ideology than the U.S. State Department gives them credit for.

“It is a totalitarian ideology that defines itself against us,” Gorka said of jihad.  “We are the antithesis.  Everything America stands for — individual liberty, based on the dignity of the human being made in the image of God — that is what must be destroyed or enslaved.  This is not random acts of violence.  It has a plan.  It has a strategy.”

In other words, and in summation, jihadis believe they are in a war, and they believe they have a workable strategy to win it.  Those are the two elements most sorely missing from the West’s political leadership, which, Gorka noted, does not like to speak in terms of defeating a jihadist enemy and is often profoundly uncomfortable with using terms like “enemy,” “victory,” or “war.”

“Think about one thing.  This is provocative, but I believe it.  Why do we have 22 vets commit suicide every 24 hours in America?” Gorka asked.  “Why do we have unprecedented levels of PTSD in this nation?  Our grandfathers saw some bad stuff in World War II, especially in the Pacific, especially when they liberated the death camps. But when they came home in the 1950s, they didn’t eat the barrel of a 1911.  Why?  Because they knew they were on the side of the angels.  Their President, their commander, told them, ‘This is a war against evil, and what you are going to see may be nasty, but it’s okay, guys, you’re on the side of Right.’  We don’t say that anymore.”

“If we don’t have a sense of victory, if we don’t talk about the enemy as they are, we could lose this war,” Gorka warned before sadly concluding that Europe, from whence he hails, has already lost it.  “America is ten years behind Europe, if you look at the threat internally, and not just from terrorism… We’ve got, tops, five years.  If the next Administration doesn’t go to war — with our Muslim allies — against the jihadists, we could lose this, either kinetically, or from the inside through subversion.  Five years, maximum.”

Breitbart News Sunday airs each week from 7 to 10 P.M. Sunday night on the Patriot Channel, channel 125 on the SiriusXM network.

You can listen to the full interview with Dr. Sebastian Gorka below:

Islam and the Radical West. By Bret Stephens.

Islam and the Radical West. By Bret Stephens. Wall Street Journal, April 11, 2016.

Stephens:

Years ago I had a chat with three young Muslim men as we waited in a Heathrow airport lounge to board a flight to Islamabad. I was going to Pakistan to report on the fallout from a devastating earthquake in Kashmir. They were going there to do what they vaguely described as “charitable work.” They dressed in white shalwar kameez, wore their beards in salafist style and spoke in south London accents.

I tried to steer the conversation to the earthquake. They wanted to talk about politics. Had I seen Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11”? I avoided furnishing an opinion about a film they plainly revered. The unvarnished truth about Amerika—from an American. Authority and authenticity rolled into one.

I think of that exchange whenever the subject of Islamist radicalization comes up. There’s a great deal of literature about how young Muslim men—often born in the West to middle-class and not particularly religious households—get turned on to jihad. Think of Mohammed Emwazi, the University of Westminster graduate later known as Jihadi John. Or Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, of Fort Hood infamy. Or Najim Laachraoui, who studied electrical engineering at the prestigious Catholic University of Louvain before blowing himself up last month in Brussels. Or Boston’s Tsarnaev brothers and San Bernardino’s Syed Farook.

It’s a long list. And in many cases investigators are able to identify an agent of radicalization. Maj. Hasan corresponded with extremist cleric Anwar al-Awlaki. Laachraoui seems to have come under the spell of a Molenbeek preacher named Khalid Zerkani. The Tsarnaevs took their bomb-building tips from “Inspire,” an online English-language magazine published by al Qaeda’s branch in Yemen.

But the influence of the Awlakis of the world can’t fully account for the mind-set of these jihadists. They are also sons of the West—educated in the schools of multiculturalism, reared on the works of Noam Chomsky and perhaps Frantz Fanon, consumers of a news diet heavy with reports of perfidy by American or British or Israeli soldiers. If Islamism is their ideological drug of choice, the political orthodoxies of the modern left are their gateway to it.

