Clueless About a Religious War. By Jonathan S. Tobin.

Clueless About a Religious War. By Jonathan S. Tobin. Commentary, October 12, 2015.

Tobin:

After another day of stabbings and other attacks of Israelis by Palestinians is making it harder to pretend that a third intifada has not broken out. As the Times of Israel notes, Palestinians are calling this surge of terrorism the “hibat al-Quds” or the “Jerusalem awakening.” That is significant and not just because it recalls the way Palestinians referred to the second intifada as being about the “al-Aqsa” mosque on the Temple Mount. While the narrative about this latest outbreak of violence from critics of Israel is that it is all about the sins of the “occupation” and Israel denying hope to the Palestinians, what we hearing from them is a very different story. Read any of the accounts of the motivations of the people going into the streets to stab random Jews they encounter or the mobs in the West Bank who are seeking to set off confrontations with Israeli troops, and you don’t hear much about frustration about the peace process. The same applies to clips from Palestinian television that Palestine Media Watch provides. What you do see are accounts of Muslim religious fervor that is drenched in the fever of martyrdom and faith-based hate.

This is significant and not just because most of the popular notion that the violence is caused by the failure of Israel to make enough concessions in negotiations to bring peace. If Palestinians are engaged in an intifada that is, at its core, a religious war rather than a protest movement about Israeli policies or a desire for a Palestinian state, then everything that the Obama administration and even many of Israel’s American supporters think they know about the conflict is just plain wrong.

This is, after all, the same administration that is engaged in a war against Islamist terrorists that it claims has nothing to do with religion. Even though jihadis throughout the Middle East are driven to try to kill Americans and their allies by their faith, the president, and his foreign policy team have been consistent in refusing to admit that there is any conflict with the form of Islam that has produced these enemies.

Part of that stubborn denial of reality is rooted in common sense. The U.S. doesn’t want or need a war against all Muslims. It is only fighting adherents of a variant of Islam that we have come to call Islamism. So differentiating between ordinary peace-loving Muslims in the United States or elsewhere and those who wanted to wage an unending war of annihilation on the West is smart. But pretending that those people that we are fighting have nothing to do with Islam is stupid. They may not represent all Muslims, but backers of ISIS, al-Qaeda, and other terror groups are not a tiny minority in the Middle East. In fact, though the number of active fighters is relatively small, those who sympathize with them make up a significant proportion of the Muslim population. The reason for that is that, although President Obama poses at times as an expert about what is and is not Islam, large numbers of Muslims disagree with his rulings on that question.

This failure to acknowledge reality is a major obstacle to the faltering U.S. efforts to deal with the rise of ISIS and other terror groups. It stands to reason that if you don’t know what you are fighting or why your opponents are so dedicated to your destruction, you’re not likely to defeat them.

The same rule applies to evaluations of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians and hopes for renewed peace talks.

If the struggle between Jews and Arabs over the same small country were merely about whether it could be split to grant both peoples a share of sovereignty, then the century-long war between them would have ended many decades ago. Though partition plans were offered before World War II and then again prior to Israel achieving independence, the Arab answer was always “no.” Since the 1967 Six Day War in which Israel came into possession of the West Bank and unified Jerusalem, the conventional wisdom was that if only the Jews gave up the “occupied territories,” peace would come. This ignores the fact that the “occupied territories” before June 1967 was Israel itself. Even today, Hamas and most other Palestinian groups, and at times the supposed moderates of Fatah, refer to all of Israel as “occupied.”

What those who keep saying that more concessions from Israel that will give hope to Palestinians don’t understand is that for those who go into the streets to seek martyrdom while killing Jews, the location of a future border between Israel and a state of Palestine is irrelevant. After all, Israel offered the Palestinians independence and statehood in almost all of the West Bank, Gaza, and a share of Jerusalem in 2000, 2001 and 2008. And even Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu offered them the West Bank in 2010.

But if the goal of the Palestinian leadership and the angry mobs with knives, rocks and gasoline bombs in the streets don’t care so much about statehood as they do about destroying Jewish rule in any part of the country, then this conflict is about religion and not land. That’s not a message most Israelis, who would like nothing better than a compromise that would bring them peace, want to hear. But that is the message of the hibat al-Quds that is coming through loud and clear.

The focus on saving the mosques on the Temple Mount from a mythical Jewish threat or the notion that, in the words of PA leader Mahmoud Abbas, “filthy Jewish feet” are present at holy sites in Jerusalem is a clear sign that faith is what is driving Palestinian anger. Unfortunately, that faith is not so much one of peace, as we would like to believe, as it is one that regards a Jewish state, no matter how much land it possesses, as anathema.

Those who blame Israel for what is happening aren’t merely wrong about the nature of the conflict. They are blaming the victims and mistaking jihadist intentions for a desire for peace. Protests about land and negotiations can be met with diplomacy. Religious wars that seek to spill the blood of infidel Jews must be with decisive force, not talk. Those Americans who don’t understand this are part of Israel’s problems, not advocates for a viable solution.

The Consequences of Mayhem. By Jonathan S. Tobin. Commentary, October 13, 2015.

Tobin:

As bad as the situation in Israel seemed yesterday, Tuesday began with even more Palestinian terror that sent shock waves through the country. A pair of terrorists entered a Jerusalem bus and stabbed and shot passengers, killing two and wounding many more until police stopped them. Elsewhere in the city another Jew was killed by a Palestinian terror attack that drove a car onto a crowded sidewalk and then attempted to finish his victims off with a knife. There were also more stabbings in the city of Ra’anana. But while the details of the attacks vary, the dynamic is clear. These are for all intents and purposes suicide attacks that are motivated by religious fervor. The Palestinian Authority leadership’s false charges about Israel — broadcast on their official media — about Israel’s supposed intent to harm the mosques on the Temple Mount has set off a wave of religiously-inspired terror attacks that it can’t control. The question now is what comes next? Will the Palestinians eventually come to their senses and stop the madness? Or will this situation continue to spiral out of control with lives lost? Yet whatever the answers to these questions turn out to be, there is no question which side in the conflict will come out the loser from this disastrous turn of events.

