The Left Against Zion. By Caroline Glick.

The Left against Zion. By Caroline Glick. Jerusalem Post, December 19, 2013. Also at CarolineGlick.com.

Glick:

The Left’s doctrinaire insistence that Israel is the root of all evil is not limited to campuses.

 

In the 1960s, the American Left embraced the anti-Vietnam War movement as its cri de coeur.

 

In the 1970s, the Left’s foreign policy focus shifted to calling for unilateral nuclear disarmament by the US and its Western allies.

 

In the 1980s, supporting the Sandinista Communists’ takeover of Nicaragua became the catechism of the Left.

 

In the 1990s, the war on global capitalism – that is, the anti-globalization movement – captivated the passions of US Leftists from coast to coast.

 

In the 2000s, it was again, the anti-war movement.

 

This time the Left rioted and demonstrated against the war in Iraq.

 

And in this decade, the main foreign policy issue that galvanizes the passions and energies of the committed American Left is the movement to delegitimize Israel’s right to exist.

 

This week has been a big one for the anti-Israel movement. In the space of a few days, two quasi academic organizations – the American Studies Association and the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association – have launched boycotts against Israeli universities. Their boycotts follow a similar one announced in April by the Asian Studies Association.

 

These groups’ actions have not taken place in isolation. They are of a piece with ever-escalating acts of anti-Israel agitation in college campuses throughout the United States.

 

Between the growth of Israel Apartheid Day (or Week, or Month) from a fringe exercise on isolated campuses to a staple of the academic calendar in universities throughout the US and Canada, and the rise of the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement to wage economic war against the Jewish state, anti-Israel activism has become the focal point of Leftist foreign policy activism in the US and throughout the Western world.

 

Every week brings a wealth of stories about new cases of aggressive anti-Israel activism. At the University of Michigan last week, thousands of students were sent fake eviction notices from the university’s housing office. A pro-Palestinian group distributed them in dorms across campus to disseminate the blood libel that Israel is carrying out mass expulsions of Palestinians.

 

At Swarthmore College, leftist anti-Israel Jewish students who control Hillel are insisting on using Hillel’s good offices to disseminate and legitimate anti-Israel slanders.

 

And the Left’s doctrinaire insistence that Israel is the root of all evil is not limited to campuses.

 

At New York’s 92nd Street Y, Commentary editor John Podhoretz was booed and hissed by the audience for trying to explain why the ASA’s just-announced boycott of Israel was an obscene act of bigotry.

 

Many commentators have rightly pointed out that the ASA and the NAISA are fringe groups.

 

They represent doctorate holders who chose to devote their careers to disciplines predicated not on scholarship, but on political activism cloaked in academic regalia whose goal is to discredit American power. The ASA has only 5,000 members, and only 1,200 of them voted on the Israel- boycott resolution. The NAISA has even fewer members.

 

It would be wrong, however, to use the paltry number of these fringe groups’ members as means to dismiss the phenomenon that they represent. They are very much in line with the general drift of the Left.

 

Rejecting Israel’s right to exist has become part of the Left’s dogma. It is a part of the catechism.

 

Holding a negative view of the Jewish state is a condition for membership in the ideological camp. It is an article of faith, not fact.

 

Consider the background of the president of the ASA. Curtis Marez is an associate professor in the Ethnic Studies Department at the University of California, San Diego. His area of expertise is Chicano Film and Media Studies.

 

He doesn’t know anything about Israel. He just knows that he’s a Leftist. And today, Leftists demonize Israel. Their actions have nothing to do with anything Israel does or has ever done. They have nothing to do with human rights. Hating Israel, slandering Israel and supporting the destruction of Israel are just things that good Leftists do.

 

And Marez was not out of step with his fellow Leftists who rule the roost at UCSD. This past March the student council passed a resolution calling for the university to divest from companies that do business with Israel.

 

Why? Because hating Israel is what Leftists do.

 

The Left’s crusade against the Jewish state began in earnest in late 2000. The Palestinians’ decision to reject statehood and renew their terror war against Israel ushered in the move by anti-Israel forces on the Left to take over the movement. And as they have risen, they have managed to silence and discredit previously fully accredited members of the ideological Left for the heresy of supporting Israel.

 

This week, Harvard Law Prof. Alan Dershowitz retired after 50 years on the law faculty. His exit, the same week as the ASA and the NAISA announced their boycotts of Israeli universities, symbolized the marginalization of the pro-Israel Left that Dershowitz represented.

 

For years, Dershowitz has been a non-entity in leftist circles. His place at the table was usurped by anti-Israel Jews like Peter Beinart. And now Beinart is finding himself increasingly challenged by anti-Semitic Jews like Max Blumenthal.

 

The progression is unmistakable.

 

The question is, is it irreversible? Must supporters of Israel choose between their support for Israel and their affinity for the Left? Certainly it is true that the more the issue of support for Israel splits along ideological and partisan lines, the more reasonable it is for supporters of Israel to move to the ideological camp and the party that supports Israel, and away from the ones that do not support Israel.

 

The average voter is not in a position to change the positions of his party or the dogma of his ideological camp. He can take it or leave it. With rejection of Israel now firmly entrenched in the Left’s dogma, and with the Left firmly in control of the Democratic Party under President Barack Obama’s leadership, for those who care about Israel, the Republican Party is a more natural fit.