Take the most recent issue of Inspire. Mixed in with step-by-step photos on how to build a timed hand grenade and an analysis of the Charlie Hebdo massacre, there’s a long article on the oppression of blacks in America, starting with the killing of Ferguson’s Michael Brown. The Spring 2013 issue contains a “message to the American nation” from al Qaeda Commander Qassim Ar-Reimy in which he asks whether “meddling in our affairs and installing whomever tyrant agents and lackeys you want who kill and oppress [is] forgivable?”

“Leave us with our religion, land and nations and mind your own internal affairs,” the commander—now Emir—writes. “Save your economy, look after your concerns, for it is better than what you currently are.”

This isn’t the language of Islam, with its impressive tradition of conquest. It’s the language of the progressive left, of what Jeane Kirkpatrick at the 1984 Republican convention called the “Blame America First” crowd. It fits the left’s view of the West as the perennial sinner and the rest of the world as its perpetual victim. It is the language of turning the page on a decade of war, of focusing on nation building at home.

It strikes us as radical only because it comes from the pen of a terrorist. If it had appeared as an op-ed in the Guardian, it would elicit nodding approval from many readers, a dismissive shrug from others, but no big whoop either way.

In the early 1990s my former columnist colleague Thomas Frank came up with the clever phrase “commodification of dissent” to explain how capitalism turned all kinds of countercultural beliefs and radical ideas into just another product in a box, to be sold and distributed through the usual channels. “Fahrenheit 9/11” might have been a political revelation or even a call to arms for some impressionable young Muslims from Tower Hamlets, but to Hollywood it was $222.5 million of box office gold. That made it a winner in the marketplace of ideas, and who can quarrel with that?

The commodification of dissent may have the effect of blunting the impact of all kinds of extreme notions. But it can dull us to their extremism, leaving us astonished when someone turns notion into action. The catharsis of violence seems like an interesting idea in the pages of “The Wretched of the Earth.” In practice, it’s scores of young men and women gunned down in a Paris concert hall.

We’ve become lazy in our thinking about Islam and the West. Whether the Islam practiced by al Qaeda or ISIS is “radical” or merely traditional isn’t the question. It’s whether the West can recognize that the moral nihilism of today’s Jihadi Johns is the logical outgrowth of the moral relativism that is the default religion of today’s West.

The Islamic State of Molenbeek. By Roger Cohen.

The Islamic State of Molenbeek. By Roger Cohen. New York Times, April 11, 2016.

Cohen:

BRUSSELS — There are military trucks parked in Molenbeek, and soldiers with submachine guns patrol the jittery streets of the Brussels district that has been the epicenter of European terrorism in recent months. On the Place Communale idle youths loiter, shooting glances at the police. This is where the Paris and Brussels attacks, with their 162 dead, overlap.

Salah Abdeslam, the only surviving direct participant in the Paris attacks, hid in Molenbeek before his arrest on March 18. Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the suspected chief planner of the Paris attacks, lived in Molenbeek. In all, at least 14 people tied to both attacks were either Belgian or lived in Brussels.

One of them is Mohamed Abrini, a Belgian of Moroccan origin who grew up in Molenbeek and was arrested in Brussels on Friday. He has told the police he is “the man in the hat” caught on surveillance cameras leaving Brussels airport after two accomplices blew themselves up on March 22. Cameras also placed him in Paris last November with the Paris attackers.

Sleepy Brussels: goodbye to that image. Yet even today there’s something soporific about this French-speaking city marooned within Flemish-speaking Flanders, beset by administrative and linguistic divisions and the lethargy that stems from them, home to a poorly integrated immigrant population of mainly Moroccan and Turkish descent (41 percent of the population of Molenbeek is Muslim), and housing the major institutions of a fraying European Union.

It is hard to resist the symbolism of the Islamic State establishing a base for its murderous designs in the so-called capital of Europe at a time when the European idea is weaker than at any time since the 1950s. A jihadi loves a vacuum, as Syria demonstrates. Belgium as a state, and Belgium as the heart of the European Union are as close to a vacuum as Europe offers these days.

Belgium — a hodgepodge of three regions (Flanders, French-speaking Wallonia and Brussels), three linguistic communities (Flemish, French and German) and a weak federal government — is dysfunctional. That dysfunction finds its most powerful expression in the capital, where Flemish geography and French culture do not align. The administrative breakdown assumes critical proportions in Molenbeek, the second-poorest commune in the country, with 36 percent of people younger than 25 unemployed.