What PA leader Mahmoud Abbas may be about to learn is the same hard lesson his predecessor Yasir Arafat absorbed during the second intifada. While it is clearly in the interests of Abbas interests to keep a lid on the violence lest he lose complete control of the situation, it’s a lot easier to start a holy war than to stop one. Abbas sought to compete with his Hamas rivals by sounding bellicose against Israel and seized on a perennial favorite of Palestinian leaders: inciting hate and fear about Jerusalem. But having convinced ordinary Palestinians that Israel intended to interfere with the Temple Mount mosques or to desecrate them with their “filthy Jewish feet,” Abbas can’t be surprised that many of them are undertaking personal terror attacks on Jews.

What Abbas wanted was to bolster his image among ordinary Palestinians as a tough opponent of the Jews. An ineffectual and corrupt leader of kleptocracy serving the 10th year of the four-year term as president of the PA to which he was once elected, Abbas has little credibility with Arabs or Jews left. Yet even now that he sees the disaster that is unfolding that could threaten his rule, Abbas can’t stop the incitement. He doubled down on it by speaking today of some of the terrorist assailants of Jews as innocent victims who were gunned down by Israeli oppression. Nor has he stopped the talk about the danger to the mosques.

But while this new wave of terror has shocked Israelis and made ordinary life difficult in areas with mixed populations such as Jerusalem, it is the Palestinians who will be the big losers here just as they were during the second intifada. The loss of life and the sense of fear inspired by these horrifying incidents have shaken Israelis. But they know that if their nation could survive the horror of the second intifada, which took the lives of over 1,000 Israelis and far more Palestinians, this episode won’t defeat their country.

On the other hand, the consequences of this mayhem for Palestinians will be terrible. If, as happened during the last intifada, Israel is forced to close the borders with the West Bank in order to stem the violence, it is the already shaky Palestinian economy that will collapse, not Israel’s. As much as doomsayers continue to tell Israelis that they can’t go on with the status quo, Israel has gotten economically stronger in the last generation while the Palestinians, mired in corruption and still refusing to make peace, lag far behind. War, especially the kind of low-level terror that Palestinian society has embraced, will do to them what the second intifada did, and erase years of economic progress while also making cooperation with more prosperous Israel — the key to any hope for their advancement — simply impossible.

Abbas and many of his people may be counting on the usual dynamic of the conflict to work to their advantage abroad and in international forums. The current strife may deepen Israel’s diplomatic isolation. The more Palestinians embrace terrorism, the more likely much of the world will be to condemn all Israeli measures of self-defense. They will likely also buy into the false notion that Palestinians are acting out of hopelessness rather than as part of a religious holy war that is inextricably tied to their century-long struggle against Zionism.

UN resolutions, even those unfairly condemning Israeli self-defense, won’t change the status quo on the Temple Mount that is defended by the Israeli government that already discriminates against Jews. Yet more condemnations of Israel won’t do a thing for the Palestinians. If we are to assume that Palestinians really do want a two-state solution (and based on the PA’s consistent refusal to accept the legitimacy of a Jewish state no matter where its borders are drawn, there is no reason to believe that they do) this new terror surge is exactly the wrong way to go about it. Israelis already were worried that a withdrawal from much of the West Bank (something that every Israeli government has offered to do — including Netanyahu’s — in the last 15 years) would duplicate Ariel Sharon’s disastrous experiment in the pullout from Gaza. But now that Abbas has whipped up the kind of hate that has Palestinians seeking to slaughter Jews they see on the street or on buses, further withdrawals seem utter madness.

By embracing terror, Palestinians have deepened the divide with Israelis while making even left-wingers less likely to trust them. Stern measures intended to prevent more terror attacks will have widespread support from right to left. Nor will many Israelis, even those most likely to want to believe in the idea that Abbas is a man of peace, soon forget the way he stoked hatred and needlessly caused so much loss of life.

If Palestinians want prosperity and peace, they need to drop the hate and start learning to accept Israel as a fact of life that will continue even if they attained statehood. But so long as their quest for sovereignty is bound up with holy war, they’ll get neither. As with past unnecessary conflicts they started, the Palestinians will be the ones who will suffer most from this one.

What Palestinian Terror and ISIS Have in Common. Video. United with Israel, October 13, 2015. YouTube.





Obama Admin Refuses to Condemn Palestinians for Wave of Terror. Washington Free Beacon, October 13, 2015.





Beacon Staff:

The “cycle of violence” returns.

A spokesman for the Obama administration Tuesday refused to identify Palestinians as the perpetrators of a wave of Palestinian terrorist attacks that have left dozens of Israelis dead and wounded in the past weeks.

Associated Press reporter Matt Lee pressed the State Department spokesman to explain why the administration says it delivers the same message to both Israeli and Palestinian leaders when only Palestinians are carrying out terrorist attacks. “Does the United States believe–does the administration believe–that Israel is inciting or not condemning violence?” Lee asked.

Spokesman Mark Toner replied, “I think what we’ve been very clear about saying is that we want to see both sides take affirmative steps.”

“So the U.S. – the administration sees both sides at fault here, is that correct?” Lee asked.

“Both sides need to, as their leaders need to express the fact that both sides need to decrease the tensions that are leading to ongoing incidence of violence. But you know, you’re asking me to assign blame and I don’t think that’s the case,” Toner said.

“Well, I mean, if the secretary is calling up both Abbas and Netanyahu and has the same message for both of them, it would suggest that you think that both of them need to do more to that,” Lee said. “I’m just trying to figure out what is it you would want the Israelis to do more in condemning the violence.”

“For one thing, upholding–for one thing, as I said upholding the status quo in Haram al-Sharif and Temple Mount,” Toner said.

“But has there been suggestion that the status quo is going to be changed?” Lee asked.

Toner then changed the subject. There has been no change in the status quo on the Temple Mount, nor any consideration given by the Israeli government to changing the status quo there. Palestinian leaders have spread the unfounded claim that Jews are threatening the Al Aqsa mosque on the Temple Mount, sparking Palestinian rioting there.

Lee then pressed from a different angle.

“Do you think the Palestinian Authority, President Abbas, needs to do more to combat incitement and condemn violence?” he asked.