 

So, too, the ideological Right is far more congenial to the Jewish state than the Left.

 

While the most sensible place for supporters of Israel to be today is on the political Right, it is also true that it is neither smart nor responsible to abandon the Left completely. Jews should be able to feel comfortable as Jews, and as supporters of Israel everywhere. Ideological camps that castigate Jews for their pride in the accomplishments of the Jewish state, and for their support and concern for its survival and prosperity, are camps in desperate need of fixing.

 

But we should not fool ourselves. Challenging the likes of Marez, or the Swarthmore students, or Max Blumenthal or Peter Beinart to a reasoned debate is an exercise in futility. They do not care about human rights. They do not care that Israel is the only human rights-respecting democracy in the Middle East. They do not care about the pathological nature of Palestinian society. They do not care about the Jewish people’s indigenous rights and international legal rights to sovereignty not only over Tel Aviv and Haifa, but over Hebron and Ramallah.

 

Being hypocrites doesn’t bother them either.

 

You can talk until you’re blue in the face about the civilian victims of the Syrian civil war, or the gender apartheid in Saudi Arabia and the absence of religious freedom throughout the Muslim world. But they don’t care. They aren’t trying to make the world a better place.

 

Facts cannot compete with their faith. Reason has no place in their closed intellectual universe.

 

To accept reason and facts would be an act of heresy.

 

Marez may be a hypocrite, and even a servant of evil. But he is no heretic.

 

The only real way to mitigate the hard Left’s devotion to Israel’s destruction is by changing the power balance on the Left. For the past decade, donors like George Soros have been open in their commitment to elect Democrats who oppose the US’s alliance with Israel. A decade ago, Soros and fellow Jewish American billionaire Peter Lewis funneled hundreds of millions of dollars into Moveon.org. Moveon.org became a clearinghouse for anti-Israel and anti-Jewish messages that became the stock in trade of the ideological Left, and of Democratic candidates in need of campaign funding.

 

It was due to then-Democratic senator Joe Lieberman’s refusal to get on the Soros- and Lewis-funded anti-Israel bandwagon in the 2004 elections, that they turned Moveon.org against Lieberman in the 2006 Democratic primary for his seat in the Senate. His Democratic challenger, Ned Lamont, who won the primary, ran a campaign laced with anti-Israel and anti-Jewish propaganda.

 

There are Democratic funders, like Penny Pritzker, Lester Crown and Haim Saban, who support Israel. If they were so inclined, they could use their considerable funds to change the power equation in the Democratic Party. They could cultivate and support pro-Israel Democratic candidates. They could take the Democratic Party back.

 

This week ended with Democratic Sen. Charles Schumer finally breaking his silence on Obama’s Iran deal and joining forces with his fellow Democrat Sen. Robert Menendez and Republican Sen. Mark Kirk to defy Obama on Iran’s nuclear weapons program. Given Obama’s floundering popularity, it is possible that Schumer’s move will open the door for a change in the Democratic Party.

 

In truth, there is no reason for the Democratic Party to remain in place. It isn’t ordained that the Democrats must cleave to the hard Left.

 

The rejection of Israel is not a natural component of leftist dogma. It’s just that for the past decade, the smart money and the rising power on the Left has been with those who oppose Israel’s existence as a strong, independent Jewish state.

 

While the ASA and its comrades are on the fringes of academia, they are not fringe voices on the Left. The Left has embraced the cause of Israel’s destruction. And its financial power has made it difficult for pro-Israel Democrats to act on their convictions, and those of their voters.

 

The combination of an exodus of supporters of Israel – Jews and non-Jews alike – from the Left and from the Democratic Party on the one hand, and generous funding for pro-Israel Democratic candidates on the other, can change the equation.

 

America lost the Vietnam War. The Sandinistas are back in change in Nicaragua. But if people are willing to stand up now and be counted, America need not harm Israel.

Why Do Christians Tolerate Palestinian Historical Revisionism? By Evelyn Gordon.

Why Do Christians Tolerate Palestinian Historical Revisionism? By Evelyn Gordon. Commentary, December 26, 2013.

The World In Crisis. By Ben Domenech.

The World In Crisis. By Ben Domenech. The Federalist, December 24, 2013.

Domenech:

We close 2013 in a world that seems to be swiftly tilting toward ever-larger crises of government legitimacy, oncoming clashes of foreign powers, and an abiding sense of concern on the part of the American people that the economic realities of long-term unemployment, wage stagnation, and the working class squeeze of higher prices for health care, higher education, and basic goods and services are not a brief trend, but enduring problems for which Washington has no solutions.

 

On the foreign policy front, 2013 may well turn out to be the year in which offered a preface for the Next Big War. From Iran to Syria to China, the American position has collapsed with such rapidity that our understanding of these situations from just a year ago are dramatically altered. The era of the Monroe Doctrine may be over, but the lack of an American grand strategy has left our approach to foreign policy an extended drama of incoherence, and our inability to grapple with the unraveling of the Middle East in the wake of the Arab Spring is only one of many challenges which will present themselves in the coming year. Unrest is only likely to increase in a global economy where youth unemployment has actually increased to the same levels as during the economic crisis.

 

But the crisis closer to home may be the one which proves more troublesome in the long term: a crisis of legitimacy within Western democracy, one that has gripped the American system in the wake of the mismanagement of elections, disasters, wars, financial crises, stimulus packages, bailouts, and now health care overhauls. Americans are losing faith in the American Dream for themselves and for their children, and they are roughly evenly split on whether the solution to these problems is more government or more liberty – a question which is becoming the defining decision of our era.