As Julia Lynch noted recently in The Washington Post, Molenbeek’s radicalism is not new. It was “home to one of the attackers in the 2004 commuter train bombings in Madrid and to the Frenchman who shot four people at the Jewish Museum in Brussels in August 2014. The Moroccan shooter on the Brussels-Paris Thalys train in August 2015 stayed with his sister there.”

This is an outrage. Splintered Belgium had lost control of Molenbeek. A heavily Muslim district of Brussels had in effect seceded. If this were the extent of the problem, it would be grave. But Molenbeek is just the most acute manifestation of a European failure.

The large-scale immigration from Turkey and North Africa that began a half-century ago at a time of economic boom has — at a time of economic stagnation — led to near-ghettos in or around many European cities where the jobless descendants of those migrants are sometimes radicalized by Wahhabi clerics. As the French prime minister, Manuel Valls, warned recently, an extremist minority is “winning the ideological and cultural battle” within French Islam.

The fact that the jihadis, often Syrian-trained, are a minority, and that many Muslims who immigrate to Europe are leading successful and integrated lives, is little consolation. After the carnage in Paris and Brussels, the laissez-faire approach that had allowed those clerics to proselytize, private Muslim schools to multiply in France, prisons to serve as incubators of jihadism, youths to drift to ISIS land in Syria and back, and districts like Molenbeek or Schaerbeek to drift into a void of negligence, has to cease. Improved intelligence is not enough. There is an ideological battle going on; it has to be waged on that level, where it has been lost up to now. The moderate Muslim communities of Europe need to do much more.

Europe, of which Brussels is a symbol, presents an alarming picture today. The Dutch, susceptible to propaganda from Russia, have just voted in a referendum against a trade agreement with Ukraine for which more than 100 Ukrainians died in an uprising in 2014. The British are set to vote in June on whether to leave the Union. The euro has sapped economies insufficiently integrated for a common currency. A huge refugee flow has raised questions about a borderless Europe. President Putin plots daily to do his worst for the European Union.

There is a vacuum. Vacuums are dangerous. The answer is a reformed, reinvigorated and stronger Europe, not the kind of division that produced Molenbeek — a microcosm of what fragmentation can bring.

My two older children were born in Schaerbeek. My daughter, now a doctor in New Mexico, took some of her first steps at Brussels airport. This is not the Europe I imagined for them.

The GOP Has Two Fevers That Need to Break. By Michael Gerson.

The GOP Has Two Fevers That Need to Break. By Michael Gerson. Real Clear Politics, April 12, 2016. Also at the Washington Post.

Gerson:

Some Trump-obsessed, hysterical nitwits have overstated the case that the Republican Party may be on the verge of self-annihilation. “If Trump were the nominee,” said one, “the GOP would cease to be.”

That quote would be mine. The mood of the moment (not to mention the rhythm of the sentence) was irresistible. But the Republican Party would probably not disintegrate if either Donald Trump or Ted Cruz were its nominee. The reality is both less dramatic and (for those who wish the GOP well) more tragic.

On the whole, the Obama era has been the best time to be a Republican since Herbert Hoover left office. The 2014 election yielded the highest number of GOP House members since 1928, and the second highest number of GOP senators. There are currently 31 Republican governors. The GOP controls 70 percent of state legislatures and enjoys single-party rule in 25 states.

RealClearPolitics election analysts Sean Trende and David Byler put together an index of party strength, based on performance at federal, state and local levels. By their measure, Republicans are doing their best overall since 1928. “The Republican Party,” they conclude, “is stronger than it has been in most of our readers’ lifetimes.”

The overwhelming volume of presidential election coverage creates an illusion that only presidential elections matter. But Democratic decline at the state and local levels has radiating effects — influencing the shape of redistricting, emptying the bench of future electoral talent, and helping to undermine the implementation of Democratic initiatives such as Obamacare.

Consider: If Republicans had fielded a strong presidential nominee this year, who managed to win a winnable election, the party’s success would have been more comprehensive than any since 1980. The tragedy is not that Republicans are on the verge of self-destruction; it is that they were on the verge of victory, and threw it away.