Toner replied, “I think that both leaders need to – need to convey that message.”

Toner later called the past month’s wave of unprovoked Palestinian terrorism “the cycle of violence that’s currently taking place.”

Mark Levin Blasts the Jew Hatred in the Obama Administration. Audio. The Right Scoop, October 13, 2015.

Muslim Cleric Sheikh Muhammad Sallah “Abu Rajab” Calls Upon Palestinians to Stab Jews.

Rafah Cleric Brandishes Knife in Friday Sermon, Calls upon Palestinians to Stab Jews. Video Clip No. 5098. MEMRI, October 9, 2015. YouTube.

Cleric Tells Palestinians to Stab Jews: “Cut Them into Body Parts.” By Morgan Chalfant. Washington Free Beacon, October 12, 2015.









Transcript:

In an October 9 Friday sermon delivered at the Al-Abrar Mosque in Rafah, the Gaza Strip, Sheikh Muhammad Sallah “Abu Rajab” brandished a knife, calling upon his brothers in the West Bank: “Stab!” “Oh young men of the West Bank: Attack in threes and fours,” he said, and “cut them into body parts.”

Following are excerpts:

Muhammad Salah “Abu Rajab”: Brothers, we must constantly remind the world, and everyone who has forgotten… The world must hear, via these cameras and via the Internet: This is Gaza! This is the place of trenches and guns! This is the West Bank! This is the place of bombs and daggers! This is Jerusalem… Jerusalem is the code word… This is Jerusalem… Much can be told about Jerusalem. This is where the soldiers of the Prophet Muhammad are. This is the grace of Allah. The soldiers of the Prophet Muhammad are here. Brothers, this is why we recall today what Allah did to the Jews. We recall what He did to them in Khaybar.

[…]

Today, we realize why the [Jews] build walls. They do not do this to stop missiles, but to prevent the slitting of their throats.

[…]

“Abu Rajab” brandishes a dagger and makes stabbing motions

My brother in the West Bank: Stab! My brother is the West Bank: Stab the myths of the Talmud in their minds! My brother in the West Bank: Stab the myths about the temple in their hearts!

[…]

Today, we have declared a curfew [in Israel]. Listen to what the Jews are saying to one another: Stay at home, or go outside to your death. They have no alternative. Oh men of the West Bank, the first phase of the operation requires stabbing in order to bring about a curfew.

[…]

Now, we are imposing a curfew with daggers, and in the next phase, which is Allah willing, about to be realized… We shall not send you back to Russia, Bulgaria, the Ukraine, or Poland. We shall not send you back there. You have come here… The Islamic military court has ruled… This court, presided over by the Prophet’s Companion Sa’d Ibn Mu’adh, has ruled… Sa’d Ibn Mu’adh has reappeared – in the West Bank. Sa’d Ibn Mu’adh is now in the streets of Jerusalem, Afula, Tel Aviv, and the Negev. The Islamic military court has made the divined ruling: You will get nothing in our land except for slaughtering or stabbing. Why? The world will say that we are terrorists, that we incite. Yes! “Oh Prophet, sufficient for you and for whoever follows you of the believers is Allah. Oh Prophet of Allah, incite the believers to fight” Why? Oh America, oh Crusader aggressors, oh Arab Zionists, oh Zionists from among the criminal Jews: Are we aggressors? You have come of your own volition to be slaughtered on our land.

[…]

“When the promise of the Hereafter comes, We shall gather you from various nation.” Allah has brought the Jews, His enemies and the enemies of humanity, who have destroyed our homes in Syria, Iraq, Egypt, and everywhere.

[…]

Oh people of Al-Abrar Mosque and the people of Rafah – from this mosque of yours, you have the honor of delivering these messages to the men of the West Bank: Form stabbing quads. We don’t want just a single stabber. Oh young men of the West Bank: Attack in threes and fours. Some should restrain the victim, while others attack him with axes and butcher knives.

[…]

Do not fear what will be said about you. Oh men of the West Bank, next time, attack in a group of three, four, or five. Attack them in groups. Cut them into body parts.

[…]

Palestine: The Psychotic Stage. By Bret Stephens.

Palestine: The Psychotic Stage. By Bret Stephens. Wall Street Journal, October 12, 2015.

Psychotic Palestine: Bret Stephens Nails it, alas! By Richard Landes. The Augean Stables, October 15, 2015.


Stephens:

The truth about why Palestinians have been seized by their present blood lust.

If you’ve been following the news from Israel, you might have the impression that “violence” is killing a lot of people. As in this headline: “Palestinian Killed As Violence Continues.” Or this first paragraph: “Violence and bloodshed radiating outward from flash points in Jerusalem and the West Bank appear to be shifting gears and expanding, with Gaza increasingly drawn in.”

Read further, and you might also get a sense of who, according to Western media, is perpetrating “violence.” As in: “Two Palestinian Teenagers Shot by Israeli Police,” according to one headline. Or: “Israeli Retaliatory Strike in Gaza Kills Woman and Child, Palestinians Say,” according to another.

Such was the media’s way of describing two weeks of Palestinian assaults that began when Hamas killed a Jewish couple as they were driving with their four children in the northern West Bank. Two days later, a Palestinian teenager stabbed two Israelis to death in Jerusalem’s Old City, and also slashed a woman and a 2-year-old boy. Hours later, another knife-wielding Palestinian was shot and killed by Israeli police after he slashed a 15-year-old Israeli boy in the chest and back.

Other Palestinian attacks include the stabbing of two elderly Israeli men and an assault with a vegetable peeler on a 14-year-old. On Sunday, an Arab-Israeli man ran over a 19-year-old female soldier at a bus stop, then got out of his car, stabbed her, and attacked two men and a 14-year-old girl. Several attacks have been carried out by women, including a failed suicide bombing.

Regarding the causes of this Palestinian blood fetish, Western news organizations have resorted to familiar tropes. Palestinians have despaired at the results of the peace process—never mind that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas just declared the Oslo Accords null and void. Israeli politicians want to allow Jews to pray atop the Temple Mount—never mind that Benjamin Netanyahu denies it and has barred Israeli politicians from visiting the site. There’s always the hoary “cycle of violence” formula that holds nobody and everybody accountable at one and the same time.