 

This is about more than just who we elect or which party we trust in which arena. It represents a very real schism about first principles and the universe – a division between an approach to life which considers natural law, inherent rights and duties, the rule of law and more as important, and one which views as essential the ongoing actions of the collective to achieve a secular social justice. The shared underlying assumptions about life and the ordering of society, which had such a strong role in America’s early success, are largely gone or greatly diminished. They aren’t coming back.

 

The rise of the Nones – those who don’t believe in anything in particular, and aren’t interested in investigating faith – is only likely to increase. One in three Millennials profess no religious affiliation, and one of the underestimated aspects of their absence of participation in a faith community of any sort is their lack of interest in seeking one out. Perhaps there’s a silver lining here, from a secularist perspective: a less religious America may sound like a context for less religious strife – fewer people who care, fewer people to argue about it, right? But the reverse is true.

 

The culture wars haven’t ended – they’ve escalated, and they will continue to escalate in a society where people have fewer commonly held views, and less respect for those who disagree with them for any reason, least of all a religious one. The lack of a shared language of compromise and respect leads to ongoing and increasingly contentious clashes of faith, politics, and sexual rights, where lightning rods of courts and culture lead to flashpoints that strain social bonds, break friendships, and end the ability to have a healthy community where disagreement over law and politics does not lead to death threats on social media.

 

The next year will bring more flashpoints in the broken public square. In 2014, the highest courts in the land will rule on the ability of Christian business owners to practice their faith as they see fit, and the power of government to compel them to go against their beliefs. We might hope for a country where more people would lay down their arms and view those who disagree with their ideology with respect and impartiality. But for all the handwringing, history has shown us that this is the way things go when trust breaks down and respect vanishes. As G.K. Chesterton notes: “Why should they be impartial, what is being impartial, when the whole world is at war about whether one thing is a devouring superstition or a divine hope?”

 

Of course, there is still hope. The nation has survived incredible crises before, on the global scale and within our society. The path toward liberty is still a viable one. And perhaps we will find that even when things break down, when government fails and grand strategies fade, the American people can count on each other more than they thought. These are strange times for the country and the world. But we may find that, even as institutions fail us, the American people exceed expectations. They have done it so many times before. In the coming year, they will be called on to do so again.

America’s Culture Wars Will Never End. By W. James Antle III.

America’s Culture Wars Will Never End. By W. James Antle III. The National Interest, December 26, 2013.

Antle:

The United Methodist Church defrocked yet another minister for officiating a same-sex wedding, in this case his son’s. While some 70 Methodist clergy members recently vowed to defy their church’s teachings on marriage, the largest mainline Protestant denomination has been reaffirming them every four years by commanding margins.

 

In Utah, a law against polygamy has been weakened while judges struck down the state’s prohibition of same-sex marriage. Or, to frame the issue as Utah’s Mormon majority might see it, the state’s reaffirmation of marriage as the union of a man and a woman.

 

At times it seems impossible to escape the controversy over Duck Dynasty, with the protests and the counterprotests that were unleashed when GQ decided to ask one of its stars to share his deep thoughts on human sexuality.

 

Leon Trotsky, call your office. You may not be interested in the culture war, but the culture war is interested in you.

 

The objectives of the culture warriors are clear. The right-most flank hopes that it can re-stigmatize homosexuality, nudging gays back into the closet. The left-most flank aims to reclassify traditional religious and moral beliefs about homosexuality as the equivalent of racism, to be stamped out by custom and law like Jim Crow.

 

Both of these goals bumps up against what Al Gore might call an inconvenient truth: neither gay people nor people with traditional sexual values are likely to go anywhere anytime soon.

 

With the possible exception of smoking, there is no issue on which the culture has changed so rapidly as homosexuality. Gay marriage has gone from unthinkable to inevitable. Less than a decade ago, even mainstream liberal Democrats opposed it (especially if they had national ambitions). Now even some conservative Republicans are declaring their support.

 

At the same time, the Christian churches that remain opposed are not small sects. They are the biggest religious denominations in the country, and in a few cases the fastest growing. The Protestant churches that are changing their positions on marriage and sexuality are, like the Episcopalians and the United Church of Christ, usually small and shrinking.

 

In an odd way, both gay rights groups and social conservatives deal with two different but occasionally overlapping motivations: they both want to be left alone and to change the culture. Proponents of gay marriage want to be able to live as they choose and also to make the culture more accepting of the way they live. Social conservatives want to protect their own religious liberty and also transform the culture according to their moral vision.

 

This points to a possible truce, but also suggests continued conflict will remain inevitable. Both sides of the culture war can agree to maximum tolerance of the other side. “Showing a bit of respect for cultural values with which you disagree is not a bad thing,” Barney Frank said in 2004. “Don’t call people bigots and fools just because you disagree with them.”

 

At the same time, people were more willing to be tolerant as they also came to believe that gay marriage, for instance, wasn’t such a bad thing on the merits. To protect their own religious liberty, social conservatives will have to keep making the positive case for their values—values that are in some cases derided as bigotry. It’s no coincidence that Frank made his plea for cultural respect back when opponents of gay marriage were still winning.