This singular failure is not a small thing for the GOP. The patient is brimming with health and vigor in every way, except for the missing head. Either of this year’s likely Republican failures would complicate the job of candidates down the ticket and alienate demographic groups that are essential to future national victories.

At the presidential level, the GOP has two arguments in desperate need of defeat — two ideological fevers that need to break. The first is the tea party claim that ideological purity is the key to presidential success. Republicans, in this view, have lost recent presidential elections because their quisling candidates, John McCain and Mitt Romney, could not turn out 4 million “missing” conservative voters.

That number, it actually turns out, is a myth, rooted in the slow reporting of vote totals after the 2012 election. “There’s no magic formula,” said Dan McLaughlin of RedState, “no cavalry of millions of conservatives waiting just over the hill to save the day.” A Custer-like loss by Cruz — who has shown little ability to expand beyond his narrow ideological appeal — would demonstrate this point.

The second fever is less common in the United States than in Europe, but it is a particularly vicious strain. This is the claim by right-wing populists that Republicans need to completely reorient their ideology in favor of nativism, protectionism and isolationism in order to appeal to working-class whites. This was the message of Pat Buchanan’s presidential campaigns starting in the 1990s. With Trump, it is back in full force.

The problem? Aside from the fact that protectionism is self-destructive economic policy, and isolationism is disastrous foreign policy, an attempt to pump up the white vote with nativist rhetoric alienates just about everyone else. Trump has secured his stagnant plurality in GOP primaries by earning record-level disapproval from the rest of the country. If Trump were the Republican nominee, winning states such as Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan would require an increase in the white working-class vote so vast that the math is essentially impossible.

This is now the subject of many conversations among Republicans: Is it better to lose with Cruz or Trump? The arguments for tea party purity and for “white lives matter” nativism each need discrediting defeat. Unfortunately, they seem to be the two available choices.

Eventually, Republicans will require another option: a reform-oriented conservatism that is responsive to working-class problems while accommodating demographic realities. This is what makes Paul Ryan so attractive as the Hail Mary pass of an open convention. But, more realistically, it will be the work of a headless Republican Party, reconstituting itself in a new Clinton era.

NOVA: Vikings Unearthed.

Vikings Unearthed. Video. NOVA. PBS, April 4, 2016. Also here.

View From Space Hints at a New Viking Site in North America. By Ralph Blumenthal. New York Times, March 31, 2016.

Possible Viking Settlement Discovered in Canada. By Tessa Berenson. Time, April 1, 2016.





Blumenthal:

A thousand years after the Vikings braved the icy seas from Greenland to the New World in search of timber and plunder, satellite technology has found intriguing evidence of a long-elusive prize in archaeology — a second Norse settlement in North America, further south than ever known.

The new Canadian site, with telltale signs of iron-working, was discovered last summer after infrared images from 400 miles in space showed possible man-made shapes under discolored vegetation. The site is on the southwest coast of Newfoundland, about 300 miles south of L’Anse aux Meadows, the first and so far only confirmed Viking settlement in North America, discovered in 1960.

Since then, archaeologists, following up clues in the histories known as the sagas, have been hunting for the holy grail of other Viking, or Norse, landmarks in the Americas that would have existed 500 years before Columbus, to no avail.

Douglas Bolender, left, and Sarah H. Parcak, right, looking for evidence of a Viking presence at a remote site, called Point Rosee by researchers, in Newfoundland. If confirmed, the site would be the second known Viking settlement in North America. Credit Greg Mumford.

But last year, Sarah H. Parcak (pronounced PAR-kak), a leading space archaeologist working with Canadian experts and the science series NOVA for a two-hour television documentary, “Vikings Unearthed,” that will be aired on PBS next week, turned her eyes in the sky on coastlines from Baffin Island, west of Greenland, to Massachusetts. She found hundreds of potential “hot spots” that high-resolution aerial photography narrowed to a handful and then one particularly promising candidate — “a dark stain” with buried rectilinear features.

Magnetometer readings later taken at the remote site, called Point Rosee by researchers, a grassy headland above a rocky beach an hour’s trek from the nearest road, showed elevated iron readings. And trenches that were then dug exposed Viking-style turf walls along with ash residue, roasted ore called bog iron and a fire-cracked boulder — signs of metallurgy not associated with native people of the region.