Left out of most of these stories is some sense of what Palestinian leaders have to say. As in these nuggets from a speech Mr. Abbas gave last month: “Al Aqsa Mosque is ours. They [Jews] have no right to defile it with their filthy feet.” And: “We bless every drop of blood spilled for Jerusalem, which is clean and pure blood, blood spilled for Allah.”

Then there is the goading of the Muslim clergy. “Brothers, this is why we recall today what Allah did to the Jews,” one Gaza imam said Friday in a recorded address, translated by the invaluable Middle East Media Research Institute, or Memri. “Today, we realize why the Jews build walls. They do not do this to stop missiles but to prevent the slitting of their throats.”

Then, brandishing a six-inch knife, he added: “My brother in the West Bank: Stab!”

Imagine if a white minister in, say, South Carolina preached this way about African-Americans, knife and all: Would the news media be supine in reporting it? Would we get “both sides” journalism of the kind that is pro forma when it comes to Israelis and Palestinians, with lengthy pieces explaining—and implicitly justifying—the minister’s sundry grievances, his sense that his country has been stolen from him?

And would this be supplemented by the usual fake math of moral opprobrium, which is the stock-in-trade of reporters covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? In the Middle East version, a higher Palestinian death toll suggests greater Israeli culpability. (Perhaps Israeli paramedics should stop treating stabbing victims to help even the score.) In a U.S. version, should the higher incidence of black-on-white crime be cited to “balance” stories about white supremacists?

Didn’t think so.

Treatises have been written about the media’s mind-set when it comes to telling the story of Israel. We’ll leave that aside for now. The significant question is why so many Palestinians have been seized by their present blood lust—by a communal psychosis in which plunging knives into the necks of Jewish women, children, soldiers and civilians is seen as a religious and patriotic duty, a moral fulfillment. Despair at the state of the peace process, or the economy? Please. It’s time to stop furnishing Palestinians with the excuses they barely bother making for themselves.

Above all, it’s time to give hatred its due. We understand its explanatory power when it comes to American slavery, or the Holocaust. We understand it especially when it is the hatred of the powerful against the weak. Yet we fail to see it when the hatred disturbs comforting fictions about all people being basically good, or wanting the same things for their children, or being capable of empathy.

Today in Israel, Palestinians are in the midst of a campaign to knife Jews to death, one at a time. This is psychotic. It is evil. To call it anything less is to serve as an apologist, and an accomplice.

On Bret Stephen’s hate speech [sic]. By Dorgham Abusalim. Mondoweiss, October 14, 2015.

Ali Abunimah on Twitter:

.@majornewstweets I don’t have any control, but killing of innocents, Jewish or Palestinian, is always wrong. Zionism is the root cause.

The Real Obama Doctrine. By Niall Ferguson.

The Real Obama Doctrine. By Niall Ferguson. Wall Street Journal, October 9, 2015.

Ferguson:

Henry Kissinger long ago recognized the problem: a talented vote-getter, surrounded by lawyers, who is overly risk-averse.

Even before becoming Richard Nixon’s national security adviser, Henry Kissinger understood how hard it was to make foreign policy in Washington. There “is no such thing as an American foreign policy,” Mr. Kissinger wrote in 1968. There is only “a series of moves that have produced a certain result” that they “may not have been planned to produce.” It is “research and intelligence organizations,” he added, that “attempt to give a rationality and consistency” which “it simply does not have.”

Two distinctively American pathologies explained the fundamental absence of coherent strategic thinking. First, the person at the top was selected for other skills. “The typical political leader of the contemporary managerial society,” noted Mr. Kissinger, “is a man with a strong will, a high capacity to get himself elected, but no very great conception of what he is going to do when he gets into office.”

Second, the government was full of people trained as lawyers. In making foreign policy, Mr. Kissinger once remarked, “you have to know what history is relevant.” But lawyers were “the single most important group in Government,” he said, and their principal drawback was “a deficiency in history.” This was a long-standing prejudice of his. “The clever lawyers who run our government,” he thundered in a 1956 letter to a friend, have weakened the nation by instilling a “quest for minimum risk which is our most outstanding characteristic.”

Let’s see, now. A great campaigner. A bunch of lawyers. And a “quest for minimum risk.” What is it about this combination that sounds familiar?

I have spent much of the past seven years trying to work out what Barack Obama’s strategy for the United States truly is. For much of his presidency, as a distinguished general once remarked to me about the commander in chief’s strategy, “we had to infer it from speeches.”

At first, I assumed that the strategy was simply not to be like his predecessor—an approach that was not altogether unreasonable, given the errors of the Bush administration in Iraq and the resulting public disillusionment. I read Mr. Obama’s 2009 Cairo speech—with its Quran quotes and its promise of “a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world”—as simply the manifesto of the Anti-Bush.

But what that meant in practice was not entirely clear. Precipitate withdrawal of all U.S. forces from Iraq, but a time-limited surge in Afghanistan. A “reset” with Russia, but seeming indifference to Europe. A “pivot” to Asia, but mixed signals to China. And then, in response to the revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, Syria and Libya, complete confusion, the nadir of which was the September 2013 redline fiasco regarding the Assad regime’s use of chemical weapons in Syria and Mr. Obama’s declaration that “America is not the global policeman.”

An approximation of an Obama strategy was revealed in April last year, at the end of a presidential trip to Asia, when White House aides told reporters that the Obama doctrine was “Don’t do stupid sh—.”

I now see, however, that there is more to it than that.

The president always intended to repudiate more than George W. Bush’s foreign policy. In a 2012 presidential debate with Mitt Romney, Mr. Obama made clear that he was turning away from Ronald Reagan, too. “The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back,” he jeered, “because the Cold War’s been over for 20 years.” Mr. Romney’s reference to Russia as “our number one geopolitical foe” now looks prescient, whereas the president’s boast, in a January 2014 New Yorker magazine interview, that he didn’t “really even need George Kennan right now” looks like hubristic rejection of foreign-policy experience itself. Two months later, Vladimir Putin annexed Crimea.