 

But that doesn’t mean social conservatives can’t take Frank’s advice. A good start would be to recognize that the Judeo-Christian ethic, in sexual mores and so much else, is no longer intuitive to a great many Americans. Heavy-handed appeals, be they theological or (in the case of Phil Robertson) scatological, are likely to fall flat. Don’t call people heathens or fools (or worse) just because you disagree with them.

 

While specific social debates come and go, the culture wars will never end. But neither will the reality that the combatants must live together.

How the GOP Became the “White Man’s Party.” By Ian Haney López.

How the GOP became the “White Man’s Party.” By Ian Haney López. Salon, December 22, 2013.

Haney López:

The Republican Party today, in its voters and in its elected officials, is almost all white. But it wasn’t always like that. Indeed, in the decades immediately before 1964, neither party was racially identified in the eyes of the American public. Even as the Democratic Party on the national level increasingly embraced civil rights, partly as a way to capture the growing political power of blacks who had migrated to Northern cities, Southern Democrats—like George Wallace— remained staunch defenders of Jim Crow. Meanwhile, among Republicans, the racial antipathies of the rightwing found little favor among many party leaders. To take an important example, Brown and its desegregation imperative were backed by Republicans: Chief Justice Earl Warren, who wrote the opinion, was a Republican, and the first troops ordered into the South in 1957 to protect black students attempting to integrate a white school were sent there by the Republican administration of Dwight Eisenhower and his vice president, Richard Nixon. Reflecting the roughly equal commitment of both parties to racial progress, even as late as 1962, the public perceived Republicans and Democrats to be similarly committed to racial justice. In that year, when asked which party “is more likely to see that Negroes get fair treatment in jobs and housing,” 22.7 percent of the public said Democrats and 21.3 percent said Republicans, while over half could perceive no difference between the two.

 

The 1964 presidential election marked the beginning of the realignment we live with today. Where in 1962 both parties were perceived as equally, if tepidly, supportive of civil rights, two years later 60 percent of the public identified Democrats as more likely to pursue fair treatment, versus only 7 percent who so identified the Republican Party. What happened?

 

Groundwork for the shift was laid in the run-up to the 1964 election by rightwing elements in the Republican Party, which gained momentum from the loss of the then-moderate Nixon to John F. Kennedy in 1960. This faction of the party had never stopped warring against the New Deal. Its standard bearer was Barry Goldwater, a senator from Arizona and heir to a department store fortune. His pampered upbringing and wealth notwithstanding, Goldwater affected a cowboy’s rough-and-tumble persona in his dress and speech, casting himself as a walking embodiment of the Marlboro Man’s disdain for the nanny state. Goldwater and the reactionary stalwarts who rallied to him saw the Democratic Party as a mortal threat to the nation: domestically, because of the corrupting influence of a powerful central government deeply involved in regulating the marketplace and using taxes to reallocate wealth downward, and abroad in its willingness to compromise with communist countries instead of going to war against them. Goldwater himself, though, was no racial throwback. For instance, in 1957 and again in 1960 he voted in favor of federal civil rights legislation. By 1961, however, Goldwater and his partisans had become convinced that the key to electoral success lay in gaining ground in the South, and that in turn required appealing to racist sentiments in white voters, even at the cost of black support. As Goldwater drawled, “We’re not going to get the Negro vote as a bloc in 1964 and 1968, so we ought to go hunting where the ducks are.”

 

This racial plan riled more moderate members of the Republican establishment, such as New York senator Jacob Javits, who in the fall of 1963 may have been the first to refer to a “Southern Strategy” in the context of repudiating it. By then, however, the right wing of the party had won out. As the conservative journalist Robert Novak reported after attending a meeting of the Republican National Committee in Denver during the summer of 1963: “A good many, perhaps a majority of the party’s leadership, envision substantial political gold to be mined in the racial crisis by becoming in fact, though not in name, the White Man’s Party. ‘Remember,’ one astute party worker said quietly . . . ‘this isn’t South Africa. The white man outnumbers the Negro 9 to 1 in this country.’ ” The rise of a racially-identified GOP is not a tale of latent bigotry in that party. It is instead a story centered on the strategic decision to use racism to become “the White Man’s Party.”

The War on Christians in the Middle East. By Michael Gerson.

The War on Christians. By Michael Gerson. Real Clear Politics, December 27, 2013. Also at the Washington Post.

What the Middle East would be like without Christians. By Christa Case Bryant. The Christian Science Monitor, December 22, 2013.


Gerson:

In some parts of the world, Herod’s massacre of the innocents is a living tradition. On Christmas Day in Iraq, 37 people were killed in bomb attacks in Christian districts of Baghdad. Radical Islamists mark — and stain — the season with brutality and intolerance.

 

The violence, of course, is not restricted by the calendar. In recent months, we’ve seen Coptic Christians gunned down in Cairo and churches burned. Thousands of Syrian Christians have fled to Turkey. “Where we live,” said one refugee, “10 churches have been burned down. . . . When the local priest was executed, we decided to leave.”

 

Across North Africa and the greater Middle East, anti-Christian pressure has grown during the past few decades, sometimes subtle, sometimes overt. This persecution has gained recent attention from the archbishop of Canterbury and the pope. “We won’t resign ourselves,” says Pope Francis, “to a Middle East without Christians.”