In addition, radiocarbon tests dating the materials to the Norse era, and the absence of historical objects pointing to any other cultures, helped persuade scientists involved in the project and outside experts of the site’s promise. The experts are to resume digging there this summer.

A lump of what scientists say is bog iron ore, and one of the samples being tested from the possible

Viking site at Point Rosee. This roasted ore is a sign of metallurgy not associated with native people

 of the region. Credit Greg Mumford.

“It screams, ‘Please excavate me!,’ ” said Dr. Parcak, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, who won the $1 million TED prize last year for her pioneering work using satellite images to expose the looting of ancient Egyptian antiquities and is using it to globally crowdsource new archaeological sites from space.

The NOVA program will stream online at http://pbs.org/nova in the United States at 3:30 p.m. Monday, Eastern time, (along with a BBC program in England), and will be broadcast on PBS at 9 p.m. Wednesday.

Given the dashed hopes of previous searches and the many spurious claims of Viking presence in the Americas, scientists on the project as well as outside experts have voiced caution.

“Tremendous, if it’s really true,” said William Fitzhugh, director of the Arctic Studies Center and Curator in Anthropology at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington. “It wouldn’t be unexpected,” he said, but added that he wanted to see the data.

“There’s no lock that it’s Norse, but there’s no alternative evidence,” said Douglas Bolender, a research assistant professor at the Andrew Fiske Memorial Center for Archeological Research and the Department of Anthropology at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, who joined the expedition. He said a buried structure there could be a smithy for longboat nails and weaponry, another strong indicator of Viking presence.

“It would just be logical that there’s more than one site,” said Gerald F. Bigelow, a lecturer in history at Bates College in Lewiston, Me., and a specialist in archaeology of the North Atlantic.

One of the satellite images used by Sarah H. Parcak to identify potential Viking settlement sites along North America’s Atlantic coast. Darker areas were seen as potential structures. Credit DigitalGlobe.

Davide Zori, an assistant professor of archaeology at Baylor University in Waco, Tex., and a specialist on Viking expansion in the North Atlantic, called the find potentially “very important.”

Much depends on what else is found at the site. In archaeology, context is everything. A famous prehistoric site in Brooklin, Me., yielded an 11th century silver Norse coin but it is believed to have landed there through trade and not as proof of Viking settlement.

Master shipbuilders and seafarers, warriors, traders and raiders, the Vikings boiled out of the Scandinavian fjords starting around the 8th century, marauding through Asia and the Middle East, North Africa and Europe. The Vikings focused particularly on the British Isles, and west to Iceland and Greenland, as memorialized in oral narratives and later recorded as the sagas by 13th-century Icelandic monks.

Around 1000, Leif Ericson led an expedition to what became known as Vinland at the northernmost point of Newfoundland at L’Anse aux Meadows (the name an obscure corruption from the French) where explorers starting in 1960 discovered remnants of an extensive colony, including dwellings, a forge, and carpentry workshop — the Vikings’ first and so far only known landmark in the New World. They appear to have been routed by indigenous people the Norse called Skraeling.

One intriguing find was the seeds of a butternut tree, which did not grow that far north and hinted of travels to milder climates in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. But evidence of other Viking settlements has been lacking.

Dr. Parcak began her research by using a commercial satellite called WorldView-3, belonging to the company DigitalGlobe, to search known Norse sites on minuscule Papa Stour in the Shetland Islands of Scotland. Using the near-infrared spectrum invisible to the human eye, the satellite detected buried walls, and digging yielded a carnelian bead from India similar to those found at other Viking sites. Dr. Parcak then focused her satellite search on thousands of miles of coastline from the Canadian Arctic to New England.

After two weeks of digging at Point Rosee, an unexpected find in a flooded trench excited the explorers — several seeds, or perhaps blueberries, which were hurriedly sent for testing. The dates came back wildly off — 700 years after the Vikings, maybe even contemporary. They seem to have migrated onto the site much later.

“You feeling nervous, Sarah?” a NOVA reporter asked Dr. Parcak.

“No, I’m not,” she said.