Mr. Obama also had his own plan for the Middle East. “It would be profoundly in the interest” of the region’s citizens “if Sunnis and Shias weren’t intent on killing each other,” Mr. Obama said in that same interview. “If we were able to get Iran to operate in a responsible fashion—not funding terrorist organizations, not trying to stir up sectarian discontent in other countries, and not developing a nuclear weapon—you could see an equilibrium developing between . . . predominantly Sunni Gulf states and Iran.”

Now I see that this was the strategy—a strategy aimed at creating a new balance of power in the Middle East. The deal on Iran’s nuclear-arms program was part of Mr. Obama’s aim (as he put it to journalist Jeffrey Goldberg in May) “to find effective partners—not just in Iraq, but in Syria, and in Yemen, and in Libya.” Mr. Obama said he wanted “to create the international coalition and atmosphere in which people across sectarian lines are willing to compromise and are willing to work together in order to provide the next generation a fighting chance for a better future.”

The same fuzzy thinking informed Mr. Obama’s speech at the U.N. General Assembly last week, in which he first said he wanted to “work with other nations under the mantle of international norms and principles and law,” but then added that, to sort out Syria, he was willing to work with Russia and Iran—neither famed for spending time under that particular mantle—so long as they accepted the ousting of yet another Middle Eastern dictator.

A fighting chance for a better future in the Middle East? Make that a better chance for a fighting future.

It is clear that the president’s strategy is failing disastrously. Since 2010, total fatalities from armed conflict in the world have increased by a factor of close to four, according to data from the International Institute of Strategic Studies. Total fatalities due to terrorism have risen nearly sixfold, based on the University of Maryland’s Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism database. Nearly all this violence is concentrated in a swath of territory stretching from North Africa through the Middle East to Afghanistan and Pakistan. And there is every reason to expect the violence to escalate as the Sunni powers of the region seek to prevent Iran from establishing itself as the post-American hegemon.

Today the U.S. faces three strategic challenges: the maelstrom in the Muslim world, the machinations of a weak but ruthless Russia, and the ambition of a still-growing China. The president’s responses to all three look woefully inadequate.

Those who know the Obama White House’s inner workings wonder why this president, who came into office with next to no experience of foreign policy, has made so little effort to hire strategic expertise. In fairness, Denis McDonough (now White House chief of staff) has some real knowledge of Latin America. While at Oxford, National Security Adviser Susan Rice wrote a doctoral dissertation on Zimbabwe. And Samantha Power, ambassador to the U.N., has published two substantial books (one of which—“A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide”—she will need to update when she returns to academic life).

But other key players are the sort of people Henry Kissinger complained about more than half a century ago: Michael Froman, the trade representative, was one of Mr. Obama’s classmates at Harvard Law School; Deputy Secretary of State Tony Blinken is a Columbia J.D.; éminence grise Valerie Jarrett got hers from the University of Michigan. What about Secretary of State John Kerry? Boston College Law School, ’76. Not one of the people who advise the president could claim to have made contributions to strategic doctrine comparable with those made by Mr. Kissinger or Zbigniew Brzezinski before they went to Washington.

Some things you can learn on the job, like tending bar or being a community organizer. National-security strategy is different. “High office teaches decision making, not substance,” Mr. Kissinger once wrote. “It consumes intellectual capital; it does not create it.” The next president may have cause to regret that Barack Obama didn’t heed those words. In making up his strategy as he has gone along, this president has sown the wind. His successor will reap the whirlwind. He or she had better bring some serious intellectual capital to the White House.

The Humanities Need a Course Correction. By Paula Marantz Cohen.

The Humanities Need a Course Correction. By Paula Marantz Cohen. Wall Street Journal, October 9, 2015.

Marantz Cohen:

Consider academia’s contrasting treatment of Erich Segal in the 1970s and Cornel West today.

Forty-five years ago, a Yale assistant professor of classics named Erich Segal published a best-selling romantic novel after completing his academic opus on Roman comedy. Although the book on Roman comedy was widely and positively reviewed in academic journals, Segal was denied tenure. Whether the success of his novel “Love Story”—which also became a blockbuster film in 1970—accounted for the denial, the perception within academia was that it did. The division between high and low in the humanities was then strictly enforced: A scholar didn’t stoop to writing popular fiction.

Today, Segal’s success would be applauded as a sign of savvy entrepreneurship, and his university would no doubt welcome the publicity. He could then spend the rest of his career analyzing the semiotics of his success, connecting “Love Story” to classical narratives, hosting a blog on the afterlife of the protagonist, Oliver Barrett IV, and parsing the meme: “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.”

For an actual example of how things have changed since 1970, consider the 2001 case of philosopher  Cornel West, who was chastised by then-Harvard President  Larry Summers for recording a rap CD and writing the kinds of books reviewed in newspapers rather than in serious academic journals. Incensed, Mr. West decamped for Princeton, where he was embraced by that university’s president,  Shirley Tilghman. Mr. West has since amicably parted ways with Princeton and is now employed by the Union Theological Seminary, where he has continued to write popular books and articles and appear on talk shows.

What happened in the interval between Segal, who died in 2010, and Mr. West?

By the end of the 20th century, the humanities departments in universities had become closed enclaves. The writing of scholars in these disciplines had grown increasingly dense and jargon-filled, inaccessible to anyone without years of graduate study. For some academics, this enforced isolation became stifling. They sought new forms of expression. Thus literary theorists  Wendy Steiner, Frank Lentricchia and  Henry Louis Gates Jr. have turned to opera librettos, mystery novels and PBS documentaries.  Harold Bloom and  Stephen Greenblatt have largely abandoned scholarship for popular nonfiction, while others have escaped into blogging and personal memoir.

Driving this change is the emergence of a new media landscape. An academic book in the humanities from a good press used to have guaranteed sales to most university libraries and a solid readership among scholars in the field. Now, as fields have splintered and libraries have cut back on print acquisitions, an academic author, even a well-regarded one, is lucky to sell 300 copies of a book that may have taken years to write. Only the most masochistic scholar would cheerfully submit to that process.