 

The most passionate advocate has been Prince Charles — an often underestimated, consistently thoughtful figure. “For 20 years,” he said in a recent speech, “I have tried to build bridges between Islam and Christianity and to dispel ignorance and misunderstanding. The point though, surely, is that we have now reached a crisis where the bridges are rapidly being deliberately destroyed by those with a vested interest in doing so.”

 

The growth of this persecution is sometimes used as a club against the very idea of democracy promotion. Middle East democracy, the argument goes, often results in oppressive Sunni religious ascendancy. Majority rule will bring the harsh imposition of the majority faith.

 

But this is the criticism of a caricature. Democracy promotion — as embraced by the National Democratic Institute or the International Republican Institute or Freedom House — is about human liberty protected by democratic institutions. Securing institutional respect for minority rights is particularly difficult in transitioning societies, as we’ve recently seen. But clinging to authoritarianism further hollows out civil society, making the results even more chaotic and dangerous when a dictator falls. And even marginally more favorable dictators can’t be propped up forever, as we’ve also recently witnessed. So it matters greatly whether America and other democracies can help pluralism survive and shape the emerging political order.

 

This is a priority for both humanitarian and strategic reasons. As William Inboden of the University of Texas notes, there is a robust correlation between religious persecution and national security threats. “Including World War II,” argues Inboden, “every major war the United States has fought over the past 70 years has been against an enemy that also severely violated religious freedom.” The reverse is equally true. “There is not a single nation in the world,” he says, “that both respects religious freedom and poses a security threat to the United States.”

 

There are a number of possible explanations for this strong correlation. The most compelling is that religious freedom involves the full and final internalization of democratic values — the right to be a heretic or infidel. It requires the state to recognize the existence of binding loyalties that reach beyond the state’s official views.

 

It took many centuries for Christendom to achieve this thick form of pluralism. Whether the Islamic world can move toward its own, culturally distinctive version of this democratic virtue is now one of the largest geopolitical questions of the 21st century.

 

Some argue that Muslim theology — emphasizing fidelity to its conception of divine law — makes this unlikely (or impossible). Others point to past centuries when Muslim majorities and rulers coexisted with large Arab-Christian populations — a thin form of pluralism in which Christians were second-class citizens but not subject to violent intolerance. Every major religious faith contains elements of tribal exclusivity and teachings of respect for the other. The emergence of social pluralism depends on emphasizing the latter above the former.

 

Promoting democratic institutions is no easy task in the midst of revolution and civil war. But even limited levers — stronger condemnation of abuses, conditioning aid on the protection of minorities, supporting moderate forces in the region — are worth employing when the stakes are so high. America, however, seems strangely disengaged. “One of America’s oddest failures in recent years,” argue Economist editors John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, “is its inability to draw any global lessons from its unique success in dealing with religion at home. It is a mystery why a country so rooted in pluralism has made so little of religious freedom.”

 

A recovery of that emphasis might begin with a simple commitment: not to resign ourselves to a Middle East without Christians.

How the U.S. Triumph in South Sudan Came Undone. By Colum Lynch.

How the U.S. Triumph in South Sudan Came Undone. By Colum Lynch. Foreign Policy, December 26, 2013. Also here.

The White House bet on guerrilla fighters changing their warring ways. Turns out it was a bad bet.


Drill Down. By Keith Johnson. Foreign Policy, December 23, 2013. Also here.


Lynch:

Earlier this month, Riek Machar, South Sudan’s first vice president, returned to what he knows best, leading an armed insurgency being fought by members of his Nuer tribe. In recent days, the fighting has escalated sharply, engulfing several of the country's 10 provinces, and bringing the young nation to the brink of civil war.

 

The stakes are high for the United States, as fighting threatens to upend one of the most important foreign policy initiatives of the last two decades in sub-Saharan Africa – one that unified Republicans, Democrats, African Americans, human rights advocates, and Christians. On Saturday, four U.S. troops were wounded when their V-22 Osprey came under fire during an aborted operation to evacuate U.S. nationals from the town of Bor. An additional 150 Marines have been sent to the region to prep for possible future evacuations.

 

It’s an extraordinary and painful development, given America’s major role in securing independence for South Sudan. But the toughest part for Americans to swallow may be that it’s the U.S.-backed leaders of South Sudan – the supposed good guys – that are responsible for plunging the country into chaos and threatening to wreck America's signature achievement in the region.

 

“A whole generation of U.S. leaders that are invested in the success of South Sudan are heartbroken; I’m heartbroken about what going on there, especially because you don’t see the hand of Khartoum in this,” said [U.S. diplomat] Cameron Hudson. “I think it’s going to be very [difficult] to get the genie back in to the bottle. These guys are good at fighting and they are comfortable doing it.”


Johnson:

But turning that oil promise into reality faces plenty of daunting challenges, as underscored by the violence in South Sudan over the last week. Security looms largest, because it is a precondition both to develop the oil itself and also to build the pipelines, roads, and rail lines the region needs to make energy development a reality. But cronyism, weak laws, poor governance, corruption, and domestic politics can combine to scuttle hopes of a quick energy-fired economic bonanza.

 

“There is a myth that many oil companies and policy makers subscribe to, which is that economic interests will trump everything else. What gets discounted, is that in some places in Africa, there is a different calculus. Tribal animosities, personal animosities, political grudges  all those weigh a lot heavier, and there are a lot of people willing to cut off their noses to spite their faces,” said the Atlantic Council’s J. Peter Pham.

Palestinian Leader Farouq Qaddoumi: We Supported the Nazis in World War II.

Palestinian Leader Farouq Qaddoumi: We Supported the Nazis in WWII. MEMRI TV. Video No. 4075, December 7, 2013. YouTube. Atlas Shrugs.

The Mufti of Jerusalem: Architect of the Holocaust. By Pamela Geller. Breitbart, February 7, 2010. Atlas Shrugs.

MEMRI Transcript:

Interviewer: Were you sympathetic with Nazi Germany in WWII?

Farouq Qaddoumi: I don’t think it would be wrong to say that we were enthusiastic supporters of Germany.

Interviewer: You supported Hitler and his people.

Farouq Qaddoumi: Germany, yes. This was common among the Palestinians, especially since our enemy was Zionism, and we saw that Zionism was hostile to Germany, and vice versa.

Interviewer: There was a Nazi radio station in Arabic at the time, right?

Farouq Qaddoumi: I recall something like that.

A&E’s Duck Dynasty Dilemma. By Lee Habeeb.

A&E’s Duck Dynasty Dilemma. By Lee Habeeb. National Review Online, December 26, 2013.

Habeeb:

It had never happened before. When big, powerful TV executives ask a star to apologize for what they deem inappropriate comments or behavior, the star simply complies. A team of publicists is assembled, the star does the obligatory apology tour for the press and promises never to do or say what he did or said again. Ever.

 

But the TV gods never met a man like Phil Robertson. Or his family. When they decided to place the patriarch of the Duck Dynasty clan on a non-suspension suspension for his comments to a GQ magazine writer about homosexuality, the executives at A&E created a problem.

 

Because this family believes in a bigger God. The same God that roughly 70 percent of Americans believe in. The Robertsons take their faith seriously, and one of the more important elements of that faith involves putting no god before theirs. Not even the suits at the big network.

 

It is such an important notion in Christianity that there are commandments about it in the second book of the Bible. I guess the executives at A&E never got that far.

 

If not, didn’t they at least see the movie version with Charlton Heston?

 

Here’s a quickie theology lesson for those executives: The Ten Commandments are pretty important rules for followers of Christ. And for Jews, too. The first four commandments are all about man’s relationship to God and how God must be first in our lives.

 

Not network executives or ratings. God.

 

Those commandments are the reason dictators throughout history haven’t much cared for Christians and Jews.

 

The executives at A&E weren’t aware of the Fifth Commandment, either — the one that talks about honoring your father. When they decided to punish Phil Robertson, they should have been ready for the immediate response from his sons: We stand by our dad.

 

This is a family that honors their father and understands that without his commitment to them, there would be no Robertson family, let alone a Duck Dynasty.

 

If only we had more fathers respect their commitments, this country would be in much better shape.

 

Indeed, that’s been the appeal of Duck Dynasty from the beginning: the culture of family that Phil Robertson created. The culture of family the show celebrates. His family sticks together. They tease and mock each other. They fight, play, and work together. They even eat together.

 

It’s the secret wish of almost everyone I know — to be a part of a big, loving family. And it seems harder than ever to pull off, given the pace of modern life. Given the temptations around us to put other values above family.

 

In that GQ article that caused all the fuss, we learned a lot about Phil Roberston. Yes, he described his position on homosexuality not very artfully, but it is no different in the end from what most Christians believe about it, that it is a sin. And that is enough these days to get yourself in a lot of trouble with gay activists.

 

But here is, as Paul Harvey liked to say, the rest of the superb GQ story by Drew Magary that most Americans never read. And it is a heck of a tale.

 

Phil Robertson grew up poor as poor can be in the northwest part of Louisiana, where, as the writer pointed out, “Cajun redneck culture and Ozark redneck culture intersect.”  His father was tough as nails, his mother a manic-depressive. Roberston was a star quarterback in high school and as a scholarship athlete played for one year at Louisiana Tech. But he never played a second year, because duck-hunting season and football season overlapped. The young man who replaced him at Louisiana Tech was none other than Terry Bradshaw, because, as Drew Magary wrote, “that’s how these kinds of stories go.”

 

Robertson spent his days after college working a series of dead-end jobs and his nights chasing girls, getting drunk, and popping pills. At one low point, he had to flee the state of Arkansas after beating up a bar owner and his wife. Kay Robertson persuaded them not to press charges, in exchange for a sum of money that amounted to most of their then-meager life savings.

 

In his mid 20s, GQ reported, a “piss-drunk Robertson” even managed to kick his wife and three kids out of the house. “I’m sick of you,” he told Kay.

 

That’s a story that repeats itself every day in America, with tragic consequences.

 

Luckily for Phil and his family, he stopped worshipping Jim Beam and chose to follow Jesus Christ. Phil turned to God and turned his life around. And the lives of his wife and boys.

 

That, too, is a story that repeats itself every day in America.

 

Robertson soon founded a company that created a contraption that was able to replicate with remarkable accuracy the sound of a real-life duck. It was bad news for ducks everywhere but great news for duck hunters. And the Robertsons. They made a DVD about the family duck hunts, which led to a show on the Outdoor Channel, which led to Duck Dynasty, and fame and fortune.