Another motor of change has been the growth of creative-writing programs. To be a creative writer now doesn’t impinge on being an academic. In fact, an MFA in creative writing can sometimes provide a better route to a university position than a Ph.D., as students clamor to take courses in which they can write their own work rather than read the work of others.

A recent issue of PMLA, the official scholarly journal of the Modern Language Association, devotes a number of its pages to what it calls “The Semipublic Intellectual: Academia, Criticism, and the Internet Age.” The articles under this heading concede that online writing and reviewing (forms in which footnotes and theory are minimal) will soon have to be considered in tenure and promotion evaluation. PMLA, in short, is acknowledging its own imminent obsolescence.

There was once a generally agreed-upon hierarchy of what was considered original and important. Serious books were at the top, and television was at the bottom. (In the 1950s, the radio comedian  Fred Allen quipped that “imitation is the sincerest form of television.”) That hierarchy has mutated. Check out the repetitive subject matter and the duplication of references in books from the most-prestigious university presses. Television, on the other hand, has become an enormously creative medium. There are now many TV series available—from “The Wire” to “Blunt Talk”—that can surprise and delight a viewer with their insight and wit.

Academics my age have passed through two eras. We grew up revering great books and good writing. We then saw the books we loved become fodder for deconstructionist theory and politicization while the writing in our fields grew ugly. No wonder that many of us have turned to other forms of expression, connected to personal experiences and popular culture rather than the great tradition we were trained to study.

The future of the humanities seems to depend on finding our way to the following: a curriculum of serious reading that conforms to what Matthew Arnold called “the best which has been thought and said in the world”; a support for research-driven and critical writing that is accessible and graceful; and a perspective on popular culture that is intelligently appreciative when warranted. (This is what the eminent literary critic Christopher Ricks has done with his 2003 book on Bob Dylan, “Dylan’s Visions of Sin.”)

The challenges to getting to such a place are considerable, given where we are. But I hope the next generation of humanities scholars—recognizing the value of inspiring students to read great work and write eloquently about it—will take on the mission of renovating their disciplines.

A Reagan Doctrine for the Twenty-First Century. By Matthew Continetti.

“Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” Ronald Reagan at the Berlin Wall, June 12, 1987.

A Reagan Doctrine for the Twenty-First Century. By Matthew Continetti. Washington Free Beacon, October 9, 2015.

Continetti:

How to confront Vladimir Putin.

From Sweden in the Baltic to Tartus in the Mediterranean, Russian forces are on the offensive. The consensus among U.S. officials not beholden to the White House is that Mitt Romney was right. Vladimir Putin’s Russia is the most dangerous threat to America.

And not only to America: Russia’s attempts to reclaim its empire spread conflict and misery, prolong war, destabilize the postwar alliance system that has brought security and prosperity to the world, and erode Western values such as freedom, equality, and individualism. Though Russia may no longer espouse global communist revolution, the consequences of its militarism and aggression are not limited to a small geographic area. The Comintern is gone. But the goals of dominating the Eurasian heartland, Finlandizing Europe, and isolating and challenging the United States have returned. The stronger Putin becomes, the more despotic, poorer, and more corrupt is the world.

Except for sanctions imposed after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the occasional scolding, President Obama has been uninterested in retaliating against imperialism and deterring further aggression. He holds the view that history will expose Putin as a pretender and fool, and that Russia will be bogged down in a Syrian quagmire just as it was bogged down in Afghanistan long ago. What Obama forgets is that the Soviet Union’s defeat in Afghanistan came about because the United States financed and equipped anti-Soviet forces—a course of action he has rejected since the Syrian uprising began in 2011.

Obama’s supporters note that there is no clear U.S. ally in the Syrian conflict. Obviously not, since the president did nothing to identify and assist potentially friendly anti-regime Sunnis when the war began. Nor has he aided fully those few groups—“Syrian Kurds close to Turkey, moderate forces supported by Jordan close to its border, and small number of other moderate Syrians”—that, at least rhetorically, the United States backs today.

Obama’s critics, meanwhile, are concerned with tactics. Both Hillary Clinton and Marco Rubio have called for America to impose a no-fly zone over Syria. They’re several years too late. A no-fly zone might have worked at the beginning of the conflict, as part of a strategy of coercive diplomacy to remove Bashar al-Assad and reach some sort of power-sharing agreement among Syrian tribes. Now, with Su-25s flying unrestricted over Syria, a no-fly zone would be greeted by the Russians as a nonstarter.

Worse, it would invite direct confrontation with the Russians, who are already buzzing NATO airspace from their new southern flank. Putin would like nothing more than to humiliate America over the skies of Raqqah. A no-fly zone is also superfluous. Our forces are already operating above parts of Syria—we could establish safe-havens at any time without asking for Russian permission. The problem isn’t our capabilities. It’s our lack of will.

What to do? The time has come for a revised strategy towards Russia, the greatest military and ideological threat to the United States and to the world order it has built over decades as guarantor of international security. We’ve faced a similar problem before. To create a freer and richer world, not the United States but Russia must be knocked back on its heels.

That is exactly what Ronald Reagan did in the final years of the Cold War. What is required today is a Reagan Doctrine for the twenty-first century—a comprehensive military, diplomatic, and cultural approach that elevates America’s stature and diminishes Russia’s.

I can hear liberals already: Reagan, they’ll say, was not a warrior but a peacemaker. Didn’t he negotiate with Gorbachev, didn’t he offer at Reykjavik to eliminate all ICBMs in exchange for the right of strategic defense? And so he did. But to focus only on Reagan’s diplomacy is to suffer from historical myopia. It is to ignore Reagan’s first term in favor of his second.

The hawkish policies Reagan enacted between 1981 and 1985 gave him the economic, political, and military leverage to become friends with Gorbachev later. And only with Gorbachev: During Reagan’s first term, three Soviet leaders preceded the author of glasnost and perestroika. The president didn’t meet with any of them. “They keep dying on me,” he liked to say.