 

Right from the beginning, though, this was no ordinary reality-TV family. The Robertsons were not the Kardashians. During their negotiations with A&E, Jase Robertson told the GQ reporter, “the three no-compromises were faith, betrayal of family members, and duck season.”

 

That’s why the A&E executives will never get an apology from the Robertsons. Because people of faith should not have to apologize for what they believe in. Even if they give an answer now and then that is less than artful — or even insulting.

 

Ironically, there was a day not too long ago when network executives thought it best for gay people to keep quiet about their lifestyle. It would have ruined careers, and shows.

 

It was a tragedy that actors such as Rock Hudson had to live a lie their entire adult lives out of fear they might be “outed” and lose everything. It’s a type of cruelty one can’t imagine, being compelled to lie to the world, and even families and friends, about such a fundamental aspect of your life — your sexuality.

 

That Ellen DeGeneres can be who she is, and what she is, and do a great show for all to enjoy, and do it with class, style, and wit, is a testament to how far we’ve come as a society. And how tolerant we’ve become. She has many Christian fans. I know, because I’m one of them.

 

I also happen to be one of those Christians who believe she should have the right to get married. That the state should be the state, and the church the church, and that we should not punish each other or boycott each other for who we are. And what we think.

 

If anything, a new brand of intolerance is rising from certain gay activists hell-bent on bullying Christians into suppressing their core beliefs — or else. They are also showcasing their own narrow-mindedness by judging a man’s entire life through the narrow prism of their own agenda. And one bad sound bite. (Conservatives, too, have been guilty of this same practice; think Bill Maher after 9-11, and the Dixie Chicks during the Iraq War.) I was thumbing through a book recently about John Wooden, the legendary coach of UCLA’s great basketball program. On the subject of integrity, he had this to say: “The five people who first come to mind that best reflect integrity are Jesus, my dad, Abraham Lincoln, Mother Teresa and Billy Graham. The order of the last three really doesn’t matter.”

 

There they are, the two most important influences on one of the most influential coaches and exemplary men of the 20th century — Jesus, and his father.

 

Today, Wooden would get roped into an interview with some reporter, get asked what the Bible says about homosexuality, give the “wrong” answer, and get fired from his post for “hate speech.”

 

Is that the gay activists’ idea of progress?

 

But back to Phil Robertson and that article in GQ. The writer wasn’t expecting his time killing time on the Robertsons’ 20,000-acre stretch of Louisiana floodplain to affect him as it did. Here was Drew Magary’s remarkable confession:

The ecology here has been so perfectly manipulated that it feels as if two giant hands reached down from the sky and molded the land itself, an effect that I’m sure would please Phil. Whatever you think of Phil’s beliefs, it’s hard not to gaze upon his cultivations and wonder if you’ve gotten life all wrong.

Magary wondered about his own life, and his own priorities, and if they may indeed need to be reassessed:

I shouldn’t be sitting around the house and bitching because the new iOS 7 touchscreen icons don’t have any [f***ing] drop shadow. I should be out here, dammit! Killing things and growing things and bringing dead things home to cook! There is a life out in this wilderness that I am too [chickens***] to lead.

The reporting from Magary ended as gracefully as it began, with the two men leaving the wilderness after a day together.

We hop back in the ATV and plow toward the sunset, back to the Robertson home. There will be no family dinner tonight. No cameras in the house. No rowdy squirrel-hunting stories from back in the day. There will be only the realest version of Phil Robertson, hosting a private Bible study with a woman who, according to him, “has been on cocaine for years and is making her decision to repent. I’m going to point her in the right direction.”

As we reflect on all matters at the turn of the new year, maybe we should think about how lucky we all are to live in a country as rich, diverse, and beautiful as ours. One that allows the Robertson family and Ellen DeGeneres to live their lives freely, and to make a living without fear of reprisal for simply being who they are, and for believing what they believe.

 

And as some among us seek to cleanse the world of sound bites and speech that hurt our feelings and sensitivities, maybe we can reflect on Thomas Jefferson’s great words on the subject: “It does me no injury for my neighbors to say there are 20 gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my legs.”

 

For a New Year’s resolution, let’s stop breaking legs and destroying the livelihoods of people for the mere act of disagreeing with us. Or saying something we don’t like.

 

We are better than that. And tougher.

The Orphaned Middle Class. By Victor Davis Hanson.

The Orphaned Middle Class. By Victor Davis Hanson. Real Clear Politics, December 26, 2013.

Vladimir Putin, Conservative Icon. By Brian Whitmore.

Vladimir Putin, Conservative Icon. By Brian Whitmore. The Atlantic, December 20, 2013.

Is Putin One of Us? By Patrick J. Buchanan. Townhall.com, December 17, 2013. Also at The American Conservative.

Putin the Paleo? By Rod Dreher. The American Conservative, December 18, 2013.

Strange bedfellows: Pat Buchanan and Putin. By Harold Meyerson. Washington Post, December 24, 2013. Also here.

TRANSCRIPT: Presidential Address to the Federal Assembly (transcript concluded). By Vladimir V. Putin. Johnson’s Russia List, December 16, 2013. Also at eng.kremlin.ru.

Islamic Militant Al-Ahrar Movement in Gaza: “We Harvest the Skulls of the Jews.”

Islamic Militants in Gaza: Allah’s Teachings Are the Fire with Which “We Harvest the Skulls of the Jews.” MEMRI TV. Video Clip No. 3190, November 3, 2011. YouTube. YouTube. Transcript, Transcript. Also at The Elder of Ziyon, Michael J. Totten.














Transcript:

Following are excerpts from statements made at a rally of the Palestinian Al-Ahrar movement in Gaza, a pro-Hamas group that split from Fatah, which aired on Al-Aqsa TV on November 3, 2011:

Rally organizer: Praise be to you, our Lord. You have made our killing of the Jews an act of worship, through which we come closer to you.

[…]

Allah’s prayers upon you, our beloved Prophet [Muhammad]. You have made your teachings into constitutions for us – the light with which we dissipate the darkness of the occupation, and the fire with which we harvest the skulls of the Jews.

[…]

Yes, our beloved brothers, even though the entire world moves closer to Allah through fasting, through hunger, and through tears, we are a people that moves closer to Allah through blood, through body parts, and through martyrs.

[…]

Oh sons of Palestine, oh sons of the Gaza Strip, oh mujahideen – wage Jihad, wreak destruction, blow up and harvest the heads of the Zionists. Words are useless by now. The lie of peace is gone. Only weapons are of any use – the path of [recently killed] Yousuf and Ali, the path of martyrdom and Jihad. Only our wounds talk on our behalf. We speak nothing but the language of struggle, of Jihad, or rockets, of bombs, of cannons and of martyrdom-seekers. This is the language in which we talk and negotiate with the Zionist enemy.

[…]

We say to the Zionists: Like a bad seed, we shall uproot you from our land, so that it can blossom in the light of the everlasting sun of our Jihad, and of our invincible religion. Jerusalem is not yours – get out of it! Haifa is not yours – get out of it! Tel Aviv is not yours – get out of it! Oh Zionists, get out before we expel you. these are the words of the mujahideen.

[…]

Jon Stewart’s Zionist Takeover of Egypt. By Jeffrey Goldberg.

Jon Stewart’s Zionist Takeover of Egypt. By Jeffrey Goldberg. Bloomberg, December 23, 2013.

Jon Stewart, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and the Zionist Takeover of Egypt. By Walter Russell Mead. The American Interest, December 28, 2013.

Mead:

The prevalence of delusional conspiracy thinking at all levels of Egyptian intellectual and political life is a “tell” that points to important limits on Egypt’s potential for political, social and economic progress. Societies in thrall to this kind of darkness are unlikely to develop the vigorous, forward looking and competent civil societies that can promote true democracy. Societies whose intellectual leaders cannot understand how power works in the modern world are unlikely to adopt policies that bring rapid economic progress. Given the power of these ideas among prominent Muslim Brotherhood officials and leaders, it should have been clear to the Obama administration that whatever it was observing in Egypt, it was unlikely to be a “transition to democracy.” At best, the Egyptian revolution was always likely to be an interregnum between despotisms; at worst there is still a chance (hopefully small) that the country could fall into the kind of chaos and violence that has become much too common across the Middle East.

 

Rabid anti-Semitism coupled with an addiction to implausible conspiracy theories is a very strong predictor of national doom; Nazi Germany isn’t the only country to have followed these dark stars to the graveyard of history. Many liberal minded Americans (though loathing both anti-Semitism and chowderheaded conspiracy thinking themselves) don’t like to look this truth in the eye.  It leads to some very uncomfortable reflections about the potential for democracy in many countries beyond Egypt, and casts a dark shadow over the prospects for the development of a stable and prosperous Palestinian state. It suggests that there are narrow limits on what we can expect from diplomacy with Iran.

 

Two American administrations in a row have seen their Middle East policies come crashing down because they ignored the unpleasant implications of the unhealthy thought climate so prevalent in so much of the region. President Bush and President Obama, dissimilar as they are in so many of their regional policies, shared a naive optimism about the prospects for quick transitions to democracy in the Middle East. In both cases that optimism led to unwise policy choices that made both US interests and values harder to protect. In the Bush years, those who raised questions about Iraq’s and the Arab world’s readiness for democracy were denounced as racists; in the age of Obama they are called Occidentalists or sometimes Islamophobes.

 

Not everybody in the region is caught up in the kind of thinking behind Mr. Ammar’s clownish pronouncements, and it is certainly true that Israeli actions sometimes contribute to an emotional climate that makes crazy talk appealing to minds that otherwise might be ready to take a more sensible view. But the grim reality remains: as long as feverish conspiracy thinking dominates the world views of so many regional social, cultural and political actors, civil society will be weak and both democracy and prosperity will prove elusive.

 

The whiggish optimism of American culture rebels at such thoughts, but the Middle East at the moment is not a particularly fertile mission field for liberal ideals. At the same time, the region’s role in world oil markets and its place on world trade routes makes it a region from which we cannot walk away. Managing our national portfolio under these difficult circumstances will take more maturity and patience than either the Bush or the Obama administration (so far) has displayed. We can hope that the unraveling of its once bright hopes in the region will lead the White House to a process of reflection and analysis that will bring it to a more sober understanding of the region and our choices in it. Beyond that, we must hope that the winning candidate in 2016 will bring a more sensible and grounded approach to what for some time to come will be an inescapable but difficult theater for American foreign policy.


Egyptian Author Amr Ammar Attributes Involvement In Subversive Anti-Egypt Schemes to Jewish-American Comedian Jon Stewart. Video Clip No. 4070. MEMRI TV, December 5, 2013. Transcript.