In their moral disapproval of force, in their fallacious belief that human beings of every nation and every government share the same values and interests, liberals forget that every diplomatic solution is based on the balance or preponderance of military power. It is the weaker party that seeks negotiations—just as Europe and the United States, consumed by wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, did after Russia’s invasion of Georgia. Just as President Obama, preoccupied with ending the Middle Eastern wars and resolving the financial crisis, attempted his reset with Russia. Just as Europe and the United States, in the grip of anomie and malaise, have sought to freeze the conflict in Ukraine and “de-conflict” the escalating war in Syria.

Let’s reverse the equation.

Like the strategy pursued by our fortieth president more than thirty years ago, a twenty-first century Reagan Doctrine would have three parts:

Military buildup. President Reagan reversed the degradation and demoralization of the U.S. armed forces. The defense budget in his first term more than doubled. Yes, there was waste. But more important than the $400 toilet seat were the B1 bomber, the stealth fighter, the Trident submarine, and hundreds of F-14s and F-15s. Defense spending created jobs, inspired patriotism, and laid the foundation for American success in Operation Desert Storm and the Balkan wars. We use many of these platforms to this day.

The gusher of weapons scared our enemies. “The scale and pace of the American buildup under Reagan,” writes Henry Kissinger in Diplomacy, “reinforced all the doubts already in the minds of the Soviet leadership as a result of debacles in Afghanistan and Africa, about whether they could afford the arms race economically and—even more important—whether they could sustain it technologically.”

Who now holds such doubts? The trajectory of U.S. troop numbers and defense budgets is downward. The “sequester” is about to take a huge bite of the Pentagon’s resources. Our ability to fight in two theaters at once, a pillar of postwar American defense policy, is in doubt.

“Just as the threats have become visible and undeniable,” write the authors of “To Rebuild America’s Military,” a new American Enterprise Institute report, “the United States is continuing to cut the armed forces dramatically, having imposed the cuts through an extraordinary means—a law imposing arbitrary limits on parts of the federal budget and employing the mindless tool of sequestration—with no analysis whatsoever of the impact on the nation’s security.”

The AEI scholars recommend a return to the level of defense spending proposed by Robert Gates, and the gradual build to “an affordable floor of 4 percent of gross domestic product that would sustain the kind of military America needs.” These numbers might not be as shocking as Reagan’s. But at least they would reverse the hollowing out of the force. And they would grab the attention of the Kremlin.

Both left and right are likely to oppose more spending on the grounds of debt and deficits. For the left to make this critique is disingenuous—their leading economists say deficits do not matter in the current economic environment and call for an expansionary fiscal policy. What the right needs to understand is that deficit reduction and balanced budgets are worthy goals in a time of peace. And peacetime this is not.

Strategic Weapons. Vladimir Putin plays ICBM politics. His regime holds nuclear retaliation as its ultimate trump in negotiations—and while the Russians have not played this card, oh how they love to show it.

The U.S. response is naïve. Not to mention contradictory. It combines idealistic calls for nuclear abolition with hapless and toothless diplomacy that does little to stop Iran from spinning centrifuges, North Korea from building more bombs, and Russia from violating treaty commitments.

We forget we hold nuclear cards, too. This is a fact Reagan did not lose sight of. “The two strategic decisions which contributed most to ending the Cold War,” writes Kissinger, “were NATO’s deployment of American intermediate-range missiles in Europe and the American commitment to the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI).”

Keep the Pershing IIs on hold (for now). But please update and modernize our nuclear forces, which exist in an embarrassing state of disrepair and neglect. And do not forget the importance of strategic defense: Development of anti-ballistic missile technologies would be a highly controversial, and highly important, part of any renewed defense buildup. The broadening of the missile shield reassures allies—and worries Russia.

Not only would a revitalized and advanced nuclear force, coupled with increased funding and enlargement of strategic defense, assert U.S. supremacy, deter adversaries, and develop innovative technologies. It would also bring political benefits to whoever proposed it.

When Reagan announced SDI in the spring of 1983, notes Kissinger, “The experts had all the technical arguments on their side, but Reagan had got hold of an elemental political truth: In a world of nuclear weapons, leaders who make no effort to protect their peoples against accident, mad opponents, nuclear proliferation, and a whole host of other foreseeable dangers invite the opprobrium of posterity if disaster ever does occur.”

The president’s duty is to ensure that it does not—not by terrorists who desire weapons of mass destruction, not by the states that possess them.

Insurgency. It was Charles Krauthammer who coined the phrase “Reagan Doctrine” in an April 1985 essay for Time magazine. The article described Reagan’s support for anticommunist forces in Nicaragua, Angola, Afghanistan, and beyond. Some of those forces, like Solidarity in Poland, truly were democratic. Others, like the mujahedin, were the enemies of our enemy—and thus, in specific circumstances, worthy of our help.

It takes a set of moral blinders the size of the president’s ego not to recognize today’s Russia as America’s enemy. There is no other power as devoted to undermining U.S. authority and prestige and interests—from subverting the NATO alliance to replacing us as the dominant external power in the Middle East to hacking our technological infrastructure to harboring the fugitive Edward Snowden. As America has waned, Putin has waxed. And so for America to wax, Putin must wane.

We must arm his enemies. That means deadly weapons and massive financial aid to Ukraine. Forward bases in the Baltics. And the sending of arms and cash to the Syrian rebels his jets are strafing. Not even the liberal Vox.com pretends that Putin is going after ISIS; why should our government?

Imposing costs on Putin requires dealing with unsavory people. It risks unforeseen consequences, some potentially negative. But the actual consequences of the policy being pursued at the moment—ongoing war, regional destabilization, humanitarian chaos, Islamic radicalization, and erosion of U.S. leadership and credibility—are worse.

The insurgency launched by Reagan was not limited to arms. It also had an ideological component. “The Reagan Doctrine has been widely understood to mean only support for anticommunist guerillas fighting pro-Soviet regimes, but from the first the doctrine had a broader meaning. Support for anticommunist guerillas was the logical outgrowth, not the origin, of a policy of supporting democratic reform or revolution everywhere, in countries ruled by right-wing dictators as well as by communist parties,” says Robert Kagan in A Twilight Struggle.

Speaking forthrightly and proudly of liberal values, and condemning their abuse within the Russian sphere of influence, is a requirement of any foreign policy associated with Ronald Reagan. As Secretary of State George Shultz put it in 1985: “The forces of democracy around the world merit our standing with them. To abandon them would be a shameful betrayal—a betrayal not only of brave men and women but of our highest ideals.”

Standing with the forces of democracy is not the same as calling for elections everywhere. Elections are not the beginning of the policy. They are its endpoint. The beginning is in the rhetorical promotion of individual freedoms, in renewed financial support for nongovernmental organizations promoting civil society and an independent media, in education in the habits and traditions of the West.

The Kremlin spends hundreds of millions of dollars each year on a global propaganda network that spreads conspiracy theories, distorts reality, and incites suspicion and hatred of the United States and its representative democracy. And that is just Russia—China and Qatar have similar operations. We have nothing that bears comparison. The main Putin network, RT, has more employees than the Voice of America. We are disarming ourselves not only materially but also ideologically. This must end.

The agenda I have outlined would cost quite a bit of money. It would involve America with some morally suspect individuals. The debate over it would be heated. There would be reprisals.

But the Reagan Doctrine was all of those things, too. And it worked. “The Reagan Doctrine proclaims overt and unashamed American support for anti-Communist revolution,” Krauthammer wrote in 1985. “The grounds are justice, necessity, and democratic tradition.” Replace anti-Communist with anti-authoritarian, and what has changed? If we are to reestablish American ideals, American interests, and American pride, we must hurt the bad guys, and overtly and unashamedly revise the Reagan Doctrine for a new American century.

Putin? He is one bad guy. So let’s take off our gloves.

What Is Putin’s End Game In Syria? By Garry Kasparov.

What is Putin’s end game in Syria? Garry Kasparov interviewed by Paul Gigot. Video. Journal Editorial Report. Fox News, October 10, 2015. Also at Lenovo.

Putin’s Goal in Syria Is Chaos. By Garry Kasparov. Newsweek, October 7, 2015.

Kasparov:

One year ago, the Russian military expanded its push into eastern Ukraine once it became clear that Europe and the United States had no interest in standing up to Vladimir Putin’s latest gambit—at least

not in any way that would deter him. The core of the problem with the West's response is that economic

and political measures cannot stop a dictator's tanks or defend a commercial airliner from a Russian

missile. Putin consistently responds to words with action and he has done so again in Syria, where

Russian airpower is now bolstering the murderous regime of Bashar Assad by hitting rebel forces,

including those trained and supported by the United States. The Kremlin’s official pretexts, that the

strikes are against ISIS and part of the global war on terror are, like most Kremlin statements, blatantly

false, as can be seen by a glance at a map of Russia's targets.

As in Ukraine, Putin will stay in Syria until it no longer suits him. He has no long-term strategic goals

beyond creating chaos and weakening the alliances of the free world wherever possible. This allows him

to play the big man on the international stage, an essential element of his domestic appeal. 24/7 propaganda and Soviet nostalgia have turned Putin's invasion into a domestic hit in Russia. In contrast,

Russians have no interest in Syria or Assad, but who cares what they want? Unlike the leaders of

Europe, the U.S., and other democratic countries, Putin doesn’t have to worry about how popular his

foreign adventures are at home. There are no checks and balances in the Russian government, no free

media to criticize him, and no popularity polls that matter more than ranks of well-armed riot police.

This security allows dictators like Putin to move opportunistically into any breach as the White House

dithers. Yesterday Ukraine, today Syria, and what about tomorrow? Africa provides inviting targets,

such as Benghazi in Libya, another hot-spot where the United States has retreated. Putin is happy to sell

or even make gifts of Russian weapons far and wide, especially where he smells oil.

Despite looting Russian retirement funds for cash and all his bluster about changing the world order at

the United Nations last month, Putin isn’t interested in waging a big war himself. The one thing Putin’s

dictatorship couldn’t stand is for its hero to look like a loser. He cannot risk a military confrontation he

might lose, hence his habit of finding targets NATO isn't willing to defend, such as Syrian rebels and

Ukrainian farmers. Putin’s military pokes and prods the borders of NATO to provoke division among his

opponents.

He does it in the Baltics and now he’s doing it in Turkey, a NATO member with the second-largest

military in the alliance. Will America and Western Europe defend Turkish airspace or will they tell the

Turks to stand down? It’s a question Putin may soon demand an answer to. Meanwhile, he’s helping

Assad flood Europe with refugees while at the same time supporting anti-immigrant parties there. The cynical calculus is that when the time comes for the European Union to renew sanctions on Russia over

Ukraine, perhaps a few of his allies will be in power to block them.

When I said last year that Putin was more dangerous than ISIS it was not a reference to the immense

Russian nuclear arsenal, at least not directly. ISIS is dangerous and growing more so, but it is regional

and would quickly be beaten down without Putin and his clients in Iran and Syria stoking civil war and

creating fertile ground for ISIS's recruiting by slaughtering Sunnis. Obama is already scurrying to avoid

contact between Russian and U.S. forces in Syria and Iraq, allowing Putin to function as a nucleararmed

guarantor of Assad's massacres.

Every Putin action that catches the West flat-footed leads to another round of what a brilliant “chess

master” he is, a metaphor that annoys me more than most, as you might imagine. For years I’ve said that

Putin doesn’t play geopolitical chess, and if he did he wouldn’t be very good at it. He is, however, good

at playing poker with a weak hand against anxious opponents who fold against his every bluff.

The greatest danger isn’t in confronting Putin, it’s in waiting so long to do so that the stakes will be

incredibly high. The longer we wait, the more confident he becomes and the more dangerous the

eventual confrontation will be. Stopping Putin will be harder now than it would have been two years

ago, but easier than it will be a year from now.

Putin is trapped in a downward spiral of hatred and violence. His survival at home depends on it. It will

end only with a major conflict abroad and when Russians are willing to shed their blood to free

themselves. When the end comes for Putin it will be the way that most dictators fall: abruptly, violently,

and as a result of the economic and moral bankruptcy of the state he has created in his image.

Charlie Rose: Full PBS Interview with Vladimir Putin.

Charlie Rose: Full PBS Interview with Vladimir Putin. Part 1. Part 2. Video. Charlie Rose.com, Sept 27, 28, 2015.